“Feel very carefully all round it. Don’t pull it, whatever you do. Feel carefully, and something inside might feel warm, like Timmy Rat in his nest.”
“Oh!” cried Desmond. “Look!” He held out a fawn-coloured animal, with short working legs and stump of tail. “What is it?”
“I thought so, you know!” cried Phillip, in triumph. “It’s a drey of young squirrels. Bring it down, for a photo. Put it in your shirt, for safety.”
Desmond did so. He climbed down carefully. “Oh, it tickles! It’s trying to crawl away!”
The baby squirrel was about five inches long, very soft, with fine silky hair, a blunt head and rounded tags of ears. It had long claws, as yet soft and unpointed. The boys admired it, holding it against their cheeks in turn.
“Father had one as a pet when he was a boy, as well as ferrets, a white rat like mine, and other things,” said Phillip. “Only his squirrel was a nuisance when it grew up. It used to prance around the rooms, leaping from particular places every time, so that its claws wore them out after a bit. So he had to let it go. It used to drink the cream off the milk in the larder, and also suck hen’s eggs. Hold it in your two hands, will you, while I take a photo.”
Phillip went back two paces, and shaded the view-finder with a hand. The Brownie box camera, with its fixed focus, clicked. “Good! That’s our first photo! Five more, and I’ll be able to develop the film. Have you ever done any developing?”
“No, Phillip.”
“It’s quite easy. You want some black cloth over the window, a lantern with red glass in it, a tray with developer, and when it’s done you wash the negative in the bath under the tap for an hour, to stop further oxidisation of the silver nitrate on the film, which turns black in light. That’s all. Only when the film is wet, you have to be jolly careful not to nick it with your nail, for it’s soft like jelly, and a nick comes out black on the print afterwards.
“My first camera was a penny pin-hole one,” went on Phillip. “It was a tiny little cardboard one, with a pin-hole instead of a lens. It took about a minute exposure. For the penny you got also a glass plate, chemicals for the developing solution, a piece of sensitised paper for the print, and a screw of hypo for fixing. I took a photo of Father holding his bike. The bike came out very well, but instead of Father’s face and body only my thumb-mark was there. I must have touched it with chemicals, before I developed it.”
They talked under the tree, sitting on the ground among the primroses and rising shiny leaves of wild arums. Rooks were cawing in a distant rookery among the beeches. They heard again the laughing cry of the woodpecker, and the thin singsong of a chiffchaff.
“Soon all the migrants will be arriving, Desmond. They come from Africa, many of them. My Lord, we’re going to have a wonderful time in our woods! It’s a damn sight better’n scouting, don’t you think? Though those days were fun, weren’t they? I am glad I didn’t miss them!” He rolled over with delight, and pressed his face into the drift of dead leaves under the holly. “I say, smell this earth! It’s all fresh leaf mould. And just look at these skeletons, aren’t they lovely? You wouldn’t think that every leaf had all these ribs and veins in it, would you? It’d take years to make, if you tried to do it yourself. It’s finer than any lace-work. Yet on the tree they just grow! How? Who makes them, really? Have you ever tried to think about why the stars are, and everything on the earth, Desmond? I can’t think about the stars for long, it makes my head simply reel.”
“Well, God made everything, Phillip, didn’t he?”
“I suppose so, but how? Don’t tell your Mother, will you, but my Father doesn’t believe in God. That’s why he never goes to church. I don’t believe in church very much myself, either. Do you?”
“My Mother and I are Catholics, and Mother says it is not for man to question Holy Mystery,” said Desmond, in a quiet voice, with a slight quaver in it.
Phillip hastened to say that his mother liked the Catholic Church.
“I went once with her to the church at the top of Comfort Road, almost opposite where I was born, and I preferred it to St. Cyprian’s or even St. Simon’s. I liked the singing of the Gregorian chants, and the smell of the incense. It was like those joss-sticks my uncle Hilary had burning on the shelf at Epsom, when I was a child. But Father doesn’t seem to like the Catholics. He talks about Catholic countries being priest-ridden. Is your Father like that, too?”
Desmond went pale, and then slightly pink. Phillip pretended not to see, as he examined an empty case of beech-mast. He felt awkward, remembering that Mother had told him never to ask personal questions, or about other people’s affairs.
Desmond climbed up to put back the baby squirrel. Afterwards they walked over the pasture, among ewes with their lambs, to the gate leading to the bailiff’s cottage, and the paddock where they had camped.
Desmond produced a penny. “Mother said I must get a glass of fresh milk if I could, Phillip. Do you think Mr. Wilson would let me have one?”
“Let’s try, and see. Only I haven’t any money.” The bailiff’s wife gave them each a glass of milk, and refused to take any money for it. Rejoicing in their luck, they left, caps politely raised, and went across the road into the paddock, to search for marks of their camp-fires of long ago. Round the hedges they found two thrushes’ nests, each lined with cowdung and tinder-wood mixture, and holding four blue, warm black-spotted eggs; a hedge-sparrow’s with sky-blue smaller eggs; a blackbird’s with its faint rusty freckles; and a wren’s building in the side of a haystack.
“I’ll make a map, and put them in, tonight,” announced Phillip.
Down in the quarry farmyard there was much to interest them, including a pink white pig with a big pouch hanging below its hind legs. It was so big that Phillip said there must be something wrong with the pig.
“I wonder if it’s deformed, Des. I think it must be. Perhaps it has been put in this pen, alone, in case the others bully it, as they always do a weaker creature,” he went on, recalling what Father had once told him. “Poor devil, its insides must have fallen out! That pink bag must be part of its intestines. You see, the pigs in the other pens aren’t like that.”
“I expect it’s ruptured itself, and is going to be done away with,” suggested Desmond. They scratched its back with their sticks, to give it a little happiness, poor thing, before its sad end.
Cows were in another building; and looking in the open upper halves of the doors, Phillip pointed out the grey mudded cups, over which feathers and grasses showed, on the rafters. “Swallows!” he cried, recognising them from a photograph in his Kearton bird book. “They’ll be home again soon. I say, isn’t all this simply wonderful?” He ran round in a circle, pretending to be a dog, panting, with tongue over teeth, hands on both sides of his head for ears. “Aough! Aough! Aough! I know how a dog feels when it’s off the lead. My Lord, I’m glad I wrote for our permit! How about some tea, are you peckish?”
They sat in the only patch of sunlight near the entrance, to be warm. While they were there, eating their banana sandwiches, the crunch of boots came down the road, and immediately a shrill squealing arose from the pig-houses at the lower end of the quarry. They wondered what the row was about, and went down to see. The pigs, including the deformed one, were all standing, snouts held still, small glassy bristled eyes staring, hairy ears raised as though listening. Suddenly they all began squealing again.
When a labourer walked down the cart track, with two pails of swill fixed to chains from the wooden yoke over his shoulders, Phillip asked him if the pigs were hungry, and was told it was their feeding time. A thought came to him. “Did they hear your footsteps, do you think?”
“Aye, they listen, their bellies is their clocks, young sir,” said the pigman.
Phillip thought that the man had mistaken him for perhaps a relation of the Dowager Countess, because he had called him “sir”. How awful when he found out that he was only a nobody! He decided to bring him a packet of Ogden’s Tabs when he came
next, so that the man would not be too disappointed in his mistake, and feel he had been cheated.
The boys watched the feeding. What a jostling, grunting, slopping of chops and greediness there was! Some of the pigs stood their front trotters in the troughs, to keep others away, like staking out an extra claim, while they sucked and gulped the swill as far away as possible from their feet. It was like Ching, who if he had a bag of sweets, would hide it in his pocket (unless he wanted a favour done) in order to cadge a sucker from someone else. Phillip thought that he had done that, too, when he was at the dame school. He asked the pigman about the deformed pig. Was it going to be killed?
“That one? Not likely! That’s one of the best boars us ever ’ad, sir! His sire took the blue ribbon at the last show.”
“Then it’s not deformed?”
“Deformed? Not likely! Whatever made you think that?”
“Well, he was all by himself,” said Phillip, lamely.
When the pigman had gone again with his buckets, Phillip threw little pieces of chalk on the boar’s back, because he had been deceived.
“Fancy having them so big as that,” he reflected aloud, feeling a half-guilty pleasure in the sight. “Sows have a lot of pigs at a time, and I suppose that’s why, don’t you, Des? Don’t tell your Mother, or anyone else, what I said, will you? I don’t want it to get back to Old Pye, who lives at the top of our road, in case he thinks I have an unclean mind, and tells the Rollses. It isn’t true, for I don’t like smutty yarns. Do you?”
“No,” said Desmond, turning a faint pink.
“They are vulgar without being funny,” said Phillip. “I like this old boar now. I know what I’ll call him—Squire Bigballs.”
*
Boys who had unclean minds were severely punished when they were found out, Phillip knew. There was the case of Jack Hart, who had had to leave school for going out at night with girls, despite many thrashings given him by Mr. Hart, to cure Jack’s brazen ways. Jack was now a cadet in a training ship, preparing for the merchant service.
There was a story that Jack had been expelled after being found, one Wednesday evening, with two girls in the sheep-fold on the Hill. According to Ching, Jack Hart had lured them into the fold. His father, Mr. Hart, had seen the clay-stains on Jack’s knees when he got home, and accused him of misconduct with the girls, one after the other. Jack Hart had not denied it, but refused to say who the girls were. According to Ching, Jack Hart had been brazen. When his father had said to him, “I know all about one of those girls you were with! She is a bad lot, and wears a blouse that shows her chest!”, Jack Hart had replied, “That wasn’t her chest, Father, that was her belly!” So Mr. Hart had tried to give Jack a thrashing, but Jack had not only refused to take his trousers down for his father, but had given him a black eye as well, and then run away from home.
Mr. Hart was a squat man in a brown suit and broad brown face, rather ugly. He was known to be very bad tempered. Phillip was frightened of him. Mr. Hart, said Ching, had reported his son to the Police Station. Mr. Hart had been heard to say—the Harts lived two doors down from the Chings—that he would break his son for having struck him. The police sergeant had told Mr. Hart to control his temper. So Mr. Hart had gone to see the Magister, saying that his son was beyond his control. The Magister had sent for Jack’s house-master, and then for Jack, in his study. There, according to Ching, Jack Hart had still been brazen; so he was expelled.
Phillip felt a fascinated admiration whenever he thought of Jack Hart, as well as a slight fear of his badness. He had met Jack in the High Street a day or two after he was expelled, when Jack had asked for a loan of his bicycle pump. Jack said he did not care a hoot about being expelled. He was really awfully brave, like Peter Wallace; and the funny thing was that both of them wore glasses, while all the boys with spectacles in The Gem, Marvel, and Pluck libraries were sort of milk-sops and swots, interested in butterfly-catching and poetry and stuff like that. Since then, a year ago, Jack had joined the merchant navy.
Jack Hart’s photo in his cadet’s uniform was side by side with his own in the window of the shop in the High Street where he had had his taken, in Eton suit and gloves, and his lower front teeth over his upper teeth, to give the effect of an out-jutting jaw. Jack Hart was grinning in his photo. Phillip looked at them whenever he walked that way, for a change, home from school.
How he would like to be bold, like Jack Hart! Jack had been, not only not afraid to speak to girls, but brazen enough to ask them to go for a walk with him. As for anything further, oh, that was unthinkable——. And yet——
*
When Desmond went away with his mother for part of the holidays, Phillip felt lonely. He seldom saw Cranmer now; cousin Gerry had his own friends at St. Anselm’s; and the only friend he had, if he could call him a friend, was Ching, who hung about because of Mavis, who disliked him, thank goodness.
On Saturday afternoon, too wet to cycle out to his preserves, Phillip was looking at the new motor fire engine, all polished brass and red paint, when several dogs on the pavement took his attention. They were jumping on one another’s backs in turn; a common enough sight in the streets and recreation grounds, but one always of furtive interest to Phillip. While he was watching them, pretending to be examining the fire engine, someone touched his arm. It was Jack Hart.
Jack Hart invited him to the cook shop over the road, and they went inside to eat a penny plateful each of the tasty yellow pease-pudding, which had little bits of boiled bacon in it.
“Well, thanks for treating me, Jack,” said Phillip, when they went outside. “I was going to the Electric Theatre, I’ve only got tuppence, else I’d treat you.”
Phillip had lost some of his nervous fear of Jack Hart, after he had told him about his training ship: the rigging they climbed up, boxing and sword-stick games, celestial navigation, the model steam engines which worked, the magic lantern lectures with slides of foreign ports.
“That’s all right, you can treat me another time,” replied Jack Hart. “It’s my treat this time.” They went into the dark hall, and found seats on the fixed forms, halfway down.
When their eyes were accustomed to the flickering light Jack Hart turned round to look about him. “We might find a couple of birds,” he said. “Wednesday afternoon is the best time, when the shop girls get their half-day. If you can get in the corner seat at the back, you can’t be overlooked.”
Phillip did not want to meet any girls; yet the idea fascinated him. He forgot it in the wonderful film on the screen. There was a train robbery, the hero on a horse racing the train, and leaping on it to fight the bad men. He was standing on top of the train, which was about to enter a dark tunnel, looking the other way. Oh, what relief! He saw it and ran back just in time, leaping from roof to roof of the coaches. But the end of the train was near. Would he fall off? Ah, there was his faithful horse, racing alongside! The hero leapt sideways, right into the saddle, and pulled up just in time to save the horse from crashing into the wall of the tunnel. Then, climbing up a path and galloping down the hill again, he forded a river, swam the torrent, and pursued the train again, which was crossing a high wooden bridge over a gorge. Jack was staring at the picture now, his peaked cap on the back of his close-cropped head.
When they had seen the programme through once, Jack Hart wanted to go; but Phillip said he would like to stay and see it through once again. Before leaving, Jack Hart went down to the girl playing the piano behind the curtained rail, below the screen, and Phillip watched him speaking to her. Then he came back, slid into the seat beside Phillip, and whispered that he had fixed up to see her home after the place closed.
“Is she very hot?” asked Phillip, greatly daring. He did not want to be thought backward in knowledge, even if he was under-developed.
“She will be, if she isn’t now,” replied Jack Hart, with a grin, biting his nails with a kind of glee. Phillip wondered why Jack Hart bit his nails. Mother said biting your nails was a very bad habit
you got into in childhood, and one very hard to break. She used to do it, she said, but going to the Roman Catholic church on Sunday evenings had helped her to stop the bad habit.
“Well, so long, Phil. I might be seeing you again this leave. I might come up and see some of the chaps after school one day.”
“Yes, I hope so,” replied Phillip, hoping he would not see Jack Hart if he did come. He was rather scared, once more.
On the Monday night he met Jack Hart, again by accident, in the public library, where he had gone to collect his Field of the week before. It was a fine night, with a new moon, and they went for a walk. They walked through the Randiswell Recreation Ground on the way to the Roller Skating Rink at Fordesmill. Phillip had learned to skate, down Hillside Road, on one roller skate, a year or two back, crouching down to sit on the skate with the free leg held out in front, parallel to the pavement, for balance; but he had never tried two at once. The composition of the skate wheels, said to be made of ox-blood and sawdust, soon wore out on the asphalt. Cousin Gerry sometimes went to the Fordesmill Rink.
“You can hire a pair for twopence an hour,” said Jack Hart; as, feeling very daring, for the rink was known to be a hot place, Phillip set off with him.
*
The Rec. was a dark low flat grassy place beside the river. There was a path beside the river, and several wooden rustic bridges, where the fearful figures of the toms lurked. With Jack Hart beside him, Phillip did not feel so scared of them as when he and Desmond had hurried by, never daring to speak.
The toms, called whores in the Bible, were terrible women. They were said to drop unwanted babies, wrapped in brown paper and tied up like a parcel, over the bridges into the river, where they floated down into the Thames. They were murderers!
Young Phillip Maddison Page 28