R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (12 page)

'There's a whiff of national recovery about,' Algy Herries remarked, watching Cooper win the Old Boys' 880-yards at a canter. 'Something tells me we're getting back on course and, if
we
are, here in the wilderness, then everyone else must be, my friend. We've got a healthy waiting-list already, and when the post-war crop of babies grow up – a majority of them boys,
please God – we'll have to tackle the Governors about the new wing behind Outram's. I doubt if I'll be here to see it full, P.J., but you will, since you've burned your boats by taking a wife! She's a fetching gel, I hope. We could do with a little uplift in that direction, although Irvine seems to be setting a spanking pace.'

Irvine was the first of the reinforcements Herries had promised him, a genial, bullheaded, heavy-shouldered young man, almost exactly his own age, who arrived via a shortened ex-subaltern's course to teach geography to all but the Second and Third Forms, where Judy Cordwainer still campaigned for neatness in preference to speed and accuracy.

Davy soon made a friend of Irvine, despite the fact that he was a breezy extrovert, with limited imagination. Alone among the staff Irvine had an active service record, a year and a half spent in Palestine, where he received a foot injury severe enough to get him shipped home and discharged a year before the Armistice. The wound had healed satisfactorily but one of his great toes had been amputated, leaving him with a curious, bobbing walk, as though, at any moment, he would over-balance and turn a neat somersault. He had a good Army and Varsity sports record, despite his slight disability, and promised to prove very useful when the rugby season began. In the meantime, before even settling in, he produced a blonde wife, a pretty, talkative girl with a pink and white complexion, violet eyes and a quick smile, who was no sooner introduced to the Saturday night dancing class than the senior boys were queueing for foxtrots and one-steps.

Phyllis Irvine's tremendous popularity among the boys was a source of uproarious amusement to Irvine, a cheerful fellow who would laugh his head off recounting the circumstances under which he lost his toe. 'Damnedest thing you ever saw,' he said, telling the story to David over a gin and lime, in the tiny sitting-room at Havelock's. 'We were lobbing five-nines from lorry to battery in a chain, and I happened to sneeze just as I laid hold of one of 'em. I dropped it, and didn't feel a thing until I came to after the anaesthetic, and saw my foot slung up to a gantry, swathed in bloody great bandages. Then I knew about it all right, and reckoned myself damned lucky it was one of ours and not one of theirs. Slice of plum cake really, since I missed the draft when we were pulled out and went in at St. Quentin, just in time for the Big Push. My battery was wiped out on March 21st. Jerry went through it like a dose of salts. Chum of mine defused my five-nine and sent me the case before he went west, poor devil. Phyl and I intend to use if for an umbrella stand.'

That was Irvine, whom the war seemed to have touched very lightly, but he was honest enough to draw a sharp distinction between his eighteen months in the Near East, and David's three years on the Western Front. 'Damned if I know how any of you chaps stuck it out without going loco, old man. Bloody shambles, they tell me. Don't wonder you holed up here the moment you got the chance, but I had second thoughts myself when I climbed aboard the old buggy down at the station. Reminds me a bit of Sinai – with vegetation, of course. I'm a bit worried about Phyl sticking it out in winter. Everyone except you and Carter are practically superannuated, aren't they?'

'You'll get used to it after a term or two,' David said, 'and if I was you I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to move on. You might get a better social life but you won't find a more easygoing head and even some of the old stagers grow on you after a bit.'

'Well, maybe you're right, but Phyl says she'll be relieved when your missus arrives. She says it's a bit like going back to school herself, with old Mother Kruger searching her desk for lipstick and letters from boys. The kids themselves seem a decent lot, taken all round. Is that your experience?'

David admitted that it was, adding that every time he moved among the seniors he had to remind himself that they were not so much sausage meat, queueing for Haig's mincing-machine.

By now, however, he was adjusting to all grades, enjoying teaching in a way he would not have thought possible a year ago. He had his own methods with the syllabus and had already introduced a range of new text-books.

His formula for teaching history seemed to produce good results, simple stuff up to Middle School, with the emphasis on personalities rather than text-book landmarks, and from then on any amount of free discussion on topics likely to crop up in the question papers of the junior and senior Cambridge exams. In the Second and Third Forms he instituted a question-and-answer system of oral tests, taught him by Howarth, who did not trust written work. 'Like to find out on the spot how much has sunk in before I waste too much breath,' he said. 'When I'm sure I concentrate on the odd plant or two, where a modest crop can be expected. Damned waste of time marking all those bloody little test-papers, half of them cribbed. Nobody can hide ignorance at an oral round. Line the little beggars up, number 'em off, and throw spot questions at them. Give 'em three seconds before they pass and the first boy who comes up with the answer moves up to where it all started. Let 'em try and play fast and loose with that box of tricks.'

It worked, as David soon discovered, but so did an innovation of his own that he employed not only in the Second and Third forms but also in Middle School, and just occasionally in the Fifth. This was to capture the attention of the class by a whiff of scandal, or a bizarre episode that the academics would have dismissed as trivial or apocryphal.

His first real success was with the story of Owen Tudor's siege of the widow of Henry V, giving him licence to draw a lively picture not only of court life as it was lived in the mid-fifteenth century, but also of Newgate, and the administration of justice. He scored again in the blood-and-thunder-loving Third Form with a blow-by-blow description of Colonel Blood's attempt to steal the Crown jewels, an incident that led him to a general assessment of Charles II's character and policies. He sometimes started a class on a new period by plunging straight into an account of a particularly colourful incident, usually one with cliff-hanger aspects, like the flight of the Young Pretender after Culloden. All the time, with whatever period he was dealing, and whatever the age and standard of his audience, he strove to make history come alive, and would compare statesmen of the Tudor and Stuart periods with men like Lloyd George, whose antics featured in the daily headlines.

Sometimes, if he was lucky, or dealing with one of his favourite eras or characters, the lesson would fly, and both he and his class would be surprised by the five-minute bell, warning them that it was time to put away books and forage in their desks for the next period, or disperse to the dining-room.

For the rest, he was pretty well extended supervising sports, performing roster duties in the dining hall and dormitories, and helping out with activities connected with the Old Boys' Association, of which Cordwainer had been secretary for twenty-five years.

It was in this area that he began to perceive hidden qualities in the meticulous, unsmiling Judy, among them a fanatical loyalty to the school, that showed itself in endless letter-writing and formidable documentation. Judy had a phenomenal memory. He could tell you the age, occupation and address of every paid-up member – and there were many hundreds of them – but Judy's approach to Old Boys was never moderated by the passage of time. He still addressed distinguished members of the Governing Board (or such of them who had been boys at Bamfylde) as though they were thirteen-year-olds, presenting a botched exercise, whereas the Old Boys, for their part, treated him with tolerant amusement, and never resented his honking dismissal of what he sometimes denounced as a slovenly approach to problems
of patronage and administration. Even when suggestions were put forward by Sir John Riscoe, who had been responsible for all troop movements in the northern command during the war, or Brigadier Cooper, who had been on the staff of General Plumer throughout the battle for Passchendaele Ridge, he would still honk them down if they trespassed on his preserves, and David would not have been surprised to learn he had hurled his keys at them into the bargain.

David also accepted the chairmanship of the Sixth Form 'Owl' Society, a group that specialised in debates on current topics, and played an important part in the social and cultural functions of the school, but all this was only his outward, visible life. Beneath it was a pulsating glow centred on Beth Marwood, and stimulated by her letters, helter-skelter outpourings of hospital gossip, preparations for their August wedding, and quaintly expressed endearments. Sometimes, musing over her letters for the fourth or fifth time, he would see her again as a lively, lovable child, living in constant anticipation of a stupendous treat.

In her actual presence he had never been conscious of his relative maturity, of the small gap in years, only the great gulf of experience brought about by his experiences in Flanders. But when he read her letters, or studied her photograph in nurse's uniform that stood on his bedside table, he began to see her in the context of boys about two-thirds of the way up the school, colts bursting with animal high spirits almost ready for the responsibilities thrust upon them by Algy Herries (a great advocate of the prefectorial system) the moment they reached the Sixth.

He wondered about her a great deal. What she would make of life in this remote but surging community; how his dour old mother would view her; whether she would make allowances for the terrible ageing process, forced upon every member of his generation who had survived the trenches but, above all, how they would adjust to one another as lovers. For here, he suspected, she would be far more knowledgeable than he was.

He became so apprehensive about this that he ultimately confided in Willoughby, the ex-R.A.M.C. doctor in his mid-fifties, who lived at Stoke Steps, the nearest village to Bamfylde, and was regarded as the school doctor.

Willoughby was a brusque, hardworking man, with a severely practical approach to his patients, and a sharp eye for malingerers. David would have thought of him as a typical ex-army doctor had not Howarth, whose standards were impossibly high, spoken of him as a man thoroughly up to his job. He
made an appointment with Willoughby on the excuse of a general check-up demanded by an insurance company but when the doctor pronounced him one hundred per cent fit, he raised the subject uppermost in his mind. To his relief Willoughby shed his brusqueness and became almost sympathetic.

'Don't think your misgivings are singular,' he said. 'Quite the contrary. “Veldt-starvation", we used to call it in South Africa – any number of men came to me after we had rounded up the last of De Wet's commandos over there. Same thing cropped up in P.O.W. camps this time. Fellows seemed to think they'd lost all interest, and capability into the bargain!' He smiled, as though recalling something out of his own youth. 'I've known men ask for aphrodisiacs, along with their demobilisation kit, but it's all poppycock. The fact is, most males adjust to deprivation after a time. Damned good job they do, or every single one of you chaps would have come home with a roaring dose, and passed it on to the first decent woman he met. But why should you worry, seeing you've found yourself a filly you fancy? That speaks for itself, doesn't it? I hear you didn't take long to make up your mind about the girl.'

'No, I didn't,' David told him, 'and Beth being a trained nurse ought to help, but… well, the fact is, before running into her I never had the slightest inclination to go out and find myself a woman. Isn't that unusual, a virgin at twenty-three?'

'Not in your case, old chap. Nonconformist upbringing, for one thing, and I've met plenty of Nonconformists who regard sex as the ultimate sin. Sensitive nature too, I daresay, but above all, pitchforked into that bloody holocaust, before your eighteenth birthday. The wonder is you can bring yourself to discuss it with a stranger. Oh, I could use a lot of long words, and sound off like a medical dictionary, but it isn't in the least necessary in your case. You're fit now. You've got the moor and that place up there to thank for that, and you've had the luck to meet a girl who revived your natural instincts. My advice to you, old man, is to let well alone and give those instincts free rein. And for God's sake, don't go into a solemn conclave with the poor girl when you're supposed to be enjoying your honeymoon. Don't plough through any of these well-meaning tracts my fellow witch-doctors are always bringing out, either. The world's been going a long time, and the population is still rising, despite our attempts to kill one another off for the sheer hell of it! Do you want children?'

'I don't think I've thought about it.'

'Well, don't. If they come, they come. When they like rather than when you like. At all events, that's my experience. Family planning, my good right foot!' His face clouded for a moment. 'Had two myself. Boy and a girl. The boy was killed at Vimy. Fine young chap. Made up his mind to go for surgery, like his grandfather, but a Jerry hand-grenade put paid to that. Daughter's married to a chap about your age. He came out of it with a bad whiff of gas and they're living in Scotland. He had to take a forestry job, although he was trained as an accountant. Six months in an office would kill him. Told him so and he took my tip. Got a photograph of your fiancée?'

David showed him a snap of Elizabeth, taken with her Brownie camera on the walls of Caernarvon Castle and Willoughby studied it, objectively. 'Looks a bonnie lass,' he said. 'Should be very good for you.' And then, incuriously, 'How are you liking it up there?'

'I like it fine, mostly because Herries knows what he's about.'

'Aye, he does. But he's had his troubles, converting the traditionalists to his peculiar style of government. Well, proof of the pudding, they say. He's getting results, and it was a Dotheboys Hall when I remember it, in Wesker's time. Couldn't stand the man, neither could the boys. Here, what the devil am I doing gossiping to you? I've got a baby due over at Barrowhead Farm,' and he grabbed his bag and hat and hurried out to a high-slung gig that his man had brought round from the stable. 'I'll trade this in for a car as soon as they improve the roads about here,' he called from the driving seat, and cracking his whip went off at a spanking trot, leaving David with the impression that Howarth was an excellent judge of character.