R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (20 page)

'I think we're very lucky this way, Davy,' she said, on an occasion quite
early in their marriage. 'It must be absolutely awful to have to go through a chemist's shop drill every time you want to make love. I suppose people get used to it but I don't think I could.'

'You might have to eventually,' he said, grinning at the moonlit patch of plaster above the bed. 'If I can't bully Algy into giving us married quarters someone will be roughing it in the outhouse and it's not going to be me. I've too much on my plate and need my sleep.'

He had, too, for his long-term plans were beginning to mature. They had altered since the days Beth and he had planned how to go about getting his degree. Various opportunities had opened up for ex-servicemen who could claim a spell of teaching experience at a reputable school. He was now working hard for an external London degree, using an Oxford correspondence course that required of the student a minimum of eight hours' work a week. In fact, David was able to put in more, mostly by reading while supervising in class or prep. He was covering British and European history from earliest times to 1900, social and economic history over the same span, one special subject – he chose his favourite, fifteenth century – and political theory. There was one other paper, translating a historical extract from two modern languages out of a choice of five, and this required special cramming. His French was adequate, but he knew very little German and had to be coached by Ferguson, a fluent German speaker although he did not teach it. His intermediate was behind him now, taken at Exeter in 1921, when he sailed through in four subjects, including English and European combined history, English literature (coached by Howarth) and Latin, in which he gained a poor pass after some steady coaching by Barnaby.

As the time for taking his finals approached he sometimes wondered whether he would use all this effort as a means of moving on, perhaps applying for a more important post at a better-known school, but it seemed unlikely so long as Herries was around. Even before the incident of the fire he had acquired a special relationship with Algy, whose unconventional approach to education made a direct appeal to him, whereas Beth seemed happy enough, despite social isolation.

Against all probability, she had integrated into the school and come to share his love of the untamed countryside, even in its savage moods. Yet it was not her humour and unswerving devotion alone that played their parts in banishing the final traces of shell-shock, in healing a mind and body that had survived three years on the Western Front. The cure, to his way of thinking at least,
had been wrought mainly by regular access to a woman whose approach to him was maternal, in that she was equipped to ease the tensions that had built up inside him, simply by being herself and absorbing him with a directness and merry-hearted innocence. Simply to lie there and watch her undress in the lamplight was a kind of therapy. The sight of her young, supple body, glowing with health and redolent with mystery, even when she was naked, was a demonstration of wholesomeness and flawlessness to a man who had been in such close contact with everything foul and shattered.

He would watch the lamplight play on her breasts and move, like a sensuous lover, over her thighs and buttocks. Sometimes, by way of a laughing glance over her shoulder, she would assess the intentness of his fond scrutiny before pursuing her unhurried way to bed and bestowing on him a few brief moments of ecstasy that would leave him speechless with gratitude for her presence and for her being.

This was her unique contribution, but the other, broader road back to vigour and full mental health was signposted by boys. Boys of all ages and all temperaments, boys who came to represent for him a world of rich and varied promise, that he had assumed lost for all time in hurricane bombardments under Aubers Ridge and Polygon Wood.

They were signposts of variable aspect. Humour was there, and sometimes pathos, and two incidents stood out during that period, so that he thought of them, in after years, as important crossroads.

The funny one, that had the undertones of an outside world's tribulations, was the affair of Paddy McNaughton, the Irish boy who staged a spectacular and convincing show of running amok one wet half-holiday, when games were cancelled, and a group of his peers in the Upper Fourth were passing an idle hour tormenting him about his championship of the Irish Free State. That was in the winter of 1921–22 shortly after Bloody Sunday brought about a final crisis in Irish affairs, and Michael Collins, the Sinn Fein hero, made a clean sweep of British Intelligence officers and Scotland Yard men assembled in Dublin to arrest a number of rebel leaders.

Nobody really resented Paddy's chauvinism. By then it was an accepted fact of the Bamfylde scene, particularly as it was generally known Paddy's father had been badly wounded serving with the Munsters, in France. But on this particular afternoon Lower Fourth banter over-reached itself and Paddy was collared and thrust into the Big School dust-hole, a relic of the Victorian era, that still absorbed dust and rubbish under the rostrum and was reached by a
small trap door.

They got him down there easily enough, egged on by Bickford, Rigby, and several other members of The Lump, but their high spirits turned to panic when Paddy re-emerged via a wormeaten section of wainscoting flourishing a large Smith and Wesson revolver, that he used to corner all but one of his persecutors, yelling that he would show them that one Irishman was the equal of a dozen Englishmen.

Half-mad with fright, Bickford and his associates were backed the full length of Big School but Rigby managed to slip away, dashing into the quad and flinging himself upon David, who happened to be crossing the quad on his way to the bandroom.

'Please, sir, come quickly, sir! He'll shoot 'em all, sir! He's in there now, with a damn great gun. Clean off his rocker, sir…!' and David hurried in the direction indicated, too late to rescue the hostages but in time to see them herded over the slushy ground in the direction of the swimming pool. He ran after them, a crowd of whipping boys in his wake, but seeing Boyer, now a Sixth Former and trainee prefect, he shouted to him to keep the others back.

He was twenty yards short of the cricket pavilion when he heard a confused outcry, terminated by a series of splashes, and when he burst into the enclosure there stood McNaughton, enjoying the prospect of Bickford and five of his cronies floundering in the deep end.

He walked up to the boy with his hand extended and McNaughton, breathless and grinning, lobbed the revolver in his direction. He caught it and saw at a glance that it was far from being a lethal weapon. It was hammerless and corroded by rust, the relic, no doubt, of a discarded war issue rescued from a rubbish dump.

'What the devil possessed you to play such a tomfool trick?' he demanded, and McNaughton said, cheerfully, 'I had to do something, sir. There's a limit to the ragging a man can take. I'll take a beating and no complaints at all sir. It was worth it, to see 'em cooling off in there, and this no weather at all for a swim, sir!'

He snapped, 'Wait here, McNaughton, I'll deal with you in a moment,' and leaving the boy by the firing platforms of the miniature range he hurried down to the bedraggled group climbing out of the pool and looking, he thought, extraordinarily foolish as they shook the water from their clothes.

Bickford said, breathlessly, 'He's raving mad, sir! He would have drilled us if we hadn't done what he said and jumped…' but David said, holding up the
rusting antique, 'With this?' and the pistol passed from hand to hand with cries of indignation. Bickford said, uncertainly, 'He kept telling us it was loaded, sir. He said he'd brought it back from Dublin, and kept it specially for us. We didn't get a chance to get a close look at it. It's… it's a real one, isn't it, sir?'

'It was. About the time of the Phoenix Park murders over there. Run on back, strip off and give yourselves a good rub down. Then go down to the kitchen and tell Ned Priddis I said you were to have a pint of hot cocoa apiece. Off with you and don't hang about,' and they went, making a cautious circle round the impassive McNaughton as they filed through the gate.

He sauntered back, balancing the weapon in his hand and said, curiously, 'Where did you find this McNaughton? And how did it come to be so handy in that dust-hole?'

'I've had it since I was a kid, sir. I found it on a Liffey dump years ago and brought it back after last hols.'

'Why, exactly?'

McNaughton hesitated. 'Nothing to do with them. The Black and Tans were making house-to-house searches at the time. I didn't want to give them an excuse to shoot the Governor. Even an antique like that could cause trouble over there, sir.'

'Ah, so I've heard,' David said, and the boy looked at him carefully, as though trying to decide whether the remark was ironic or conciliatory. He said, finally, 'My people are neutral actually. My Governor fought for the British and won the M.C. at Cambrai,' and then, defiantly, 'But the Tans were right bastards, sir!'

'Do you really feel steamed up about asses like Bickford and Rigby?'

'Och, no, sir. Bull Bickford's dim, but there's nothing personal, sir. And the others, well, they just go along. It all began as a lark, sir.'

'But got out of hand?'

'Well, yes, sir. But like I said, they asked for it, so they did.' Then, doggedly, 'I'll shake hands, sir, if Bull and the others will, but there's sure to be a rare shindig now. It'll be all over the school by tea-bell.'

'That won't matter, so long as it's handled properly.'

'You're saying you'll speak to the head, sir? Tell him my side of it?'

'Wouldn't you prefer to tell him yourself?'

'No, sir. You see – well, I reckon you know about Ireland and the Irish. You must have been in the trenches with people like my Governor. Maybe you could make him see why I blew my top?'

'Very well, leave it to me. As to this gun, what shall we do about it?'

'Throw it away I'd say, sir.'

'Good idea. I've seen all I want to see of guns, antique and otherwise.'

He nodded and went off towards the plantation, finding a fox earth, stuffing the pistol into it and ramming it home with his boot. He had no intention of punishing McNaughton for what he saw as a justifiable explosion of wrath, and he did not think Herries or Howarth, McNaughton's housemaster, would overrule him. And anyway, by now Paddy McNaughton, with his cool truculence, and his disposition to fight his own battles in his own way, had joined the company of Bamfeldians who had succeeded in forming a strong, personal contact with him, a group that already included Cooper and the Sixth Form volunteers of his first term, Boyer, Ridgeway and the Kassava boys, on account of the shared adventure of the fire, Skidmore, now known as 'Preacher', on account of his prolonged bedside prayers, Briarley, the boy he had tried to comfort back in the days of the Big Push, and one or two others, whom chance had singled out for eligibility. There was to be one other before that integration period ended, the boy who now featured in what he would recall as the curious affair of Blades and Julia Darbyshire.

Like most of the episodes that passed as peaks in the terminal graphs it came about by chance, one hot afternoon in late May, when he was taking the long way home over the plank bridge of the stream that ran between two folds of the moor above Stone Cross.

The First Eleven were playing Christow Manor and there had been two free periods after lunch. It was an important match but he had cramming to do and after watching the visitors' innings, he left the field and cut through the plantation to the slope that led down to the Coombe. He had a purpose in mind. A rivulet ran through the cottage garden and Beth had made a water-garden there, planting wild flowers on the margins and hoping for the best. She was now in search of marsh marigolds and he remembered having seen them growing in the river bottom when he had passed this way during the last of the Lent term runs. He borrowed a trowel and a carton from Westacott, the gardener, and decided to see what he could find on his way home.

He had reached the head of a steep path leading to the bridge, half-aware of the distant sounds from the cricket-field that carried all the way over here when the wind was in the west, the faint but distant
snack
of a ball hit for a four and the scattered applause, pleasant, summery sounds he thought them and very English in that setting. Perhaps this was why he paused a moment
to listen, his back to the school, his eyes on the valley below, a riot of brown and russet, shot through with the vivid green of new growth and, on more open ground, the gleam of celandine showing among the softer hues of lingering primroses and columbine. Rashes of campion grew there and a few sparse patches of bluebells at the top of the wooded slope, a complex that utterly transformed the aspect of this same coombe once summer was at hand.

He was standing there, about twenty yards from the stream, when he heard a woman's laugh and swinging round detected a slight movement among the waist-high ferns. There was no reason why he should investigate. The village women went there to mushroom and collect wood but the sound did not strike him as a local's laugh. It had a light, musical quality that told him whoever was down there was what the moor folk would call a 'foggy-dew' or foreigner. Something else, too. The laugh was associated with dalliance. He thought shrugging, 'Well, I'm no spoil-sport. Nobody tips his hat to a Peeping Tom,' and was already turning away when the laugh was repeated, followed by a few indistinguishable words in the voice of a boy, almost certainly a Bamfylde boy, judging by the vowels. He thought, dismally, 'Well, that does it. Now I'll have to stick my silly nose in,' and moved a few yards lower down, walking on brindled turf, to a point where he could see through a gap in the young foliage to the bank of the stream.

What he saw made him recoil. Sitting against the bole of an ash, her thick chestnut hair unpinned and half-screening her face, was Julia Darbyshire, the new Second Form mistress, who had recently replaced Mrs Parminter, the motherly soul everybody knew as 'Ma Fender'. And reclining full length his head on Julia's lap, was Blades, plagiarising the poet Herrick in a somewhat different sense from that implied in Howarth's comment.