R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (29 page)

He raised another barrier against introspection and self-pity. He had always been primarily interested in post-Conquest history but, via some construes he had made of Plutarch's
Lives
when mugging for his degree, he was led back to the Ancients and tackled, for the first time, Gibbon's massive work on the Roman Empire. Having whetted his appetite, so to speak, he began to study Persian history, from Cyrus the Great to the Alexandrian conquest, so that his small store of Latin was of real service to him and names like Darius, Xerxes and Zenophon emerged as something more than cardboard figures and supplied him with a new source of anecdotes that he could retell to the Third and Fourth Forms.

Barnaby was the first to note this extension into what he regarded as his field and said, when they were sharing a coffee break one morning. 'I always took you for a bit of a Philistine, P.J., a chap who thought history began at the traditional starting point, 55 B.C. I was wrong it seems. Young Hilary, a duffer if ever there was one, came out with something I didn't know about Hannibal this morning during construe. Damned if I didn't think I was hearing Joan of Arc's voice for a minute. Then he admitted you gave them half an hour on the Punic Wars on Thursday.'

The incident, trivial enough, had the effect of bringing him and Barnaby closer together. He had always liked the classics master, a very easygoing man, despite a touch of exhibitionism, but he had never quite succeeded in making a friend of him. Now they sometimes took long walks together, or shared a drink in Howarth's rooms, and the association helped, as did the tendency on the part of everyone save Carter, and Molyneux, who had replaced Ferguson in modern languages, to go out of their way to help. There were still two vaguely hostile camps in the common room. His own, that included the amiable Barnaby and was led from behind by Howarth, and Carter's, for Carter, although a stickler for discipline, had a talent for recruiting the younger,
pushing men, often with pet theories on education, men who were slightly contemptuous of Algy's refurbished Arnoldian concepts. The rift was deeper than appeared on the surface, dividing those who thought of themselves as progressive-traditionalists, like Herries himself, and those Howarth labelled the Eager Beavers, committed to raising Bamfylde's academic status and attracting a different kind of parent. There was, however, no danger of a flare-up so long as Algy remained in charge, for although he was careful not to flaunt his authority, it was he who charted the school's course and formulated its policies, and his influence with the Governors, some of whom shared Carter's outlook, was very strong after twenty years of steady progress and the lengthy waiting-list he had built up since the war. Sometimes David wondered what would happen when Herries retired, as he was scheduled to do after the summer term of 1927. He would be sixty-seven then, and had already made arrangements to take the living of Yatton-under-Edge, twenty miles nearer the coast.

He did not give it much thought, however, being fully occupied getting his second wind, and in the event it was not until May, 1926, when the shock waves of the General Strike rolled as far as the Exmoor plateau, that the breach was highlighted, not so much between the two factions as between himself and Carter, catalysts of opposing schools of thought.

3

It almost surely would not have occurred had not David chosen that particular week to pay his first visit to Greystoke, the Kent rehabilitation hospital to which Grace, now making very definite progress, had been transferred in April.

He found her in far better health and spirits than he had anticipated. The legacy of that avalanche of stones could still be traced down the dead side of her face, where plastic surgeons had been at work, and in a heavy limp caused, they told him, by the shortening of muscles in the left leg, where three operations on the bone had resulted in a contraction of half an inch. In all other respects, however, she seemed to have made an amazing recovery and Harvey-Smith, who had maintained his personal interest in the case despite the fact that he lived in Plymouth, told him the child would always limp but that the scars on her face would fade a little every year.

'If she had been a year or so older,' he said, 'say, around eight when it happened, we shouldn't have been so lucky and the limp would have been
worse. As it is she'll climb to ninety-five per cent in six months. Apart from strenuous games there's no reason at all why she shouldn't lead a perfectly normal life.'

It was a kind of miracle to watch her tackling her formidable exercises in the solarium. He had expected a pale, withdrawn child, heaving herself around on crutches but it was not like that at all. At first she was as shy with him as he was with her but after his third visit they adjusted very well and he was astonished, and a little touched, by her curiosity about the past, asking him all kinds of questions to supplement her fragmentary memories of the last year in the cottage and the few short weeks they had shared at Havelock's.

She said, almost gaily he thought, 'I remember bits, Daddy, but mostly it's all mixed up, and there's a lot I don't remember at all.'

'Do you remember the actual crash?' he asked, fearfully, and she said she did not, recalling nothing whatever of the final trip they made to Challacombe, not even the inoculation immediately preceding the accident. Her memories, it seemed, were concentrated on the last year at the cottage, leading up to the move to school and the Easter she and Joan had spent with Grandfather Marwood, at Elmer's End. She remembered the last new boys' tea-party Beth had given, in September, '…because it was the day a boy with glasses upset the tea-pot on Towser.'

'Ah, that was Rowlandson,' he said, 'he remembers that too, and will laugh when I tell him you do. How much do you remember about Mummy and Joan?'

'I remember Mummy bathing us in front of the fire in a tub, and wrapping the towel round us to look like Indian girls. And her singing instead of reading a story when we went up to bed.'

'Singing what, Grace?'

'A song with a lot of words, that all came out in a rush. About a queen it was.'

It was like a dart and the impact made him catch his breath. It had been one of Beth's songs from
The Gondoliers
, that year's Gilbert and Sullivan, and the laughter behind her voice came to him now, as clearly as though she was serenading them from the terrace outside. He steered her away from memories after that, telling her of his plans for her when she was finally discharged from hospital, tentative as yet but sketched over the last few weeks after Harvey-Smith had said she could be home by the start of autumn term.

'You'll have my old room overlooking the moor,' he said, 'the one I slept
in, and used as a study before you were born. The builders, who are working at school now, are going to fix it up and make it pretty and Mrs Arscott, our new Second Form mistress, is going to give you private lessons for the time, to help you catch up. You'll have to look after me at Havelock's, because I'm all on my own there apart from the boys, and Mrs Herries says she'll teach you to cook. Would you like that?'

'I'd like it very much,' she said. 'Could I give new boys' tea-parties?'

'Why, that's a splendid idea! So you shall, as soon as you're settled in. I've arranged with old Hodge to give you riding lessons too, on that pony of his, the one that used to scrape his hoof at the door for bread crusts. You'll be able to saddle up and ride down to see Ma Midden whenever you want, and over to the village to do the shopping. Granfer and Grandmummy Tilda ('Tilda' was Mrs Marwood's collie, and the twins had used her to distinguish between their two grandmothers, ever since they were three) will come down here and see you, and take you out once in a while, and I'll come again at half-term. Keep at those exercises, won't you, love?' and he left her, a little hurriedly, reflecting thankfully that she was a cheerful, uncomplicated child, and likely to prove a great comfort to him in the years ahead.

Summer term had already begun when he paid his visit and he was due back on Monday but then, spending Sunday with his father-in-law, the strike was upon them, and there was no hope of returning by rail. He got through, with some difficulty, to the bursar's office, and was somewhat taken aback when the phone was answered by Carter, who happened to be in the office while the bursar was out. David explained the circumstances, asking Carter if he would tell the head he would be back at the earliest opportunity, and was puzzled rather than annoyed by Carter's breezy rejoinder, 'Right, Powlett-Jones! Leave it to me.' Then, 'A case of hoist by your own petard, eh, old man?'

'How's that again?'

Carter said, in what David had learned to think of as his Sixth Form voice, 'Nothing, old chap. Only a little dig on my part. After all, you're for the red flag, aren't you? No, that isn't fair, let's call it pink!'

He did not trust himself to answer, having learned something about the art of duelling with Carter over the years, but rang off, glowering through the kiosk panes at two special constables enjoying the brief authority vested in them by their armbands. Then, muttering 'Bloody little swine…' he walked down the main road towards Clockhouse.

Carter's gibe, and his own instinctive sympathy with the miners, based on all
he knew of the Valleys, conditioned his approach to the strike from the outset. Temporarily stranded, he passed the time talking to anyone who he thought might give him deeper insight into the cause and effect. This included not only members of the British public (as communicative during an emergency as they were uncommunicative when life ran smoothly) but local organisers, who were holding street-corner meetings to promote solidarity. He also read the
British Gazette
, Churchill's broadsheet, impatient with its stridency, and even probed the police point of view from a sergeant guarding a bus driven by an undergraduate.

What surprised him, dismayed him somewhat, was the apparent absence of acrimony on both sides and the inclination of the general public to regard the stoppage as an impromptu national spree. There seemed no way of communicating to the man in the street the reality of the miners' grievances and the unsentimental justice of their claim. As a miner's son he was unable to share the hilarity of the occasion. As a teacher of nineteenth-century history he was all too familiar with hidden factors contributing to the present confrontation. Long hours, backbreaking, primitive conditions above and under ground, miserly pay, the ever present threat of death or mutilation – these were things that men who hacked a subsistence living from the seams had taken for granted over two generations. What stuck in the craw was the underlying conviction in the heart and mind of the miner that, whereas an approach to some kind of equity was apparent in every other heavy industry since the Armistice, his own had got itself bogged down in a slough of bureaucratic wrangling, Governmental indifference and avarice on the part of the mine owners and drawers of dividends. And behind all was a threat that few ever voiced outside the coalfields, the prospect of technological advances hurrying the industry towards a date when the demand for coal dropped away, a little every year, leaving skilled men, now in their late twenties and early thirties, without such bargaining power as they held today, perhaps without a trade to ply. It was like a huge, ugly boil slowly coming to a head, with everyone watching and no one possessing the wit or the spirit to apply an internal remedy and frustration ultimately drove him to the public library to read some of the debates in Hansard preceding the stoppage.

He found little here he did not know already. There were thousands of words on pay, safety devices, pithead baths and the like, but no one seemed to have commented on the inborn pride in his craft that the miner carried underground every working day. Neither, for that matter, had anyone at Westminster seen
fit to acknowledge the modesty of the Miners' Federation's claims made the previous year. It made him wonder, not for the first time, if he had made the most of such brains as he possessed by burying himself on a Devon moor all these years, when he might have played some part in the nation's affairs, either in politics, or as a professional organiser of the Workers' Education Association, that was striving so hard to improve the education of men and women who had left school at fourteen and younger. But, somehow, illogically, it all led back to Carter and Carter's type, lucky renegades as he thought of them, who had used their superior educations to infiltrate into the lower ranks of the bosses' class. He thought, 'I've got to get back there somehow. I've got to see how Bamfylde is taking it and whether anyone down there is trying to see our side of it!' It reminded him how deeply rooted were his prejudices against monied interests, that had succeeded in killing his father and brothers, and an entire generation in the years that followed.

'I'll bloody well get there if I have to walk,' he told his railwayman father-in-law, 'There's no damned sense in what I'm doing, unless I can say my piece at places like Bamfylde,' and he went out and bought a knapsack, begging a lift on a milk lorry as far as the Great West Road, where he got another lift in an army lorry returning to Alders hot for more troops.

He walked nearly twenty miles the next day before putting up at a cyclists' hostel and the day after that, following a succession of lifts and tramps, he came down over the moor near Dulverton, riding a market cart. He made short work of the last leg, arriving at school just after dusk on Sunday, May 9th. The strike still had three days to run.