R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (5 page)

But Gosse, a diehard if ever there was one, stuck to his point.

'I take it they were prisoners, sir?'

'Yes, they were. But shell-splinters aren't particular where they find a billet. They risked their lives to save mine.'

'But in 1914 they burned Louvain, sir.'

'Yes, they did. But I like to think they've learned since then. We've all learned something, or should have. If we haven't, getting on for a hundred chaps who occupied those desks of yours a few years ago died in a circus, not a war.'

He hadn't meant to say as much as this but later he was glad. For two reasons, separated by a few hours. In the first place, when the bell sounded marking the end of morning classes, they crowded round him, asking all kinds of questions, a few baffled and even hostile, but every one of them prompted by a burning curiosity. Then, as dusk was setting in, and he was closeted in what Herries called Mount Olympus – the ground-floor lavatory in the head's house with its opaque window opening on to the covered part of the quad – he overheard Gosse and two other Fifth Formers discussing him. Dispassionately, as though they already accepted him as a queer fish. He made haste to get out then but before he could escape he heard one boy say, 'All right, he's a Bolshie. But what he says makes sense to me, Starchy!'

He was getting to grips with the Bamfylde obsession for nicknames. There were two Gosse boys at the school. The elder, a beefy extrovert, was called 'Archibald', so it followed that he should be labelled 'Archy' and his elegant brother 'Starchy'. Starchy Gosse was a pedant but fair-minded, it seemed, for he said, mildly, 'It depends on how long he's been out there,' and the third
boy asked, 'Why, Starchy?'

'They say it gets a man down in the end. That chap talks just like my uncle Edward. He was invalided out two years ago, but my governor has stopped inviting him over. Seems to think he's… well, almost pro-Hun… pro-Jerry. I don't think he is. I mean, how the hell could he be, with one eye and one leg gone?'

David was sweating when he reached the stairs but in the privacy of his rooftop room, lent to him until he took up his quarters in Havelock's House at the start of the summer term, he found he was able to take a more encouraging view of the conversation. At least Gosse had begun to think outside his prejudices. And at least doubt had begun to cloud the Classical Fifth's conventional picture of the war, as drawn for them by Northcliffe and Bottomley. And also, as a bonus, Starchy had corrected himself when using the word 'Hun'. Did it matter a damn if they thought of him as a Bolshie?

The Sixth Forms had to be handled very differently. In a way he equated them with the very youngest boys in the school, for they were exceptionally vulnerable at seventeen-plus. If the war dragged on for a few months, some of them would be out there and they were all too aware of it. The Rupert Brooke approach – “Breast expanding to the ball” – spent itself long ago, and disillusionment was general among all but the fanatics and armchair strategists. Sometimes it seemed to him that the foul blight had already touched these youngsters, so that he saw them stripped of their high spirits, leading some forlorn attack on a German sector, defended by heavy machine-guns, and belching mortar fire. They pressed him shyly for technical details, extensions of questions posed in the drill books of the Officers' Training Corps that paraded twice a week in the plantation and on the hillsides beyond. He humoured them, feeling his age here more than in any other part of the school. The gap between him and the eldest of them was no more than four years but it might have been fifty.

And then, towards the end of term, a week or two after Ludendorffs shattering breakthrough on Gough's Fifth Army front, with the appalling prospect of Paris falling, and the British being flung back on the Channel ports, there was another incident that left its mark on him yet encouraged him to see his presence here as something of real value.

Algy Herries told him at breakfast that young Briarley's father, a captain in the Rifle Brigade, had been killed on the Lys, and the boy had been told the news by Ellie, who usually took it upon herself to perform these melancholy chores. 'The poor little toad is sunning himself out front now,' Herries said. 'Suppose you go and have a chat with him?'

'What could I say that Mrs Herries hasn't already said?' David asked, and Herries said, airily, 'Oh, I don't know… something about all the chaps who have gone on ahead, maybe. And perhaps what it's all in aid of,' and at this David guessed Herries had heard, through the Bamfylde grapevine, of his 'Bolshie' chats with the Fourth and Fifth Forms, but was giving no clue as to whether he approved or disapproved.

He went out into the forecourt where Briarley sat on a seat under the huge cedar that spread itself across the headmaster's lawn. The boy looked stunned but more or less in control of himself. He sat very still, his hands on his knees, staring down across a field of rough pasture, part of which had been dug over for potatoes. Beyond the violet skyline granite outcrops of the Exmoor plateau winked and glistened in the pale sunshine, but nothing moved out there. The spring landscape looked as lonely and desolate as Briarley.

He sat down beside the boy, saying nothing for a moment, but then he saw Briarley's lip quiver and lifted his arm, resting it gently on the boy's shoulder. He said, at length, 'Was he a professional, Briarley?' and when Briarley nodded, 'We couldn't have held out this long without them, lad. They taught us everything we knew in the early days,' and then, when the boy made no reply, 'Do you care to tell me about him? I've served in the Lys sector twice. Maybe we met, spoke to one another.'

He could not be sure whether his presence brought any real comfort but it must have eased Briarley's inner tensions to some extent for presently he said, 'I didn't see a great deal of him, sir. When I was a kid he was mostly in India or Ireland. He came here once, on leave. Last autumn, it was. We… we sat here for a bit, waiting for the school boneshaker to take him to the station.'

'Did he talk about the war, Briarley?'

'No, sir, not really. He only…'

'Well?'

'He said if anything did happen, and he was crocked and laid up for a time, I was to be sure and do all I could to look after the mater while he was away.'

'Are you an only child, Briarley?'

'No, sir. I'm the only boy. I've got three sisters, one older, the others just kids.'

'Well, then, you've got a job ahead of you. Your mother is going to need you badly. That's something to keep in mind, isn't it?'

'Yes, sir. I suppose so, but…'

He began to cry silently and with a curious dignity, so that David automatically tightened his grip on the slight shoulders. There was no point in saying anything more. They sat there for what seemed to David a long time and then, with a gulp or two, Briarley got up. 'I'd better start packing, sir. Algy… I mean the headmaster said I was to go home today, ahead of the others. Matron's getting my trunk down from the covered playground…' And then, in what David thought of as an oddly impersonal tone, 'The telegram said “Killed in action", sir. What exactly – well, does that always mean what it says?'

'If it hadn't been that way it would have said “Died of wounds", and there's a difference.'

'Thank you, sir.' He was a plucky kid and had himself in hand again. He nodded briefly and walked back towards the head's house. David would have liked to have followed him, letting himself be caught up in the swirl of end-of-term junketings, but he could not trust himself to move. His hands were shaking again and his head was tormented by the persistent buzzing that always seemed to assail him these days in moments of stress. He said, explosively, 'God damn everybody! Where's the sense in it…? Where's the bloody sense, for Christ's sake?' And then, like Briarley, he was granted the relief of tears.

2

There were plenty of moments during that period of initiation when he was able, to his own surprise, to put the war out of mind and find handholds that promised hope of a climb back to objectivity. Occasionally it was in class, when he was interested in some particular aspect of the syllabus, but more often it was in the common room, rubbing shoulders with the assortment of eccentrics that the arch-eccentric Herries had assembled round him to tide him through the war.

They were not a very likeable bunch but one had, David assumed, to make allowances. The older men were petrified in the Victorian mould, some of them so deeply rutted that they appeared to regard the war as a tedious and irrelevant interruption to their careers or well-earned retirement. Of the younger bunch, the C.3 men were almost pitiable, feeling themselves terribly handicapped as civilians in authority over four hundred boys, almost all of
whom had fathers, brothers and uncles at the front. There was one among this latter group who was teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Meredith, a twenty-five-year-old diabetic, with a sallow complexion and huge defenceless eyes. Meredith's classes, David learned, usually ended in a riot, and he was said to stand on the rostrum and let the tide of ribaldry sweep over him, bleating, 'I
say
there… I
say
, you fellows…!' Beyond that he would make no protest. Meredith had a curious sideways-sloping gait, moving over the ground with long strides, one shoulder raised an inch higher than the other. The boys had taken to mimicking him and some of them did it rather well, occasionally, it was alleged, lurching up to the blackboard in his actual presence and taking over, while Meredith stood helplessly, whimpering, 'I
say
… I
say
, you fellows…!' Herries had done what he could to help and even advised Meredith to take a cane into class, but when the poor devil followed this advice even worse chaos resulted. Boyer and his ilk, pretending to be terrified of Meredith's ineffectual swipes, fled in all directions. When cornered they fell on their knees, shrieking for mercy.

The older masters showed no sympathy at all with the poor chap and frequently complained of the uproar resulting from his classes. Carter, the only younger master apart from David who had been in uniform, was the most persistent common-room nag, and David soon conceived an intense dislike for the man, whose conceit amounted to arrogance.

Carter was a stocky, rather florid man, with smooth red hair that he kept oiled so that it gleamed like wet rust. He had a long inquisitive nose, rimless glasses and no eyelashes to speak of. On the strength of six months' service as a Territorial officer, at a camp in Northumberland, he claimed David as a war comrade, explaining in great detail how a knee injury, received in a pre-war football game, had been responsible for his discharge in 1915.

'Let me down with a bump, old man,' he said, during one of his interminable reminiscences, that made David think of himself as a newly joined officer buttonholed by a patronising major. 'Damn thing gave out the week my draft was due to leave for France. Most of them went west at Loos, of course. Damned awful show, Loos. Badly bungled, I gather.'

David murmured that it was, and that he had seen some fighting in the area, but Carter was not interested in positive experience, preferring to talk of his triumphs on the drill ground outside Newcastle in the early days of Kitchener's army. He was still very much the martinet, with a small army of his own, the school O.T.C., and was extremely put out when David politely refused to join the Corps.

'Damn it, why not, old man? We could use a chap like you, someone with trench experience. I daresay you could teach us a few wrinkles if you cared to, and the top brass regard the O.T.C. as the nursery of subalterns, don't they?'

'If they do then God help the lot of us,' said David, the Welsh lilt edging back into his voice as it often did under stress. 'The average life of those kids out there is three weeks. Good God, man, they don't even have time to learn when to duck!' and at once regretted his testiness. He need not have bothered. Carter was exceptionally thick-skinned and said blandly, 'Well, that's war, old chap. Can't win a war without losing a few. However, I'll not take no for an answer. The head tells me you're still convalescent. We'll talk about it again later, eh?'

He drifted off, unaware that the convalescent was having the greatest difficulty in restraining himself from committing assault upon his person, but the moment he was out of earshot Howarth, the senior English master, said, 'Ignore the poopstick. Most of us do, whenever we can,' and he at once felt cheered, for he was by no means sure, at this stage, whether Herries would expect him to take part in O.T.C. activities. He said, cautiously, 'Is that true about his knee?' and Howarth, reluctantly laying aside his
Times
, said that everybody at Bamfylde took that knee on trust, as the medical board must have done, Carter being but thirty-one years old. He added, however, 'The devil of it is it gives him the edge on all the civilians about here and being Carter he makes the utmost of it. Maybe somebody was lucky he was crocked on the football field. Shouldn't care to have him lead me into action, would you?'

'No, by God, I wouldn't,' David said, and at once saw the testy, taciturn Howarth in a new light. Up to then he had been very wary of the man, a notable disciplinarian, with the reputation for possessing a bitter tongue. No one at Bamfylde, save Herries himself, had escaped Howarth's sarcasm, but he was recognised as a first-class teacher who had the respect, if not the affection, of the boys, even the wild ones in the Lower Fourth. When the other masters had drawn their dishwater coffee from the tarnished urn and moved off, David said, 'You've been here a good many years, Mr Howarth. How would you say it compares with other schools, schools of the same standing?' and Howarth said, for once without irony, 'I can tell you that. It compares extremely well under Herries. It'll never be a Harrow, a Clifton or a Rugby. That chance passed us by when our numbers dropped in Bull's day. But I think of it as a first-class second-rater. Or could be, when the wartime chaff is blown away, and the Governors spend some money on the fabric.' He seemed to reflect
a moment. 'I stayed when I might have moved on and I've had my chances, especially in the last few years, when my age group has had it all their own way. But if you asked me why I don't think I could give you a specific answer. Maybe it's because I like and respect Herries. He's an original.'