R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (6 page)

'You don't look for originality in this profession, do you?'

'You do here,' Howarth said shortly, and abruptly terminated the conversation by picking up his
Times
, leaving David with the impression that Howarth was someone on whom it might be wiser to reserve judgment. He was right about Bamfylde as regards originality, however, as David soon discovered when he became better acquainted with the older men on the staff.

There was Cordwainer. There was Acton. And there was Gibbs, respectively known as 'Judy', 'Bouncer' and 'Rapper'. The Sixth called the trio 'The Magi', for each, in his different way, was a man of distinction. Judy Cordwainer taught geography as his main subject, and elementary mathematics to the juniors, but he did many other things. He played the organ at Stonecross Church, where the school worshipped on Sundays, marked out the cricket and football pitches with fanatical precision, presided over the school stationery cupboard and even taught woodwork. Judy came of the generation of schoolteachers who practiced before the age of specialisation and could turn hand and brain to anything once he was persuaded Bamfylde had need of his services. A tall, austere man, with cadaverous features, he was without a sense of humour, but his unswerving loyalty to boys and colleagues more than made up for this and, over the years, he had acquired a gratuitous popularity. Wags were fond of explaining how he came by his nickname, back in the nineties, when he had been housemaster of Outram's, a post he had relinquished in favour of Carter on his official retirement. It appeared that Outram's was cock-house that particular year and were expected to win the house cup for rugby, but their final game against Havelock's showed a lamentable lack of form. Cordwainer, disgusted by their poor performance, trotted up and down the touchline shouting encouragement to their rivals, who finally won both match and trophy. Cordwainer's own fifteen were so outraged by this treachery that they styled him Judas, softened, over the years, to Judy.

A standard entertainment at Bamfylde was to crowd round the stationery cupboard in the Remove in order to witness Judy issue replacements. He would refuse to renew an exercise book unless he was satisfied that every page of an old one was covered with scrawl, and would sharpen an inch of pencil and uncross Waverley nibs when boys presented evidence of spent equipment.
He had a high-pitched, honking voice, and despite his age could still subdue a classroom, hurling a huge bunch of keys at inattentive pupils and sometimes hitting the hot water pipes in a way that sent an echoing clang through all the classrooms of Lower School. He had a passion for neatness and precision. Later on David saw him award marks to Third Formers with wrong answers, rejecting correctly answered exercises that were decorated with blots. Cordwainer saw Bamfylde as a kind of rural Athens, and probably thought of it as the centre of the cultural universe. Being as bald as a tonsured monk (and looking like one in his voluminous gown) he would wear his tweed cap in class on cold mornings and stand honking there, a perfect prototype of the old-style dominee, whose methods were unchanged since he came down from Cambridge in the early seventies. Indeed, a parody of Judy Cordwainer, one of the standard turns among the juniors who could exactly reproduce his honking voice, usually began with one or other of his favourite precepts – 'I'll have
method
before speed, d'ye hear?' or 'Oh…
prince
of fools! Take it away, slovenly numbskull!'

By contrast, Bouncer Acton was a hearty, excessively amiable man, an ordained priest who ministered to a small parish north of the school, where he occupied a rectory used as a spill-over for new boys. Everyone liked Bouncer, who taught divinity throughout the school, and Latin to the juniors, but everyone took shameless advantage of his slight deafness and nearsightedness, and the fact that he preferred to look over rather than through the steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his pudgy little nose. It was said that Bouncer had donned those useless spectacles while taking part in a charade as a boy, and had subsequently forgotten them, leaving them perched there even when he went to bed. The bolder boys were fond of asking Bouncer earnestly phrased questions concerning passages in the Bible relating to Lot's incest, circumcision, concubines, how much the elders saw of Susannah, and the Virgin birth, but he would always answer straightforwardly, seldom suspecting he was being hoaxed. On occasion, however, he could be savage. His standard punishment, for the few misdemeanours he detected, was a volley of four penal marks and this meant one hour's drill on Saturdays. As four was the limit allowed, and any penal marks in excess earned the delinquent a thrashing, this had the effect of keeping skylarkers in purdah for the remainder of the week. The wags were equally expert at mimicking Bouncer, who had pendulous cheeks that quivered when he bobbed up and down, the trick that had won him his nickname.

Rapper Gibbs was different again, a wizened insignificant-looking man, who taught music and accompanied the popular choral and operatic societies that
Herries had founded on becoming headmaster. Rapper's soubriquet stemmed from the short pointer he used on the knuckles of blundering amateur pianists, but despite his asperity he was an excellent tutor and music, David discovered, played a prominent part in the cultural activities of the community.

There were some two dozen masters on the staff in the spring of 1918. Apart from outstanding characters, like Judy, Bouncer, Rapper and the sarcastic, withdrawn Howarth, there were several other oddities, some of whom David did not get to know until the following term. Ferguson, for instance, a volcano of a man who taught French, and would never utter a word of English during a class, ignoring boys who addressed him in their own tongue. His habit of prancing up and down the classroom, using his gown like a sail, had earned him the nickname of 'Bat'; Barnaby was an amiable, erudite man who taught Latin in Senior School, and was said to be inordinately fond of porridge, even the glutinous concoction ladled out in Hall every morning throughout the school year. There was the motherly Mrs Parminter, who presided over the Second Form, and was so formidably corseted that her substantial bust projected like the flying buttress of a Gothic town hall. She was known, on this account, as 'Ma Fender', but the smaller boys, particularly those newly removed from home, were glad of her comfort and sympathy. There was only one other woman on the staff, Mrs Gorman, the elderly Matron, who was inflexible and matter-of-fact with patients and malingerers alike. No one had coined a nickname for her until a returning Old Boy, happening to seek her out for relief of some minor ailment, emerged with a slip of paper marked 'M & D', that meant, so he told his audience, 'Medicine and Duty', thus establishing a legend that Mrs Gorman had served in the R.A.M.C. in the Boer War. After that the boys referred to her as 'Kruger'.

They were, David decided, a very colourful lot, but apart from Herries himself he was unable, during those first weeks, to strike up a friendship with any one of them. It was as though he had joined a band of castaways on a desert island, the lone survivor of a subsequent wreck, and at first he was inclined to view his isolation as the inevitable result of his own mental confusion. In the end he took his problem to Herries.

'In a sense you
are
an outsider, my dear chap,' he said, 'and that's the reason I grabbed you the moment you showed up. You're the bridge, don't you see? A passage over a generation gap, and it isn't the conventional generation gap we all have to cross if we know our business properly. Your gap, caused by the war, is semi permanent. It might take twenty years to close.'

'But some of the chaps on the staff are only a year or so older than I am,' David argued. 'There's the C.3 men, and Carter.'

'It's not a matter of years, but of experience, don't you see? What are our casualties to date? Not far short of three million, I'd say, and a third of them dead at eighteen-plus. No one who hasn't been out can imagine what it's like. Mentally a man like you must have aged about a year every month, and that makes you immeasurably senior to theorists like me, and faithful old buffers like Cordwainer, Acton and Gibbs.
Someone
has to tackle the job of nudging all those young rascals over the threshold into what I sincerely hope will be an entirely new world.
We
can't do it because we're even more adrift than they are and haven't a compass reading between us. In a year or so I daresay we can find you some help. Hang it all, everyone in his early twenties can't be dead or maimed or gassed. In the meantime you're on your own, lad.'

He thought about this during his long tramps across the moors and his moochings around the silent and deserted buildings during the Easter holidays, when most of the staff and all the boys were gone save a dozen who lived in the head's house while their parents were abroad. It was a sombre thought but it represented the challenge that he, and Herries, and the Osborne neurologist thought of as therapy, and with the slow return of vitality, and a surer grip on his nerves, he began to respond to it in a way that revived his self-confidence.

The news from the front was bad but his infantryman's eye had taught him to read between the lines of press reports so that, alone among everyone he met in this backwater, he was able to assess the problems of the German vanguard, who had far outrun their supplies in the surging advance that began on March 21st. Right now they were crossing the old battlefields of 'fifteen, 'sixteen and 'seventeen, devastated country where the difficulties of the victors would be more formidable than those of divisions falling back on base areas. Eventually, he supposed, there would be a counter attack, spearheaded by the Americans, so that on the whole he was optimistic of the eventual outcome.

By the last day of April, when the school reassembled, he was scanning the newspapers for signs of a large-scale holding operation and found his opinion eagerly solicited by boys whose fathers and brothers had been caught up in the spring debacle.

'Will the Yanks attack, sir?'

'Is our own show under way, sir?'

'Do you suppose Jerry has shot his bolt, sir?'

It was curious, he thought, that even the fourteen-year-olds were more instinctively aware of what was at stake out there than men thirty, forty or even fifty years their senior. In a way, in a perverse way, it might even be hopeful.

1

H
E WAS FINDING HIS WAY ABOUT, FAMILIARISING HIMSELF with the great, sprawling barn of a place that straggled halfway up the rise behind the grey-stone buildings of the original Bamfylde, built of imported materials that always seemed at odds with the honey-coloured local stone used for the extensions.

There were really two schools here, the tall squarish pile that reared itself four sides of the quad (and even after seventy years of Exmoor weathering, still looked like a baroque folly) and the utilitarian additions added over the years, that had already adapted themselves to the green-brown hillside, a straggle of farm buildings, and unfenced pastures bounded by the sports fields in the south and west, and plantation windbreak to the east, and the crest of the moor to the north. Herries and Howarth were right about the decaying fabric. It had needed extensive renovation long before the war began. Now it was beginning to look seedy, scarred and very shabby.

Most of the classrooms, together with Big School, and the headmaster's house that occupied the whole of the south side of the quad, were housed in the older block. Big Hall, the kitchens and all but one of the dormitories, were in the newer block. Long, stone-flagged passages connected these quarters with the quad. Branching from it, one floor up, was a wainscoted passage known as the Rogues' Gallery. Here, in a sombre row, hung portraits of Bamfylde's five headmasters, including a younger, cherubic-looking Herries. Opposite them, posed in wide-eyed, dutiful groups, were football and cricket teams, reaching back to the earliest days of the school when nobody wore special clothing for games and everyone played cricket and football in workaday boots and shirtsleeves. There was a veritable warren of music rooms, laundry rooms,
a boothole and a stray classroom or two about here, together with a school museum and, on the floor above, a range of attics used as storerooms. There was also a garret where, once a fortnight, the barber from Challacombe, the nearest market town, plied his clippers. One of Algy Herries's aversions was overlong hair and the boys, from the Fifth downwards, were shorn at frequent intervals. For a day or so after the appearance of Bastin, the barber, known and reviled as 'Sweeney' by the boys, everyone on the premises (the Sixth had won an exemption charter) went about with a whitish skull and Bastin was seen to drive away with a sack of clippings. The boys swore that he used them to make hairshirts that he sold to monks, but David later discovered that a condition of his contract was to dispose of his debris after a mass haircut, the school being desperately short of domestic staff.

Apart from the headmaster's house, which was spacious and comfortably furnished, and some of the quarters occupied by living-in masters, the premises were bleak and daunting to a newcomer. When he left the temporary refuge of the O.B.A. President's room, David was given a sitting-room and tiny bedroom in Havelock's House, ruled by Ferguson, the French master. Mrs Ferguson was a Frenchwoman and reminded David of the black-draped madames he had seen counting their takings in estaminets behind the lines. The Fergusons were a staid, methodical couple, who left him to his own devices in his limited free time, and he grew to like his little sitting-room that looked south over a stretch of moor dotted with birchwoods and the rhododendron forest he had noted on his first walk from the station.

The aspect of the moor changed dramatically during his first few weeks up here. When he had arrived, in early March, the countryside had a wind-swept, breathless look, as though its hardihood had been taxed to the limit by winter gales and frosts, but even before the summer term opened, spring had enlarged its hold. All the beeches and elms in the two drives began to sprout new leaves, a sheen of bright green varying the mottled pattern of gold and russet, and a rash of primroses appeared in the breast-high banks, relieved every few yards by great plumes of cow-parsley and a scatter of scarlet campion. Soon, in the folds under the copses, where the little river Brent ran to join the Bray or the Barle (it seemed undecided which) acres of bluebells dusted the margins, like early morning mist masking the shallow valley. The sky patterns changed minute by minute, now streaked and dappled with bluish trailers, now a jumble of plumped-up pillows, gashed by gusts of wind that came soughing down from the upper moor. This high land stretched away into the far distance, a
series of brown and grey ridges, broken here and there by the blur of woods where pockets of ash, sycamore, thorn and elderberry had found some kind of refuge from the north-easterlies and south-westerlies that Herries said took turn and turn about from October to May.