R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (69 page)

'Och, Chad'll do fine,' she said, with almost staggering directness. 'It was time he moved on. It was only a wee school. Nothing like this.'

Her unexpected forthrightness made an immediate impression on him so that he thought, 'She's just what he needed, come to think of it. Someone to rally on, someone who matters to him,' and when Grace accepted Alison's offer to give a hand with the lunch, he said, in response to Boyer's interrogative glance. 'You've got more sense than you think, Chad. I always had a morbid fear you'd turn up one day with one of those mincing little blondes, all promise and no performance. My mother would approve of Alison instantly, and so would Beth. They both had a preference for down-to-earthers.'

1

C
HRIS WROTE EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR, WHEN HE WAS beginning to wonder how soon it would be before he heard her pleasant Yorkshire brogue over the phone, asking when and where they could meet. But she wasn't coming home, after all, or not for some considerable time. She had been selected for what she described as a 'McKenzie-Solomon Travelling Scholarship (financed by a couple of reformed robber barons, buying their way into heaven with an educational trust fund)' and would be working in Western Europe for six months, a trip that would take in shortened courses at Strasbourg, Rome and Munich Universities. And after that, on the strength of the travelling scholarship, she was committed to lecture her way across the States, all the way from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific.

She wrote, with a touch of her old breathlessness,

I was lucky to be selected but I was slow to accept. It meant not seeing you for almost another year, and even that isn't certain for, at this stage, I'm not sure how many cities the U.S.A. tour takes in. However, if I am to play fair with the people who sponsored me I owe it to them to be available for a candidature in early '34. I see the date of the next General Election as '35 but I may get pushed forward at a by-election much earlier. I've decided to resign the South Mendips candidature. Not even Keir Hardie could win that seat from the Tories, but that's enough about me. I treasure every scrap of Bamfylde news you send and am sure (despite your becoming modesty on paper) that you are proving a
whale of a success as headmaster of that hallowed establishment! My love always, Davy dear… and I miss you so, and will go on missing you… your male gentleness and your sanity. Where did you get them both? Not in the trenches and not, I think, in the Valleys, where folk are exciting and amusing but intolerant. It follows that it must have been at Bamfylde, and that's funny when you think of it. I always saw those places as bastions of prejudice…

He accepted the letter, despite its breezy reassurances, as virtual disengagement, a gentle placing of their association on a platonic plane, and although this saddened him it was not unexpected. Like him, she was finding fulfilment and their inclinations no longer pursued parallel courses, but divergent ones, likely to carry them farther and farther apart as each of them spread their wings. He was sure now that she would never willingly exchange politics or even an academic life, for the role of a Martha, here in the wilderness. While he might have adapted, she never would. Always she would see herself as a walk-on player, meriting a leading role. Perhaps the only things they had ever had in common were physical hunger and a deep, personal loneliness.

He folded the letter, feeling that he needed time to reflect on an answer, and went into the Sixth to take his period on current affairs, beginning halfheartedly, his mind still on her implied renunciation but, as always, warming to his theme, and the rallying questions of Hislop and others, who enjoyed these occasions as much as he did.

The letter spurred him to make yet another decision, to enrol a commercial tutor and start courses in shorthand, bookkeeping and typing as soon as the new classrooms were ready. It had been put forward by several parents and at least one Governor a year ago, when he first took Alcock's place, but it had made no special appeal to him then. Bamfylde had produced several merchant princelings over the years, but few of them entered commerce at the clerical level, despite the usual poppycock talked by fathers about the importance of starting at the bottom. Businessmen's sons, he noted, invariably began their business life several rungs up, but now times were changing rapidly. More and more Old Boys came to him, or wrote to him, with tales of long spells of unemployment, and the inadequacy of a formal education in the scramble for jobs on an open market. It was time, he thought, to give seniors approaching school-leaving age a head-start, by introducing them to the kind of jobs they
might have to use as footholds in the free-for-all of competitive business.

There was, however, another and strictly personal reason for introducing a commercial course, and it was Christine's letter that brought it into the open. Grace would be thirteen in May, and could expect about four more years at school. Nothing would please him more than to have her back here permanently. With the prospect of her acquiring secretarial skills at Bamfylde he could hope to reduce those four years to two. Bamfylde needed a woman's touch at the centre of affairs, and she was already half-qualified for the job. She knew hundreds of Bamfeldians by name and almost as many parents. Algy said she was tarred with the Bamfylde brush but in softer hues – 'Shades of sweet pea, wouldn't you say, P.J.?'

The builders moved in during a dry spell in January and everyone had to adapt to the uproar and vast array of bricks, wheelbarrows and cement mixers about the place. When the foundations of the new wing were dug, and the first line of bricks had been laid, Stratton-Forbes wrote suggesting they should place a school muster-roll in a cavity, and this was done at an informal public ceremony. Even David, however, who thought himself attuned to Bamfylde's eccentricities, was surprised by the orgy of commemorative inscribing that followed. Half the boys in the school scratched their names in wet concrete, some of the bolder ones defacing the pier supporting the stone where the memorial plaque would be fixed. He took no counter action but mentioned the outcrop at assembly one morning, referring to that particular section of the foundations as the wailing wall, and advising vandals to beat their heads against it in moments of stress. It was a successful joke, of the kind he was beginning to fashion nowadays, and a matter for secret pride when he discovered that the facing side of the new block was permanently dubbed The Wailing Wall.

He gave Chad and Alison Boyer an unusual wedding present that spring, undertaking to pay for the installation of an indoor privy at the cottage. 'Beth and I abominated that feature of the place,' he told them, when they were moving in. 'It's no joke to wade across that yard in dressing gown and slippers in a north-easterly. I've given Grover instructions to take in a small section of the landing and connect it with the kitchen wastepipe.' When Boyer said, chuckling, 'It's lucky we aren't displaying our gifts at a wedding breakfast, Pow-Wow,' he said, 'Ah, you may laugh now but Alison will live to thank me for it.'

The term slipped by and it was Easter before he knew it. The sodden moor to the west came to life again and the Sunsetters began their traditional task of preparing the cricket pitch. Then, suddenly, it was full summer again, with extra half-day holidays reintroduced for the important cricket matches, and the inter-house drill competition, and Certificate 'A' examination, conducted by a spruce young captain sent from the War Office.

He was still disinclined to take an active interest in the Corps, apart from keeping a fatherly eye on the band, now capable of playing Sousa's marches, 'Soldiers of the Queen', and many another martial tune, but still saddled with the derisory title of the Orpheans. The School Forum made progress, and another innovation, a housemasters' fortnightly conference was successful, although Howarth was cynical about it. 'No more than a cast-iron excuse to skip a period and sit around guzzling coffee, P.J.' he said, but Algy approved. He was over here a good deal nowadays, sometimes to the shameful neglect of his parish, and was already recruiting for next term's
Pirates of Penzance,
but warned that, when the nights drew in, David would have to take over production. 'My eyesight isn't what it was,' he said, 'and it would be undignified to finish my time here upside down in a bog.'

'No more than a case of the moor claiming its own,' David told him. 'How many years have you been up here now?'

'Forty, counting my five-year stint under Wesker,' Algy said. 'Half my lifetime, and I count the other half wasted. Look at me, my boy, well beyond the allotted span and I could still head the Second Form round the buildings, given a modest start!'

'I believe you could,' David said. Then, diffidently, 'How am I making out, Algy? For my private ear alone?' and Algy replied, cheerfully, 'Fair to middling. What are your own conclusions?'

'Rather on the lines of a hospital report, “as well as can be expected", but I still find authority over the senior staff a bit embarrassing. Can't help feeling, sometimes, that it's a bit of a liberty to give orders to chaps like Howarth, who were learning their trade when I was learning to read.'

'The point is you don't, P.J. One of your rare qualifications – and I flatter myself I spotted it a week after you came here – is that you have the knack of gentle persuasion. Men like Howarth respond to it, even when they have reservations about your policies.'

'They aren't my policies at all, they're extensions of yours, Algy.'

'Perhaps, but where do you suppose I got mine? Invented 'em? Of course I
didn't. Something rubs off from everything you read, observe and tinker with. The job's really no more than a lifelong process of subconscious distillation of other men's successes and failures. Point is, most chaps in our line of business let their arteries harden at thirty-five and become their own worst enemies on that account. Self-doubt never did anyone any harm, so long as it's offset by the gambling spirit. And by all accounts you've got your share of that. Your prefects don't beat any more, I hear.'

'No, they don't and never will under me. That was something I always thought you'd sit on, Algy.'

'Never had the nerve. I was lazier, too. But I approve, none the less. You seem to be bringing on a decent lot of seniors, but don't be surprised if you come across the odd rotten apple. You lay odds with yourself that you know how to spot them from afar but every now and again you come a mucker, particularly as regards the selection of prefects.'

'What do you do then, Algy. Demote him on the spot?'

'Never. Bad for the system.'

'Why?'

'Gives the old lags in Middle School the notion they can unseat any perk providing they go the right way about it. No, you tail him, everywhere he goes, until he gets nervous and keeps looking over his shoulder. That tames 'em. They either pull their socks up or leave a term or two ahead of schedule.'

'You see, I still have to consult the oracle at least once a week.'

'I should think so. I was the despot here nearly twenty-four years, and you're coming up to your second. Be reasonable, old son. If you lived two lifetimes you'd still be carried away in a box without knowing the half of it.'

2

Sports Day, Whitsuntide Reunion and Opening Day.

Carter, suave and successful-looking, arrived for Sports Day, telling David he now had over two hundred boys and was, in his jubilant phrase, 'fairly coining it, old man'. David did not envy him. His approach was too much like merchandising, as Howarth was quick to comment on over a gin and tonic that night, when dusk had fallen, and the last parental car had swept off down the drive.

'Man might as well be churning out those bloody little gnomes for suburban
lily-ponds,' he growled. 'A place of that kind isn't a school, it's an assembly belt, with the staff stationed at stipulated intervals, screwing up nuts and applying the odd touch of solder.'

Many others appeared that same day, some of them faces that David had not seen in years, and a few he had never seen at all. One comparatively new friend was Mrs Hislop, whom he had first met when she restored her son to them in his first term as head. A Northerner, she found it difficult to express gratitude but managed it somehow. 'That man Alcock did the boy a good turn,' she said. 'Pulled him up short and don't think I didn't know he needed a jolt. But you did him an even better turn by letting him come back again. My guess is you're going to be proud of him before he's finished.'

'In a way I already am,' he told her, 'but for Heaven's sake don't tell him I said so.'

At Whitsuntide there was a swarm of visitors, among them Stoker Monk who, now that he was at liberty to smoke himself to death, had taken up rowing and renounced the weed. Twitted on this account, as he and David contributed their quota to the sustained uproar in the Old Boys' bar, he justified his eccentric behaviour. 'After that first pipeful in the Third, when I wasn't sick but everybody else was, I had a reputation to maintain,' he said, 'but now, who gives a damn whether I smoke or not?'

Archer the Third elbowed his way forward, back for the first time since leaving in 1924, and reminded David of the occasion when he got lost during a run-in and the whole field had to be turned out to search for him. Archer, now a captain in the Royal Engineers, had seen action on the North-West Frontier. 'They recommended me for a decoration for completing a bridge under sniper fire,' he said, 'but I'd swop that experience any day for the two hours I sat under that hedge, waiting for you to show up. Never so pleased to see anyone in my natural, Pow-Wow.'

It made him feel, as the day wore on he was now a sizeable thread in the Bamfylde pattern of legend. Skidmore drove up, confirming every prophecy made about him by appearing in a dog collar, just as they had feared when he spent so long at his prayers, but unlikely, David concluded, to qualify for martyrdom. He had charge of a big Methodist church in what he called 'the Yorkshire Bible belt', a place where 'the presentation of a good
Messiah
every year is the key to the kingdom of heaven'. It amazed David to hear Skidmore talk like that and he put it down to a general broadening of the mind among Methodists since the recent amalgamation of rival factions, a subject upon
which Skidmore had some interesting comments. 'If we can do it after all this time, then any denomination can,' he declared. 'Wouldn't that be something? An amalgamation of all the Christian churches in Britain?'