R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (7 page)

The air and its landscape improved his health, soothing his ragged nerves and inducing a state of suspended dreaminess when he was not occupied in class, or with games, or dormitory supervision. Slowly, week by week, the Western Front began to recede, an old wound he was learning to live with, and sometimes the war seemed so remote that it might have been fought by Wellington or Marlborough. He was helped in this by his growing rapport with the boys.

He had his favourites or, if not favourites, then his star-performers, whom he saw as he had once seen the section leaders of his platoon. There was a star-performer in every group and round him were gathered his acolytes. The mystique of leadership was as obvious here as in the trenches and he found he could soon spot the rankers marked down for a stripe. Boyer, of the Lower Fourth, was such a one, with Dobson as his runner-up. Blades, in the Upper Third, was another, a handsome boy who took the leadership of his group for granted and was said by Howarth to have an original mind. 'Might even write some good verse when he matures,' Howarth said, and then, as though unwilling to forgo the characteristic touch of acidity, 'Poor devil!' Below Blades, in the Remove, was Bickford, a lumbering fourteen-year-old, lazy as a mastiff in the sun and attended, wherever he went, by his two henchmen, Rigby, a farmer's son, and Ford, whose father was said to be a bookmaker. Bickford, although indolent, was a bit of a bully, much feared by the urchins of the Lower Third and Second Form, over whom he held sway, a slothful, medieval despot, who could be mollified by tribute or subservience. The sort of boy, David thought, who needed watching, although his grin was infectious and he could sometimes exhibit a certain inventiveness. David discovered this one day when Bickford made use of a warped floorboard to set the stationery cupboard rocking without apparent agency, declaring that the manifestation was proof of the existence of the Remove ghost, a failed master of Bull's era who had, so the story ran, swallowed salts of lemon and been buried in Stonecross churchyard with a suicide's gravestone placed at a different angle from all the other monuments.

He grew to like some of the older boys in the Sixth, most of whom would be leaving to join one or other of the Services at the end of summer term.
Cooper, Fosdyke and Scrubbs-Norton were typical of this cadre, boys who had come to Bamfylde in the last year of peace, and were now prefects and far better at keeping order than some of the younger masters. Their eagerness to get into uniform touched David as nothing else was able to. He already saw them in their Sam Brownes and British warms, seeking an opportunity to prove themselves as men, and while he was often tempted to introduce them to the stark realities out there, he never did. It would have been like telling five-year-olds that Father Christmas was a myth. He did get as far as accepting their shy invitations to take cocoa with them in their studies after prep, and would sit there discussing the war news with them, news that came to Bamfylde a day late in a bundle of papers from Challacombe. Luckily it was getting progressively more cheerful, with the successful British counter-attack at Villers Bretonneux, a unified Allied command and, in the first days of July, the beginning of the Le Hamel offensive. Farther south, in the Chemin des Dames area, the French were still taking a hammering and there were some spectacular German advances but these, David assured them, would soon peter out, as all offensives did in the nonstop slogging match. More and more Americans were landing in France, and the general pattern of the summer fighting was becoming clearer every day. 'I think Ludendorff may have shot his bolt by the time you get back here in September,' he said, cautiously, but then Cooper reminded him that most of the Sixth would not be returning for the autumn term, and all he could do was offer up a prayer that somehow these babies would be kept in training bases until the promised all-fronts counter-attack was launched.

The climax came, for David Powlett-Jones, on the eleventh day of August, just before he set off on his belated visit to his mother at Pontnewydd. Screaming headlines announced the breaching of the Hindenburg Line and unheard-of advances by the British in most of their sectors, places where, only a year ago, the gain of a few hundred yards of quagmire was won at the cost of a hundred thousand casualties.

He took Northcliffe's journal up to Herries's thinking post and read it very carefully, his heart-beats quickening when he came upon the familiar name of some devastated village where no building was more than a foot high, and the soil was rich with the bones of the dead of earlier battles. There could be no doubt about it now, surely? Cooper, Fosdyke and Scrubbs-Norton were reprieved. They would take their place in some office or factory, or perhaps spend a pleasant spell at one of the universities, after which, no doubt, they
would marry some fluffy girl and have children of their own, earmarked for Bamfylde if they were boys.

He toyed with the fancy for a spell, visualising a subdued thirteen-year-old young Cooper, or a young Fosdyke, who would be coming here halfway through the nineteen-thirties, and the prospect must have caused him to smile, for suddenly he heard Herries's chirpy voice say, 'Good news, P.J.? My stars, it would have to be to fool me! I've been inflated and deflated so many times by that rag that I've stopped reading it, apart from casualty lists.'

David said, 'It's real enough this time. We've broken the Hindenburg Line. I'd stopped believing that was possible. It'll be open warfare from here on and that's something positive.'

'Was that worth grinning at?'

'In a way, sir.' He could always talk uninhibitedly to Herries. 'As a matter of fact, I was smiling at the prospect of Cooper's boy sitting under Mrs Parminter in the Second in a dozen years or so,' and he smiled again when Herries's tufted eyebrows shot up. 'Pure speculation on my part, I'm afraid. What I mean is, the chances are that Cooper will live long enough to marry and have children. If he does he'd want to send his boys here, wouldn't he?'

'They all do,' Herries said. 'Without them we should wither, I'm afraid.' He sat down on the shaft of the horse-roller, parked up here in obedience to his decree every time the roller-gangs finished a stint on the cricket pitch. 'Haven't seen so much of you lately. Settling in?'

'I think so, sir. What do you think?'

'You'll do. You've frightened one or two of the old stagers, I'm told. Oh, don't let that bother you. It never did me. If you can't smuggle your own convictions into the curriculum you might as well go away somewhere, dig a hole and live in it.' He lit his short pipe and puffed contentedly for a while. Then, cocking one eyebrow, 'How do
we
look to you?'

'I've been very happy here, sir.'

'I didn't mean that. How do we seem to be trundling along to someone from outside?'

David hesitated. It seemed a propitious time to make a point he was very eager to make.

'I can only answer that from an academic standpoint, Headmaster.'

'Go ahead.'

'It's the text-books I've inherited. Most of them were printed about the time
of Victoria's first Jubilee. How much say does an unqualified man get in the choice of texts?'

'Depends on the man. You? I wouldn't pull on the bit unless I thought you were rushing your fences. You're a bit inclined to. Not that that's unusual in a chap your age. What kind of history were you taught as a boy?'

'Strings of dates and battles. The Treaty of Troyes and the War of Jenkins' Ear.'

'Ah, that fellow Jenkins. I always thought that was a bit of liberty, passing his ear around Parliament like the plate at church. Still, it worked. They had their war, didn't they?'

It was always difficult to decide whether or not there was a coded message in Herries's puckish good-humoured talk and this time David decided to put it to the test. 'I think we should have different text-books for different ages,' he said. 'The subject needs to be introduced with colour – Alfred's cakes, Bruce's spider and so on, but it ought to progress from there without getting dull.'

'What's your prescription?'

'To catch the interest in Lower School with the legends, move on to a more solid diet in Middle School, and then use half the periods for free discussion in the Fifth and Sixth. Especially the Fifth, when they're coming up to School Certificate and Matric. Discussion promotes original thought, doesn't it? And I believe most examiners like originality, even when it reads like heresy.'

'Something in that. Maybe you'd like to work out a syllabus for next term. After all, you'll have more latitude then. I'll get someone else to take the Lower School in English. It won't be Howarth, of course. He likes his subject too much to reach down. Maybe one of the new chaps, there are a couple coming. Why the frown, P.J.?'

'If it's all the same to you, sir, I'd like to continue English with the Second and Third. I know I'll have to start reading for my own degree, but I can manage. The fact is… well, it might sound absurd, but those extra periods have helped. Helped me, I mean. In rediscovering Gray, Cowper, Tennyson and Goldsmith, and those excerpts from some of my old favourites, like
Silas Marner
and
Westward Ho!
. The mugging up enabled me to get things into a better focus.'

'Well,' Herries said slowly, 'that sounds encouraging. If Gray's “Elegy” still has relevance to you after all you experienced out there, then the sooner the young come to it the better.' He relit his pipe and over the flaring match David saw he was smiling. He went on, 'The jungle drum tells me you occasionally
feed them something more up-to-date than Mr Gray. Is it true you read the Sixth a poem by that chap Sassoon?'

'Yes, it's true. They're going out there, some of them. It seemed to me that someone ought to do something to counteract all the rubbish these chaps print,' and he indicated the newspaper he had laid aside.

'What was it, exactly?'

'It was a poem called “Memorial Tablet", that Sassoon published this year. I've got a copy of his later poems. Some of them are strong stuff but they have more relevance to what's actually occurring in Flanders than all the leading articles I've read on the war. I… er… I could lend you a copy, Headmaster.'

'I'd be obliged,' Herries said, without irony. 'I like to keep up to date. Well, then, my compliments to your mother, and we'll expect you back a day or so before term begins.'

'Yes, sir. Thank you.'

They got up by mutual consent and went down the slope towards the nearest of the outbuildings, but when they drew level with the fives court Herries said, 'I suppose you're aware of your nickname by now?' and David, suspecting it would be 'Bolshie', said he had certain suspicions but had thought it best not to pursue them.

'Oh, it's an amiable one,' Herries said, 'not like some of them. It stems from your… consultative methods in class.' He stopped, taking his pipe from his mouth and extending his hand. 'Well, goodbye, “Pow-Wow". Have a good holiday!' and he wandered off towards the piggeries. David remained standing by the fives court for a moment, thinking, 'I've had my share of luck, God knows, but running across him beats anything that happened to me.'

He had a curious afterthought then, concerned with a squat, bowlegged, round-shouldered man, who had died underground in the summer of 1913, a man who, even then, had had unwavering faith in him and had never been diffident about showing it. It was as though his father, feeling the darkness pressing in, had called for help on his behalf, and Herries, walking his rounds on this high plateau, had heard him across the width of the Bristol Channel.

2

Just over a year had passed since he had visited the Valley on leave, a month or so before the Brandenburgers' mortar shell had blasted him out of the war. It seemed narrower and shabbier, a place of steep, huddled streets, fortress-like
chapels, rundown corner shops with nothing much to sell, and the familiar tip overshadowing them all. The corporate spirit of the Valley, that had been its sturdiest plant ever since he was a boy, seemed also to have withered, translating itself into bitterness, a different kind of bitterness from that of frontline men, for it lacked the inevitable sardonic humour. There was no jingo stridency here, only a glowering sense of exploitation by politicians, by mine owners, by royalty leeches, by war profiteers. For the vicarious prosperity that had come to other industrial areas seemed to have by-passed the coalfields. No one was encouraged to forsake the industry and enlist, or join in the scramble for high wages in the munitions factories. Instead they were expected, almost compelled, to go on dragging coal from the hillsides at twice the speed and without comparable rises in rates. There was an undertone of militancy and strikes, of demands to put the industry on a new and realistic basis, a war that had little to do with the war of the headlines. He sensed what was happening even before he talked to his brothers-in-law, both miners, and although this world was almost lost to him now, fenced off by an education that none of these men had had, and experiences at the Front they had been spared, he still thought as a miner's son and could identify with their grievances and fear for their future when the need for coal was not so desperate and their bargaining power had been removed.

For the first time he heard men of his own race openly champion the Russian Revolution, and Trotsky's separate peace at Brest-Litovsk, an act that many Welshmen in the line had regarded as a betrayal, but which miners here saw as a portent of enormous social significance. Ewart Griffiths, married to his elder sister Gwynneth, was the first to put this into words when he said, 'There's a rumour we're going to be asked to dig coal and help turn the Bolshies out but I'm telling you, man, they'll get no bloody help from us down yer! Time we started our own bloody revolution, Davyboy.'

His mother, miraculously, was untouched by bitterness. The tragedies of her life did not show in her round, smooth, unmistakably Welsh face, with its pink and white bloom, still there after sixty years in the valleys, and forty-odd years of making twopence do the work of a shilling. She still kept the little terrace house spotlessly clean, still spoiled her five grandchildren, still cooked an appetising meal from the cheapest ingredients, and glowed when he told her he was now teaching in a school of four hundred boys, a place she would surely think of as a Gentleman's College. To her this was a far greater achievement than surviving three years on the Western Front, scholarship
representing maturity, warfare being a little boy's scuffle in the street outside. 'Been that proud of you, Dadda would,' she said, when he told her his post had been made permanent. 'There's a wonder it is! That Dadda should know it all those years ago, and your brothers Hughie and Bryn too, for you were the only real bookworm of the litter. Are they feeding you well down there, boy? You could do with more flesh on your bones, but maybe that's on account of all those hospital slops they gave you when you were hurt in the fighting.'