R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (71 page)

'Tell me about it. But first of all, have you eaten?'

'No, but any old thing will do. I've got to leave in an hour or so. I'm due in London by morning and I sail the day after, from Southampton.'

He rang for Rigby and cold supper for two was brought in. She ate at speed, as though racing the clock, and he began to notice she did most things like this. Between gulps she told him how she came to be involved with Ulrich Meyer, towards the end of her three months' stay in Munich. 'I'd heard about what was taking place over there but like you, like everyone else outside Germany,
it didn't make an impact. I mean, one regarded it as a wave of street riots but it isn't like that at all. It's the end of the world for anyone opposed to Hitler, and for neutrals too. It's like living in Czarist Russia during a Cossack pogrom. Everyone's looking over their shoulder. They've set up camps for Communists, Socialists and Social Democrats, and for any Catholic or Lutheran who speaks out. Gangs of louts range the streets, knocking on people's doors and smashing windows. Before this happened to Herr Meyer, he had “
Juden”
scrawled across his shop windows and men posted outside to turn customers away.'

'You mean just in Munich and other Bavarian cities?'

'No, all over. Ever since the Reichstag fire in February. People outside have got to wake up, Davy. I'm going to start campaigning during my lecture tour but it needs far more than that.'

'You mean it's likely to last? That there won't be a counter revolution of some kind?'

'These might, but even that would mean civil war in the streets, and tyranny of one sort or another. Democracy is finished over there, so long as Hitler and his thugs are around. You can depend on that.'

It made him acutely aware of his isolation, a political isolation that he would have found shaming a few years ago. He read the newspapers, and occasionally listened to radio bulletins on the library four-valve set, or one of the homemade radio sets built by radio enthusiasts, of which there were a dozen or so in Bamfylde. But strife and persecution on the scale she was describing, and of which Ulrich Meyer was living proof, had not emerged from news bulletins, only the political instability one had come to accept as the post-war norm in Germany, France and Italy.

He said, 'You're right, of course. Down here we're cut off,' but she countered, sharply. '
No,
Davy!
Not
just down here. Everywhere on this side of the Channel. I've heard Germans talk openly of “
Der Tag”
again, the way they did before the 1914 war. It's no better in Italy. Fascists there kidnap political opponents, sometimes murder them, and dose others with pints of castor oil. Sooner or later everybody's got to face up to what's happening, and when I get a constituency I'm going to make sure they do.'

'That won't win you many friends in the Labour party. They're all for disarmament, aren't they?'

'I can't help about that. I've seen what's happening and they haven't. Ulrich is going to be a
cause célèbre
before I'm done with him.'

'And in the meantime I'm in
loco parentis?'

'I can't think of anyone better suited for the job, can you?' She smiled, got up and came round the table to kiss him. 'That's all about my obligations. How are you coping with yours, Davy? How it is working out?'

'Algy Herries tells me fair to middling,' he said, 'but I'll say one thing. Standing in for three-hundred-odd parents eight months of the year is an ageing process. Look at the hair above my ears.'

'There would have been a lot more grey if you hadn't taken the bit between your teeth, Davy. You were a born worrier when I met you, muddling along under that man Alcock. Thank God somebody on that Board had the sense to push you forward. It'll be the saving of this place and the making of you. You already look fruitier than the old Davy.'

'I wish I could say the same for you. When are you going to stop driving yourself, Chris?'

She gave him one of her half-humorous and speculative looks. 'When I've dropped anchor, like you. When I can see where I'm heading. In that respect you're lucky, Davy. I'll keep in touch and you must write regularly, too, and tell me every last thing about that poor little beggar upstairs. Could I go up and say goodbye to him?'

'Surely. It's left at the top of the stairs, and the door facing at the end of the corridor.'

She went out and he rang for Rigby to clear away, moving over to the windows where the last glimmer of light glowed in the far west. It was very quiet and still out there, as though the place was conserving its energies for the tumult of the approaching term.

3

Grace was due back the next day but in the meantime he took 'Stilts' Rhodes into his confidence, sensing that the Sunsetters, above all, would have to be briefed about the arrival of Ulrich Meyer in their midst. They had no continentals at the school and the fact that the boy spoke near-perfect English was a help. But those clothes, and that little bow, would mark him down from the first day of term, and he would have to rely on Stilts to weight circumstances in Meyer's favour.

Stilts was an immensely tall, long-legged Fifth Former, whose father was a railway superintendent in Lahore, an easy-going chap and a brilliant cricketer, who had captained the Bamfylde Eleven through the summer. He was head
boy of the Sunsetters and although David did not credit him with much imagination, he relied upon Boyer to press the message home.

Stilts said, aghast, 'A Jerry, sir? We've never had one of those, have we?'

'No, we haven't but if things continue to happen, like the circumstances that brought the poor kid here, we're likely to get a steady trickle in a year or so. The point is, I don't want him ragged, not even gently. You've got to behave to him “correctly", as he understands that word. He's bright but he's had a pretty rough deal for a kid of his age. His father was booted to death in front of him only a few weeks ago, and he's a refugee.'

Stilts was visibly shocked. '
Booted,
sir? You mean mobbed-lynched?' 'That's exactly what I mean. He's a Jew, and they're attacking Jews on the streets all over Germany. He was smuggled out by a friend of mine.'

'A kid his age? Good Lord, sir, they wouldn't have manhandled him, would they?'

'My information from an eye witness is that there's nothing they won't do. You probably read about how they set fire to the Reichstag and charged a half-wit with the crime.'

'You mean I should… well… spread it around, sir? What happened, I mean?'

'Yes, but discreetly. It's the best way of getting him sympathy.' 'Well, I'll do what I can sir. He'll be going in with the Sunsetters, won't he?' 'As soon as term starts. Meantime I'll have to coach him a bit. I daresay he'll regard this place as another kind of beargarden if I don't. Can I rely on your help, Stilts?'

'Well, yes, sir, under the circumstances… I mean, it's a bit much, isn't it? Kicking a chap's pater to death. But I suppose it's the kind of thing you can expect from them, isn't it?'

'I wouldn't have expected it. I fought the Germans for three years and although I came across the odd brute, most of them seemed pretty decent fellows. I remember upsetting the Fifth when I first came here, telling them how two Jerry prisoners carried me across open ground under a barrage on the Somme, and how front-line infantrymen soon stopped calling them Huns. Some of the chaps thought it pretty odd of me to put in a good word for them. Now, I imagine, I shall have to do it again. The point to remember is it's only a section of Germans who go along with that kind of thing. I hope to God some of the better people sit on Hitler before he gets a real grip on the country.'

'Oh, that chap won't last long, sir,' Rhodes said, cheerfully, 'I mean, he's nuts, isn't he, sir? He looks nuts and he acts nuts. Not like Mussolini.'

'You admire Mussolini?'

'No, not exactly, sir, but I was reading in the Sunday paper during the hols that he's smartened the Eyeties up a bit – new roads and suchlike.'

'Well, don't believe all you read. My information from the same witness is that he murders his opponents and doses others with pints of castor oil.'

It did not seem to shock Stilts as much as the booting. 'Is that so, sir? Well, you never can tell what they'll get up to over there,' and David thought his attitude was probably reflected by almost every boy at Bamfylde, including the dozen or so coloured boys, and the odd Colonial on the muster roll. It made him reflect upon Chris's warning that, on this side of the Channel, everyone tended to lower a safety curtain.

He had a long talk with Ulrich that same day and took him to tea with the Boyers. Alison warmed towards him and he responded to her in the way he had to Chris. 'Wouldn't it be a good idea to let him stay here for a term or so?' she asked, but David said, no, it would only delay integration. The best way was to drop him gently into the deep end.

'It won't be the deep end once the word gets around,' Chad said. 'If someone had shot his old man it mightn't have made much difference. But kicking, that's different. The chaps won't go for that.'

The chaps didn't. Within two days of reassembly Meyer became an object of respectful curiosity. Nobody chivvied him, nobody jeered at his outlandish clothes, or his formal manners. He was an extraordinarily bright little boy. Barnaby and Howarth said he was up to Lower Fifth standard, and Renshaw-Smith discovered that he had a rare appreciation of classical music and was a promising pianist. 'It only goes to show,' Howarth grumbled, 'that there's something bloody wrong with our system of education. Here's a child of eleven who is already at home with Goethe, and we have louts in the Sixth who make nothing at all of Goldsmith and Tennyson. I don't know, maybe we're all on a wrong tack, P.J.'

'I wouldn't say that,' David said, 'there's nothing wrong with Continental academic standards but the boy's presence here proves they've got a hell of a lot to learn about the art of government. I know which slant Algy Herries would favour.'

'Question of priority,' said Barnaby, and came up with the inevitable tag from his favourite Tacitus –
'"reipublicaeforma laudari facilius quam evenire…"'
translating it, in response to Howarth's bleak stare, as 'It is easier for a form of government to be praised than brought about; if brought about it cannot be made lasting.'

'I prefer Burke,' grunted Howarth. 'More down to earth. “Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.” '

David left them spouting at one another and went about his business, but Ulrich Meyer proved a springboard for some lively current affairs discussions with the Sixth that term, particularly as regards recent events in Germany. The trial of Van der Lubbe, for the Reichstag fire, followed by the threatened withdrawal of Germany from The League, were two sizeable straws in the wind and Meyer's presence among them gave both items an immediacy they would not otherwise have had. Hislop was particularly aggressive, declaring that Germany, left to herself, would soon prove the menace she was twenty years before, and 'ought to be sat on, pronto!' The mild-mannered Christopherson II took the pacifist line, declaring that a new armaments race was the most certain way of bringing about a second World War. Where did David stand, he asked, looking for support from such a well-known opponent of militarism but David, who always tried to be absolutely frank with the Sixth, had to admit that he did not know.

'The fact is,' he said, 'any sane man should prefer civilised discussion to war, as a means of settling international disputes, but what do you do against brute force? Meyer's father was a pacifist. It didn't stop the louts picketing his shop, kicking him to death and running off scot-free.'

'There's provision in The League of Nations Charter for the application of economic sanctions,' protested Christopherson, but Hislop came back with, 'Nobody seems all that anxious to stop trading with Japan since its invasion of Manchuria.'

Christopherson, one of the few seniors with strong religious convictions, held to his point, aware that he was in a minority of one. 'If a nation professes Christianity, oughtn't it to practise Christian virtues in politics, sir?' but before David could think of an answer Mainwaring growled, 'Christian virtues, my eye! If anyone started shoving my Governor around he'd wake up in hospital if he woke up at all!' and everyone laughed as the bell rang, and the familiar hum of dismissal rose from surrounding classrooms. They hustled out, most of them, for a quick puntabout until lunch bell, but Nixon, a boy who had travelled the Continent during his holidays, remained and seemed David thought, troubled.

'Well, Nixon?'

'Excuse me, sir… something I didn't like to mention in front of the others – I mean – seeing we had a kid like Meyer here. Have you read
The Road Back,
sequel to
All Quiet on the Western Front?'

'No, I haven't Nixon. Does it have a bearing on what we've been discussing?'

'In a way it does, sir. It's concerned with what the Jerry front line troops found when they went home after the war. The whole country had been sewn up by the war profiteers while they were away at the Front.'

'That wasn't peculiar to Germany. Every country had its own crop of profiteers who made a pot of money while others slogged it out in the mud.'

'Yes I know, sir. But I met a one-legged ex-service chap in St. Moritz when I was there in the Easter hols and he said the German Jews had sat up and begged for what they were getting. What I mean is, maybe it's a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other? Hitler recruits from ex-service chaps, doesn't he? I daresay a lot of them have got it in for the Jews. Mightn't that be a reason why a screw ball like Hitler gets so much support?'

He was glad Nixon had asked that question. It gave him a chance to get the situation into a better focus. He said, 'The fact is, Nixon, the two things don't match up. Jew-baiting has been a time-honoured sport on the part of despots for centuries, a means of diverting attention from failures on the part of the government. The Tsars went in for it, so did the Spaniards. And Henry V – a chap I never could stand – kicked the Jews out of England at one time. It was Cromwell who had the sense to invite them back. I daresay there were Jewish war profiteers in Germany, but profiteering isn't a Jewish prerogative by any means, so don't fall for that one, however convincing that one-legged Jerry sounded. The Jews are singled out because they're easily recognisable.'