R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (8 page)

He reassured her as to his health, but as he did so a thought struck him. He said, 'God knows, you've earned a rest, Mam. Why don't you pack your things and come back to Devon with me? It's beautiful country down there – like Wales in Grandfather's time – and we could rent half a cottage from old Mrs Bastin, the wife of our lampman. He's got a splendid garden, chock full of vegetables. You'd like it down there.' But she said, sadly, 'Nice to be asked it is, Davy, but my place is here, so long as I can give Gwynneth and Megan a hand with the children. Besides…' and she glanced through the gap between the freshly-laundered curtains of the tiny kitchen, contemplating a view of her lean-to shed and the uniform backs of the houses in Alma Street, 'whatever would I do with myself in a strange place among strange folk? I was born yer, and I'll die yer among my own people. It's different with you. You've moved on, as Dadda said you would.'

He left it at that, but soon the stale, claustrophobic atmosphere of the little town began to oppress him so that he thought longingly of the miles of moorland he could see from his dormer window in Havelock's House. In the last week of August, when the newspapers were trumpeting the British advance on the Ancre and the capture of Bapaume, he slipped away, promising to return for Christmas. Late the same evening, he caught the Challacombe train for Taunton and got out at Bamfylde Bridge Halt, revelling in the two-mile tramp up the twisting roads to the sportsfield gate, still lacking a hinge and leaning outwards.

Dusk was settling in the highest folds of the moor and the scent of honeysuckle and thyme came to him, together with the pungent whiff of grass clippings where old Tapscott, the one groundsman remaining to them, had been scything the grass on what would be the scene of the autumn house matches. The school buildings, from this angle, were silhouetted against a tangerine sky, where the sun was sliding down behind the sentinel beeches of the west drive. He thought, 'It's the damnedest thing… I've been here six
months but it's already more home to me than Pontnewydd. Can't imagine being anywhere else…' and vaulting the crippled gate he moved up towards the southern fringe of the Planty, as the boys always referred to it, then down past the cricket pavilion and swimming pool to Herries's thinking post and a blur of light showing in the headmaster's house. 'It's a niche,' he told himself, 'and damned if I don't cling to it as long as I can!' It struck him, passing the Gothic arch into the empty quad, that niches, like most other things, were likely to be in short supply for ex-servicemen in the years ahead.

3

The world of school enfolded him. By half-term even the mounting relief that the war was nearly over was muted by the immediacy of Bamfylde's problems, by the trivia of existence within the periphery of his work and personal encounters. When Bulgaria sued for peace, in early October, he was very elated, but only for an hour or so. Leatty, the games coach (who also acted as assistant bursar) had persuaded him to replace Wilton, the running captain, as chief whipper-in for the fortnightly cross-country events and this was no sinecure for a man eight months out of hospital. Bamfylde took its runs seriously and in rough country like Exmoor, the post of whipper-in was equivalent to a rearguard command. Small boys, lagging a long way behind, and unfamiliar with the country, had been known to get lost. The job of whipper-in was to co-ordinate the efforts of the prefects who were not running colours and keep the laggards closed up over a five-mile course.

And then, on his very first run-in, Archer the Third had to go missing when call-over was held in the quad and the boys were about to disperse for high tea.

It was almost dark then and inclined to be foggy. With storm lanterns and a band of volunteers he headed back beyond Stonecross, where Archer the Third was found snivelling in a gully, nursing a twisted ankle and the fear of death from exposure. They carried him home sedan-chair fashion and when he sat down to his pea-soup David was in a worse state than Archer, and so stiff that he had to haul himself up to the staff bathroom and soak in soda. He had forgotten all about Bulgaria.

It was easy to see how ageing men like Cordwainer and Acton had become so barnacled, tending, as the seasons passed, to identify the universe with Bamfylde and Bamfylde's concerns. Decisions like the date of speech-day, which pitch
should be used for the house semi-finals and crises like the influenza epidemic that filled the sanatorium in ten days, or the near-mutiny of the O.T.C. over threadbare puttees that kept unrolling during manoeuvres, had a way of enlarging themselves into events of tremendous importance. Who was the locker-pilferer in Outram's? Was he boy or domestic? Who was covering for Howarth, himself down with flu? What could be done to stem the overflow of the brook that flushed the latrines, inevitably known as the Bog?

Surprisingly, it was Algy Herries who restored to him his sense of proportion once a week when he announced, often with tears in his eyes, the death of yet another Old Bamfeldian in action, and spoke a few words about the boy's years at the school. It was a sombre, almost masochistic duty he inflicted upon himself but David, who was beginning to get the full measure of the man, understood why he performed this weekly penance. He would see it as an obligation, to speak aloud, possibly for the last time, the name of a youngster, or perhaps someone who was not so young, whose shouts had once been heard on the pitches beyond the pointed windows of Big School, a person who had taken away with him some tiny part of the ethos of the school, planted in his mind and muscle during his time here. It was on these occasions that David would get a glimpse of that multitude of khaki-clad figures who had disappeared in the slime of Passchendaele, or fallen on the chalky wilderness of the Somme. For casualties, despite the Allied surging advances almost as far as the battlefields of August, 1914, were still trickling in, four in August, three in September, two more in October, one of them Bristow Major, who had been head prefect the term before David joined the staff and whose younger brother, Bummy Bristow, was still in the Upper Fifth.

But then, like a thunderclap, it ended. Word came over the telephone – from Second Lieutenant Cooper, of all people, now training as a demolition expert in London – that he had it on the best authority (an uncle in Fleet Street) that a cease-fire was to be declared at eleven a.m. the following day, and although no newspapers confirming this stupendous news could be expected until late afternoon, Algy took a chance and announced a school holiday, with leave to go into Challacombe, if transport could be arranged. Local boys disappeared but a majority stayed on, pooling their pocket-money to empty the tuckshop, and Ellie Herries was set to work with other masters' wives to perform a prodigy of baking for a communal supper and sing-song in Big Hall instead of the usual Prep.

The immediate effect upon David was to increase his popularity as the one
member of the staff who had fought at First Ypres, Loos and Neuve Chapelle, and who was regarded, somewhat to his embarrassment, as the ultimate authority on all things martial. He was cheered when he made his way up to the dais, luckily a little in advance of the other masters save Bouncer, who was there to say grace, and found himself blushing, for although he felt an immense sense of gratitude he could feel no personal achievement in survival when nearly a hundred Old Boys had died.

He kept his gaze on the floor until Bouncer had subsided, but there was worse to come. When the school orchestra had assembled and the singing began, they chose numbers that the troops had sung so repetitiously down all the roads of Picardy and Artois, 'Tipperary', 'Who's Your Lady Friend?', 'Long, Long Trail' and the like. To someone who had heard these choruses sung in that setting it was unbearable and soon, but inconspicuously, he escaped, slipping out through the sculleries to the cinder path leading to the piggeries. And here, unashamedly, he wept, blundering through trailers of mist until he found the path to Herries's thinking post, and pausing there, gulping down the dank, night air but still with earshot of the uproar in the Hall. He thought, desperately, 'For Christ's sake… what is there to sing about…? Why does it have to be a celebration when it ought to be a wake?'

He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply, and he was still there when he saw a match flare down by the fives court. Feeling the need to communicate, he made his way down, certain that he would discover that Algy Herries had excused himself under similar pressures.

It was not Algy, however, but that dry old stick Howarth, the English master who had once advised him to ignore Carter's appeal to join the O.T.C., still the basis of a feud between them. Howarth's pince-nez flashed in the glow of his Gold Flake. He smoked, they said, forty to fifty a day and this was not his only vice. Rumour had it that he also accounted for three bottles of gin each week in his cosy rooms at Nicolson's, where he was housemaster.

He said, greeting David, 'Saw you slink off and decided to take the same route. Obliged to you for the hint.' And then, in the friendliest tone he had so far employed, 'I imagine you've even less stomach for it than a slacker like me, P.J. But I'm human, after all. Bristow Senior was one of the brightest boys I've ever taught. He wrote to me several times from France. Said he was going into publishing with his step-father and would have made a success of it, I daresay. But he had to die, at eighteen. For what? Can you tell me?'

'Not yet. I might, in a decade or so.'

'You're another of the millennium boys, then?'

'Not necessarily. But something hopeful must emerge from it. If it doesn't it'll be our fault – yours, mine and Algy's. Even the fault of the old stagers, so long as they stay on the job!'

'The devil of it is,' Howarth said, 'I never did go along with all this hang-the-Kaiser balderdash. I've never been able to hate the Germans. Have you discovered Heine yet?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Try him, sometime. He's got a trick of suiting all kinds of moods. Tonight's for instance – '
Enfant Perdu
', Houghton's translation –

But war and justice have far different laws,
And worthless acts are often done quite well;
The rascal's shots were better than his cause,
And I was hit – and hit again, and fell

– appropriate, wouldn't you say?'

'It's appropriate to the whole generation.'

Howarth said nothing and, more from a need to divert his own gloomy thoughts than his companion's, David added, 'Didn't Heine write a lot about love?'

'Yes, he did.

The old dream comes again to me;
With May-night stars above,
We two sat under the Linden tree
And swore eternal love.
Again and again we plighted troth…

Here, what the devil has got into me?' and Howarth hurled his cigarette across the gravel, as though its trail of sparks would purge him of sentimentality.

'Has Heine personal significance for you?'

'He did have, a long time ago.'

'Were you ever married?'

'No.' There was a pause. In the darkness David could sense Howarth doing battle with himself, trying to break through the home-baked crust of reserve that he wore like a breastplate wherever he went. Finally he said, 'I was to
have been, when I was about your age. But she made the right decision. She married a stockbroker. It wasn't the financial aspect,' – he said this almost defensively – 'she just couldn't see herself as a schoolmaster's wife, and I don't blame her when I look at some of the old birds roosting about here. Besides, this is a job for a bachelor if you mean to make a go of it. Miserable pay, no real prospects unless you strike lucky, and a fresh family every four to five years. What woman in her senses would take that on?' He stood up, lighting another cigarette. 'What the devil are we doing, sitting here in the fog and talking drivel? Come up to my rooms and let's do our celebrating in the warm,' and without waiting for David's assent he stalked off, leading the way through the quadrangle arch and up the steep flight of slate steps to his quarters.

That was the beginning of his tacit alliance with Howarth and he was to be grateful for it, for Howarth, by far the prickliest pear of the common room, was a counterpoise to Carter and one or two of the older men who had already begun to identify him as a radical. He had a conviction that this was not so much on account of his discussions with senior boys on the war, or his championship of a poet like Siegfried Sassoon, who had bravely challenged the establishment the previous year, but because they saw him as someone better qualified than they were to communicate with a generation that had moved into adolescence in the last four years. Howarth, for his part, recognised and accepted this, as indeed did Herries himself. Their patronage probably encouraged men like Carter to think of him as an interloper currying special privileges on the strength of his war record.

Three other shifts in the pattern of his life at Bamfylde occurred before the anniversary of his arrival came round. One was distressing, one reassuring. The third was a compromise, made with the object of closing the breach between him and the commandant of the Officers' Training Corps.

The compromise was proposed by Algy Herries, an admitted past master at reconciling extreme points of view. Hearing of David's uncompromising refusal to take part in military exercises, he buttonholed him outside the tuckshop between periods one December morning and said, gaily, 'You're a Welshman, Powlett-Jones, and all the Welsh are musical. How do you fancy yourself as a bandmaster?'

'A bandmaster, Headmaster? You mean a stand-in for Pym, as orchestra leader?'

'No, dear boy. As the organiser of a drum and fife band for the Corps. We've had a legacy. A consignment of instruments from an Old Boy, name of
Cherriton. Before my time, but it seems he was a local Volunteer enthusiast up in Yorkshire, before the Volunteers were merged into the Territorials. They had a band and Cherriton stipulated in his will that the instruments should be sent on to us. They arrived yesterday, half a cartload of them. Do you play an instrument?'