R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (80 page)

She had observed the solitary paths taken by the loners. Always they followed the same spare time route between bells, when there were no compulsory games. Loners mooched off on a parallel line to the hedge dividing the main playing field from the Juniors' pitch, drifting towards the swimming bath, then turning off into the planty, where their heedless steps brought them to Towser's grave beyond the first of the trees.

Hookham took this route, book in hand, and she followed him, coming on him seated on a beech log, out of sight and sound of his private purgatory. She said, casually, 'Hallo, old chap. What are you reading?' and he offered her the book, a battered library edition of
Treasure Island.

'One of my standbys,' she said. 'The Cradle is halfway through it this term, reading it aloud. But you'll be done with all that, I suppose.'

He was trying, she thought, to categorise her, to find her niche in his long, long catalogue of tormentors, and was finding it very difficult. It was therefore time to press her advantage and she said, turning the pages, 'How far have you got?'

'I finished it,' he said, guardedly, 'and
Kidnapped
was out, so I didn't hand it in but started all over again.' Then, very carefully, 'Is that against the rules, miss?'

'Oh, no,' she said, cheerfully, 'quite the opposite. Mr Howarth is a great believer in second readings. Who is your favourite character, Hookham?' and he replied, without a moment's hesitation, 'Ben Gunn, miss.'

'Oh? Why exactly?'

'Because he managed, I suppose.'

'You mean he managed to survive on his own all that time?'

'He was the hero really.
They
wouldn't have managed without him.'

Her opinion of Hookham shot up. She saw his line of reasoning at once, and it underlined not so much his originality but his remarkable powers of deduction. He would see himself as the maroon. Scoffed at, put upon, mocked and belittled, when justice, had justice been done to Ben Gunn and himself, proclaimed that their wits were so much sharper than those of Dr Livesey and Captain Smollett.

She said, 'You know, I think you're absolutely right, Hookham. They
couldn't
have managed without him. I'll tell my boys that this afternoon. Happy reading.'

His startled gaze followed her all the way down the path to the Planty's edge and it might have surprised him had he been in a position to notice that her eyes were bright with tears, but it all worked out satisfactorily and that within hours of the encounter. Hookham was demoted to the Cradle where his age and erudition gave him certain advantages and Chris was not slow to exploit them, going to work the second day Hookham had arrived among them, by announcing, during the reading hour, 'Hookham has the advantage of us. He's read
Treasure Island
twice. He's an expert on it, aren't you, Hookham? That's why I'm going to ask him to judge the maps. Has every pair finished their map?'

Eager hands shot up and the maps were gathered in, blotched and grossly distorted variations of Stevenson's map, in the front of the standard edition. The Cradlers had been divided into pairs and told to assume the role of Jim Hawkins and make a treasure chart of their own devising.

Purposely she did not so much as glance at them but handed them all to Hookham, telling him to leave class and stay out until first bell in order to select the winner and runner-up. It was difficult to keep them quiet while he was absent and when the bell rang excitement erupted in squeals of glee and a great of bobbing up and down. Then, conscious of making an entrance, Hookham re-appeared. 'This one, miss. It's easily the best,' and he handed her a brownish roll of cartridge paper that had about it a definite stamp of authenticity. 'Good. Help me unroll it, Hookham. You hold that end. Yes, this is very good indeed! It looks as though it might have come straight from Billy Bones's chest. Which pair did it?'

Gosse and Meadowes, both blushing, raised their hands.

'Well, come out and tell us about it. How did you make the paper and writing look so old, Gosse?'

Gosse expanded under her approbation. 'We boiled, it, Miss.'

'
Boiled it?
In what?'

'In tea, miss.'

The Cradlers received this news with gasps of delight.

'That was really Meadowes's idea, miss.'

'Good for you, Meadowes!' and Meadowes hung his head.

'And which of you did the drawing and invented the clues?'

'I did, miss. I borrowed Whatmore's fountain pen because of its green ink and crossed nib. It came out all spidery and faded-looking.'

She pinned the map to the blackboard. 'Twenty out of twenty for that, Gosse. And some of these others aren't bad at all. Dismiss now. I'm going to show the winning chart to the head. Wait a minute, Hookham. Off to tea, you others.'

They scuttled out, with the usual desk-banging and competitive scuffling, while Hookham remained, looking at the floor. She said, 'Thank you for helping, Hookham. It wouldn't have done for me to judge them.'

His head came up. 'Why not, miss? You're the teacher and give the marks.'

'Yes, I know, but you see, I invented the exercise, and you noticed how they all accepted your decision. Would you like to be class monitor?'

'What does a monitor have to do, miss?'

'Oh, all kinds of things. Give out test papers, collect up books, clean the blackboard and even take charge if I have to pop out. You see, you're the biggest and the oldest now, and they'll take it from you. They'd skylark with any of the younger ones.'

He said, doggedly, 'I'll be monitor, miss.' And then, warily, 'How long will I stay in the Cradle, miss?'

'Just a term or two. Until you get the hang of things. You're beginning to settle, aren't you?'

'I'll get used to it, I reckon.'

He said it as though addressing himself and she had a conviction that he had made the same affirmation many times over the last few weeks. He had surfaced, certainly, but she had an idea he would sink again if she let go too soon.

'Hookham?'

'Yes, miss?'

'What's your initial “R” stand for?'

He looked surprised, 'Roy, miss.'

'I'll tell you something, Roy, something I wouldn't want the others to know. A secret between us. I'm fairly new here as well and getting used to it, a bit at a time.'

'But how can you be? I mean, Dixon Major told us all you were the head's…'

'It doesn't matter who I am, I'm new. New at this job and new at the school, so don't think I don't understand how hard it is. Put it this way. To play me in they made
me
a monitor. Monitor of the Cradle.'

Surprisingly, and to her great relief, he grinned. Davy was right about him. He really was an original, and the grin encouraged her to gamble again. She opened her handbag and extracted his grubby little note. 'The head said I was to give you this. He's read it but he thinks you ought to stick it out a while longer, and so do I.'

He took the note wordlessly and stuffed it in his pocket. Then, as a clamour rose from the quad, he said, 'That's tea parade. May I go now, miss?'

'Yes, of course, but be here before first bell tomorrow. We're doing nature study and there's a lot to give out.'

He nodded and hurried out and a moment later she heard the duty prefect's command, '
Paraaade… shun!
Dis
miss!'
and the prolonged scrape of boots as the four contingents turned left and fell out. She took a closer look at Gosse's map, deciphering three blurred crosses, marking the treasure. The crosses were not scratched in green but in red, almost certainly in blood. Meadowes's blood, probably, for Gosse would see him as the obvious donor. She thought, 'Davy's always said adults learn more than they teach in a place like this and, by God, he's so right!'

2

Despite his admitted experience, despite his sly Celtic trick of winning most people round to his point of view in the end, she did not wholly trust him with the Hookhams. It was very different, however, in the Middle and Upper Schools, where she would sometimes watch him at work.

He was, she decided, uniquely tailored for the job and once they were through the Upper Third, and beginning to notice such things, a majority of boys acknowledged this as freely as she did. This was particularly true in the Sixth, where he was able to step outside his tutorial role and move among
them as a kind of group leader, appointed by popular ballot. She realised this one October afternoon when all the Cradlers were down on the lower pitch, practising for the Sevens Competition, and he invited her to attend a current affairs period on the dominant issue of the day, Mussolini's defiance of The League of Nations and invasion of Abyssinia.

Ordinarily, she said, she should have stood in the punishing wind on the touchline, pretending to take a professional interest in Lower School frolics in the mud, but she could never arouse more than a casual interest in their interminable games, and had, indeed, questioned the emphasis placed on them.

Up to a point he shared her view but added, on this occasion, 'You'll find they grow on you. They did on me, after a year or so, but, strictly for your ear alone, I can still take 'em or leave 'em. Cross-country running excepted, that is, for that offers a change of scene. If you're at a loose end this afternoon, why don't you sit in on a Sixth Form current affairs? We often have the occasional visitor.'

The Sixth subjected her to the half-amused appraisal that Beth and Phyl Irvine had received at their first Saturday dance, and he didn't fail to notice it, thinking, 'It's good to have a pretty woman about the place again. Sweetens the atmosphere somehow,' but took good care to ignore her during the discussion until Venn, with a brisk show of gallantry, turned to her and said, 'What do you think?' and she looked apprehensively at Davy and then quickly away, for he was grinning. She said, 'Coxe made a good point just now. Sanctions won't stop Mussolini. He'll be in Addis Ababa by the new year.'

'But Coxe said we should have gone to war over it.'

'It wouldn't have come to war. Bluff would have done the trick. We should have sent the fleet to Suez, and the whole thing would have fizzled out. As it is, who knows where it could lead?'

They were impressed, every last one of them, and Coxe, finding his minority views supported, was encouraged to prompt. 'Could you say where, ma'am? To another World War?'

'It might. Mussolini isn't the only braggart on the rampage. There are plenty of others throwing their weight about in Berlin and Tokyo. How can they be anything but encouraged by the way he's getting away with it?'

After that she was embroiled and they went at it, cut and thrust, until the
bell rang. It was not until after lock-up, when they were having their final cup of tea by the fire, that she glanced across at him and remembered how effortlessly he had chaired that lively discussion and how, in the end, every boy in the room turned to him, not to her, for the summing-up. She said, 'It was very stimulating. But I won't come again if you don't mind.'

'Why not? I thought you made out a pretty good case for military sanctions.'

'So did I but they didn't think so. They were just being polite. Now if you told them the moon was made of blue cheese, they'd accept it as gospel, and that's victory, Davy. You're coming down the straight now, whether you realise it or not,' but he said, seriously. 'It's a damned long straight.'

'Then, deep down, you're as scared as I am, especially since Mussolini got away with it. You're scared for boys like Venn and Coxe. And even for some of the younger ones. If it ever did come to the crunch, how would you regard them having to go through what you went through?'

He was a long time answering. It was something he had thought about very deeply. That much was obvious by his concentrated expression and the deliberation of his answer. He said, finally, 'I'd feel like you, that I'd been right all along. Oh, not about politics, or the way things have drifted from bad to worse since Versailles. I'm not pretending to have foreseen that, or anything like it. All along the line you've been the only Socialist prophet of doom I've met, and every day's newspaper headline keeps reminding me of the fact. I'm talking about something different, more general, if you like.'

'Could anything be more “general” than another World War?'

'For me it could. Our approach to it, if and when it came. Looking back, that's what I've been working on ever since I settled in here, and saw things through adolescent eyes. But it's late for amateur metaphysics, love.'

He was getting up but she stopped him. 'Tell me, Davy. It's important.'

He said, 'I remember a story Algy told us to illustrate the same point years ago. The night of his farewell supper, it was, and it made a terrific impact on everyone at the time. They gave him a cheer for it. Loudest cheer I ever heard in Big Hall and won't hear a better, not if I'm here in my dotage.'

He told her the story of Petherick, O.B.E. and 'Chuff' Rodgers, killed at First Ypres, of the train ride they shared with Algy over to Barcombe, the baby who was sick, and how Chuff had mopped up mother and baby with his handkerchief. It had always stayed in his mind so that gradually, over the
years, it had become a kind of slide rule he applied to the potential of every boy he taught. There were the Pethericks, who went on to become presidents of insurance companies, who had their names in the Honours Lists, and there were the Chuffs, a majority he liked to think, although sometimes he wasn't sure.

'It's a good story,' she said, 'and very relevant. But shocking to my way of thinking.'

'Why?'

'What you're really saying is that you accept the fact that the Chuffs will be sacrificed and the Pethericks, who stay put, will make a pile, grow fat and die in their beds.'

'That's the way it usually goes.'

'But it's too awful to contemplate, Davy. We ought to try and change it.'

'You saw how difficult it is to change. The only consolation is that it seems to work and if I don't know who should? I came here absolutely convinced that every Chuff in the world had gone west, but they hadn't. They seed themselves somehow. I've got a good many of them here at this moment, nearly twenty years after they blew half-time out there.'