R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (81 page)

'But that's what I mean, Davy, you're accepting it passively and that's as wrongheaded as that ostrich attitude that drove me out of politics.'

'Not really. Neither is Howarth, Barnaby or any of the others who believe in what they're about. My job, yours too now, is to encourage the Chuffs and slap down the embryo insurance presidents, while grabbing their parents' money with both hands. The more we can swing our way the better our chance of survival, if it ever does come to another showdown.'

3

There had been a time when his personal fortunes had seemed to run a parallel course with the roller-coaster ride of the world outside, a world where quarrelsome tribes continued to collide with one another all the way from Manchuria to Madrid. But things were different now. All about him, if the newspapers and radio bulletins were to be believed, was conflict and disarray, but here on the plateau it was sometimes difficult for a man, busy from rising-bell to lockup, to think of himself as involved in the ferment beyond bounds, and this despite the fact that he shared bed and board with a woman who was half-convinced they were all riding an express to perdition.

His own objectivity stemmed from several sources. His splendid health was one, and her presence was another, for sometimes, immersed like him in the come-day-go-day trivia of successive terms, she too could join him in looking at the outside world through the wrong end of a telescope. Her restored confidence and her new tendency to value the smaller bonuses of life, governed her moods so that for weeks together she could join him in forgetting what was going on outside.

She was made aware of this, and even acknowledged it with a private chuckle, when George V died a day or so after the Lent term began in 1936, and the boys put on their black ties and marched to Stone Cross Church for the memorial service. Everyone had liked harmless old George, whom they saw as a country squire, and everyone was sorry for Mary, but there was nothing personal about their regrets. Somewhere, two hundred miles to the east, a seventy-year-old stranger had died but that was less immediate than the Corps' attempt to play 'The Dead March from Saul' over the last two hundred yards of the journey to Stone Cross.

Now and again, of course, she was jolted out of her complacency and so, to a degree, were David and a few of the Seniors. As the months spent themselves in a succession of regularised assemblies and dispersals, in sports fixtures, Choral Society concerts, examinations, O.T.C. field days and the climactic event of the Christmas term, with Algy Herries as yet another Ko-Ko ('Seventy-five, by the Lord Harry, and still capable of warbling “Tit-Willow” to Katisha!') the malaise of the world across the Channel would cross boundaries, and the Owl Society would debate the Popular Front in France, Mussolini's rape of Ethiopia, Hitler's re-occupation of the Rhineland and purges in Moscow. But as soon as the bell rang the inner rhythm of the place would reassert itself, and it would require something as immediate as the abdication of Edward VIII to turn Bamfylde eyes outward. But even then not for long. When a school had spent four months rehearsing
The Mikado
, even someone like Mrs Simpson has to wait her turn.

Occasionally something would occur on the plateau that would make them aware that there was still abysses to be crossed on frail rope-bridges and usually they would cross in convoy, as in the case of young Driscoe's miry flirtation with death, in December.

Driscoe II was the youngest brother of the Driscoe who sang treble in the 1919
Mikado
, when he was the third little maid from school, partnering Beth and Phyl Irvine. At the London dinner in January he reminded David that his
kid brother would be arriving at Bamfylde in the summer term, and added, 'Kid's a bit of a weed. As the youngest of five he's been spoiled to hell, particularly by the old lady, but he's okay upstairs. Might even pass an exam or two, and that's something I never did, did I, Pow-Wow?'

'You had compensating distinctions as far as I was concerned,' David told him, and reminded him of his appearance on stage before an audience of four hundred beside an obviously pregnant Yum-Yum, but when Driscoe said, 'Will you keep a special eye on the kid, Pow-Wow? Mater's orders, I'm afraid,' he added, drily, 'Hang it, I'm paid to keep an eye on all of them, but you can tell your mother I shall regard him as special if it's likely to stop her worrying.'

But Driscoe II was seen to be something of a special case when he presented himself the following April, a morose little boy, light as a feather, with glasses, a slight stutter and exceptionally knobbly knees. It was those knees, singular enough to earn Driscoe II a lot of ragging, that encouraged David to put him straight into the Upper Third. Upper Third boys had discarded short pants and the boy's entrance exam paper justified a flying start. Moreover, it did not look as if Driscoe was likely to distinguish himself outside a classroom.

One could not always prejudge these things, however. Driscoe II, far too frail for rugby, showed unexpected promise as a cross country runner, astonishing Outram's shield-holding team by averaging nine points in the first three runs of the season. Nine wasn't many, set against the impressive total of Outram's longstriding house-captain, Parker, but it was reckoned good for a shortsighted, knock-kneed first-termer, and Parker, a fanatic in this field, selected the boy as his fag, partly with the object of encouraging him when he was doing odd jobs about the study.

The result was predictable. Driscoe became fired with a desire to develop his unlikely talent to a pitch where the splendid Parker, an all-round sportsman, and in line for the house prefectship, regarded him as an asset to the house. When the run-in started from the crest of Middlemoor, the final run of the term, the new boy went off like a fugitive slave a few yards ahead of the bloodhounds.

He had no luck. At a gap in the hedge, dividing Man Dixon's sheep pasture from the marshy river bottom, he fell flat on his face and lost his glasses. Groping for them in inches of Exmoor mud he was trodden flat by a succession of runners determined to keep up with the leaders, and in a momentary lull between his involuntary prostration he decided to continue without them and
return to recover them before first bell in the morning.

It was a reckless decision. Badly winded, and quite unfamiliar with the route, he ran far wide of the track, reaching the soggy floor of the valley at a point where the river bank was approached by a broad area of marsh, screened by a fringe of last year's sedge and partitioned off from firmer ground by a fence of two-by-four palings.

Any country-bred boy would have realised that a crossing here was impassable and that there was a very good reason for fencing out here on the open moor, but Driscoe had lived the whole of his life in Golders Green, and even his summer holidays had been spent with a doting aunt in Worthing. He made nothing of the flimsy barrier, scrambled over and plunged waist-deep into a slough as thick as black treacle.

He had time to yell and somebody heard him.

Gosse, maker of treasure maps, was passing the gap higher up the slope, moving at a deliberately leisurely pace, with the object of evading the whippers-in at the next belt of timber and making for Ma Midden's farm, where he could exchange a sixpence (carefully wrapped in his handkerchief) for two hot pasties, one for him, one for his crony, Meadowes.

Gosse, his curiosity aroused, changed direction, descended the steep field and stopped short at the barrier, appalled by what he saw on the far side. It was no more than half of Driscoe, who looked like the stump of a small tree hammered into soft ground.

Gosse was not only resourceful, he was also quick-thinking. Out of the corner of his eye he noted two things. One was his henchman Meadowes, who had followed his angled descent but stopped higher up the slope, puzzled; the other, a few yards to the right, was the remains of what had once been a wire fence, no more than a rotted post enmeshed in rusty wire. Above the frantic howls of Driscoe he put his hands to his mouth and shouted, 'He's stuck! He'll never make it! Find the whippers-in – tell 'em a new kid is drowning in Man Dixon's bottom. Run like hell…!' and as Meadowes scudded off across the great, slabsided field, Gosse made his own dispositions, slopping through mud on his side of the fence and dragging the isolated stake from its bed.

The wire was rusted and tangled, but it was a matter of seconds to unravel some ten feet of it and loop the free end round his shoulder. Then, wading as far as the fence, he threw the billet to Driscoe and was immensely relieved when he saw failing hands grasp it either side of the staple, and a mud-spattered face stare up at him with an expression of baffled hostility – 'Just as though
I'd flipping well pushed him there,' as he told an enthralled audience in the Outram dormitory that night.

The wire tautened and the strain paid out another three or four feet, so that Gosse, his shoulder wedged against the nearest upright of the fence, was able to get some kind of purchase and even attempt to twist the loose end round the lower horizontal. He did not ask himself how long he could hold on there but as long as the fence stood the strain, the billet held by Driscoe did not crumble, and the wire did not part, there was a prospect of supporting Driscoe until someone with more muscle and more practical apparatus arrived on the scene. In the meantime Gosse gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. He did not want to see Driscoe disappear under the mud, or watch his final struggles through the wide gap in the planks. It was enough to know he was still there, chest deep in the black, filthy stuff, and would sink no deeper so long as the wire remained taut.

Gosse did not see the combined approach of Coxe, Venn and Davidson, who arrived in a bunch, their whistling breath indicating that they had run a downhill mile in approximately the time it would take the best of them to complete the 880-yard circuit of Lower Side pitch. They crowded him even closer to the fence, Coxe taking the strain and Davidson, himself a moorman, straddling the fence and lowering himself on to the far side. Then, with what Gosse thought of as great cunning, making a bridge of his body by taking a grip of the lower horizontal and calling to Driscoe to grab his ankles. Venn, unable to find more wire, replaced Coxe as anchor, and Coxe, taking his cue from Davidson, scaled the fence farther along, noticing as he crossed it a section of loose planks. It took him only a moment to prise one loose and squirm along the inside of the fence to the spot where his friend Davidson was lying face downward in the mud. Driscoe was no farther down and had even contrived to flounder a few inches nearer the fence in order to improve his grip on Davidson's shins but it seemed that he had not entirely lost his head for he still held the wire between his teeth.

They huddled there, all five of them, in an ungainly group, a tableau that, viewed from a distance, looked like a clumsy exercise in gymnastics. Driscoe was hardly more than a black bubble on the surface. Davidson was only visible above the thighs. Venn was now flattened against the near side of the fence,
with Gosse still trying to loop the fag-end of the wire to the cross-piece. There was progress of a sort, however, for Davidson, turning his head to spit out mud, saw Coxe's plank and shouted, 'Under my knees, Frankie! Hard under my bloody knees! Quick, for Christ's sake…' so that Coxe, kneeling, plunged the board deep into the slime, aiming to burrow under Davidson's thighs. Despite ample lubrication, the passage of the rough timber made him wince but he found that it strengthened his purchase so long as Coxe remained kneeling on his end of the board. Beyond that, however, there was little they could do and glancing sideways Coxe saw that Driscoe could not hold on indefinitely. Then Venn called from the other side of the fence. 'They're coming, Frankie. Pow-Wow and Man Dixon. They've got ropes!' and Davidson, ordinarily a very taciturn boy, made the only joke of the operation, grunting, 'Shout up to them! Tell 'em not to hurry, will you?'

4

His instinctive front-line reactions were not as immediate as they had been, at the time of the Havelock fire. The war was a long time ago now, and although he thought of himself as very fit for a man turned forty, the habit of contemplation slowed him down when it came to making snap decisions.

He had been at the tail of the field, shepherding the few Second Formers running the course over the crest of the pasture and down into the valley, but once he saw the last of them wade the ford, and disappear into the spinney, he stopped to have a word with Man Dixon, remembering him not as he saw him now, a stolid, thickset moor man, but as the day-boy who, in 1925, had been credited with killing old Bat Ferguson with a buzzsaw rendering of the French adjective
vert.
He reminded him of the incident now and Dixon, as master of the family holding, could afford to grin. 'Arr,' he mused, never having lost his upland burr, 'and there was a particle o' truth in it, Pow-Wow. I never could get my tongue round his ole French words, and I reckon he would ha' knocked me across the class if he hadn't seized up on the spot.' He spoke philosophically and man to man, as though, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, he was David's contemporary. 'Things are looking up downalong, I hear,' he added.