R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (88 page)

She stood still in the darkness for a moment, out of immediate reach but close enough for him to hear the soft rustle of her nightdress as she shrugged herself out of it.

3

Twice during that winter of war that was not war the battle flared, two live coals in an otherwise dead fire. H.M.S.
Royal Oak,
at anchor in Scapa Flow, was torpedoed by a U-Boat and sank at dead of night, taking with her Lieutenant Graves-Jones, who had served in the Navy since leaving the plateau in the mid-twenties. Beth would have remembered him well, for he had been the least shy guest at her first new boys' party in 1919, acknowledging her hospitality with a Prussian heel-click when saying goodbye in the garden of the cottage. Always a bit of a ladies' man, Graves-Jones, but a credit to Bamfylde, for he was naval cadet of the year when he passed out at Dartmouth. But David recalled him for another reason, seeing him as a self-assured senior standing on the threshold of Havelock's parlour the night they buried Beth and Joan up at Stone Cross, holding a bunch of flowers he had intended laying on the
grave and suggesting they went instead to Grace, lying trussed in hospital at Challacombe. 'She won't see them, sir, but maybe she could smell them. The freesia has a lovely scent…'

He wrote his name, achievements and dates in the rearward section of his day-book, on a page that was blank save for the name of Christopherson, killed in Spain two years earlier, and as he made the entry he shuddered at the prospect of seeing the page studded with names. But records would have to be kept. Already letters were beginning to trickle in from all over the world, so that he found himself stuck with his old job of O.B.A. Secretary, a task he had cheerfully surrendered to Howarth but did not care to entrust to anyone else these days. Not even Barnaby who, with the best will in the world, would be likely to revere the dead of Thermopylae and Salamis above those doing battle in aircraft and tanks. Bamfylde's naval minority had it very much their own way that season. Letherett was aboard one of the destroyers that pursued the
Graf Spee,
and Ruby Bickford, surely tailored for the role, was aboard
Cossack
when she intercepted the prison ship
Altmark
in such dashing style, the boarding party leaping on deck like Elizabethans capturing a Spanish treasure galleon off Panama.

Then, for the first time since any of them could recall, there was a school wedding at Stone Cross, almost a fairy-tale wedding it seemed to him, when he came in by the west door with Grace on his arm, and moved up the aisle to join Sax Hoskins, in R.A.F. uniform, with sergeant's stripes up, evidence of promotion that had astonished him until Sax explained 'Aircrew get their third automatically… Can't have A.G. plonks flying kites, can you, Pow-Wow?' Sax was good enough to offer a free translation of this jargon for the benefit of those who did not yet speak the strange new language, a language that was already invading civilian sectors.

Algy Herries married them, and besides a full congregation of staff and boys there were one or two former cronies present, down to give Sax moral support. Massa Heilbron was one of them, the West Indian Sunsetter, over here on a gunnery course. Rowlandson was another, who might have remembered upsetting the teapot at the new boys' party, in 1924. David kept hoping to spot Winterbourne but he did not, and when he asked around nobody seemed to have news of him.

There was a lively reception back at the school, and the rowdy send-off he would expect in the forecourt as the short afternoon died, and the couple drove off to catch their train to Taunton and Paddington. The finality of the
event did not strike him at the time, for so many old friends hung about the place until late that night, and there was the usual end-of-term tumult at first light the following morning.

'Have a good hols, sir…!' 'Don't join up while we're gone, sir…!' and the inevitable sober note, this time from Vicary, head boy and due to join the Royal Marines in the new year – 'I'll keep in touch, sir… Might even be handy for a spell. They tell me there's an R.M. training camp at Lympstone, just south of Exeter.'

He stood on the steps and watched the last of them go, and it was then that he missed Grace most keenly, and was glad that she was likely to be back for a spell, at least until Sax found out where he was posted, and could wangle a living-out pass near the camp. He would miss her secretarial work too, for the post did not get any lighter, and Chris couldn't help him much, with her Cradle at full muster, and Ian at the toddling stage. Chad Boyer nudged him, collar turned up against the biting north-easterly and said, 'How about a coffee, Pow-Wow?' in a way that suggested a confidence of some kind, so he went back into the house and told Rigby to bring coffee into the study, where a mountain of work awaited him. Chad said, when the door had shut on the old man, 'Are all those letters from Old Boys overseas, Pow-Wow?'

'Most of them. Care to read some? There are several from chaps here in your time.'

'Not in my present mood,' Chad said, and when David asked what was amiss he said, gloomily, 'I don't know. I feel out of it somehow. All the old crowd are doing something – Letherett, Dobson and even the Gosse brothers.'

'A lot of the older bunch made a career of the services, Chad. It's no more than their job. Yours is right here, especially with Alison, one boy, and a second child on the way.'

'Sure, sure but… I don't know… I still feel out of it. Is that so crazy?'

'I think it is. You're not much younger than I am, and from all I hear they can't cope with more men at the moment. Nothing seems to be happening, does it? Sometimes I see it as a kind of mime, a ritual squaring up to one another that will end in a compromise.'

'Does Chris see it that way?'

'No. She says it'll get going in the spring, but she could be wrong. Frankly, I never imagined anything like this. The last war started off at a rare gallop. Mons was twenty days after declaration and I was in action three months later. Do you really want my advice?'

'I don't. Alison does.'

'Well, for God's sake go back and tell her I said don't do any enlisting until it's absolutely necessary. For one thing I'd find it damned hard to replace you. For another you've got her and the kids to consider. But quite apart from all that, I think you'd find it difficult to land anything but a stooge job, in one or another of these new ministries. You'd be making a far better contribution here than getting bogged down at a desk.'

Chad said moodily, 'You were under eighteen when you signed up,' and he snapped, 'I was a bloody fool and lived to regret it. Besides, nobody knew a damned thing about war in those days.'

He foraged among the incoming mail and found a single-sheet letter. It was from Gilbert, the Tory M.P.'s son, a contemporary of Boyer's and postmarked Tiree, in the Hebrides. 'Listen to this. It illustrates my point.

Dear Pow-Wow,

You'll note from the above address the Governor managed to get me into the R.A.F. after all. You need a lot of influence to get in, I can tell you. I tried half a dozen things off my own bat up to the end of October, but they didn't want to know. I couldn't even get into a line regiment as a ranker, and as for Cert 'A', nobody seemed to have heard of it. They probably regard it as a passout at the archery butts, or the Bamfylde certificate of proficiency for pike-drill. I was chuffed when I made it to O.C.T.U., but I might just as well have stayed put. I was failed aircrew on account of age (!) and given an admin. job up here, and I've never been so brassed off in my natural. All I do is look at the sea, sign chits for crafty weekends, and churn out daily returns that nobody reads. Believe me, it's all a big-scale hoax. Drop me a line if you've time, and tell me how my lot are making out. And tell old Barnaby, preferably in Latin, that the pen is not only mightier than the sword, it's a hell of a sight more universal in this man's army.

Warmest regards,

R.S. Gilbert

He was relieved to look up from the letter and see Chad grinning. 'You're
wasted as a schoolmaster, Pow-Wow,' he said. 'You ought to have been one of those barristers who sit waiting for hopeless briefs handed down from the Bench. If ever I fall foul of the law I'll engage you. You'd come up with something proving I had a damned good reason for having the spoons in my pocket.'

1

C
HRIS WAS RIGHT, AS USUAL.

In April, Chamberlain was talking about Hitler missing the bus. A fortnight later Denmark and Norway had fallen, and the summer term was less than a month old when Rotterdam was reduced to rubble and the distracted French Government had scuttled off to Bordeaux. The river of steel poured unchecked through the Low Countries, leaving in its wake a Maginot Line as obsolete as Martello towers, built to resist invasion in 1805. It was too late to do anything but run for cover, if cover was to be found.

The speed, and horrid finality of the onrush, stunned a man conditioned to think of an offensive's territorial gains in terms of yards, and those yards won at a cost of a hundred thousand casualties. It was an entirely new concept of war. He could think of no historical equivalent. The Napoleonic swoop on Ulm, culminating in Austerlitz, and the encirclement of Sedan, in 1870, were measured manoeuvres compared to this. At a stroke, huge French armies were dispersed and isolated, and the B.E.F., pushed back on three Channel ports, was reckoned lost.

He could not remember feeling so desolate since they brought him news of the accident on Quarry Hill. Catastrophes fell one upon the other like the subsiding storeys of a row of tall houses, overwhelmed by a hurricane. Belgium surrendered, then France, whereas over here all was confusion and dismay, even after Churchill had ousted Chamberlain, and thundered defiance in cadences that struck the ear like parodies of Henry V's oration before Harfleur.
Soon long-range shells were falling on Folkestone, road blocks were set up, even down here in the wilderness, and a local L.D.V. force, armed with rook rifles, old army Webleys and farmers' shotguns, patrolled the moors and coastal sectors. There was a sense of unreality and lack of purpose about everything one did, as if the ordinary processes of life, governed for so long by bells, by the school calendar, by arrivals and departures at the beginning and end of each new term, had lost their significance, were mere gestures in a compulsive ritual initiated long, long ago and persisted in from habit. A terrible sense of urgency, seen on the faces of adults, spread downwards to the Middle and Lower Schools, where he found himself the target of repeated questions for which he had no kind of answers.

'Will they invade, sir?'

'How about the navy, sir?'

'Is it true they're dropping paratroopers disguised as nuns, sir?'

'Will France fight in North Africa, sir?'

'Can't we join the L.D.V.s? There are rifles in the armoury, aren't there, sir?'

At least he could answer that one truthfully. There were no rifles in the armoury, not even the much-derided dummies, issued to the very youngest recruits in the Corps in their first month of training. Only a week ago a detachment of Terriers had arrived in a lorry, and carted them all away, together with what small arms ammunition was available. By now, he assumed, those same rifles, that had been humped up and down the playing fields since the days when Carter had been Corps Commander, were in the hands of half-trained men drawing army pay, awaiting the first shock waves of German invaders behind the beaches of Sussex and Hampshire, and in the hopfields of the Kentish Weald.

But then, like a blessed spate of silence after an earsplitting cacophony, came whispers of a fleet of small ships, and the lifting of 360,000 castaways from the littered beaches of Dunkirk. No more than a rumour at first, but a persistent one, that presently emerged as a fact, a kind of massive lifeboat snatch from a foundering vessel, surrounded by bobbing heads and upraised arms, and after it a vast wave of thankfulness, followed by a mood of buoyancy not unlike the first stage of intoxication. Apparently it was not the end of everything, or not quite, so that, like everybody about him, he plucked up heart and took up the threads of authority again, snatching a moment here and there to collate the snippets of news that found their way to his desk via post and telephone, and
the occasional appearance in his parlour of a harassed parent, past or present. It seemed a miracle that, of the score of Bamfeldians serving with the B.E.F., fourteen were already reported safe and well, and one or two had actually rung through while on survivors' leave. He conceived the idea then of posting a list of them on the quad notice board, announcing details within minutes of receiving his stream of messages, then squinting through the window of Algy's Mount Olympus, where he could see them crowding round the slip of paper hanging there, relaying the news to the outer fringes of the crowd.

More and more news filtered in, almost all of it good. Gilbert, last heard of looking out at sea, and signing chits on a lonely Hebridean Isle, was spirited from a French beach by an amateur yachtsman, and confirmed as much in person, writing cheerfully from Newhaven where he was set ashore. Kassava II, he who had clung to the guttering of the blazing Havelock dorm until his brother knocked him senseless, showed far more initiative at Calais, hiding in a partially collapsed slit trench until it was dark, then making his way along the tideline to the nearest evacuation point, where he was taken off by the boat's crew of a destroyer.