R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (89 page)

Through the blazing summer days the list lengthened until it ran off the page and was replaced by a larger, more comprehensive one, with notes beside every name. Daffy Jones, Nipper Shaw, Gage and Stilts Rhodes rescued by destroyers, and set ashore at Dover; Bummy Bristow, whose elder brother had been Bamfylde's last casualty in the First World War, having more luck than his brother, this time off Bordeaux, where he got off in the
Lancastrian,
went down with it, but bobbed up and was hauled aboard a trawler and carried into Falmouth; Johnston, the indirect cause of Winterbourne's flight in 1925 (he had told him his mother's divorce was all over the Sunday papers) taken prisoner at St. Malo but dodging the column (Johnston was always a bit of a column dodger, David reflected) and making his way to Brest, where he caught the last refugee boat out of the harbour; Maxton, third official bell-ringer in David's recollection, together with Heffling and Keith Blades, rescued by the navy at Dunkirk; Parker and Morgan-Smith carried home on a paddle steamer that had once plied for hire from the Isle of Wight; Cookson, whose father had once shamed him by appearing on Sports Day in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, using more plebian transport and landing, black as the Ace of Spades, from a collier at Newport, Monmouthshire. Some fifteen in all, the last being Driscoe who had partnered Beth and Phyl Irvine as the third of the three little maids in the 1920
Mikado
, reported safe a week after having been
listed a P.O.W. Driscoe, it seemed, had made it all the way to Marseilles in an elderly Citroen, found by the roadside near Abbeville, paying his way with cigarettes, looted from an abandoned N.A.A.F.I.

And after that a lull, while David was seeking, and getting, confirmation of their two known casualties, a sad pair to anyone's way of thinking. For Briarley, serving as a captain in the Calais garrison, was killed some thirty miles from the river Lys, where his father had died in the Big Push of 1918. Details concerning Skidmore's death were more confused but it looked as if he had achieved a kind of martyrdom after all. Serving in the B.E.F. as a Methodist padre, he had remained behind to tend to the wounded and was now reported missing, believed killed.

The day he got confirmation of Briarley's death he went out across the forecourt to the big cedar beside the tennis court, sitting near the spot where he had talked to the boy twenty-two years before, after Ellie Herries had sent him out to offer what comfort he could. He wondered if Briarley's mother was still alive, and if she was, how would she take this second blow? Bitterly, he would say, for Briarley Senior had died in what was reckoned a war to end war, and Briarley Junior, he recalled, was an only son.

The boy's voice seemed to speak to him over the years – 'Didn't see a great deal of him, sir… when I was small he was mostly in India or Ireland…' and a later question, 'Would it have been quick, sir? I mean, you'd know…'

He sat there in the blinding heat, biting his lip and silently cursing the fools who had let things drift and drift until they had reached an impasse where the only hope of a future rested on the wanton sacrifice of boys like Briarley, boys with guts and imagination, now called upon to go out and do their fathers' work all over again. The bell rang for lunch but he did not hear it and later Chris found him there, staring into the heat haze shimmering on the western slopes of Middlemoor.

She said, quietly, 'What is it, Davy?' and he told her of all three Briarleys, father, thirteen-year-old son who had sat here beside him, and thirty-five-year-old regular, left behind in Calais to stop Panzers with hand grenades and a standard issue revolver.

She said, taking his hand, 'All in all, we've been lucky, Davy. In two ways if you can bring yourself to see it in that light. Fifteen out of seventeen saved
by a miracle, or a string of miracles. But that isn't what I mean.'

'Well?'

'God knows, I've never seen you or myself as people subscribing to those platitudes about the nobility of sacrifice –
pro patria mori
, and so on. I never was entranced by Kipling, or that chap Newbolt, who wrote that slosh about the voice of the schoolboy rallying ranks. But this is different, utterly different. I think it's important you should face up to it now, for it looks to me as if there's worse to come.'

'How is it different? Briarley, father and son, died in the same war, on the same ground, fighting the same enemy. What's different about it?'

'I don't think I have to go over that again. I made it clear five years ago, when I backed down on every principle I ever held. This time it isn't a question of dying for king and country, for the flag, for honour and glory and all that rubbish.'

'It never was,' he said, 'for the chaps called upon to do it.'

'But it was for the people who weren't, people like me standing on the touchline. Only now there isn't any touchline. We're all in it, right up to our necks, and that's a point in our favour, I'd say. At least, there's no more bloody hypocrisy, no more do-your-bit-son, no more white feathers and promises of homes fit for heroes to live in. This is total war, with nothing but survival as the prize-money. More muddle if we win, a living death if we don't. It's worth dying for if that much is clear. Briarley was killed at Calais, you say?'

'Left to his fate, back to the sea. Bombed from above, fired on by God knows how many tanks.'

'But if it hadn't been for Calais, what would have happened up the coast at Dunkirk?'

'I'm damned if I know and I don't see how you could know.'

'It so happens I do,' she said, 'for Bradshawe told me. He plied one of those small boats, and that's something else you should put on your little list before you draw a line under it. Don't look so outraged – Bradshawe was here and I tried to find you but you were over at Challacombe at the L.D.V. conference. He couldn't wait. He was on his way to Plymouth to join the navy.'

'What exactly did Bradshawe tell you?'

'A lot they didn't print about Dunkirk. More than he's told anybody, I'd say. I have a very special relationship with Bradshawe.'

She had too, beginning that day during her first term here, a month or so after they were married, when Howarth, the old fox, had persuaded her to
mediate between Bradshawe, then fifteen, and his parents, plaguing him with their respective versions of the family divorce. 'He picked nine out of the water, close inshore. I didn't know he was a yachtsman, did you?'

'No,' he said, the weight beginning to lift from his shoulders, 'but I settled years ago for learning something new about every damned one of them every day I make contact. Both during and after their time here.'

He stood up. 'That's not such a bad idea, either – adding Bradshawe to the list, I mean. He only left in 'thirty-eight, and there'll be quite a number here who remember him. They'll be excited to hear we had someone who took part in that crazy armada.'

He made no excuse for his sudden change of mood and she watched him move with long strides across the sunlit tennis court, over the forecourt and through Big School arch to the quad. He already had his fountain pen unscrewed and she thought 'He's no more than a Briarley or a Bradshawe himself some days. But, just occasionally, he's as old as God. That's the way of it in his job, I imagine… my job, too, now, if I'm honest with myself…'

She got up, smoothed her skirt and walked thoughtfully across the sunbaked lawn to the steps, meaning to pass straight through into the kitchen and warm his untouched lunch, but tempted, en route, to use his Judas window in the lavatory. She was in time to see him repin the notice and stand back to let the first quad loungers read the addendum.

2

She had promised him worse and he had learned to trust her judgment in these things, yet the summer blazed on tranquilly enough, with plenty of bustle, and a steady bombardment of officialdom certainly, but as yet no cataclysmic sequel to the epic of Dunkirk.

World War was lapping into the quadrangle, into the nooks and crannies of the old place in a less dramatic way, creeping paralysis rather than a seizure, for the very influx of boys that summer slowed them down, sometimes to a virtual standstill. Seemingly the reverse of the 1931 slump was at work in the minds of parents, particularly those living in Greater London, and the threatened southeastern areas. Younger brothers arrived out of nowhere, often at short notice, so that the waiting-list, that had always had to be nursed, shook itself out well ahead of time as people remembered the relative immunity of the plateau.

In addition to their own swollen complement of four hundred and seventeen,
there was an increase in Carter's contingent. 'Minimals' Barnaby called them, a play of their school's official name, St. Magnus, and Carter was very jealous of their identity, keeping them within their perimeter, which was just as well in view of the chronic shortage of dormitory, classroom and playing field space. There were now over sixty Minimals, living like a dependant and slightly disreputable tribe under the lee of the planty, where two more Nissen huts were erected to serve as dining-room, kitchen, and communal classroom. Carter managed them with one assistant master, an elderly man called Badger, said to be an amateur archaeologist, with extravagant theories about Middlemoor being the real site of Arthur's Camelot.

They lost Molyneux towards the end of term. It seemed that he, too, heard the call of duty, in the form of a muted 'Marseillaise', played by the exiled de Gaulle. He was not a Frenchman but had many Gallic friends and one of them, a certain Capitaine d'Orley, appeared in uniform one morning and talked him into joining the nucleus of the French Resistance Group as an official interpreter.

He went off gaily, despite David's indignant protests. He had never really integrated into the school but his work was first-class, and David was reluctant to lose him. He said, by way of valediction, 'I've been stuck here fifteen years, P.J., and I've never had
any fun
. I'm nearly forty now, and if I turn this down I'll marry a local peasant and grow a turnip for a head. Time I moved on, but it took a thing like this to shake me loose. Never had enough initiative, but d'Orley tells me there's a prospect of seeing the world once we get properly organised. It was that that decided me.'

He was replaced, almost at once, by an elderly Belgian refugee, a Monsieur Oujardier, a name that the boys instantly converted into 'Oojah', without waiting for Barnaby's cue. In some ways the Belgian reminded David of the long-dead Bat Ferguson, in that he was excitable and very voluble, but he showed promise of being adequate, and at least qualified as an eccentric, an honour that Molyneux had never achieved, notwithstanding his middle name, Aloysius, and that awful Australian uncle who looked like a Colonial pretending to be Bernard Shaw.

Then, in the final week of term, when he was in the throes of making arrangements to house an additional fifty boys for the holidays, on the lines of the Sunsetters, a much heavier blow fell on him. A grim-faced Boyer invited him and Chris down to the cottage for tea one baking Sunday afternoon, and announced in the momentary absence of Alison, that he was enlisting in the
merchant navy as soon as their second child was born, and that it was no good trying to talk him out of it because he had been to Plymouth and signed on the previous Saturday.

In the last twenty-odd years there had been many occasions when Boyer had exasperated him but never more so than now. He said, explosively, 'But that's absolutely crazy, Chad! The merchant navy! Good God, what the hell do you know about the sea? It's no more than a Quixotic gesture. Why don't you borrow a suit of armour while you're at it, and charge Man Bullivant's bloody windmill at Bamfylde Halt?'

Chris said, 'Keep your voice down, Davy. Maybe he hasn't told Alison,' and Boyer said, calmly, 'Yes, I have, and she's behind me, odd as it may seem. Or not so odd, perhaps. Her kid brother, Hamish, went down on the
Jervis Bay
last winter. She was very fond of Hamish. He was only seventeen.'

'I never heard that,' said David, checked somewhat. 'She kept it very much to herself, didn't she?'

'She isn't a song and dance artist, Pow-Wow, but it left a scar. I was scared of admitting how I felt about things, but when I did she saw my point of view, particularly as I've every hope of training as a gunner, although my real duties will be steward.'

'Steward!' David growled, warming up again, 'Steward, with a good degree and a reserved occupation!' but Chris intervened again, saying, 'Do stop erupting, Davy. Let Chad explain if he wants to.'

'He already has. He came to me when the phoney war was still on, mumbling about missing out, but I thought I'd talked him out of it. Damn it, I could understand it if you were in the Sixth, or still up at university. But thirty-five, with one toddler and another expected in October!'

Chad said, addressing Chris, 'The trouble with Pow-Wow is that he won't accept the end product of his own gospel. He's like an apostle of the early Christian Church who gets cold feet and urges his converts to pay homage to Nero the minute he hears the lion roar,' and Chris said, laughing, 'That's a pretty good analogy, Chad. Go on.'