Young Phillip Maddison (10 page)

“No, remain if you please!” cried Richard. “You may as well hear the latest about this precious boy of yours!”

“Oh dear, what is it now, what have you been doing to annoy your Father, Phillip?”

Phillip, hanging his head, began to weep.

“There you are, you see! Found out, he blubbers, like all bullies!”

Richard then recounted to his wife what had happened.

Turning to Phillip, Hetty cried, “Why did you do it, Sonny? It isn’t like you at all! I just can’t understand it, Dickie! The other boys on the Hill call him ‘Grandma’, you know, because he is usually so concerned when smaller boys are hurt. He really does try and stop them from getting bullied, you know. Oh dear, I don’t know what things are coming to!” She sat down, sighing deeply, and held the arm of the chair. “I don’t understand, Dickie! Why, when it rained once, Phillip lent his overcoat to a little boy who had not got one, and took him home to Randiswell, because he was crying, leading him by the hand! Hern the grocer told me. He thinks the world of Phillip, you know.”

Renewed sobbing from Phillip followed this unexpected tribute. He thought he would swallow the brown crystals in the red box in his
Magician’s
Chemical
Set,
labelled
poison
—the potassium cyanide crystals.

“All the same, his present conduct has been most unmanly, to say the least of it! So much so, indeed, that this fellow Hawkins went to the Police about the assault on his boy. And only a few moments ago, I heard what Phillip’s friend had to say to him. He called him, in these very words, ‘a nasty little coward’. Is that not so, Phillip? Answer me, sir!”

“Yes, Father.”

“I think it was something to do with the boy in question wanting to see Mavis, Dickie,” said Hetty; and immediately she regretted her words for Richard said:

“Oh, and what about, may I ask? This is the first I have heard of it.”

Thereupon, in reply to Father’s questions, Phillip stammered out part of the story of Alfred Hawkins waiting for Mavis over the fence, and going with her into the long grass.

Richard remained silent after this information. His face was thin-looking. He breathed deeply. Then, controlling his emotion, he said, his voice much higher than usual, “This puts quite a different complexion on the matter.”

He left the room; but returned almost at once, to enquire where Mavis was. Hetty said she was on the Hill with her little friends, playing tennis. Putting on his straw-yard, and taking his walking stick, Richard went to find her, his face set.

“You bad, bad boy, Phillip!” complained Hetty, in distress, when Richard’s footfalls had gone up the road. “Now your Father has put an entirely wrong construction on Mavis’ action! There was no harm in it at all, in the first place! But now Father has got an idea into his head, goodness knows where it will end.”

It ended, for the meantime, in Richard returning with a weeping Mavis. Hetty watched anxiously through the window as Richard closed the gate behind him. Then she went to open the door. Richard said, “Now up to bed you go, my girl!”

“Oh, Dickie, I beg you! There is some mistake, I am sure!”

“Dr. Cave-Browne will be able to decide that, I consider! Then I shall be able to determine whether or not you are a proper person to have a young girl in your charge! I think your injuries, years ago, must have affected your brain!”

This was a reference to the time when Thomas Turney, having learned that his daughter Hetty was secretly married to Richard, while still living at home, had knocked her down; and she had remained in a fit for several hours. Hetty had been pregnant, with Phillip, at the time.

Hetty began to weep. Phillip did not know what his father had meant; but the sight of his mother crying made him exclaim,

“Don’t, Mum, don’t! It is all my fault! I will atone for it.”

Outside he heard Father saying, “No, I will never forgive you,
my girl! I do not love you any more,” and Mavis’ sobbing as she went up to bed.

“There, you see what you have done, my son?” whispered Mother, her face all twisted with crying. “Your Father——” Her mouth worked, but could not pronounce words. Phillip went into the scullery, to cry to Timmy Rat.

*

When darkness came, Mavis got up from her bed, unknown to anyone, dressed herself, and creeping downstairs, opened the front door and hastened up the Hill, still weeping, with a wild smothered idea of running away and never returning. She believed that her father had ceased to love her. At the top of the gully she wandered about aimlessly in the darkness, finally going down into the grassy area known as the Warm Kitchen; and lying down, hoped she would catch a chill and die.

It was nearly midnight when Richard, now alarmed, found her near the Bandstand, cold and shivering, and took her home to the house in Hillside Road wherein two other children lay in bed, Doris at one end of the house and Phillip at the other, awake and frightened in the darkness. Mavis was given some hot milk with brandy in it, then put to bed with a stone hot-water bottle, after kneeling with her mother and saying her prayers, asking God to protect her and all her family, and to make her a better girl in future.

*

On the return from Epsom, Richard never referred to the incident again; but no longer did he and Mavis share their former affection. The shock to the delicate, fanciful girl, believing herself no longer loved by the father she adored, was greater than Richard ever knew; it lasted throughout her life, long after he had forgotten the night when she had run away.

Phillip went down to apologise to Peter Wallace, and to Alfred Hawkins. Peter would not shake hands, but Alfred would. This made Phillip cry. After apologising, he felt relief that now there would not be any more horrible fighting to be done by Peter Wallace. He promised his mother that he would reform all his wicked ways; and with this in mind, he avoided interference with other boys, big and small. Occasionally, however, the taunt of “Grandma” was borne to him across the grassy spaces, where in the evenings of longer light boys played
their versions of cricket, football, hares and hounds, and other pastimes.

Then hope came to him one spring day, as he was walking down from the Heath, after school. It came in the form of a penny weekly magazine, of a kind he had not seen before.

W
ITH
an expression of thoughtful care upon his face, Phillip walked sedately down the hill from school, satchel slung on shoulder. At the bottom of the hill, where the trams passed, he saw a man standing and giving away something white. The man had a white bundle under one arm, there was another pile at his feet, resting on a sack. Boys were walking away with copies.

Phillip took one. Eagerly he read the title on the front page,
The
Scout,
Volume
1,
No.
1. He walked on under the railway bridge, absorbed in the pages, and continued along the pavement beside the brook which he could just remember being made to flow in a concrete bed behind iron railings, after old black willow trees on its bank had been pulled out by horses. Leaning on the railings, he waited for Milton, but when he did not appear, he crossed over to the Obelisk, where the electric trams stopped; and walking on, came to Mill Lane. Under another railway bridge beside a wood-yard; and so to a row of small early Victorian cottages facing the Randisbourne, and a tall and dingy brick mill, which was worked by a water-wheel.

Mill Lane, or Botany Bay as some called it, was a poverty-stricken place, noisy with ragged bare-foot children, slinking dogs, and women with tousled hair. Some, in winter, had mud on their clothes; Ching said it came from being whores, a word he pronounced hoo-ers. Phillip was frightened by them.

Still reading, Phillip went along the path of trodden cinders towards the other end of the lane, past the row of tiny dingy cottages, and through two posts sunken there to stop the entry of carts. Under another railway bridge, and up the road rising to the tree-grown outline of the Hill. All these objects and places were insubstantial to Phillip. He was reading
The
Boys
of
the
Otter
Patrol.
Up and over the Hill he went, past the Socialist Oak, and so down the gully.

Leaving the gully behind, he was passing the park gates, when he saw on the asphalt pavement opposite Gran’pa’s house a small boy throwing stones at one of the sheep on the other side of the railings. There was a bigger girl with the small boy. Phillip crossed over, and had said no more to the boy than, “I say, please don’t do that, for the ewe has got a lamb!” when the girl, who was thin and had very black hair, turned on him and smacked his face hard, several times. Phillip shut his eyes. The pain and humiliation made him cry. He turned away without a word, and was crossing the road when Mr. Pye came out of his gate and pointing at him cried,

“I saw what happened! Let me tell you this, you thoroughly deserved all you got!”

Deeply mortified, Phillip walked on down the road, hoping that Mr. Pye had not recognised him as Mr. Maddison’s son, and would think that he lived down Charlotte Road somewhere. Turning the corner, he hung about for some moments, while wiping away the signs of tears with his handkerchief; then noticing that a woman in one of the flats opposite was looking at him, he hurried up Hillside Road, and slipped through his own gate.

At tea, eating hot beef-dripping toast with his mother and sisters, Phillip did not speak.
The
Scout
took all his attention. Hetty was glad to observe his absorption in the new magazine, which he had shown to her on coming downstairs after washing his face and hands and brushing his hair, determined more than ever to turn over a new leaf.

Hetty was happy because the meal proceeded without any of the usual bickering between Sonny and Mavis; the two were antagonistic, they were different from one another in the first place; and, she feared, Dickie’s marked preference for Mavis, as soon as she was born, had very early in life put Phillip’s nose out of joint. She had tried to show equal affection and love to the children, always; but Dickie had been the one they looked to, until—but beyond that point Hetty flinched away in thought.

“It seems a very nice paper, dear. What is it about?”

“Boy Scouts, Mum. Look, it tells you how to track wild animals, and recognise birds by their footmarks in snow.”

He turned over a page. “This tells you how to build a boat,
and whoa back, look at this, how to tie all sorts of knots! Then you can make a bivouac of branches, this way, see, look at the picture! No no, don’t keep it, I want to read it before Father comes home, in case he confiscates it.”

“Oh, I don’t suppose he will do that, Sonny. It’s only those other papers he considers to have a bad effect, dear.”

“I know. Here it tells you how to build a camp fire. Look, this page is about signalling by semaphore. And there are dozens of hints and wrinkles, how to keep boots dry, et cetera. Oh, and you can buy tea pellets, too, and drop one in a cup of boiling water, without needing a teapot, see here’s the advertisement! I do hope Father will let me be a Boy Scout! I bet he won’t. Do you think he’ll give his permission, Mum?”

“I should think so, dear. But you must ask him yourself.”

“To form a patrol,” went on Phillip, “you only want six boys in all. Then you can go camping, and find your way about by the stars at night, and cook on a camp fire, and have a singsong. A wide-awake hat costs four and sixpence. Look at these wonderful tents, from the Boer War! Goo, they’re expensive, seven and six! Perhaps I can save up for a wide-awake, and do without a tent to sleep in! Stop grinning at me across the table, Mavis! Mum, tell her to stop grinning.”

“Phil is funny,” said Mavis, amiably. “First he says he must have a hat to keep him wide awake, then he wants a tent to go to sleep in. Ha ha! How like him, to want to go to sleep and remain wide-awake at the same time!”

“I
never
said I wanted to sleep in a wide-awake! Of course I shan’t sleep in my hat! Do you think I’m an old crone, snoring in bed in a nightcap? Anyway, who wears thick woollen socks in bed? Mum, could I have a Scout’s hat, for an extra birthday present, do you think?”

“Ah, I knew that was coming!” exclaimed Mavis in triumph, pointing across the table. “You were just trying to get round Mother, to buy you something! I know what’s behind all your ideas, every one of them! I can read you like a book!”

Mistaking his sister’s sense of fun—he rebuffed all attempts at affection from his mother and sisters—Phillip sought for something sarcastic to say, which would shut her up. Unable to think, he made an ugly face at her.

“Sonny, if you could only see yourself,” said his mother.

“Well then, stop Mavis getting at me, Mum. More tea,
please.” With head held down reading, slowly he held out his cup. “What’s the jam? Gooseberry? I don’t like it very much. Can I have marmalade?”

“Say ‘Please’ to Mother,” said Mavis. She was a pretty, delicate girl, with dark brown hair, regular features, and the large brown eyes of her mother. These eyes nowadays often held a far-away look.

Behind the china teapot, and its thick woollen cosy, Hetty presided over the children’s tea. She was always hoping that Phillip and Mavis would be friends, she was always trying to reconcile them to each other; for their habitual bickering distressed her. Hetty was generally optimistic, her natural gaiety never far away, but she felt it a strain so often having to play the part of peacemaker; and under her cheerful exterior she grieved that her efforts seemed unavailing.

She sometimes wondered if she had made a mistake in never having had Phillip, after the first few months of his life, to sleep with her. She had been afraid of him becoming too dependent on her; for Richard had seemed to feel that he was no longer wanted. Once he had said that she cared more for her “best boy”, as he called him, than for himself.

So Hetty had denied her natural instinct, the common instinct of animals, to share a common warmth; and Phillip had grown up alone, with no feeling of shared warmth; and no spontaneous feeling of sharing with another—until he had made friends with Cranmer, who was in large part animal.

Regarding Mavis, Hetty had rejoiced that Dickie had cared tenderly for his little daughter from the first; but now it looked as though a deep reserve had come between Dickie and Mavis. For Doris, the youngest, Dickie seemed to have no fatherly feeling at all: she had taken, he once declared, his place in his wife’s affections. It was quite untrue. She had no favourites. All were equally dear to her. He was a strange man, she often sighed to herself.

“Be friends, children!” said Hetty. “Life is too short, to be always bickering.”

“Can I have some marmalade, please, Mum?”

“I am afraid I forgot to get some more Golden Shred, dear.”

“I like the Oxford marmalade,” said Phillip. “It has bits you can chew on. Can I have some, Mum? Just a little?”

“But Phillip, you know it belongs to your Father.”

Richard still received from his brother John a case of Cooper’s Oxford marmalade every Christmas. The case was hidden under the floor of the lavatory, next to the ’cello. This comestible was particularly understood to be his own; he ate of it sparingly, and the same amount every day. One china pot stood on the higher larder shelf, to be taken out and put on the table, with its heavy lid and his own particular christening spoon, only when he was at home. It was a ritual, a link with his old life; it had been so in his Father’s time, when neither he nor any of his brothers or sisters would have dared even to think of expecting a spoonful, unless invited to have some. But the old punctilio, the old idea of what constituted good manners, had gone by the board, Richard had long decided. Nothing was sacred to Master Phillip. So the case was hidden; and a new pot brought forth at night, when the old one had been scraped clean.

Often when he took off the lid, he saw that someone had been at the contents, and although the identity of the culprit was obvious (for there was only one person in the house who habitually ignored the law of
meum
et
tuum
)
Hetty, of course, must try and suggest some excuse or other, such as, “Are you sure, dear, it isn’t as you left it?” or, “It may have dried a little, during the recent hot weather, dear”—anything but the plain truth that it had been pilfered!

Richard had once loved his son, in those earliest years of commingled warmth. Then, he had been delighted that “the little chap” had imitated all his ways, wanting to do things as he did them, to copy him in every respect. This flow between them had been broken by Richard trying to break imitative habits in his son which previously he had encouraged, with delight, as a natural thing—as indeed it was. But by trying to break this natural habit of imitation, by use of the veto, and later by punishment, he had, without knowing the effects of his actions, tried to put the little machine in reverse; never realising that a child can truly go only forward, not backward. So the child mind, or its impulse, had gone in other directions—apparently. In reality, it was a variant of the parental model or direction: but round the barriers. So Phillip became a disobedient boy.

In Cranmer’s case, the child-will had been broken in its own home; he had become a wild street-boy; and finding kindness from Phillip, had grown to him as an ideal.

The wooden case of white marmalade pots stood in darkness, under the lavatory floor, hidden away. So these thoughts were hidden away in darkness, from those who lived in the rooms above, in those Edwardian years.

Richard, product of Victorian respectability, of rigid Mosaic commandment, was unaware of any irony in his attitude to his son. Let the boy’s schoolmasters, he complained, try and reform him; let Hetty ruin him with her indulgence; let the boy go his own way, and find out for himself, when he was a man, the errors of his ways! He, the boy’s Father, had washed his hands of him!

Thus Richard in his wearier moods, after a long and confining day in the City, underfed, indeed permanently undernourished, an exile from the countryside where he had been born and bred—on plenty of butter, eggs, milk, poultry, occasional game and venison, brown wheaten bread, mutton, beef, and bacon.

What the stomach feels in the morning, the head thinks in the afternoon, as Hugh Turney, his despised brother-in-law, once said.

*

“It isn’t fair to take Dad’s own marmalade,” said Mavis. “He always knows, and blames Mother for letting you take it.”

“It isn’t often that I take some, anyway! Only just now I feel it would go with the dripping, Mum, to stop indigestion.”

“Mavis is quite right, Phillip. Your Father trusts you, you know. After all, it
is
his marmalade. I’ll get some Golden Shred tomorrow, dear.”

“It’s too sweet! Oh well, I’ll do without any, and get indigestion! Then
how
can I learn my Latin, Algebra, and Euclid? Mum, can’t I have half-lunch at school? It was apple tart today. I am sick of free lunch, of cold mutton sandwiches, also you always put on too much salt.”

“Don’t listen to him grumbling, Mum.”

“I’m not grumbling! I’m telling the truth, which fools can’t see, ever! I always feel better after oranges or marmalade, so I know what I’m talking about! Very well, you people, as I’m not wanted here, and always shouted down by Father, or chipped by Mavis, I’ll leave the house as soon as I can! No one’s really friendly to me in this house!”

“Hush, Sonny! You ought not to speak like that, even in fun.”

“I won’t hush! And please don’t call me Sonny!”

In the retort, Hetty heard her husband’s tones.

Phillip sighed, picked up
The
Scout,
and pushed back his chair. At this, Doris, whose round face and serious little eyes had been turning from one speaker to another, as though wondering what the words were about, said with her gaze upon her big brother’s face,

“Don’t go, Phillip. I’m friendly.”

Unheeding this unexpected tribute, Phillip left the room, quietly closing the door behind him. He went into the scullery, to talk to Timmy Rat. The usual thud of Timmy’s tail striking the wood of the hole as it dashed out, greeted him.

“Hullo Timmy, you old devil,” he whispered, regarding pink eyes and twitching whiskers in the light entering by a small window facing the back yard outside. Then an idea came to him. Turning the wooden button on the lid, he opened the flap and withdrew the soft, warm animal and held it against his neck, to feel its comforting warmth for a few moments before putting it inside his coat. At once it crawled up until it lay distended and relaxed in the warm space between collar-bone and shoulder. Unlocking and unbolting the back-door, Phillip went down the concrete steps to the gate in the fence leading to the next house, and so to grandfather’s back door. This, in contrast to his own, was usually unlocked.