Young Phillip Maddison (6 page)

Was this meant to be Polly's hint to him, just because once, long ago, they had been childish sweethearts? Obviously Mavis had written the poem. He put it in his pocket.

Mother and Father were staring at the chess-board. Phillip opened
History
of
the
Borough,
which was by an Old Boy of his school, Mr. Graham, and turned the pages to find something of interest. He found an old-fashioned picture of the High Street, trees beside the muddy high road, a wooden Roe Buck Inn set back behind a long wooden horse-trough, and a coach standing in front, a man holding the horse's head. The date was 1810. There was another picture on the opposite page, of the Old Roebuck in 1830, and Plough Green in front of it, and the brook on the other side of the road. There was a chestnut tree near the inn, and the book said it had, according to local tradition, been planted in 1683, and was the parent tree of those in Bushey Park.

Why that was just near where the Obelisk was now! He passed over the bridge twice every day, going to and coming from school, but he had never seen any fish, except stickle-backs. Sometimes he had seen boys with glass jars paddling among the old pails, rags and thrown-away things on the stony bottom, hunting for them.

Phillip yawned.

Hetty saw the yawn, and said, “Why not go to bed dear? I expect the girls are out of the bathroom by now.”

“Have I got to have their water?”

“No dear, of course not. Only don't take too much.”

“And not too hot—it's enervating, Phillip,” said Richard.

He got up. “Goodnight, Father, goodnight, Mother.”

About five minutes later, when Richard called “Check mate”, Hetty got up, saying, “I'll just go and see if Phillip is all right, Dickie.”

“Ah, you do not like leaving your best boy for long, do you?”

“Well, he doesn't look very well just now, Dickie. I won't be long.”

*

The door closed behind her; and with a sigh of relief, Richard
settled himself at his ease for the first time that evening. Picking up the book on the tablecloth at his elbow, he opened the title page.
The
History
of
the
Borough,
with
an
Itinerary
looked interesting; and for the next hour and a half, while Hetty went next door to see her parents, and Richard sipped his cup of hot-water—to flush the system, as recommended by a regular medical correspondent in
The
Daily
Trident
—he was absorbed in the pages, while thinking of what he might have missed by not continuing in the local Antiquarian Society, its field-days organised and led by the vicar of St. Simon, Mr. Mundy, accompanied by that siren, Miranda MacIntosh, for whom, in his secret thoughts, Richard still felt at times a sort of sentimental affinity, mingled with thoughts of dislike and derision for that Amazonian beauty: thus to dismiss from his mind the half-shameful erotic feelings which he had felt to be unworthy of himself, apart from the fact of his being a married man, and a father.

To his further secret guilt, Richard was now aware that some of these thoughts had been transferred to his daughter Mavis. He must take himself in hand!

Against the sky outside, seen through the uncurtained french windows looking on the garden, was a greenish flash. He got up to look, and saw by the clear haze of light in the lower sky that the fog had cleared. The glow came over the rooftops from the distant High Street, where electric trams ran in a blaze of light from shops and tall light standards—a street remembered by Richard for its darkness at night, relieved at long intervals by lamp-posts with single gas-jets when first he had come to the district; when horse-drawn waggons, loaded with corn and vegetables, had moved on their way through the borough to the Old Kent Road, and the markets of London.

There was quietness then—and peace.

T
HE
Backfield, an area behind the garden fences of Hillside Road of about eight acres, was considered by Phillip to be his particular property. It was steep, grassy land, the upper slopes of which opened in wide cracks in summer, being yellow clay. In the
highlands of this wilderness, among bird-sown thorn bushes, Phillip had his camp. He was the leader of a band of boys by virtue of ideas rather than of strength. Here they baked potatoes in the embers of a camp-fire, and conducted war with any rival bands that came that way, which was seldom.

Phillip had been forbidden by his father to climb the garden fence into the Backfield. He had been forbidden, too, to climb over the spiked railings, five feet high, which enclosed the L.C.C. park, called the Hill, to the north. The main reason, said Richard, was that it was bad manners to trespass on other people’s land. In vain had Phillip, once, feebly suggested that the Backfield had no legal owner. It had been enclosed, he said, by Antill the builder, who hoped that after twenty years the land would become his, by a squatter’s title.

“I don’t know where you get that idea from, my boy. I know only that it is not my land, and therefore you will not go upon it.”

Phillip forebore to say that he had heard about it from Gran’pa Turney. Gran’pa had declared that, as title could not be proved by Antill, no action for trespass could be sustained in court.

“Then it can belong to anyone who squats for twenty years, Gran’pa?”

“Certainly, m’boy. Why, are you going to enclose a bit of it?”

“Yes, Gran’pa, I have already, the bit above the red ballast heap. That’s where our camp is, you know. We defend it from all comers.”

“He-he-he,” laughed Gran’pa. “You mean your prize-fighter friend does, don’t you?”

Phillip did not like this reference to the boy who did his fighting for him. Peter Wallace, Phillip’s right-hand man as he called him, was Scots. He was one of a family of brothers and sisters living in Charlotte Road. Peter Wallace was a sturdy, round-headed boy with close-clipped hair. He wore steel-framed glasses, being very near-sighted. He had an effective, indeed an invincible way of dealing with any opponent in a fight. Quietly Peter would remove his glasses, while his opponent stood on guard, waiting for the usual procedure of doing first dags, then cowardies—challenge and acceptance—before the real blows of combat. Quietly Peter would fold his spectacles, and put them in their case, while appearing to ignore the other boy facing him. Without glasses Peter could not see; his eyes and face were therefore expressionless; but suddenly he leapt upon his dim-seen
opponent, flung his weight upon him, enwrapped him with his muscular arms, got the helpless boy’s head under his left arm, while with the fist of his right hand he jabbed again and again at the downheld face until no fight was left in his adversary.

Phillip had no idea that Peter Wallace was such a terrible fighter until one morning, during the past Christmas holidays, he had come to his help upon the Hill. On that occasion Phillip had been set-upon by four rough boys from the Borough, who had recognised him as the “posh boy” who had asked them to stop tormenting a local destitute character called Jack o’ Rags, who slept in an old swan’s nest in the Randiswell Recreation Ground at night, and hung around the market stalls and carmen’s coffee houses by day, for odd scraps of food. Jack ’o Rags was a bearded and dirty short man, with a hoarse voice, about whom there were many rumours, connected with wealth he had rejected; it was always the poor boys of the neighbourhood who sauced him, pelting him with horse-dung and other garbage.

“It’s ’im, come on, mob ’im, boys!” cried the leader, recognising Phillip on the Hill during the Christmas holidays. Phillip stood his ground, too proud to run away. “Jack o’ Rags is a poor old man, really,” he said, white in the face.

Thereupon, seeing him afraid, the scowling bigger boy promptly rushed at him, with swinging fists, together with his three companions. Soon the four roughs were on top of Phillip, who between his sobs cried for help. Peter Wallace had run up; lugged off one boy and sent him spinning with a thump on the ear; butted a second in the stomach; bitten a third on the thumb; hauled off the leader, and then in the words of Phillip’s Uncle Hugh, who had watched it all, “the bra’ bracht moonlacht laddie proceeded to get the poor wretched devil’s head into the position of a cask on stools, in order to tap his claret.”

With such a brave friend beside him, Phillip thenceforth had felt confident to address boys bigger and stronger than himself, should they be doing things of which he disapproved—such as twisting the arms of other boys, throwing stones at stray dogs, or otherwise being guilty of what he deemed to be hooliganism. With Peter beside him he found that he could interfere in such cases with impunity, and redress what he fancied were wrongs. When Phillip was challenged to fight, Peter by his side stepped forward and said, “You want to fight me, do you?”

The dialogue on such occasions usually went on familiar lines.

“Yuss mate! An’ I don’t trouble what sawney tool-greaser I takes on—sparrer-knees or yerself—Four Eyes, cor, laugh at ’im! Four Eyes!”

Peter removed his glasses at this. He was so quiet that the other became threatening.

“Right, mate, you arst for it! Here’s your dags. There’s yer cowardies! Now ’it ’im! Come on, ’it ’im!”, as he stood back on guard, scowling, fists clenched.

Fascinated, Phillip watched Peter Wallace during the folding and pocketing of spectacles; he waited with shortening breath for what was coming—the sudden leap, the clinch, the pummel, rapid and sustained, of right fist upon downheld face, blow after rapid blow until the falling away, the stagger, the doubling-up of the victim, his nose streaming with blood. Phillip felt tremulous pity for the beaten boy, coupled with the flaring feeling of terror-excitement he had when he saw flames spreading in the dry yellow grasses after he had deliberately set fire to them in the Backfield, on a scorching summer day.

*

One morning during the Easter holidays Phillip, Peter Wallace and his brother David, and another boy were baking potatoes in the embers of their fire, in a fold of the ground above the Red Ballast Heap. This was a conical mass of several hundred tons of burnt clay, left by Mr. Antill the builder some years before, after the completion of a row of houses to the south of the Backfield. Without any warning a shower of hard red lumps fell upon the camp, where the four boys were sitting. In the first volley Phillip received a hit on the nose which knocked him backwards; but Peter and David Wallace immediately gave chase. While the intruders fled from Peter’s wrath over the spiked iron railings which marked the boundary of the Hill above, Phillip sat on the ground and cried with pain. His nose seemed very big, the skin was broken, and smarted when he touched it.

He thought he would go home; but changing his mind, he climbed over the railings and went to find out what had happened to the others. Peter had caught a boy near the tennis courts; and was sitting astride him, waiting for Phillip. When he arrived, Phillip saw that the prostrate boy was Alfred Hawkins, son of the barber in Randiswell, who had the cheek to be sweet on his sister Mavis.

Peter Wallace let Alfred Hawkins get up, but held his arm in a
grip which, if forced, was supposed to break it at the elbow: a policeman’s grip.

“Who threw the bit of ballast that hit Phillip? You did!”

“I never!”

“Then why did you run away?”

Alfred Hawkins was silent.

“Who were the others?”

“I’ve told you, I don’t know. I never sin them before.”

Phillip, fixing Alfred Hawkins with accusing eyes, said, “If you weren’t with that band, then what were you doing in the Backfield?”

Alfred Hawkins looked on the ground.

“Ah, you daren’t answer! Well, I know why! You came after my sister, didn’t you!”

Alfred kept his gaze lowered.

Several people were watching the little group. Among them was Mr. Pye, who was with his two children throwing up their diabolos into the air, and catching them on the string again. Phillip felt uneasy as he came towards them.

“What’s the trouble, Phillip?”

“Nothing, Mr. Pye.”

“Well, you boys don’t want to fight on a fine morning like this! It’s almost sacrilege! Why not shake hands and make it up?”

None of the boys moved. Mr. Pye, after a pause to look at the white clouds passing in the sky, hummed a little tune to himself, and moved away to his children who were still spinning their new red diabolos.

“Come on, Peter,” said Phillip. “Let’s go. I know damn well what you were after, Alfred Hawkins, skulking round by my fence. If you trespass on my preserves again, you’ll be sorry!”

*

Phillip’s scorn of the blushing, smiling boy with the downcast glance left sitting by the tennis court was derived, unconsciously, from Richard’s various remarks about lovers lying on the Hill at night. Phillip had developed a feeling of revulsion and scorn for “lovers”, or any idea approaching the figment. They were
filthy
people. As for Richard’s attitude, it too was an unconscious reflexion of ideas generally held among incomplete men towards sex: a suburban horror of irregularities, based on the fear of venereal disease, and its effects on the innocent.

This jangle of half-living had made Alfred Hawkins, in Phillip’s eyes, a figure that had no relation to the truth of Alfred Hawkins. He was a dreamy, high-minded boy, whose mother had died when he was young. His father was half-paralysed, a barber owning a little shop in Randiswell, where poor people had their hair cut; and this by itself was almost enough, in Phillip’s eyes, to show that Alfred Hawkins was not fit to have anything to do with his sister. Alfred Hawkins had gone into the Backfield to look at the house, from a distance, where the object of his dreams lived. He had stood there for an hour, elevated by the illusion of love, beauty, and service. He had been on his way back from his vigil when, fancying himself pursued by Peter Wallace, he had panic’d and taken to his heels.

Alfred Hawkins wrote little notes to Mavis with poems copied out in them, and Mavis replied similarly. Shyly, almost dreading to meet one another, they exchanged these tokens of the spirit in a crack of one of the posts of the fence.

“And what’s more, Alfred Hawkins, you steer clear of my sister, or I’ll know the reason why!” And with this warning Phillip went away, all unconscious that he was a pattern of his Father’s moral indignation.

*

For twenty-five years Richard had been going to and from the City, and in that time, as he had estimated one recent evening while compiling his diary, he had crossed upon the flag-stones of London Bridge, in the roar of iron wheel-bands and horses’ hoofs on granite, approximately on fourteen thousand five hundred occasions. He might have added, had he been a man used to observing himself objectively, that on the last ten thousand or so occasions he had done so almost entirely out of a sense of duty towards wife and family. Duty and decorum were the ruling abstracts of his life. However, in moments of unhappiness he did allow himself to reflect that, if he had not married Hetty—if he had gone away after Mr. Turney had forbidden him to see his daughter—if he had not weakly given in to the illusion of love—he would by now be an entirely different man, living an open air life of action in Australia, where his younger brother Hilary had farming and other interests.

City life, nevertheless, had its compensations. During the spring and summer months he could cycle into Kent and Surrey, and enjoy his own life of green fields, trees, water, the
sight of sheep and cattle, the song of birds, sunlit flickering of butterflies. Now once again it was almost time to take to the wheel, to wipe vaseline off plated handlebar and pedal crank, and polish the enamel of the frame of his faithful iron steed. How well was that machine named—his all-black, all-weather
Sunbeam
with
the
Little
Oil
Bath,
built in Wolverhampton, made to last a lifetime by British craftsmanship, the finest in the world!

Proud of his thoroughbred possession, its black frame lined with gold after twelve stove-enamellings, its bright parts solidly plated with nickel-silver, Richard, during the seasons of light and life, kept the Sunbeam polished, lubricated, and adjusted; while the Dunlop tyres were always pumped to the recommended resilience against those enemies of the pneumatic tube—the innumerable pale flints of the white and dusty roads of Kent.

*

At breakfast Richard announced his intention of cycling that Saturday afternoon to the Salt Box on the North Downs, for a tea of boiled eggs and brown bread and butter, should the weather keep fine. Would anyone (meaning Phillip) care to accompany him? No one apparently would.

“Well, don’t all speak at once,” said Richard, after a silence.

“How about you, Phillip?” said Hetty, with forced cheerfulness.

“I may have to play football for the House this afternoon.”

“Well, if your name is not on the list, I am sure you will want to accompany your Father, won’t you dear?”

Before Phillip could think what to say, Richard said, “Oh, please do not force the boy to do anything he does not want to do! My Father always used to say, ‘One volunteer is worth ten press-men’.”

“Do tell us about when you were a boy, Dads,” said Mavis. “I simply love hearing about what you did.”

“Humph,” said Richard, not displeased. He was very fond of his elder daughter. He looked at his watch. “Another time, perhaps, my gipsy—— Hetty, I hope to be home at a quarter to two o’clock this afternoon.”

*

A pleasant scene greeted Richard on his return from the City. The sun was shining brilliantly after a doubtful morning; the warm bright rays of April filled the south window of the sitting room, where the table was laid for lunch. The place had been
cleaned, the floors polished by Mrs. Feeney, the charwoman. Everything looked fresh, almost new—a pleasing condition for Richard, so meticulous in his sense of neatness and order, both within and without a house. No smells of cooking, or over-cooking, greeted him from the kitchen; nothing was burning, or had burned, after boiling over; instead, the scent of—could it be?—wild sweet violets had greeted his nostrils as he entered the front door.