R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (17 page)

It was years since he had sat a motorcycle. The last, he recalled was a Brough Superior he rode in the Salient while doing a spell of despatch-carrying. This one chugged along at an uncertain twenty-five miles per hour, giving him time
to bask in his own serenity, that merged with the flowering May countryside and made him want to express his glee in song. And soon he did, keeping time with the stuttering beats of the Douglas engine, crooning snatches of 'Coal Black Mammy', Carrington's favourite dance-tune,

Not a cent, not a cent,
And my clothes are only lent…
But I know she'll think I'm just fine…

His high spirits expressed itself in other ways, in cheery waves at farmhands he passed, and in squeezing the bulb horn at every bend in the road, and in this way, with two hours to spare, he chut-chutted into Challacombe and stopped outside Gorman's the florists, to buy an enormous bunch of flowers, remembering as he did that huge bouquet he had bought her the day after her nineteenth birthday.

She looked prettier and more radiant than he ever recalled, with colour in her cheeks and a triumphant sparkle in her brown eyes. Clearly she was tremendously pleased with herself and said, when he kissed her with the restraint he had shown that first time outside her sister's dairy, 'Oh, come
on
, Davy! Don't travel backwards! You can do better than that, can't you?' and she kissed him, with no nonsense about it, and said she was quite reconciled to the girls because they were unbelievably pretty – 'Far prettier than I ever was, and prettier than Esther was as a baby and she was the flower of the flock, so Father says. You can't actually see them but you can nip into the corridor and peep through that glass-panelled door. The staff nurse there is a frightful dragon. You'd think she'd given birth, and I'd tidied up afterwards!' and as much to humour her as satisfy his own curiosity he slipped out and glanced through the glass panel of a door marked 'Maternity', and was rather taken aback by what he saw, a row of half a dozen cots, each, presumably, containing a baby, although he couldn't be sure because some of the canopies were raised.

He was still craning his neck there, trying to identify his own children, when a pleasant voice at his elbow said, 'Mr Powlett-Jones, I presume?' and he turned, blushing, to confront a slim, blonde woman wearing a red-lined cloak of matron.

'Yes,' he said, 'I'm Mrs Powlett-Jones's husband. I was trying… er… er which two
are
mine, exactly?' and the matron smiled and edged him over the threshold, saying, 'Just a peep. They're sleeping and, anyway, you mustn't stay long. We don't usually allow visitors the same day but Dr Willoughby said you were rather special. Are you, Mr Powlett-Jones?'

'Every father of twin girls is special,' he said, quickly getting the measure of her, in the manner boys like Boyer and Dobson had taught him. 'These two?' and when she nodded, 'Well, Beth's right! They are pretty, the pair of them, but I suppose all the fathers say that, don't they?'

'No,' she said, 'mostly they stammer and goggle, and don't say anything intelligible. I suppose you don't because you're accustomed to infants.'

'Not this age, and certainly not this sex,' he said, taking a sudden liking to her. Then a door at the far end of the little ward banged open and a buxom nurse cruised in like a Whippet Tank, and sensing her extreme indignation both he and the matron made a strategic withdrawal to the passage where she went about her business. He returned to Beth's room, announcing that he had not only seen Joan and Grace but compromised the matron in the eyes of her underling.

'You're absolutely right,' he went on, 'they're a couple of…' but she cried, 'You
named
them! You called them by name! And I've been lying here cudgelling my brains ever since I was told David and Jonathan were out. Joan and Grace! Why, that suits them exactly, Davy! How clever of you.'

'I can't take credit for it. Algy and Ellie agreed the names between themselves, and presented me with a
fait accompli
. Seriously, though, I'd like to call them that, if only to please the old couple. Algy's been splendid all the time you've been gone, and I've been pigging it up in the President's room. Since they heard it was twins they've begun to think of them as grandchildren.'

'Joan and Grace it is then…' but then she yawned, so that he said, 'I'd better take myself off. I can look in tomorrow, it's a special half-day for the Devonshire Dumplings match. I'll borrow Barnaby's Douglas again. He's umpiring, I think.'

'Please,' she said, but sleepily, so he kissed her and stole away, walking down the hill into the evening sunshine and feeling slightly less excited than when he climbed it but more certain, somehow, of the unfolding pattern of his life and hers.

2

There was no doubt about it. The twins and their presence in the crowded little cottage at Stonecross increased his confidence in himself in a way that everyone about him noticed, not only Herries and Howarth, but the more discerning of his boys, especially those that he had begun to think of as friends. Boyer put it into words when David's name cropped up during one of those desultory conversational exchanges the old hands indulged in concerning members of the staff who had joined the family after themselves, thus giving them licence to patronise.

'Y'know, history periods were a crashing bore before Pow-Wow showed up but now they're a high spot. You never quite know what line he's going to take, in or out of the syllabus. Carrington told me he introduced another book of war poems to the Sixth yesterday. By a chap called Wilfred Owen. Bolshie, of course, but that's Pow-Wow, isn't it?'

But no one could accuse him of Bolshievising history in the junior forms although, judged by his own standards, he was prone to revert to old-fashioned methods. The truth was he would use any means to brighten a period, to leaven it with anecdotes, speculations and sometimes doggerel rhymes that he recalled from his elementary school days.

There was a great favourite, designed to jog the memory concerning the string of battles in the Wars of the Roses, dull enough in themselves, maybe, but not the way Pow-Wow presented them, for he used them as a means of teaching the Second and Third Forms the art of war in the fifteenth century, and would even turn aside to sketch bills, glaives, body armour and the early ancestors of the trench mortar on the blackboard. As regards the doggerel, he felt it contributed a little to Irvine's geography lessons, whisking the boys all over England in the wake of the Yorkist and Lancastrian armies. 'All-Boys-Naughty-Won't-Memorise-All-Those-Horrid-Hateful-Battles-To-Bosworth' the Second Form would chant, thus, by identifying the capitals with place names, recalling battles at St. Albans, Bloreheath, Northampton, Wakefìeld, Mortimer's Cross, St. Albans again, Towton, Hedgley, Hexham, Barnet, Tewkesbury and Bosworth.

It was a great success, as was the old saw to remind them (God alone knew why they should be reminded) of the fate of Henry VIII's wives, viz:

Divorced, beheaded, she died;
Divorced, beheaded, survived.

He sometimes invented new ones to raise a laugh, as when he fixed the sequence of the Stuart kings in their minds with –

James was nearly blown sky-high,
Charles, his son, knelt down to die.
Charles-the-next hid in the oak,
James-the-next was a bigoted bloke.

It was all very juvenile, he supposed, but it added to his popularity, for the boys loved to feed upon staff eccentricities and this was one of his. The broad effect of his free-ranging and highly improvised methods had more important results, however, introducing a fruity generality into his periods, and enabling a class to break free of the cast of history text-books and cruise down what he thought of as the mainstream of time.

He had always seen history as the Clapham Junction of education. It opened doors on so many other subjects, not only geography, but English prose and poetry, economics, law, religious knowledge and any number of fringe subjects. A brief study of Edward I's administrative reforms, for instance, whetted the appetite of some – just a few, here and there – interested in the British jury system. An hour or two spent with Lord Shaftesbury's industrial crusades shed some light on the Trades Union movement, and the strikes headlined in the newspapers. In the Fifth and Sixth Forms it was sometimes possible, in his view, to humanise history to a point where he had seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds questioning accepted attitudes concerning the structure of democracy, and the lessons that were to be learned (but rarely were) from the long stalemate on the Western Front.

Here and there, of course, he was challenged. Gilbert, a Tory M.P.'s son, boldly disputed his over-facile analysis of the Russian Revolution, but he dealt with him gently, content to point out that the Czarist regime had been overthrown by the abysmal folly of the ruling class, stoking the fire century by century without once opening a valve to siphon off the steam.

'But surely that's no justification for slaughtering the entire royal family, is it, sir?' Gilbert had argued, and he said, mildly, that it was not, but one rarely looked for justification in human affairs, only the merciless logic of cause
and effect. 'If the Czar, or rather that neurotic wife of his, had bent a little in 1916, she wouldn't have been murdered in 1918. Over here, thank God, our royal family had more sense, or perhaps more regard for their own skins. Victoria was the most revered monarch in the world when she died in 1901, but as to real political power, she exercised virtually none compared with her uncle, in 1837. That's what I mean by bending, and as a nation we're very good at it, Gilbert. You ask your father if you don't believe me.'

Fortunately for David Gilbert
père
was a left-wing Tory, with a heavy build-up of unemployment in his own industrial constituency. 'Like to meet that chap,' he told his son during the holidays. 'He sounds original for a schoolmaster,' and Gilbert Junior obliged, introducing them at the subsequent Speech Day, when they had an amicable discussion on the wisdom of nationalising the coal mines.

This was the way of it, and all that summer and autumn, while Beth was fully occupied coping with the twins in a four-roomed cottage lacking piped water, electricity or even an indoor privy, he was growing into the ethos of the school, so that sometimes it seemed to him he had been here ten years instead of just over three.

It was often difficult, under the circumstances, to continue studying for his degree, but he achieved slow progress and made tentative arrangements to sit for his B.A. at Exeter University College of the South-West during the forthcoming Easter break. He hated the idea of leaving Beth to cope with two twelve-month-old babies but there was no help for it. Exeter couldn't give him a degree but it was the nearest centre available for sitting the exam. Long before he went, however, something occurred that entrenched him even more deeply at Bamfylde, enabling him to throw down roots that would take a great deal to dislodge.

They were passing through one of their tiresome periods, assailed by snow, then by ceaseless downpours, and finally towards the fag end of the Christmas term, by another sharp spell of frost that caused havoc with Bamfylde's antediluvian water supply. On the last day of February Bat Ferguson approached him with news that his aged French mother-in-law had died in Beauvais, and he was obliged to cross the Channel, attend the funeral and clear up her affairs. He would be away a week, he said, and would be greatly indebted to David if he would live in as resident housemaster of Havelock's during his absence.

It was a confounded nuisance but, having lived there prior to his marriage, he was more familiar with the routines of Havelock's than any of the younger men, and Ferguson invited him to bring Beth and the twins up from the cottage and occupy his quarters for the week. David accepted the chore but Beth declined the invitation to move into the school.

'It'll be an awful upheaval, with all the children's things,' she said, 'and not worth it for a few days. You sleep up there and come home for lunch every day. I'll be perfectly all right down here, and I can always send a message by Mrs Ricketts's boy if I need to. You ought to help out, oughtn't you? You always told me the Fergusons were kind to you in their old-fashioned way when you lived with them.'

She packed him off with a bag and he took up quarters in his old room, with its view over the rolling moor. Nothing much was to be seen there now, apart from wan glimpses of frozen stubble and a desolate hillside whenever the wind tore rents in the prevailing mists. Shouts, scuffles and the impact of boots on the setts of the quadrangle below were muffled, and even the clamorous notes of Nipper Shawe's bell-ringing seemed to come from far out on the moor.

He called the roll, went the rounds, exchanged a joke with Boyer and Dobson who were Havelock boys, and supervised 'Silence', the five minutes dedicated to private prayer by the bedsides. It was a duty he performed with secret amusement, being absolutely certain that young Skidmore, the Methodist parson's son, was the only boy there who used the interval to commune with the Almighty. After that he followed Ferguson's Airedale, Towser, into the housemaster's study, where he built up the fire and spent a couple of hours brushing up on Central European history as far as Charlemagne's death.