R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (3 page)

'I'm very far from fit, sir.'

'You'll
get
fit up here. Everybody does.' He expanded his barrel chest and David thought briefly of Rugeley-Scott, and his insistence on the benefits of upland air. 'Besides, we'd make allowances. History is your main subject, isn't it?'

'Modern history was to have been, sir.'

'Could you make a stab at English in Lower School? Ground work? Introductory stuff? As I say, we're in a rare pickle here. Every school is, of course, but out here, miles from the nearest town, we're at the very end of the queue. Just how do you feel about hanging around Osborne until those shortened courses are set up, then going up for the minimum two years?'

'Frankly the prospect terrified me, sir. It's difficult to make the necessary effort when the only people you meet are crocks, as bad or worse than yourself. They tell me it'll be much the same at Cambridge. Every man on those courses will be ex-service.'

'You're afraid of becoming institutionalised? Is that it?'

'More or less. I had thought about signing away pension claims, discharging myself and going it alone somewhere.'

'Anywhere particular?'

'In the Welsh mountains. I had some good times up there when I was a boy but Rugeley-Scott insists…'

Herries flipped the cover of a buff file.

'It's only fair to tell you I had a lengthy letter from Mr Rugeley-Scott. He was very explicit. Would you care to see his letter?'

'No, sir. I can guess what he said.'

'The bit about an enclosed community?'

'I know the clinical symptoms of severe shell-shock. I should do, after seven months in hospital.'

'Let's take it as read then. As to “going into retreat", you could do that here if you cared to. Term ends in three weeks and you could stay around and nurse yourself for a month. It's very quiet during the holidays. I could show you the country on horseback. We still have a couple of old screws the requisitioned left behind. Or you could walk solitary if you preferred it.'

For the first time since he had been fully aware of his situation David came to terms with his profound reluctance to go home to Pontnewydd. His mother, who had survived worse tragedies, would stay clear of him, but who else would in a close-knit mining community, where almost everyone knew him as 'Davyboy'? What was necessary, what was absolutely essential in the next few months, was privacy. Privacy, within a community of people cut off from the reality of what was still happening over there.

'Could you give me a moment to think it over, sir?'

'I can give you all evening. No need to pound down that road for the five-thirty. Be our guest and sleep in the President's Room – President of the Old
Boys that is. We always keep a room for him, that's his privilege. I can lend you pyjamas and we'll root out a toothbrush, although I'm told they're in short supply like everything else except eggs and bacon. We're very privileged in that respect. We keep our own hens and pigs.'

He opened the door and stepped out, calling to his wife Ellie for the tea. David went over to the window that opened on the quad. Behind what looked like the changing rooms the light was dying. Through a screen of leafless elms bordering the playing field he could see the orange glow of a heatless sun. Sunsets belonged to his earlier life. In the trenches the sun always set behind the British sectors. There was some kind of bath-house over there and every now and again a towel-draped boy darted across a flagged court and disappeared into a cloud of steam. It was as much a masculine world as Flanders but the difference showed in the speed of the boys' movements and their high spirits that reached him as half-heard sallies and short barks of laughter. Out there men still laughed but rarely in that way, rarely without bitterness. He thought, 'It's what I need, I daresay, but how the devil do I know I could stand up to it? If any one of those kids tried it on, as boys always do with a new man, I might go berserk. Or I might crumple up and pipe my eye, as I nearly did when Herries mentioned that 1913 First Fifteen…'

He braced himself to take a closer look at the photograph. The boys were his contemporaries, their average age about seventeen when that picture was taken. It was even possible to fancy he could recognise one or two of them, so typical were they of all the youngsters who went west in the bloody shambles in 1916. That was the day Robin Barnes copped it two yards from the trench. And Nick Austin, too, although Nick had taken a night and a day to die, too far out to be brought in by the stretcher-bearers. A whole generation gone and here was the next, flexing their muscles for the show, looking forward to it, he wouldn't wonder. There was talk of a big Jerry offensive, with whole divisions released by the collapse of the Russian front. If things were desperate enough they might even come combing in places like this. Jerry already had. Two prisoners, brought in by trench raiders the night before he stopped the mortar blast, had been seventeen and looked much younger. He remembered them vividly, although he had never thought about them since, a pair of terrified starvelings in uniforms several sizes too big for them, their coal-scuttle helmets sitting on their shaven heads like extinguishers… Could anyone do anything about it at this stage? Suppose the war ended next year or the year after? Would there be anyone left to listen?

Herries and his wife came back together, the headmaster carrying a loaded tray. Mrs Herries was four inches taller than her husband and thin as a beanpole. Her eyes were as kind and shrewd as his and he thought, as Herries introduced them, 'He's holding on better than most and so is she… It must be a little like losing seventy-two sons…' and the reflection helped him to make up his mind. He said, 'Could I wire for my things, sir? Enough to tide me over?' and Herries said, casually, 'Better than that. We'll telephone the hospital as soon as you've had a meal and a look round. Crumpets? Why not? There are certain compensations in being marooned, my dear chap.'

It was dusk in the quad when they went out. They had no electricity up here and a shuffling little man with buck teeth was lighting oil lamps suspended over the three arches and at intervals down the long, flagged corridor to the dining hall. David peeped in and made a rough calculation of numbers seated at tea. Four hundred, give or take a dozen. He followed Herries up two flights of slate steps to a landing giving access to two large dormitories, each sleeping about thirty boys. It seemed a very Spartan school. There were no floor coverings, apart from narrow strips of scuffed coconut matting, and no lockers beside the iron cots, each covered with a red blanket. Under each bed was a laundry basket and an enamel chamber-pot. It was very much like a barrack but some of the headmaster's brusque geniality had rubbed off on the fabric, enough to make it threadbare-friendly, like an old and shabby rectory. Herries, reading his thoughts, said, 'We're not too well endowed and all the renovations we had in mind have been postponed for four years. The carpentry shop keeps us from disintegrating completely. Our numbers keep up, however, a third of them the sons of Old Boys. A few of their fathers were in Upper School when I came here.'

'When was that, sir?'

'Summer term, 1904. I always say I came in on the radical tide. It was a year or so before a Liberal landslide. You would have been a child of eight.'

'I remember for all that,' David said, smiling. 'You can't evade politics in the valleys. How did Bamfylde come to be built in a place as remote as this, sir?'

'Everyone asks that. It grew from a school for farmers' sons. About two dozen of them used to ride their ponies to a farmhouse a mile or so nearer the village. Most of the day boys still ride. One of Arnold's disciples was rector
here and talked the local people and county authorities into founding the place, in 1853. We're a direct grant school, and about a third of our income comes from the Ministry. They leave us pretty much alone, however, and I get my way in most things. Lord Hopgood – this is part of the Hopgood estate – and the Old Boys make all the real decisions. After I've primed them, that is. Some of the Governors are Old Boys, others are local government bigwigs, a few of them local tradesmen in the area. I'll give you some registers and a prospectus to lull you to sleep after dinner. Come on down now. We've just time to view the place from my thinking post before it's dark!' and he bounced down the stairs, into the passage, across the quad and through the arch leading to the changing rooms and bath-house, moving at a half-trot.

The red-brick block behind the school was shut and silent now. Herries, bustling ahead, pointed to a row of single-storey stone buildings. 'Tuck-house, stables, junkroom, armoury – we have a very flourishing O.T.C. – and the fives court. Latrines opposite. Have to do something about them soon, war or no war. The only effective flushing we get is by moorland brook. Well enough this time of year, when it rains five days a week, but a problem in a dry spell. Take the left-hand path between those two elms. That's the cricket pavilion and swimming bath. We had the devil's own luck there. It was finished the week war broke out. Mind the roller – the chain-gang shouldn't have left it there. Along under the hedge towards the plantation. I've seen that grow. Local wiseacres said trees couldn't survive in the path of the north-easters but they did. We now have a windbreak I wouldn't care to be without. Here's the spot. My thinking post!' and he stopped, giving David time to catch his breath. Herries heard him wheezing and was instantly apologetic. 'I say, old chap, I'm sorry… simply never occurred to me… I trot everywhere. Most of us do up here, except in summer term. Have to keep the blood circulating. But I should have remembered, you're still convalescent. Take a breather.'

Herries's thinking post was the stump of an enormous beech, snapped off about twenty feet from the ground. He seemed to have a great affection for it and patted it as though it was a dog. 'Getting on for three hundred years when it was struck by lightning, in 1912. Lucky job it happened in August, with no one about. Could have killed a dozen of us. Took the sawyers a month to cart it away but it's still very much alive for me. I used to climb it as a boy.'

'You were a boy at Bamfylde?'

'Seventy-three to seventy-eight, but that was in Wesker's time. Wesker was a brute. I've seen him flog a whole class for spelling mistakes in dictation. Damned fool thing to do. Lucky I could spell.' He paused for a moment, looking down on the scatter of orange lights some two hundred yards below. The outline of the main buildings was just visible, a blue-black blur, quickened by the last pulse of the winter sun. 'I very rarely flog a boy and then only for two offences. Persistent lying, and persistent bullying.'

David said, suddenly, 'How do you see it, sir? Education, I mean, the real purpose of it? In all that time you must have formed some conclusions.'

In the dusk he saw the man smile as he stroked his thinking post.

'How? Well, certainly not as a matter of hammering information into boys. That was the general idea when I was young, before Arnold's ideas had time to flower. He was an insufferable prig, of course, and most of his disciples were worse, but they were moving in the right direction. The important thing is to adapt their theme to the twentieth century, before the commercials move in and take over. I don't really regard myself as a schoolmaster, or not any longer. I've changed direction myself a good deal since I took charge here, particularly so in the last few years. I suppose I see myself as a kind of potter at the wheel but then, that's priggish too, wouldn't you say?'

'Not the way you mean it.'

'Ah, but how
do
I mean it, precisely? It isn't easy to put these things on paper, or even convince yourself satisfactorily. Parents send their sons to a place like this for specific reasons. The main one is to get an education that will enable them to survive, I suppose. But once they settle in many other processes go to work. They learn a little tolerance, I hope, and how to see a joke against themselves, and how to stand on their own feet. But, above all, the knack of co operating. I'm not too insistent on scholarship. Scholars are dull dogs for the most part. When I was a boy here there were no organised games to speak of. We crammed and then mooched about, devising ways of avoiding punishment, and tormenting one another out of sheer boredom.'

'Isn't that what everyone's engaged in now, sir?'

'Yes, it is. But there's a well-defined end product, thank God.'

'What is it, sir?'

'A second chance. You're a history man, so let me ask
you
a question. Granted my thinking post is three hundred years old, what was happening when it was a foot high?'

'The Civil War was brewing.'

'Precisely. And something very practical emerged from that. Parliamentary democracy for one thing. Two steps up, and one and a half down. That's my view of history. British history, at all events.'

'But we've fallen down a long flight since 1914, haven't we?'

'We've taken a tumble certainly, but that's because we were too damned cocky in the first years of the new century. I daresay we'll learn from it. Dammit, we have to unless all those youngsters were the victims of an obscene practical joke, and I can't let myself believe that they were. As I say, I saw seventy-two of them grow up, and there weren't many fools among them. And no cowards, either, not in the true sense of the word.'

The man's optimism was working on him like a drug. His staying power, the strength and simplicity of his faith, was something the men out there had lost long ago, as long ago as Neuve Chapelle and Loos. But a flicker of doubt remained. He said, 'As to learning from it, I take it you mean internationally? Out there everyone below the rank of field officer has had a bellyful of patriotism.'

'Ah, patriotism,' Herries said, affably, and although the dusk now shrouded them completely, David divined a twinkle in the eyes. 'Don't forget Edith Cavell, Powlett-Jones. “Patriotism is not enough"… She could have amplified that, poor soul. Patriotism is a first step, I'd say. On the road to civic maturity that is. You had three years out there. I still believe in a Divine Purpose. You survived for a purpose, I imagine. To help head other survivors in the right direction, maybe.'