Young Phillip Maddison (51 page)

Phillip did not take shorthand. It was too late, unless he were prepared, said the Magister, to carry on his lessons, either by postal tuition or evening classes elsewhere, when he had left school. Phillip said he did not think he was prepared; so he took only Book-keeping and Commercial Languages.

“No Spanish?” asked Gran'pa.

“No,” said Phillip.

“A pity,” said Gran'pa. “Spanish will be——”

“I know,” said Phillip.

“What do you know, m'boy?”

“That I will see you at Pompeii, Gran'pa.”

“He-he-he,” chuckled Thomas Turney. “Don't you mean Philippi?”

But Phillip had gone. He was on his way to tell Mrs. Neville his news about the Bagmen, as the Commercial Class was called.

The only other class privileged to work by themselves were the prefects of the Upper Sixth, some of whom were preparing for University entrance exams. There was no connection between these aloof and lordly ones and the Bagmen except that they, too, possessed a nickname. Someone had heard one of the prefects, coming out of the Upper Sixth room, humming an operatic aria. Ever since they had been known as the Belle Cantos, shortened to the Belles, sometimes the Swells, or the Swelling Belles. They had a glorious future; whereas the Bagmen, a term out of Dickens, were considered to be little more than embryo pedlars, door-to-door salesmen, cheap-jacks at fairs, or tic-tac men for bookies. One of the Swells was Milton, who was preparing for the Little Go, for Cambridge.

The Bagmen were well-content. They had formed themselves into the Bagmen's Mutual Improvement and Protection Society, an unofficial intimate club. Timmy Rat was an honorary member, who entered the Club premises usually concealed under his owner's coat. Another member was not so honorary; this was Jerry the jay, who being accustomed to having its freedom about the rooftops and gardens of Hillside Road, and moreover having a voice more penetrating than any Sunday afternoon speaker by the Socialist Oak on the Hill, had to be left outside. The Magister heard the querulous screeches from the roof of the school, near the bell turret, and went into the playground and to his surprise a bird with light blue eyes, raised crest, and
wings with blue-white bars flew down and perched on his gowned shoulder. Quite unperturbed, and realising that it was an escaped tame bird, the Magister stroked its poll, bore it to the porter's lodge, suggested a meal of beef scraps and peas with which to speed the visitor on his way, and returned to what to him was the universal poetry of Higher Mathematics.

The visitor, however, so liked the peas, and the white suet, that he stayed up by the turret and slept off his meal, to return for more at midday, when Phillip on his bicycle took him home.

The remarkable thing was that Jerry, who sometimes flew up to the elms on the Hill, must have recognised the distant trees to the north-east as those partly hiding the bell-turret of the school; and sloping thither on his short wings, made for slipping from tree to tree in woodland, by easy stages he returned; and during the afternoon his screeches of pleasure were once more heard up by the roof-ridge and the lead-covered bell turret. There he lived, more or less, accompanied by Jack and Jill the daws, whom Phillip had brought to school, thinking this a good chance to get rid of them.

There were wild daws on the Heath, and jays in the Crown Woods of Shooter's Hill. The birds wandered; they were reported in Greenwich Park; they were known to enter the windows of various houses in Tranquil Vale during sunny days; they were seen being chased out of a rookery by rooks which were claiming their old spring homes again. They were strong of wing; and one day they were seen no more.

*

The sand-martin returned, and the chiff-chaff.

On the last Friday morning, Phillip suggested a farewell outing for his special friends among the Bagmen, the following day. Nobody cared about the Bagmen on a Saturday morning. One of their number was a pale, quiet boy named Cundall, whom Phillip had taken once or twice into his preserves. Cundall was going into a bank. Another boy was Greenall, nicknamed Snouter, since his Christian names were Percy Ivor. A third was Lawrence Pett, the youngest of three brothers who came of a Thames barge-building family at Greenwich.

Phillip had taken Lawrence Pett one May day during the previous year, and shown him his nests, in hedges and trees around Knollyswood Park, in the area of the camps of the rival troops of Boy Scout days.

There had been coal titmouse, spotted flycatcher, bullfinch, chaffinch, blue-tit, wren, blackcap warbler, corncrake, gold-crest, turtle dove and woodpigeon, among others. Returning two evenings later, alone, Phillip had found that nearly every nest was empty. The following day he had accused Pett of betraying a friendship. Pett, a boy with bright curly hair and light blue eyes, looked so unhappy that Phillip was sorry he had spoken so severely to him. He did not know that Pett, who had thought nothing of birds before Phillip had taken him out, had been so imaginatively stirred by what Phillip had told and shown him, that he could not rest until he had returned with a friend; and between them they had shared the contents of the nests.

Lawrence Pett had looked at Phillip with such dejected humility in his face when Phillip accused him of treachery, saying that he was very sorry, that Phillip held out his hand.

Now, at the Bagmen's Outing, Lawrence Pett accompanied Phillip, Cundall, Snouter, and two others of the Commercial Class. Milton came by special invitation, from the Swells. They met at the Clock Tower, and took the tram to Whitefoot Lane, and walked up to the woods. There were more footpaths in these woods now; as game preserves they had been abandoned; red rows of houses from the north had come very near. In one strip of wood a rusty old bath was found, lying by itself. How had it come there? Phillip looked at it with sinking heart. In some way he could not express to himself, the bath, which had a hole in its bottom, was the final mark of doom upon the woods, and upon his own boyhood.

An old faded notice-board, hanging askew a tree, said
Trespassers
will
be
prosecuted.

They crossed the lane to the woods on the other side, which were less trodden. One of the Bagmen was a pale, almost muddy-faced boy named Pype, who was something of a naturalist. A flock of thrush-like birds flew out of the treetops, clucking and making rachety noises; these were fieldfares, explained Pype. They had come from Norway, and soon would be returning across the North Sea for the nesting season.

Farther down the narrow strip of woodland was a lightning-blasted tree, fairly narrow, and branchless to its broken top, where a coronet of dead bark was silhouetted against the sky. Pype swarmed up, gripping with his knees, and was about to
put a hand over the rim when a large brown bird flew off. A tawny owl! Phillip had never found a nest with eggs, before. Pype held up a nearly round white egg. There were two others, he said. He descended, something else in cap held between teeth.

“Look,” he said. “You can see what the tawny feeds on, by the broken pellets it disgorges.”

There were several mice skulls and thigh bones, a sparrow's leg with the horn of toes dissolved away, innumerable minor bones of mice, rib and knee, knuckle and foot, together with dark blue gleaming shards or wing-cases of beetles.

Phillip held the egg in his hand. A hundred dreams of twilit nights, of stars and wind in darkness passing, passing, arose from the oval white egg. He decided to put it back. He looked at Pett. “I swear I don't want it, Phillip.”

“There aren't many owls about, you know. And they do good.”

Egg in cap, he swarmed up the tree, and put the egg with the other two. Among the litter and frass was an acorn which had sprouted there. Phillip brought it down, and planted it in leaf-mould on the ground. Goodbye, little tree, he whispered to it, before rising again.

At the end of the wood—a narrow strip which extended along the northern boundary of the Seven Fields until it joined the main road just beyond Cutler's Pond—they walked silently, in file, for they were now near Perry's mill, and might be seen. This tall boarded building, half covered with ivy, stood beyond the pond at the bend of the road, by the water-cress beds. The cedar tree, with its massive brown trunk covered with its dark strata of branches, which looked as though no wind would ever shake them, lay over most of the pond. The water was as clear as glass. Fish glided away under its surface. They were the last of the Randisbourne trout, for the brook was now polluted below Cutler's Pond. Even the stickle-bats, minute fishy urchins armed with spines, had not been able to survive the tar and creosote acids from the drains of the new road. The black county of London was steadily invading the green county of Kent.

It began to rain. They sheltered under the cypress, and when an omnibus came, grey mud squelching out from its solid rubber tyres, they decided to take it to the market town. It was full inside; but who cared about rain? They rode on top, under
the tarpaulins fixed to the seats, and with occasional songs in the intervals of ragging and jokes, arrived at the market place.

Cundall now took charge; this was his country; the Elmstead woods were his preserves. They were divided by a railway; houses were creeping on them, too. The woods were of hazelnut in rows among standard oaks. Celandines and primroses were out on the brown leaf-floor; bluebell plants were rising.

Pheasants were still preserved in the woods, for here were gibbets on which several domestic cats hung tail down, with more hedgehogs than Phillip had ever seen in his preserves. Perhaps, said Pype, the low, rather damp ground caused more slugs to be about; hedgehogs ate slugs for their main diet.

Phillip was not sure about the honesty of Pype. Recently the Dowager Countess had written him a brief note, declaring that as so many nests had been robbed in the past season, all permits would be withdrawn.
All
permits? Who else was there, besides himself and Desmond? This had been a shock to Phillip, since he had never robbed any nest, taking only one egg of each new species he had found. He had spotted Ching following him one day; Ching and Pype were rather thick. Had Pype written for a permit? Challenged, Pype admitted it. Pett had told Pype about his permit. As Mother always told him: he was his own enemy.

*

After his dismissal by the Dowager Countess, Phillip had gone to his preserves farther afield. The best of them was a large estate about five miles beyond Reynard's Common. Of rolling arable and pasture under the downs, among great beeches, Squerryes had, running through the park, a series of trout ponds. Above them, on the grassy slope, were rabbit warrens enclosed with wire-netting fences. Little doors were fixed in the fence, exits for feeding at night.

The keeper here had explained that, on the night before a shoot, when the rabbits had left the warren, the doors in the wire fence were dropped at the pull of a string. The rabbits, being unable to get to their burrows, lay out rough, and provided good sport, being driven rather in the manner of hares, towards the guns.

Phillip and Desmond had come upon the young squire of this estate, a schoolboy in a grey suit and grey felt hat, shooting with his friends, their keepers and loaders in attendance. In fantasy
Phillip had imagined himself performing some heroic act, such as climbing up the side of the mansion in flames, a cord, attached to a rope, round his waist. He saved the young squire's life; and was forthwith invited to shoot rabbits with him and his friends.

“This is my great friend, the Birdman of Britain (
vide Daily
Trident,
1920) who not only discovered a rare Willow Tit on my estate, but also saved my life. He has an eye like a hawk, and is a considerable Mathematician, having come top of his school in Arithmetic, despite great odds.”

With the saloon gun firing bulleted breech-caps in this variation of
The
Prince
and
the
Pauper,
Phillip knocked over coney after coney, each ball striking in the head and killing instantaneously.

In reality Phillip, in silence with Desmond beside him, had hurried past the line of young shooters. From behind a great old beech tree in the park, half its trunk gaping where a limb had fallen, they had watched the splendid and rich young men firing at rabbits.

A dead barn owl hung half out of the hole in the beech trunk, where it had been chucked when the keeper had shot it during the past winter. A shame! For the white owl took only mice; but keepers were ignorant men, explained Phillip, to Desmond. Behind the trunk they had watched while one of the under-keepers flung up a bottle, for the shooters to take pot-shots at it. Again and again the bottle was missed after being flung up; no one had hit it. Later in the afternoon, when the party had gone, the keeper explained that he had rammed a cork into the bottle, to make an air-cushion within. This caused the shot to rebound off the glass.

“My young gents had a sweepstake, a bob a head, and when no one won it, they gi'ed me the money,” he said, with a grin.

Phillip thought that he and Desmond must give him some money, too, just to show him they were not exactly ordinary boys. A packet of twenty Goldflake was eventually decided upon.

*

He would take care that neither Pype nor Pett heard of his other preserves. So Pype knew all about hedgehogs, did he?

“How about baking some in clay?” he said, pointing to the rows of hedgehogs hanging before them. “Pretty toothsome dishes, I can tell you!”

“Ooh, you horrible cannibal!” said Cundall.

“You may be a hedgehog in disguise, but I'm not,” replied
Phillip, cutting the string of what looked to be a recent addition to the gibbet. “Let's make a fire, and roast this one. Come on, Pype.”

“Honestly, do you mean to say you're going to eat that thing?” asked Milton.

“What's wrong with hedge-pig?” retorted Phillip, casually. “Their flesh is rather like chicken. I've had many a good tuck-in of hedge-pig.”