He knew who she was: the only daughter of Brigadier Sir Gerald Southcott who lived at the Big House – officially West Hilton Manor – in the village where Tom’s family lived. He had seen her before many times, in church, at the village fete, at the Christmas concert in the village hall, together with her two elder brothers and her parents, all so clearly aware of their position and of doing their duty by the village.
Sir Gerald, who disappeared three days a week up to London where he worked in the City, spent the remainder of the week engaged in hunting, shooting and other country pursuits, and Lady Southcott was on the board of the village school, the cottage hospital and the orphanage which West Hilton shared with East Hilton and Hilton Common, a cluster of small Hampshire villages just south of Winchester. She was also one of the few women still to ride sidesaddle – and look magnificent while doing so – when out hunting.
In short, they were the perfect First Family of the village, popular but slightly distant. Tom, whose father was the village postman, and who was already discovering rather egalitarian principles nurtured by his grammar-school education, regarded them with less awe than most of the village and was rather satisfied by his exchange with Diana. His mother he knew would have quite possibly made a small bob and his father – perhaps slightly grudgingly – raised his cap as she passed them by.
It was many years before he spoke to her again.
Tom was the golden boy, set bang in the middle of five siblings, with two elder sisters and two younger brothers. His sisters alternately adored him and resented the adoration showered upon him by their parents, being the longed-for first boy, and his little brothers looked up to him and considered him the fount not only of all wisdom, but pretty much every other quality as well. He was certainly the cleverest of them – Jack and Mary Knelston were conscious of that – and at parents’ evenings Miss Rivers, his teacher at the village school, reported favourably upon his exceptional reading skills; while most of the children were still struggling with the simplest of stories, Tom, at six, was reading real books – Babar the Elephant being his favourite, with its illustrations and thick cardboard covers – and at eight venturing into such glories as Huckleberry Finn, which resulted in him making his own raft and setting sail across the stream at the bottom of the village, soon to sink in a morass of water weeds. His favourite present every Christmas was The Monster Story Book for Boys, which silenced him for several days.
When Tom was ten, Miss Rivers asked Jack and Mary to come and see her. In her view, Tom was exceptionally bright – grammar-school material. She would like to enter him for the scholarship.
Jack and Mary felt panicked. They couldn’t possibly afford school fees, they said – they were at least £5 a year – and why should Tom rise to the unimaginable heights of a grammar-school education and not the other children? It wouldn’t be fair.
Miss Rivers explained that there wouldn’t be any fees, that a third of grammar-school places were free to children from elementary schools, provided by way of the scholarship examination; the only cost would be his uniform.
There was a silence and then she continued, ‘I really do think Tom is an exceptional child; it would be wrong to deny him this chance.’
Whereupon Mary said, with the look on her face that Jack knew there was no escape from, that if Tom passed the scholarship they would find the money for the uniform somehow.
Miss Rivers was delighted and said she would enter Tom along with two other boys and one girl in their class – since 1922 girls had been considered worthy of free education – and that the examination would be held in the early spring.
Words were exchanged as the Knelstons walked home; Mary told Jack he had heard what Miss Rivers said, it would be wrong to deny Tom this chance, and if she had to take in washing to pay for the uniform she would. After a brief struggle, Jack gave in.
‘But none of the others’d better want it,’ he said, ‘or you’ll be doing the washing for the whole village.’
When they told Tom he went pink with pleasure. He’d often looked at the grammar-school boys as they got off their school bus in their uniforms and thought how lucky they were. He’d never dreamed he’d have a chance to join them.
‘Why lucky exactly, lad?’ Jack asked, genuinely intrigued.
‘Because they get to know so much,’ said Tom simply, and it was this that swung Jack round wholeheartedly. If it was knowledge that above all mattered to Tom, then Jack could sympathise; he had had to leave school at twelve and found the education he was enjoying stopped for ever. He’d embarked on a correspondence course for a while in geography, always his favourite subject, but once marriage and babies overwhelmed him, he gave up. He was, however, genuinely worried that Tom might be lost to the family as he grew older; but he told himself that he hadn’t sat the exam yet, and might not even pass it. Miss Rivers’s idea of exceptional might not be the same as the examiners’.
Tom did pass the scholarship, though, and with very high marks. Mary was about to advertise herself as a washing resource when Tom’s godmother, Isobel, stepped in and said she would like to pay for the uniform. Isobel was a rather glamorous figure; she had gone to school with Mary but married well – to the heir to Parsons, the big department store in Hilchester, the nearest proper town. She and the heir, one Alan, lived in a red-brick villa on the edge of Hilchester and had the unimaginable luxury of a housemaid. They also had help in the garden.
Isobel had remained close to Mary and, being childless, became involved in Mary’s large family and was particularly fond of Tom. When he heard what she was going to do for him he went into Hilchester on the bus to thank her personally. Isobel was very touched and celebrated by giving him chocolate eclairs for tea and trouncing him at draughts.
Tom was very happy at the grammar school. Tall and well built, good at games as well as lessons, he was never in danger of being bullied; there was a genuine cross section of class in the school and the sons of local farm workers, jobbing builders and tradespeople were taught alongside those of businessmen, teachers and doctors. Tom particularly attracted the attention of the history master, a rather flamboyant character called Tristram Sherrin; he was a brilliant, inspiring teacher, and had sent many boys on to read history at university. He ran a chess club after school, which Tom joined, after which he would sit and chat with the boys and talk about their futures and their aspirations. Tom told him that what he really wanted to do was become a barrister: ‘The law really interests me, and I’d love to stand and argue people’s cases in court.’ Sherrin said this was an admirable ambition, but a university degree was essential, adding tactfully that he feared this would not be an option for Tom on financial grounds. However, Tom might become a solicitor, by way of taking articles, and this too was fascinating work. ‘Not as glamorous, perhaps, but I think you’d enjoy it. I have a friend who is a solicitor; if you’re interested when the time comes, we can have a further conversation.’
Tom said he would be very grateful and challenged him to another game of chess which he won. Sherrin looked after him as he left the room and marked him down as a boy to watch.
As Tom reached sixteen and faced the School Certificate, there was certainly no sign of him developing the dreaded ideas above his station. He was as devoted a son as could be wished for and by the time of the chance meeting in the lane with Diana Southcott, he was also becoming extraordinarily good-looking.
Chapter 2
1937
The Southcotts were not proper aristocracy – Diana’s father had been knighted after the war, rather than inheriting his title, but that was a detail that both he and Lady Southcott considered of little importance. The Manor House in West Hilton had been bought by Sir Gerald’s father, a rich industrialist who had raised his eldest son to consider himself landed gentry. Sir Gerald and his family moved into the house after he died, thereby cementing their impression of themselves, and indeed the impression of everyone else in the area.
Lady Southcott took her duties as
Lady of the Manor very seriously, and devoted herself to her charities, and to the local community, most assiduously. She produced an heir (and a spare) to the dynasty, Michael and Richard, and had then offered a final flourish, Diana, who would be presented at court in the next London Season.
That summer of 1937, Diana was seventeen years old, beautiful, accomplished, supremely self-confident, and waiting impatiently for her season in the sun – or at least in London and planning her own dance, to be held in May at West Hilton Manor, at the end of which she would quite possibly have found herself several rich and suitable young men as suitors, one of whom (ideally titled) would, fairly swiftly, become first her fiancé and then her husband. Such was the ordered and indeed expected rite of passage for girls of her class and upbringing.
Diana’s dance – actually her whole season – was a great success. Held on one of the loveliest nights of the year, early in June, at Hilton Manor in a marquee filled with white roses and studded, like the garden, with starry lights, it was a fairy-tale occasion, as several of the society pages chose to call it. A hundred and fifty young people attended, the girls all sweet faced, the boys well behaved, the band fashionable. The food – a small dinner beforehand and a breakfast at dawn – was splendid, the champagne vintage. Sir Gerald had been budgeting for the occasion for years, knowing his daughter’s future could very well depend upon it.
Diana had serious work to do, and only a short time in which to do it; this had been none too subtly impressed upon her by her mother, who had been reading aloud from the engagement column in The Times over breakfast for several months now, exclaiming at the felicity of one girl’s choice and the inopportuneness of another’s. Putting the paper down when she had finished, she would smile at Diana and say, ‘Well, darling, this time next year, who knows?’ Or words to that effect.
Had Diana had more of an education she might have baulked at her role in this drama. As it was, she accepted it excitedly, and entered into preparations for it with great enthusiasm. And as she danced the night away and a seemingly endless procession of suitable young men told her how beautiful she was, many of them adding that they would hope to see her again very soon, she realised the fulfilment of her – and her mother’ s – ambitions were to be achieved without undue difficulty. To love, at this stage, she gave little consideration.
Tom left the grammar school with several credits in his Higher School Certificate, and Tristram Sherrin kept his promise to introduce him to Gordon Pemberton, a local solicitor, who was looking for an articled clerk. He was impressed by Tom and took him on. There was a little difficulty over the fee of £300 required for articles; once again, the admirable Isobel was happy to advance this. Tom, deeply grateful, assured her he regarded it as a loan, and that as soon as he was earning anything at all substantial, he would repay it.
He was fairly happy during his first two years at Pemberton & Marchant. It was a very quiet life. The firm was a small one, with just two partners: Pemberton himself and Basil Marchant, both in their early fifties; then there were two senior clerks, with two secretaries, one for each partner, and Gordon Pemberton’s son, Nigel, studying for his articles like Tom.
Tom’s favourite member of staff was Basil’s secretary, Betty Foxton. She was fifty and a widow, bosomy, rosy and very cheerful. She behaved in a motherly way towards her ‘boys’ as she called them, often bringing them in a cake she had baked, and always interested in what they had done at the weekends.
The work was almost entirely conveyancing, with some probate thrown in, but Tom’s dream of becoming a solicitor made him feel that whatever he was doing was important.
‘It does have its moments,’ he told Angela Smithers, with whom he had been going out for six months. Angela was a salesgirl at Parsons, and he had met her through his godmother. She was very pretty, endowed with blonde hair and big blue eyes but not a great brain; she had high hopes of her relationship with Tom Knelston even though he was, as her mother pointed out, ‘only a postman’s son’. Angela, a spirited girl, retorted that she couldn’t see much difference between that and being a motor mechanic’s daughter.
Tom had no hopes, high or otherwise, of his relationship with Angela, except to kiss her more often and perhaps more excitingly, and in six months they had certainly progressed beyond the peck on the cheek, the dry kiss on the lips, to quite exploratory activities, usually in the back row of the cinema – she had even once or twice allowed him to stroke one of her breasts (very briefly). He could see he was never going to get beyond that stage without certain commitments which he was most assuredly not prepared to make. For the time being, she was fun and they enjoyed one another’s company.
Mr Pemberton didn’t often praise Tom or even speak to him, but at the end of his first six months, he said, ‘I’m pleased with you, Tom, very pleased. You’ve worked hard and done well. I hope you’re happy here.’
Tom told Mr Pemberton that he was. Mr Pemberton nodded and said he hoped he and Nigel were getting along, and Tom said, yes, of course, Nigel was extremely pleasant to work with.
This was absolutely true as far as it went: Nigel had never been remotely unpleasant to him, always nodded to him in the morning and said goodnight to him at night and occasionally commented on the weather; that was about it. Tom put this down initially to the fact that he was indeed rather in awe of Nigel who was older than him and had been to university. At Pemberton & Marchant, he was the heir apparent – Basil Marchant had only daughters. Nevertheless, they were the youngest people in the office by a country mile, as Betty would say, and it would have been good to make a real pal of him. Tom once tried, suggesting they went to the cinema together when the much-vaunted film Lost Horizon came to Hilchester, but Nigel said he was busy on Saturday night.
‘Doesn’t have to be Saturday,’ Tom said. ‘Friday, maybe, or if it arrives Thursday we could go then.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Nigel. ‘Not really my bag.’
Tom shrugged, tried again once with a different film, and then gave up.
They had really nothing in common apart from their work. Nigel was a keen golf player, went on holiday to places like Eastbourne and Cornwall with a crowd of friends, and from time to time up to London. Tom would learn of these activities through Nigel’s answers to Betty’s questions. She was insatiably curious about both boys’ leisure activities and Nigel didn’t seem to regard this with anything but good-natured amusement. It was as if he came from another country, speaking another language and with terms of reference Tom couldn’t understand. It puzzled him at first, but gradually it dawned on him: he was from a totally different class. The Pembertons lived in a big house on the outskirts of Hilchester, with a family car and servants; and apart from the cachet of having been to university, Nigel had also gone to public school. He had an easy confidence bordering on arrogance, simply by virtue of this, or so it seemed to Tom. He occasionally, very politely, asked about life at the grammar school and seemed surprised when he was told some pupils went to university.
Some of the differences were created purely by money: Nigel could afford to belong to the local tennis and golf clubs, to go to concerts and the theatre, and he and his father were often to be heard discussing some book or other they had bought, rather than borrowed from the library. Money – Nigel’s possession of it, his own lack of it, and the difference that must make – Tom could understand.
Class, that was different. Apart from the Southcotts, the village grandees, as his father called them contemptuously, were clearly from another world so alien it might have been Mars. It hadn’t occurred to him that some perfectly ordinary people, going about their business, whatever that might be, might consider themselves superior to other perfectly ordinary people, purely by virtue of what their fathers did and, to a degree, how they spoke. Tom was aware that the grammar school had taught him to speak differently from his parents, but that had been a result of hearing what was called Received Pronunciation all day long. He had made no conscious effort to change his
accent, and would have been astounded if anyone had suggested he might. Having become aware of the class thing, Tom became first irritated, then annoyed, and finally slightly disturbed by it. It seemed genuinely regrettable to him, this yawning chasm between him and someone of his own age, doing the same job. For the first time he properly understood his father’s hostility to his own tacit ambitions of leaving his class behind.
The other yawning gap between him and Nigel was their clothes. Nigel had at least three winter suits and three summer ones and many ties. Tom knew it was absurd to care, but he couldn’t help it, and as his cheap work suit grew shiny on the seat and his two ties increasingly worn, he became acutely self-conscious about the whole thing and asked Isobel for money for clothes when she enquired what he would like for Christmas. Isobel realised what the problem was, having risen in the social firmament herself, and duly provided the wherewithal for several ties and a pair of new shoes, offering to take him shopping for a new suit when it was his birthday.
In the office, Tom was rather lonely, despite loving the work; he missed the camaraderie of school, the genuine sense of friendship and shared endeavour that had constituted life there. He did see some of his old friends at the weekends, but they too were divided. The cleverest had gone to university – one to the unimaginable heights of Oxford – and others into their father’s businesses, some to do quite menial jobs or to work on farms.
But Tom had very little money to spend; apart from taking Angela to the cinema, he could only manage occasional nights at the King’s Head in West Hilton with his mates. And his father kept him busy at the weekends, demanding rather than requesting his assistance with the endless tasks in the house and garden; it was his way of reminding Tom where he belonged, and maintaining his own dignity against the fact that his eldest son was marking out a path so different from his own.
A Question of Trust Page 2
