It would be unprofitable to list the efforts of Rumble Patrick Palfrey to enliven the school’s day-to-day life. They began, conventionally enough, with run-of-the-mill pranks—the sudden elevation of the chalk on a length of thread suspended across the blackboard, the insertion of a dead rat under the teacher’s rostrum, the ghostly creakings of an isolated upright piano moved on to the edge of a warped floorboard shortly before Speech Day ritual began, the organic rumblings in blocked hot water pipes to illustrate a geography lesson about earthquakes and so on, but it was soon evident that Rumble was warming up for the big league, in Middle School. At fifteen he abandoned this kind of nonsense to the professional time-wasters, devoting himself to the planning and execution of more ambitious diversions and the inspiration of some of them must have derived from long-dead ancestors, jesters and tumblers in medieval Hungary perhaps, passed onto him by his emigrant grandmother. He was not only as good a mimic as his father had been but a better actor and was able, by the exercise of some strange Jekyll and Hyde alchemy, to assume all manner of personalities with the minimum of disguise. His voice had a wide range, his soft, cherubic features astonishing mobility and he was, above all, a persuasive salesman of comic ideas. There was never any malice in his jokes but his intense curiosity to witness what would occur if a certain number of actions were put into effect sometimes produced alarming results, as when he opened the sluice-gates of High Wood’s millpond and flooded a road to the depth of two feet or when, in less desperate mood, he persuaded the village signwriter to paint and erect a large board advertising an isolated section of school property for sale by public auction. Sometimes he would operate as leader of a band of jokers but more often he would work alone, as when he disguised himself as a grizzled labourer and rode about the country all one Sunday on a Douglas motor-cycle owned by the school cricket coach. He took his inevitable punishments cheerfully enough, counting them mild in exchange for the entertainment they represented, and for all his crazy unpredictability and nuisance value he somehow contrived to remain popular with the staff, even the Headmaster, who sat down to write his ultimatum to Paul with reluctance, reasoning perhaps, that life at High Wood after Rumble Patrick’s departure would be restful but dull. The letter was sent the day after Rumble, disguised as a deputy Stationmaster, sent the school eleven on a cross-country trip to Cornwall when they should have been playing away to Somerset Stragglers. In writing to Paul the Head admitted that ‘the boy could, if trained and tamed, prove a credit to himself and family’ but honesty compelled him to qualify this by adding ‘he might find it difficult to adjust in a society where the patterns of general behaviour were already established’, which Paul took as a hint to despatch Rumble Patrick to an outpost of the Empire where his originality would have free play among the primitives.
The day Rumble and his school trunk returned to Shallow-ford Paul left word that the boy was to report at once to the library. He did not consult Claire on the matter, knowing that she had long since succumbed to Rumble’s spell. In any case he always hated these occasions which embarrassed him and left him with a feeling of inadequacy as a father. When Rumble arrived, however, he saw at once that the boy was determined to make things as easy as possible, for he entered with Ikey’s engaging grin and said, without preamble and without hypocrisy, ‘I’m sorry I let you down, Gov’nor, but you don’t have to involve yourself any more you know. After all, I’m not a kid any more.’
Paul looked at him as he stood by the tall window and found himself comparing the boy to Ikey in his scrapyard days. He had Ikey’s sense of detachment and Ikey’s small, neat head but his frame was all Potter, sturdy, thick-set, suggestive of speed as well as power. He thought, sadly, ‘I wonder what the devil poor old Ikey would have made of him? Or Old Tamer, his grandfather?’ and his spirits lifted somewhat when he recalled that on both sides of his family Rumble had heroes of a kind and stamina that ought to be good survival currency in a world drained of security by the demands of the last sixteen years. He said, with more curiosity than reproach:
‘Why is it you prefer to live in hot water, Rumble, when most chaps your age are content to take a dip in it now and again?’ and the boy answered, with unexpected promptness, ‘The world is so lopsided, Gov’nor. Everyone is tearing themselves to pieces looking for answers and all they come up with are more and more questions!’ and he looked across at Paul shrewdly, as though it occurred to him he would have to elaborate a little if he was to make his point but Paul understood, having not only known and reared Ikey, but also observed Hazel when she was running wild in the woods. He meant, of course, that most people were so reluctant to laugh at themselves and that Rumble’s pranks were no more than an attempt to redress the balance.
‘Everybody’s finding life pretty tough these days, Rumble, and they aren’t all endowed with your kind of bounce. The point is, what the devil am I to do with you now? You can’t earn a living pulling people’s legs! Your father was a rare handful but at least he compromised and made a success of the Army. Suppose I passed you on to a crammer’s? Would you promise to stop acting the goat for once? It’s high time you did, you know!’
The boy, serious for once, said, ‘Simon and The Pair have gone off and only the girls are left. It must be a bit frustrating for you, Gov’nor—to have no one to carry on, I mean.’
‘You think you could make a career of farming?’
‘I wouldn’t want to step in ahead of them, it wouldn’t be fair, would it?’
‘Then what?’
‘I’d like to get out and about for a couple of years. Not like Simon—politics are a fearful bore—and not like Steve and Andy either, for I’d make a fearful hash of a commercial career. I mean really out and about; overseas.’
So here it was again; none of them had a particle of affection for the Valley. All they wanted was to escape as from a noose that threatened to throttle their initiative. They saw him, one and all, as an anachronism, clinging to a way of life that had begun to wither as long ago as the summer of 1914. The conviction that this was so made him feel defeated and old beyond his years.
‘Have you anywhere particular in mind?’
‘Yes,’ said Rumble, unexpectedly, ‘I’d go to Australia first. There was a chap I was friendly with at school, a fellow called McPherson, whose pater had a sheep farm inland from Brisbane. He was always keen for me to visit and I’ve heard from him lately and the offer is still open. It’s a big place, Queensland.’
Paul glanced down at the Headmaster’s letter and remembered the hint,’ . . . a place where the patterns of behaviour were not fully established . . . ’ Claire wouldn’t like it, or Mary, who, of all his children, had been the closest to Rumble. Yet the idea had obvious advantages. Australia was probably populated with unconventional people and any one of the numerous Diggers he had met in France during the war would be more than capable of knocking commonsense into the boy with the flat of his hand. Maybe a year or two roughing it among strangers was what he needed and yet, with Simon and The Pair already gone, he was reluctant to help empty the Valley of young men. He said, resignedly, ‘Check on that invitation, it might have gone cold; in the meantime I’ll think things over but while I’m doing it for God’s sake try and keep out of trouble, Rumble!’
Suddenly the boy was himself again, mischief sparkling in his eyes, so that Paul, recalling Ikey’s impudence, hardly knew whether to laugh or clout him across the head as he rushed into the hall calling to Mary. Paul heard his daughter’s joyous shout from the top of the stairs and then, as she relayed the news of Rumble’s home-coming to her sisters, a rush of feet across the landing. He went out of the garden door and down the drive to see Maureen, who had always shown a great interest in Rumble Patrick, but she only gave the advice he expected.
‘Damned good idea!’ she said. ‘Head him that way and don’t let Claire or the girls talk you out of it!’ and when he protested that all the young to whom one might look for suc
cession were leaving the Valley, she added, ‘He’ll come back! That one will always come back! Too much of his mother in him to stay away long!’ and went briskly about her business, leaving him to reflect glumly that she herself had not been much help since John had died and her own boy had gone off to study medicine in Dublin.
These days he was beginning to feel more and more isolated, more and more turned in upon himself. The decade that had closed with the death of old John, his chief confidant, had not only deprived him of all three of his sons but several of his intimates, men like Arthur Pitts, of Hermitage, and his dour father-in-law Edward Derwent, who, on his son buying the freehold of High Coombe, had deliberately placed himself beyond the sphere of interference by moving into a quayside cottage overlooking Whinmouth harbour. Mary, the dreamer of the family, kept to herself when she wasn’t mooning after Rumble Patrick and even Claire seemed to have withdrawn from him a little as her two younger daughters claimed more of her attention, Whiz with her eternal round of gymkhanas and hunter trials, the youngest with the business of growing into the most sought-after adolescent within riding distance. Sometimes, as today, he was very sorry for himself, wishing the whole boiling of them would give him leisure to concentrate on his own concerns while making themselves available to help form a decision once in a while. He went down the river road a mile or so and for once found a little comfort in the distant prospect of Henry Pitts hup-hupping his three-horse plough team across the red down-slope of Undercliff, the farm’s southernmost field. He stood leaning on a rail watching Henry’s broad back from a safe distance, reflecting how often and how. fruitlessly he had tried to talk him into selling his horses and buying a tractor like Francis Willoughby, Eveleigh’s foreman, and Brissot, the cork-footed co-tenant of the once sterile Potter holding. ‘Well,’ he told himself, as Henry dragged his team round and came back towards him, ‘there’s one thing that won’t change—Henry’s methods of husbandry and his hatred of “buddy contrivances”!’ and although he had no wish to talk to Henry today the sight encouraged him to make his way to French Wood, a direction he often took when he was in the dumps.
He approached it from the south, climbing the escarpment above the big bend in the Sorrel and pushing his way through the tall thistles and docks that crowned the little plateau in front of the plantation but here, on the very edge of trees, he stopped short seeing the hunched form of a girl sitting with her back to him on a log near Grace’s flowering cherry. It was his daughter Mary and he did not have to see her face to realise that she was in tears.
She had not heard his approach so he stopped and drew back below the crest, his mind assembling the pieces of the puzzle with a speed and certainty that surprised him. Less than an hour ago he had heard her greet Rumble from the stairs and the note of pleasurable excitement in her voice told him that she must have been unaware until that moment of Rumble’s return; now she was here alone, more than a mile from the house, and even a man to whom feminine changes of mood remained a mystery after two marriages did not need to be told why. Rumble must have blurted out his harebrained plan and, equally obviously, the prospect of Rumble removing himself half-way across the world had devastated her. Here then, was something new, Mary and Rumble Patrick linked in a way that he had never suspected and he wondered if Claire had an inkling and if she had whether she was amused, displeased or indifferent. The revelation, complicating an already teasing problem, irritated him and he thought, impatiently, ‘Damn it, surely I must be imagining things! He’s not eighteen yet and she’s less than two years older!’ and he stole back to take another look but found to his relief, that she had disappeared and the distant crackle of dry bracken below the crest told him that she must have ridden up here on one of the ponies. He made up his mind then to watch her closely at supper and if she gave herself away to consult Claire at once but then, as though it had dropped through the trees and struck his head like a pebble, he had another and even more extravagant idea. What if it turned out that his eldest daughter and the son of Ikey Palfrey and Hazel Potter were to succeed him, the Valley passing not to his sons, as he had always assumed, but to his grandsons? He sat down on the stump to think and it astonished him that he could contemplate the irony of such a twist without resentment, could even find in it a kind of inevitability as he followed a loose end of the skein all the way back to the scrapyard beside the Thames. ‘I daresay it’s no more than wishful thinking on my part!’ he grumbled to himself. ‘But then, do I really wish it? Would I prefer events to have taken a more natural course and the valley pass to Simon, or one of the twins?’ He found himself unable to answer the question but he could not put it out of mind; the memory of his daughter’s hunched figure was too poignant to support the theory that he was deducing too much from too little. He sat musing a long time and then, crossing the grove, he picked up the pony’s tracks in the dust that lay thickly on the path around the northern bulge of Hermitage Wood. As he left the frees and walked into bright sunlight a hen pheasant whirred up less than a yard ahead and flew squawking across the dip. ‘I daresay you’re wiser than I am, old girl!’ he said aloud. ‘Kark-kark—Kark-kark! That’s about all any of us can say when it comes to explaining other people’s motives, especially when they are your own flesh and blood!’
II
It would have astonished him even more to have learned that he made his discovery, or half-discovery, only an hour or so before Mary herself gauged the strength of the bond that linked her to Rumble Patrick. Alone among the Craddock children she remembered his actual arrival at Shallowford, a small, plump, easily-delighted child of four, speaking an even broader Devon brogue than Mrs Handcock and Martha Pitts, and because she was the eldest girl, and no one in their senses vested responsibility in The Pair, her mother had taken her aside that same evening and told her frankly that Rumble’s mother had been killed and that his father, Ikey, was away at the war and that she was to do all in her power to make Rumble feel at home in the Big House. It was not, she soon discovered, a particularly onerous charge. Rumble Patrick made himself at home anywhere and in a week or two seemed to have forgotten everything about his mother and the enclosed life he shared with her at Mill Cottage, becoming almost at once one of the Craddocks, sleeping in Mary’s room until he was six, riding her ponies, sharing her toys and Claire’s good-night kisses. Mary soon noticed that her mother showed him special tenderness and would have found it difficult to believe that Rumble’s appearance in the world, and the war-time marriage that followed it, had sparked off the only important quarrel between her father and mother in the history of their marriage. When the child had been thoroughly absorbed, however, Mary did not relinquish her post as playmate extraordinary. Her maternal instinct, naturally strong (she was the only one of the Craddock girls who played with dolls), had been matured by Rumble’s presence and as her sisters grew up to develop their own interests and needed her less and less, she became Rumble’s sole companion in his eternal wanderings in the woods and valleys, where he constantly surprised her with his knowledge of fieldcraft, wild flowers and the habits of the thousand and one creatures who lived out their lives within a mile of the Sorrel springs on the moor. He never treated her as a girl, as did Simon and The Pair, but expected her to climb the same trees, wade the same streams, and disdain tears when brambles clawed at her bare legs and nettles left their smart on her wrists. Because he never seemed to want to ride but preferred to penetrate into places inaccessible to ponies, Mary soon ceased frying to compete with Whiz, the equestrienne of the family and thus lost favour with her Aunt Rose, who sometimes invited them all to stay at her sprawling Gloucestershire home that was a kind of horse-barracks. But there were compensations. By the time she was ten, and Rumble was eight-and-a-half, each of them knew the Valley better than Paul, or John Rudd, and among the tenants only Smut Potter, who drove the bakery van for his French wife’s business in Coombe Bay, could challenge them on the termini of the rabbit-runs in Shallowford Woods or the exact location of the p
rincipal otter holts along the weaving courses of the Sorrel and Teazel. They liked Smut, who would often stop his van and pass a pleasant half-hour with them during his rounds, telling them where to find nests and sometimes recounting his poaching exploits of pre-war days, and they had their favourites among the tenants, farmworkers and Valley craftsmen. They liked old Martha Pitts up at Hermitage, who would sometimes bake them savoury pasties, telling them she had done as much for Rumble Patrick’s mother when she had lived wild in the woods before her marriage. They liked and respected Grandmother Meg, whom they encountered in out-of-the-way places where she was gathering herbs or selling her rush mats and baskets and Meg, unsmilingly and with a deliberation that fascinated Mary, would sometimes tell their fortunes and prophesy that Mary would marry a gypsy and have blue-eyed children, a pledge that Mary secretly doubted for she could not imagine marrying anyone but Rumble, whose eyes were the colour of his mother’s name. They were fond of Henry Pitts, with his great, rubbery smile and were well-received by the Timberlakes at the sawmill, and also by the cork-footed Frenchman, Brissot, who did most of the work in the Dell while his partner, Jumbo, stood around cracking jokes in his thin, Cockney voice. Mary found it difficult to believe that both Mrs Brissot and Jumbo’s wife were Rumble’s aunts. Each of them seemed so old and each treated him with the respect they showed the Squire’s children but it was so, for Paul made no mystery of Rumble’s background and once took them up to French wood, pointing out the two trees he had planted in memory of Rumble’s parents, saying that Ikey, his father, had been a very brave soldier and his mother, Hazel, had known even more of what went on in the coverts and goyles of the estate than Smut Potter, a statement that helped Mary to understand Rumble’s instinctive knowledge of woodcraft and fieldcraft. They had their dislikes too, usually avoiding High Coombe and thinking of Mary’s uncle, Hugh Derwent, as an aloof, tetchy man plodding about his business without a smile, and although they got along well enough with Marian Eveleigh, at Four Winds, it was never a farm they frequented much for they were half-convinced that old Norman Eveleigh was a little soft in the head, partly because he looked at them as though they were not there but also because one side of his mouth dribbled a little, as though he had left his handkerchief at the farm. Rumble told Mary this was nothing to wonder at; Norman Eveleigh had evidently been touched by the Four Winds’ curse and sooner or later every master of this particular farm went mad.
Post of Honour Page 45
