Suddenly realising that he was lonely Simon smiled and begged to differ, admitting that he had been unrepentantly Roundhead from the Third onwards. Then the boys began to clamour for gory details of the execution and the little man, whipping off his steel-framed spectacles, said, ‘Ask Rawlins, he’s obviously read it up,’ and Rawlins confirmed that, on this very spot, on January 30th, 1649, King Charles’ head had been removed by a single blow and that ‘the blood had dripped through the planks of the scaffold by the pint.’
‘Extraordinary how they love blood!’ the schoolmaster said, as though he had thought about it intermittently over the last fifty years. ‘They’ll never forget Rawlins’ touch of local colour but they’ve already forgotten the Grand Remmonstrance and the Self-Denying Ordnance.’
‘So did you and I at that age,’ observed Simon, ‘and that, I imagine, has a direct bearing on what we’re supposed to be celebrating.’
‘You have a point,’ said his companion, ‘but I daresay you’ve had enough of it.’
‘More than enough. I kept the boiler stoked up until D-Plus-Two but after that I began to simmer down. Do you mind if I ask you something? Isn’t this an odd day to conduct a sight-seeing tour with that bunch in tow? It’s not a responsibility I’d care for on V.E. night.’
‘A matter of killing two birds,’ said Mr Chips, seriously. ‘After all, they’re seeing history made, aren’t they? We heard Churchill speak from the Air Ministry this morning, we’ve seen General Smuts go by, we’ve cheered Royalty, and we’ve taken in the Houses of Parliament, Scotland Yard and now the scaffold site of the Royal Martyrdom. Or the salutary end of The Man of Blood, whichever way you care to regard him.’
It was as he said this, finishing on a long rasping sniff, that Simon caught the elusive familiarity of the man by the tail. He was so pleased with himself that he grabbed the schoolmaster by the shoulder, spun him round, and exclaimed with the greatest gusto, ‘I know you! You’re Archie Bentinck! You were on the staff of High Wood when I was there, twenty-five years ago,’ and the little man did not seem displeased at having his identity shouted down Whitehall in the presence of his boys but smiled, shook Simon’s hand, and said, ‘I am indeed, but please don’t expect me to remember your name, or even murmur that your face is familiar. It isn’t, for at my age all faces are alike. I never have been much good at recognising old boys. Only their style of essay distinguished them at the time—that and the wide range of excuses they made for various shortcomings.’
‘My name is Craddock,’ Simon said, curiously excited by the encounter, ‘Simon Craddock. I was there from 1917 to 1922 but you left before me. There was a …’ and he stopped, looking down at a boy who had strayed from the orbit of Rawlins’ commentary and was staring up at him expectantly.
‘A sharp exchange of views between me and that prig of a headmaster,’ Bentinck said, with another resonant sniff. ‘Yes, there was indeed. And I had the better of it. For here I am still hard at it, whereas that silly ass died of thrombosis years ago.’
Mention of the headmaster during his five unprofitable years at the school drove a passage through the mists of Simon’s memory. He remembered he had shared Bentinck’s dislike of the head, a pompous, pretentious man, with high-falutin notions of dragging High Wood inside the select circle of schools where it could never be comfortable. There had been a long simmering row between the Head and Archie Bentinck, whose teaching methods were as unconventional as his appearance, and the boys, who had revelled in Archie’s eccentricities, and had recognised him as a soft touch who enlivened history lessons by stray and sometimes slightly scandalous snippets of information, had been very sorry to see him go.
‘You must be getting on,’ he said, ‘do you really mean to say you’re still teaching?’
‘A war-time stopgap,’ Bentinck told him, unable to conceal the pride he felt in his invincibility. ‘Apart from Merchant Bankers, the makers of armaments, and scoundrels who made five hundred per cent profit on the leaky huts we occupy at our temporary premises, I’m probably the only man of my generation who welcomed the war! I was dying of boredom when they called me back. To a private school of course. They wouldn’t look at a man my age at the kind of place I taught after leaving High Wood.’
‘Are you taking this lot back tonight or are you staying over? The trains will be packed, won’t they?’
‘It’s a two-day excursion,’ Bentinck said. ‘Around you stands the élite of St Budolph’s, the odd dozen who sold one hundred pounds’ worth of savings stamps in a single term. The local Aldermen didn’t think we could do it but we did and they had to fulfil their side of the bargain by footing the expenses of a V.E. jaunt. I think it rather rattled them when I phoned in our total.’
‘You haven’t changed at all,’ Simon said, laughing, and his memories of Archie Bentinck became sharper every moment so that he could now see him, in shredded gown, perched on the end of the desk declaiming a favourite passage from ‘The Deserted Village’, or obliterating the equations left on the blackboard by the maths master and looking as if this was a task he enjoyed. ‘Where are you staying overnight?’
‘Guildford Street, by virtue of having a nephew who runs a small hotel there. Rawlins and two others are looking forward to sleeping in the bath. Incidentally, my nephew has been billeting Americans, so why not come back for a nightcap?’
‘I’d be delighted,’ Simon said and they moved along to the Strand, the little man shouting, ‘Keep me in view and if any of you stray it’s 23a, one minute’s walk from the Russell Square tube entrance.’
They were in Guildford Street in fifteen minutes and Simon, whose feet ached with so much pavement pounding, marvelled at the little man’s energy as he darted about superintending the issue of cocoa and biscuits before shooing his charges off to bed.
‘Would you mind telling me exactly how old you are?’ he asked, when they were both enjoying a large whisky, and Archie Bentinck said, ‘Not now we’re off the streets. I’ll be seventy-nine next week but keep quiet about it or the boys might whip round and buy me another pipe rack. You can’t be such a chicken yourself—let me see … 1917–1922 … you were eighteen when you left, twenty-three years ago … wait a minute!’ and he choked into his whisky. ‘I’ve got it! Craddock. Craddock S. A whole family of you somewhere in the West … you had farms … don’t tell me.’
‘I won’t,’ said Simon grinning, ‘but you’re on course.’
The schoolmaster subsided but continued to watch Simon’s face with his alert squirrel’s eyes. ‘Got it,’ he said finally, ‘and you didn’t believe in it, either, did you? There was that old boy—a conscientious objector—Norfield, Horsborough … some such name—and you got into hot water defending him after he was killed in France stretcher-bearing?’
‘Horsey,’ Simon said, ‘and I married his widow.’
‘Good God,’ Bentinck exclaimed, proving that he could after all, be astonished. ‘It tallies, of course. You were another rebel and I really ought to have remembered you. There weren’t all that number there. Not that I’ve anything against second-class public schools like High Wood, providing they make do with the material to hand and don’t borrow the Eton Boating Song. There’s still a place for them in the educational field but I was a misfit and it took me a long time to wake up to the fact. Once I did, and went back to the elementary day school, I was happy enough. They even made me a headmaster in the end. Galleywall Road Junior School, not all that far from here. It’s in Rotherhithe.’
‘You not only enjoyed it, you still enjoy it.’
‘Enormously.’
‘Could you explain why?’
‘It’s a matter of temperament. All those second-hand traditions … all that esoteric slang … it seemed to me such a waste of good material. That was what the Head and I quarrelled about. We had diametrically opposed ideas about education. He wanted a production line of Doctor Arnold-type English gents and t
hat didn’t suit my book at all, and not simply because it was out-of-date even then. There’s some promising stuff in places like Rotherhithe if you don’t mind rooting for it. So many schoolmasters make so many mistakes about their essential function. After all, it’s simple enough if you think about it. The job isn’t to cut boys to a pattern, academic or social. It’s to help them to develop individual personalities within the terms of reference we call civilisation. I did just that and I turned out some Tartars in my time. Three or four of them are doing a stretch right now but far more are doing well. Apart from that I like to think that a few of them are reading a book or two, or thinking a thought or two, that they wouldn’t have been if I had stayed at High Wood. As for me, I’ve enjoyed the last thirty years of my life more than the first forty. You’re not a regular, are you?’
‘No, but I’ve been in since ’39 and I’m due out the minute Japan packs it in.’
‘And then?’
‘I was wondering that when I bumped into you.’
‘What did you do before?’
‘Shouted in the wind. I fought by-elections, fought in Spain, was taken prisoner and had to be rescued by a Tory M.P.’
‘Are you going to fight at the coming election?’
‘Not me!’
‘But you chaps could scoop the pool this time.’
Simon explained, reflecting as he did that here was a very strange phenomenon indeed—a professional schoolmaster who listened. By the time the level of their host’s whisky bottle was appreciably lower he had told Bentinck as much as he would have told a close friend, but could not have said why. His memories of Archie Bentinck were vague but there was, within the man, an ability to probe that was the result of instructing generations of boys through successive eras.
He said, when Simon seemed to have finished, ‘Pity about you, Craddock. You’ve wasted a lot of time. Still, you’re better equipped to start fresh than I was. I never had a proper degree, whereas you have, plus a good war record. Put in for a teacher’s training course and do what I did. They’d never stand for you in a place like High Wood but you might be a spectacular success in a junior school. The thing you have to remember, of course, is that there is a far greater area of tolerance between grandfather and grandchild than between father and son and it’s easy to see why. The one has ceased to expect miracles and the other hasn’t had time to grow an inpenetrable hide. Take a tip from me. After the age of eleven pass ’em on to somebody else to cope with. That way you’ll keep some of your illusions.’
‘You really think I could start teaching at my age?’
‘What the devil has age got to do with it? You’ve got a better idea of what life is about than some cocky young undergraduate with a swollen head stuffed with facts and theories. Give it a trial anyway. You’ll find it a lot more rewarding than preaching the gospel according to Saint Keir Hardie, or trying to compromise between writing the truth and keeping the goodwill of local councillors who happen to be your advertisers. I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a personal contact with the Principal at a Westcountry T.T. College in your area. Used to be a colleague of his before he took the job. I’ll write to him if you like as soon as I get back. Or would you prefer to think it over between now and when you’re demobbed?’
‘I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,’ said Simon, thoughtfully, ‘I’d like to phone my wife and do it right now. I lost track of you for twenty-five years and I don’t want to risk it happening again. There’s something weird about bumping into you tonight of all nights.’
Luck was obviously running his way. In spite of jammed lines he made the connection in fifteen minutes, smiling at Evie’s almost incoherent excitement at hearing his voice.
‘I’ve just seen Uncle to bed,’ she said, ‘we’ve been down at the Coombe Bay V.E. Celebrations. I’ve been telling everyone you were still in Brussels. What are you doing back here? You aren’t demobbed, are you?’
No, he told her, he was not, but to moderate her disappointment he assured her that there was no possibility of his being drafted out East. ‘It wasn’t that I ’phoned you about,’ he said. ‘Do you see yourself living in a redbrick schoolhouse, putting iodine on grazed knees?’
‘It depends. Redbrick you say? That rules out the Perrin-and-Trail hazards. Yes, if you were happy and settled I’d have no complaints. It’s better than living over a shop and a lot better than sitting on a political platform beaming down at an audience who would sooner be home listening to the radio. What’s headed you in that direction?’
‘Far too expensive to tell you on the ’phone, particularly as we’ll probably be cut off any moment. That’s all for now. I’ll write at length if I can’t wangle a forty-eight hour pass.’
‘No wait. You haven’t …’
He left it at that and rejoined a dozing Archie Bentinck in the lounge, nudging him awake.
‘Write that letter, Archie,’ he said. ‘There’ll probably be a stampede for teachers’ training college places as soon as the big demob starts and for once in my life I’d like to be first on a bandwagon!’
III
Paul would have denied it and Andy would have derided it, but the truth was they were more alike in essentials than any of the Craddocks. Both had a steadiness of vision that was strong, purposeful, and could at times be brutally obstinate; both had uncertain tempers. Paul, fortunately for himself and others, had found his purpose early in life, and succeeded in holding on to it through periods of boom, slump, local disaster and two world wars. Andy was not so fortunate. At twenty-one he had broken away to find a purpose of his own, and although, to Paul, it had seemed a very seedy one, it had satisfied him up to the time he rushed into the RAF.
From then on, unlike Stevie, he had found another kind of fulfilment. The hard, bright little machines he flew and the challenge of wits presented by aerial combat, had absorbed his zest and curiosity, so that, up to the time he was invalided from the Service, he asked for nothing more, supposing that he would ultimately drift back to his peacetime occupation and get along as best he could with a relatively minor handicap. He had not been (as Claire had expected him to be) shattered by the news that his wife had been seduced by his brother in his absence. He was astonished and, at the outset, irritated by having to make another major adjustment, but his relationship with Margaret, although eroded to some extent, was not destroyed by the circumstances, as it might have been in the case of a less tolerant man. Its present weakness had nothing to do with Stevie. It was related to the changes in society as a whole, for there seemed to Andy to be very little left of the old world by the winter of 1943 and months of hospital boredom had brought about changes in himself, among them a readiness to admit that his affection for Margaret had never had more than a physical basis.
It was not simply the result of a long cooling-off process. Their world, the world they had shared with kindred spirits like Stevie and Monica, had been buried under the rubble of the blitz. Scrap was still in demand but its scavengers were very different men from those Andy had haggled with in dockside pubs and on provincial golf-courses. The Civil Service had moved in and taken over, as they had taken over almost everything else in the country. Behind every rolltop desk and trestle table was a faceless man who worked from the book, who used set rules of procedure and who went home at five o’clock to a wife in the suburbs. In almost every case he was what had become known as ‘a Ministry man’ and this meant that he was immune to flattery and armoured against bluff and bribes. You could not beat him or bully him and he would have been outraged if you had suggested joining him. He was there by Government edict, entrenched behind mountains of forms and files, all needing a hundred different signatures in ancillary departments that seemed to Andy, in his quick, scornful, post-discharge survey of once-familiar terrain, nothing whatever to do with scrap metals, their source or their ultimate destination. It was this, more than his wounds, or the break-up of the old alliance, that
convinced Andy Craddock there was no place for him in the present scheme of things and that he would have to make one and make one soon unless he was to go mad with boredom. The demand for scrap, his commercial instinct told him, would not last much longer and he had never had much doubt regarding the final outcome of the war. The old territory had been fenced off. He would never fly again. It therefore followed that he would have to break new ground and take advantage of the fact that he had arrived at the frontier in the vanguard of the gold rush.
He had other unquestionable advantages, chief among them capital that had accumulated appreciably during the last few years. He also possessed a trained ally in the person of Ken Shawcrosse, the ex-gunner. Shawcrosse, he discovered, was really no more than a buccaneer of the kind Andy had encountered by the score in the pre-war scrap world, but there was a difference. The dealers of those days had never sought to acquire the trappings of conventional society whereas Ken, and more particularly his wife, were greedy for them. They were snobs and made no apology for their ambition to be someone, to exert influence, to call the tune wherever they perched, and this intention was the mainspring of their commercial aggressiveness. Shawcrosse admitted this soon after he and Andy had registered their first company, Romulus Development Incorporated. The name, suggested by Shawcrosse, was a sneer at his own obscure origins and the buffeting he had received in the ’thirties.
‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, they tell me,’ he said, ‘but the joker who built it knew his business. His first job was to clobber the opposition and brother, that’s me from here on! Before the war the Big Boys had it all their own way but now it’s anybody’s race. Did you ever read Gone with the Wind?’
Andy, who had never finished a novel in his life, said he had seen the film but Shawcrosse said, ‘It didn’t come over in the film. There was that Wide Boy, Rhett Something-or-other, whose theory was there was more dough to be made out of a crumbling civilisation than a healthy one and he was right. This society was a regular carve-up before the war, where two per cent owned ninety-nine per cent of the property but now it’s bust wide open. It’ll never be the same again.’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 33
