Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  “What would you like to do when you leave school apart from what your mother has mapped out for you? I mean, if it was left to you, would you go around the world or something?”

  “Not me,” said Diana, promptly, “you can have globetrotting for all I care! Travel isn’t anything like as exciting as it’s cracked up to be. There’s nowhere like this, for instance, at least not where I’ve been so far. France is flat and bare, and Switzerland is sickeningly picture-postcardy. Italy’s all right in some ways but it’s ever so smelly and I’m glad Mummy and Daddy are going to Africa on their own in the summer, because then I shall have you and Sennacharib all to myself for seven glorious weeks!”

  Suddenly she stopped talking and looked at me speculatively for a long moment, sucking her finger and “freezing” her enormous dimple. “Do you know, Jan,” she went on at length, “I think that’s what I like about you—apart from your nice wide shoulders and your long eyelashes, I mean—you feel about this place as if it was something alive, like an animal. That’s exactly how I feel but I don’t think I’d have known that if I hadn’t met you that day in the wood. What would I do if I wasn’t packed off to Switzerland to be finished, and then hauled home for all that presentation flimflam? I know what I’d do”—she stood clear of the window ledge and interlocked her long fingers—“I’d run a riding school, hunt all the winter and swim all the summer. I’d teach you to ride, so that we could go long hacks together and in the evenings I’d give parties—not the kind of parties that Mother gives, where dreary people stand around nibbling those soppy little sausages on sticks but real parties, where we all danced on the terrace and had midnight swims and talked and talked, you know, about interesting things, like books and plays and being in love.”

  The mention of books was the one chord I recognized in this rhapsody and I pounced on it, recalling my pitiful little success with the essay on “A Day at Hampton Court.”

  “Would you … you marry a writer, Diana? A famous one, of course!” I added, seeing a puzzled expression cross her face.

  She put her head on one side so that her dark curls swung freely in what I thought an enchanting manner.

  “A writer? Ye-es! I think I would, providing he wrote the right sort of books, of course. I wouldn’t care to be the wife of a writer like Edgar Wallace, for instance, but it might have been fun to have been, say Mrs. Kingsley, or Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson! A writer would never be dull, would he? He’d always be surrounded by other interesting people, you know, painters and sculptors and famous people of one sort or another. Yes …” she finally made up her mind. “I would like to marry an author, Jan!”

  There was so much that I wanted to say to her but I needed time and leisure to think it out. I had a conviction now that our relationship was entering a new phase and that it might be fatal to make rash promises I had no power to keep. A vague plan was already forming in my mind but it needed time.

  “Can we meet on Saturday, Diana?” I asked her. “I might have something important to tell you.”

  She pouted. “Oh dear,” she said, “I won’t be here on Saturday. I should have gone back with Mother and Daddy but I wriggled out of it because I knew you were coming. I tell you what, why not write to me about it? I’ll give you my school address too, at least I’ll give you a day girl’s address to write to, because old Passy-Glassy has a nose a yard long and if she recognizes letters in male handwriting she redirects them to parents! Here”—she whipped a tiny diary and a stub of pencil from the pocket of her jeans and scribbled an address on it—“write to me as much as you like and then I’ll be one up on Sheila Bryanstone. She’s always showing off about the sloppy letters she gets from the boys she meets in the hols.”

  I took the address and as I did so I saw through the open casement that dusk was creeping across to the edge of the wood and lights were showing down in Shepherdshey hollow.

  “We’d better be going, Diana,” I told her. “It’ll be dark before we get back.”

  She looked out of the casement and then picked up her book, opening it at the flyleaf and rereading the inscription. “All my love …” she repeated and then, shutting it abruptly: “Do you mean that, Jan, really mean it?”

  “Why yes,” I said, grateful for the fading light, for I knew that I was blushing, “yes, of course I meant it.”

  The half-smile that was so peculiarly Diana’s flickered at the corners of her mouth.

  “You mean you haven’t got a girl already?”

  “No,” I said, using the Whinmouth term for an adolescent courtship, “I’m not ‘going’ with anyone, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s funny,” she said, half to herself, “I always imagined that a boy as big as you and going to work …”

  She trailed off, as though turning something over in her mind, and then quickly looked at me, with serious eyes.

  “You won’t see me again until next hols. Wouldn’t you like to kiss me, Jan?”

  If she had said that before we entered the Folly, before I gave her the book and she had responded with the impulsive kiss given in acknowledgment, I should have been far too shy and gawky to have responded, but I had grown very appreciably during the last half hour, and when she stepped closer and tilted her face I felt no embarrassment, only a great surge of warmth and ecstasy, that lifted me higher than this—the highest point in Sennacharib. I kissed her very softly on the mouth and I think she must have known then that it was the first time I had ever kissed a girl. Then, as gently as I kissed her, she took me by the hand and led me down the staircase and into the wood. As we came out on the path to the paddock there was a flutter of wings in the oak on the very edge of the copse as our buzzards rose and wheeled above the larches below.

  Neither of us remarked on them but Diana’s fingers tightened on mine before she released my hand to climb the rail and jump down into the field.

  Chapter Three

  EARLY THE next morning I put on my best suit and went around to the building behind the High Street office of what my Aunt Thirza described as “The Gospel According to Saint Reuben”—that is, the headquarters of Uncle Reuben’s Whinmouth & District Observer.

  I had been there before, of course, but my visits had been impersonal. Then the machines that were engaged in grinding out handbills and posters, and the lumbering great flatbed on which the Observer was printed each Friday had been no more than a source of clatter. Now I looked at them with respect, for I knew that they underpinned the bridge I so desperately needed to approach even the most tentative claim to Diana, or Sennacharib.

  It was the usual small-town printing office, employing half a dozen men and boys, all wearing indescribably filthy aprons. The machines appeared to me to be but a slight improvement on the apparatus of William Caxton, seen in the famous picture depicting the patronage of Edward IV. Each machine was surrounded by bulkheads of type cases at which men stood, plucking at type and slamming then gleanings into what to me looked like metal pencil boxes. Over all hung a rancid smell of machine oil and printer’s ink, together with an air of quiet absorption.

  Uncle Reuben greeted me with the professional heartiness of a habitual public speaker.

  “Well, young feller-me-lad, and what can we do for you today?”

  I had learned to ignore his forced breeziness and look-smart-about-it manner, for I knew that he possessed qualities of kindness and patience. I spoke up without fear or embarrassment.

  “I want to be a reporter, Uncle,” I told him, adding a conciliatory “I’m quite prepared to start at the bottom.”

  He stared hard at me for a moment or two and then laughed. A laugh was a luxury in which he rarely indulged.

  “God bless my soul!” he exclaimed, laying down his “pencil box” and thrusting both hands into his apron pocket. “Whatever gave you that idea, John? Was it Uncle Luke or Aunt Thirza? Have they decided you’re not cut out for a junk merchant?”

  “No,” I told him, “I think they like me working for them, but there�
��s no future in it.”

  Suddenly he looked pleased and studied me for a long minute; then he said:

  “I daresay you’re right at that! It isn’t a real trade, like printing. What you really mean, I imagine, is that you want to learn to be a compositor?”

  “No,” I said pompously, for one glance had assured me that Diana would regard printing as only slightly less degrading than junk dealing, “it’s writing I want to do, writing for the paper. You see, I think I’m going to be a writer someday and words and phrases are the tools of my trade.”

  This impressed him more than it should have done. How was he to know that the statement had been lifted from a book on writing for the radio, borrowed from the local library?

  “Come with me,” he said briefly, and led the way between type cases into a poky little office behind the flatbed.

  It was lit by a single, begrimed skylight and its sole items of furniture consisted of a roll-top desk, a cane-bottomed chair and a vast array of paper, all kinds of paper, from galley proofs and posters to dog-eared ledgers and offcuts. The hardboard walls were plastered with old posters and trade calendars and there was one impressively bold notice that said: FOLLOW YOUR COPY, EVEN IF IT GOES OUT THE WINDOW. The desk likewise was a litter of proofs—“pulls” I later learned to call them—and in here the smell of ink and oil was subordinate to that of my uncle’s vile tobacco. He swept papers from the chair and sat down, groping for his pipe.

  “A reporter,” he began, “has to be observant. Are you observant? Take a quick look around this office and then close your eyes. Ready? Now then, what’s in this pigsty?”

  I reeled off a list of nearly two dozen items that had remained in my memory and he was obviously struck by my powers of observation.

  “That’s very promising,” he conceded, “but supposing I sent you to report a funeral, what would you find out?”

  “Who was there and who read the burial service.”

  “Good! And a wedding?”

  This was more ponderable so I took my time.

  “What the bride had on and what all the people had given them for presents,” I suggested.

  His eyes smiled. “That’s not a bad guess,” he admitted, “except that we don’t print the presents unless they pay three pence a line for them! Well, you seem to have the right instincts but can you write shorthand?”

  I told him that I was willing to learn, adding that I had taught myself to type on Uncle Luke’s ramshackle Oliver. When he rose I saw that I had pleased him.

  “I don’t know why this never occurred to me when your mother died,” he said, absently. “It was very remiss of me, for you shouldn’t have wasted time in that wretched furniture shed. That’s no kind of job at all for a bright boy like you! I shall have to see Mr. Priddis, of course, but I think I can talk him into it.”

  This was disappointing. I had forgotten for a moment that Uncle Reuben did not own the paper and printing office.

  “But everybody says you run the paper, Uncle Reuben,” I protested.

  “Everybody says wrong,” he replied gravely, “I only do as much as I do because Mr. Priddis hasn’t been very well lately. Now run along and don’t say anything to anyone until you hear from me.”

  I gave him my promise and went out the back way into the yard. Twenty-four hours later I was junior reporter on the Whinmouth & District Observer. Not content with riding two horses, I had cheerfully committed myself to riding three.

  In 1927 the Observer had a circulation of about three thousand. This doesn’t sound much but it was impressive for all that, as the local population did not exceed twelve thousand and we reckoned to sell an Observer to four out of every five houses in Whinmouth Bay.

  It was owned and nominally edited by Nick Priddis, a man in his mid-sixties and a chronic sufferer from asthma. People were not much mistaken in supposing Uncle Reuben to be the real editor, for Priddis’ ill-health had prevented him from active participation for some years and he spent most of his time in his cottage up the coast.

  Uncle Reuben did most of the original writing and I stress the word “original” because at that time less than a third of our copy was written by any member of the staff. About half of it was shamelessly snipped from the columns of the County Press, a much larger and more important journal, published biweekly in Whinford, the county town. Much of the remainder was sent in by local contributors who viewed the act of publication as adequate reward for their efforts.

  The economics of the paper baffled the uninitiated. Advertisement space was sold at two shillings an inch, and even less if the advertiser was a regular. The Observer sold at one penny but local news agents were charged eightpence a dozen, ninepence if we had to deliver. The ready money that did flow into the office came in via small ads, at threepence a line. Lists of wreaths in funeral reports and lists of wedding gifts in wedding reports were the main sources and petty cash was also supplied by the lucrative set pieces—births, deaths and marriage announcements and the “return thanks” panel that invariably followed a funeral. For the rest, the paper existed on quarterly payments for larger advertisements and on the steadier proceeds of its printing office.

  The Observer had a curiously old-fashioned format. Its front page was devoted exclusively to standard advertisements, built around a huge, blurred block depicting the Whinmouth esplanade as it had looked in the eighteen-seventies. This picture set the tone of the publication. One only had to glance at the bathing machines, the little girls in pantaloons and the lowering clouds in the background,to know that the inside pages would be solid wedges of close print, difficult to concentrate upon and impossible to skim. It gave the paper a dull, self-righteous aspect. It said, in effect: You may look in vain for sensation in here. Whatever is written down happened just so, whether you like it or not!

  Uncle Reuben was perfectly capable of going out and about town to collect information for the inside columns, but the printing office was the only one for miles around and his presence was needed there as supervisor. He therefore welcomed the idea of having a boy to send here and there for raw material that he could shape into news at his desk under the dirty skylight.

  Usually he only had to snip the reports from The Whinford Times, rewrite the introductions, change the headings and send the copy down to the keyboard operator to be used in our paper. This meant that most of the paper had to be printed in a single day and a night, and it was becoming clear to Uncle Reuben and his employer that the business would not stand the overtime rates entailed by this makeshift process. The mainstay of the firm was the printing office and my uncle was needed in there to set type and operate the keyboard for the Monotype.

  I had a brief interview with Mr. Priddis, the owner, on the day I started work and, although I was to see little of him during the years I worked on the paper, he impressed me as a man with original views on journalism. I never afterwards forgot his handling of my initiation.

  He looked like a Victorian actor, tall, spare, and all knees, knuckles and black eyebrows. He had a strong, resonant voice and punctuated his lecture with deft applications of a nasal spray, the use of which might have brought him physical relief but seemed to irritate him to a point of frenzy.

  “So you’re Reub’s boy? What’s your name? Well, I don’t imagine we shall see much of one another—curse this bloody contrivance—I’ve got a cottage up at Hartland and have to spend most of my time there. The air’s less oppressive, or so they tell me. Reub says you’ve got a nose for news. What do you say, hey? Drat this pestilential invention, don’t know why I use the damn thing—listen, sonny, since you’ve volunteered for the treadmill your uncle will expect you to put your back into it. People! That’s your job from now on, people around here—nowhere else, just around here—what they do, what they think, what they eat, what they wear, how they get on with their wives, how they don’t—devil take this blasted thing—nothing outside matters, see? Governments fall, war breaks out in South America, records are smashed—earthquakes, pla
gues, revolutions—none of it matters as much as who runs the woolly stall at the Missionary Sale of Work. There’s a coronation in Westminster Abbey—not your business! You’ve got your eye on the choice of a Carnival Queen right here, d’you follow? Curse this bloody squirt—that’s all, boy, that’s all!”

  It was, too, for Uncle Reuben had entered in with some proofs and jerked his head toward the door, indicating that the explosive interview was over. I made a bewildered exit and a few minutes later I was on my way to get an account of the Whinmouth Club’s away match, from the strongly partisan source of the man who won it by kicking a last-minute goal.

  Mine was no slow, painful apprenticeship wherein I was led, step by step, from the petty sessional court to a coroner’s inquest, from the interschool athletics contest in Harbor Meadow, to the autumn production of the Whinmouth Thespians. I was picked up and flung headlong into the torrent of local politics and social activities, hearing something fresh almost every hour and marveling at the complexity of what I witnessed and learned.

  To the impersonal spectator, Whinmouth Bay was a deceptively tranquil community—“dead-and-alive,” visitors called it—but to an inquiring boy, engaged in recording its day-by-day history, it seethed like a hot spring. I was so frantically busy during those first weeks, and so tired after my scurryings about the district and my two-hour stint at shorthand after supper, that I barely had time to think of Diana or Sennacharib. At first I was nervous of making mistakes and sometimes I was homesick for the humdrum peace of Uncle Luke’s Mart, but on the whole I enjoyed my new importance and a front-row seat at every event that took place in the triangle between the estuary of the Whin and the eastern edge of Teasel Common, the boundaries that marked the extremities of our territory.

  I was the impersonal witness at family tragedy and family celebration. I attended concerts, council meetings, lectures, sports meetings, dances and every kind of social function. I got to know every face in town and I saw the inside of every kind of dwelling, from the three-roomed cottages on the quay to the detached houses that stood in their own two-acre plots in the area west of the Shepherdshey road. I was absorbed in the business of becoming if not a writer, then at least a professionally observant chronicler of British provincial life and, as I say, I had almost forgotten how and why this transformation in my life had taken place until the morning that I received Diana’s letter.