Whinmouth Bay was expanding very quickly in those days and in the vanguard of its advance was a former jobbing builder, now a hotelier, called Singleton. Already a comparative newcomer like myself could notice changes about the town, evidence of Singleton’s reiterated boast to put Whinmouth on the map.
Through the early part of the twenties his had been a lone voice but now, as the first postwar decade drew to a close, he won over a group of adherents, small businessmen who felt that they stood to gain by equipping the town to cater for a bigger influx of holiday makers.
Thus, almost imperceptibly, Whinmouth began to lose its Peggotty qualities. The promenade was extended, neat flower beds and parking areas began to replace the sand hills, a council estate was built where the Foxhayes road entered the town, and a rough-hewn swimming bath took shape in a rocky natural basin east of the jetty.
I witnessed these changes without either resenting or welcoming them. Uncle Reuben was a progressive and lent the Observer’s weight to the business interests. Looking at Whinmouth Bay now, and remembering what it once was, I have the strongest sympathies with the old-fashioned councilors, men who fought a rear-guard action to keep the rates low and retain what was left of the town’s salty charm. I remember that Diana was more farsighted than I and argued strongly against the Singleton group at the time, pointing out that no amount of money or enterprise could convert our isolated community into a serious competitor with the big, established resorts and that we might as well nurse the benefits of that isolation as long as we could.
In this way we managed to see a good deal of one another but there is a curious blank in dating my memories from the first day and night of that summer holiday. I can recall a number of incidents but I can never assemble them in chronological order. Reckoning back, I know that when we met that first morning on the common I was fifteen and a half and Diana had just passed her fifteenth birthday, but from then until prior to her departure for Switzerland, a period of nearly two years, the development of a boy and girl friendship into that of young man and woman is confused and episodic. I am only sure that each highlight in our friendship taught me something new about her, filling a blank space in the picture of Diana that I carried about with me every waking hour. It was like coloring a printed outline in a child’s painting book, and the portrait was never wholly completed.
There was the day she asked me to row her over to Nun’s Island, the inviting conical rock that broke the surface of Nun’s Bay and lay about a mile from the mainland of Sennacharib’s coastal border.
I had asked Uncle Reuben to tell me about this islet and about the wreck that had given it its local name. He, in his grave way, had referred me to the files of the County Press, where I read all I could learn of the tragedy in which the vessel foundered during the southwesterly gale and all hands save one had been lost.
The grim story intrigued Diana and as we rowed along the coast from Whinmouth and struck out across the bay toward the island, she made me recount every detail. Was it a paddle steamer, like the one Grace Darling went after? How many nuns were drowned? How many crew? Did they find all the bodies? Was there any salvage? Who was the survivor, and what explanation did he give of the calamity?
I told her all I knew, and she was particularly interested in the recovery of the bodies, all but two of the crew having been found during the next few days and buried in a common grave at Whinmouth Churchyard. I had to promise to take her to see this grave and then she wanted to know if the two missing bodies were ever found. I had been saving this as a dramatic climax and told her that they had come to light years later, a pair of clean skeletons, found by Crusoe Jack, the lobsterman who once lived on the islet as a recluse and remained there until comparatively recent times. These two sailors were Negroes, firemen or greasers who had been trapped below when the vessel wedged itself on the rocks, and their skeletons were found after a particularly heavy gale had smashed the remaining timbers of the wreck and uncovered a deep drift of sand between the ridges.
“What happened to them then?” she demanded, her eyes shining with interest.
“Crusoe Jack buried them up near the trees,” I told her, nodding to the tiny copse of pine and dwarf oak that crowned the highest part of the island.
“You mean they were actually buried in unconsecrated ground?”
“Well yes, I suppose so. Uncle Reuben told me that Crusoe Jack—he was as crazy as a coot—didn’t say anything about finding them for months and then nobody bothered to have them dug up again and examined. I read the adjourned inquest report in the County Press and after Jack had described how and where he found them, the coroner said he saw no point in exhuming them and carting them over to the mainland churchyard; it had all happened so long ago.”
“Well, I think that’s terrible!” exclaimed Diana, to my great surprise. “I think we ought to do something about it.—
“What on earth can we do?” I protested.
She thought for a moment, biting her lip, and then, as our skiff grounded on the tiny beach about a hundred yards west of the wreck, she jumped into the shallows and ran ashore shouting, “Come and show me the graves, Jan!”
We went up a gully and climbed the knoll to the trees. Apart from a magnificent view there wasn’t much to see. The island was about two hundred yards long by a hundred yards wide, and the slopes below the knoll, which boasted some twenty trees, was covered with couch grass and a low, fungus type of scrub. On the southern slope, facing the open sea, was the ruin I recognized as Crusoe Jack’s shanty, now nothing but a roofless structure of pine boughs and driftwood, with a stone chimney and a pebbled floor. We poked about for a spell and eventually found the graves or rather grave, for there was a single mound with a cross fashioned from driftwood, now leaning at an angle of forty-five degrees. She stood and stared down at it for so long that my own interest began to wane; I was more eager to inspect what remained of the actual wreck.
“He didn’t even carve the names,” she said at last. “Good Lord, Jan, they bury dogs with more dignity and I’ll tell you the heart of the matter, it’s because they were only black men!”
This aspect of the resumed inquest had not occurred to me and I readily agreed that the lack of ceremony was probably due to the fact that the two men had belonged to some other religion—that, and the lapse of years between the sensation of the wreck and their discovery as a pile of bones. Suddenly she caught me by the arm and I recognized the expression that always heralded some extraordinary and involved plan.
“Can you get off tomorrow evening and bring the boat along as far as the landslip below Nun’s Head, Jan? I could meet you there and we could do it. … I’ll have all the things we shall need and I can ride over on Sioux. I’ll hobble her in the meadow, behind the Pilot Inn, and pick her up on the way back.”
“Well yes,” I told her, quite bewildered, “I could row along and pick you up easily enough but—”
“Don’t ask any more questions now, Jan,” she said imperatively. “I’m not sure whether I can manage it without help, but I’d like to try and I’d like to do this on my own—all on my own, do you understand?”
She would not explain any further and seemed then to dismiss the fate of the two Negro firemen, dragging me down the gully to the humps that were all that remained of the wreck and pointing out the barnacle-covered frame that had once been the paddle wheel of the vessel. She seemed preoccupied during the pull back to Whinmouth and when we said good-by and she rode off on the gardener’s ill-used bicycle, she seemed hardly to be aware of me until I called after her and reminded her of our appointment the following day.
“That’s right,” she said, “about five o’clock! I’ll be here on the beach.”
She was, too, a lonely little figure, squatting on a lobster pot, with the great red wall of Nun’s Head rising behind her like a backcloth in a pantomime. As I pulled around the rocks and hailed her she jumped up, flourishing what looked like a cross, of the kind Peter the Hermit held in my illustrat
ed volume of The Crusades.
“What on earth have you got there?” I asked, noting that she was in a high state of excitement, so much so that she could not wait for me to beach the skiff but dashed into the water and flung herself down in the stern, nearly upsetting us.
“We’re going to have a proper burial service,” she said. “It’s high time it was read, and you’re going to officiate! I’d like to do it myself, of course, but as I’m a woman it wouldn’t be right; it would seem too much like a joke and this isn’t a joke, it’s terribly in earnest.”
I gaped at her for a moment and then looked more closely at the cross. It was neatly jointed, freshly varnished, and finished off with plain black lettering that read: Two Unknown Seamen. R.I.P.
She watched me nervously as I examined it and then, when I looked at her, she began to blush, looking so adorably pretty and confused that my throat went dry and I wanted to fall on my knees before her, kiss her hands and tell her what a lovely, exciting girl she was and how proud I was to act as her partner in such an enterprise.
“Then you … you don’t think it’s silly, do you, Jan?”
“No,” I said, truthfully, “I think you’re very wonderful to think of it, Diana.”
She was pleased with that and we rowed out to the islet in silence, a silence we enjoyed. When we had beached the boat and thrown out the anchor she took my hand and led me along the high-water mark to gather anemones, and then, as the sun touched the rim of the bay and sent a flood of red-hot brass across the water, we climbed the knoll and replaced Crusoe Jack’s rotting pole with our cross. I remembered then that I knew barely a word of the burial service and mentioned as much, almost in a whisper. The hush, the solemnity of the act, and Diana’s nervous excitement had combined to extinguish the last sparks of frolic from the occasion.
“I’ve thought of that,” she said and from a satchel worn as a shoulder bag she produced a handsomely bound Book of Common Prayer, with the silk marker inserted in Service for the Burial of the Dead.
She placed the anemones at the foot of the cross and then took her place at the foot of the grave, first covering her head with a white scarf and tying the ends under her chin.
“Go on, Jan,” she prompted, very gently, “don’t be afraid.” And when I still hesitated, fumbling with the prayer book: “You needn’t think God doesn’t approve, I’m sure He does. I’m quite sure He put the whole thing into my head!”
I was grateful for this assurance and at once began to read, clumsily at first but with mounting confidence. I remember shuddering a little when I came to the passage about worms destroying the body, but I cheerfully raised my voice on the cadences of the Ninetieth Psalm. When I had worked through to the piece preceding the final prayer Diana spoke the responses and our voices rose together in that quiet, lonely place, with only a curious herring gull as an audience. When at length I closed the book and coughed with returning embarrassment, I noticed that her eyes were brimming with tears but I was too near shedding them myself to remark upon the fact. She said, after an awkward pause, “Thank you, Jan dear, you read it quite beautifully,” and she took my hand, squeezing it as we walked through the soft sand to the boat.
I lay awake a long time that night pondering what we had done. It seemed to me that the incident had revealed an entirely different Diana from the girl whose exploits included thwarting her mother, tearing about on horses and poking fun at the conventions piled up around her.
It seemed that I had stumbled across a Diana in whom a religious training was something more than a convention, someone who took her recent confirmation seriously, who had an adult sympathy for the friendless and underprivileged, and I wondered if this helped to explain her championship of me when I was in the grip of Keeper Croker’s half nelson, or her deep humility after the quarrel we had at the stable. I fell asleep at last, luxuriating in the memory of Diana standing with downcast head, her back to the sea, her white scarf fluttering in the evening breeze, and somehow, in trough of sleep, this endearing memory transformed itself into a picture of Diana standing in her bridal veil before the altar at Oare Church. She was undoubtedly Lorna but I was not conscious of standing beside her as a devoted Jan.
2.
Not all my recollections of Diana’s exploits at this period in our lives were as solemn or serene as the latter-day burial service. One particularly is in direct contrast, an uproarious occasion about which I can never think without a chuckle.
This was the intrusion of Alice, the prize sow, into the Conservative Fete held in the grounds of Heronslea, and it revealed to me yet another aspect of Diana, the reckless practical joker, forerunner of the Bright Young Thing who intrigued British newspaper readers a year or so later.
It must have been during the early summer of 1931, when the country was approaching the financial crisis that unseated MacDonald’s short-lived government. The Whinmouth constituency was predominantly Conservative and had never returned anyone but a Conservative Member. Our Member at this time was Major Fayne, a terse, soldierly man and, as might be expected, high in favor at Heronslea House where he was a frequent visitor.
Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton was a very active Conservative. She was president of the Constituency’s Women’s Association, and organizer of a seasonal succession of Conservative functions, one of which was the annual May Fayre, an ambitious project organized for the dual purpose of raising funds and propagating the gospel according to Stanley Baldwin and Mabel Gayelorde-Sutton.
I attended all these functions as a matter of course and had already acquired the journalist’s blasé indifference to politics, regarding them more as a source of copy than the means of advertising a social system under a party banner. It was shortly before the advent of aggressive fascism and fascism’s chief exponent at that time, the lamented Benito Mussolini, was regarded as a huge joke by Conservatives, Liberals, and Socialists alike.
As the date for the May Fayre approached, marquees and sideshows sprouted on the broad lawns of Heronslea House, and Diana, together with some of the more socially elevated young locals, were enlisted as usherettes, all the girls being attired in the Quaker uniform of high bodice, gray ankle-length skirt and starched headdress.
Diana did not take kindly to this form of regimentation and the fuss, the uniform, and the inroads these events made into her freedom had already colored her political outlook.
“It’s absolutely daft!” she complained to me, the evening before the Fayre, when I had slipped over to Heronslea on the pretext of getting advance data. “Quakers and Puritans weren’t Conservatives, were they? They lopped poor old Charles’ head off, didn’t they? And a good job too, if he was anything like Major Fayne and all the old hens who cackle around him up here. Talk, talk, talk, all about what’s happening to their filthy money! As if that was the only thing that mattered to the country! You aren’t a Conservative, are you, Jan? I shall loathe you if you say you are!”
I said I supposed that I was a Liberal, like my Uncle Reuben, but she declared that she was going to vote Red when she was twenty-one and that what was needed anyway in Parliament were lots more women who would not be so beastly careful of their dignity. By this I inferred that Diana inclined to the Left because her mother was so staunchly Right.
“If they must put us in fancy dress,” she went on, “we ought to look like orange girls, at the time of Nell Gwyn, you know—something off the shoulder, to get the men to buy more programs and draw tickets and suchlike!” She looked despairingly at the array of tents and stalls that had transformed the broad sweep between the terrace and the Shepherdshey road into a genteel fairground. “Well,” she added, “I’m praying for rain. That’ll put the kibosh on everything!”
“It rained last year,” I told her, “but they all crowded into the marquee to hear the Member’s address. You couldn’t breathe in there and Uncle Reuben said they didn’t give him elbow room to write notes.”
At the thought of a damp and dripping fiasco she cheered a little. “Come and
say hello to Alice,” she invited, and when I inquired into the identity of Alice, she told me that Alice was the Heronslea prize sow who, together with a lusty litter, was being offered by Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton for the fete skittle prize.
Alice was the kind of prize that only Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton would offer. She was undoubtedly the largest pig in the West. Penned in a temporary sty under the avenue beeches, she lumbered to and fro like a malevolent dinosaur, herding her squealing litter out of range of Diana’s bamboo cane and grunting maledictions on those who had transferred her from a comfortable paddock sty to a few square yards of unfamiliar enclosure.
“I love pigs,” said Diana, dreamily, “they’re so gloriously antisocial. She’s very unhappy in there. Do you think we could let her out and give her a bit of a root around under the trees?”
“No jolly fear,” I told her. “You leave her where she is! She looks a killer to me and if she got loose there would be hell to pay and I’d be sure to get mixed up in it somehow.”
“Well,” said Diana, “I’ll tell you what, the minute old Pumpjaw”—this was Diana’s pet name for the Honorable and Gallant Gentleman representing Whinmouth—“pauses for breath, and all the other old pumpkins on the platform start billing and cooing, you nip out to the old coach house, I’ll meet you there with some choice refreshments and wine. The only thing good about this show-off is the grub, it’s going to be scrumptious!”
I promised to keep the appointment and went about my business. The following morning a glance at the sky told me that Diana’s prayers were about to be answered. By midday the rain had begun to fall, lightly at first but very heavily by midafternoon, the time fixed for the Member’s address. Provision had been made for this contingency and everyone crowded into the vast marquee. By the time Major Fayne had got under way the heat inside the tent was suffocating, the sour smell of wet canvas and crushed grass combining with that emanating from the clothes of three hundred damp constituents, packed on benches each side of a narrow gangway.
Diana Page 16
