Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  His son watched him digging, and using the wooden scraper. He remembered where Daddy’s spade was placed after use, up against a corner in the wall of the house, and went into the garden the next morning, a Monday, to do likewise. The spade being too much for him, he concentrated on the scraper. He prodded the clay with it, squatting intently, for a while; he was digging with a spade. He splashed it in the pail, and dug until he remembered his golliwog, and went indoors to get it. In the kitchen the piece of wood became a poker, to be put between the bars of the kitchen range, as he had watched his mother doing. He drew it forth alight; it hurt his finger; he dropped it with a yell, and ran out of the room. The glowing end fumed on the stone base below the range.

  Hetty was making the beds upstairs. After a while, the boy came back, remembering the Daddy-thing. He gave it to Golly to dig with, and at six o’clock it was floating beside him in his night-night bath, before the kitchen fire. It went with him, being a Daddy-thing, and therefore part of his life, with Golly and Hanky in his cot. His mother took it from his hand when he was asleep, and, not recognising it, burnt it on the open fire, which the range became with the side flaps pulled out, ready for Dickie’s homecoming.

  That evening, going out with goloshes over his boots to do some digging, Richard missed his scraper. He spent the best part of an hour before twilight in wondering where he could have put it. He returned indoors perplexed. Was his memory beginning to fail? Where could he have put it? Again and again as he read the Daily Trident his mind wandered to the little piece of carved wood. He asked Hetty if she had seen it when she was in the garden.

  No, Hetty had seen nothing like it. Eventually, unable to settle to the newspaper, he lit his dark lantern and went prowling in the garden, again without result. When he came into the house once more, the boy was crying, calling “Daddy, Daddy!” from his cot. Touched by the appeal, Richard went upstairs to be with him, feeling concerned lest he might have had a nightmare. The child was sitting up, wild-eyed, sucking his finger which had a blister on the top. He had dreamed of everything being red, a deep glowing red, the ning-a-ning man, the ning-a-ning man’s hat, the ning-a-ning, and all the houses. What puzzled him was why Mummie and Daddy were not red, too.

  Richard went to his room to fetch a bar of Callard and Bowser’s butterscotch, his favourite sweetmeat. Returning to the cot, by which Hetty was sitting, her cheek against the boy’s soft, warm hair, he took his ivory-handled pen-knife from his waistcoat pocket and, holding the silver bar across the palm of his left hand, gave it a precise blow to crack it clearly across. While he was unpeeling the fragment he again spoke to Hetty about the missing scraper.

  “Where could I have mislaid it? Did I put it back in the clip? Surely I did. Can you recall if you noticed it on the handle of the spade as you passed that way? Who hung out the washing? Not you, surely, in your condition?”

  “No, dear, Mrs. Feeney hung it out. I did not notice it, I am afraid.”

  “Are you sure you know the piece of wood I mean?”

  “I think so, Dickie. It was what you were carving by the kitchen fire the other night, wasn’t it?”

  Then with a start, which was received by the boy, Hetty realised that it must have been the piece of wood Sonny had been playing with during the day. It was what he had pushed between the bars of the fire.

  As his mother looked at him, the child’s eyes opened wider, feeling her anxiety, though he had no notion of the direct cause of it.

  From within the safety of her arms the child looked at the world-filling face of his father. He understood what he had been saying, but did not connect it with his own digging, the splashing in the pail, the poker: he had forgotten the Daddy-thing, with Golly and Hanky safe in bed with him. Looking at Daddy’s face, he had the same feeling he had had from the Daddy-thing, and now from the Daddy-sweet he sucked, removing it between finger and thumb to look at it for the greater pleasure of putting it back in his mouth.

  *

  The child did what the father did because his wonder was stirred and he was happy with all he saw Daddy doing. The small man coming to see the big man, the son tottering on his feet with joyous cries towards the father, the child approaching with arms held out for balance, his mind showing itself in his eager face and attitude, the idea of Father and the idea of Father’s things, which the son was beginning to know as things apart, though very close together. So interest in Father was, as consciousness grew, less than the interest in Father’s things; even so, all were Father.

  Thoughts of and for Father came into the son’s mind as geological strata were formed upon the earth, in surge upon surge of energy, impressed by following feelings: the uniform layers of slow sedimentary life, alike with the faults and breaks of fiery upheaval, involving criticism, fear, resentment and, finally, schism. This had happened in Richard’s young life; it was to happen, without the father’s knowledge, in Phillip’s young life.

  Richard used to say at this time, “He is after property, the little rascal!” as a joke. Later, it became no joke.

  *

  Walking about the house in the mornings, the child imagined himself to be that wonderful thing, Daddy. Thus he sought Daddy’s pipes in the rack on the wall above the table, near Daddy’s green armchair, and though the smell and taste checked him, he put one of the curved briars in his mouth as he sat in the chair being Daddy. Then “Book! Book!” he said, and got down to fetch one from the pile in the downstairs lavatory, and carried it, pipe in mouth and goloshes dragging on his feet, to the armchair. Pipe in mouth, newspaper held upside down, one rubber over-boot still held by a foot, he was Daddy reading Book to Mummy.

  Creeping to the open door, Hetty listened to a recognisable rigmarole.

  “Julibee julibee Ol’ Q’een bike bike bike haha haha bile inn ninganing ding dong penny bike bike book no no! F’ee T ’ade donkey boy Daddy man in Moo’, all gone, all gone,” while she thought, Oh, Sonny loves his father so much.

  Richard’s bicycle stood in the lavatory. In admiration and emulation of Daddy, the child spun the pedals, tried to make the cyclometer go click click click, tried to climb up and tinkle the bell. He clambered on the lavatory seat. Tinkle tinkle tinkle was heard by Hetty in the kitchen. There was a cry, a clash of metal, and then wailing. The emulator had slipped, pulled the cycle over, and was wedged in the porcelain pan.

  “Oh, what have you done, Sonny! You must never never never touch your father’s things again!”

  “No, no,” he agreed, solemnly, holding up arms to be raised from the otherwise immovable position.

  “Daddy’s things, not for Sonny! Daddy will be angry if you are a naughty boy, Sonny!”

  He grizzled with the feel of cold water, the big white slippery hole, and Mummy cross with Sonny.

  “No, no! All gone, all gone, all gone!”

  “That’s a good boy. You must not touch Daddy’s things, Sonny, for Mummy’s sake.”

  “No, no,” he repeated, with earnest solemnity. She removed socks and shoes, washed his feet and dried them, and took him up to his cot. When he was safely settled in with Hanky, Golly, and Thumb, she returned downstairs to see if any of the enamel, or the plating of the handlebars, had been scratched. With relief she saw that no damage had been done to the precious Starley Rover.

  *

  The child did love the father. One of his joys was to get into bed beside Daddy and Mummy on Sunday mornings. He lay between them, Golly beside him, with no thought of Hanky. Once Richard tickled him for fun, but the child’s laughter came to the verge of hysteria, and so he did not do it again. He was careful not to include the child too warmly in his affection, and so the child never merged as it were into the father, to draw from him the vital warmth, to become one flesh, the basis of natural feeling. Richard was too scrupulous; he was also shy; the child did not want to snuggle into him, so he responded likewise. He felt, when he saw the child wanting to be cuddled by his mother, a little out of it.

  One morning when he put his head ne
ar the child’s, which lay on the mother’s shoulder, Phillip pushed him away. Immediately Richard withdrew into himself. Soon afterwards he got up, and without a word went into the next room, to dress and go downstairs, and so to dig in the garden. He felt that neither wife nor son wanted him.

  As a fact, the child’s action was wholly instinctive, as was his habit of imitating his father. Later, the child’s habit of seeking his father by imitation in acts with his father’s things was to be observed and misinterpreted and checked as a bad habit; then to be punished as the vice of stealing, under the commonplace thought of spare the rod and spoil the child; and by this punishment the natural feeling for his father was sealed-off, and the son became, at an early age, as aggrieved in spirit as was the father.

  The child cried easily: he could laugh, too, until the tears came. But his grief went deep, the tears pouring in silence down his face. His Aunt Dorrie discovered this, and sometimes pretended to cry, just to see Phillip’s eyes grow round, his face to pucker, his tears to run. Hetty begged her sister not to do it; for the child’s strength, like Dickie’s too, she said, could easily run out.

  Chapter 3

  A MIND OF ONE’S OWN

  RICHARD told Hetty, before Minne came, that she was a sensible, practical woman, who would bring up the little fellow to be himself.

  “Like a vegetable, with its own juices well inside its skin, and a hardened skin, too, to protect him from the pandering of others.”

  Hetty supposed that the “others” were herself, Dorrie, Mrs. Feeney, and Mamma—all of whom had, in one way or another, been the subject of his criticism. She herself had been accused of making Sonny a namby-pamby, because, when he was restless at night sometimes, and had lost Hanky, he called out to her to hold his hand through the bars of his cot. “’An’ Mummie, ’an’ Mummie, ’an’ Mummie,” the plaintive voice requested. This had sometimes kept Dickie awake, and he needed his eight hours of sleep every night.

  “Leave the child alone, it is only a bad habit, wanting to cling to you, and the longer you keep it up, the more he will require it.”

  “’An’ Mummie p’e, ’an’ Mummie p’e, ’an’ Mummie p’e,” the voice often pleaded in the darkness of the night room, faintly lit by the wan beams of the lamp-post half-way down Hillside Road.

  Once the please touched the father.

  “Dash it all, he is being polite, so we must not disappoint him,” and Richard got out of bed, tall and thin in his long white night-dress, and took the boy into bed beside him. “Anky! Anky!”

  “You don’t want that old rag when you have Daddy to keep you warm, Phil,” whispered Richard. He held him against his chest, but the child was restless, and being told to lie quiet, tried to do so. He lay unnaturally still, while Hetty suffered beside him, knowing his feeling of being held against his will, almost of imprisonment. Tears flowed in the room of wan slatted light penetrating the venetian blinds.

  Back into his cot the child went, with a warning to lie still and go to sleep like a good boy. But the good boy, now in disintegration of darkness, became the naughty boy. Silent weeping broke into sobs.

  “’An’ Mummie p’e, ’an’ Mummie p’e, ’an’ Mummie p’e!”

  Hetty herself was lying unnaturally still, keeping back her tears. A prolonged sigh from Richard; an edge of irritability in the voice pronouncing, “Tomorrow he must be put by himself in the next room. He will have to learn to rely on himself sooner or later.” He tried to settle to sleep; but detecting misery all around him, finally sat up in bed.

  “What, are you crying, too? Oh, my lord! Two cry-babies together!”

  “No, Dickie, I was thinking of the Old Queen. I don’t know why, but she came into my head. She must be so very, very weary.”

  “Oh, rot! What has she got to do with it?”

  Hetty summoned up her resolution to say, “Perhaps I should sleep alone with Sonny just now, dear. I think he is teething. And he is so very very nervous by himself.”

  Richard promptly got out of bed. “It is your husband who will have to be banished, I can see that!” He opened the connecting door between the bedroom and the dressing-room. “Now you will be able to hold your best boy’s hand to your heart’s content!” he called out. The connecting door was closed.

  *

  Minne, or Minnie as she was called, arrived a fortnight later. She set herself to work within ten minutes of her arrival. Everything she undertook she did with all her energy. Hetty soon found that Minnie wanted things done in ways different from her own. Minnie had a passion for an almost disconcerting cleanliness.

  From the front door to the beginning of the path between the burnt glass-and-clay border was a passage called the porch. It was covered by a glass verandah supported on iron posts standing on a low brick wall above the Bigges’ equivalent passage below. The porch was paved with terra-cotta pavors, a dozen yards of them. Minnie decided that these must be cleaned daily. She not only swabbed them, as Mrs. Feeney had done twice a week, but she scrubbed them with carbolic soap and hot water. Only thus should the hochgeboren’s path be cleaned. In black bodice and voluminous yellow skirt, Minnie on her knees scrubbed and scrubbed, before wiping each octagonal pavor smooth and dry.

  It was the same in the kitchen. She was respectful to Hetty, she observed a punctilious regard for what she was asked to do; but she did it her own way, until soon Hetty felt she was no longer mistress in her own house. Minnie seemed to imply that everything Hetty did was done in a wrong manner. Boots must not be cleaned in the scullery, for the dust would settle on the plates in the wooden rack above the sink. They must be cleaned outside, on the steps, above the pit where the coke was shot by the coal-men, who carried their bags all around the outside of the house.

  There was an iron-framed gas-stove beside the kitchen range. Minnie cleaned this several times each day. No bicarbonate of soda must be put in the greens. Ach, their goodness would be killed! Of course the greens-water must be used for stock. It was good for baby. Greens-water! Hetty usually carried the cast-iron cooking pot round the corner, and with the lid pressed against the greens, poured the smelly water into the rainwater drain beside the corner where Dickie’s garden tools stood in a row. This is what cook had always done at home, for to pour it away into the sink caused a bad smell in the pipe.

  Then no fat from the roasting pan must be poured into tea-cups, to stand and harden in the larder. Fat must be poured into a special basin, kept for the purpose. It was bad to peel potatoes. They should be scrubbed, and roasted in their jackets, to retain the goodness.

  Minnie washed her hands a score of times a day. If she so much as lifted Phillip into his go-cart, or tall feeding chair, she would wash her hands before doing anything else. Mrs. Feeney must not bang mats against the wall outside, to knock out the dust. Mats must be taken down the garden, laid on their faces upon the site of the lawn, and assiduously tapped, tapped, tapped, with a stick, to loosen the dust. Thus the soil would be improved. Minnie seemed to have inexhaustible energy, and an undeviating desire for cleanliness, order, and correctness. Every time she blew her nose on a handkerchief she washed her hands. That was perhaps right, but why did she make life so hard for herself?

  Minnie slept in the eastern bedroom, with Phillip in his cot beside her bed. One afternoon, when Hetty went upstairs, she was surprised to hear Minnie sobbing behind her closed door. The sound was audible down the passage, with the four doors along its length, the last of which was the night nursery.

  Hetty hesitated, drawn by the desire to comfort Minnie. But what if Minnie wanted to cry alone? Had she said anything to hurt Minnie’s feelings? Hetty decided that she ought to pretend that she had heard nothing.

  The puzzle of Minnie remained. Why did she insist on working so hard? Was it, as Dickie had said, because she was a German, with higher standards of cleanliness and order than those of the rest of the world? Minnie was quite old, of course; she must be fifty at least. Old people were different from young people. Her own papa was fift
y-six next birthday; Dickie’s Papa had died at fifty-three, and his mother at fifty-one. Minnie had been in England since she was a young girl, with Dickie’s mother, so she must be nearing fifty.

  One evening, when Hetty heard the sounds of crying again, she walked softly in her slippered feet down the passage and listened at the door. There was a double sound of weeping, or rather a lesser moaning accompanying the crying; and, somewhat agitated, Hetty knocked on the door, saying, “Are you all right, Minnie? May I come in? Is anything the matter, dear?”

  After a pause the door was opened, and Minnie’s red eyes and wet smiling face greeted her. Behind her, Sonny’s face was a picture of woe.

  “What has happened, Minnie? Why is Phillip crying? Has he been naughty? Surely not.”

  “Oh no, Gnadige Frau!” said Minnie. “He is so anschaulic, he is sad because his pflegemutter is sad, that is all. Ach, mein lieber Phillip, here is your real mother come to see you, so weep no more.”