“Well, you are big enough to look after your Mother and Mavis and Doris on the journey.”
“Yes, Aunty Bigge. I have some money, and I am going to buy a Pluck library, and if you promise not to tell Father, also a Union Jack library, and the Boy’s Friend.”
“I won’t tell him, dear. But ought you to go against your father’s wishes, if he doesn’t want you to read such things?”
“I don’t care.”
Mrs. Bigge looked at the boy. More than once on hearing his cries as he was being caned Mrs. Bigge had had to go away to another part of her house and try and think about other things. Mr. Maddison, she knew, considered that the reading of “bloods” inspired his son to mischief.
“But you ought to care, dear, for your mother’s sake. You must try and be a good boy, now that you are growing up. There now, you think Aunty Bigge is preaching, don’t you, eh?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well, do try, dear. You see, if you are disobedient it worries your mother, and then Father is angry with her for not being sterner with you, and so your mother is made very unhappy. But you know that, don’t you, dear?”
Only the ear-flaps of the deerstalker, tied across the crown, were visible now from the lower side of the fence.
“There now, I’ve made you close up. How nice it will be with your cousins, won’t it?”
After a pause the boy said:
“Percy has a gun, and he can shoot bats.”
“Are you going to shoot bats, too? Is that why you’re wearing that hat?”
“Yes, Aunty Bigge. It is a bat-stalking hat. You see, I want to stuff a bat and put it in a glass case, in my museum.”
There was the sound of a window opening high up in the wall of the house. Immediately the boy flitted round the corner, out of sight. Hetty looked down upon the scene below from the yellow brick cliff.
“Oh, good morning, Mrs. Bigge!”
Phillip reappeared, without the hat.
“Ah, there you are, there’s a good boy! I was afraid Sonny had run away again,” she said, with an apologetic laugh. “Come along, dear, and help me bring the bags downstairs. The outside porter will be here soon, and we must catch our train, mustn’t we, Mrs. Bigge?”
“That’s right, dear. Sonny has been saying good-bye to me, like the little gentleman he is. Now run along, dear, and help your mother.”
Phillip ran off, feeling good that Mrs. Bigge had called him a little gentleman.
Ten minutes later the outside porter from Randiswell Station was wheeling his iron-wheeled trolley down the steep asphalt pavement of Hillside Road. There were three bags, two of white rush secured with brown straps, and a larger portmanteau of leather and brown canvas.
Richard was going to look after himself during the fortnight his family would be away. He did not want Mrs. Feeney to come during that time, and had declined Mrs. Bigge’s invitation to have his meals with them. He was looking forward to a spell of quiet by himself.
Grannie Turney went with them to the station, pushing the go-cart in which sat the youngest, Doris. Wanting to be apart, Phillip walked in front. Across his shoulder was slung his new satchel, in which were his own particular treasures, and a special packet of banana sandwiches. He had planned to ride in a carriage by himself, and to climb up into the rack. There he saw himself reading the new Pluck Library with the dark lantern beside him, the Sherlock Holmes hat on his head, the blinds down.
The hat and lantern were packed in his satchel. He had discovered them in the tin trunk in the attic above the bathroom ceiling. He had explored all the attic, from the gable in front where there were chinks of light, the chirp of nesting sparrows, and dim remote street noises, to the water-tank in the middle, and the joists at the other end over his bedroom. There were many interesting things hidden in the attic, among them a very heavy and old round leather case with red silk inside, and an old top hat fitted into it. There was a long narrow wooden case with fishing rods in it, and leather pocket-books of fish-hooks with flies on them. There were small boxes filled with brass gimp with swivels and treble hooks fixed to them. There were little painted fish above the treble hooks, made of fish-skin. There was a pile of yellow butterfly boxes. And in the long japanned tin trunk were some clothes, a soldier’s uniform, red jacket with things like gold shell-fish on the shoulder straps, and a funny pair of boots. At the other end of the trunk he had come across the deerstalker hat and the bull’s-eye lantern. In the tin trunk was a big violin bow, three black leather books with writing in them, and some photographs. The photographs were of no interest: but the detective’s hat and lantern were a wonderful find. He was taking them to show Cousin Percy, who had a real gun with which to shoot birds, bats and rabbits.
Led by Phillip, the procession went down Charlotte Road, where the black branches of the horse-chestnuts were glistening with big buds brown as toffee apples. Phillip had discovered that they were no good to eat. He and Gerry had climbed up one tree and picked some, finding them sticky and nasty. Gerry had spoken of a fortune by using the gum for flypapers. Perhaps they could sell the discovery to Grandpa? Meanwhile some of the collected samples had been fitted as heads of arrows, to be shot at other boys with their string-and-bamboo bows. A window had been broken in Charlotte Road. Running into Gerry’s house, the cousins had hastened upstairs, to climb through an upper window and so to hide on the high brick wall dividing the lean-to sculleries of the paired houses.
Now, as he passed by the house, Phillip looked up and saw that the window was still broken. He looked the other way, in case someone was spying.
*
Sarah Turney, now sixty-two years old, left Hetty at the bottom of Charlotte Road, kissing her and the little girls good-bye—Phillip would not come to be kissed—went into No. 202, to visit her eldest daughter Dorothy. She had two sovereigns in her purse to give to Dorrie. Unknown to Tom, who already made his daughter a monthly allowance, to augment the very small pension she received as the widow of a trooper, Sarah gave her something extra every month. Sidney Cakebread’s firm had been generous when he had died in the South African war; they had paid his widow two years’ salary in monthly instalments: but this money was now spent.
Hubert, the eldest boy, had left school and was working in the Firm, living at home; while the second boy, Ralph, considered by his grandfather to be a poor specimen, was being educated at the West Kent Grammar School on the Hill. Gerry, the youngest boy, had been sent to the council school in Wakenham Road, to win a scholarship to a secondary school. Phillip was to join him after the Easter holidays.
The decision to send Phillip to an elementary school had been taken by Richard and Hetty only after some perturbation and argument, following on Hetty’s failure to get a presentation for the school on which she had set her heart since before he was born—Christ’s Hospital, in Charterhouse Square. However, things would not be so bad when Sonny had won a scholarship: perhaps the two years among the very poor children who went to the council school would not, as she dreaded, turn him into an unruly boy, with bad habits of speech and behaviour.
“Well,” Richard had said, “all schools were free schools, in the old days. I have done my best with the boy, to give him an idea of how to conduct himself; but your leniency towards him has countered all my efforts. Taking sides with him as you have done, exonerating his bad behaviour, only makes matters worse. Well, if his behaviour gets worse at the school, I cannot help it. I have done my best, and have apparently failed, as far as Phillip is concerned. And while you continue to side with him against me, I cannot see how things can ever improve.”
“Oh, Dickie, how can you say I go against your wishes? I am always telling Sonny to be good, and not to touch your things.”
*
The fact was the boy listened neither to his father, nor to his mother. Once, and once only, had Hetty caned him. She was looking out of her bedroom window while she was making the bed one morning when she saw, to her horror, Phillip across the road, with Ma
vis, behaving in a most shocking manner against the park railings. In shame, anger, and desperation she had run downstairs and across the road, to grip their arms and drag them into the house. Phillip had never seen his mother so angry before, and was for the first time in his life scared by her: by the look on her face, especially at the way she showed her teeth.
“You bad, bad boy, you! I sometimes wonder if you are not my son after all! How dare you behave like that, for all the neighbours to see!”
Phillip was too over-awed to say that they had only been pretending to be dogs, and that Father had told him liquid manure was good for grass. To Phillip’s dismay and incredulity his mother had taken him upstairs, got the long thin cane from the wardrobe in the front bedroom, and chased him into his bedroom. There he had gone to ground under the bed, where she had swished the cane to get him out. He had held on to the end, saying, “I’ll tell Father of you, using his cane without permission!”
When he had seen she was serious, he had ceased to evade her. He had done what he was told: taken down his trousers, and lain on the bed. He looked at her with a puzzled look as she stood above him, the cane raised.
Hetty gave him one cut. She had not struck hard, for when he was half-naked, remorse for the utter perplexity in his face had overcome her. She felt she was betraying him. But she must not weaken now, for his sake. She had compromised with one cut. As the cane came down he put his hand over his bottom, and it struck him across the back of the fingers. He buried his face in the bedclothes, all resistance gone.
“There now, Sonny, I did not mean to hurt you, dear, but you must be a good boy; you are driving your father and me to distraction. Please try and be a good boy in future, won’t you?”
Seeing her distress, his emotion set upon its course: he would hide himself away, and not eat any more food until he died. He got over the other side of the bed and under it again, to lie still on the floor. Hetty had left him, and gone to speak to Mavis, who was boo-hoo’ing in her bedroom.
When she had returned to Phillip, after half an hour, during which no sound had come from upstairs, she had found the door locked. She asked him to open the door and to come down and be a good boy again. Silence. Surely he had not become ill? She was always afraid that, with his highly strung nature, coupled with the fact that before his birth Papa had knocked her down and she had remained unconscious for several hours, any sudden shock might injure his brain. Supposing he was lying in a fit, and it was all her fault? Oh, why had she used the cane?
Hetty knew in her heart that it was wrong to punish young children. Theodora, who had started her school in Somerset, had written in a letter, received three months ago, that many of the ills in life, a waywardness and tendency to wrong-doing and violence, were in many cases to be attributed to severities in childhood, imposed upon tender minds by unknowing parents. It had been a bewildering, disturbing letter. Could such a thing be happening to her little boy, already so afraid of his father, to make him estranged from his mother, the one who loved him more than anyone else in the world! And worse, he might be lying there, behind the locked door, unconscious!
Hetty tapped on the door again. She listened. There was no sound inside the bedroom. The key was not even in the lock. Perhaps he had swallowed it, in his frenzy! Sonny, Sonny, open the door at once! No reply.
Hetty had run next door to confide her fears to Mamma. The first thing she saw there, to her surprise and joy which showed itself in laughter, was Sonny, talking to Hugh in his room, which was next to the garden. Hugh was about to play on a violin which he had made out of a cigar-box.
“How did you get here, Sonny?”
With a glance at Hugh, the boy had replied, “A little bird brought me, Mummy.”
“That’s right, Hetty,” said Hugh. “The stork was that little bird. Well, sister, we are about to have a lesson in the art of producing sounds of beauty from the gut of a cat and the tail of a horse.”
Hugh had not long returned from South Africa. He was brown of face and lean of body, noticeably bow-legged after much horse-riding. On his bedroom wall, framed, was a certificate of thanks for his services to King and Country signed, in print by the block process, by the Lord Mayor on behalf of the City of London.
Phillip had been forbidden by his father to go into Hugh Turney’s room; but the boy went there whenever he thought he would, to see the one who was not like an uncle at all, but a nice person to be with. Hugh told Phillip stories of the war which were not like the stories he had read in a book sent him by Uncle John in the country, called For Valour and Victory. Uncle Hugh said that at the battle of the Modder River all the soldiers ran away so fast that more were trodden underfoot in the rush to the rear than were hit by Boer bullets. Most of them had been Scotsmen in kilts, the Highland Brigade. Uncle Hugh told Phillip how the Boer women and children had been put in big lägers, or cages, many thousands of them, where ever so many had died of fever.
“War’s a swindle, my boy, and anyone who believes in the glory of war is a first-class bloody fool. Only jackals profit from war—the contractors, the arms manufacturers, together with the gold-fields capitalists—Midas & Co. Listen to this——” and the sardonic voice chanted:
“Where those three hundred fought with Beit
And fair young Wernher died?
The little mound where Eckstein stood
And gallant Albu fell
And Oppenheim, half-blind with blood
Went fording through the rising flood—
My Lord, we know them well.
“Those lines, my boy, come from a satirical poem by Hilaire Belloc, called ‘Verses to a Lord who in the House of Lords said that those who opposed the South African Adventure confused soldiers with money-grubbers’. Hello, here’s your mamma coming. What have you been up to now, eh,” and he winked at Phillip.
Phillip winked back. Uncle Hugh was a wonderful man, a soldier of the Queen. He said “bloody”; Phillip would say it, too, when he was by himself.
Hetty wondered how Phillip had got out of his bedroom. Had he slipped out, locked the door behind him and, creeping downstairs, got into the next garden by way of the kitchen steps, or perhaps by the french windows, in the sitting-room and over the garden fence? He would not say; nor did Hugh Turney know.
*
Phillip had discovered, in his exploration of the attic, that he could crawl on hands and knees over the joists to the water tank, and, squeezing past it, continue over the front bedroom ceiling, through a small opening at the apex of the common wall between the two houses, and so, by way of Grandpa’s bedroom ceiling, joists, and water tank, to the trapdoor in Grandpa’s bathroom. Opening this, he had slipped through, after arranging that the trap should shut as he let go with his hands. If detected, he would pretend to have come upstairs to the lavatory.
*
Phillip told Cousin Percy Pickering of this secret place while the two were lying in bed, a bolster between them until Percy’s mother could know how harmoniously or otherwise the two would fit into the same bed. It was Phillip’s first visit to Beau Brickhill.
“Does your father use that bloody cane I saw hanging on the back of his chair at supper, Percy?”
“No fear! Dad don’t beat me.”
“Has he ever, Percy?”
“No. Nor does Mum, or Granpa, or Gran.”
“Then why does it hang there, Percy?”
“I dunno. It always has.”
“This is a lovely house, isn’t it? I like being here. Will you be my great friend, Percy?”
“Well, I’ve got a great friend already. His name is Fred. You’ll see him tomorrow when we go nesting.”
Phillip was silent for a while. Then he said:
“Couldn’t I be your other great friend, Percy?”
“’Course you can. You can join our football team if you like. That’s a spiffing lantern you’ve got. Did your Dad lend it to you?”
“Yes, only don’t tell my Mother. She isn’t supposed to know. It’s a secre
t.”
“Between you and your Dad?”
“Yes, sort of. I say, Percy!”
“What say?”
“I will give you some of my sweets when I buy them. I’ve got lots of tin to spend.”
“I’ll let you shoot with my saloon gun if you like.”
“Oh, spiffing!”
Uncle Jim called up the stairs: “Stop talking you two, and go to sleep. Good night!”
“Good night, Uncle Jim.”
“Good night, Dad.”
It was wonderful to lie in bed, talking in whispers … whispers … whispers … while the mice in the old house ran over the thick uneven slabs of the chestnut floor unheard, for the boys were asleep.
*
Downstairs in the kitchen parlour, by the coal fire, Hetty and Eliza, her cousin and childhood friend, were talking over a cup of tea before going to bed.
In another room, where the half-sized billiard table stood, Eliza’s husband, James Pickering, partner in a firm of corn and seed merchants, was sitting at his desk, entering the day’s orders in a book.
“Well, Hetty,” said Eliza Pickering, “here you are at last! I can hardly believe it is really you.”
She was a dark, small-headed woman, of Brythonic or ancient British type; she was dressed in black, with dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back plainly over her head. “I cannot tell you how nice it is, after all these years, to see you again. It’s just like old times, and with all the children about it makes me feel young again.”
“Yes, Liz,” smiled Hetty. “Everything is just as it used to be!”
She glanced round the room, at the tall grandfather clock with the flowers painted round its face, and the pheasant across the yellow-white dial; the wooden salt-box on its nail above the long-handled basting ladle and the two-pronged meat-fork hanging beside the hearth; the copper pans on the chimney shelf; the pictures on the wall; the long farmhouse table and the high-backed chairs at either end, their woollen antimacassars on the tops, and the old yellow cane hanging by its curved handle.
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