Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  “No thank you,” he said each time. When she had gone downstairs, the pillow received more tears. The sad song consoled him, as with open eyes he thought of Helena Rolls, of her golden curls and wide blue eyes, and her smiling, and it all seemed to be up in the sky.

  Chapter 24

  PARROT MULTIPLICATION

  “NOW JUST look and see what a nice little gentleman Phillip Maddison is, sitting so still in the back row and never giving any trouble,” said Miss Norton, and the Third Standard obediently turned round to look. Phillip, dressed in blue jersey, navy-blue knickers, black stockings and button shoes, had been sitting without movement for the past five minutes, his hands folded behind him to draw back his shoulders in the approved manner, and his eyes looking straight ahead.

  The tribute came as a complete surprise to Phillip. Miss Norton had been giving a geography lesson, with coloured chalks on the blackboard, and he had not listened to a word of what she was saying.

  “He pays perfect attention, children,” went on Miss Norton. She was a pupil teacher under the new School Board of Education, and received a salary of forty-five pounds a year, “an articled forty-fiver”, as it was called.

  “Now everyone turn to their front, hands behind heads, and try to be like Phillip.”

  Phillip felt a nice feeling. He stared straight to his front, hands clutching elbows behind him, and breathing as slightly as possible to keep his jersey from rising and falling. He would always be very good now.

  “Hands behind head, now, Phillip,” said Miss Norton gently. With a start the dreamer realised what was said. He disentangled his aching arms, and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “We will have five minutes’ rest, children, before continuing.”

  When he had to copy the figures on the board on to his slate, with the grey slate pencil, he did his very best. Later he stopped himself from drawing a whale and a shark on the clear spaces on the other sides of Ireland and Great Britain.

  It was the summer term at Wakenham Road School. Phillip liked Miss Norton, who was a quiet-spoken young woman wearing black boots hidden under a black skirt, a white blouse with a high starched linen collar with a black bow, while her mousey-coloured hair bulged out flatly on top of her head with the aid of a concealed padded wire frame.

  “Now pay attention, children. We will go through the multiplication tables again. Now all together when I drop the pointer!”

  Miss Norton raised a ground ash stick, tapering gradually to its point, like half a billiard cue.

  “Wait till I drop the point! Are you all ready? ‘Twice one are two’, and so on until you reach twelve. Then pause while I raise my pointer, and when I drop it, begin ‘Three ones are three’, and so on, up to ten times table.” A gasp of awe greeted this adventurous height. “And to the one who keeps on longest I shall give two good marks to add to the total for the week. The one who wins the most for this week shall be the one to clean the blackboard for me all next week, and, as you know, the three highest totals at the end of term are to have each a prize. Ready, everyone?”

  “Yes, Miss Norton!” came with shrill massed expectancy.

  The pointer dropped. The multiplication race began. A little girl with honey-coloured hair over part of her eyes stayed the course the longest—she fell at seven nines—and with excited laughter was given the two marks.

  “Well done, Dorothy!”

  Dorothy gave a quick glance at Phillip, who was sitting, still and rigid, with arms folded behind him, hoping that Miss Norton would give him at least one mark for the best behaviour. He had followed along as far as six eights, and thereafter had sung a chanting song of his own, without any actual words. Numeration did not interest him.

  *

  During play-time massed cries, considerably shriller in pitch above the classroom chanting, came from the two asphalt paved spaces enclosed within high brick walls, the Boys’ and Girls’ playgrounds of Wakenham Road School. Richard never went near the place. He had known green fields there before the building had been put up. It seemed to him that universal education for the factory civilisation of the times was somehow directly linked to the mass graveyard on the other side of the road, where heaps of yellow clay and wilted flowers were ever increasing. He did not express this thought; it was inherent in his increasing retirement from those about him. He knew that he was becoming an embittered man.

  On the south side of the main school buildings was the Boys’ playground. On the north was the Girls’ and Infants’. Hither every morning Hetty walked with her three children, under the line of polled elms on the cemetery side of the High Road. Phillip disappeared into the Boys’ playground, Mavis and Doris into the Girls’. The entrance to the Girls’ was past a lodge occupied by an old man with a rutty face, named Mr. Scrivener. He was the janitor, an old man so gentle and unspeaking that no new child was afraid of him after a day or two; and thereafter did not even notice him about the place, except that a kind face sometimes moved past in a vivid world.

  At the end of the term, Miss Norton gave three prizes to her best pupils, who would be moving up after the holidays. The third prize was given to Phillip, a little yellow book called How Arthur Won the Day. It was the story of a boy who went with bad companions, and did bad things, such as roasting stolen pheasants’ eggs in the embers of a fire beside the hedgerow, and being found out by the keeper. Stealing eggs led to stealing money and that was the end of Arthur’s friend, as far as Arthur was concerned, for he turned back and won the day just in time. Phillip hastened home to show his prize proudly to Mother.

  “Look, Mum, I’ve won a prize!”

  Miss Norton had written his name on the flyleaf, Phillip Maddison. Phillip added underneath, in his spidery school-writing First Prize for Coming in Third.

  *

  At the beginning of the second term, after the summer holidays, it was decided that the three children might go to school by themselves. Phillip was put in charge of his sisters, but very soon he left them to get to school by themselves, preferring to walk with his cousin Gerry. One day, to liven up the walk, he and Gerry wore their overcoats back to front, and an errand boy on a bicycle with a basket threw eggs at them. This involved a chase of the boy whenever he was seen again; and as the errand boy’s friends came to his help, a feud grew between Gerry and Phillip on one side, and the roughs from Comfort Road and the streets beyond.

  One of the roughs had a younger brother in the school, a heavy boy with a big face called Mildenhall. This boy remained in the Third Standard, to which Phillip had been moved up from Miss Norton’s classroom. Phillip had not been in his new desk more than a week, when, looking up from the brown-backed Pluck Library he was reading under the desk, he saw Mildenhall looking across at him. At the time Mrs. Wilkins, the new mistress, small and dark with pale serious face, was writing sums upon the blackboard. Her back being turned to the class, Mildenhall slowly raised his fist, with his thumb, sticking out between the first and second closed fingers, and shook it menacingly at Phillip. Phillip’s stomach immediately flunked. Mildenhall’s meaning was clear. Phillip thought of the big boy’s thumb jabbing into his eye innumerable times during the lesson, in which he got all his sums wrong.

  “Come, come,” said Mrs. Wilkins, looking at his slate, as she paused between desks. “What’s the matter with you today, Phillip? You’ll have to stay in after prayers and get these right.”

  Mrs. Wilkins had started her teaching career in the old century, when pupil teachers had received twelve pounds per annum.

  “Yes, M’am,” said Phillip, with some relief, because then Mildenhall might forget to wait for him.

  At four o’clock the bell rang for the classes to file into the hall. All the rooms, built centrally around the main assembly place, had a wall, or partition, of varnished pitch-pine, with glass panes in the upper half, looking into the hall, which had big skylights in its roof. The school was thereby much enlightened.

  The hall itself faced a raised rostrum built above its
west end. The rostrum was reached by two wide stairways leading up to it, one on either side of the hall. Here stood the dreaded figure of Mr. Garstang, the Head Master, every nine o’clock when the classes filed out for prayers in the morning, and again at four o’clock in the afternoon before going home.

  The Head Master, Mr. Alfred Garstang, or Gussy, was a figure of near-terror to Phillip. Not that Mr. Garstang had ever spoken severely—and he could be very severe—to Phillip, or that he had shown towards Phillip any voice or manner other than one of kindliness. Phillip was afraid of him, because of what he had been told about Gussy by other boys as soon as he had come to the school. Whenever Mr. Garstang came near him, Phillip felt that Mr. Garside’s eyes might, at any moment, pierce his pocket and see the Pluck Library folded inside.

  Mr. Garstang was a short man in a tail coat, with a slightly curved front behind the lower buttons of his waistcoat, and wide pointed wings to his collar, which looked very sharp. He was partly bald in the front of his round head, and the hair remaining to him was always pressed down in straight flat black lengths across the pink and polished skin of his skull. Gussy looked straight at the boys, quelling them without intention. His brown moustaches were twisted at the ends to long points which drooped downwards. It was this moustache which was so alarming, in front of the deep, quiet voice which was inseparable in Phillip’s mind with the cane.

  Sometimes on the rostrum above the hall before afternoon prayers were to be seen the backs of boys’ heads and their shoulders by the remote wall. The boys were behind the big desk in the centre of the rostrum where Mr. Garstang stood, revealing partly bald head, round pink face with great moustache, and length of gold chain passing through a button-hole in rotund black waistcoat. The desk, level with the top of the pitch-pine banisters, cut off all view below the gold chain.

  The sight of boys facing the wall at the back of the rostrum made Phillip stand stilly quiet when he toed, with other children, the white line of the Third Standard. There were many such white lines ranged in parallel down the hall, with an interval in the centre. The white lines ranged downwards from the Infants in front to the biggest boys and girls of Standard Seven in the rear.

  There was only one Black Line in the hall. It was a terrible place, by the stairs up and down which Mr. Garstang moved to his study. The boys at the back of the rostrum were those who had been sent to stand on the Black Line during the afternoon. When the bell rang for afternoon prayers, the boys on the Black Line had to go up the stairs to stand behind Mr. Garstang’s desk.

  The Head Master dealt with them promptly before prayers. When all the classes were in the hall, standing to attention on the white lines, Mr. Garstang would pause, looking, it seemed, at every child staring up at his face. Suddenly the part of Mr. Garstang above the desk would turn sideways and the voice would boom, “Well, my friends! And what are you doing here?”

  No boy ever made reply. Sometimes the row of cropped heads would make a sort of tentative movement, half turning before, overcome by the gaze of Mr. Garstang, they found safety in facing the wall again. Then with a hissing sound, which seemed to echo in the breath of the children in the hall below, a cane would be drawn from the bundle standing in the upright glazed drainpipe beside the desk. With his left hand Mr. Garstang would haul a boy, sometimes wriggling, across the desk, and holding him by the neck, would strike him again and again with the his cane, black coat-tails visibly dancing about during the sudden animation.

  Sometimes a boy cried out while he was being lugged across the desk. It made no difference. He was swiftly beaten, and as swiftly discarded for another to be hauled up for the same whirlwind swishing, and so on to the last boy. There were never more than four, and the beatings were only occasional; but the bristle of canes rising over the top of the desk, the drooping points of Mr. Garstang’s moustache, almost wider than his jowl, made an impression on the children of the awe-ful results of being sent to stand on the Black Line.

  The white lines down each side of the hall were subduing in themselves; they were of silence, looking straight to the front, and stillness, and, being lines, were connected with the Black Line, the terror of all Wakenham Road School terrors in Phillip’s mind. Such was juvenile superstition, and imperfected love, in the winter of 1904.

  *

  Mr. Garstang lived on the south side of Charlotte Road. On occasional and startling moments he was to be seen, a quiet human figure wearing square-crowned black hat and tail-coat, swinging an unrolled umbrella as he walked sedately to school. Whenever Phillip passed Mr. Garstang’s house he looked straight ahead, unspeaking as he hurried onwards. Mr. Garstang sometimes wondered why; for he was interested in the little boy, knowing something of his history from his friend and fellow antiquarian, the vicar of St. Simon Wakenham.

  *

  As he stood on the white line of Standard Three, Phillip wondered if he would be sent to the Black Line if he could not do his sums after school. At the same time he wondered, if he did them quickly, Mildenhall would be waiting to fight him. Phillip was terrified of the idea of fighting. He was no good at fighting. Whenever anyone hit him, or even pretended to, he shut his eyes. And even if he tried to keep them open, and to dodge, Mildenhall was a much bigger boy. Mildenhall might do to him what he had seen him do to another boy, give him a nose-bleeder and then sit him on the hard playground. He had seen Mildenhall sit on other boys, saying they had sauced him, when they hadn’t. Mildenhall had poked Phillip in the ribs as they had filed out of the classroom, and whispered to him, “Donkey Boy! Yer farder’s Ole Tin Wills! I’ll l’arn yer!”

  When, having done the sums for Mrs. Wilkins, Phillip left the classroom, lots of boys were sliding on the playground. Snow had fallen. Thankfully he slipped out of the gate and along the road home. At tea, with fried sprats, he told his mother what Mildenhall had called him. She said, “Oh dear! Do they still remember your father?”

  “Remember what, Mum?”

  “Oh, nothing, dear. You would not understand,” a remark which made Phillip determined to understand. On Saturday morning he asked Mrs. Feeney what “Tin Wills” meant.

  “They called the first bicycles that, Master Phil. It was a low expression. Your father would not like to hear it from you, so be a good boy and forget it.”

  This reply made Phillip think more about it. Thinking about it made him remember it. Later in the morning, when he and his cousins Ralph and Gerry, and other of the Band, were around the camp-fire hidden in a cleft of the slopes of the Backfield, he asked about it.

  “‘Jesus Christ on Tin Wheels’ was how they used to sauce your Old Man,” said Ralph.

  Phillip was shocked at this use of the name of Jesus, and subdued because Father had been sauced like that. His father was the best man in Hillside Road. He was the best cyclist, too, with the only Sunbeam with Little Oil Bath and Three-speed Sturmey-Archer gear to be seen anywhere.

  Chapter 25

  BIG TREES AND BIG KITES

  ONE afternoon on coming home from school Phillip climbed up the elm tree and saw something in the Backfield which made him most curious. It was a sort of very long cart, with two pairs of stubby wheels each end. They were far apart and connected by a thick piece of wood. Soon he had hopped over the fence, startling a blackbird who was scratching in the heaps of rotting lawn-mower grass thrown over from Mr. Bigge’s garden, and had crept along a dog path under the thicket of elm suckers. This brushwood surrounded the row of tall trees in whose tops the rooks were cawing at their nests.

  He stared at the strange cart. The letters FITCHYSON, Timber Merchant, Pit Vale Sawmills, were painted on a board nailed to the left side of the front carriage. Whatever was it there for?

  There was a new notice board put up at the far lower end of the Backfield, and he ran over to have a look at that. It was a notice that Desirable Residences were to be erected. He ran back through the grass, thinking himself to be Umslopagaas in Nada the Lily running with his assagai to warn Allan Quatermain that strange scouts w
ere tracking over the veldt. On return he hid in the thicket, and was wondering where he could get a real assagai, when fear that Father might be coming home early to fly his big double-box kite, nearly a man-lifter, on the Hill that evening, as there was a fine breeze, made him get up. The Backfield was forbidden, therefore the more exciting a place to hunt in, to stalk birds and cats, and other boys, and bake potatoes in the embers of a fire like Arthur who won the day.

  Safely over the fence, he climbed the tree again. This was not forbidden, though Father said he must always hold tight with at least one hand when he was up there, as broken limbs would mean a heavy doctor’s bill, as well as goodbye to his chance of winning a scholarship.

  Making sure that the strange new cart could be seen from the tree, so that he could not be caught out in a lie and sent to bed, Phillip went indoors again, to try and learn Kings, Queens and Dates for Mr. Groat. Mr. Groat, who lived in No. 9, called “Chatsworth”, coached him twice a week for an hour on Mondays and Fridays. Mr. Groat was like Mr. Garstang, a Head Master, but as he lived in Hillside Road, there was no cane with the coaching.

  When Father came home, Phillip told him about the cart he had seen. Father went down to have a look. Then Father got over the fence, and said Phillip could come with him for just that once. Phillip pretended to get over clumsily, as though it was the first time; but Father said, “Come on, old chap, by the clay marks on that board you usually do it in one hop, sole of right boot there, and down. Don’t you think I know? I’ve been a boy myself, you know.”

  Father was not angry, and he did not know what to say.

  “Bless my soul, it’s a timber waggon. They are going to cut down our elms! Well, there you are, my boy! Progress. What a shame! Money, money, money, that’s all some people think about. Goodbye to the rooks.”