Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  “It’s not worth the tram ride up from Vilo Dogs! What you fink we are, ’king kids?”

  “That’s all you’ll get, the kites aren’t worth very much, you know.”

  “Come on, leav’r old Jew, mates, an’ next time let ’im climb on the roof and get ’is ’king kites by is ’king self!”

  Phillip crept back to bed, thinking of the awful swearing at Father. Mum came up later, and told him that the men had been very rude when Father had given them ninepence each. Phillip immediately felt ashamed because Father had not given them more.

  Father put the kites in his workroom, and then Phillip fell asleep. At breakfast Father talked about a windlass and piano wire, which was beyond him, he said. When Phillip went on the Hill to look at the seat, it was cemented back in its place.

  Chapter 26

  HAYLING ISLAND

  PHILLIP made friends with a dog on the Hill. They used to go hunting deer together, and Rover, as Phillip called him, kept the wolves at bay when they attacked his herds in his domain. He was Sir Phillip now, as Cousin Gerry had knighted him one Saturday morning, saying: “Those are your lands, Sir Phillip”, and pointed with his switch before galloping away. But Father saw him with Rover one afternoon and said he must not consort with strange dogs, in case they bit him. If a dog had hydrophobia, said Father, it would go mad if you gave it a saucer of water to drink. Everyone it bit would foam at the mouth and scream at the sight of water.

  Phillip listened, and that was all: for he was beginning to see and feel Father as something that was always trying to stop him doing what other boys did, and besides, he was always grumbling and so the only thing to do was to keep out of his way as much as possible and not let him find out anything.

  There had been a glut of cherries earlier that year. Masses of cherries were for sale in barrows in the street outside the school for a halfpenny a pound, black ones and red ones. The black ones were sweeter. Father had objected to him buying cherries in the gutter, saying they had been handled by dirty paws with no idea of sanitation. They must be washed first, before being eaten. As far as Phillip was concerned, they were washed in his mouth; the daily after-school bag was empty long before he reached even Charlotte Road. He bought some for the other boys, out of his fretwork money from Grannie. He made all his fretwork things for Grannie, who gave him a shilling an object. After selling her the seventh pipe-rack, Grannie said gently that she did not smoke, and would Phillip think of something else for the next time? So with pattern pasted on thin sycamore wood clamped to the vice on the edge of the kitchen table, Phillip began an entire piano front, to be completed in sections of twelve. He grew tired of fretwork after the second section, and asked Grannie if she would mind if he did not do the rest. After all, he pointed out, she had not got a piano.

  “No, dear,” said Grannie. “But it is very good of you to think of me. Perhaps I shall have a piano one day, and then you can finish the screen for me.”

  In compensation Phillip brought her a chaffinch’s nest, from which the young birds had flown. They were not fleas in the bottom of it, among the horsehair and the feathers, he said, but only tiny beetles which did not bite you.

  Cherry hogs were the rage at school that summer. All along the walls of the playground boys crouched behind their wooden frames made in the workshop, inviting all comers with bags of dried stones to try and win lucky shots. You knelt down at a chalk line and flipped or rolled your hog towards the satinwood frames, which had square holes in them along one edge, like the holes of a mouth-organ. If you got a hog in the smallest hole, you got ten hogs back, but the largest hole at the other end was worth only two. Mother made him a little linen bag to keep his hogs in; but Father saw them, and saying they were stones harbouring germs, sent him to wash his hands—he was an hour late for tea—and confiscated the hogs.

  Phillip swopped the rest of his cherry hogs for five-stones. A boy had got five knuckle-bones of a sheep from a butcher, and boiled them to get the shreds of meat off them. You threw them up, while crouching down, and tried to catch them on the back of your hand. Then on your fist at the side, and other places in succession. Some boys bought five-stones at the shop, five for a ha’penny, but real bones were best, for then you could think of cannibals in canoes in the South Seas, like in Father’s book, which had been his prize at school by what was printed inside the cover.

  *

  Meanwhile Richard had thrown the grubby cherry stones one and two at a time among the thorns of the gully, hoping the seeds would sprout and take root. He had never forgotten what he had heard, as a boy, of the effects of cholera sweeping through the East End of London, killing hundreds of men, women and children. It had been said at the time that the germs had been brought on a ship arriving at the East India Docks, with a Lascar crew, and that they had spread by way of an infected hawker with a fruit barrow.

  Having got rid of the cherry-stones, Richard felt that he ought to make it up to Phillip with some marbles. So he bought him a box from the newspaper shop by the station, and a big blood alley with green, red, and yellow stripes inside it. Germs were less likely to live on stone or glass.

  When Phillip took the blood alley to school, Mildenhall took it from him and put it in his pocket, saying, with thumb showing through clenched fist, that Phillip would get that in his eye if he told his cousin Gerry. A score of times as he lay in bed at night Phillip saw himself, stripped to the waist, rippling with muscles, weaving around Mildenhall and then with a tremendous straight left, knocking him backwards off his feet, while boys cheered and in the distance Helena Rolls smiled at him, and giving him a bow off her plait, asked him to wear it for her sake.

  *

  Now it was time to go away for the summer holidays. With some of the money Grannie had given him for the pipe-racks Phillip was going to buy some fishing tackle, hire a boat, and get Pluck Library as well as the Union Jack, for holiday reading. Father had forbidden this literature, saying it gave a boy entirely wrong ideas about life, and tended to make him wild and in some cases encouraged possible criminal tendencies. Father had no objection to him reading the Strand Magazines, in their thin pale-blue covers, which filled an entire drawer below the clothes cupboard in his bedroom. Phillip had read every Adventure of Sherlock Holmes during the past winter and spring, and had been horrified to learn that in the end Sherlock Holmes had fallen in a death clutch with the terrible Professor Moriarty over a precipice.

  Yet, despite exercises with his father’s dumb-bells and Indian clubs, Phillip remained a thin, pale little boy, frightened of Mildenhall; until the summer holidays came, with fresh and sunlit prospect. They were going to the seaside, to a faraway place called Hayling Island.

  Phillip duly bought his Plucks and Union Jacks at the bookstall at Waterloo, and put them to mark his ownership of a corner seat facing the engine. This time he was determined to be strong, and not to be sick. His sisters also had their special holiday papers: Mavis had Comic Cuts and Doris had Little Folks.

  “Now I must sit here, by myself, at this end,” said Phillip. “Please tell Mavis to get in the other corner, Mummy. I may want to change my seat at any moment. Also, her face opposite always worries me.” So far the family had the carriage to themselves.

  “I like this end best, too,” said Mavis. “And your face not only worries me, it makes me laugh, the way you look when you are reading.”

  “Come along to this end, Mavis, it is just as good, dear.”

  “Oh, you always put him first, Mummy! It isn’t fair!”

  “Go on, Mavis, obey your mother, this is my end!”

  “I don’t see why I should, just because you say so, so there!”

  “Mother said so, too. Wash your ears out.”

  “It’s going to be a lovely day, and so don’t let’s start bickering, there’s good children.”

  “I like that! Why, you never wash. Who pretends to have a cold bath, when he swishes the water with his hands, I’d like to know.”

  “Who puts pow
der on her face—to cover grime with chalk dust?”

  “What about the dust in your ears! You never wash them.”

  “Children, don’t bicker so!”

  “I wasn’t bickering, Mum, I was just asking Mavis to move in case I want to be sick.”

  “I know, dear.”

  “You favour Phillip, just as Daddy says!” cried Mavis, from the opposite corner.

  “You silly fool, shut up!” said Phillip. “If I have to put up with that from Father, there’s no reason why I should have to put up with it from a bit of a girl like you.”

  “Bit of a boy yourself! You aren’t very strong, are you? Anything makes you sick.”

  “Your ugly mug does, certainly.”

  “Phillip, I won’t have you speaking to your sister like that! I’ve told you before. I shall tell your father if you are not a good boy.”

  “I don’t care. You can’t frighten me! All right, if I spew right over you, Mavis, it will be entirely your own fault.”

  “Have this orange,” said Hetty. “It will settle your stomach, dear. And I won’t have you using such an expression. Where you pick up such things from I do not know.”

  “I heard it from your brother Hugh.”

  “Phillip, how dare you speak so familiarly of your uncle! I am not concerned with what Uncle Hugh or anyone else does, I will not have you speaking like a common little boy.”

  At this point an elderly woman got in. She was dressed all in black, and conveyed such an atmosphere of lugubrity that the conversation closed. Phillip had his stories folded beside him; he was putting off the wonderful moment of beginning to read, pretending to himself that he did not know they were there, so that he might pretend suddenly to have discovered them. Then Mavis was on her feet, to look out of his window as the whistle blew. Phillip got up and elbowed her away, while Hetty told him not to put his head out, in case it struck a signal. She worried in case the door had not been closed properly after the lady had got in, and was in apprehension until the lady said, “There is a distinct draught, I think I must ask you to let me put the window up half-way”, as she rose to do it.

  “Sit down now, Sonny,” Hetty said politely, “and read your papers, like a good boy.”

  The elderly woman put on a pair of steel-framed spectacles and took a Bible out of her rush bag, watched by Phillip during intervals of looking intently out of the window. When she got out at Clapham Junction he said, “Phew! What a niff! I bet she don’t use Pears soap.” There were many enamel advertisements for this luxury fixed to the sooted yellow-brick walls beside the railway lines. “It’s enough to make anybody sick.”

  “Phillip, how dare you!”

  Despite herself, Hetty could not help smiling.

  “There you go again, encouraging Phillip!” said Mavis, watching her from the opposite corner. “You pander to him.”

  “Hush, Mavis; you should not say such things.”

  “Father says them, so they must be true, so there!” and Mavis wrinkled her nose at Phillip.

  “Now who would like a nice banana?” asked Hetty, taking up her bag, in an attempt to restore harmony.

  “I would like a nasty one for a change,” said Phillip.

  “You won’t get one at all, Sonny, if you talk like that! There’s a black one here, I’ve a good mind to take you at your word. Now be a good boy, and don’t annoy. We are all going to have a lovely holiday.”

  Doris sat beside her mother, holding tight to a wooden spade and a little painted bucket.

  “Give Phil the black banana, Mum, just to show him!” said Mavis.

  “I’ll put it in my pipe and smoke it, like the mat in the hall!” retorted Phillip.

  “Isn’t he barmy, Mum?”

  “Then Father is barmy too, for he said it first!”

  “Hush, Sonny, you should not say such things about your father.”

  “Well, you tell Father not to say such silly things to me. Putting the hall mat in my pipe to smoke! Poof!”

  The incident of the mat had happened when, after a raining day, Phillip had come home with muddy boots and forgotten to wipe them on the mat. Father had been home, and sending him back, had told him to come in the front door quietly, close it, wipe his boots thoroughly, go out again and repeat the same actions six times running, to teach him to remember.

  “Don’t let me or anyone else have to remind you about the mat in the hall again, young man. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  Phillip had imagined a huge bowl, stuffed with the coconut mat, and thick blue smoke rising out of a pipe with a stem as thick as a cricket-bat handle. Recalling the pipe, the thought of it made his head ache, and nearly broke his neck, to have such a monstrous thing in his mouth. It made him feel sick, too. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep; but opening them again, there was Mavis staring at him with a grin. She was hoping he would be sick, he thought. He closed his eyes again, but now the smell of the mat being smoked in that pipe made him feel sick. He kept very still.

  *

  It was only lately that the antagonism between Phillip and Mavis had become sharpened. They had never really been friends, and now their worlds did not even touch. Phillip was in Gerry’s Band; Mavis had two particular friends in the school, who absorbed her emotions and feelings. Both her girl friends lived in Charlotte Road. The trio usually walked to and from school together, in a world of their own.

  Little notes passed between them occasionally; sometimes two were not speaking to the third; the quarrel was made up. Arm-in-arm three loving girls, oblivious of boys, walked together on the pavement; then another remark—it is always what was said by the third girl—would cause a different coalition of Mavis and Violet against Marjorie, or Marjorie and Violet were not speaking to Mavis. In times of harmony they exchanged Confession Books, where heart-burning statements about best friends were recorded, sometimes to be scratched out with ink or smothered by wetted indelible pencil, substitutions made, later to be cancelled. Once Phillip had written sarcastic remarks about Violet’s thin legs and Marjorie’s calves like table-legs, in Mavis’s book, an action that caused protest from Mavis, a reprimand not to spoil other people’s things from Hetty, and “I don’t care, I’ll do what I like” from the culprit.

  These sarcasms and antagonisms between the children were hurtful to both Richard and Hetty, in their separate worlds or provinces of thought. Richard could not understand it; he and his brothers and sisters had not been like that. He had long decided that it was through Turney traits that such things occurred. As for Hetty, she looked back on the life of her old home with Charley, Dorry, Hughie, and little Joe as one of merriment and accord. Why could not Phillip and his sisters be as they had been, in the old days? So while Richard withdrew into himself more and more—while continuing to like Mavis, because obviously she liked him, whereas Doris showed no desire to be other than her mother’s child—Hetty strove, by acting always as peacemaker and ameliorator, to avoid the discord which was wearing her out.

  *

  The train was now running rapidly. In an effort to not think of being sick, Phillip began counting the telegraph posts as they blackly hurtled past. His eye rose and fell with the curve of the massed wires. He turned for relief from the rising and falling blows on his eyes to contemplation of green fields and ripening corn. A motor-car travelling along a road trailed half-a-mile of dust behind it, and though it was far away, and easily raced by the train, somehow the dust made him feel as though it were in his own throat. Then the trees in the fields and the hedges, that Father had called hedgerow timber on the Sunday-morning walks to Cutler’s Pond while Mother cooked the Sunday dinner—all the hedgerow timber got in the way, and to remove it he had to imagine he was driving a huge chariot like Boadicea’s, with scythes on the hubs, cutting down the beastly trees. Now the smoke was coming in the open window. He left it, to sit in his corner, while Mavis opposite was combing her doll’s hair with a horrid comb. Ugh! he could see glue on the doll’s skull! He could smell the gl
ue——

  “Go away from looking at me! Stop her, Mummie. She taunts me!” he cried feebly.

  “Ha ha, you’re green about the gills! Mummy, quick, Phillip’s going to be sick!”

  “Oh, Sonny dear, do you feel all right?”

  “Tell Mavis not to grin at me,” he mumbled, as his mouth filled with water. “Oh!” and he lay back, his hand over his eyes, while the beastly train shook and made horrible grinding noises in his ears.

  He staggered to his feet. Mavis now retreated to the far corner, clutching her doll, its blanket, and its home-made underclothes.

  “All right, Sonny, come with me to the lavatory. Open the door, Mavis,” as the victim, staring eyes circular with shame and fear, tottered out of the carriage and away to sanctuary just in time.

  He returned five minutes later with pale face, tears of exhaustion after retching still on his cheeks.

  “Look, I can sec tears! Cry baby!” said Mavis.

  “Cry baby,” repeated Doris.

  Hetty smacked Mavis, who thereupon began to cry.

  “You should not taunt your brother when he is ill, Mavis!”

  Hetty was thinking of Sonny when, for weeks after his birth, he had not been able to keep down any food, and she had feared for days and nights that she would lose him. If old Mr. Pooley had not brought the jug of ass’s milk when he did, at the crisis, her baby would have died. Poor Mr. Pooley, he and his dear little mother donkey had been dead three years now. Mr. Pooley had lived to be one hundred and five years old.

  “Mavis does not really mean what she says, Sonny.”

  Indifferent to words, the invalid desired only to lie down on the seat, a rug over him, and to forget everything. He went to sleep, and awoke, aware of the world once more, as the train slowed up before Havant.