Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  Phillip paid the twopence to the old boatman, who gave him a pulley; and with throat suddenly dry, he reached the platform and adjusted the rusty wheel of the block over the cable.

  When the others got to Sea View Terrace, they saw him launching himself off the high platform against the sky, hanging to the block as it went faster and faster, then at the end of the eighty-yard cable he hit the end buffer with his feet and dropped down.

  He returned at once to the house, to sit and look at a book of uninteresting picture postcards, feeling a strange satisfaction that Father had seen him do a thing that, only that morning, Father had said looked to be far too dangerous for any small boy to risk his neck on.

  Chapter 27

  TWINEY’S

  “IT’s no good trying to make me win a scholarship! I’m an old hulk, an old hulk, quite worn out!” shouted Phillip. The lace of his boot broke. He took off the boot and flung it into the space above the pot-board below the kitchen dresser. “I can’t learn at all! I can’t! I can’t, I tell you!” and the other boot followed the first.

  He sat on a chair, completely dejected. “I am an old hulk! I shall never go to sea again!”

  “Sonny, it is not fair for you to talk to your mother like that! I am only trying to help you. You must work harder, dear, and so win a scholarship, to fit you for a good position in after-life. You will thank me afterwards that I tried to make you work.”

  “Which after-life do you mean?”

  “Hush, Sonny, hush! You must not say such things! You must do your work, dear.”

  “But my brain is worn out, quite useless, I tell you! Oh, I shall be late for school, and perhaps go on the Black Line! Where are the new laces? Quick, I tell you!”

  “I shouldn’t help him, Mummy, if he speaks to you like that! He wouldn’t dare to do it if Father hadn’t gone to the station!”

  “You shut up, you fool, Mavis! Get out! Get out!! Get out!!! I’ll slosh you, you beast!” He chased her out of the kitchen, and slipped in his black-stockinged feet on the oilcloth. The front door banged.

  “Have you hurt yourself, Sonny?”

  “Oh, I’ll be late for school! Quick, quick, take this lace out of Father’s boot. I’ll pay him back. You owe me two jam-jars! Quick, do as I say! Where’s my homework? Where did I leave it? Who’s hidden it? I bet Mavis has!” and he stood in the kitchen, near to tears.

  Hetty got him off to school at last, the borrowed lace in his boot. From her bedroom window she watched him running over the grass below the sheep-fold, a short cut. She could imagine his desperate face, fearful of being late, of being sent to stand on the Black Line. Why was there this difficulty in getting him off to school, morning after morning?

  It was a scene that nowadays Hetty was becoming accustomed to. Phillip was always in trouble: he never seemed to do things the proper way, but gave himself, and her, continual cause for worry. The moment Dickie’s back was turned he went his own way entirely. She was always dreading what he would do next, and so cause Dickie’s anger when it was found out, with inevitable punishment to follow.

  *

  He did such inexplicable things. When they had come back from the seaside, having nothing better to do, Phillip had spent much of his time in the Backfield. One day towards the end of August, in the very hot weather, he had set fire to the long yellow grass deliberately, in several places at once; and then had run home in terror and hidden himself under his bed, too frightened to come out.

  There were about eight acres of waste land left after the building, most of them on the slope below the distant railings of the Hill. The slope was covered with yellow, brittle grass. Fanned by the breeze, the flames spread rapidly in the long grasses. A high pall of yellow smoke drifted over Hillside Road. The noise of crackling flames increased, a wind swept the fires towards the wooden fences. Then the sound of the fire-engine bell sounded.

  Soon Hetty, standing talking to Mrs. Bigge, with Mrs. Groat looking over her fence below, and Hugh in the garden above, heard the noise of galloping hoofs, the bell clanging nearer.

  “I saw Phillip climbing over his fence in a great hurry ten minutes ago, Mrs. Maddison,” remarked Mrs. Groat.

  “I cannot say whether or not Sonny bad anything to do with it, I am sure,” replied Hetty.

  The noise of fierce crackling now came from all across the field. White and yellow smoke rolled in coiling drifts over the gardens.

  “I am going to fill all my pots and pans and pails with water.” Mrs. Bigge went into her house, and closed the door behind her. She was deeply hurt, for another reason, which Hetty knew only too well. Hetty was living in dread of her husband finding out what Sonny had done to Mr. Bigge’s little greenhouse recently. She went upstairs.

  “Oh dear, what shall I do, Mummy?” the voice came from under the bed. “Will they take me to prison?” He lay huddled against the wall, in the farthest corner away from the door. Suddenly exhausted, Hetty cried:

  “Oh, why do you do such things, you foolish, foolish boy?”

  “I don’t know, Mummy.”

  “Was anyone else with you?”

  “No, Mummy.”

  “Did you do it all alone, then?”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  “I can only pray that it will not cause all the new houses to be burned down. Really, Sonny, you are a trial and a tribulation, you know. Sometimes I think you are not my little boy any more.”

  “If I pray hard enough, perhaps God will forgive me. I have prayed, Mummy. Do you think God will answer my prayer?”

  At this point Mavis came upstairs to say that there were some policemen in the Backfield, with the firemen in helmets. They were beating the fires with sticks.

  “Oh, oh,” wailed Phillip. Then, “Shall I go and offer to help them, Mummy? Then they would not think it was me. Or would it be better if I were to kill myself?”

  Hetty left him. Perhaps this time it would teach him a lesson.

  On going up again, a few minutes later, to say that the fire was being beaten out, and what a fortunate boy he was that at least the garden fences had not been burnt down, she had not been able to find him.

  Five minutes later she came upon him next door, sitting beside his Grannie and holding her wool for her, “as good as gold”, Mamma said. How had he got there? The scullery door had been locked on the inside, and the chain was up on the front door. He had not gone through the sitting-room.

  Hetty confided her troubles to her mother when Phillip had run off to play on the Hill, having washed his face and hands and smoothed his hair with water, to make him feel good. What made Sonny do such strange things? Hetty told Sarah how, after Dickie had left Hayling Island for his cycling tour, Sonny had spent two whole shillings on the Life Saving Apparatus, frightening the life out of her by riding down in all sorts of positions, upside down and inside out, until in the end he had arrived at the stopping place the wrong way round, and so bumped himself violently on the padded board and hurt himself so much that she had had to get Dr. Robartes to him. Dr. Robartes had ordered him to remain in bed; but that very afternoon he had got up and gone bathing and stayed in the sea so long that he had turned green in the face. He had just managed to crawl out on the shingle, and in the hired bathing tent he had lain in a shivering rigidity which had so frightened her, she had thought he was going to die. Brandy, followed by bed with hot-water bottles, had revived him.

  “And would you believe it, Mamma, that very next day he stayed in the water over half-an-hour, ignoring my repeated requests that he should come out. Of course he was rigid again, with the need for more of Miss Barber’s brandy, and hot-water bottles at his feet and stomach. Can you wonder at it that Miss Barber said that she would not have us again the next year, when we came to leave? Oh dear, I do not know what I shall do if he annoys his father as he does any more, for it is almost beyond me.”

  “I will make some tea, dear; you rest awhile. We must trust in One Above, Hetty, that is our only consolation.”

  Tea c
ertainly helped to restore Hetty’s equanimity: and optimistically she declared that perhaps, when Sonny had won a scholarship, the new life might alter things. Meanwhile, she told Sarah, she did not like punishing him, and it could never be said that Dickie had been lenient with him, except at first. In those early days he had loved his little son, and found pride in his original ways. Dickie had been delighted when Sonny had tried to smoke his pipe, to use his garden tools, even to put on his boots. Once when Dickie was away on a cycling holiday in the Norfolk Broads, hoping to see the Swallowtail and Large Copper butterflies, Sonny had insisted on taking one of “Daddy’s boos” to bed with him, which surely showed that he was not entirely lacking, as Dickie had recently said, in a capacity for affection. “He is an entirely selfish child,” were Dickie’s words.

  Certainly it did seem at times that Sonny had no regard or affection for anyone else, perhaps not even for himself. Why else should he go out of his way, so often, to cause himself such trouble and unhappiness? The setting on fire of the Backfield was typical. If God had not answered her prayers, he might by now be in a Reformatory. Hughie’s explanation that he was “just a little devil” was really not applicable, for he never got any pleasure out of what he did, so far as she could see, but only anxiety and distress.

  “Do not worry, dear,” said Sarah Turney. “Things will come out all right in the end, I am sure.”

  *

  The very next day Phillip took his father’s chisels and mallet from the workroom, in order to hack off the lower end of a lead pipe leading from the scullery next door into the drain below the back steps. He managed to cut off about four inches of the pipe before the edges of the two chisels were rendered serrate by being struck upon surrounding brickwork. He wanted the lead to make weights for fishing, and also to carve a length of it into the shape of a small fish, for spinning with some triangular hooks his father had given him. A boy had told Phillip of a monster pike in the Randisbourne, and this, together with a reading in an old book on fishing by Cholmondeley-Pennell from the mahogany, glass-fronted bookcase, had inspired the necessity for strips of lead.

  Worse than that, was the awful thing he had done to Mr. Bigge’s little glasshouse, or plantarium. He had found out where Dickie had hidden his air-gun, and all one morning had been in the garden, watching for sparrows on the roof. Unable to hit any, he had turned his attention to objects about the garden, shooting at the clothes hanging on the line, then at the fence. Seeing the marks of the pellets in the creosoted wood, Hetty had told him that his father would be bound to see them, and since that would mean another thrashing, she had ordered him to return the gun immediately to the clothes cupboard from where he had taken it. At once he had climbed up the elm tree and, sitting in the top, taken pot shots into Hugh’s room, the french windows of which were open. Not content with this, he had, saying that he was a sharpshooter in the rigging of a wooden battleship, shot at Mr. Bigge’s glasshouse down below, over the fence. When at last he came down, a score of little starred holes showed irregularly along the coloured glass border which Mr. Bigge had made with such care.

  “How dare you do such a thing! And to Mr. Bigge, who has always been so very very kind to you! You are no son of mine!”

  “I don’t care.”

  Mr. Bigge had not said a word about the matter, nor had Mrs. Bigge, though of course they had seen the damage done. She had felt dreadfully ashamed about it; and when the thrashing for the damaged chisels had inevitably come, for once she had not felt that Dickie was being too severe. And the very next day he had set fire to the grass in the Backfield.

  *

  At the beginning of the new term, he had been moved up into Standard Four, under a strict disciplinarian, Mr. Twine. Ever anxious for his success, Hetty had gone again to see Mr. Groat, at “Chatsworth”. Mr. Groat had very kindly agreed to continue his coaching two evenings a week, but he had stipulated that the tasks set to be done in-between the boy’s visits must be done, otherwise, he said, the boy would be wasting the time of all concerned.

  Invariably the boy returned from “Chatsworth” with tear marks on his face. He seemed unable to learn at all, reported Mr. Groat; he seemed to have not the least idea of figures—Mr. Groat was coaching the boy in arithmetic, the subject in which he was very weak. It was essential, Mr. Groat had said, to show some proficiency in this subject if the boy were to qualify for one of the scholarships available annually from Wakenham Road School. Since Christ’s Hospital was out of the question now, Hetty hoped that Sonny would be able to get into the Merchant Taylors’ School, or perhaps the City of London School. Westminster School, next to the Abbey, was a beautiful school, but that too, like the Bluecoat, was out of the question.

  What made it worse was that Mr. Groat had very kindly consented to coach Sonny without any fee, though Hetty had of course offered to pay in the first place. Mr. Groat was doing it all for nothing, as she had explained to Sonny many times, without any effect, she had to admit sorrowfully to herself.

  *

  Hetty wrote to Theodora about her problem. Dora replied at some length, saying that in her own experience of teaching, the old proverb that you could “take a horse to water, but could not make it drink” had to some extent been proved true. What was wanted was an entirely new system of teaching, which would never come about until women had the franchise.

  Theodora’s letter contained unhappy news of her own venture as a schoolmistress. Two things, she wrote, had combined to bring the school to a close: her partner Rechenda Baggot’s insistence in having her sick sister in the house had given the school a bad advertisement, since she had died there of phthisis; while her own activities, though they had been kept strictly apart from the school, in the Women’s Social and Political Union, had inevitably been misrepresented and distorted. Parents had removed their daughters.

  “Well, Dora has only got what she asked for,” was Richard’s comment. He had no sympathy with Suffragettes. In the pages of The Daily Trident he had often read out to Hetty derisory accounts of their goings-on, to which she had had to agree for the sake of peace.

  “It has long been obvious to me that Dora would spoil her chances of building up a stabilised school, with her cranky ideas. Hilary called in the office to-day, and tells me that it is being closed down. Well, it’s her capital, not mine. I’ve seen that sort of thing happen with my own father when I was a boy. Dora has only herself to blame.”

  No avian shrieks accompanied Richard’s voice from the Sportsman armchair nowadays. The parrot cage stood empty on its table. Hetty always saw its emptiness with some relief, since it was connected with a rarely happy incident between father and son.

  One Sunday afternoon, following on the usual walk with the children to Cutler’s Pond and back, and a dinner of roast mutton which, thank goodness, had not gone wrong, Dickie had said, “I wonder if Polly would enjoy climbing about the tree? He knows us well enough now to know which side his bread is buttered. So what do you say, Phillip, shall we let him out to stretch his wings?”

  Before this, Richard had told the children the story of their Grandfather Maddison’s tame partridges. It had been wonderful for Hetty to feel the happiness in the room. Phillip particularly had stared at his father, his eyes shining. Dickie had looked years younger as he talked of his old home in the country.

  After dinner Dickie had taken the cage into Mavis’s bedroom, which was at the back, and opened the window wide, as well as the cage door. After a while the grey and pink parrot had climbed out, and pulled itself to the top of the wire dome. There were some elm-trees down below in the gardens of Charlotte Road, and eventually the bird had flown away to them, uttering raucous cries. It had perched in the top of one, and, at sunset, had flown back to its cage.

  The next Sunday afternoon Richard had let Polly out again, this time in the garden. The parrot had flown up into their own tree; but it had not come back. The next morning Richard had seen it in the elms on top of the Hill, perching up near the old nests, now
abandoned by the rooks for the summer. Later, he had seen it flying with rooks over the grass. He walked daily over the Hill to the station, for after an interval of years he had returned to the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, the quarterly season ticket to London Bridge being cheaper. The old feeling of embarrassment at the possibility of meeting anyone at the Tennis Club or Antiquarian Society had by now gone.

  *

  In the autumn the rooks came back at their tree tops, the African parrot with them. Phillip had seen it with the black birds on the grass. A rook was feeding it, he declared.

  “Well,” said Richard, “Polly is happier like that, it no longer has to go to an office every morning,” and Phillip wondered what Father meant, seeing no connection. He was not the only one in “Lindenheim” unable to connect one event with another.

  Phillip’s reluctance to start early for school every morning, otherwise his chronic lateness which puzzled Hetty, was in part due to fear of arriving in the playground before the bell rang for the classes to line up before going into their classrooms. He was afraid of being seen by Mildenhall and his gang as he passed by Comfort Road, where Mildenhall lived. So Phillip went as late as possible to school, hoping to arrive at the gate just as Mr. Scrivenor was about to toll the bell. For the same reason he stayed behind in the classroom, pretending to look for a lost pencil on the floor, until it was empty. Then he could steal out, unobserved, to the gate, after making sure that Mildenhall was not about.

  Phillip was still in Standard Four, where most of the boys, their hair clipped close upon the skull with a fringe left upon the brow, wore white rubber collars and long black stockings held up by garters above the knee. Standard Four was in charge of the disciplinarian, Mr. Twine. Mr. Twine was also the football master for the bigger boys in Standards Five, Six and Seven. He inspired a kind of fear different from that of “Gussy”. Known as “Twiney”, he was a man of twenty-six or seven years of age, tall and thin, with dark piercing eyes, a big brown moustache, and in the Union Jack Library he would have been described as hatchet-faced. Boys caught whispering, or even looking up from their books, were called out in front and usually told to hold out their hands, to receive two or three strokes of the cane on each palm. Phillip had not had the cane yet, but he lived in subdued terror of Mr. Twine.