Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  Father held a candle and said, “It’s all right, old chap, it’s only Mother and Father. You’ve only had a nightmare.”

  He was wet all over, and Mother held his hand, while Father went away and brought back a glass of water and put some fizzy stuff in the glass, and said, “Drink this, old chap, it will make you better; it’s bromide of potassium, and will make you sleep.”

  Phillip began to cry.

  “What’s the matter now, old chap? Got a bit of a tummy-ache? What have you been eating?”

  “I’ll never get a scholarship,” wailed Phillip. “I won’t, I know I won’t. I can’t do it, I can’t do it. I know I won’t get a scholarship. I’m an old hulk, worn out.”

  “You’ll feel all right in the morning, old chap. Just try and keep calm. Why, Mother tells me you got full marks for your English paper, and about our parrot, too! Well done, Phillip. Everyone feels like you feel before a race, or a fight, or an examination, everyone in the world. Now just you let Mother make your bed, and settle yourself down. Anyway, if you don’t get a scholarship, we shall have to find ways and means to circumvent that. Plenty of time to think of that afterwards. Some boys, you know, have to lose. They can’t all win. I bet everyone to-night is worrying himself sick about it. So don’t you worry any more, old fellow, will you now? Promise me?”

  “Yes, Father, thank you.”

  “That’s a sensible fellow. Remember how you swung on the Life Saving Cable at Hayling Island? You did all right, didn’t you? And you’ll find you will be able to do the papers to-morrow. Now we must all get some sleep. You wait till you get a bicycle, Phil, I’ll take you some grand rides into the country. It will be spiffing fun, having your own cycle. Good night, old chap, and don’t worry any more,” and giving his son a pat on the head, Richard went out of the room.

  Tucked in neatly and securely, Phillip kissed his mother. “I want to be very proud of you,” she whispered, and he replied, “Don’t shut the door, will you, please? Good night. I feel very nice now, with that fizzy drink. Like the brandy—lovely!”

  The next morning Hetty took him to Bereshill School, dressed in his best suit with a wide linen starched collar sitting upon the shoulders of his blue serge Norfolk suit. She left him there with an aching heart, he looked so pale and anxious.

  The hall had desks in it, spaced out, where silent and apprehensive boys sat down. Phillip waited with dry throat while the man came and put the printed arithmetic paper on his desk. He read the questions, and tried to grasp them against a silent rushing something in the room which took away all thought. Clamped to the seat, he saw the clock hand moving onwards to the dreaded hour when the papers would be collected.

  At last, after a fatal pause during which the air rushed silently with the brown wood of the roof and the maps and portraits on the walls about him, he gripped his hands and made himself read the questions again. He copied the figures of the first of the set sums upon his ruled foolscap paper. His hand seemed of wood and the nib jerked like the teeth of the big saw when the two men cut down the elms in the Backfield. The clock had moved an awful lot when he had done the sums. Hurriedly he read the Part Two problems.

  There was the same man wanting to paper the walls of a room, to whom Mr. Groat had often introduced to him: wallpaper which must not be pasted on doors and windows, the spaces to be allowed for. There were the two familiar trains approaching each other at different speeds; while the third and last problem was to work out how many ounce packets could be made out of two-and-a-half tons of ground coconut. Phillip tried to deal with the wallpaper, while remembering what Mother had told him had happened when she and Father had tried to paper the bedroom in their first house. Father put the flour-and-water paste on the strip of paper before putting it on the wall, and as he mounted the steps the paper stuck to his face and tried to cling to his trousers. Then the next bit curled up when he pasted it on the floor, and licked his face. However hard Phillip tried to forget Father on the ladder, and Mother’s laughter as she told him about it, he could not put it out of mind. With a stifled cry he turned to No. 5 question, the two trains.

  Phillip saw only the trains rushing with rapid thuds of pistons and screaming whistles upon one another. In despair, with glances at the fatal clock, he crossed out his figures of No. 5 and started No. 6, while fighting the sick feeling he remembered when Mr. Hern in the grocer’s shop at the corner in Randiswell had given him some mouldy coconut powder to taste, rancid and tasting like soap. Try as he would, he could not get away from a jumbled picture of himself filling packet after packet, putting them in a great pile on Mr. Hern’s shop floor, like a sand-castle being repaired as the tide came in. Sticky wallpaper got on the grey-white powder, and was smothering him, he would never, never escape. He could do the answers if only he did not itch so much and the clock would not move so quickly, and if only the boy in front of him would stop darting his tongue in and out as he wrote. Now he saw himself trying to widdle up against Mr. Groat’s lamp-post in the fog, although his bladder was bursting and cousin Ralph had said that if it got into your blood you would turn yellow and die like the old man at the bottom house of the road who had had yellow fever, in spite of lots of straw being spread in front of his home to stop the noise of passing horses’ hoofs and cartwheels.

  It was all as he knew it would be, he would never win a scholarship. The clock was now at the hour, and his neck felt like an assegai was stuck in it. O, Mummy, Mummy, I told you I was an old hulk, unable to float, like the ones on the mud near Hayling Island.

  *

  He felt better when he had been to the lavatory, after a break-off of ten minutes. When the Composition paper was laid on his desk it looked nice and cool, and he saw Percy and the other boys, in their clean white collars, asking if their collars were clean after they had hunted eels under stones in the Satchville brook. Then one boy said that young robins pecked the breasts of the parent birds and killed them, as they liked the taste of blood and the old robins were red from the blood of the Cross, after trying to pull thorns from the brow of Jesus. So it was right to stick thorns through the nestlings, to kill them first. Father said it was not true, young robins did not kill their parents, and only village cads believed such rot.

  Describe in your own words either (a) A Walk by the side of a river, or (b) Which season of the year you like best, and why.

  Phillip saw the Brickhill Ponds, the blue sky shining below the reeds, and the Satchville brook beyond, where some of the wild duck belonging to the Duke nested in pollard hollow oaks by the path leading to the Duke’s village over the moors. He heard Percy saying earnestly, Pray don’t touch so much as one egg, there is a fine of five pounds for each egg. Percy did not dare even to look into a tree, much less to climb up, though there was nobody about. He himself had climbed up, and counted eighteen eggs in one nest, grey-green eggs with feathers around them. The duck which had flown out as he had climbed up flew round in the sky, making a soft noise like quaz, quaz, quaz, until he had got down and they had gone away again, along the footpath to the village, to buy some No. 2 bulleted breech caps for the saloon gun. In the Duke’s village was a lamp-post with a tom-tit nesting in it. And on going home by the brook they saw many trout, looking thin and flat in the angle of the water, and pale-blue flowers of brooklime, and big yellow kingcups, and on some watercress which Percy called water-crease a red dragonfly was resting, near a curly skin out of which it had hatched.

  *

  In dread of the creeping black hand of the clock on the wall Phillip wrote of all he had seen, making the brook much wider, into a river, and putting swans on it, like on a real river, and the sunset beyond made it alike on fire, with the rings of rising trout breaking the smooth fire into ripples, to be carried away on the water, and the river was like life flowing past, never to return, and yet always there in flow. And he saw the blue eyes and fair hair of Helena Rolls smiling at him, and she was dead, she had died as a little child. She was his best friend who had asked him always to he
r parties, and now her spirit was in the water and the sky and in the singing of the birds, and he thought of her like Minnie, she was Minnie, and very near him as he walked alone by the river at sunset, and wherever he went on the seas or across the great spaces of the earth, she would be near him, for she loved him and love was God.

  Phillip’s eyes filled with tears as he wrote; they dropped on the paper, making some of the ink to run, but the black long hand was now ever so near the top of the clock, and the hour was nearly gone, and it was time to go home from the river and sit in the old farmhouse parlour, where the crickets played their little fish-bone violins in the cracks of the wall.

  *

  As the man came to take up his paper he was filled with fear, for what he had written was not composition at all, but all made up, and not true. O, he had lost his chance of a scholarship, and poor Mummy, it would make her cry, and Father would be cross, Father who had spoken so nicely to him and not been angry or punished him when he had had the nightmare. How could he go home, and tell Mummy the awful thing he had done? He was wicked, because Helena Rolls had not died at all, and he had never been asked to her house because he swore bad words, and he had not really tried to work for a scholarship but read about Jack Valiant and Sexton Blake instead.

  When Phillip arrived home he was at first curt and rude to his mother. Later he cried when she asked him how he had got on. The days that followed were haunted with fear, for what the Examiners would say when they read the terrible, terrible all-made-up writing he had done on the walk by the river. And, in desperation, for now nothing mattered, when Mildenhall held up his fist at him in class one day, Phillip held up his fist to Mildenhall. After school he did not run away, but went out with Cranmer to the boys waiting in the playground, some calling out, “Ha, Donkey Boy! Two black eyes and a broken nose, a lift under the lug, and down ’e goes! Donkey Boy! Donkey Boy!”

  White-faced, Phillip found himself in a crowd being pressed forward to the Woodwork Shop round the corner, out of sight of the main entrance to the school. Gerry came with him, and said, “Don’t you be afraid of him, young Phil. I’ll tell you what to do. Let him do your dags first, see, and take no notice. Stand quite still, as though you’re funky. Then he’ll do your cowardies. Now listen carefully. The moment he has done your cowardies, punch him one on the snout with your left hand. Don’t square up to him. Just bang one in on the snout, then hit him with your right before he can recover. He won’t fight, he’s a funk, really, that’s why he’s always picked on you, because he knows you don’t fight. But you’re a game cock, young Phil. I’ll stand by you, so don’t let him take the spunk out of you.”

  The boys made a ring. Mildenhall stood looking at Phillip. Phillip was frightened. He felt sick, and no stronger than a piece of paper. Gerry put his arm on Phillip’s back and urged him closer to the buck-toothed Mildenhall. Mildenhall said, in a low voice,

  “You sauced me!”

  “I didn’t sauce you, ever.”

  “Yuss you did. Will you fight?”

  “I didn’t sauce you!” cried Phillip, unhappily.

  “You did then! I can prove it. Call me a liar?”

  Gerry whispered to Phillip, “Say yes.”

  With a quaver in his voice, Phillip said Mildenhall was a liar.

  “Tell him he pinched your blood-alley,” urged Gerry.

  “And you took my blood-alley! My Father gave me that one!”

  “Yah, Ole Tin Wills,” said Mildenhall, urged on by his friends, who cried, “Go on, Mildy, do ’is dags! Paste ’im! Wears a starched collar, and parts ’is ’air at the side, fancyin’ ’isself as a toff! Take ’im dahn, Mildy, go on!”

  Mildenhall tapped Phillip with his fist on the left breast, in the traditional manner of the challenge.

  “There’s your dags,” he said.

  Phillip stood still, his hands unclenched by his stomach.

  Mildenhall dapped him again, saying “There’s your cowardies, as you won’t fight.” Shutting his eyes, Phillip poked out with his left hand. To his surprise and dismay, Mildenhall stepped back, holding his nose, which began to bleed.

  “’it ’im!” cried the boys. “Go on Mildy, ’it ’im, ’it the sawny Donkey Boy!”

  Mildenhall stood there, his mouth twisting as he tried not to cry. Blood ran down to his mouth.

  “Go on, slosh him, you can fight him,” urged Gerry, but Phillip, though he wanted to give Mildenhall a straight left, of the kind he had imagined a hundred times when reading the Pluck Library, found that he could not move. His arms would not lift up. He stared at the blood running down Mildenhall’s chin, and was sorry for Mildenhall.

  The fight was over. Phillip did not feel like the winner.

  Mildenhall’s friends jeered, and followed in a bunch, chanting “Donkey Boy! Yah! Donkey Boy! Thinks he’s better’n us wearin’ a white collar on!” as Phillip walked away with Cranmer and Gerry. There was a low cry of “Billo, Twiney!” as Mr. Twine looked out of the doorway. The shouting stopped immediately.

  The three walked out of the side-gate, followed by the others, some saying “Funk!” as soon as they were out of sight behind the playground wall.

  “Try again, Mildy, ’e ’it you when you warn’t ready. I seed him, yah, Donkey Boy! Bah! Donkey’s Ass, your farver fed you on donkey’s piss, old Tin Wheels what got two boys dahn Pit Vale put away in quod fer nuffink, only a bit o’ sport! Cowardy cowardy custard, eat your muwer’s mustard, what comes aht’v ’er——”

  In a fury Gerry turned the boy taunting Phillip and struck him two blows on the chest in quick succession, crying “Cowardies and Dags, come on!” and danced round the boy, then with a swing of his right hand struck him on the side of the head. The boy sat down, howling. “Any more?” cried Gerry, looking round with weaving fists. He caught Mildenhall by the coat collar.

  “D’you give Maddison best, eh? Want to fight? Go on, Phil, paste him!”

  Seeing that Mildenhall did not want to fight, Phillip, who was now beginning to enjoy himself, squared up to him, while the boys made a ring, shouting out, “A fight! A fight!” then “Billo! Twiney’s coming!” whereupon the whole lot took to their heels, to Phillip’s relief.

  He had won a fight! His elation was slight, for he could not forget the sight of Mildenhall’s nose bleeding. It must have hurt Mildenhall a lot, and it wasn’t a real fight. If Mildenhall had done it to him, he would have had to cry more than Mildenhall.

  The next day Mildenhall did not look at Phillip, but went home first. Soon the fight was forgotten, as the end of term drew on.

  *

  There were hot cross buns to look forward to on Good Friday, and best of all, they were going the following week to Aunt Liza’s at Beau Brickhill. Phillip was thinking of fishing, of nesting in the fields and spinneys, of sleeping with Percy, of the wonderful talks they would have, in whispers, when they were in bed together, when the classroom door opened and Mr. Garstang stood there, looking straight in his direction.

  Mr. Twine went to Mr. Garstang. They spoke together, while Phillip pretended to be working. He knew they were talking about him. Mr. Garstang had found out about his composition. His heart thudded in his ears.

  “Phillip, come with me,” said Mr. Garstang.

  *

  Phillip got up and saw himself following Mr. Garstang out of the classroom, into the hall, past the Black Line, up the stairs to the dreaded study with its glass doors. He waited by the open door, afraid to do the wrong thing, frightened of the room before him. Mr. Garstang turned his head and said in his deep voice, “Come in, my friend”, and at the mode of address Phillip felt a colder, more ominous fear.

  He was just aware that an old gentleman was sitting in a chair in the room. He had a pink thin face, and silver hair. He wore spectacles like Father’s, with a thin gold frame. Phillip wondered why the old gentleman was smiling.

  “This is the boy, Sir Park,” said Mr. Garstang. Phillip recognized with a start that his composition paper was lying on
Mr. Garstang’s desk. He was found out. He was going to be expelled.

  “Don’t look so scared, Phillip,” said Mr. Garstang, and when he smiled he seemed quite different from Mr. Garstang. Phillip smiled, but did not know what to do. He waited, with dry throat.

  “Under some tension,” said the old gentleman. “Now, with your permission, Headmaster, I will ask my questions. First, will you introduce to me your pupil.”

  “Phillip, Sir Park Gomme, of the London County Council, has come to tell me the results of the scholarships examination. This is Phillip Maddison, Sir Park.”

  At the phrase LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL Phillip went pale again. They were great big black words which ruled everything and were everything.

  “How do you do, Phillip,” said LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL, holding out a hand.

  Phillip could not speak. A swallowed cluck, a voiceless tremor of the lips greeted Sir Park Gomme.

  “You must not be afraid of me, I am the friend of all little children,” said the old gentleman.

  After swallowing, Phillip found he could speak.

  “Considerable tension as a normal condition, I should say, Mr. Garstang.”

  “Quite well, thank you, Sir,” said Phillip.

  “That’s right,” said the old gentleman genially. “And so you speak German, Phillip. Your old nurse Minnie must have been a very good friend to you.”

  Phillip began to feel happy talking to the nice old gentleman of LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL.

  “Yes, sir, only it was long ago, when I was little.”

  “And you love the countryside, do you?”

  “Yes, sir, very much.”

  “Have you ever lived there?”

  “I go holiday-making, to my cousins, sir, at Beau Brickhill, near the river, sir.”

  “And you wrote about Beau Brickhill; what a delightful place it must be.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Well, your Headmaster has told me before that one of his boys had an uncommon gift for writing, and your English paper, that is to say your composition, certainly bears it out.”