Phillip had no idea that Peter Wallace was such a terrible fighter until one morning, during the past Christmas holidays, he had come to his help upon the Hill. On that occasion Phillip had been set-upon by four rough boys from the Borough, who had recognised him as the “posh boy” who had asked them to stop tormenting a local destitute character called Jack o’ Rags, who slept in an old swan’s nest in the Randiswell Recreation Ground at night, and hung around the market stalls and carmen’s coffee houses by day, for odd scraps of food. Jack ’o Rags was a bearded and dirty short man, with a hoarse voice, about whom there were many rumours, connected with wealth he had rejected; it was always the poor boys of the neighbourhood who sauced him, pelting him with horse-dung and other garbage.
“It’s ’im, come on, mob ’im, boys!” cried the leader, recognising Phillip on the Hill during the Christmas holidays. Phillip stood his ground, too proud to run away. “Jack o’ Rags is a poor old man, really,” he said, white in the face.
Thereupon, seeing him afraid, the scowling bigger boy promptly rushed at him, with swinging fists, together with his three companions. Soon the four roughs were on top of Phillip, who between his sobs cried for help. Peter Wallace had run up; lugged off one boy and sent him spinning with a thump on the ear; butted a second in the stomach; bitten a third on the thumb; hauled off the leader, and then in the words of Phillip’s Uncle Hugh, who had watched it all, “the bra’ bracht moonlacht laddie proceeded to get the poor wretched devil’s head into the position of a cask on stools, in order to tap his claret.”
With such a brave friend beside him, Phillip thenceforth had felt confident to address boys bigger and stronger than himself, should they be doing things of which he disapproved—such as twisting the arms of other boys, throwing stones at stray dogs, or otherwise being guilty of what he deemed to be hooliganism. With Peter beside him he found that he could interfere in such cases with impunity, and redress what he fancied were wrongs. When Phillip was challenged to fight, Peter by his side stepped forward and said, “You want to fight me, do you?”
The dialogue on such occasions usually went on familiar lines.
“Yuss mate! An’ I don’t trouble what sawney tool-greaser I takes on—sparrer-knees or yerself—Four Eyes, cor, laugh at ’im! Four Eyes!”
Peter removed his glasses at this. He was so quiet that the other became threatening.
“Right, mate, you arst for it! Here’s your dags. There’s yer cowardies! Now ’it ’im! Come on, ’it ’im!”, as he stood back on guard, scowling, fists clenched.
Fascinated, Phillip watched Peter Wallace during the folding and pocketing of spectacles; he waited with shortening breath for what was coming—the sudden leap, the clinch, the pummel, rapid and sustained, of right fist upon downheld face, blow after rapid blow until the falling away, the stagger, the doubling-up of the victim, his nose streaming with blood. Phillip felt tremulous pity for the beaten boy, coupled with the flaring feeling of terror-excitement he had when he saw flames spreading in the dry yellow grasses after he had deliberately set fire to them in the Backfield, on a scorching summer day.
*
One morning during the Easter holidays Phillip, Peter Wallace and his brother David, and another boy were baking potatoes in the embers of their fire, in a fold of the ground above the Red Ballast Heap. This was a conical mass of several hundred tons of burnt clay, left by Mr. Antill the builder some years before, after the completion of a row of houses to the south of the Backfield. Without any warning a shower of hard red lumps fell upon the camp, where the four boys were sitting. In the first volley Phillip received a hit on the nose which knocked him backwards; but Peter and David Wallace immediately gave chase. While the intruders fled from Peter’s wrath over the spiked iron railings which marked the boundary of the Hill above, Phillip sat on the ground and cried with pain. His nose seemed very big, the skin was broken, and smarted when he touched it.
He thought he would go home; but changing his mind, he climbed over the railings and went to find out what had happened to the others. Peter had caught a boy near the tennis courts; and was sitting astride him, waiting for Phillip. When he arrived, Phillip saw that the prostrate boy was Alfred Hawkins, son of the barber in Randiswell, who had the cheek to be sweet on his sister Mavis.
Peter Wallace let Alfred Hawkins get up, but held his arm in a grip which, if forced, was supposed to break it at the elbow: a policeman’s grip.
“Who threw the bit of ballast that hit Phillip? You did!”
“I never!”
“Then why did you run away?”
Alfred Hawkins was silent.
“Who were the others?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know. I never sin them before.”
Phillip, fixing Alfred Hawkins with accusing eyes, said, “If you weren’t with that band, then what were you doing in the Backfield?”
Alfred Hawkins looked on the ground.
“Ah, you daren’t answer! Well, I know why! You came after my sister, didn’t you!”
Alfred kept his gaze lowered.
Several people were watching the little group. Among them was Mr. Pye, who was with his two children throwing up their diabolos into the air, and catching them on the string again. Phillip felt uneasy as he came towards them.
“What’s the trouble, Phillip?”
“Nothing, Mr. Pye.”
“Well, you boys don’t want to fight on a fine morning like this! It’s almost sacrilege! Why not shake hands and make it up?”
None of the boys moved. Mr. Pye, after a pause to look at the white clouds passing in the sky, hummed a little tune to himself, and moved away to his children who were still spinning their new red diabolos.
“Come on, Peter,” said Phillip. “Let’s go. I know damn well what you were after, Alfred Hawkins, skulking round by my fence. If you trespass on my preserves again, you’ll be sorry!”
*
Phillip’s scorn of the blushing, smiling boy with the downcast glance left sitting by the tennis court was derived, unconsciously, from Richard’s various remarks about lovers lying on the Hill at night. Phillip had developed a feeling of revulsion and scorn for “lovers”, or any idea approaching the figment. They were filthy people. As for Richard’s attitude, it too was an unconscious reflexion of ideas generally held among incomplete men towards sex: a suburban horror of irregularities, based on the fear of venereal disease, and its effects on the innocent.
This jangle of half-living had made Alfred Hawkins, in Phillip’s eyes, a figure that had no relation to the truth of Alfred Hawkins. He was a dreamy, high-minded boy, whose mother had died when he was young. His father was half-paralysed, a barber owning a little shop in Randiswell, where poor people had their hair cut; and this by itself was almost enough, in Phillip’s eyes, to show that Alfred Hawkins was not fit to have anything to do with his sister. Alfred Hawkins had gone into the Backfield to look at the house, from a distance, where the object of his dreams lived. He had stood there for an hour, elevated by the illusion of love, beauty, and service. He had been on his way back from his vigil when, fancying himself pursued by Peter Wallace, he had panic’d and taken to his heels.
Alfred Hawkins wrote little notes to Mavis with poems copied out in them, and Mavis replied similarly. Shyly, almost dreading to meet one another, they exchanged these tokens of the spirit in a crack of one of the posts of the fence.
“And what’s more, Alfred Hawkins, you steer clear of my sister, or I’ll know the reason why!” And with this warning Phillip went away, all unconscious that he was a pattern of his Father’s moral indignation.
*
For twenty-five years Richard had been going to and from the City, and in that time, as he had estimated one recent evening while compiling his diary, he had crossed upon the flag-stones of London Bridge, in the roar of iron wheel-bands and horses’ hoofs on granite, approximately on fourteen thousand five hundred occasions. He might have added, had he been a man used to observing himself objectiv
ely, that on the last ten thousand or so occasions he had done so almost entirely out of a sense of duty towards wife and family. Duty and decorum were the ruling abstracts of his life. However, in moments of unhappiness he did allow himself to reflect that, if he had not married Hetty—if he had gone away after Mr. Turney had forbidden him to see his daughter—if he had not weakly given in to the illusion of love—he would by now be an entirely different man, living an open air life of action in Australia, where his younger brother Hilary had farming and other interests.
City life, nevertheless, had its compensations. During the spring and summer months he could cycle into Kent and Surrey, and enjoy his own life of green fields, trees, water, the sight of sheep and cattle, the song of birds, sunlit flickering of butterflies. Now once again it was almost time to take to the wheel, to wipe vaseline off plated handlebar and pedal crank, and polish the enamel of the frame of his faithful iron steed. How well was that machine named—his all-black, all-weather Sunbeam with the Little Oil Bath, built in Wolverhampton, made to last a lifetime by British craftsmanship, the finest in the world!
Proud of his thoroughbred possession, its black frame lined with gold after twelve stove-enamellings, its bright parts solidly plated with nickel-silver, Richard, during the seasons of light and life, kept the Sunbeam polished, lubricated, and adjusted; while the Dunlop tyres were always pumped to the recommended resilience against those enemies of the pneumatic tube—the innumerable pale flints of the white and dusty roads of Kent.
*
At breakfast Richard announced his intention of cycling that Saturday afternoon to the Salt Box on the North Downs, for a tea of boiled eggs and brown bread and butter, should the weather keep fine. Would anyone (meaning Phillip) care to accompany him? No one apparently would.
“Well, don’t all speak at once,” said Richard, after a silence.
“How about you, Phillip?” said Hetty, with forced cheerfulness.
“I may have to play football for the House this afternoon.”
“Well, if your name is not on the list, I am sure you will want to accompany your Father, won’t you dear?”
Before Phillip could think what to say, Richard said, “Oh, please do not force the boy to do anything he does not want to do! My Father always used to say, ‘One volunteer is worth ten press-men’.”
“Do tell us about when you were a boy, Dads,” said Mavis. “I simply love hearing about what you did.”
“Humph,” said Richard, not displeased. He was very fond of his elder daughter. He looked at his watch. “Another time, perhaps, my gipsy—— Hetty, I hope to be home at a quarter to two o’clock this afternoon.”
*
A pleasant scene greeted Richard on his return from the City. The sun was shining brilliantly after a doubtful morning; the warm bright rays of April filled the south window of the sitting room, where the table was laid for lunch. The place had been cleaned, the floors polished by Mrs. Feeney, the charwoman. Everything looked fresh, almost new—a pleasing condition for Richard, so meticulous in his sense of neatness and order, both within and without a house. No smells of cooking, or over-cooking, greeted him from the kitchen; nothing was burning, or had burned, after boiling over; instead, the scent of—could it be?—wild sweet violets had greeted his nostrils as he entered the front door.
There they were, his favourite flowers, opposite his place at table, in a cut-glass jar with a silver rim—three dozen or so wild English violets, their stalks in clear water; and among them, in the centre of the deep purple petals, a solitary wood anemone, a wind-flower, fragile and white. Richard smiled with delight. Through the faint scent, instantly he perceived himself as a boy in the West Country, among happy brothers and sisters, bringing back from the woods the first violets of the year for Mother’s boudoir. For a moment he saw her face, as she stood at the window, in the room above and back from the porch, with its iron-studded oaken door.
Memory, through the sense of smell, induces the most piercing of all emotions of the past, since that sense originally was old in man when sight and hearing were new. It is startling, it is stilling, it is sad when old scenes thus return, as in resurrection, from the past. Momentarily overcome, Richard stood still, by the french windows. Mother, Mother!
“Hullo, Dads!”
Mavis, in blue-serge gym uniform, had come silently into the room on plimsoled feet. She flung her arms round his middle, jingling his watch-chain.
“Hullo, my gipsy! Got a kiss for your old Dads?”
Stretching up, she kissed him on the lips, the only place on his face—apart from nose, brow, cheekbones, and eyes—which was not rough and tickly. Richard had never shaved.
“Do you like the violets, Dads?”
“Yes indeed. I got their scent as soon as I opened the front door.”
“Would you like to have them, Dads?”
“How very kind of you, Mavis. But perhaps Mother would care for them.”
“She knows I got them for you, Dads.”
“Well, we’ll all enjoy them, shall we?”
He moved the glass eighteen inches or so away from his place at table, putting it in the centre of the tablecloth. Unaware of the child’s disappointment, he went on, “Where did you get them, Mavis, not round here, I’ll be bound!”
“Not very far away, Dads! You see, we were playing lacrosse in the Rec.—I mean the Recreation Ground—this morning, and I heard two of the girls talking about some flowers they had got for Miss Wendover, you know Dads, our games mistress. I smelt them, and they were lovely. They got them from the garden of that big old empty house that goes down to the river, you know, the one you told us might be haunted when we passed on the walk one Sunday, where nobody lives, and the carriages stand in the coach-house, all wet from the slates fallen off the roof. So my friend and I went and got some, and we found the white one under some trees in the wood—what is it, Dads? Mum says it may be a kind of Flower of Parnassus.”
“Oh no! That’s an ordinary windflower. The proper name is wood-anemone. We had lots of them growing in the woods at home when I was a boy. This one’s somewhat early, I fancy, for flowers are earlier in the west than here, owing to the Gulf Stream. Usually the anemones were out in force when the birds had laid, towards the end of April. We boys used to go through the woods with the under-keeper, looking for nests. It was safer, you see, to put them under broody hens. A wonderful sight it was, too, to look at twilight down the ride of one covert where the coops were, and see a row of lighted lanterns hung on sticks stuck in the ground. Can you tell me why the lanterns were there, now?”
“For people to see to ride by, Dads?”
“Oh no, my gipsy!” Richard laughed. “You see, a ride in a wood is a long clearing among the trees—though no-one would ride there in the rearing season, of course—but anyway, this particular ride was kept for the coops. And the lanterns were lit for—well now, try and guess!”
“Oh, I can’t, Dads! Do tell me!”
“Try and think, young woman.”
“Oh, I simply can’t. Unless it was for the hens to see by.”
“What, at night, when they were snug in their coops? Now what would they possibly want to see for?”
“Well, what for, Dads?”
“Ah, you must guess!”
“Oh, I simply can’t. The lights must be for someone or other to see by.”
“Ah, getting warmer!”
“The keeper?”
“A little warmer. He would not need to see the lights, I’ll give you that hint.”
The bright light suddenly ceased in the sitting or garden room. A rain-cloud covered the sun. A bird was singing in the top of the elm in the garden.
“He’s got a nest somewhere, I’ll be bound,” remarked Richard, going to the french windows. “Can you tell me what bird that is?”
“A thrush, Dads! I was named after a thrush, wasn’t I?”
“Yes, and it may well be after that very bird out there!”
Richard watched
the slate roofs of houses beyond the waste ground shining again, as the cloud moved away.
“I bet he’s got a nest somewhere near. Do you know how a mother thrush builds her nest?”
“Yes Dads, you told us on the walk last Sunday, don’t you remember?”
“Ah, but do you know the difference between the masoning methods of thrush and blackbird, when they build their nests?”
“Yes Dad, I remember. The thrush uses cow-droppings and bits of tinder wood to line its nest, but the blackbird puts all the mud in the bottom of his, before lining with little grasses. Oh!”
“Why, what’s the matter?” said Richard, his back to the room, as he drew pleasure from the new green of the elm at the bottom of the garden.
*
Mavis hesitated. She had, a moment before, caught sight of her brother under the table. Phillip’s face had looked out, making a frantic grimace, an anguished request not to be betrayed. He had slipped under when he had heard Father’s footfalls on the top step of three leading down from the hall to the passage below; and now was in an agony lest he be discovered, and be made to feel a fool, or worse, be rated for eavesdropping. He had hidden on sudden impulse, as a sort of joke; optimistic despite the fact that most of his jokes went wrong.
Young Phillip Maddison Page 6
