Mr. Purley-Prout, having fanned dust on the wooden floor with his wide-awake, skidded the hat away through the air to the side of the room, and lay on his back on the cleaned space.
“Ready? Now then, come on, the North West Kents!”
Mr. Purley-Prout let the boys lie on him, and get their grips on his arms, legs, and shoulders. Peter Wallace sat on his stomach.
“That’s right, Peter, do your utmost! You won’t hurt me,” Mr. Prout said. “You could strike me in the solar plexus with a sledge-hammer, and make no impression. I am a Sandow pupil, you see! Now then, everyone got his grip? One to be ready, two to be steady, three to be off!” and with that Mr. Purley-Prout heaved himself up, boys tumbling off him in all directions, but Peter Wallace still clinging to his waist. Having scattered the boys, Mr. Purley-Prout rose to his feet and waltzed round and round, Peter’s legs flying outwards as he clung on. Then Mr. Purley-Prout stopped.
“All right, Peter, well done! Let go now! I could have broken your clasp, of course, had I wanted to do it. Now boys,” he went on, as he drew up a chair by the fire and sat down, “you have had an example of how a normally fit man can protect himself against what might have been, in different circumstances, a gang of toughs intent on battery and robbery. Come, sit on the floor around me, and rest for a few minutes before tea. Here you, what’s your name? Lenny Low? Come and sit on my knee, you look rather cold.”
Lenny Low sat on Mr. Purley-Prout’s knee, and Mr. Purley-Prout put his arms round Lenny.
“Now boys, I want to say one or two things. One is, never forget you are scouts in the finest troop in Britain! If you don’t carry your scoutship into your home-life, your schoolwork, your games, your friendships—you’re not a scout, you’re a mere tenderfoot! You must be prepared for calumny, too, there are many rotters always ready to—Phillip, are you listening?”
“Yes, Mr. Prout.”
“Your eyes were somewhere up in the roof, Phillip. What was I saying?”
Phillip had been interested in a big long-legged hairy spider on its carpet web up by one of the glass tiles of the roof that let in light. The spider had run forward to a wasp—a big queen wasp, it looked like—on its back in the web, feebly struggling, as it was still half hibernating. Would the spider dare to seize it?
“A scout must always be prepared everywhere, in and out of doors, Mr. Prout.”
“Be prepared for what, Phillip?”
“For rotters, Mr. Prout.”
Mr. Purley-Prout shifted on his chair, moving Lenny Low on his lap with him.
“Now boys, I don’t propose to give you any more ‘pi-jaw’. I believe a great deal more in deeds than in words.”
Phillip stole a look at the web up above in the roof. As he had thought, the spider had funked it. The wasp was crawling away. Good!
“What you must always do, boys, is to keep the ideal of the perfect gentle knight before you. Keep your thoughts and your bodies clean, then you will do always what is right, and noble, and splendid.”
The boys were silent.
“We want to see the North West Kents setting a noble ideal of unity and concord before every district in Britain. Each scout shall be a paladin, a knight-errant, and while I remember it, don’t forget to try and get all the recruits you can.”
Mr. Purley-Prout put down Lenny Low, straightened his khaki shorts, and stood up.
“Now for those who have tuck to cook, the fire is available. It is a point of honour with every scout to clean up afterwards, and leave everything neat and tidy. I have to go now. I leave the Senior Patrol Leader, Watty Holdwich, of the Lions, in charge. Until next week then, at two-thirty parade, outside! Zing a zing! Boom! Boom!”
“Zing a zing! Boom! Boom!” the troop replied, and the leader of the Lions shouted,
“Een gonyama!”
The rest of his patrol cried, “Gonyama?”
“Ya bo, ya bo! Invooboo!”
Erect and tense, Mr. Purley-Prout gave them the salute, spun round, and bounded away.
Chapter 14
LEAFLESS DAYS
DURING the dull depths of the year, Phillip did not call his patrol together. It was a time of inactivity because the sun, though now climbing to the spring solstice, was unable to clear the vapours of London river, so that smoke and dust combined in a seasonal shroud, at times darkening to a pall.
Still, the days were lengthening, said Richard, settling to read The Daily Trident in his armchair, slippered feet before the fire, Hetty and the children more or less happy in the room with him: Phillip working at his Stamp Book, Mavis making her new Red Riding Hood cloak for party-going, and Doris sewing clothes for her dollies.
The Maddison children had been invited to three parties that Christmas, not counting Gran’pa’s and Aunt Dome’s. The best of the parties was at the Todds, down the road. The Todds always had about a dozen children to tea and supper, with conjuring tricks, table fireworks, bonbons with toys in them as well as paper caps, and plenty of cream-puffs, jellies, mince-pies, blancmanges of various flavours, in addition to cold chicken and a ham.
Phillip secretly thought that Mavis looked very pretty in her Red Riding Hood cape with her hair up, and a sort of diamond comb stuck in it. It was half fancy dress, said Mother. Mavis had rubbed some petals of a geranium on her cheeks, and a little blue ink from her finger on her eyelids, like she did for the St. Cyprian’s Hall charades, in which she had acted. Mavis’ ears, he noticed, looked very neat and delicate. He felt secretly proud of her.
He wore his Etons, with dancing pumps and white kid gloves, in case there was any dancing at the Todds. It was just as well to be prepared, said Hetty. The last time they had gone, they had danced the Polka, the Washington Post, the Lancers, and the Barn Dance.
Mr. Todd usually had several of his friends as well, so that it was half a grown-ups’ party. Mrs. Todd was a big woman, always jolly; and although Phillip was a bit wary of both her and Mr. Todd—who had a red face and a nose like a parrot’s beak—yet they were both very nice to him, he thought. His wariness was due to a belief that they must consider him a bit of a hooligan, since they were friends with the Pyes up the road. The Pye children were there, but not Mr. Pye, for which Phillip was relieved. He was also relieved, in another way, that Helena Rolls did not come to the Todd parties, although they were friends.
Mr. Todd told them the same story every year, as he pointed with pride to a photograph on the wall of a bearded figure within an oval in the centre, with six younger men, each in a little circle by himself, around the Old Pater. Each son, declared Mr. Todd, had done well. Each had turned out to be a credit to the Old Pater, who was, he said, a partner in the Firm, Rice’s Night-lights, Candles, and Motor Oil Ltd., on Thameside—and at this point in the annual Christmas party Mr. Todd, beaming, put his arm round his wife’s waist, saying that he had married the daughter of the founder, Mr. Rice himself.
“Why, the candles you see on the Christmas Tree are Rice’s!” Then the grown-ups drank a toast to the Old Pater; and afterwards Mr. Todd, smiling hugely, asked Phillip to guess which of the six faces was himself. Phillip pretended to be puzzled, while Mr. Todd waited, delighted, until he pointed to the right face.
Postman’s Knock, Hunt the Slipper, Charades, Musical Chairs, Consequences (Phillip’s pencilled additions to the slips of paper handed round, folded up, varied from the grotesque and startling to the flippant and sarcastic)—all good things came to an end at ten o’clock, when after Auld Lang Syne and a final cup of cocoa, coats and mufflers and cloaks were donned, and with goodnights and thankyous, the guests departed, immediately after arrival home again to be told to toddle up to bed, to clean teeth and to make no noise; and so into cold sheets, still dazzled by the wonderful party.
*
At Mr. Jenkins’ house there was a different sort of dancing. Mr. Jenkins, a comparative newcomer to No. 8, was different from the other people in the road. He always dressed up for his parties in yachting uniform, complete with cap, and he danc
ed with each child in turn, while making the music himself by humming the Merry Widow waltz, Waltz Me Around Again Willie, or Over the Waves, generally making the party go, while tiny Mrs. Jenkins, despite a perpetual smile on her small round shiny face, seemed somehow always out of it. Nobody danced with her; but perhaps she did not mind, being the mother, thought Phillip.
The third party was at the other end of Charlotte Road, to some friends of Mavis. Thither the three children went, Phillip, as before, in his Eton suit, Mavis in her Red Riding Hood cloak covering her white frock, worn with black stockings and boots—changing into pumps inside the house—and Doris in a Kate Greenaway costume which Mrs. Lower Low had made for her.
It was a musical house, so the children took their songs. Phillip sang In the Cathedral, and Love’s Old Sweet Song (which was his mother’s favourite) helped out by Mavis; while Doris played her new piece, Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano; of which Uncle Hugh, after hearing her play it at home, had remarked, “And I don’t wonder why”; to which Mother had replied, “Hush, Hughie dear, she is doing her best.” “So did Beethoven, poor devil”, Uncle Hugh had said. Then he had said he was sorry, it was a caddish remark, and had tried to stroke Doris’s head, but she had ducked down, and gone out of the room with a stony face.
*
When Hetty called to pay Mrs. “Lower” Low for the dress, Mr. Low came to the door. Mrs. Low was upstairs. Mr. Low invited Hetty into the front room. Then he wrote something on a piece of paper and took it up to his wife, instead of calling her down. Mrs. Low appeared, clutching the piece of paper, profuse in apology, and looking so crushed that Hetty had to restrain herself from begging Mr. Low to be kinder to his wife.
One day towards the end of the holidays Hetty said to Phillip, “I am just going round to see Mrs. “Lower” Low about making you some new nightshirts. Would you like to come for a walk with me first, Phillip, then we can call in on the way back, and she can take your measurements.”
“No, thanks,” said Phillip. “I don’t want any new nightshirts. They always scratch me so.”
“Well, I expect we can manage without special new measurements,” replied Hetty.
Left alone in the house, Phillip went into his father’s room and took his B.S.A. air rifle out of the cupboard there. He knew where the waisted lead pellets were kept, and helped himself to a dozen. Then he went into Mavis’ bedroom—she was spending a week at Beau Brickhill with the cousins—and opening the bottom of the window, he loaded the spring and waited for starlings to fly to the elm.
Various mutton bones and lumps of fat hung from strings from the lower branches. Tomtits came to them, robins tried to cling on, starlings chittered about them. Phillip was after starlings, birds he did not like, as they were noisy and went about in mobs. He shot two, drilling through each bird a hole. The waisted pellet, spinning beyond the tree, struck the blind brick wall of a house beyond the Backfield.
Then cleaning the rifle, particularly any finger-prints on its stock and pistol-grip, Phillip put it back in the cupboard. By the time Hetty returned, the starlings had been skinned in the scullery, and a mixture of whiting, oatmeal soap, and alum rubbed on the skins, to cure them. These he nailed on a narrow board, afterwards hiding the board up the chimney of his bedroom, where the draught would dry the skins. Father would never think of looking for them there. The bodies of the starlings were to be put into the steak-and-kidney pudding Mother was to make the next day, to give it a sporting flavour.
*
One day in the new term, a Monday and washing day, Phillip took mutton sandwiches for what was called “free lunch” at school. He was unable to eat them. They were too salt. On coming home, he refused his tea, saying he had a headache. Alone in the kitchen, he settled to do his homework; but feeling seedy, he packed up his satchel and went to bed. There he slept fitfully, to awaken and see Father’s face in candlelight, and Father asking him angrily why he had gone to bed without doing his homework.
“Up you get this instant! I know you very well, you know, you cannot deceive me! You are malingering!”
“I feel poorly, Father.”
“I do not believe you!”
So Phillip put on his clothes again, and, after immersing his face in cold water to cure his headache, went downstairs, while part of him seemed to be floating off about the kitchen. Shivers of cold ran up his spine. He did his homework somehow, and was unable to eat any supper. Going to say goodnight obediently to Father in the sitting room, he listened to a lecture about honesty being the best policy, and that work was man’s obligation upon the earth, to be undertaken as a duty, to be faced like a man, not to be run away from, self-indulgently. Phillip listened with his usual immobility and expressionless face, knowing that what Father said was true; all the same, he had not pretended to be feeling poorly.
The next morning his flushed face and feverish forehead convinced both parents that he ought to stay in bed until he had been seen by Dr. Cave-Browne. After the doctor had gone, Phillip was told to remain in bed. Several times he was sick. His head throbbed. His throat was swollen and sore.
In the evening Father came and sat on the edge of his bed, and speaking kindly, told him that he had scarlet fever; and if he remained at home, it would mean that he would have to have a nurse, that Doris would have to go elsewhere during the period of quarantine, and a considerable expense would be involved in the matter of the entire house being fumigated with sulphur candles, and the need to have it repainted afterwards, as when Mavis had had scarlet fever. Therefore, all things being considered, it would be best if he went to the Fever Hospital, where he would be taken proper care of, and quickly grow well again.
Phillip thought wildly for a moment that he would perhaps never again see Mother; but he remained still, and said huskily, “Yes, Father.”
An hour or two later a horse ambulance came up Hillside Road. Phillip, wrapped in blankets, was carried down the stairs and out of the house. After saying goodbye to Mother, Father, and Mrs. Bigge from inside the ambulance, he was taken away in the night, an unspeaking nurse beside him, and an oil-lamp burning fitfully above his head. On arrival in the ward he was washed in bed, first on one side then the other, and tucked into rough sheets, with tight blankets. He cried silently for some hours, and the night nurse, in felt slippers, brought him a cup of gruel to drink. On the cup, in red letters, he read the words, Metropolitan Asylums Board, with silent terror.
After the first week, when the fever had died down, Phillip began to behave oddly in the ward, sometimes not wanting to open Mother’s letters, but keeping them under his pillow unread, while he set himself to think that he did not want to see her ever again. When at last he did read the letters, he hurt himself further by not replying. When eventually he did so, it was a brief little letter, beginning Dear Mrs, Maddison, and ending up Yours Truly, Phillip Maddison, in his best writing, which resembled Richard’s in the painstaking correctitude of each stroke, pothook, crossed t and dotted i.
He became the clown of the ward as the fever and pickled-crimson appearance of his body abated. At any moment he was liable to jump on his bed, wave his arms in the thick flannel nightshirt, waggle his head about like an imbecile, and then to imitate bagpipes by holding back his head, pinching his nostrils, uttering prolonged bleating cries while tapping his adam’s-apple with the stiff fingers of his other hand. After finding some sort of appreciation in the ward, among the nurses and the other boys, he looked forward to his mother’s letters with less anguish, and replied to them in pencil, saying that he was enjoying his holiday very much, and that she need not fear infection from his “missives”, as they were “all well-baked before leaving the premises of the Metropolitan Asylums Board”.
“H’m,” remarked Richard, after reading the “missive” in his armchair. “The iron seems to have entered into your best boy’s soul, Hetty.”
*
After three weeks in the hospital, Phillip and some other boys of the ward, dressed in blue suits, went away to
the convalescent home at Dartford. This too belonged to the Metropolitan Asylums Board. The building was on a small hill, and surrounded by the usual high spiked railings of authority. It adjoined a real Lunatic Asylum. From the slope of the hill there was a view of the Lunatics’ Graveyard just beyond the railings, and several times a week there were funerals to be watched from the distance of a hundred yards or so. The boys and youths of the convalescent home stood and stared in silence while relations wept around the pit, all clad in black. Every time he saw a lunatic being buried Phillip thought of Mother’s face, should he die, and be buried there. The thought of the utter sadness of Mother’s face was almost unbearable; but he kept his feelings, as usual, to himself.
Never once since he had left in the ambulance at night, lying in thick warm blankets in the light of a hanging oil-lamp, had Phillip thought of Father.
*
The day approached when he would have his own clothes again, and meet Mother. He dreaded the meeting. Since being away, he had lived another life of his own, making friends with two boys. He no longer cried at night; he enjoyed the meals, at the long tables, except one tea-time, when someone gave him bread and butter, for a joke, which was the equivalent of those chocolates, called hypocrits, which some boys at school gave to others—filled with a peppery liquid which burned the tongue for hours afterwards. Phillip did not know that the “butter” on the bread on his plate was yellow soap until he had taken a good bite, which filled up some of his teeth; and though he scrubbed them at once, retching once or twice, in the wash-house, the soapy bubbly taste remained until the next day.
When at last he met Mother again, he felt somehow ever so small, whereas in the convalescent home he had not been conscious of being any size. Mother smiled her usual smile, gay but also a little sad. He felt rather sad, too. It was a queer train journey to Brighton. He did not feel able to kiss her, but read The Boy’s Own Paper in his corner, by himself.
Young Phillip Maddison Page 21
