How Dear Is Life (5 page)

“Well dear, have a cup of tea with me before you go out, do! Won’t you let me boil you an egg? I do so look forward to everyone coming home, you know. It’s a little lonely sometimes, with everyone away all day. If it were not for Gran’pa, I should feel quite lost! Of course, dear, I don’t mind in the least you spending any of your time with Mrs. Neville! I am only too glad that you find her such good company. Well, I’m going to make some tea, anyway.”

He jingled the coins in his pocket. Then she remembered what he had told her that morning. Of course, his first salary!

“It must be a very satisfactory feeling, Phillip, to have your own money.”

“Oh, I don’t know. In a way, I suppose it is. Look.”

He put the coins in a neat row along the edge of the kitchen table.

“Aren’t the sovereigns lovely? They feel so heavy, but if they were lead, it would not be the same feeling. These kind-of know they’re gold. I suppose they will soon be gone. I’ve got to pay back Father quite a lot. Then there’s what I’ve got to give you for my keep. How much is that?”

“Well, your Father and I have discussed it, Phillip, and we thought half-a-crown a week, if you could manage it, dear.”

“That’s fifteen shillings out of one sovereign. Then my monthly season ticket, nine and fourpence. Luncheon tickets, twenty-five bob, for thirty meals. Pay back Father, two pounds.” He calculated. “Four pounds nine and fourpence. What have I got here? Four pounds six and six. H’m. I owe two shillings and tenpence, and have to pay one pound to Mr. Howlett for my Fidelity Guarantee. So I shall have exactly nothing for the next six weeks except luncheon and train tickets. Well, all of you can take this!” he cried, sweeping the handful of coins on the floor. “Take the lot, all of you,” and ran out of the house.

Less than a minute later, he returned. “I am sorry, Mum,” he said, and burst into tears.

“I know how you feel, dear,” said Hetty afterwards. “But why didn’t you tell me you weren’t having any food in London?
Of course, you are wrought up. I’ll soon have two boiled eggs, they are new laid, and such lovely brown shells. Mrs. Feeney brought them today. I’ll just put them on to boil, then I’ll help you find the rest of the money.”

It was picked up, except one sixpence, which had rolled down the mouse-hole beside the gas-pipe.

“No, dear, for goodness gracious sake don’t go digging under the floor for it! I am sure Father won’t expect the two pounds returned, but he would be pleased if you were to offer to do so. But you do what you think is best. Now you’re grown up, and come to manhood, you must decide things for yourself.”

“Of course I’ll do what you say, Mum,” he said, after his tea, optimistic once more. And when Richard came home, he found two sovereigns under his plate. He saw also the silk hat in the hall, but said nothing about that. About the money he said, “Look, old chap, I really don’t want this returned, but thank you for thinking of it. You keep it. Put it in the bank is my advice, for what it is worth. Did you see the smoke as you walked over the Hill? Or did you come home by taxi?” he said, lightly.

“What smoke, Father?”

“In the East India Docks. As I was leaving the City all the Outer London fire-engines were clanging their bells as they rushed east through the streets. It must be a big fire, judging by the smoke to be seen from the Hill.”

“Good Lord!” said Phillip. He had made it up to Mrs. Bigge, and it was true after all! But what Phillip had forgotten, as he had ‘invented’ the news to Mrs. Bigge, was his idle glance at the stop-press column of
The
Globe
,
while his thoughts had been all on the gloss of his hat.

Phillip went down to show his golden sovereigns to Mrs. Neville, and to tell her the latest news about everything, including the abrupt departure of Miss Rooney, Gran’pa’s housekeeper. Walking down the road, in tweed cap and old school jacket, rather tight and short in the sleeve, and Timmy Rat on his shoulder, he crossed over to the flat, waving to Mrs. Neville sitting at her open window.

“I’ve had to close the door, dear,” she called down, “as it’s catsmeat day. Here’s the key.” She threw it on the grass.

He opened the door, and having closed it, walked upstairs, hiding his white rat under his jacket. On the landing, front paws
over the top step, sat Mrs. Neville’s huge cat, Mazeppa, who, according to Mrs. Neville, had second-sight. Mazeppa could see ghosts; most animals could, the fat woman often declared.

Mazeppa’s yellow eyes were fixed on its second-sight dinner now, thought Phillip. He knew the cat had been crouching there for hours, awaiting the well-known Tuesday miracle of the brass letter-box turning into horse-flesh. The catsmeat man was young Soal, the coalman’s son, who went his rounds on his bicycle after hours.

Mrs. Neville was telling Phillip that she was sure some human beings as well as animals—“After all, the same God made us all!”—were gifted with second-sight, and illustrating this with a story of her journalistic friends at Highgate, when a dull noise, a prolonged thudding, seemed faintly to be shaking the room. It was about sixteen pounds of Mazeppa hurtling down the stairs. The catsmeat man had arrived, to slip the weekly twopenn’oth of skewered horse-flesh through the letter-box. Up the stairs the grey cat bounded, to enter the drawing-room growling; and then from under the sofa came a steady noise of sideway chewing.

“Mazeppa knows the day and time all right, Phillip. He never makes a mistake in the calendar. Every Tuesday, as soon as he’s had his lunch and washed himself, he takes up his position at the top of the stairs.”

“Second-sight!” laughed Phillip; then over another cup of tea went on to tell her about Gran’pa.

“Don’t tell me, dear, if you think it is a family matter,” said Mrs. Neville, in the creamy voice she assumed sometimes, particularly when pouring from her silver teapot. “I don’t want your Mother to think that you come here only to tell me things which perhaps, after all, are not my concern. But I must confess that I thought something was in the air when I saw Miss Rooney following the outside porter from Randiswell wheeling her black corded box down Hillside Road this afternoon.”

“She came in this morning, just as Father left, and seemed a bit agitated, Mrs. Neville. She said nothing while I was there, but went into the front room with Mother. Then at tea tonight Mother mentioned that Great-Aunt Marian was going to keep house for Gran’pa for the time-being.”

“Do tell me, dear, how old is your grandfather?”

“Seventy-three, I think.”

Mrs. Neville’s society manner disappeared as she cried, “The old roué!” with a shriek, and put down the teapot. The shriek always detonated laughter between them. “Ah, a woman is never safe when alone in a house with a man, Phillip! Why, your grandfather has tried more than once to come up and see me!” and they both shook with laughter again. “Ah, the old dog! Now not a word to your Mother, Phillip, promise me? I don’t want her to think——”

“You can rely on me, Mrs. Neville,” said Phillip, munching his second doughnut; and thus dismissing all thought of it from his head, asked after Desmond, his great friend, who was at boarding-school near Chelmsford in Essex.

“T
ELL
me, my lad,” said Mr. Hollis, soon after noon on the Saturday, “what do you do with yourself in your spare time? Tennis, I suppose, or is it cricket?” He lit his pipe.

“Well, just at the moment, Mr. Hollis, I go after birds.”

Mr. Hollis threw back his head and roared with laughter. Mr. Howlett smiled, as he lit his pipe; while Downham, tanned of face, looked sardonically across from his desk. Phillip knew the implication, of course, but pretended to innocence.

“By birds, I take you to mean our feathered friends?” enquired Mr. Hollis, with sudden assumption of courtesy towards his junior. “And not what the term apparently means in vulgar parlance?”

“Yes, Mr. Hollis. This afternoon I’m going past the Salt Box, beyond Reynard’s Common, and I shall either go down into the valley below Biggin Hill, and look for woodpeckers in the beeches there, or continue onwards into Westerham, where I have permission from the châtelaine to roam all over the estate, and to fish after hay-cutting.”

Mr. Hollis stared at him. “Where did you get that highfalutin’ word ‘châtelaine’ from?”

“My father, Mr. Hollis, said it was the right term.”

“Who are they, family friends? Wasn’t your grandfather a military man?”

“Yes, Mr. Hollis, but I don’t really know them. I just wrote for permission to study and photograph wild birds.”

“Westerham, did you say? Isn’t that where General Wolfe, of Quebec fame, was born?”

“Yes, Mr. Hollis. There’s a statue of him in the village. But perhaps you know it? There’s a terrific hill before you get to the village.”

“No, I can’t say I do, Maddison. How do you get there? Bicycle?”

“Well, I walk part of the way now, Mr. Hollis, until I am round the bend, anyway.”

“Round the bend? What bend?” asked Downham.

“Round the bend of the terrific hill. Crikey, the first time I and my friend Desmond biked to Westerham, a year ago, we didn’t know what was coming, as we free-wheeled faster and faster, until we came to a right-hand bend too late to stop. I was in front, slewing about in the thick dust, and knew it would be fatal to put on the brakes. I had no idea it was such a dangerous hill, until I saw the country laid out below me like a sort of map. Golly, I went faster and faster, feeling like a bony skeleton out of the chalk suddenly fixed on a bike! I couldn’t steer, only hold the shuddering handlebars rigid and pray that the wheel-spokes wouldn’t bust. I felt I had no hair, only a skull. The bike felt thin as a knife rushing down before a white furrow of dust. You may not believe it, but my eye-lashes were actually turned in upon my eyeballs. Near the bottom, by some farm buildings, I saw a cross-roads. Phew! If a cart appeared——! I reckon I was doing quite sixty miles an hour by that time!”

“Why bless my soul,” said Mr. Howlett, when Phillip had stopped talking. “I’ve let my pipe go out, listening to you.”

“Well my lad,” remarked Mr. Hollis briskly. “I’ve a train to catch, so tell us quickly what happened at the cross-roads.”

“We got over, just in time. A May Day procession of kids in white, and Boy Scouts, was about to cross as we hurtled by.”

“You’ve missed your vocation, my lad,” remarked Mr. Hollis, putting on his straw-yard. “You should be in Fleet Street! Well, I must be off. Good-day to you all!”

“I did think of going to Fleet Street, as a matter of fact,” said Phillip, when Mr. Hollis had gone. “I met Castleton some years ago, when I was still at school, and he asked me to call and see him when I left. But I never went.”

“Where did you meet him?” asked Downham, sardonically. “Down by the Heybridge Basin, when you were wildfowling?”

“No, as a matter-of-fact it was at Brighton. He was in a Rolls-Royce landaulette. What’s more, I can give you the number!”

Phillip was telling the truth, but he felt guilty all the same.

“Brighton!” remarked Downham. “Don’t tell us you were there with a bird!”

Fool, thought Phillip; and assumed the false amiable smile he wore whenever Downham was chipping him.

*

When he arrived at the lake in front of a yellow house half-a-mile below the big red-brick Court, he saw thousands of mayflies lying on the surface of the water and fluttering in the air, while all over the lake big rainbow trout were rolling up and splashing to take the white flies. Sitting down on the stone-built edge, he watched shrimp-like insects crawling up the stones and the sedges by the verge, and knew from his reading that these were the mayfly
imagines
,
their skins soon to split and a fly to crawl forth. The big trout, some nearly a foot and a half long, did not seem afraid of his presence; they came to within arm’s-length, showing their black spots, and when they rolled to take a fly, the pinky green sheen, as on boiled salt beef, was visible on the lateral line.

This lake was private, of course, like the larger lake in front of the Court up the valley; his permit to fish was in the pond by the road, opposite the brewery; but watching fish was the next best thing to fishing. As the hay in the meadow was not cut, he did not cross over to look at the pond, which held coarse fish, and a legendary monster pike, but wandered off, along his usual round. The chain of small lakes up the valley, feeding the water-mill under the trees, were made by the damming of a water-thread, which was the beginning of the river Darent. The tiny brook ran at the foot of the beech wood, opposite the rabbit warrens. The trout in these smaller ponds were not so large, but they, too, were rising all over the clouded surface of the chalky water after mayfly. He sat and watched them, warm and happy to be in the sunshine, with a feeling of intense joy in being alive with so much beauty around him.

A pair of sparrowhawks had a nest in the high top of one of the spruces in a plantation beyond the hill above the valley. The nest had been shot at by the keeper, several times, but it was built on an old crow’s nest, and the twigs were thick.
Walking there, he longed to be able to climb up, and get one of the fledglings. He could hear them faintly mewing as he lay on the ivy under the tall spruce poles, shadowed below except where little freckles of sunlight came down in shafts. They would be flying, very soon now. Woodpigeons were cooing far away. The cries of jackdaws came from far up in the blue beyond the sighing canopies of the spruces. It was pure happiness to lie there, feeling himself to be part of England. He closed his eyes, he felt as though little golden bubbles were arising through him; and when he opened his eyes again, he saw a robin looking at him from a twig, not twelve inches away.

His packet of sandwiches lay beside him. He put some crumbs on his open palm, and sat up. The robin flew to his knee, eyeing the out-held hand; then jumped upon it, seized a crumb, and flew away. The bird came back again, showing no fear.

There was peace in the plantation. Shafts of sunlight speckled the ivy on the ground, growing over fallen limbs of the firs. The wind sighing in the tall tops of the spruces was like the sound of the sea, far away. The mewing of the young hawks was remote, too. The parent birds did not hunt in the plantation, but away in the beech woods, and along the hedgerows of the cornfields. The robin, perhaps, had not seen a man before.

From the plantation, he walked to the keeper’s cottage. Near it stood an ash with a broken limb. In this stump of a branch was a hole where a white owl nested. He had taken one of the eggs in April, and now the young were hatched, squatting among many dead mice and voles which were left from the old birds’ dawn hunting. He wanted one of the owls later on. How lovely to see it, quartering the grasses of the Backfield, and perhaps on the Hill at twilight—his white owl, returning to sleep during the day in a special box in the elm!

The keeper showed him a kestrel sitting in a disused ferret cage in his garden. It was an adult bird, with a broken wing. Would he like it? Phillip said, “Rather!” Into his haversack it went, a tightly compressed small falcon, with yellow legs and black claws, large liquid brown eyes. It was bluish grey on its back, its breast plumage being chestnut streaked with black. Its yellow scaley feet were clenched tight. The hawk’s beak could give a sharp cut, so take care, said the keeper. Fortunately in his pocket was a present for the keeper—a sixpenny packet of yellow perils, twenty Gold Flakes.

With the kestrel in his bag, he set out for home. He would be able to shoot sparrows for it with his saloon gun, in the elm thicket behind the garden fence. Perhaps he could put the broken wing in a splint, and mend it; then the kestrel might fly wild, and return to him for food. It might even attract a mate, and nest among the chimney pots on his house. What fun that would be! With the kestrels, and an owl, he would bring wild life back to what Father called the lost province of Kent, now officially part of London.

Dreaming thus, he pushed his bicycle up the steep and lonely hill, his back hot in the ardent sun of young summer. On the summit of the Downs he rested, watching the swifts racing over green fields of hay and corn. The only sounds were their shrill whistling, the trilling of larks, a faraway cracked cuckoo-voice, and the burring of bees on hedgerow flowers. Far below lay woods and cornfields and meadows, in shadow and sunshine, extending to the Weald of Kent. How glad he was that he had not gone to Australia! Office life wasn’t so bad after all, with plenty of time in the evenings for tennis, and rides like this into the country. He liked being alone in the country best of all.

Still, the fellows on the Hillies were fun to be with, the little band he went with sometimes, sky-larking after tennis, a grass court for which could be hired for twopence an hour. Helena Rolls sometimes played there in white clothes and shoes and stockings, with her friends from Twistleton Road, but of course he did not stare, or hang about; but passed on quickly when he saw them, as though bent on going somewhere. If she smiled when he raised his hat—as she always did—he was at once filled with elation, which lasted for days—until, suddenly, a lead weight dropped inside him, and there was nothing to be done about it; except to hope.

With a sigh, he got on his bicycle again, and headed home, the kestrel in the haversack crouched taut, alive to every movement, thrilling and starting with shock of every sound, its wingless life burning away, burning, burning, burning, as it passed the lonely fields of corn and pasture on top of Biggin Hill.

*

Thursday night was the great weekly occasion on the Hill. The band played; then fireworks from the Crystal Palace, on Sydenham ridge to the south, arose into the summer’s soft darkness. While the band played, ere it was twilight, small boys stopped
Phillip for cigarette cards of boxers and musical comedy beauties, motorcars and flowers, as once he had stopped what had seemed to be tall men for similar clean, radiant, coloured wonders—faintly smelling of delicious tobacco threads—depicting the series of Birds and Their Eggs, Fish, and Flying Machines. These tall men were still about, but looking quite different: they seemed to have shrunk, and many had pimply faces, barber’s rash, which he had not noticed before. He heard one of them, standing by the bandstand, straw hat tilted on back of head, say to another fellow leaning on his stick, “God, what a poxy hole! Look at all these snotty-nosed kids, like a lot o’ spadgers’ crap!”

Phillip was hurt by the remark. Hitherto he had regarded the Hill as rather a good place to live beside. The two men looked a poor sort themselves; weedy. The one that had spoken had a face yellow-spotted with barber’s rash. Why then had he spoken like that about poor children? After all, it wasn’t their fault that they had been born where they were. Take Cranmer, for example. Cranmer, although poor, was at least a thoroughly decent chap. What fun they had had together, as Boy Scouts. It was sad how you seemed to drift apart from your old friends when you grew up. Cranmer, what days they had had together, in the old Bloodhound patrol! Cranmer was a sort of sparrow, a spadger.

He wandered on the Hill, feeling lonesome. The cuckoo’s voice had cracked; another spring had gone. He was glad to meet some of the fellows of the band he belonged to, despite the fact that Tom Ching usually attached himself to them. Phillip knew that he was after his sister Mavis, and so trying to court favour with himself. Mavis was still at the convent in Belgium.

Jack Hart, the bold bad Jack Hart who had been expelled from school, sometimes was to be seen, in Merchant Service uniform, his arm in his regular girl’s. If only he could be bold, like Jack Hart! Phillip still felt a mixture of admiration and fear for Jack Hart. Fancy blacking his father’s eye, when still at school, when he had been thrashed for taking girls into the sheepfold at night!

Phillip still felt slight horror, mingled with envy, that Jack Hart had had carnal knowledge of eight High School girls before he was fourteen. Jack Hart was a black sheep; and yet he
never told smutty stories, like Tom Ching did; he just pleased himself, and went his own way, always laughing.

Phillip was glad that Jack now had a regular girl. It made him feel that he himself was not such a weakling, somehow, for not wanting to lie down on the grass with any girl. He was quite happy to be one of a skittering band, in the twilight, talking and joking, and exchanging badinage, with occasional couples of young girls. The girls on the Hill always seemed to go in couples, while the youths roved in a loose pack, sometimes, in the safety of dusk, singing songs in harmony. Phillip thought singing in the open air rather vulgar, until one moonlit June night he joined in. It was lovely to feel yourself only a voice in the timeless warm dusk, the evening star shining in the sky, the elms beginning to blacken against the sunset. Life seemed to be eternal, in such moments.

Cousin Bertie sometimes came on the Hill. He never could make out what Bertie thought of him. Did he
really
think he was a bit of a tyke, as once he had called him? Bertie had never been, even in his young days, a ‘hooligan of the Hillies’, as he himself had been. Bertie played tennis, but with his own set, two of whom were the sort who were genuinely entitled to wear silk hats to church on Sundays, with morning suits, for they worked in the Bank of England. Bertie, who was a terrier in the London Highlanders, and a keen athlete, practised running on the Hill after dark twice a week—crunch of plimsolls on gravel, dim ghost suddenly appearing, scarce-audible panting, then fading away. Bertie also spent an evening a week at headquarters, boxing and bayonet-fighting in the School of Arms. He had wonderful muscles.