The Broken Chariot (2 page)

After a round of the ecclesiastical gems of Belgium they were rewarded at the end of their three-week tour by a few days at Ostend. The girls drank coffee and ate ices in the cafés, and made fun of common tourists coming off the boat from Dover, while the vicar, between walks up and down the beach, sat in the hotel lounge collating his notes.

When war began in 1914 Maud put on coat and goggles, and drove to Norwich, giving a lift to half a dozen volunteer soldiers on the way. Her experience and mechanical skill left no alternative, she said, but to enrol in an ambulance unit, but she fumed and brooded when no one wanted her, or she was sent from place to place, and felt herself sinking into an impossibly complicated maze of offices and organizations.

In six months she was driving an ambulance in France. From dressing stations near the front line to base hospitals she transported her cargoes of pain and misery, and sometimes death, and wept inwardly at the awful tribulations of the wounded, and swore with the sulphurous colour of any trooper at whoever mishandled them in or out and made their plight worse. A staff officer wanted to marry her, but she believed in love at first sight, deciding it was better to live an old maid than fall prey to whoever had the same idea.

She refused work in the administration of the ambulance service because it would take her away from motors, in spite of the hardship and the miserable squalor of stoppages on broken rainswept roads. In October 1918, resting one morning between goes at the starting handle, she recognized Colonel Thurgarton-Strang. His horse drank at a village trough, and when he mounted, his dressage was perfect. ‘I've seen you before,' she called, above the boom and crack of distant gunfire. ‘Yarmouth, when my father's car broke down. Long time ago, now. Don't suppose you recollect.'

He saluted and smiled. ‘Of course I remember. Always hoped I'd see you again.'

‘Well, now you have.'

‘I'm astounded and delighted.'

‘Got to surround Blue Force by morning!'

‘We most certainly will!'

They laughed together, then he led his battalion of mainly eighteen-year-olds towards the German rearguards, whose machine gunners could not prevail against his enthusiastic young, who knew nothing of muddy stalemates in the Salient or on the Somme.

They met on the Rhine six months later, and Maud realized his place in her heart since their first encounter. ‘You've hardly been out of my mind,' she said. They strolled the balcony of the hotel at Bad Godesburg while the orchestra played the old familiar tunes in the dining room. Maud smoked a cigarette, and Hugh took her statement as flattery, thinking that you ought not to believe a woman when she said something good about you. ‘There's nothing I'd like better than to believe you.'

She put a hand on his. ‘I never say anything I don't mean. I wouldn't know how.'

All he wanted was to be the husband of this delightful woman. ‘I'm quite sure', he told her, ‘that I shall love you forever – if you'll have me.'

They were married at St Mary's-All-Alone by an ex-chaplain uncle of Maud's, the ceremony as much a regimental as a Christian affair, with an arbour of glistening swords to walk under, and so many dress uniforms that to Maud the gathering seemed like a scene of peace after a rabid and pyrrhic war.

In India the Thurgarton-Strangs avoided the oven heat of the plains by renting a house in Simla, living in a style helped by Maud's thousand a year on the death of her father. Hugh expected their first child to be a girl, given the family from which Maud had come. This would not have disappointed him, but the dark-haired ten-pound baby, sound in wind and limb, was a gift for both, and they were pleased that he was stoical enough to make no sound at the font when he was christened. Their happiness was so intense – undeserved and precarious, they sometimes felt – that they could not resist doting on Herbert who, being new to the world, and having nothing to compare it with, thought such treatment normal.

His earliest memory was of being pushed in a large coach-like perambulator by a uniformed
ayah
along a track flanked by poplars. The continual trot of horses going to the polo ground was counterpointed by monkeys and birds performing an opera in the Annandale gardens. Above his cot he heard the clatter of raindrops on rhododendrons, violent splashes suppressing the voices of birds, and even his own when he gurgled for his nurse. Thunder gods growled among the deodars, then played to such a climax as seemed to burst the biggest granite globe asunder, sliced clean in two above the earth by a blade of lightning, which set him screaming.

The nurse was familiar with infants who were frightened, so he rarely wailed for long before she carried him – like a precious melon, Maud once said – to the covered terrace of the bungalow.

On calmer days, teething fractious hours, when he grizzled at the miasma of inherited dreams, his
ayah
laid him by the edge of a stream and, snapping off a hollow reed, directed the water from a few inches above, so that drops coming out of her home-made conduit on to his forehead with such gentle regularity soon put him to sleep. ‘You must have been too young to remember,' Maud said in later years. ‘Or we told you about such incidents.'

He may also have imagined them, or they were culled from his dreams, the worst of which was of the nightmare meteor cleaved in half by an enormous blade of white fire. ‘The splintering of monsoon artillery,' his father laughed.

Self-sacrifice was at its most poignant when Maud and Hugh took him to England, and left him in a boarding school which had everything to recommend it for a boy of seven except pity.

Two

The prospectus which moved Hugh and Maud to banish Herbert read: ‘Clumpstead, Sussex. Preparatory for the Public Schools and the Army, situated in a most healthy position on the summit of Clumpstead Downs. Climate most suitable for Anglo-Indians. Exceptional premises and grounds of 25 acres. Teaching staff of University Graduates. Latin a speciality. Rifle range, swimming, ponies for riding. Every attention given to physical development.'

No sooner was Herbert left – abandoned, was the word he used – than the description seemed to be of some other establishment altogether. As for the healthy position, the climate was one to kill or cure, autumnal mist preceding rain that swept icily in from the sea, and snow whitening the school grounds before any other place in the area. The rifle range was in the dead end of a sunken lane and mostly unusable due to mud, and the ponies for riding must have been retired from some coal mine in the north after being worked almost to death. The swimming pool was a hole in the dell, and physical development meant little more than running and jumping whenever no time could be given to mediocre lessons due to the masters being either blind drunk or in bed with a cold.

Most of the teachers behaved when sober as if children had been put on earth to be beaten and terrified, while the boys had only each other to abuse for entertainment. Herbert, controlling his misery, learned to hold the first at bay by guile, and the latter by more violence than any among them could equal.

Apart from cricket, the only sport the boys were encouraged in was boxing, and Herbert's instinct told him that subtlety of manoeuvre was unnecessary if you forced a speed out of yourself which no defence could hold back. They said he had a black speed, a devil's drive, a killer's fist, but the skill Herbert even so developed made his attacks deadly. A not quite matching adversary blooded Herbert's nose but he bore on in, scorning all cheers at his courage, learning that whoever drew blood first was three-quarters the way to winning.

He loathed boxing, but endured it by making his opponent pay for the inconvenience, fighting ruthlessly only so as to get more quickly out of the ring. He discovered the joy of being someone previously unknown to himself, vacillating between imagining he would either murder such a stranger if or when they became properly acquainted, or accept him as a friend for making him feel better able to survive. Who he really was, or wanted to be, he couldn't say, though he secretly liked the sportsmaster's remark that: ‘You must have been born with the soldier in you,' a quality Herbert showed only when necessary.

Putting on weight and height, in spite of the thrifty diet, made him less likely to be bullied. He began to feel invulnerable though without turning into a bully, which at first made others suspect him of holding demonic punishment in store for some harmless remark, which an unfortunate boy would not realize until too late was a painful insult.

Hugh and Maud, when home on leave, were unable to understand why he showed no happiness. He was heartless and faraway, even for a boy of eleven. Hugh put an arm on his shoulder to point out Firle Beacon from the garden of their furnished cottage, and Herbert moved as abruptly as if he had been touched by fire.

‘He was just being a manly chap,' Maud told him, after Herbert had gone to bed. ‘Anyway, it's his age.'

Hugh paused between the measuring out of his whisky. ‘I remember being like that as a boy myself,' he said with regret, 'and would have given anything not to have been.'

She held his hand, that strong pragmatic hand perfectly in harmony with the eye of his sharp intelligence. ‘He'll learn to love us when he grows up. In the meantime, my dear, we'll make do with each other.'

‘That'll always be so.' He put down the glass to fill his pipe, ‘but it's a shame children can't realize that parents aren't much beyond children themselves, in certain ways.'

‘I often wonder if I shouldn't have had another child or two. Then we wouldn't need to dote so much on Herbert.' She recalled her feelings after his birth: No more of that. He tore me to blazes.

Hugh stood up before going out to close the shutters. ‘No regrets. One child's enough with which to surround Blue Force by morning!'

The new blazer needed some name tapes, and Maud picked up the needle. ‘I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll take him to the cinema tomorrow. They're showing
Fire Over England
again.'

‘Good,' he said. ‘I haven't seen it myself.'

Herbert was sustained by the hope of one day getting revenge on his parents who callously condemned him to a school which, without experience of any other, he thought was the worst in the world. They deserved to pay even for sending him home to any school at all. Having waited for him to be born, he imagined them gloating over the ease of his first years, then springing this deadly trap. What other explanation could there be? Everyone knew what they did, and if they didn't the crime was all the greater. He evolved a potent fantasy of luring them to a valley in mountains as remote as those of Baluchistan seen from the top deck after leaving Karachi. The boulder behind the tree on the left bank of the stream was so vivid he could almost touch the moss. Taking an axe from his rucksack, he chopped them bloodily down, no pity at the look of horror as they died.

He wrote the daydream as a story, every stark detail sketched in words of fiery resentment, and the English master said it was an excellent piece of composition, though moving his head from side to side, as if in his experience he had read much similar work. Then with his tone laced by a threat he told Herbert to put it in the dining hall stove and never to pen such a whining screed again. ‘In any case, don't you know, boy, that you may never see your parents more? There's a war coming on. In the meantime, write five hundred lines for your lack of filial love. Exodus chapter twenty verse twelve first line.'

Thereafter the scene of carnage came to him less frequently, for which he was glad, because living the murder through in his mind had left him weak and ashamed, though the sense of injustice against grown-ups took a long time to go away.

When the Second World War began there was a change of teachers, and his school was evacuated to Gloucestershire. The buildings were an even gloomier pile, all the boys listing gleefully its apparent illnesses of dry rot, rising damp, and deathwatch beetle, wondering how long it would be before the whole lot collapsed and buried them in a mound of dust.

It was as if the war had been sent especially to enthral them. Sitting in the library every day to hear the six o'clock news was like being in a cinema, and Herbert craved to take part in the glorious actions being fought. He performed well enough in class to keep ahead of many, but his greatest interest from the age of thirteen was devoted to the Army Cadet Force. The khaki uniforms were made out of last war misfits, but with cloth gaiters fastened, belt pulled tight, and cap angled on, he found it a glamorous transformation from school uniform. Maybe soon he would get into proper kit, because the war was bound to be on when he was old enough.

At times of despair he imagined a gaggle of Heinkels skimming like the blackest of black crows low over woods and fields on a deadly track to the sheds and towers of the school. His childhood nightmare of a world exploding in two and falling to crush life and soul out of him was overpainted by a smoking ruin in which everyone was dead or half-buried except himself and a few cadets coming from cover at the end of a tactical scheme. They would work tirelessly to rescue the living, especially those he saw reason to hate, so that he could go on hating them; or they would nobly clear up the mess and scorn all praise for their cool bravery among the as yet unexploded bombs. But the only sound of war in this backwater of England was the occasional wailing alert due to German bombers straying from the main path further south, or the dream-like ripple of ack-ack in the Gloucester direction.

He and Dominic Jones were enthused by yarns of conflict and exploration in
King Solomon's Mines, Treasure Island
and
Sanders of the River
but, above all, by
Kim
. Herbert saw himself as a district commissioner in some remote province of Africa, the ruler of an area as big as any country in Europe, sitting by the tent door at dusk while his native bearer set out supper on a camp table. Puffing at his pipe, he would see a range of purple-coloured mountains to be trekked through the following week, into an equally extensive territory administered by Dominic, a social and courtesy visit before coming back to his own zone for another six months, no doubt fighting through an ambush of rebellious tribesmen on the way.