The Green Gauntlet (36 page)

It had been growing on him some time now, ever since the day he had seen Evie bob up from behind that beach obstruction in Coombe Bay. Something akin to his father’s extreme provincialism had seeded itself in him during that leave and had been enlarging its hold all the way from Normandy to the Ruhr. The difficulty was to find a useful place in that withdrawn society, for he knew himself well enough to realise that whatever he did would have to offer something creative. His father had found a life purpose in nursing thirteen hundred acres of English soil but his father, born in the heyday of Victorian imperialism, was not a self-doubter. For his part he could never be satisfied with farming, even in the purely administrative way his father had farmed and down there, in what was still a backward and isolated community, there were very few occupations independent of agriculture and tourism. He thought for a moment of the church, assessing the ready-to-hand advantages of its organisation, but he had no real belief in survival after death and no interest in religious dogma. Medicine did not attract him and neither did the law. One demanded serious dedication, the other an impersonal approach to people which he could never acquire. During his last leave he had discussed all these possibilities with Evie but nothing hopeful had emerged and now, he supposed, he was already half-inclined towards journalism, for at least some journalism was creative and there had been talk of a local paper going up for sale in Whinmouth.

It was, he supposed, within his means if he could persuade Paul to join him as partner, and for a moment the prospect of thundering out editorials about local car parks and sewage projects amused him, even though he saw it as a kind of surrender.

He was still weighing the pros and cons of newspaper proprietorship when he saw the boy, and at once he forgot everything else, for who could fail to be astonished by the sight and sound of a twelve-year-old in a crumpled Eton collar, gazing up at the pediment of Inigo Jones’ banqueting hall and chanting,

‘He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene

But laid his head

Down as on a bed!’

Simon was so struck by the piping voice that he did not immediately connect the quotation with the laughter that followed but then, looking closer into the eddy of pedestrians flowing down from the Cenotaph, he saw that the boy was one of a party of schoolboys in charge of a dried out little nut of a man, and the schoolmaster, catching his eye, said without irony, ‘Rawlins is speaking up on behalf of the majority. At his age all of us are Cavaliers! Reaction shows in the Fifth!’

Suddenly realising that he was lonely Simon smiled and begged to differ, admitting that he had been unrepentantly Roundhead from the Third onwards. Then the boys began to clamour for gory details of the execution and the little man, whipping off his steel-framed spectacles, said, ‘Ask Rawlins, he’s obviously read it up,’ and Rawlins confirmed that, on this very spot, on January 30th, 1649, King Charles’ head had been removed by a single blow and that ‘the blood had dripped through the planks of the scaffold by the pint.’

‘Extraordinary how they love blood!’ the schoolmaster said, as though he had thought about it intermittently over the last fifty years. ‘They’ll never forget Rawlins’ touch of local colour but they’ve already forgotten the Grand Remmonstrance and the Self-Denying Ordnance.’

‘So did you and I at that age,’ observed Simon, ‘and that, I imagine, has a direct bearing on what we’re supposed to be celebrating.’

‘You have a point,’ said his companion, ‘but I daresay you’ve had enough of it.’

‘More than enough. I kept the boiler stoked up until D-Plus-Two but after that I began to simmer down. Do you mind if I ask you something? Isn’t this an odd day to conduct a sight-seeing tour with that bunch in tow? It’s not a responsibility I’d care for on V.E. night.’

‘A matter of killing two birds,’ said Mr Chips, seriously. ‘After all, they’re seeing history made, aren’t they? We heard Churchill speak from the Air Ministry this morning, we’ve seen General Smuts go by, we’ve cheered Royalty, and we’ve taken in the Houses of Parliament, Scotland Yard and now the scaffold site of the Royal Martyrdom. Or the salutary end of The Man of Blood, whichever way you care to regard him.’

It was as he said this, finishing on a long rasping sniff, that Simon caught the elusive familiarity of the man by the tail. He was so pleased with himself that he grabbed the schoolmaster by the shoulder, spun him round, and exclaimed with the greatest gusto, ‘I
know
you! You’re Archie Bentinck! You were on the staff of High Wood when I was there, twenty-five years ago,’ and the little man did not seem displeased at having his identity shouted down Whitehall in the presence of his boys but smiled, shook Simon’s hand, and said, ‘I am indeed, but please don’t expect me to remember your name, or even murmur that your face is familiar. It isn’t, for at my age all faces are alike. I never have been much good at recognising old boys. Only their style of essay distinguished them at the time—that and the wide range of excuses they made for various shortcomings.’

‘My name is Craddock,’ Simon said, curiously excited by the encounter, ‘Simon Craddock. I was there from 1917 to 1922 but you left before me. There was a …’ and he stopped, looking down at a boy who had strayed from the orbit of Rawlins’ commentary and was staring up at him expectantly.

‘A sharp exchange of views between me and that prig of a headmaster,’ Bentinck said, with another resonant sniff. ‘Yes, there was indeed. And I had the better of it. For here I am still hard at it, whereas that silly ass died of thrombosis years ago.’

Mention of the headmaster during his five unprofitable years at the school drove a passage through the mists of Simon’s memory. He remembered he had shared Bentinck’s dislike of the head, a pompous, pretentious man, with high-falutin notions of dragging High Wood inside the select circle of schools where it could never be comfortable. There had been a long simmering row between the Head and Archie Bentinck, whose teaching methods were as unconventional as his appearance, and the boys, who had revelled in Archie’s eccentricities, and had recognised him as a soft touch who enlivened history lessons by stray and sometimes slightly scandalous snippets of information, had been very sorry to see him go.

‘You must be getting on,’ he said, ‘do you really mean to say you’re still teaching?’

‘A war-time stopgap,’ Bentinck told him, unable to conceal the pride he felt in his invincibility. ‘Apart from Merchant Bankers, the makers of armaments, and scoundrels who made five hundred per cent profit on the leaky huts we occupy at our temporary premises, I’m probably the only man of my generation who welcomed the war! I was dying of boredom when they called me back. To a private school of course. They wouldn’t look at a man my age at the kind of place I taught after leaving High Wood.’

‘Are you taking this lot back tonight or are you staying over? The trains will be packed, won’t they?’

‘It’s a two-day excursion,’ Bentinck said. ‘Around you stands the élite of St Budolph’s, the odd dozen who sold one hundred pounds’ worth of savings stamps in a single term. The local Aldermen didn’t think we could do it but we did and they had to fulfil their side of the bargain by footing the expenses of a V.E. jaunt. I think it rather rattled them when I phoned in our total.’

‘You haven’t changed at all,’ Simon said, laughing, and his memories of Archie Bentinck became sharper every moment so that he could now see him, in shredded gown, perched on the end of the desk declaiming a favourite passage from ‘The Deserted Village’, or obliterating the equations left on the blackboard by the maths master and looking as if this was a task he enjoyed. ‘Where are you staying overnight?’

‘Guildford Street, by virtue of having a nephew who runs a small hotel there. Rawlins and two others are looking forward to sleeping in the bath. Incidentally, my nephew has been billeting Americans, so why not come back for a nightcap?’

‘I’d be delighted,’ Simon said and they moved along to the Strand, the little man shouting, ‘Keep me in view and if any of you stray it’s 23a, one minute’s walk from the Russell Square tube entrance.’

They were in Guildford Street in fifteen minutes and Simon, whose feet ached with so much pavement pounding, marvelled at the little man’s energy as he darted about superintending the issue of cocoa and biscuits before shooing his charges off to bed.

‘Would you mind telling me exactly how old you are?’ he asked, when they were both enjoying a large whisky, and Archie Bentinck said, ‘Not now we’re off the streets. I’ll be seventy-nine next week but keep quiet about it or the boys might whip round and buy me another pipe rack. You can’t be such a chicken yourself—let me see … 1917–1922 … you were eighteen when you left, twenty-three years ago … wait a minute!’ and he choked into his whisky. ‘I’ve got it! Craddock. Craddock S. A whole family of you somewhere in the West … you had farms … don’t tell me.’

‘I won’t,’ said Simon grinning, ‘but you’re on course.’

The schoolmaster subsided but continued to watch Simon’s face with his alert squirrel’s eyes. ‘Got it,’ he said finally, ‘and you didn’t believe in it, either, did you? There was that old boy—a conscientious objector—Norfield, Horsborough … some such name—and you got into hot water defending him after he was killed in France stretcher-bearing?’

‘Horsey,’ Simon said, ‘and I married his widow.’

‘Good God,’ Bentinck exclaimed, proving that he could after all, be astonished. ‘It tallies, of course. You were another rebel and I really ought to have remembered you. There weren’t all that number there. Not that I’ve anything against second-class public schools like High Wood, providing they make do with the material to hand and don’t borrow the Eton Boating Song. There’s still a place for them in the educational field but I was a misfit and it took me a long time to wake up to the fact. Once I did, and went back to the elementary day school, I was happy enough. They even made me a headmaster in the end. Galleywall Road Junior School, not all that far from here. It’s in Rotherhithe.’

‘You not only enjoyed it, you still enjoy it.’

‘Enormously.’

‘Could you explain why?’

‘It’s a matter of temperament. All those second-hand traditions … all that esoteric slang … it seemed to me such a waste of good material. That was what the Head and I quarrelled about. We had diametrically opposed ideas about education. He wanted a production line of Doctor Arnold-type English gents and that didn’t suit my book at all, and not simply because it was out-of-date even then. There’s some promising stuff in places like Rotherhithe if you don’t mind rooting for it. So many schoolmasters make so many mistakes about their essential function. After all, it’s simple enough if you think about it. The job isn’t to cut boys to a pattern, academic or social. It’s to help them to develop individual personalities within the terms of reference we call civilisation. I did just that and I turned out some Tartars in my time. Three or four of them are doing a stretch right now but far more are doing well. Apart from that I like to think that a few of them are reading a book or two, or thinking a thought or two, that they wouldn’t have been if I had stayed at High Wood. As for me, I’ve enjoyed the last thirty years of my life more than the first forty. You’re not a regular, are you?’

‘No, but I’ve been in since ’39 and I’m due out the minute Japan packs it in.’

‘And then?’

‘I was wondering that when I bumped into you.’

‘What did you do before?’

‘Shouted in the wind. I fought by-elections, fought in Spain, was taken prisoner and had to be rescued by a Tory M.P.’

‘Are you going to fight at the coming election?’

‘Not me!’

‘But you chaps could scoop the pool this time.’

Simon explained, reflecting as he did that here was a very strange phenomenon indeed—a professional schoolmaster who listened. By the time the level of their host’s whisky bottle was appreciably lower he had told Bentinck as much as he would have told a close friend, but could not have said why. His memories of Archie Bentinck were vague but there was, within the man, an ability to probe that was the result of instructing generations of boys through successive eras.

He said, when Simon seemed to have finished, ‘Pity about you, Craddock. You’ve wasted a lot of time. Still, you’re better equipped to start fresh than I was. I never had a proper degree, whereas you have, plus a good war record. Put in for a teacher’s training course and do what I did. They’d never stand for you in a place like High Wood but you might be a spectacular success in a junior school. The thing you have to remember, of course, is that there is a far greater area of tolerance between grandfather and grandchild than between father and son and it’s easy to see why. The one has ceased to expect miracles and the other hasn’t had time to grow an inpenetrable hide. Take a tip from me. After the age of eleven pass ’em on to somebody else to cope with. That way you’ll keep some of your illusions.’

‘You really think I could start teaching at my age?’

‘What the devil has age got to do with it? You’ve got a better idea of what life is about than some cocky young undergraduate with a swollen head stuffed with facts and theories. Give it a trial anyway. You’ll find it a lot more rewarding than preaching the gospel according to Saint Keir Hardie, or trying to compromise between writing the truth and keeping the goodwill of local councillors who happen to be your advertisers. I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a personal contact with the Principal at a Westcountry T.T. College in your area. Used to be a colleague of his before he took the job. I’ll write to him if you like as soon as I get back. Or would you prefer to think it over between now and when you’re demobbed?’

‘I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,’ said Simon, thoughtfully, ‘I’d like to phone my wife and do it right now. I lost track of you for twenty-five years and I don’t want to risk it happening again. There’s something weird about bumping into you tonight of all nights.’

Luck was obviously running his way. In spite of jammed lines he made the connection in fifteen minutes, smiling at Evie’s almost incoherent excitement at hearing his voice.