Donkey Boy (34 page)

“Well, we'll have that one. Only don't waste the battery flashing it on in the daytime. How about a football? Oh, I gave you one, did I? A magic lantern, how about that?”

“Oh, thank you, Uncle Hilary!” Phillip clasped his hands as hard as he could in his excitement, in case Uncle might change his mind. But no, Uncle was going to buy it!

They went into a tea-shop. Phillip ate three cream buns, a doughnut, and a macaroon, followed by an ice-cream.

“We'll take some back for your sisters, shall we? How do you get on with them. Do you like your sisters?”

“Oh, yes. I get on very well with them, thank you, Uncle Hilary.”

“That's right. I remember how we, in our family, that is, your Uncle John, your Father, and the Aunts—my sisters—were all thick as thieves. Yes, we were a jolly family. You've never met your cousin Willie, Uncle John's boy? I suppose you've not been to Rookhurst?”

“No, Uncle.”

“Well, I'm going to pay them a visit shortly. Shall I give Willie your love. He's rather like you. You two ought to get on. What do you want to be when you grow up? An open-air life, I hope. How about being a farmer?”

“Yes, please, Uncle Hilary.”

“Good. Now your mother tells me you're in trouble with your father, Phillip. Is that right?”

The boy stared with frightened look at the man. The remaining part of the doughnut, oozing strawberry jam, remained in his paw.

“Tell me, Phillip. I've been a naughty boy myself, you know.”

The boy remained silent.

“Don't want to say anything against your father, is that it?”

Phillip thought he was expected to say yes, and with hope in his voice, he replied, “Yes, Uncle Hilary.”

“H'm. Eat your doughnut up, boy. We must be getting back. I've got to go all the way down to the coast, right through the New Forest. Ever been there?”

“No, Uncle Hilary.”

“Lovely place. You must come down one day, and see Aunt Bee. She's a particular friend of yours, you know. Remember her?”

“Yes, Uncle Hilary,” he smiled.

“Well now, tell me what went wrong between you and your father. Took his dark lantern, didn't you, without asking? Come on, you can tell me: I shan't split on you.”

“Yes, I did, Uncle Hilary. But I didn't break it.”

“Why did you take it in the first place?”

“Because I wanted it so much, to get a bat with, because I like bats better'n butterflies.”

“Do you, b'jabers. Well then, why didn't you ask your father?”

“He would have said ‘No', Uncle Hilary.”

“How d'you know, if you didn't ask him?”

“Father always says ‘No', Uncle Hilary. He doesn't like anyone touching any of his things, Uncle Hilary.”

“H'm! I don't blame him. Why should his things be taken specially when they get spoiled. I shouldn't like you if you took my motor-car without permission, and smashed it up.”

“I wouldn't ever take it, Uncle Hilary.”

“Well, thanks for the reassurance! Why wouldn't you take it, tell me that?”

“My legs aren't long enough to touch the pedals, Uncle Hilary.”

Hilary roared with laughter. Then he looked seriously at his nephew.

“You're a funny fellow, you know, Phil. You've got plenty of
intelligence, really. And it's the kind of mind that sees clearly. Every answer you've given me is logical, and factual. In other words, you have in every instance spoken the truth. Then why in heaven's name, does your father firmly believe that you are incapable of telling the truth? Can you answer me that one, now? If you can, you're more clever than I am. Well, what do you say?”

Phillip said nothing. He did not understand what Uncle meant. He thought of Uncle going away for ever, like Uncle Sidney, and never coming back. And Father was going to thrash him if he told him he had taken the lantern, and send him away to the Reformatory if he didn't say he had taken it. Terror in both directions closed upon his mind, obliterating the cakes, the birthday presents, the motor-car ride home.

“Why, what's the matter now? Come, come, you mustn't cry! You're a big boy now. Think of when you went to the Derby with the old dog, d'you remember? That was a pretty plucky thing to do, the spirit of your Viking ancestors coming out, if you like. Don't cry, Phillip. Here, take my
handkerchief
to dry your tears with.”

Phillip's mind had broken down under the dilemma. In the motor-car, on the way home, he was sick. Hilary stopped, helping the boy to clean himself up. Afterwards Phillip sat beside the driver, “very white about the gills”, his uncle remarked. Phillip thought of the time coming nearer and nearer when Father would come home. Turning up Hillside Road, they passed Mr. and Mrs. Rolls and Helena Rolls on the pavement. Mrs. Rolls waved to him, and he waved back, but with face turned away, as tears were falling again. He hurried into his house before Mr. and Mrs. Rolls and Helena Rolls could catch up with him and see his face. He ran to the downstairs lavatory, and bolted himself in.

Hilary explained to Hetty that it was, perhaps, the motion of the vehicle, or the fumes of the engine. It took some people like that at first, he said.

“Do you mind,” said Hetty, nervously, “if I say something to you in confidence, Hilary? You don't mind me calling you Hilary, do you?”

“My dear Hetty! I am honoured. Please believe that anything you tell me will be in the strictest confidence.”

Hetty did not know precisely how to express what was weighing on her. She could not say anything against her husband for she could not even think anything against him, such was the loyalty of her nature.

“It's about Dickie and your son, isn't it, Hetty?”

“Yes, Hilary. I wonder if you saw Dickie, you could say a word for Phillip? You see, he is a strange little boy, and intensely susceptible. Dickie tells him things, and shows him his butterflies, or he used to at any rate, and once he showed him the lantern, which I know means so much to Dickie because it was his grandfather's, as was the deerstalker hat he treasures equally—well, I am afraid it will all sound rather peculiar, but you see, Phillip seems to have the same feelings for Dickie's things, and I am sure he gets them from his father. I expect what I am trying to say sounds very silly.”

“Not in the least, Hetty. But if I may say so, I can't quite see the connection between what you say, and Phillip taking his father's things behind his father's back. Out in the world, you know, that sort of thing is called stealing. And you know what small boys are, they break things. It's a mistake to let them have them too young. I had a telescope when I was only about ten. Of course I pulled it to bits, and lost one of the lenses. It was too good for me.”

“Yes, Phillip soon picked to bits the watch Dickie gave him, too young, for a Christmas present.”

“Exactly! Now tell me if I can help you in any way.”

“I was wondering if it would not be bothering you too much, if, when you return to London, you might have a word with Dickie about Phillip being more adventurous than really bad, Hilary.”

“Well, I shall have to leave it for a week or so as I'm due to return direct to Hampshire. In fact I ought to be on my way there now, by way of Mitcham and Hampton Court.”

Hetty tried to conceal her despair. “Oh yes, well, please think no more of it. I expect things will come all right in the end.” She gave a little hopeful laugh.

“I'll write a line to my brother, if you like.”

“Oh no, Hilary, please don't! I think he would know I have been speaking to you about Phillip.”

Feminine “logic”, thought Hilary: his brother would know
whether he spoke of the matter direct or wrote about it, for how else could he, Hilary, have got his information?

“School may make all the difference, I expect. Cricket, and football, sweat the vice out of 'em. Boys are inquisitive little brutes, anyway, by nature.” For a moment Hilary had an idea of offering to pay the fees of a decent school for Phillip, but he dismissed the idea. Let the boy find his own level. “Well, it has been so nice seeing you, Hetty, and don't let these trifles worry you. Dick's a bit of a worry-guts, you know, as we used to tell him. Your boy's got plenty of ability, Hetty. He's a cute little beggar in many ways. Well, I must be on my way. I've brought a few things for the nieces. Will you let them have 'em? Good bye, Hetty, and don't worry—life's too short, I find.”

Phillip came out of his hide, farewells were said. The Panhard et Lavassor drove away up Charlotte Road, turning south for the Crystal Palace and beyond into Surrey and the road to the West. Hilary arrived at his house at a quarter-past seven in the evening, happy and pleased with his day's run.

At a quarter-past seven Richard returned from London. Phillip was waiting for him. Phillip, weeping, confessed. He was ordered upstairs to prepare himself to receive his punishment.

Afterwards Phillip lay in bed, his head on a damp pillow, listening to a thrush singing on the chimney-pot of Grandpa's house. The starling no longer sang there, since Phillip had shot it, for skinning and stuffing behind glass, with his father's air-gun. The skin was hidden on top of the cupboard, where he had thrown his gollywog and forgotten it.

When the thrush had gone, Phillip heard Uncle Hugh playing his violin. When that stopped, and Uncle Hugh had clumped away on two sticks to supper in the front room, Phillip sang his song to himself. It was in the usual minor key, but the notes did not run into one another as in ordinary songs. The notes were lonely notes, like the wind in a keyhole or telegraph wires. They rose and fell, and were his secret music of beyond the sunset, and among the stars. He sang them quietly to himself, for no one must hear.

The music gave way to interest in the state of his behind. Creeping out of bed in his nightshirt, he took down the looking glass from the chest of drawers, and, baring his rump, examined
in the light of his new flash-lamp the long blue-red weals across the torn skin. They stung like billy-o, and were sticky with a sort of water. He counted ten, and then went back to bed again, crying to himself. Later Mummie came up with a glass of water and slice of bread. He shook his head. “No thank you.” She put them beside his bed. They were untouched when later she came up to say good-night. He would not kiss her, though she came back three times to ask him.

“No thank you,” he said each time. When she had gone downstairs, the pillow received more tears. The sad song consoled him, as with open eyes he thought of Helena Rolls, of her golden curls and wide blue eyes, and her smiling, and it all seemed to be up in the sky.

“N
OW
JUST
look and see what a nice little gentleman Phillip Maddison is, sitting so still in the back row and never giving any trouble,” said Miss Norton, and the Third Standard obediently turned round to look. Phillip, dressed in blue jersey, navy-blue knickers, black stockings and button shoes, had been sitting without movement for the past five minutes, his hands folded behind him to draw back his shoulders in the approved manner, and his eyes looking straight ahead.

The tribute came as a complete surprise to Phillip. Miss Norton had been giving a geography lesson, with coloured chalks on the blackboard, and he had not listened to a word of what she was saying.

“He pays perfect attention, children,” went on Miss Norton. She was a pupil teacher under the new School Board of Education, and received a salary of forty-five pounds a year, “an articled forty-fiver”, as it was called.

“Now everyone turn to their front, hands behind heads, and try to be like Phillip.”

Phillip felt a nice feeling. He stared straight to his front, hands clutching elbows behind him, and breathing as slightly as possible to keep his jersey from rising and falling. He would always be very good now.

“Hands behind head, now, Phillip,” said Miss Norton gently. With a start the dreamer realised what was said. He disentangled his aching arms, and clasped his hands behind his head.

“We will have five minutes’ rest, children, before continuing.”

When he had to copy the figures on the board on to his slate, with the grey slate pencil, he did his very best. Later he stopped himself from drawing a whale and a shark on the clear spaces on the other sides of Ireland and Great Britain.

It was the summer term at Wakenham Road School. Phillip liked Miss Norton, who was a quiet-spoken young woman wearing black boots hidden under a black skirt, a white blouse with
a high starched linen collar with a black bow, while her mousey-coloured hair bulged out flatly on top of her head with the aid of a concealed padded wire frame.

“Now pay attention, children. We will go through the multiplication tables again. Now all together when I drop the pointer!”

Miss Norton raised a ground ash stick, tapering gradually to its point, like half a billiard cue.

“Wait till I drop the point! Are you all ready? ‘Twice one are two’, and so on until you reach twelve. Then pause while I raise my pointer, and when I drop it, begin ‘Three ones are three’, and so on, up to ten times table.” A gasp of awe greeted this adventurous height. “And to the one who keeps on longest I shall give two good marks to add to the total for the week. The one who wins the most for this week shall be the one to clean the blackboard for me all next week, and, as you know, the three highest totals at the end of term are to have each a prize. Ready, everyone?”

“Yes, Miss Norton!” came with shrill massed expectancy.

The pointer dropped. The multiplication race began. A little girl with honey-coloured hair over part of her eyes stayed the course the longest—she fell at seven nines—and with excited laughter was given the two marks.

“Well done, Dorothy!”

Dorothy gave a quick glance at Phillip, who was sitting, still and rigid, with arms folded behind him, hoping that Miss Norton would give him at least one mark for the best behaviour. He had followed along as far as six eights, and thereafter had sung a chanting song of his own, without any actual words. Numeration did not interest him.

During play-time massed cries, considerably shriller in pitch above the classroom chanting, came from the two asphalt paved spaces enclosed within high brick walls, the Boys’ and Girls’ playgrounds of Wakenham Road School. Richard never went near the place. He had known green fields there before the building had been put up. It seemed to him that universal education for the factory civilisation of the times was somehow directly linked to the mass graveyard on the other side of the road, where heaps of yellow clay and wilted flowers were ever increasing. He did not express this thought; it was inherent in his
increasing retirement from those about him. He knew that he was becoming an embittered man.

On the south side of the main school buildings was the Boys’ playground. On the north was the Girls’ and Infants’. Hither every morning Hetty walked with her three children, under the line of polled elms on the cemetery side of the High Road. Phillip disappeared into the Boys’ playground, Mavis and Doris into the Girls’. The entrance to the Girls’ was past a lodge occupied by an old man with a rutty face, named Mr. Scrivener. He was the janitor, an old man so gentle and unspeaking that no new child was afraid of him after a day or two; and thereafter did not even notice him about the place, except that a kind face sometimes moved past in a vivid world.

At the end of the term, Miss Norton gave three prizes to her best pupils, who would be moving up after the holidays. The third prize was given to Phillip, a little yellow book called
How
Arthur
Won
the
Day.
It was the story of a boy who went with bad companions, and did bad things, such as roasting stolen pheasants’ eggs in the embers of a fire beside the hedgerow, and being found out by the keeper. Stealing eggs led to stealing money and that was the end of Arthur’s friend, as far as Arthur was concerned, for he turned back and won the day just in time. Phillip hastened home to show his prize proudly to Mother.

“Look, Mum, I’ve won a prize!”

Miss Norton had written his name on the flyleaf,
Phillip
Maddison.
Phillip added underneath, in his spidery school-writing
First
Prize
for
Coming
in
Third.

At the beginning of the second term, after the summer holidays, it was decided that the three children might go to school by themselves. Phillip was put in charge of his sisters, but very soon he left them to get to school by themselves, preferring to walk with his cousin Gerry. One day, to liven up the walk, he and Gerry wore their overcoats back to front, and an errand boy on a bicycle with a basket threw eggs at them. This involved a chase of the boy whenever he was seen again; and as the errand boy’s friends came to his help, a feud grew between Gerry and Phillip on one side, and the roughs from Comfort Road and the streets beyond.

One of the roughs had a younger brother in the school, a
heavy boy with a big face called Mildenhall. This boy remained in the Third Standard, to which Phillip had been moved up from Miss Norton’s classroom. Phillip had not been in his new desk more than a week, when, looking up from the brown-backed
Pluck
Library
he was reading under the desk, he saw Mildenhall looking across at him. At the time Mrs. Wilkins, the new mistress, small and dark with pale serious face, was writing sums upon the blackboard. Her back being turned to the class, Mildenhall slowly raised his fist, with his thumb, sticking out between the first and second closed fingers, and shook it menacingly at Phillip. Phillip’s stomach immediately flunked. Mildenhall’s meaning was clear. Phillip thought of the big boy’s thumb jabbing into his eye innumerable times during the lesson, in which he got all his sums wrong.

“Come, come,” said Mrs. Wilkins, looking at his slate, as she paused between desks. “What’s the matter with you today, Phillip? You’ll have to stay in after prayers and get these right.”

Mrs. Wilkins had started her teaching career in the old century, when pupil teachers had received twelve pounds per annum.

“Yes, M’am,” said Phillip, with some relief, because then Mildenhall might forget to wait for him.

At four o’clock the bell rang for the classes to file into the hall. All the rooms, built centrally around the main assembly place, had a wall, or partition, of varnished pitch-pine, with glass panes in the upper half, looking into the hall, which had big skylights in its roof. The school was thereby much enlightened.

The hall itself faced a raised rostrum built above its west end. The rostrum was reached by two wide stairways leading up to it, one on either side of the hall. Here stood the dreaded figure of Mr. Garstang, the Head Master, every nine o’clock when the classes filed out for prayers in the morning, and again at four o’clock in the afternoon before going home.

The Head Master, Mr. Alfred Garstang, or Gussy, was a figure of near-terror to Phillip. Not that Mr. Garstang had ever spoken severely—and he could be very severe—to Phillip, or that he had shown towards Phillip any voice or manner other than one of kindliness. Phillip was afraid of him, because of what he had been told about Gussy by other boys as soon as he had come to the school. Whenever Mr. Garstang came near him,
Phillip felt that Mr. Garside’s eyes might, at any moment, pierce his pocket and see the
Pluck
Library
folded inside.

Mr. Garstang was a short man in a tail coat, with a slightly curved front behind the lower buttons of his waistcoat, and wide pointed wings to his collar, which looked very sharp. He was partly bald in the front of his round head, and the hair remaining to him was always pressed down in straight flat black lengths across the pink and polished skin of his skull. Gussy looked straight at the boys, quelling them without intention. His brown moustaches were twisted at the ends to long points which drooped downwards. It was this moustache which was so alarming, in front of the deep, quiet voice which was inseparable in Phillip’s mind with the cane.

Sometimes on the rostrum above the hall before afternoon prayers were to be seen the backs of boys’ heads and their shoulders by the remote wall. The boys were behind the big desk in the centre of the rostrum where Mr. Garstang stood, revealing partly bald head, round pink face with great moustache, and length of gold chain passing through a button-hole in rotund black
waistcoat
. The desk, level with the top of the pitch-pine banisters, cut off all view below the gold chain.

The sight of boys facing the wall at the back of the rostrum made Phillip stand stilly quiet when he toed, with other children, the white line of the Third Standard. There were many such white lines ranged in parallel down the hall, with an interval in the centre. The white lines ranged downwards from the Infants in front to the biggest boys and girls of Standard Seven in the rear.

There was only one Black Line in the hall. It was a terrible place, by the stairs up and down which Mr. Garstang moved to his study. The boys at the back of the rostrum were those who had been sent to stand on the Black Line during the afternoon. When the bell rang for afternoon prayers, the boys on the Black Line had to go up the stairs to stand behind Mr. Garstang’s desk.

The Head Master dealt with them promptly before prayers. When all the classes were in the hall, standing to attention on the white lines, Mr. Garstang would pause, looking, it seemed, at every child staring up at his face. Suddenly the part of Mr. Garstang above the desk would turn sideways and the voice would boom, “Well, my friends! And what are you doing here?”

No boy ever made reply. Sometimes the row of cropped heads would make a sort of tentative movement, half turning before, overcome by the gaze of Mr. Garstang, they found safety in facing the wall again. Then with a hissing sound, which seemed to echo in the breath of the children in the hall below, a cane would be drawn from the bundle standing in the upright glazed
drainpipe
beside the desk. With his left hand Mr. Garstang would haul a boy, sometimes wriggling, across the desk, and holding him by the neck, would strike him again and again with the his cane, black coat-tails visibly dancing about during the sudden animation.

Sometimes a boy cried out while he was being lugged across the desk. It made no difference. He was swiftly beaten, and as swiftly discarded for another to be hauled up for the same whirlwind swishing, and so on to the last boy. There were never more than four, and the beatings were only occasional; but the bristle of canes rising over the top of the desk, the drooping points of Mr. Garstang’s moustache, almost wider than his jowl, made an impression on the children of the awe-ful results of being sent to stand on the Black Line.

The white lines down each side of the hall were subduing in themselves; they were of silence, looking straight to the front, and stillness, and, being lines, were connected with the Black Line, the terror of all Wakenham Road School terrors in Phillip’s mind. Such was juvenile superstition, and imperfected love, in the winter of 1904.

Mr. Garstang lived on the south side of Charlotte Road. On occasional and startling moments he was to be seen, a quiet human figure wearing square-crowned black hat and tail-coat, swinging an unrolled umbrella as he walked sedately to school. Whenever Phillip passed Mr. Garstang’s house he looked straight ahead, unspeaking as he hurried onwards. Mr. Garstang sometimes wondered why; for he was interested in the little boy, knowing something of his history from his friend and fellow antiquarian, the vicar of St. Simon Wakenham.

As he stood on the white line of Standard Three, Phillip wondered if he would be sent to the Black Line if he could not do his sums after school. At the same time he wondered, if he did them
quickly, Mildenhall would be waiting to fight him. Phillip was terrified of the idea of fighting. He was no good at fighting. Whenever anyone hit him, or even pretended to, he shut his eyes. And even if he tried to keep them open, and to dodge, Mildenhall was a much bigger boy. Mildenhall might do to him what he had seen him do to another boy, give him a nose-bleeder and then sit him on the hard playground. He had seen Mildenhall sit on other boys, saying they had sauced him, when they hadn’t. Mildenhall had poked Phillip in the ribs as they had filed out of the classroom, and whispered to him, “Donkey Boy! Yer farder’s Ole Tin Wills! I’ll l’arn yer!”

When, having done the sums for Mrs. Wilkins, Phillip left the classroom, lots of boys were sliding on the playground. Snow had fallen. Thankfully he slipped out of the gate and along the road home. At tea, with fried sprats, he told his mother what Mildenhall had called him. She said, “Oh dear! Do they still remember your father?”