Donkey Boy (42 page)

There was a lamp-post just outside the gate of “Chatsworth”, and one evening, coming out into chilly fog, Phillip thought he would be unobserved if he imitated a dog; and he was relieving himself against the fluted iron post, painted cream, when the familiar click of his own garden gate gave warning, but too late; for even as he saw Father’s form against the halo of lamp-light at the top of the road, so his own movement was perceptible. In contemptuous anger Richard hauled him home by the arm, shaking him and calling him a dirty little beast; and the front door having been opened to the jingle of keys, Phillip was ordered upstairs, and to take down his trousers immediately. Pleas for
pardon and reiterated apologies greeted the arrival of the parental cane. By the post at the bottom of the stairs Hetty stood, holding her hands to her heart, while near-hysterical shrieks came from the bedroom.

Hetty had a saying which she uttered on occasion with a little laugh—“There is no peace for the wicked”—meaning herself. Why were such trials sent to her? What was the
reason
of it all?

“Sonny, Sonny, what
will
your father say when he finds out this time? Oh, you wicked boy. You’ll break my heart, Sonny.
Why
did you do it, dear? Don’t you ever
think
what you are doing?”

These words were uttered a few minutes after a loud report in the back garden one Saturday morning had brought her down from the bathroom, where she was washing out handkerchiefs. Saturday night was bath night. The fire being lit in the kitchen range after breakfast, Hetty took advantage of the hot water to get all the small washing of the week done before Dickie came home at two o’clock.

Sonny had his Saturday task, or chores as they were called, as well as Mavis and Doris. His work was the polishing of the brass, the burnishing of fire irons, and the cleaning of boots. Hetty had fondly supposed, as she told Mamma afterwards, that he was busily engaged on this work, which brought a reward of
twopence
a week—one half of which had to go into his money-box for the Post Office Savings account for a bicycle one day—when a bang bigger than that of the largest Chinese Cracker startled her at the bathroom basin. Running into the back bedroom, she saw the boy crouching down behind the fence dividing the Bigges’ garden from their own, while a cloud of blue smoke hung above his head, and a voice that she recognised as Mrs. Groat’s called out, “I
saw you fire that pistol, Phillip, and as soon as Mr. Groat comes home I shall ask him to come and see your father! You have deliberately broken the whole of this window!” There followed the sound of a window being shut, and a tinkling of small glass.

“Where did you get that awful thing?”

The awful thing was a percussion cap horse pistol, with a barrel seven inches long, and a bore of three-quarters of an inch.

“I bought it in Sprunts’, Mother.”

“But it is highly dangerous! Are you mad, my son? Is that the reason why you do such wicked things?” Standing in the garden, Hetty looked at the bedroom window of “Chatsworth”, the lower pane of which showed a large black jagged hole.

“It was only a cork, Mother, not a bullet. It had no right to go where it did. I fired into the air, and it just went that way. It’s only a pop gun really, a sort of firework. It’s as safe as houses, really. It’s an antique.”

“How long have you had it?”

“I bought it last night, on my way to the dancing class at St. Cyprian’s Hall, with Mavis.”

“So that’s what you do when you are trusted to go dancing!”

To try and use up some of his energy in the right direction, Hetty had persuaded Phillip to join the dancing class once a week, from six till eight on Fridays. The new church hall was near Sprunt’s, the pawnbroker’s at the end of Comfort Road. His shop was distinguished from the others by three large gilt balls suspended above it. For days Phillip had coveted a horse pistol lying in the dusty window, seeing himself keeping off Mildenhall with it, among other Dick Turpinal enthusiasms. The pistol lay among an assembly of old ivory chessmen and brass cornets, flutes, dress button-boots, hockey sticks, javelins, coconuts carved and painted as ugly masks, a fiddle or two, a concertina, a clarionette, silver-mounted walking-sticks, sets of china (most of it cracked and mended with little metal rivets), sets of books, and a bric-à-bac of faded jewellery and old silver on shelves.

From Mr. Sprunt, who had a passion for natural history, Phillip had bought for his father’s birthday a small silver tobacco or snuff box, engraved with flowers, and fairly heavy, for one shilling and sixpence; but on seeing the pistol, a week or so before the birthday, he had, after much hesitation, gone into the
pawn-shop
, after taking Mavis to the class in the hall, and enquired the price.

Mr. Sprunt, a seedy individual who looked as though he had been in pawn most of his life, as indeed he had, told him the price was ninepence. Thereupon Phillip, feeling daring and important, had produced the silver box in which he carried his swops since Mum had given him a stamp book for Christmas, and pawned it for ninepence. With the money he had bought the pistol.

The next midday he had bought some black gunpowder at the ironmongers’, and a little round tin of copper percussion caps, with money extracted from his money box with a knife. He had gone on the Hill, and having first made sure that neither the Lanky Keeper nor Skullface were about, he had poured about a thimbleful of powder into the pistol, rammed some newspaper in, hard down, put a cap on the nipple, fully cocked the hammer, pointed up into the elms, and, eyes shut, pulled the trigger. A report followed, and a lovely fireworky smell of blue-white smoke. The paper went to shreds in the air, and when picked up, was seen to be edged with black where it had been torn by the explosion. It really worked! He ran home to find some tintacks, meaning to stalk sparrows in the Backfield. He would bake them in clay in his fire in a hidden hollow behind the Ballast Heap, and eat them, thus doing better than Arthur who won the day.

In Grandpa’s back garden Phillip had found a nice fat cork with a bulging tin head, marked
champagne
. Thinking that this might make an extra loud report, he had fitted it into the muzzle of the pistol, whence by some ballastical aberration it had moved at a tangent over Mr. Bigge’s fruit trees, his arch of jasmine and yellow ivy, his lower fence, and so to Mr. Groat’s
sash-window
, shattering the glass of the lower half. There the cork was, partly blackened by powder, waiting on the front-room table of “Chatsworth” as evidence when Mr. Groat should arrive home from his weekly hot bath (economy being the order of the day at “Chatsworth”) in Randiswell Baths.

Having obtained possession of the horse pistol, Hetty went into Mrs. Groat’s, and begged her not to say anything about it, adding that of course it was only right that Phillip should be punished by having to pay for the damage out of his Post Office Savings Account.

“He is a very naughty boy indeed, and I am very much ashamed of him, he does not seem to be my son sometimes,” said Hetty. “I can only tender you my sincere apologies, and I would not ask you to keep it a matter between us, Mrs. Groat, were it not for the fact that the scholarship exam, is so very very near. Mr. Groat has been so very very good in every way, and if Phillip has any success, it will be entirely due to what Mr. Groat has done for him.”

Hetty did not dare to look Mrs. Groat in the face. She could never be sure which eye she ought to look at, which was the glass one and which the real one. Hetty hoped Mrs. Groat would not think she was looking at her worn carpet too much.

Mrs. Groat did some thinking, while tapping her toe on the carpet, then she said, “It is dangerous to allow a small boy to have such a weapon. Look at my eye, Mrs. Maddison!” and then Hetty had to look up into Mrs. Groat’s face. Which eye ought she to look at? Fortunately the matter was soon taken out of her hands, for pointing to what Hetty had thought to be the real eye, Mrs. Groat said, “I lost this eye, Mrs. Maddison, because a boy, very much like Phillip, never did what his parents told him, and one day, pretending to be Robin Hood, he fired an arrow at me, with the result that I lost the sight of the eye forever.”

Mrs. Groat spoke in a doleful voice, and Hetty made a
sympathetic
double-click with her tongue.

“And I’ve had to wear a glass eye ever since, because of one little boy’s wildness. A nice thing it would have been for me, just think, if I had happened to be looking out of the window just now, and had got this right in my other eye, wouldn’t it?”

Mrs. Groat picked up the offending cork.

“Yes, you are quite right, Mrs. Groat. I will see to it that Phillip never has such a dangerous weapon again.”

“I think I understand all your feelings in the matter, Mrs. Maddison.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Groat. Phillip is such a worry, he never means any harm, I am sure, but he is always up to mischief. When he gets his scholarship, and Mr. Garstang is very pleased with his Composition, which I am sure is largely due to Mr. Groat’s coaching, I am hoping it will make a great change in him. May I send him down to Randiswell at once, to send up the glazier, Mrs. Groat? Of course, I shall ask him to let me have the bill.”

“Very well, Mrs. Maddison, just for this once. But if he fires it off again, it will be my duty to tell Mr. Groat, for we cannot have that sort of thing as a habit, you know. Our lives may be in peril.”

On hearing of his lucky escape, Phillip ran down at full speed
to the sweep in Randiswell, urging him to come at once, for double pay. His khaki-coloured Savings Book that afternoon was stamped by a withdrawal of ten shillings, duly handed over to Mr. Nightingale. Later in the afternoon the pistol went in Hetty’s handbag to Mr. Sprunt’s, where it was exchanged for a ticket and sixpence.

On the following Monday a quantity of deal planking was delivered at “Montrose”, and stored in the passage below the fence, near Mr. Bigge’s upper conservatory. Phillip wondered what it was for. He soon learned; for the next day two carpenters arrived, and raised the fence by another three feet, thus concealing all but the blank part of the passage, where there were no windows or fixed lights, from the garden of No. 11.

“There, you see what you have done, Phillip!” said Hetty, looking at him intently. “Oh, I feel so utterly ashamed!”

“Hark” said Phillip. “I can hear old Josie at his harp again, and I expect Old Mother Bigge is going to cook tripe and onions tonight. Ugh! Beastly stuff.”

T
HE WEEK
before the examination arrived. Day by day the dreaded Saturday came nearer, while Phillip felt colder and colder inside whenever he thought of it. He went to bed early on the Friday night, to rest his brain, as Father said; he spent the slow hours until long after his parents had gone to bed in trying to find a cool place on his pillow, in pulling up the sheet which had somehow got twisted round his knees in a lump, in trying to stop the quicksilvery rush of jumbled pictures through his head.

When they slowed down, other figments moved down from the fluid dark, to resolve themselves into great ugly faces before his shut eyes, flowing up and shaping themselves like the colours when stirred in the tanks of Grandpa’s factory in
Sparhawk
Street, where they made the end papers of ledgers and account books in blue, red, black and brown. He saw the factory in Sparhawk Street, with its iron stairs and crowded printing machines, shafts and wheels, and bands turning; in other rooms lithograph stones with men in aprons making wet pictures on them, also in colours. Over two hundred men and girls worked there, Mr. Mallard said, then asked him if he would like to go into the Firm one day. Then Mother took them to Madame Tussaud’s, which Uncle Hugh had said was full of great glaring dolls. Some of their faces now came up and became like rotten cabbages, and all sorts of awful things looked at him, with lips bulging and pulled down and skulls and lots of white worms wriggled and grinned at him, and he went down a dark tunnel deep into the earth, and he could not breathe and the white worms were going to eat him alive and he shrieked and shrieked and his voice made no sound as he tried to run and his feet were like those of a fly on flypaper and then a light was jabbing his eyes and he heard himself cry out Save me! Save me! and Mother was there, and Father in his white nightshirt.

Father held a candle and said, “It’s all right, old chap, it’s only Mother and Father. You’ve only had a nightmare.”

He was wet all over, and Mother held his hand, while Father went away and brought back a glass of water and put some fizzy stuff in the glass, and said, “Drink this, old chap, it will make you better; it’s bromide of potassium, and will make you sleep.”

Phillip began to cry.

“What’s the matter now, old chap? Got a bit of a
tummy-ache
? What have you been eating?”

“I’ll never get a scholarship,” wailed Phillip. “I won’t, I know I won’t. I can’t do it, I can’t do it. I know I won’t get a scholarship. I’m an old hulk, worn out.”

“You’ll feel all right in the morning, old chap. Just try and keep calm. Why, Mother tells me you got full marks for your English paper, and about our parrot, too! Well done, Phillip. Everyone feels like you feel before a race, or a fight, or an examination, everyone in the world. Now just you let Mother make your bed, and settle yourself down. Anyway, if you don’t get a scholarship, we shall have to find ways and means to circumvent that. Plenty of time to think of that afterwards. Some boys, you know, have to lose. They can’t all win. I bet everyone to-night is worrying himself sick about it. So don’t you worry any more, old fellow, will you now? Promise me?”

“Yes, Father, thank you.”

“That’s a sensible fellow. Remember how you swung on the Life Saving Cable at Hayling Island? You did all right, didn’t you? And you’ll find you will be able to do the papers to-morrow. Now we must all get some sleep. You wait till you get a bicycle, Phil, I’ll take you some grand rides into the country. It will be spiffing fun, having your own cycle. Good night, old chap, and don’t worry any more,” and giving his son a pat on the head, Richard went out of the room.

Tucked in neatly and securely, Phillip kissed his mother. “I want to be very proud of you,” she whispered, and he replied, “Don’t shut the door, will you, please? Good night. I feel very nice now, with that fizzy drink. Like the brandy—lovely!”

The next morning Hetty took him to Bereshill School, dressed in his best suit with a wide linen starched collar sitting upon the
shoulders of his blue serge Norfolk suit. She left him there with an aching heart, he looked so pale and anxious.

The hall had desks in it, spaced out, where silent and apprehensive boys sat down. Phillip waited with dry throat while the man came and put the printed arithmetic paper on his desk. He read the questions, and tried to grasp them against a silent rushing something in the room which took away all thought. Clamped to the seat, he saw the clock hand moving onwards to the dreaded hour when the papers would be collected.

At last, after a fatal pause during which the air rushed silently with the brown wood of the roof and the maps and portraits on the walls about him, he gripped his hands and made himself read the questions again. He copied the figures of the first of the set sums upon his ruled foolscap paper. His hand seemed of wood and the nib jerked like the teeth of the big saw when the two men cut down the elms in the Backfield. The clock had moved an awful lot when he had done the sums. Hurriedly he read the Part Two problems.

There was the same man wanting to paper the walls of a room, to whom Mr. Groat had often introduced to him: wallpaper which must not be pasted on doors and windows, the spaces to be allowed for. There were the two familiar trains approaching each other at different speeds; while the third and last problem was to work out how many ounce packets could be made out of two-and-a-half tons of ground coconut. Phillip tried to deal with the wallpaper, while remembering what Mother had told him had happened when she and Father had tried to paper the bedroom in their first house. Father put the flour-and-water paste on the strip of paper before putting it on the wall, and as he mounted the steps the paper stuck to his face and tried to cling to his trousers. Then the next bit curled up when he pasted it on the floor, and licked his face. However hard Phillip tried to forget Father on the ladder, and Mother’s laughter as she told him about it, he could not put it out of mind. With a stifled cry he turned to No. 5 question, the two trains.

Phillip saw only the trains rushing with rapid thuds of pistons and screaming whistles upon one another. In despair, with glances at the fatal clock, he crossed out his figures of No. 5 and started No. 6, while fighting the sick feeling he remembered when Mr. Hern in the grocer’s shop at the corner in Randiswell had
given him some mouldy coconut powder to taste, rancid and tasting like soap. Try as he would, he could not get away from a jumbled picture of himself filling packet after packet, putting them in a great pile on Mr. Hern’s shop floor, like a sand-castle being repaired as the tide came in. Sticky wallpaper got on the grey-white powder, and was smothering him, he would never, never escape. He could do the answers if only he did not itch so much and the clock would not move so quickly, and if only the boy in front of him would stop darting his tongue in and out as he wrote. Now he saw himself trying to widdle up against Mr. Groat’s lamp-post in the fog, although his bladder was bursting and cousin Ralph had said that if it got into your blood you would turn yellow and die like the old man at the bottom house of the road who had had yellow fever, in spite of lots of straw being spread in front of his home to stop the noise of passing horses’ hoofs and cartwheels.

It was all as he knew it would be, he
would
never
win
a
scholarship.
The clock was now at the hour, and his neck felt like an assegai was stuck in it. O, Mummy, Mummy, I told you I was an old hulk, unable to float, like the ones on the mud near Hayling Island.

He felt better when he had been to the lavatory, after a break-off of ten minutes. When the Composition paper was laid on his desk it looked nice and cool, and he saw Percy and the other boys, in their clean white collars, asking if their collars were clean after they had hunted eels under stones in the Satchville brook. Then one boy said that young robins pecked the breasts of the parent birds and killed them, as they liked the taste of blood and the old robins were red from the blood of the Cross, after trying to pull thorns from the brow of Jesus. So it was right to stick thorns through the nestlings, to kill them first. Father said it was not true, young robins did not kill their parents, and only village cads believed such rot.

Phillip saw the Brickhill Ponds, the blue sky shining below the reeds, and the Satchville brook beyond, where some of the wild duck belonging to the Duke nested in pollard hollow oaks by the
path leading to the Duke’s village over the moors. He heard Percy saying earnestly, Pray don’t touch so much as one egg, there is a fine of five pounds for each egg. Percy did not dare even to look into a tree, much less to climb up, though there was nobody about. He himself had climbed up, and counted eighteen eggs in one nest, grey-green eggs with feathers around them. The duck which had flown out as he had climbed up flew round in the sky, making a soft noise like
quaz
,
quaz
,
quaz
, until he had got down and they had gone away again, along the footpath to the village, to buy some No. 2 bulleted breech caps for the saloon gun. In the Duke’s village was a lamp-post with a tom-tit nesting in it. And on going home by the brook they saw many trout, looking thin and flat in the angle of the water, and pale-blue flowers of brooklime, and big yellow kingcups, and on some watercress which Percy called water-crease a red dragonfly was resting, near a curly skin out of which it had hatched.

In dread of the creeping black hand of the clock on the wall Phillip wrote of all he had seen, making the brook much wider, into a river, and putting swans on it, like on a real river, and the sunset beyond made it alike on fire, with the rings of rising trout breaking the smooth fire into ripples, to be carried away on the water, and the river was like life flowing past, never to return, and yet always there in flow. And he saw the blue eyes and fair hair of Helena Rolls smiling at him, and she was dead, she had died as a little child. She was his best friend who had asked him always to her parties, and now her spirit was in the water and the sky and in the singing of the birds, and he thought of her like Minnie, she was Minnie, and very near him as he walked alone by the river at sunset, and wherever he went on the seas or across the great spaces of the earth, she would be near him, for she loved him and love was God.

Phillip’s eyes filled with tears as he wrote; they dropped on the paper, making some of the ink to run, but the black long hand was now ever so near the top of the clock, and the hour was nearly gone, and it was time to go home from the river and sit in the old farmhouse parlour, where the crickets played their little fish-bone violins in the cracks of the wall.

As the man came to take up his paper he was filled with fear, for what he had written was not composition at all, but all made
up, and not true. O, he had lost his chance of a scholarship, and poor Mummy, it would make her cry, and Father would be cross, Father who had spoken so nicely to him and not been angry or punished him when he had had the nightmare. How could he go home, and tell Mummy the awful thing he had done? He was wicked, because Helena Rolls had not died at all, and he had never been asked to her house because he swore bad words, and he had not really tried to work for a scholarship but read about Jack Valiant and Sexton Blake instead.

When Phillip arrived home he was at first curt and rude to his mother. Later he cried when she asked him how he had got on. The days that followed were haunted with fear, for what the Examiners would say when they read the terrible, terrible all-made-up writing he had done on the walk by the river. And, in desperation, for now nothing mattered, when Mildenhall held up his fist at him in class one day, Phillip held up his fist to Mildenhall. After school he did not run away, but went out with Cranmer to the boys waiting in the playground, some calling out, “Ha, Donkey Boy! Two black eyes and a broken nose, a lift under the lug, and down ’e goes! Donkey Boy! Donkey Boy!”

White-faced, Phillip found himself in a crowd being pressed forward to the Woodwork Shop round the corner, out of sight of the main entrance to the school. Gerry came with him, and said, “Don’t you be afraid of him, young Phil. I’ll tell you what to do. Let him do your dags first, see, and take no notice. Stand quite still, as though you’re funky. Then he’ll do your cowardies. Now listen carefully. The moment he has done your cowardies, punch him one on the snout with your left hand. Don’t square up to him. Just bang one in on the snout, then hit him with your right before he can recover. He won’t fight, he’s a funk, really, that’s why he’s always picked on you, because he knows you don’t fight. But you’re a game cock, young Phil. I’ll stand by you, so don’t let him take the spunk out of you.”

The boys made a ring. Mildenhall stood looking at Phillip. Phillip was frightened. He felt sick, and no stronger than a piece of paper. Gerry put his arm on Phillip’s back and urged him closer to the buck-toothed Mildenhall. Mildenhall said, in a low voice,

“You sauced me!”

“I didn’t sauce you, ever.”

“Yuss you did. Will you fight?”

“I didn’t sauce you!” cried Phillip, unhappily.

“You did then! I can prove it. Call me a liar?”

Gerry whispered to Phillip, “Say yes.”

With a quaver in his voice, Phillip said Mildenhall was a liar.

“Tell him he pinched your blood-alley,” urged Gerry.

“And you took my blood-alley! My Father gave me that one!”

“Yah, Ole Tin Wills,” said Mildenhall, urged on by his friends, who cried, “Go on, Mildy, do ’is dags! Paste ’im! Wears a starched collar, and parts ’is ’air at the side, fancyin’ ’isself as a toff! Take ’im dahn, Mildy, go on!”

Mildenhall tapped Phillip with his fist on the left breast, in the traditional manner of the challenge.