Flowers on the Grass (29 page)

There was nothing about the new Helper to put you off your food. Pamela thought he looked quite nice, but he would probably turn out to be just as bad as the others in the end.

“Looks a pretty good wet,” said Mervyn, who was next to her. “Daniel, his ghastly name is. Well, he’s come to the lions’ den all right. Haw, haw.” He laughed the coarse, exaggerated guffaw which the boys had picked up from the lads of the village and used at all times.

The first thing Pamela noticed about the new Helper was his look of horror when he saw the hors-d’oeuvres. It was one of Mrs. Harvey’s Vitamin C days, and she had arranged on the dish every available kind of raw vegetable, shredded coarsely, with a few tired old prunes in the middle.

You were allowed to criticise the food at Rosemount. Peter did it himself. “What’s this?” he demanded, picking out one of the prunes with his long fingers, which always looked cold. “The by-product of a gasworks?”

Brian, who was top boy this term, which didn’t mean much except having a room to himself and being allowed to ride Humphrey’s motor-cycle, flicked a bit of bread at him. “That’s a pretty corny joke, Peter,” he said.

“Well, make a better one. You’re all so ruddy dull. The new member of our little community will think us a sadly lack-witted lot and wish himself back in the gay metropolis.” Peter often talked like this, in a kind of quoting voice, to show that the clichés were deliberate.

“D’you come from London?” Babette asked Daniel. “Why on earth d’you want to come all the way up to this God-forsaken hole?”

“Oh well, you know.” The new Helper eased his tie and stammered a little. “If you want to teach, you’ve got to go where the job is.”

“You haven’t come here to
teach
? I say, what a scream.” Babette appealed to everyone to giggle at him. “You can’t teach here, because we never listen.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Daniel a little grimly, jerking back his head as plates of cauliflower cheese began to pass down the table under his nose.

Peter stopped serving it out to shoot him a look through the thick-lensed glasses that hid the expression of his eyes. The
new man must not get bossy with his friends; that was not the idea. “You’ll be surprised, I daresay, by our freedom from rules here. The children make their own. A self-governing community, you might say.” He gave his wolfish grin, lifting his lip from his long teeth without moving the rest of his face.

“What are the rules then?” asked Daniel.

“None,” said Babette. “Haw, haw, funny joke.”

“Pass the potatoes, dear,” said Alice. “Humphrey wants some.”

“Why the heck doesn’t he ask for them himself then?” retorted Babette, not passing the dish. “I knew he was dumb but not about food.”

“Mind your own business, and pass the potatoes, if there’s any left after they’ve been down your end.”

While they were wrangling, Peter was telling the new Helper: “We have made a lifelong study of the fundamental motives of original child-nature, don’t you see. On that we base our system, which I beg leave to say is the finest in this God-awful country. No is a word that has fallen into desuetude here. If you don’t forbid them to do wrong, they will do no wrong, because they don’t know what it is. Look at Adam and Eve. Everything in the garden would have been lovely if they hadn’t been
told
not to eat the apple. Not that I believe in the Old Testament, mind. I am merely illustrating my thesis for your enlightenment. Now cads, who wants some more of this muck?” He swashed the ladle around in the cauliflower dish.

The studio at Rosemount was a converted barn a little way away from the house. It was used for dances and had a radio-gramophone, which was played all the time during art lessons. It was blaring away, and Mervyn and Wanda were doing a Samba among the easels when Daniel came in for his first class. “Shut off that ruddy noise!” he shouted. He was learning fast how to talk to his pupils.

“Let’s make it a dancing lesson instead,” Wanda pleaded, jigging up to him and raising her left hand to his shoulder.

He brushed her off. “You’ve come here to draw, and draw you damn well will. Now get on those chairs, everybody, and pick the easels up and let’s see what we’re going to do.”

Gabriel always let them draw what they wanted. He insisted on it, in fact. They must paint to express themselves.

“It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t look like anything,” he said.

“Draw the inside of your brain.”

So they splashed on blocks of mad colour and explosions of zigzag lines, and women with two heads, and men like playing cards with eyes in the wrong place. You could paint on the walls if you wanted to, or draw caricatures of the Helpers. That was Observation.

Pamela always wanted to draw neat little pictures of cape gooseberries, or kingcups in a green glazed vase, with the reflection of the window highlighted in squares on the bulge. But/when she drew flowers that looked like flowers, Gabriel ran “his hand through what there was of his hair and said: “What do you think this is—a botany class?”

“I’ve been told I can let you draw what I like,” Daniel said.

“What
we
like,” they corrected him, lolling. John Birch was sharpening pencils with a Japanese dagger with which he was making great play this term, even eating his meals with it and using it on onions in the cookery class.

“We’ll start with the human form not so divine,” Daniel said. “One of you sit out here. You—girl with the red hair— come on.” He put Eileen on a chair in the middle of the room and arranged her arms and legs, which she rearranged as soon as his back was turned.

“Now you others get on and draw her. Draw, I said,” as Mervyn began to flourish a brush. “No colour until I see how you can use your pencils.”

While they began, with sighings and groans, he went to look out of the window where the grassland dropped downhill to the village among oak trees stunted by wind and pulled at odd angles by the slope. Pamela liked the view, but Gabriel would never let them paint it. He said it was bucolic, and made them look out of the other window and paint the slag-heaps instead.

Perhaps Daniel would let her paint the rolling green view. He seemed to like it, and dragged himself away reluctantly to walk round the room and quell the scufflings that were breaking out as people got bored with drawing Eileen.

“Good God,” he said, as he looked at the drawings. “What is all this—spirit drawing? None of them are anything
like.” He picked up Mamie’s drawing, tried it’upside down, turned it round again and said: “Ghastly.”

“Well, it’s how I see her,” said Mamie, who fancied her art, and was going to design materials for her mother’s shop.

“If that’s how she looks, God help her,” said Daniel, and Eileen stuck her tongue out at him.

“We’re always allowed to draw how we like,” said Mamie smugly. “You mustn’t repress us.”

“It’s just a waste of my time,” he said, flinching at what he picked up from Mervyn’s easel. “You could scribble that nonsense in the playroom.”

“Ah, but we haven’t got a playroom, and it isn’t nonsense. It’s the expression of our inner selves, Daniel.”

“If that’s the expression of yours,” he said, tossing the paper back to Mervyn, “I don’t want to know it—and don’t call me Daniel. I’ve never been a schoolmaster before, but my impression is that I should be called Mr. Brett, or even Sir.”

“Oh no, not here, Daniel,” they chorused.

When Daniel came to Pamela’s sketch, which had a head, two arms, two legs, buttons down the dress, and was just possibly recognisable as Eileen, he said: “Ah now, this is better. Here’s something sane at last.”

“Oh, her,” Mamie said scornfully. “She doesn’t count. She’s not been here very long. She hasn’t progressed as far as us.”

“Anyway,” said Babette, “she’s wet.”

“I’m not!” Pamela picked up a ruler and fell on her. She had progressed far enough anyway to fight in class. Most of the others joined in, and Daniel wandered over to the gramophone and began to look through the records.

“Oh, look,” he said, “if you’re going to scrap, you might as well go and do it somewhere else. What time is this class supposed to end?”

“We go when we like,” they said.

“Well, you can go when I like today. Scram.” ’ When the others went out, Pamela was left behind snivelling in a corner. Someone had hacked her on her weak ankle and it still hurt too much to walk, so Daniel said: “Sit down and finish your drawing. It’s not bad, you know. Those others— ye gods! How old
are
those dead-end kids?”

“About fourteen or fifteen, this class. Babette’s sixteen, but she’s backward.”

“Hardly the word I’d have used.”

“They say I’m retarded,” Pamela told him, limping over to her easel, “because I still like playing games. But I can’t see the point of being grown up too soon, can you? After all, you’ve got to be it all the rest of your life.”

“Too true.”

Pamela was surprised to find she could say such things to him. The other Helpers would have told her to get wise to herself, or given her a little lecture on infantilism.

Daniel played the gramophone and wandered round looking at the pictures on the walls, while Pamela put shadings into her drawing of Eileen. She was quite pleased with it. At the High School, when her cape gooseberries were successful, she used to take them home for Aunt Winnie to hang in her bedroom, but Estelle would not want Eileen on the candy-striped walls of her bedroom, which had just one picture that Pamela thought must be the wrong way up.

Presently Daniel said: “Don’t you want to go?”

“Not particularly. It’s not Sociology till after lunch, and there’s nothing to do. We’re supposed to fill in our own time between classes. I wish we had them all the time. I get so bored. When we do have classes or lectures, you can’t hear, even if it was worth hearing, because the others make such a row, or get the Helper sidetracked into some discussion about sex or something.”

“Not in my classes they won’t,” Daniel said. “I’m going to bring a new régime to this reformatory.”

“Oh
do
, Daniel. I’m sorry, would you like me to call you Mr. Brett?”

Feeling much happier, she went away to strum on the piano in Peter’s room, until he told her for God’s sake if she didn’t know anything else but the Jolly Farmer to go and drown herself. She banged down the piano lid and went into the garden, where some of the younger ones were having secrets under the weeping birch and would not let her in. She didn’t mind. She felt happy. She believed she was going to have a crush on the new Helper.

She was, and it made all the difference to her. Life now had some purpose. Having crushes on people kept you very busy, for you had to scoot about all day trying to see them
as often as possible. Her life revolved round Daniel’s. In the morning she dressed quickly and hung about outside his room until she heard him drop his shoes on to the floor—one, two—which meant he was going to put them on. When he came out, she would be casually sauntering by and they would walk to breakfast together. If he had been late getting up, Pamela was in a fever, in case there might not be two seats left next to each other. If she could sit by Daniel and pass him things, it was a propitious day and she knew that she would see him often, and he would talk to her and perhaps ask her to run an errand, having learned already that it was a waste of breath to ask any of the others.

She dogged his movements all day, not following him about, but always managing to turn up at strategic places; and when he walked down to the village through the park Pamela would sit on the terrace wall and watch him appear and disappear among the trees. It was worth waiting about for a glimpse of him coming back, although she would get down from the wall before he could see her, for she was terrified of annoying him. If he was cross with her, she was suicidal. If he was nice, she burst out of her skin with happiness. She did not know how to contain herself, and people asked her why she was going about with that silly grin on, and had she been to Peter’s drink cupboard?

Every word that Daniel said to her was printed on her brain, to be gone over and over in bed at night. Sudden sights of him made her breath catch and her heart hammer, and his day off was as flat and forlorn as the third act of the Chekhov play they were rehearsing. It was a real, slap-up crush all right. Just as good as the one she had had on Miss Parkins.

The summer term footled itself away, and Peter bought a set of ribbons and bells and instituted morris dancing on the lawn. He tried to make Daniel teach it, and quarrelled with him when he refused. Selina, who was in Peter’s room mending his socks, heard it all and reported to the others some of the things Daniel had said about the school.

“You could be sued for saying things like that,” Brian said. “I admire the man’s mastery of language though, if he really put all those words you said into one sentence.”

“He’s shockingly reactionary,” Mamie said. “I can’t think why he came here.”

“That’s what Peter said,” Selina told her, “and Daniel said he was a snooper from the education authorities and had come here to bust this place wide open.”

“Haw, haw,” went the boys, but Eileen, who lacked thyroid and always took things literally, said: “I say though, suppose he were? He’d spoil everything.”

“Of course he’s not,” Pamela said. “I think it’s mean of you to suspect him.” They looked at her slyly, and Bobby whistled “Love Is The Sweetest Thing”.

We all know what
you
think, O foolish virgin,” Brian said. “Thank God you’re growing up at last.” She did not know what he meant. Getting up, she parted the curtains of the weeping birch and left them, for it was time to go and offer to help Mrs. Harvey with the vegetables, so that she could be in the kitchen when Daniel came in for his coffee.

In July there were fewer and fewer lectures, because everyone had to help with the haymaking. Even Peter, who had recently discovered Outdoors, toiled in the heat in a yellow shirt and orange linen trousers, his peeling nose reddening like a slowly boiling lobster, his spectacles perpetually misting up with sweat. John Birch was working on an invention to fit them with little windscreen wipers, although Peter, who was a man of brief enthusiasms, would have given up working in the sun long before it was finished.