How Dear Is Life (24 page)

W
HEN
he arrived back in camp a company parade in fatigue dress was just assembling. Douglas, new stripes on his jacket, said that they were to be inoculated against enteric fever. This fact had given rise to the rumour that their destination was Egypt, or even South Africa. But it turned out to be an anti-typhoid injection, which pointed to France, where the water was notoriously bad to drink.

A dab of iodine on bared upper arm, then the needle, which Captain MacTaggart, with pursed lips, pushed hard into nipped flesh. Why did some chaps faint, he wondered. To his surprise Furrow, the powerful rowing man, was among them. Phillip kept upright; but an hour later he began to shudder violently, perhaps because he had gone to the washing benches, stripped, lathered all over, and emptied a pail of cold water over himself.

There was a big fire of wood flaring up in a space near the canteen marquee. He managed to lug four blankets there, and lying down to cover himself up, teeth clenched, head throbbing, shaking in every limb. After an hour under blankets the paroxysms passed. Feeling sick, with aching arm, he returned to lie down in the tent. Shivering, he pulled his blanket over his head, and slept beside his rifle.

Others were lying there, pale and quiet. By tea-time he felt better. He felt considerable cheered when Colours came to tell them that the Commanding Officer had succeeded in his request to the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, that each man be given twenty-four hours’ embarkation leave. Half companies were to start the next day after morning parade.

Leave was in two batches. Phillip was in the second. After Saturday morning parade he and others of the half company were given railway warrants. Off he and Baldwin hurried to catch the fast train from Jarvis Brook to London, free until Retreat on Sunday night.

*

With keen anticipation he showed his pass at Wakenham station to the porter. The porter looked at it, then waved him through with his clippers, as though unaware that he had
returned. Outside the station the houses looked small, drab, forlorn. He saw for the first time that they had slate roofs. Banana skins lay in the gutter, with pieces of paper. He went into the newspaper shop, to buy some Cavalier tobacco; the wooden-legged man who gave him his penny-ha’penny change from sixpence did not seem to recognise him, but returned to study of the League prospects. Football, was there still
football
? He hurried away up Foxhill Road, anticipating the wonder of his arrival home—and Desmond.

At the top, opposite St. Simon’s Church, they were playing tennis in the club. His heart accelerated. Peering through the shrubs he saw Helena Rolls, all in white, playing a set.

He hesitated, feeling twisted inside; then not daring to reveal himself, he hurried onwards. Home, Mother’s face was now prominent in his mind.

The Hill was just the same, though somehow looking more bare. There was the slow form of Mr. Krebs walking towards him, arm in arm with his grey-haired wife. Would Mr. Krebs recognise him? He remembered he was a German. Mr. Krebs looked straight ahead, Mrs. Krebs smiled. Phillip saluted. Mr. Krebs seemed startled—ah, he had recognised him after all! He raised his hat, showing bald pink head as he bowed. Phillip strode on, feeling a little happier.

He passed the West Kent Grammar School, much enlarged since the L.C.C. had taken it over as the Wakenham Secondary School. The old grammar school was still there, its wasp-dug and flaking old red brick enclosed by new clean high walls. It did not seem alive, it had been suffocated by the L.C.C. He went down by the sheep-fold, glad to see the Crystal Palace glittering on the ridge some miles away; but it seemed to be much nearer.

Vaulting the hurdles, he crept down the steep clay bank above the gully, seeing the same old blackish-red hips on the trees, and same curled dry notched brown leaves fallen under them. Yes, summer was ending. Soon the rest of the leaves would fall, and old sparrow nests be shown in bare branches. He stopped, closed his eyes: why, why did life change so?

The front door of the Rolls’ house was open. He passed, looking straight ahead, hoping he would not see, and have to speak to Mr. Pye, should his sallow face be visible in the next house. He got to the safety of Gran’pa’s house, looked in at the
window, saw no one. He shut away a piercing thought of Grannie, of Uncle Hugh, of the old faces, the old days——Ah, Mrs. Bigge peering round her gate! He was glad to see her.

“They’re all waiting for you, Phillip. How well you look! We are all proud of you in Hillside Road. Go in, dear, don’t waste time with Aunty Bigge, as you used to call me. Mother is waiting to see you! What days we’re living in, to be sure!”

“Yes, Mrs. Bigge. I hope you are quite well?”

“Yes thank you, dear.”

“And Mr. Bigge? And Norah?”

“They had a spree all by themselves at the sea-side, you know, without Mother. Now in you go, bless you!”

*

How terribly quickly the time had rushed away. It was Sunday afternoon.

“You ask him, Mum, please. I daren’t.”

“I am sure Father would do so at once, dear, if you asked him yourself. Besides, it would please him if it came from you. He is very proud of you, you know.”

Mother and son stood in the kitchen. He had left the sitting-room ostensibly to carry in the tea-tray, but really to ask her to ask Father to play the gramophone.

Down in the sitting-room sat Richard, Mavis, Doris, Petal, Mrs. Neville, and Desmond. It was four o’clock. At a quarter past five he would be leaving to catch the half-past five train from Wakenham to London Bridge. They were all going to walk over the Hill together, to see him off.

He glanced at the Ingersoll alarm clock on the dresser shelf, ticking away alert as Mrs. Feeney. Only another seventy-five minutes! How small the kitchen looked, how dark. How small Mother was, really. He had never thought of her as small before.

“The kettle will soon boil, dear.”

Why did Mother pretend to be so cheerful? Yet somehow, it was all part of the kitchen, with its varnished wallpaper, faded and yellow; the clock on the wall that used to ring the morning alarm but had stopped owing to fumes of the gas-stove, which had made its brass wheels green; the table, the chairs, the scullery where Timmy Rat lived in his box on the copper-lid; the pail under the sink with the swab and hearthstone in it used by Mrs. Feeney; the plate-rack over the sink; the small window above, the door with its several bolts and chain; the empty water-butt
outside where he had once put some roach and so been found out taking Father’s things.

“I think I’ll just run up and take a last look at my bedroom.”

He opened the corner cupboard, with its faded gummed label stuck on the door,
Private
. How dark it was inside, all the light shut out by the house next door, and the roof. There lay his “treasures”—the most valued custard-box of birds’ eggs on sawdust: half-cured skins of birds, and the stoat, and various claws, wings and skulls from gamekeepers’ gibbets: his model stationary steam-engine, with steam-hammer attachment and circular saw: his model yacht
Dipper
,
which Mother had given him for winning his scholarship: the set of conjuring tricks, and box of chemicals with which he had not experimented for years, since Father had discovered that one of the little red pill-boxes had been labelled potassium ferrocyanide, declaring it to be a deadly poison. The box had cost 1/-, from Murrage’s, an old Christmas present. A score of memories smote him, of his lost childhood. There was his pocket accumulator in its curved transparent celluloid case, which leaked sulphuric acid, and was charged for 2
d
.
at Wetherley’s in the High Street. It bubbled considerably, and had lit several bath-nights, standing on the soap-dish, until Father had forbidden its use, vitriol being dangerous, he said. Its place had been taken by the big flask-like bottle holding dark-yellow potassium chromate, a single-cell battery so heavy and clumsy that it had fallen into the bath, out of which he had hopped so quickly that the
Boy’s Own
Paper
he had been reading had got soaked and dyed yellow. How he had scrubbed the bath, to get rid of the yellow stain: then the
B.O.P.
had stuck in the lavatory pan, and had to be torn into little shreds with pincers to get rid of it, in panic lest he had stopped up the drains for ever.

On the wall was fixed his cigar-box telephone, with carbon rods balanced to make a diaphragm: he had laid wires across the ceiling, above the door, along the passage and so to Mother’s bedroom, where a similar cigar-box was fixed behind her bed. The telephone had worked, too. The trouble was you had to yell to be heard in the cigar-box at the other end, to make sufficient vibrations to move the carbon rods which regulated the current: and so you could never be sure if it was your shout that was heard in Mother’s bedroom, or your telephone voice. He had put it up without permission, but Father had never spoken about it, although he had driven screws into the wallpaper and made
some false-move holes in the plaster. After the accident with the single-cell potassium chromáte battery, there had been no more telephoning.

And there, standing guard over his boyhood ‘treasures’, stood the bittern on its small wooden stand, covered all over with pepper to discourage moths. It was time to go down. He felt a thin wire-like feeling of almost desperate pain to be leaving his bedroom now. Voices came up through the floor, as they had when he had lain awake at night, listening to Father’s mumble at Mother: and where he had, long ago, lain in terror waiting for Father to come upstairs to punish him with the cane. He sat on the bed, mourning, until he heard Mother’s footfalls coming up the stairs. He went to meet her.

“You ask him for the gramophone, Mum. I
can’t
!”

“All right, dear. Come on down now. I put the pepper on your bittern, as you asked me.”

“You can have it for Christmas dinner if you like, with some salt added!”

“It may well come to that, if prices rise any more!” she said, gaily.

When they re-entered the sitting-room, which used to be called the parlour, he suddenly remembered, Father said, “Now old chap, would you like me to play the gramophone?”

“No thanks, Father.”

Richard looked at Hetty. Then he got up from his chair, and selecting the key on his ring, unlocked the top.

“There you are, old chap. You play anything you like.”

Mrs. Neville looked across the table at Phillip. She wore a hat rather like a large pale green pork pie with ribbons round it.

“I hear your gramophone has a beautiful tone, Mr. Maddison.”

“What would you like to hear first, Mrs. Neville?”

“Oh, I am sure your choice would be better than mine, Mr. Maddison!”

“May we have the one by Wagner, Dickie? I am sure Phillip would like it.”

As the
Liebestod
filled the room Mrs. Neville surreptitiously wiped the corner of her eye. “Ah, how it brings back Covent Garden!” she exclaimed in her creamy voice. She had once gone there to hear
Traviata
.

Petal smiled at Phillip. Everyone was sitting very still, as always when Father played the records. When the
Liebestod
was finished, Father looked at his watch. Mother said—why
did
she have to say the obvious?—“We must not be late at the station, Dickie,” rather anxiously.

“Oh, there’s plenty of time yet,” he said, airily. “Petal, what would you like next?”

“May we have Paderewski, Uncle Dick, please?”

“Yes, the
Waterfall
one!” exclaimed Phillip. It was one of the Études, tumultuous and sad. As the record was playing, he saw Mrs. Bigge’s hat move along the level of the fence beyond the half-open window. She was listening.

“May we have the
Humoresque,
Father?”

This was a song set to the music of Dvorak. Mrs. Neville watched Hetty’s face as the lamenting words came with the sad plaint of violins. 

Mrs. Neville said boisterously, to cover her emotion, “Phillip, you would choose that, wouldn’t you, you bad boy! Don’t heed him, Mrs. Maddison. I know Phillip of old! Why, when we hear from him next, he will probably be adopting some of the monkeys on the Rock of Gibraltar, and putting Timmy Rat’s nose out of joint when he hears of it. I am sure animals understand what we humans are saying, half the time, and how they must laugh at us!”

Mrs. Neville’s jollity eased the feeling in the room. She went on,

“Haven’t you got one of Harry Lauder, Mr. Maddison? My idea of a send-off for Phillip is
Stop
your
tickling,
Jock
. Though,” she added, in her creamy, best-manner voice, “I must say that your selection of records is a very fine one indeed.”

“I have not got the record you speak of, Mrs. Neville, but here is the next best thing, perhaps,” and Richard put on
Over
the
Sea
to
Skye
.

As the plaintive tune and words for the defeated Prince Charles
Stuart filled the room, Mrs. Neville could not restrain a drip of tears. Fortunately Thomas and Marian Turney appeared at the open french windows before, as Mrs. Neville remarked later to Desmond, Mr. Maddison could put on
The
Dead
March
in
Saul
.

Richard was glad of the intervention. He greeted his father-in-law and Miss Turney with an affability that was, for the occasion, genuine.

“Well, Phillip m’boy, how are ye?” said Thomas Turney. After awhile he chuckled and said, “Now then, Phillip, you’re in the thick of things, so tell us the secret about the Russians from Archangel.”