Long Summer Day (56 page)

He was made aware of his head start by his habit of careful observation underlined by a personal experience arising out of the mild system of bullying new boys, something High Wood had adopted as a matter of course in the same way as it encouraged senior boys to wear fancy waistcoats and walk arm in arm to chapel, or called its Annual Speech Day ‘Speecher’ and its nightly call-over ‘Bill’.

During his first term Ikey was assigned as fag to Juxton, vice-captain of cricket and a notable ‘blood’, with the faintest shadow of a blonde moustache. Juxton was an amiable oaf whose study was usually crowded with other bloods and whilst going about his chores, whitening cricket boots and making tea and toast, Ikey learned from their conversation precisely what was done and what was not done, what could be worn and what would brand a man as an ‘Oick’, a ‘Yob’, or a ‘Swedebasher’. There was, in fact, a very great deal to learn in this field and a single bad mistake on the part of a new boy might have taken a good deal of living down but Ikey’s acute observation, together with his unerring ear for accent, stood him in good stead, so that he was soon Admirable Crichton to all the other first-year boys in the Lower School. He could tell you, for instance, at what angle one’s cap should be worn at any stage up the school; how much familiarity it was safe to show certain masters and certain boys, and even such minutiae as exactly how long one should hold on to the second syllable of the Dervishlike howl of ‘High
Woooode
’,
whilst applauding the inter-school cricket matches. He found it absurdly easy to absorb these essentials so that his quick eye and ear kept him clear of trouble with the seniors, who came to accept him as a deft hand with the toasting fork, a notable polisher of sporting equipment and a quiet but respectful scrag-end of humanity. With the Middle School, however (where dwelt the Flashmans, the Scaifes and the Beaumont-Greens), other tactics were required and it was here that Ikey’s triple background gave him an enormous advantage over all the other little toads who arrived at the school from moderately prosperous homes and cheap prep schools. This was made clear to him at the first New Kids’ Concert, half-way through his first term.

At stipulated intervals every newcomer to High Wood was required to mount the fifth form rostrum and divert his betters with songs or recitations and whereas most of the new boys, giving of their poor best, received nothing from the audience but a shower of books and inkwells, Ikey’s imitation of a Cockney coster rendering ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road’ won genuine applause. The audience was, in fact, stunned by what they naturally assumed to be a superb mastery of the Cockney dialect and when he obliged with an encore, giving them ‘Widdicombe Fair,’ as it might have been sung by Tamer Potter or Horace Handcock, he was at once acclaimed ‘A Turn’ and thereafter treated with a degree of geniality by boys whose Sundays (Sunday was dedicated to the persecution of new boys) were long vistas of unutterable boredom.

It would have been fatal, of course, had he let it be known that the coster idiom was his native tongue, or that he had learned broad Devon whilst employed as a stable-boy on an estate only fifty miles away but he was far too astute to allow this secret to fall into enemy hands and preserved it jealously from all, including his cronies in the Upper Third. In fact he did the reverse, using his mastery of the two accents to imply that he was a man of the world, familiar not only with the music-halls, but the idiom of grooms and house-servants in the provinces. It was this, more than anything, that gave him not only stature among his peers but also a chance to bring his wider, overall strategy into play for in one way he was handicapped, the crammer not having had the time to teach him the important things about life at a minor public school. He was completely ignorant, for instance, of Rugby football, he could not swim, and his experience of cricket was limited to standing before chalked stumps on the scrapyard wall and hitting an underhand ball with a piece of plank. His prospects in the athletic field were no more promising. He discovered, for instance, that he had short, rather clumsy legs and was usually the last to arrive at the tape in a 100 or 220 yard junior house sprint. He knew that, somehow or other, he must make this deficiency good by the end of his second term, and perhaps he was fortunate in beginning his school life in the summer term, when cricket occupied the seniors and nobody took the junior events seriously.

He thought about his handicap a great deal, and at length arrived at a possible solution. If he could never expect to run fast then he might train himself to run a long way, for he was told that in the term ahead cross-country running took precedence over every other sport except Rugby football. Rugby, he felt, he might learn from a book and as a new boy he was unlikely to be called upon to play in even a Junior House Match. He thought it best, therefore, to concentrate on long-distance running and during his first holidays, when his new status as gentleman freed him from chores in tack-room and stableyard, he went into strict training, refusing all Mrs Handcock’s heavy pastry and going out over the stubble fields as far as Coombe Bay morning and evening in sandshoes (known at High Wood as ‘stinkers’), running shorts and vest. He had seven weeks in which to translate himself into a potential winner of marathons and here again he was lucky, for he soon made another discovery that he could never have found in a book. Early in his training, he discovered that a run across firm, springy turf was far less demanding than a run along the tideline of Coombe Bay and that to cover a mile on the beach was far more punishing than the same distance on the hard-packed track beside the Sorrel. It occurred to him then that if he trained on sand his calf muscles and wind would develop very rapidly so that he would have the edge on boys who did not have the luck to live beside the sea. Thereafter he merely jog-trotted to the beach, or sometimes rode the cob across the dunes and tethered him to a tide-post after which he ran as far as Nun’s Head and back, using the landslip boulders as the equivalent of High Wood’s hedges and ditches. By the time the autumn term arrived he was confident of giving a good account of himself in the first series of runs and so it proved, for at the first cross-country event he was the first junior boy into the quad and this feat set him apart in a way that might have gone to the head of a less wary athlete. Thereafter, in five successive runs, he scored a total of seventy-nine points, a record for a first-year boy. Nobody seemed to remember his dropped catches and gasping sprints of the previous term.

His efforts to master the mystique of Rugby football were not so successful, for he found the game complicated by rules against forward passing, by dropped kicks and the off-side prohibitions but his stamina, developed by his concentrated training, soon won him a place as a forward in the Junior Grenville pack and here he put into practice a trick of falling on the ball and letting the field storm over him, something he had marked down as worth remembering in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

Juxton, his fagmaster, developed an interest in him and the fact that Ikey privately considered Juxton a pompous fool did not prevent him taking full advantage of the great man’s patronage, even to the extent of obliging study guests with song and dance, so that seniors came to refer to him as ‘That Palfrey kid, Jumbo Juxton’s fag, an amusin’ little devil, who can run like a hare but doesn’t put on side’.

And so, after a couple of terms, the metamorphosis was almost complete and a boy who began earning his bread as a collector of old iron at the age of nine, and had subsequently shared a loft with the gardener’s boy over a stable, was absorbed into the narrow, formalised life of boarding school without one of his contemporaries suspecting for a single moment that he was the victim of a bizarre practical joke. Yet there was a curious element in the transformation and this was Ikey’s own appreciation of it, for not once did he cease to regard it as a social experiment practised upon a community not so much by himself but by Squire Craddock and there grew in Ikey a terribly urgent sense of obligation to Paul, a longing, so far unappeased, for the means to repay a little interest on the investment represented by himself. As the weeks passed, however, he could see less and less hope of achieving this for he was all too aware that the Squire had changed a very great deal during the last year and Ikey connected the change, as did everyone else in the Valley, with the inexplicable disappearance of the Squire’s wife, said by some to have run off with a man in a motor, and by others to have gone raving mad so that she turned her back on hearth and home in order to chain herself to railings and throw soot at politicians. Ikey considered these theories separately but could make no sense of either, being reluctant to accept the view of Mrs Handcock, who declared, ‘Missus ’as gone mazed, same as all they other suffragettes, an’ Squire’s well shut of ’er, the daaft baggage!’ He was, in fact, persuaded to the contrary, it being clear that Squire was quite unable to put his wife out of mind and Ikey, having an affection for Grace Craddock, refused to believe that she could have lost her wits in the manner of Farmer Codsall. He was ready to admit, however, that her behaviour was eccentric and altogether outside his experience. He had been witness to many quarrels between man and wife in his childhood and remembered that they had all ended in a cuddle and a quart of beer and was therefore convinced—provided the means could be found of bringing the principals together—that all could be settled in minutes. In the meantime, concern over the Squire’s despondency grew as the months passed and on the whole he was inclined to blame Mrs Craddock the less, for a careful study of the Squire’s demeanour during the Christmas holidays left him with the impression that Paul was almost enjoying his sulks and this made him wonder if, in some mysterious way, that man with the motor was at the back of it all. When, therefore, he learned that the agent’s son was now cruising the China seas it struck him that something should be done before he came home again to charm Mrs Craddock into committing further indiscretions in his motor, and Ikey gave the matter the same careful consideration as he had given to the process of consolidating himself at High Wood. It was some time, however, before he hit on a plan to improve the situation.

Part of his duties in Juxton’s study was to light the fire and Juxton, who read the sporting page of the
Daily Mail
every day, saved the political pages for this purpose. It was in this way that Ikey came to read a lengthy report dealing with suffragette activities in London and he put it aside to study in the latrines, the only place at High Wood where new boys could expect privacy. The article interested him far more than he thought it would. He had never dreamed that suffragettes had so much fun, or were regarded so seriously by the police. He read an account of various outrages committed by these extraordinary women and became excited when he found the name ‘Mrs P. Craddock’ bracketed alongside the name of ‘Grace Philimore’. It worried him a little, this name ‘Philimore’, for it might mean that Squire and his wife were already divorced and that she was now married to someone else but he soon discarded this possibility, reasoning that such a dreadful scandal would certainly have reached the Valley and become common gossip in the kitchens. It must mean, therefore, that Mrs Craddock had two names, one as the Squire’s wife and another as a suffragette. He read on to learn with some dismay that she had actually been to prison, just like old Smut Potter, and was not wholly reassured when he gathered (lower down the column) that suffragettes were always going to prison, and were, in fact, more often to be found there than not. The value of the report, however, lay in the address of the movement’s headquarters which he ringed in pencil before putting the clipping in his pocket book. It came to him then precisely what he must do to restore happiness to the Squire. Somehow or other he must travel up to London, find her, and bring her back with him, and although he realised that this might prove a very difficult undertaking he had faith in his lucky star, and more in his ability to tell such a harrowing story that she would have little choice but to accompany him home at once.

He spent the last week of term perfecting this story, toying with a variety of illnesses but finally settling upon a fiction that could not be verified by a call upon the doctor, or indeed exploded by Grace returning home to find Paul in excellent health. He would tell her bluntly that he had proof that Squire was considering suicide but he was too good an artist to draw directly upon the well-known circumstances of the Four Winds tragedy. He would simply tell her that, on one occasion, Paul had been dragged half dead from the Mere (and his rescuers sworn to secrecy) and that on a second occasion he himself had caught Paul’s bridle just as he was putting Snowdrop at an impossible fence. He thought it almost certain that she would check these reports but he could probably delay this somewhat by warning her that Paul had also sworn him to secrecy, and that he alone was cognisant of the cloud that had settled on Squire’s brain. The important thing was to bring them face to face and shock the Squire out of his unforgiving sulk. After that he was sure that God would wade in and help. After all, he would have done the spadework and how many times had it been proclaimed from pulpits that God helped those who helped themselves?

Having settled his approach he went to work on practicalities, realising that he would have to explain absence from home during the first two days of the holidays. He would also have to pay his own railway fare to London and as it was near the end of term, and his wealth amounted to tenpence, at least ten shillings would have to be raised for journey money. First, however, at the final Sunday letter-writing session, he wrote to Mrs Handcock, telling her that he had accepted an invitation to spend a couple of days with Rawlinson, his particular friend, who lived near Plymouth, adding that Rawlinson’s father owned a car and had promised to drive him back to Shallowford. He did not post this letter but held it back until the final evening, in order to guard against a cross-check with the headmaster. Then he buttonholed Davis Minor and offered his tuck-box at the knockdown price of ten shillings. He selected Davis not simply because he was the Lower School miser but because he was also the only boy in the Third who did not possess a tuck-box, his father being a faddist who disapproved of the tradition. He knew that Davis was secretly ashamed of this and when the boy, having inspected the tuck-box, offered seven-and-sixpence, Ikey closed his locker and said he would accept Martin’s offer of nine-and-sixpence. Money changed hands at once, and Davis carried away the tuck-box in triumph, having decided to torment hungry companions throughout the following term by praising the fictitious delights of the contents.