The Book of Ebenezer le Page (25 page)

I thought he had something up his sleeve; but I didn't know what. It was hard to believe this gay, good-looking young chap, laughing and making mock of the very religion he was going into, was the chétif little boy who used to follow the big Horace everywhere and couldn't live without him. I wondered if he had a devil in him, the same as me; but, if so, it wasn't an unclean spirit like mine. His was a clean spirit. I have never seen a cleaner-looking young chap. Nor was he preaching at me to make the Great Decision. He was being something in front of my eyes. He was bubbling over with something. When I remember him as he was those days, I think of what it say in the Bible: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'

I think it is true to say that Hetty died from love of Raymond; and, in a way, he killed her. He didn't want that love. It was smothering him. She was never satisfied with anything he did. First, she wanted him to go into a bank; and he went into the Greffe. Once he was in the Greffe, she hoped he would rise to the top, and take Quertier Le Pelley's place as Greffier some day; but instead he treated the whole thing as a joke. Now he was set on going into the Wesleyan Ministry; but when she said she would be able to go and live with him in England, he put her off. He would be sent on Circuit and didn't expect to be more than two years in one place. It seemed she was going to lose him altogether. ‘Oh, I'll be back in Guernsey for holidays to see you,' he said, ‘as often as I can.' At the back of his mind he was hoping she and Harold would be a comfort to each other once he was gone. He said to me, ‘A father and mother ought to mean more to each other than the children do. If they live only for the children, the children don't get a chance to live themselves.' He had a wise head on his young shoulders.

Hetty came round complaining to my mother. ‘I don't know why us poor women got to bring children into the world for,' she said. ‘They're good while they are small; but when they grow up they are only a trouble and a disappointment.' My mother didn't say nothing about her two. ‘Mais ch'est comme chonna,' was all she said. I know Tabitha and me was a disappointment to her, because neither of us was of the household of faith. It is true she would go as far as to say ‘La Tabby is not a bad girl.' As for me, she knew I didn't have a very good reputation. It goes without saying she heard from Prissy, or somebody else, of every girl I was supposed to have been with, even if I hadn't. I let her think the worst. In Guernsey, it is just as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb, since you are going to be hung in any case. She would listen to what people said, but all she'd say was, ‘Ebenezer is a good son to me.' She didn't talk in the house about me getting married; but when the time came I picked up with Liza again, she said, ‘Now that's a girl will never make a man a good wife.'

I mustn't give the idea Raymond was bad to his father and mother when he came out of the Army. If anything, he was more patient than before. He said to me, ‘I'm the one who is the father and the mother in this house. They are just two unhappy children.' He didn't help his father in the yard; but he got him boys' adventure stories from the Library. I remember Harold reading
Coral Island
and
Peter the Whaler
forwards and backwards; and he said they was good yarns. For himself, Raymond was reading a book I looked into, but couldn't make head or tail of. It was called
The Unrealised Logic of Religion
, I don't know by who. There was another book he had I read bits of called
The Beloved Captain
by Donald Hankey; but that book he had bought for his own, because he liked it so much. I liked the bits I read of it, myself. That Captain must have been a nice chap.

Hetty had bought Raymond a piano from Fuzzey's in High Street for him to practise on. She chose it on the advice of Mr Pescott and it was quite a good one. I know it fetched over a hundred pounds at the sale. Harold and Hetty didn't think much of Raymond's playing. They said, after all the money they had spent for him to learn, he couldn't play a piece with a tune in it. That wasn't true. He used to play ‘The Death of Nelson' for his father, and ‘Home Sweet Home' with Variations for his mother; and then he would play a piece by Beethoven for me. It wasn't I was above liking pieces with tunes. I thought there was tunes in those too; though with lots of twiddly bits. The one I liked best was the slow middle part of a sonata Raymond said was called The Pathetic. I thought he played that well; but when I told him so, he said, ‘I will never really be any good; except as an accompanyist.'

It was after the War that Prissy began to get younger and younger. Her skirts got shorter and shorter and her blouses lower and lower and her hair frizzier and frizzier; and she painted and powdered her face, and wore hats La Hetty said she wouldn't be seen dead in. She laughed at the idea of Raymond being a minister. ‘He will never make a minister, that one,' she said. ‘All he think about is enjoying himself.' When the spring came he joined the Old Intermedian's Tennis Club at Elm Grove, and learnt to play tennis. Prissy would be watching from her upstairs window and see him go off on his bike in his white flannel trousers and open-neck shirt carrying a tennis racket. ‘Why, he don't even go to Chapel!' she said. He did go to Chapel Sunday evenings, and sometimes in the morning; but she would see him in the afternoons with a towel round his neck going to L'Ancresse for a swim. He had given up teaching in the Sunday School when he was in the Army, so as he could be at home with his friends from the Fort.

They had been demobbed and gone back to England; but two or three came over in civvies for a holiday at different times that summer and stayed at Wallaballoo. The one I remember was Clive Holyoak, and I also heard a lot about him from Archie Mauger. If Raymond was the most popular N.C.O. in the Battalion, Clive Holyoak was certainly the most famous Private. When he came over for a holiday, Raymond invited me to go down to Wallaballoo and hear him play his violin, though I had already heard him once at a concert when he was in khaki. He was only a little chap and had silky golden hair and a face, I thought, like a sulky girl. In civvies he was smartly dressed in a loose woolly suit and didn't look too bad; but, as a soldier he was hopeless. Raymond used to let him fall out for most of his P.T., or otherwise he'd faint; and Archie Mauger said that in Ceremonial Drill, when he sprung to attention to present arms, his puttees fell down on his boots.

Archie was in the barrack-room when our Clive arrived with his draft from England. While the other fellows was getting unpacked and laying out their kit for inspection he, if you please, was sitting on his bed with his legs crossed like an Indian snake-charmer, playing his violin. Sergeant Strudwick happened to be crossing the barrack square. I used to see the one-time Sergeant Strudwick the years after the War peddling his barrow of fruit and vegetables from door to door. He was the toughest, ugliest, wickedest-looking scoundrel I have ever seen; except for old Steve Picquet, who lived after the Second World War in a bunker at Pleinmont called Onmeown and died a few years ago. As might be expected, Raymond liked Sergeant Strudwick and said he had a heart of gold. Archie Mauger said he was the best blasphemer in the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry and, he was willing to bet, in any regiment of the whole of the British Army. He had been Bandmaster of the Manchesters in peace-time and now played a one-stringed banjo he had made himself. When he heard Clive playing his violin, he stopped dead in the middle of the square as if he was struck by lightning, raised his fists to heaven and, in words I dare not write down, called on God the Father Almighty and His bastard Son, Jesus Christ, and Mary, the mother thereof who, according to Sergeant Strudwick, was anything but a virgin, to come down and listen to this! Then he was across the square and up the steps and along the verandah and into the barrack-room like a lion let loose.

The fellows dropped everything they was doing: he looked so fierce. They thought he was going to murder Clive. Clive took no notice whatever, but, lost to the world, went on playing his piece to the end. The Sergeant stood listening with one eye screwed up, and the other swivelling round like a lobster's, in case any fellow dared to move, or make a sound. When Clive had done playing and put his violin back in its case, Strudwick said, ‘Report to me in the Orderly Room! At once!' and marched out. ‘Poor old Clive!' the fellows said. ‘Twenty days C.B.,' said one. ‘Twenty years, more likely,' said another.

Raymond was never tired of talking to me about Clive Holyoak; even after he hadn't seen him, or heard from him for years. Raymond was a boy of deep feelings and never forgot anybody he had once admired. Horace remained first in his heart always; but I think Clive had a great influence on his mind. Raymond was the only one who knew what happened between Strud and Clive that morning. When Clive came back to the barrack-room, all he said was, ‘The sergeant wants to take charge of my violin for fear you fellows smash it.' Actually, Strudwick had gone for him with all the blasphemous language of which he was a master, and which used to make the toughest fellows on parade quake and tremble in their Army boots. Clive didn't tremble. He listened with a smile. Strud swore at him for joining the Army; when he didn't join it: he was conscripted. Strud swore at him for imagining he could be of any use as a soldier; when he didn't imagine anything of the sort. Strud swore at him for longing to get into the trenches as soon as possible and have his hand smashed by a bullet from a Boche. Well, he wasn't going to be allowed to do it, that was all; and Sergeant Strudwick, with the help of God the Father and His disreputable Family up above, was going to see to it that he wasn't. ‘Then I won't, if you say so, Sergeant,' said Clive sweetly.

If the War had lasted twenty years, he would never have finished his training anyhow; for he was always having to do a part again, because he hadn't passed the test. He was pulled up by every N.C.O., except Raymond, and given punishments galore. If he had done all the fatigues he was given, he would have dropped dead; and if he had done all the C.B., he would never have got out of the barracks at all. For some mysterious reason his name was for ever left out on the defaulters' roll. The nearest he came to being punished was over Church Parade. He was like Archie Mauger and objected to going on Church Parade; but he wasn't dishonest enough to change his religion when it suited him. He did go on Church Parade once ‘For the experience', as he said; but he refused to go again. He was warned and warned, and almost begged on bended knees to go; until at last, against everybody's wishes except his own, he had to be brought up before Colonel Nason, or the whole business of Military Discipline would have been made ridiculous. When the fellows in his barrack-room said it was rotten luck, he said, ‘It will be interesting to experience the luxury of martyrdom.' They gaped. I knew Colonel Nason from when I was in the Militia. He was more of a Colonel than any Colonel on the stage ever was; and I could just see young Clive standing to attention in front of him, rooted to the spot by the Colonel's glass eye. The Colonel's other eye would be searching hopelessly for help, while he was wondering what the hell he could do to get himself out of an awkward corner with flying colours. ‘Now tell me, my man,' said the Colonel to Clive, ‘on what grounds do you object to attending Divine Service conducted by the Very Reverend Dean Penfold, the Chaplain of our Battalion? I see you have attended once.' ‘I was bored,' said Clive. ‘BORED!' bawled the Colonel. ‘Never in my whole military career has a man dared to stand up and tell me to my face that he was bored by Church Parade! Dismiss!'

Though he wasn't punished by the Colonel, he was marked on his papers as having no religion; and Sunday mornings those who had no religion was put on fatigues, usually cleaning out the latrines. Actually, he was put on scrubbing the floor of the Sergeant's Mess. He was down on his knees just going to begin, when in walked Sergeant Strudwick. The Sergeant's Mess nearly caught fire from his language. Clive didn't scrub the floor. Sundays he spent with various people on the island who was interested in music. He was soon known among the officers and played at Regimental Concerts, and was the first violin of the string quartette used to play for Sir Reginald Hart, the Lieutenant Governor, when he gave one of his dinners. Clive was given what amounted to a permanent pass to go out of the Fort whenever he wanted to. The guard was instructed to let him pass the Barrier Gate any time he was carrying a violin case. The little monkey bought an empty violin case he kept under his bed in the barrack-room and, when he wanted to go out and wasn't going to play anywhere, he walked out with it and dumped it in a hedge along the Fort Road, and picked it up on his way back. Naturally, when the 'flu broke out, he was among the lucky ones to be stranded on Fort Hommet; and Raymond said he used to pass his time sitting on the rocks playing to the gulls.

I heard him play first at a smoking concert for the troops in the canteen of Morley Chapel with Raymond at the piano. I must give it to Clive Holyoak he was a wonderful violin-player. I will never forget the way he used to rise up on his tip-toes on his little short legs to reach the top notes. It wasn't so much as if he was playing the fiddle as if the fiddle was playing him. That night he played good pieces first, and the few officers present in the front rows gave him a loud clap. I don't think the fellows liked those pieces much; but they kept quiet while he was playing, and gave him a few claps at the end. Then he let them have what they liked. He played ‘It's a long way to Tipperary' and ‘There's a long, long, trail of winding' and ‘Way down in Tennessee'; but from the way he slammed his old violin, you could tell he felt nothing but contempt for what he was playing and for the fellows he was playing it to; yet he roused them to singing and roaring and cheering and, when they gave him encore after encore, he just smiled.