Young Phillip Maddison (9 page)

*

Richard, relaxed in his armchair in the sitting room, read
The
Daily
Trident.
Once again his eye glanced over the paragraph of the Cannon Row Police Station; wherein his sister’s name was mentioned with other Suffragettes who had been creating a nuisance. What a mess Dora had made of her life! Why was it? He paused, the paper held unseeing before him. He sighed. Well, it was no good thinking about the past. Nor was it much good thinking about the present. The old days were gone, never to return.

“Phillip.”

“Yes, Father.”

“I hope you will never go into woods belonging to other people, regarding it as a right. Look at the way those hordes of cyclists behave—they go out in their hundreds, nay, thousands, nowadays, and pull up and destroy everything they can lay their hands on. Nothing is sacred to them.”

“Yes, Father.”

“In a few years, at the rate things are going now, there won’t be a bluebell left, or a wood unravaged, for miles around London. I think it is a great pity.”

“So do I, Father.”

“It is all very well for people like this Lloyd George person to talk of equality, and the wickedness of landlords, but if he and
men like him have their way, what would be left of the beauty of the countryside?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Are you listening to what I say?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Then please have the courtesy to remove your eyes off your book when I am speaking. What is the book?”

“
Coral
Island,
Father.”

“Ah, that’s a good book. A spiffing yarn, isn’t that what you would call it? A capital story, as my Father would have said.”

“Yes, Father, it’s frightfully exciting!”

“Well,” said Richard, picking up
The
Daily
Trident
once more. “I won’t disturb you further.”

After a few moments he put down his paper and said, “There is something on my mind I must say to you, Phillip. I am sorry if I appear unpleasant, but I have my duty to do. You are old enough now to begin to think of fighting your own battles. Do you know what I mean, my boy?”

Phillip swallowed, before saying, huskily, “Yes, Father.”

He was relieved when Mavis came into the room. She sat on Father’s lap, while Phillip sneered inwardly as Father put his arm round her, and kissed her. Sucking up to Father, he thought—she would!

Richard touched her brow with his lips, and then, feeling a flow of life in him, her mouth.

“Now Mavis,” he said immediately afterwards, in a sharp voice, “I think it is time you went to your Mother, to enquire if you can be of any help to her.”

Feeling that this was a good time to get away, Phillip went to sit by himself in the front room, to enjoy the coming of the pirates to Coral Island.

O
N
the following Saturday something occurred which so upset Richard that, hearing his brother Hilary was home from his travels, and staying with Victoria at Epsom, he determined to cycle over on the Sunday and confide his distracted thoughts in
his brother and sister. He took Phillip with him: a very subdued and silent Phillip, who obediently pedalled behind his father all the way to the Crystal Palace, across Thornton Heath, through the areas of the herb fields around Cross Aulton (now being built upon) and so to the North Downs and the polite pleasances of villadom, where among lime-trees, and far from Sunday noise of pony-cart and motorcar, lived his brother-in-law George Lemon. Never once during the journey did Richard speak to his son: the boy was in disgrace.

They arrived at The Lindens at noon. It was a sunny day; the blossom of cherry, plum, and pear gave the garden a virginal appearance. The visit was unexpected; and though the visitors were made welcome, Richard would accept no hospitality beyond a glass of water. Phillip, anxious to conform to everything his father required, said, when asked if he would like some ginger pop, that he would like a glass of water also.

Pressed to stay to luncheon, Richard thanked his sister, but said that he must be getting back shortly. The feeling of constriction was so obvious, despite the superficial geniality in the garden, that Victoria asked her brother if all was well at home.

“Yes,” replied Richard, but in such a way that his sister knew something was troubling him. After some conversation on general topics, she invited him to see the conservatory, and Hilary accompanying them, Phillip was left alone with his uncle George Lemon, and Aunt Beatrice, the beautiful person he remembered as a child.

Soon, under the influence of the sympathetic Cornish brother and sister, Phillip’s misery broke, and his tears fell.

“My pet,” said Beatrice, looking with her big blue eyes into his face, and taking his hand. “Confession is good for the soul. Poor Phil,” she smiled at her brother. “He was always in the wars!”

“Let’s come up the garden, to your old hiding place among the apple-trees,” said George Lemon. “Then you can tell us all about it.”

Meanwhile, inside the house, Richard was unburdening himself to his brother and sister.

*

While he had been crossing the Hill from Wakenham station a week previously, enjoying the south wind of the equinox on his face—walking with his long swinging stride, rolled
umbrella on one arm, bowler hat in hand—Richard had been accosted by a neighbour, known to him only by name, who had stopped him to make a complaint about Phillip’s behaviour.

Richard did not particularly care about the appearance of Mr. Pye, who was fat; while he himself was lean. However, he listened to what he had to say with some appearance of courtesy. He was wanting his lunch; and Mr. Pye’s manner and attitude were, although correct, in some way antagonising. Having raised his grey homburg hat, which matched his grey, heavy, clean-shaven face, Mr. Pye had begun, in punctilious tones that were, in Richard’s ears, verging on oilyness.

“I trust that you will forgive me for what I am about to say. Believe me, my dear Sir, I speak only after some considerable hesitation, fully aware that I am liable to be accused of undue interference. Be that as it may, I consider it my duty, as a neighbour, to inform you of what I have seen this morning, and upon other occasions. If it were, indeed, an isolated incident, I should not be undertaking what is, as I see it, my duty, however unpleasant. But I will come to the point. Your boy,” went on Mr. Pye, while with the ferrule of his polished malacca stick he disturbed a pebble on the gravel path, “is in the habit of provoking quarrels with other boys, here on the Hill, for no other reason that I can see except to get his friend—Peter Wallace I think is his name—to thrash them for him. I cannot call it fighting, for Peter Wallace’s practice is to get his opponent’s head under his arm, and then to pummel his face so violently that I wonder serious injury is not done to the victim’s sight. More than once I have seen Phillip and the Wallace boy walk away, leaving the victim with his head hidden in his arms, sobbing upon the grass. It is, in my opinion, the most disgraceful behaviour, and I think you will agree with me, as Phillip’s parent, that it should be stopped.”

Mr. Pye was trembling as he finished his prepared speech.

“You are aware that you are making the most serious charges against my son, sir?” said Richard, as he strove to control his feelings. “I have my witnesses,” said Mr. Pye, his face now a yellowish-green.

“Well, I shall have to talk seriously to my boy. Good-day to you,” and with a stiff small bow, Richard walked on towards his home, feeling that the entire spring day was now spoiled. There was, in his mind, no doubt of what his neighbour had
said. Mentally Richard addressed several remarks to the image of his wife, on a familiar theme of the inferior nature of her son, and its obvious derivation from her family. Of one thing he could be sure: Phillip did not get it from him, or from any of the Maddisons!

At the same time, was he not taking too much on trust? There were some fearful little ruffians on the Hill; and after all, the antagonisms of small boys were natural. And on this slightly easing thought, Richard entered his house.

The subject of Phillip, as a bully—safe behind his friend—recurred again that evening as he showed Hetty the latest news of his blessed sister, the crack-pot Dora. There it was, for all to see and to read in
The
Daily
Trident.

“Theodora, with many others of her sort, was detained yesterday for an hour and more by the police, after a march along the streets with banners, to protest, if you please, to Campbell-Bannerman in Downing Street, against some of their unruly, window-breaking friends being sent to prison for hooliganism! There is her name, in the list of viragoes taken to Cannon Row Police Station. Blest if I know where she gets it from!”

With Dora in mind, offset as it were by Mr. Pye’s complaint, Richard said nothing just then to Hetty about Phillip.

*

On the following Saturday morning, coming home from school, Phillip thought he saw members of a rival band upon the lower slopes of the Backfield; and swarming over the spiked railings, he and Peter Wallace crept down to the camp in the hollow beside the thorn bushes. From here it was possible to move, without being seen, almost to the back-garden fence of the Rolls’ house at the top.

When the two friends got there, they stood up, and seeing no one, Phillip told Peter to hide in the grass, while he would do some exploring.

“Perhaps if they think I’m alone, they’ll come for me,” he said. “If I give a yell, come to my rescue. Only don’t be long—you know I can’t fight.”

No-one was in the elm thicket behind his own garden fence, which had grown up when the trees had been felled some years previously. Phillip lay down, to be able to see along the various dog-tunnels in the black thickness of the twigs. No one was there.

About to climb over the fence to his garden, to get his bamboo stick for throwing clay bullets, he was surprised to hear Mavis crying on the other side. Mother was speaking. He listened.

“But Mother dear, we weren’t doing anything! We were only talking.”

“I know, dear, but other people may think otherwise, if they see you over there from their back-windows. It would not be nice, Mavis, so you must promise me never to do it again. You don’t know life as I do, dear.”

“But Mummy, he is ever so nice really! And we were only talking!”

“I know nothing about the boy, except that he is not the kind you ought to consort with, Mavis. Your Father would be very angry, if he were to hear of it. So don’t let me hear of such a thing again!”

Then they went indoors. Phillip climbed over the fence. In the sitting room sat his younger sister Doris, playing with her dolls’-house.

“What’s up, Doris? Tell me, quick!”

“Mavis was lying in the grass.”

“Who with?”

“Alfred Hawkins.”

At this, Phillip became hotly indignant. He ran into the kitchen and demanded to know why Mavis had been in the field again with Alfred Hawkins.
And
lying
in
the
grass
with
him
—his sister!

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

Hetty was surprised, and a little saddened, to notice how Phillip was beginning to adopt his father’s intolerant manner in some things. It might be Dickie talking! It was really comical, her little boy so indignant, so angry: at any rate, it showed that he had some care for Mavis after all!

Phillip rejoined Peter, who had found a robin’s nest. After feeding the young with bread-pills on a twig, they went back to their camp, and dug for mica in a crack in the clay. Phillip had an idea that where there was mica, there might be diamonds. Anyway, it was fun pretending.

Father was not due home yet, so there was plenty of time. Then Phillip began to feel hungry, and suggested they depart. Peter, he said, could come over his fence, and through his house to Hillside Road, a short cut to his own home.

They went down to the Red Ballast Heap, and along the alley fence behind the row of houses built by Antill several years ago; and crossed over the dried-out marn-pits, now grass-grown, below a clay cliff at the top of which, a dozen yards back, were the familiar fences—Rollses’, Pye’s, Gran’pa’s, his own, Bigge’s, Groat’s, “Sailor” Jenkin’s, Todd’s, the “Higher” Low’s, (who were Catholics, and called “Higher” Lows by Hetty to distinguish them from the “Lower” Lows who lived near the cemetery) and downwards, among the not-knowns, to No. 1. Phillip knew all about their gardens, by the rubbish they tipped over their fences—this one had a decent lawn, that one threw over a lot of weeds in spring, another always had straw, with old strawberry plants. The only clean ones were his own, as Father composted everything; and Mr. Rolls’.

Scrambling up the grass-grown clay cliff, where he had once found a hedgehog’s nest, Phillip saw a figure standing by his garden fence, half-hidden behind the leaves of an elm sucker.

“So you sneaked back again, did you?”

Alfred Hawkins smiled feebly at Phillip. He had on a new jacket, and a butterfly tie. His hair was neatly brushed.

“Hullo,” he said, going red in the face.

“You horrible cad, Hawkins!” said Phillip, disliking his tie almost violently. “I warned you once before not to come to our fence!”

The upshot was that the quiet boy, a sad drooping smile as though fixed upon his face, was seized by Peter Wallace; and a minute or so later he left, crying silently, his new bow-tie and jacket front splashed with blood.

“I bet he won’t have the nerve to come after my sister again,” said Phillip, who was quivering within. He now felt sorry for Hawkins. Also, he felt as though part of himself was gone, or broken within.

*

Another feeling arose in him a couple of hours afterwards, when Mr. Hawkins the barber, hauled up Charlotte Road in a bath-chair by his two sons and an assistant from the shop, called to see Peter’s father. Phillip was in Peter’s garden when he arrived. He swarmed immediately over Peter’s back fence, and dropping into Randiswell Lane below, ran up to the cemetery gate, round Ivy Lane, up the footpath by St. Cyprian’s Church, and over the grass to the gully; and so home, in a state of alarm.

Meanwhile Peter Wallace was confronted by three severe faces a foot and more above his own. After the interview Peter was lugged upstairs, and his trousers forcibly removed, preparatory to being thrashed by his father, who was a sergeant in the Volunteers, the London Highlanders. In the bedroom a struggle ensued, by no means a one-sided affair, for after the first slash of the cane Peter sprang at his father, clung to him, and bit him across the back of the hand, making his teeth meet through the skin.

Later, as Phillip was pretending to learn Latin in the kitchen, there was a knock on the front door. Phillip recognised the knock, and ran to open the door. There in his best suit stood Peter Wallace. Without preamble Peter Wallace said,

“My father says you are a nasty little coward, and that I am to tell you that you can fight your own battles in future,” whereupon he turned away and departed, leaving Phillip with a pale face.

He had always known he was a coward, and been ashamed of not being able to fight for himself; now he was branded a coward in Peter’s, and everyone else’s, eyes. Should he take poison? There was some, in the little red boxes of his
Magician’s
Chemical
Set
upstairs.

He closed the door quietly, and went into the front room, to sit down and think about it all. With a shock he saw Father there already. He was oiling the motor of the Polyphone. Why had he not swallowed the poison straight away? Father looked at him sternly.

“Well,” he said. “Your chickens appear to have come home to roost.”

Phillip looked at the carpet.

“I have heard about your practices, my boy, from a neighbour, but I have not said anything so far, as I thought I would give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Phillip looked at Father’s face; then quickly his glance fell again to the carpet, while the word
terra-cotta
kept recurring to his mind, as this was the colour Father said was reddish-brown in the carpet pattern.

Wagging his finger, Father said,

“You are, as your friend has just said, and as I have had on more than one occasion to remark, an unpleasant little bully. I have already received, as I have told you, a complaint about your conduct from Mr. Pye, which substantially bears out that
you have made a regular practice of assaulting others with the aid of your bully. Now let me tell you this!” cried Father, his voice going higher, as he shook his finger more towards him. “A few minutes ago, as I was coming up the road, I had a further complaint from the invalid father of the boy you caused to be injured!”

At this point Hetty opened the door, and seeing them there, stopped.

“Oh, I didn’t know anyone was in here! I’ll come back later, dear, if you two are talking.”