R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield Read online

  Copyright © 1972 by R.F. Delderfield. Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate.

  Cover and internal design © 2008 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects

  Cover image © Getty Images, Kenn Biggs

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1972.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Delderfield, R. F. (Ronald Frederick)

  To serve them all my days / R.F. Delderfield.

  p. cm.

  1. School principals—Fiction. 2. Boarding schools—Fiction. 3. Married people—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PR6007.E36T6 2009

  823’.912—dc22

  2008036692

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to my friend and colleague

  of the book world

  —Robin Denniston

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  A Horseman Riding By

  Long Summer Day

  Post of Honour

  The Green Gauntlet

  The Avenue Story

  The Dreaming Suburb

  The Avenue Goes to War

  The Swann Saga

  God Is an Englishman

  Theirs Was the Kingdom

  Give Us This Day

  Diana

  Come Home Charlie, and Face Them

  Seven Men of Gascony

  Farewell, the Tranquil Mind

  The Adventures of Ben Gunn

  Contents

  * * *

  Part One: Initiate

  Part Two: Catalyst in a Beret

  Part Three: The Bell in the Brain

  Part Four: Ave Et Cave

  Part Five: Impasse

  Part Six: Cut and Come Again

  Part Seven: Island in a Torrent

  Part Eight: Plenitude

  Part Nine: Re-Run

  A Qualified Disclaimer

  * * *

  ALMOST EVERY WRITER OF FICTION INSERTS THE OBLIGATORY disclaimer in his work and some, I suspect, do it with tongue in cheek. The truth is, of course, no one ever invented anyone. Every character in fiction is an amalgam of factors drawn from the author’s memory and imagination and this is particularly true of To Serve Them All My Days. No character here is a true portrait, or caricature, of any master or boy I ever encountered at my six schools and one commercial college, between 1917 and 1929, but aspects of people I met are embodied in all of them, and I have even used nicknames I recalled, as well as several scholastic backgrounds. To write fiction in any other way would be to divorce oneself from reality and what kind of book would emerge from that? In using, say, an average of six schoolmasters and six boys for every one between these pages, I intended no slight or criticism, only to portray life at school as I saw it up to 1940, when I had entered my twenty-ninth year. I was glad to leave five of the six schools but there is one I still regard with the greatest affection. I leave it to the reader to sort the wheat from the chaff.

  R.F.D.

  February 1971

  Part One

  * * *

  INITIATE

  How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

  Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!

  My hasting days fly on with full career,

  But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.

  —John Milton

  One

  * * *

  1

  THE GUARD AT EXETER WARNED HIM HE WOULD HAVE TO change at Dulverton to pick up the westbound train to Bamfylde Bridge Halt, the nearest railhead to the school, but did not add that the wait between trains was an hour. It was one of those trivial circumstances that played a part in the healing process of the years ahead, for the interval on that deserted platform, set down in a rural wilderness, and buttressed by heavily timbered hills where spring lay in ambush, gave Powlett-Jones an opportunity to focus his thoughts in a way he had been unable to do for months, since the moment he had emerged from the dugout and paused, rubbing sleep from his eyes, to glance left and right down the trench.

  From that moment, down long vistas of tortured, fearful and horribly confused dreams, his thoughts, if they could be recognised as thoughts, had been random pieces of a child’s jigsaw, no two dovetailing, no half-handful forming a coherent pattern. Yet now, for a reason he could not divine, they coalesced and he was aware, on this account alone, of a hint of reprieve.

  The shell, a coal-box, must have pitched directly on the parados of the nearest traverse, filling the air with screaming metal and raising a huge, spouting column of liquid mud. He had no real awareness of being flung backwards down the slippery steps, only a blessed certainty that this was it. Finish. Kaput. The end of three years of half-life, beginning that grey, October dawn in 1914, when his draft had moved up through a maze of shallow ditches to a waterlogged sector held by the hard-pressed Warwickshires they were relieving. Even then, after no more than two days in France, his sense of geography had been obliterated by desolation, by acres and acres of debris scattered by the sway of two battle-locked armies across the reeking mudflats of Picardy. There were no landmarks and not as many guidelines as later, when trench warfare became more sophisticated. The confusion, however, enlarged its grip on his mind as months and years went by, a sense of timelessness punctuated by moments of terror and unspeakable disgust, by long stretches of yammering boredom relieved by two brief respites, one in base hospital, recovering from a wound, the other when he was withdrawn for his commissioning course. Superiors, equals and underlings came and went. Thousands of khaki blurs, only a very few remaining long enough to make a lasting impression on him. Here and there he had made a friend, the kind of friend one read about in the classics, true, loyal, infinitely relished. But the mutter of the guns, the sour mists that seemed to hang over the battlefield in summer and winter, had swallowed them up as the wheels of war trundled him along, a chance survivor of a series of appalling shipwrecks.

  Occasionally, just occasionally, he would be aware of conventional time. The coming of a new season. A birthday or anniversary, when his memory might be jogged by a letter from home, full of mining-village trivia. But then the fog would close in again and home and the past seemed separated from him by thousands of miles and millions of years, a brief, abstract glimpse of links with a civilisation as dead as Nineveh’s.

  And at the very end of it all that ultimate mortar shell, landing square on the parados and pitchforking him over the threshold of hell where, for the most part, he was unaware of his identity as a man or even a thing but floated free on a current of repetitive routines – shifts on a stretcher or in a jolting vehicle; daily dressings, carried out by faceless men and women; odd, unrelated sounds like bells and the beat of train wheels; the r
umble of voices talking a language he never understood; the occasional, sustained yell that might have signified anger, pain or even animal high spirits.

  The intervals of clarity and cohesion lengthened as time went on, but they were never long enough for him to get a firm grip on his senses. He learned, over the months, that he had been dug out alive, the only survivor of the blast, after being buried for several hours. Also that he had survived, God alone knew how, the long, jolting journey down the communication trenches to the dressing station, to advance base and finally to Le Havre and the hospital ferry. For a long time, however, he was unaware of being back in England, shunted from one hospital to another until he finally came to rest at Osborne, reckoned a convalescent among a thousand or more other shattered men as confused as himself.

  Then, but very slowly, he became fully aware of himself again. Second Lieutenant David Powlett-Jones, “A” Company, Third Battalion, South Wales Borderers; sometime Davy Powlett-Jones, son of Ewart and Glynnis, of No. 17 Aberglaslyn Terrace, Pontnewydd, Monmouthshire, a boy who had dreamed of scholarship and celebrity, of bringing a gleam of triumph into the eyes of a short, stocky miner who had worked all his life in a hole in the mountain and died there with two of his sons in the Pontnewydd-Powis explosion of August, 1913.

  He was aware of his identity and, to some extent, of his past and present, but the future was something else. He could never attach his mind to it for more than a few seconds. The war surely would go on for ever and ever, until every human soul in the world was engulfed in it. He could never picture himself leading any different kind of life but that of trudging to and from the line, in and out of the mutter of small-arms fire and the sombre orchestra of the shells. Hospital life, as he lived it now, was no more than an interval.

  Then Rugeley-Scott, the neurologist, infiltrated into his dream world. First as a white-smocked and insubstantial figure, no different from scores of predecessors who had paused, hummed and prodded during the last few months, but ultimately as a force where he could find not comfort exactly but at least relevance. For Rugeley-Scott had certain theories and persisted in putting them forward.

  One was his theory of upland air and David’s own Celtic roots responded to this, feeding a little vitality into the husk of his flesh and bone. For Rugeley-Scott said that a man could enjoy a sense of proportion in upland air that was denied the Lowlander, upland air being keen and stimulating and capable of clearing the fog in the brain and reanimating petrified thought-processes. It had a trick, he said, of making a man at one with his environment. Rugeley-Scott, of course, was a Highlander, whose boyhood had been spent in Sutherland and whose medical studies had taken him no further south than Perthshire. He believed passionately in upland air in the way a primitive savage believes in the witch doctor’s bones and amulets.

  Rugeley-Scott’s second theory grew out of the first, close involvement in a small, tightly knit community, where a personality was encouraged to flower as it could never flower in a city. It was concerned, also, with a specific purpose, enshrined in an ideal of some kind. In a creed, perhaps, or a crusade. In one or other of the arts that yielded an end product. Above all, in involvement with others but not too many others. A hundred or so, collectively breathing upland air.

  David never afterwards recalled how these theories came to centre on the profession of schoolmaster, imparting to successive generations of the young such knowledge as a man accumulated through books, experience, contemplation. Yet somewhere along the line, in the first weeks of 1918, this concentration occurred, so that David Powlett-Jones, white hope of the Pontnewydd Elementary School, the miner’s son who had won the first local scholarship to the Grammar School at thirteen, and had gone on to win another for university four years later, began to see himself, a little fancifully, as an usher on a rostrum, writing on a blackboard in front of an audience of boys.

  It was no more than a silhouette at first but Rugeley-Scott, with Celtic obstinacy, persisted until a comprehensive picture emerged. And after that, a train of minor events was fired that involved letters and telephone calls, so that at length, on a still afternoon in early March, seven months after the coal-box had exploded below Pilckhem Wood, David Powlett-Jones found himself sitting on a paint-scarred seat on Dulverton Station, wondering who had dumped a rail junction in such an isolated spot. He wondered too how long he would have to order his thoughts before he boarded a train for a place he had never heard of before Rugeley-Scott gave him the envelope containing particulars for his interview with the Reverend Algernon Herries, Headmaster of Bamfylde School, Devon.

  He thought then, with a mixture of bitterness and humility, ‘But what the hell am I doing here anyway? What headmaster in his senses would engage a wreck like me, who jumps a foot in the air every time a door bangs? That chap Herries, whoever he is, will take one look at me and show me the door, tut-tutting all the way to the motor, providing they have motors out here.’

  He then drew three deep breaths of upland air and despite the memory of the ward’s wry jokes about it, found that it did have a noticeable effect upon his powers of concentration. At least it enabled him to evaluate the view of those hanging woods, part evergreen, part the skeletal branches of older, heavier timber, and remark on the astounding quietude of the little station. Quiet was something he had forgotten about, along with so many other things that belonged to his childhood and boyhood. Never once, not even on the blackest night in Flanders, had it been as quiet as this. Always there had been the scrape and shuffle of working parties, the plash of signallers slipping in flooded trenches, cursing at every traverse. And in the background, always, the guns had growled north or south of the sector, a thunderstorm roaming between Switzerland and the sea.

  Here you could almost reach out and touch the quiet. It was a living thing that seemed to catch its breath up there in the hanging woods and then, at a wordless command, slip down the long hillside and gust over the rails to lose itself in the wood opposite. Its touch was gentle and healing, passing over his scar tissue like the fingers of a woman. He wanted to embrace it, press it into himself, swallow it, lose himself in it. And all the time the white clouds overhead kept pace with it, moving in massive formation across the blue band above the valley and the breeze smelled of resin and bracken and all manner of clean, washed, living things. No whiff of putrefaction here. And no hint of gas.

  He surrendered to its benediction, and was sound asleep when the walrus-moustached stationmaster found him, studying him with the compassionate detachment of a sixty-year-old who had seen the passage of a thousand troop-trains. The long, slightly saturnine face was Celtic, one of the darker, taller, heavy-browed Celts who had little in common with West Countrymen this side of the Tamar. The limbs, relaxed now, seemed shrunken under the khaki gaberdine, the body pulled in by the worn Sam Browne belt. The face was that of a boy prematurely aged, with hollowed cheeks accentuated by deepset eyes and high cheekbones. The skin was tanned, but below the tan there was a hint of pallor. The railwayman muttered, ‘Osspittle. Somewhere up the line,’ and was tempted to let him sleep on but then, recollecting his duty, he shook him by the shoulder and said, ‘Tiz yer, lad. Vower minutes late. Your stop’ll be fourth on, no more’n vifteen minutes.’

  The man’s clumsy gentleness touched him. It was a long time since anyone had called him ‘lad’. It was another short step on the road to resurrection.

  2

  The flint road wound upward through immense patches of wild rhododendron, then down again to culverts that carried a swirl of storm-water from the moor, along with a sludge of brown, decaying twigs and dead leaves. There had been no one to meet him at the halt and no sign of a conveyance of any kind but he did not mind walking. It set forward the time of the interview by half an hour, the time he calculated it would take him to walk the two miles to the crossroads marked on the map enclosed with the letter confirming his interview. The crossroads was marked as Barton Cross and when he reached it he saw that the barn or barton marked a junct
ion of four roads that were really no more than half-surfaced cart-tracks. He thought, ‘Now who the devil would build a school right out here? Nothing lives here but rabbits,’ but then, as at the station, his awakening senses told him the wilderness was teeming with life, every kind of life, and that there was promise here, in a month or two, of an immensity of colour and movement under the touch of April.

  Already the hedgerows were starred with campion and primrose, with dog violets showing among the thistles and higher up, where the rhododendrons tailed off on the edge of a little birch wood, the green spires of bluebell were pushing through a sea of rusty bracken.

  He calculated the gradient at about one in six and the road kept twisting towards a brown-green summit that was the open moor. And then, coming at last to a level stretch, he saw the grey line of buildings on the southern edge of the plateau, and the twin ribbons of leafless beeches lining the two drives. He paused at a ruined five-bar gate that lacked a hinge and bulged outward. Beyond it was a playing field and on the rugby pitch a game was going on between two fifteens wearing identical red and black jerseys. The cries of the players came to him faintly on the freshening breeze and he had a sense of renewal, seeing the little figures over there not as part of the present but of a time a million years ago, when he had played in the Grammar School fifteen, and had worn a jersey rather like that, save that the stripes were red and yellow. The moment passed and he pushed on, passing up the east drive to the forecourt and pausing in front of the three-storey Gothic building that reared itself there, grey, rather gaunt and incongruous in that setting.

  The façade itself was long and flattish but outbuildings straggled all the way up the slight rise to a quadrangle he could glimpse beyond an arched doorway. He remembered then that the place had been built at a period when no commercially minded architect would dream of using any but a Gothic design, a time when the missionaries of Arnold of Rugby swarmed south, carrying the Doctor’s creed into every shire of the nation. You did not have to be told it was a school up there. It had, even at this distance, the smell of school, a compound of boiled greens, stale dust, steam-heat, spurned grass, sweat, socks and damp clothes. He moved along the forecourt until he came to an iron-studded door with a knocker fashioned in the shape of a dolphin. He raised the knocker, dropping it without resolution.