Bilgewater (2 page)

Again silence. There is at length the clanging jamboree of the Prep. bell or the supper bell, or a boy arrives with an O level test paper or old Hastings-Benson puts his huge red face around the door and away my father goes.

I believe that father's friends are considered almost as odd as we are and Hastings-Benson (HB = Pencil, dimin. Pen. “In the end all things are appropriate,” ibid.) perhaps the oddest. He is certainly the nicest.

He is old—generations older than father—and a Captain in the army in some War or other father was too young for. He won a lot of medals there and then went to Cambridge and became a Senior Wrangler. He is thus—or was—more brilliant even than my father who would never wrangle with anyone. He is a very big man even now and must have been a giant before he went to the trenches years and years ago and got gassed. It is the gas and the trenches, Paula says, that did for him and has resulted in his high shoulders and visits to The Lobster Inn every night along the sea-front these fifty years or so. “You're so lucky,” visitors say, visiting from the major public schools. “He's
brilliant
. Could have gone anywhere.” And in spit of The Lobster Inn his results are still pretty good and everyone's so fond of him that it would be a great pity if he did go anywhere. Mind you at nearly eighty he's not likely to go anywhere much now.

His great friend is Puffy Coleman (History) who always stands sideways in the School Photograph because his teeth drop out. The Headmaster said at the last one, “Let's see, Coleman—how many School Photographs is this for you?”

“Thirty, Headmaster. Perhaps thirty-one.”

“Then what about a full face this year? Quite solemn, you know. No need to smile.”

But Mr. Coleman after a lot of pondering and swinging about in his gown which is green as grass and has buttercups and the eyes of day sprouting out of the seams and dates from the time of St. Wilfrid the Founder—Mr. Coleman swings about, rotates his jaw a bit as is his wont before utterance and says, “No, Headmaster. Not this year. I think not,” and does his usual click-toes left-turn, appearing as usual peering deeply into Hastings-Benson's right ear with his nose almost touching the tassel. The tassel that is to say of Hastings-Benson's mortar-board because my father's school is immensely out of date, dresses to kill and stands on ceremony and Hastings-Benson stands higher on ceremony than most. He has stood on cerernony for so long that he has come to symbolise the school in the four corners of the earth—perhaps rather further in these days now that the Empire is over and the Commonwealth a shadow—but still he is remembered. On various nostalgic occasions when Old Boys are gathered together they will talk of their schooldays and say, “Remember old Hastings-Benson?” And they will all start to roar and laugh.

It seems to me that Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson has served his country well if someone, twenty, thirty years on can say, “D'you remember him?” and roar and laugh. Such a man is an immortal, a god come down. In fact let me state boldly that if I had to choose between Hastings-Benson and a god come down, full ankle deep in lilies of the vale (Keats. Paula) it would be Hastings-Benson for me every time. I love him. We understand each other. He is far from dead yet.

I will tell you why they laugh at him: he is always falling in love. My mother was his first and everyone apparently said then, no wonder for she was such a beauty. “That wonderful hair. And really—married to poor old Green!” In fact however I don't believe my mother loved Uncle Edmund at all—or just as everybody does. As I do—for I have been told that my mother adored my father, poor and old though he may seem, and my father for all these seventeen years has never looked at another woman. He keeps her photograph by his bed where it has turned the colour of white coffee and very soft and faded. You can't see much of her really but the hat which is floppy with a rose in it, a string of amber beads, and a lovely gentle chin not in the least like mine.

 

My mother fairly set Uncle HB off and all my life I have known that we have to be kind to him because he's sad. Love has always made him sad. It's odd he has kept at it so assiduosly when you come to think of it. On and on he goes however—first it's the girl in the chemist in the town, then it's the new woman on school dinners, then it's the terrible 'cellist they got in for the school orchestra, then it's the Pro they took in for the school Christmas production of
Captain Brassbound's Conversion
. That one was a tremendous do—just last year—and I was in at every phase of it because Mrs. Bellchamber—the actress in question—stayed in our House and Uncle Edmund was round morning, noon and night, leaving his classes, forgetting the Scholarship Sixth, abandoning the second eleven and you could hear the noise from his Silent Study right over on to Scarborough promenade. The reason being that he was nowhere near it being over in the school theatre ostensibly supervising the lighting for the first night, which is why the whole stage, auditorium and half the High Street was plunged into darkness and a quiet, able boy called Boakes who really knows something about lighting was flung to the floor from a ladder with such a charge of electricity through him that he will be safe from rheumatism to the second and third generation if such, and no thanks to Uncle Edmund, he manages to produce.

When this actress left, Uncle Edmund's plight was pitiable. He pinned people down, he pressed them against walls to talk about it. Paula would put her head round father's study door when we were deep in chess and cry, “Run—he's coming!” and my father would be out of the back door and hiding in the Fives Court. Once when Uncle HB was very desperate he went off to see Puffy Coleman—the one who stands sideways—and when he found the door locked, the front door and the back door, too, he went round to Mr. Coleman's back shed—I suppose he guessed Mr. Coleman had seen him coming and had gone up to bed and down under the blankets though it was mid-afternoon and a warm Spring. He took a ladder out of Mr. Coleman's shed and put it up against the back wall of Mr. Coleman's house. Mr. Coleman said that it was most unpleasant and eerie to hear the clump clump of the ladder getting into position and the scraping on the wall, and the two spikes of ladder appear between his bedroom curtains and the bounce and creak of Uncle Edmund Hastings-Benson's mounting feet. Deeper down beneath the sheets he went as Uncle E. HB's great big red face and huge hook nose and kind little blue eyes rose like the dawn behind the pane and tap tap tap—“I say, Coleman. Will you let me in? I'm afraid I really must talk to you. It's about Mrs. Bellchamber.”

Thus I have been no stranger to love, isolated though my life has been. The derangement love seems to cause has actually made me value isolation more as term has followed term.

And I love the holidays.

Let me describe how it is with me and father in the school holidays.

My father is reading in the Fives Court and looks up to see if I am still there. When he sees that I am not, he wanders about in the rockery, then among the greenhouses and lettuce beds to see if I am there, keeping his fingers all the time in the place in the text—he teaches the Classics and reads them all the time for pleasure, too. On the journey he gets deflected once or twice, standing for long stretches of time regarding a caterpillar negotiating a stone, picking a sweet-pea and running a finger up and down its rough, ridgy stalk, walking out to the village shop to buy tobacco but forgetting the tobacco to watch water running down a drain. At most seasons of the year he wears long mufflers curled over into tubes. He has an invalidish look, fragile at the waist, snappable as a sweet-pea and this is for some reason lovable. If he notices anybody as he walks about he smiles at them and they look at him kindly back.

Sometimes he finds me. If it is summer he most likely finds me in the School pool, swimming up and down. It is one of the most marvellously royal and luxurious things to do—most princess-like—to be legitimately and all alone in a school swimming pool in the school holidays. Up and down, up and down I swim, frog's face, frog's body, eyes shut tight, thinking how I would be the envy if they knew it of the whole of my Comprehensive who are all in the town making do with the Public Baths or the freezing sea.

Up and down, up and down I swim, father standing across on the shore, like Galilee, watching the green water and the black guide lines wriggling like snakes as I pass over them. “There's a poor beetle,” he calls. “Whisk it out. That's right. Poor fellow.”

Up and down the pool I go, spluttering bubbles. Soon my father starts reading again. After a while, still reading he wanders away.

Once—just once—when I was about thirteen I remember opening my eyes and finding him gone and wondering in a very inconsequential way if my mother had had a rather unexciting life.

T
hroughout the peace there has always of course been Paula and perhaps without Paula such peace would have been intolerable. Perhaps it was intolerable, it occurs to me now. Perhaps that is why my mother upped and died. Perhaps my mother took one look at me and thought, “I'm bored stiff and now
this
.” I think that it may be Paula who makes desirable the wonderful peacefulness of father, and the great tornado of Paula which makes the still air round father such delight.

She is thirty-six and comes from Dorset. That in itself is extraordinary for up here. You meet plenty of people in the North-East from Pakistan or Jamaica or Uganda or Zambia or Bootle but scarcely a body from the south coast of England.

Paula arrived here mysteriously—I don't think she had thought it all properly out—when she was seventeen as assistant to a real matron who retired hastily leaving Paula to swoop into power. She must have looked and been most improperly young but I would like to see the Headmaster or Board of Governors or representative of any Ministry of Education, Emperor, Principality or Power who could have removed her even at seventeen had she a mind to stay. And not a gestapo, K.G.B. nor any hosts of Midianites I think would ever have wanted Paula to go. Once you've met her you need her. The world runs down, the lights go out and everyone starts stumbling in the dark the minute Paula isn't there.

She's lovely, Paula. She has a grand straight back joining on to a long, duchess-like neck and a whoosh of hair scooped into a silky high bundle with a pin. She's tall, with a fine-drawn narrow figure with sloping shoulders and whatever she wears looks expensive. At father's school functions she sails in dressed in anything and sits down anywhere and all eyes turn. She nods and smiles, this way and that, and all the pork butchers' wives in polyester and earrings on the platform look like rows of dropping Christmas trees.

Paula has a voice like
Far from the Madding Crowd
—beautiful. “There's my duck,” “That's my lover.” To show you the full marvellousness of Paula when she says, “That's my lover” to any of the boys who's in her sick room I've never heard of one who sniggered.

Paula's deep funny burry voice goes with her rosy cheeks and bright eyes and hurtling feet. She is always running and usually towards you. “Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,” always makes me think of Paula, and I told her so the first time she read it to me when I was about eleven. I was a very late reader and it was an effort even at eleven to sit down and read for long so Paula used to read to me. I wish she did so still.

“Warm south,” says Paula, “Wish I wurr an' not in this God-forzaken hoale.”

“Why d'you stay here then?” asks the boy of the day, calling through from the sick room. There is a sick room for solitary sufferers and a San for epidemics. The sick room nearly always has someone or other in it, usually one of the youngest ones. They troop up in droves. “Matron, I'm sick,” “Matron, I've got a burst appendix,” “Matron, I've punctured a lung,” and she bundles them off whizz, bang, thermometer, pulse—“Rubbish, my lover. Stop it now, do. Sit through on the bed and drink some cocoa and hush whilst I read to our Marigold.” She sorts them out every time, the ones who are sick and the ones just home-sick. They say terrible things sometimes.

“Matron, I'm bleeding from the ears.”

“Matron, Terrapin's committed suicide.”

“Matron, Boakes is in a coma.”

If it's not true, and it hardly ever is—she knows. If it is true she's like a rushing mighty wind and the local hospital is on its toes in an instant as she hurtles down upon it ahead of the stretcher, orderlies toppling like ten-pins, the plume of hair bouncing masterfully to the very lintel of the operating theatre door. She's well-known is Paula. When anyone is waiting for exam results it is Paula who prises them out. She's down at the Post Office at dawn. They expect her now. And when there is any trouble or excitement in a boy's family she knows the minute it has happened, and sometimes before.

“Why d'you stay here?” asked the patient of the day after I'd told her she was like the warm South.

“The dear knows, my lover.”

“Who's the dear?” asked the boy. It was probably Terrapin or Boakes. They were forever slurping cocoa the first year or so.

“Well, not you and that's for sure.”

Terrapin (or Boakes) lay comfortably warm within, just out of sight through the sick-room door. I sat on the floor, by Paula's sitting room fire. Paula sat in the rocking chair, straight upright under her hair, Keats on her knee.

“Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.”

The fire blazed up. There was a raw, bleak wind outside and a black branch tap-tapping on the glass, sea-gulls shouting miserably at each other, the sea noisy. On the mantelpiece was a picture of Paula's family—a farmer on a hay-cart and a lot of little children grinning and squinting against the sun in floppy hats. Somewhere near Lyme Regis apparently, wherever that was. Dorset. Wessex. The warm South.