The Chinese Garden (6 page)

Punch's rooms were themselves of unbelievable squalor. In front of the small rusty grate lay a black and red rag hearth-rug, thick with crumbs and hair and coal-dust. In my early days, a dog repellent with age, rheumy of eye and for the most part hairless, lived on this mat. Later he was replaced by a corpulent dachshund whom Punch took everywhere with her at the end of a lead at least ten feet long, fixed to her waistband. With this creature she could be seen from afar off in park and pleasure gardens, a vast rolling barrel of a
woman, with a small, fourlegged bottle-shaped dog panting along at a distance of ten feet, the two joined by what appeared to be an umbilical cord.

On the far side of her rooms were the domestic quarters, which ran along one side of the house and were sealed off from the studies and upper dormitories by a locked door. Men and maid servants slept in these tiny attic rooms, an arrangement which the presence of Punch was supposed to regularize. Once, I saw the rooms, I have no idea why. Perhaps it was after the end of term when I had stayed on for a few days. I remember I walked the length of that corridor from the prefects' studies to Punch's quarters. Below me were the noble wrought-iron gates of Chief's private garden, the green turf, the flower-beds a blaze of colour, and the dark yew hedges bordering its brightness. I turned from these windows to look into the rooms, for the doors were open, and I was so sickened that I could hardly refrain from running down that corridor. In those little airless garrets was the most piggish squalor I had ever seen. Beds were unmade, chamber-pots unemptied, chests of drawers lurched sideways, lacking a leg, or hung half open to reveal a few discoloured clothes, and there emanated from those wretched cells, and from the unspeakable lavatory, a smell I shall never forget. Who knew of it? No one. Not even Punch, living within a few yards of that smell, thought it worth while to make those rooms more habitable.

The servants at Bampfield frightened me. They were brutish, but I did not at the time draw the necessary conclusions from what I saw that afternoon. I was only the more disgusted and fearful. One of the servants was an old woman called Bessie who was often to be found lurking in dark corners of the back stairs, and who was, I think, a
natural. She spoke an unintelligible Somerset, in which the elisions ‘ch'ill' and ‘ch'ave' were common and almost the only distinguishable features of her barbaric speech. The servants were no one's responsibility. Their squalor was part of the corruption which festered underneath the smooth Palladian skin of Bampfield. It was one of the many contradictions of the place that Punch, who certainly must have known of that evil corridor, remained indifferent to it, and to the sordid discomforts of her own rooms, and yet displayed in her own person, despite the shabby evidence of her clothes, a fastidiousness, and in her bearing a quality which fitted with absolute harmony into the cultivated home she shared with her sister. I never knew her well enough to find the solution to this contradiction. I leave her in the picture as I saw her for six years, keen-eyed, weather-beaten, good-humoured yet irascible, with a face like one of Rembrandt's women, as wrinkled as a stored apple.

Miss Gerrard, the third member of the triumvirate, was a tall, severe, fine-looking woman, a ‘handsome' woman, with blue eyes of the most piercing quality I have ever seen. Her hair was a golden-brown, rather stiff – almost
en brosse
– but at least it was not an Eton crop, and indeed she was not masculine. But neither was she truly feminine. She looked a woman, but somehow every ounce of femininity had been drained out of her and left her a splendid shell, animated by a fierce devotion to work and duty. I never knew her well. Some children were fond of her, but most of us feared her too much for affection. She left when I was about fourteen, and I never saw her again. I have often wondered why she went, and suspect (with no grounds whatever) that there was in her adamant nature a righteousness and high principle which could not in the end countenance the regime for
which she was expected to work. We called her the Rock, and she was one of the very few women at Bampfield for whom I felt and still feel an honest respect.

When Miss Gerrard left, her place in the triumvirate was taken by Miss Murrill. She was mildly attractive, with curly hair and a small neat figure. She was lively, and, when in good humour, very charming. When I arrived at Bampfield she was not more than twenty-seven and engaged at the time in a fervent love affair with a local man, of which she later told me some most unsuitable details. Even after her affair came to nothing, she made some effort to retain her femininity. She never got as far as make-up, but she sometimes wore frocks. In keeping with the masculine principle of the place, Chief had christened her Georgie, her Christian name being Georgina.

Mrs Watson, Miss Gerrard and Miss Murrill were house-mistresses. I knew only one of them, therefore, at all well, my contact with the other two being limited to the classroom. Though we all lived under one roof, different parts of the building were sacred to different houses; there were house colours and house mascots, and separate dining-rooms. The combined influence of the triumvirate was weaker, therefore, because it was diffused. It reached us in small draughts, in the history lesson, or the house match. Chief's influence, however, reached us wherever we were. Though she seldom met us in the classroom, dormitory or games field, she was present in those places where we were most vulnerable – the chapel and big hall – and she wandered the passages ceaselessly, so that we were always aware of her physical presence. She was not spying on us. It would be unfair to suggest this. She had a beautiful and melodious whistle and this she used as she walked the corridors, to
warn us of her coming. She once told me that she had deliberately cultivated the art of whistling for this purpose. Because of this, I do not think I ever feared her as a remote, God-of-vengeance figure. I
did
fear her, but my fear was something far more subtle. I feared the idea of headship, the immanent power of which she was a manifestation. With her actual presence I was often on the best of terms. Yet I knew always that no matter how good-humouredly she fell in with my wildest schemes, no matter how flattering her warm interest in anything I wrote, I was subject to her pervasive will, by a process I was half-conscious of, yet incapable of rebelling against, for a part of my nature enjoyed and was gratified by it. If I am honest, I must admit that many children passed through Bampfield unscathed. If I was one of those who suffered, then it was, at least partly, my own fault, in that there was much that nourished the less creditable sides of my nature, and which I imbibed willingly.

The key figure to this aspect of my youth was Georgie Murrill. There was never a more untrue cliché than that which says we needs must love the highest when we see it. Not only did I like and enjoy the wrong things. I liked, and even loved, the wrong people. For Miss Burnett, to whom I owe so much of what has made life worth living, I felt no personal affection at all. I place on record now a belated tribute to her and to all she gave my adolescent mind. It does not matter to me that she was a failure personally. As far as I am concerned, she was a success, and in trying to discover the sources of my imaginative life, and the roots from which grew my mature self, I am inevitably led to Miss Burnett. Chief was less an influence than an atmosphere in which I breathed. It had certain virtues. It made me resistant to some things, but more prone to others, but I
dare say this would have happened wherever I had been educated. My mind and heart were driven to find their nourishment in books and in my evocative and strange surroundings, by the rigid discipline of the school and the physical hardships imposed on us, and by the stifling atmosphere with which Chief surrounded us. I think I was fortunate that Bampfield gave me so much, even if in this negative manner. It furnished me, all unknowing, with a weapon which I was later able to turn against the worst elements it had encouraged in me. At another school I might have been ‘made to pattern' and remained so, with no rebel vision to tear away the falsity. Other schools might have had no Chief, and no Miss Burnett. They would, I fear, have had plenty of Georgie Murrills. One was enough.

This young housemistress was addicted to mascots, hockey matches, nineteenth-century history and early Beethoven. It is difficult to resist the charm of such things when one is young, and many people, who have had too many Georgie Murrills in their lives, never grow out of such addictions. To all of them she succeeded in enlisting my devotion, with the exception of the hockey matches. I have nothing against the other three enthusiasms, but they can hardly be said to lead one on to maturity.

She also succeeded in enlisting my personal devotion, as no one else did at Bampfield, and this was an entirely limiting and wasteful experience. It is not possible for an adult to attempt to pull a child into her own adult world, and this is what Georgie Murrill attempted. She treated me as a confederate, elevated me to the position of a confidante and personal assistant in matters relating to the house of which I was later to be captain. She was incapable of seeing me as a child and a rather immature one. She played upon the
arrogant side of my nature, allowing me to believe myself a far more grown-up and privileged person than I actually was. Put, as I thought, upon an equality with her, I took the same liberties, and made the same demands which I should have made of my contemporaries. It was unfortunate that I had no contemporaries for whom I cared anything. Bisto was soon to leave and Margaret was inaccessible. I learned to despise my fellow prefects when I became one – blown up by Georgie with self-esteem, and set apart from them in any case by my university work.

Chief, whatever her faults may have been, did not make the mistake of favouring me above my fellows. She encouraged and praised my writing, but she judged my character ruthlessly. She told me bluntly, when she had seen how I behaved as a prefect, that she would never make me head of the school, and she told me why. ‘You have not learned to suffer fools gladly,' she said. ‘Moreover, you are not reliable enough to be in such a position. Plainly, I do not trust you, completely.'

I was hurt, but she was right. Georgie Murrill, instead of supporting Chief in her verdict, undermined it, allowing me to recover with her the worthless and inflated self-esteem which Chief had refused me. I wish to be just to Chief, aware that I have ridiculed and criticized her. But I find it hard to be just to Georgie Murrill who took so much and gave so little, who sucked the life out of her favourites, but was herself too small and limited a personality to make such an operation in the least worth while to her victims. It is a truism that out of our most wretched and humiliating experiences there is usually something to be gained. I think Daniel might agree that the walk through the fiery furnace was worth the meeting with the three holy children. I am
not going to shed tears because I spent my schooldays in a place where many of the staff were morally corrupt, the physical standards those of Dartmoor, the religion perverted and the games mistress a sadist. It looks a formidable list, but children will always be subjected to something. I was not beaten, as I had been at my previous school, by a gang of bullies. I was not underfed. I was not entirely ill-educated. But I find it necessary to place on record that Georgie Murrill, the least valuable in personality, the most trivial in mind, procured my affection and exploited it for her own ends. The full measure of her turpitude will be seen later, when her cowardly desire to appear on the side of the angels led her to jettison the child she should have protected. I think it is for the Georgie Murrills of this world that the millstones are reserved.

CHAPTER NINE

                
‘Boy!' I remember Bowyer saying to me once

                
when I was crying the first day after my return

                
after the holidays – ‘Boy! the school is your father!

                
Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school

                
is your brother! the school is your sister!

                
the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin,

                
and all the rest of your relations! Let's have

                
no more crying …'

C
HARLES
L
AMB

I
T
became colder towards the end of November. The skies cleared. Music and art mistresses licked their wounds and prayed that the fine weather would continue to the end of term. Strolling down to the deserted stables, one afternoon, to see if they could find their pet rat, Bisto and Rachel suddenly stopped in their tracks. They had seen a figure running along by the fence of the big shrubbery on the far side of the stream. It was Margaret. Half-way along the palings, she halted and took something from her pocket. For a few moments she stood there and seemed to be pulling and twisting the wire. ‘Right against the forest fence, by St Agnes' fountain,' murmured Rachel, whose mind ran all too easily to facetiae. ‘So that's where it is – whatever she found and told us about that night.'

Margaret had undone the wire and was pulling out a paling. She laid it on the ground, squatted down and squeezed herself through the opening in the fence, to disappear in the thick undergrowth inside.

‘Shall we follow her?' asked Bisto, in an unnecessary whisper.

‘I don't know,' answered Rachel. ‘Perhaps we ought not to go at all. After all, it's her secret, whatever it is she's found.'

‘She promised to show it to us ages ago,' said Bisto impatiently, ‘and she never has.'

‘She's probably changed her mind.'

‘Then let's follow her.'

‘I'd rather wait and see if she tells us,' said Rachel, stubbornly. ‘If we go now we might meet her and she'd think we were spying on her.'

‘All right,' agreed Bisto, good-humouredly. ‘Let's see if Willy's there.'

Willy was our favourite rat. We fed him on pieces of school dinner which he liked far better than we did, and he grew quite tame. We had met him at the very beginning of the term and visited him at least once a week.

The stables lay at the end of an overgrown carriage-way, almost half a mile from the house. The silent bell still hung in the turret and beneath it the stable clock, with its stained, immobile face. This had lost its hands long before, and its timeless dial gazed fatuously up the decrepit lime avenue. The stable gates were rotting and half open. Inside, grass was growing over the courtyard and the windows of the coachman's quarters were broken. In the harness-room were a few mouldering pieces of harness, and in every empty room some tiny scraps of evidence remained to show that the stables had once been alive. The corn bins were empty, but rotting sacks still lay piled in one corner. There was a rusty bit hanging on a nail in one of the loose-boxes, and in the coach-house itself the seats of a brougham were still
stacked up, their torn velvet almost unrecognizable, a few lumps of smelly flock hanging from them like entrails.

The two girls crouched in the empty stable, in half-darkness. Bisto had produced a lump of pudding from her pocket and laid it on the floor a few yards away from them. The minutes went by and every now and again Bisto made a curious soft noise in her throat. I don't know where she learnt the lore which enabled her to get on friendly terms with wild creatures.

‘Oh, let's give him up,' said Rachel impatiently.

‘No, no,' whispered Bisto. ‘We haven't seen him for ages. Perhaps he's hungry. He might even be too faint to walk.'

She was distressed. She loved Willy. There was a slight rustling in the corner. ‘There he is,' she breathed.

A small brown creature scuttled across the floor, sniffed cautiously, inspected the food for a moment and then fell on it voraciously. It then picked up a huge lump of pudding and disappeared down its hole.

‘Poor darling, how hungry he is! But he thinks of his wife and dear ones at home, his quiverful,' said Bisto, feelingly. ‘He's much more unselfish than any human being.'

The rat reappeared and gnawed again for a few delicious moments, then half-dragged the remaining lump of suet towards its hole. It manoeuvred it to the entrance, propelling it with forefeet and snout, negotiated the hole successfully and disappeared with its booty. The girls rose and stretched. Bisto looked at her watch.

‘Oh, lord,' she groaned. ‘It's after three. We're late for prep.'

The mistress on duty wrote down their names as they went into the cloakroom. Bisto was crestfallen.

‘Does that make me up to six points?' she asked.

‘No, only five,' replied Rachel with irritation. She knew well enough that most of Bisto's bad points were gained in company with herself and too often through her fault, and she felt guilty. The climax came with the sixth point, which resulted in a spell of punishment drill. This to Rachel was no more than an hour's deprivation of liberty, but to Bisto it was torture.

As she sat down at her desk, Rachel saw Margaret looking at her with a sardonic smile. She threw a glance back which was intended to convey alliance. ‘We're in this together,' she wanted to say. But Margaret ceased smiling and took up her pen. Obviously
she
had not been late for prep.

It was inevitable that Bisto should suffer. She attracted pain. Her unhappy, anxious face reflected the shadow of a harpy's wing for ever hovering over her, a creature which saw her downsitting and her uprising and spied out all her ways, quick to mark what she did amiss.

‘It
was
the sixth point. I've got P.D.,' she said ruefully to Rachel the following evening. ‘I shan't be able to come out tomorrow. I'll be on that awful block of concrete, being
tortured
. Will you go down and feed Willy? And then, after P.D., if there's anything left of me, I could come down and join you.'

‘But I suppose I'll have to go out “on bounds”,' said Rachel.

‘You could easily put your name down with Margaret or one of the others, couldn't you?'

Week-end walks outside the park – ‘on bounds' – had to be taken in groups of not less than three, and passes had to be obtained from the housemistresses. Margaret and Rachel had both, on several occasions, persuaded others to include their names on a pass, and then gone off secretly upon their
private occasions. It was an easy technique, though the consequences of such a deception, if found out, would have been serious. But both were delighted to take risks of this kind, Rachel even more than Margaret, for to Margaret it was largely a matter of indifference whether she were expelled, whereas to Rachel it was a deliberate risk, compatible with the physical risks she took to satisfy her physical strength. For Bisto to encourage such a thing showed the measure of her desperation. She could not face Saturday afternoon without Rachel. After P.D. was over, there was nothing for the victims to do but wander about the park or sit in their form-rooms. Others took this in their stride, but Bisto, broken by previous occasions, dreaded it almost as much as the P.D. which preceded it. She needed Rachel to restore her after an hour in the hands of Miss Christian Lucas, who took the punishment drill. Rachel agreed to fake a pass, and Bisto looked a little less tortured.

Although not a member of the triumvirate, Miss Lucas was bound to Chief by a personal tie. She was no mere employee. Her friendship with Delia Faulkner had been formed during the war, and it was in her house in Somerset that the school had been founded, and existed for three years before its growth necessitated the move to Bampfield. Miss Christian Lucas was tall and although only in her thirties had a shock of pure white hair. Her eyes, like Miss Gerrard's, were of a hard, piercing blue, but with a difference. The eyes of Miss Gerrard were like the eyes of God. They pierced through one's soul. They were moral eyes. However uncomfortable they made me feel, I never feared them as prying eyes, nor was there a hint of cruelty in them. They were terrible but just. I was afraid of her, as most of us were, but I believe that fear was the most wholesome emotion at
Bampfield. Miss Christian Lucas's eyes were the slightly bulging china-blue eyes of the sadist. They assumed a horrid magnitude and her face a hue of unhealthy purplish red when she was angry. But no one ever laughed at Miss Lucas. She was powerful not merely by virtue of her friendship in high places, but in her own right. She had the inner power of evil as I think I have never seen it in anyone else. She did me less harm personally than some others in authority at Bampfield, yet for her I feel a detestation untempered by pity.

I remember well my first meeting with her. It was the second day of my school career. The tall white-haired figure bore down upon me, an alarming figure – the blue eyes very prominent and glaring, the muscles taut and stringy, stretched over a frame of which flesh and skin seemed to have shrunk to a mere carapace.

‘I am Miss Christian Lucas. What is your name?' asked the figure.

‘Rachel Curgenven.'

‘And where do you live, Rachel Curgenven?'

‘At Sandhurst, Miss Lucas.'

‘I see. At Sandhurst. Your father is in the army, no doubt?'

‘No, Miss Lucas. He is a doctor.'

‘Oh, a doctor.' (Air slightly chillier, but not cold, for doctoring was, after all, a profession, even if not so honourable a one as soldiering.)

‘Have you brothers, Rachel?'

‘Yes, I have three.'

‘Ah, no doubt they will be at the Military College.'

‘I'm afraid not –'

The eyes glared fiercely at me. The sinews of the neck were drawn as tight as a military strap. For a moment she
seemed at a loss for words, so enormous was my family's crime in following peaceful professions. Then a gleam came into her eye and she said – quite seriously, I must emphasize, and without any jovial attempt to put me at my ease – ‘You will have to be the soldier of the family, Rachel Curgenven.'

For drill we assembled outside the house on the flat sweep of the drive, surfaced with flints which cut one's gym-shoes to pieces. Unless it was actually pouring with rain, drill was always held there, or else on a piece of raised, bumpy concrete adjoining the school chapel. No matter whether the midday sun beat down upon our unprotected heads, or a westerly gale blew upon our shivering bodies, no matter whether frost sharpened the soft contours of the park, or (as was commoner) swathes of mist obscured the trees and the little round shrubberies, and marshy vapours filled our lungs as we
Breathed … Deep! Breathed … Deep!
drill must be held out of doors, for this was part of the toughening process of the system.

‘Arms …
Swing!
Arms …
Swing!
Knees … outward …
Bend! Stretch! Bend! Stretch!'

The commands echo in my mind still.

Miss Lucas's sadism found its fullest outlet in the punishment drill, which took place for one hour on Saturday afternoons on the grim slab of concrete immediately outside the chapel. This was roughly the size of a tennis court, and the concrete seemed to have been made by workmen infected with the same malignant humour as Miss Lucas, for it was rough and stony and full of unexpected holes and excrescences designed to trip the unwary or fatigued offender. It did not improve Miss Lucas's temper that in having to conduct punishment drill she invariably missed every school match, and Miss Lucas was an ardent upholder of Bampfield's
honour on the games field. The exercises she chose, therefore, were designed to punish, and were pursued until the unfortunate victims were almost dropping.

The drill was always preceded by an inquisition into the reasons for which the punishment was being given, for Miss Lucas liked to know what she was punishing. Suitably scathing comments then accompanied her orders, individuals being picked out by name, and the worst offenders sometimes given a harder and longer grilling. She always took care to provide herself with a dossier on each child's origins and family connection, and this affected her treatment of individuals, her judgments being further reinforced by a retentive memory which fastened up each misdemeanour like a gobbet of meat in the thorny larder of the butcherbird. Bisto was especially the focus of Miss Lucas's sadistic hate, for her father was only in the Marines, a service she regarded as most inferior; and Bisto possessed, also, a quiet, enduring temper which Miss Lucas interpreted as impertinence.