The Merciless Ladies Read online

  When we returned to Turstall its staff, exiguous at the best of times, had been depleted by the loss of four masters, and three women only had so far come to take their place. Dogden, the maths master, of uncertain temper anyway, was in a vile mood. In fact, although he looked to us a man far gone in age, he was thirty-four and a bachelor, and during the holidays two separate ladies with bright smiles but hard eyes had presented him with a white feather.

  Paul, slow at any but the simplest of sums, and coming from a background that Doggy despised, was an obvious butt, and I remember distinctly the first words addressed to him that morning. ‘Stafford, stand up when I speak to you. You’re lazy, you’re idle, you’re insubordinatious, you never have cared the toss of a button whether you do your work or not! I don’t believe you even know what a square root is, unless you suppose it to be something your father grows in his vegetable garden!’

  There was much laughter at this, and much laughter followed. If Doggy cared to entertain us with his sarcasms, well and good, so long as they were not directed at us. And it all helped to get through the forty-five minutes. But soon another diversion occurred. Dogden hated summer flies and of late had been suffocating his class by keeping the windows shut. The Headmaster chose this moment to put in one of his rare appearances. He came in noisily, banging the door, and stumped with his club foot across to the desk.

  ‘Mr Dogden, pardon me; I came to ask you about – mm – mm – mm – mm – Infernally stuffy in here – mm – mm – mm – mm – Why don’t you open the windows? mm – mm – mm …’

  ‘Well, Dr Marshall, that is what I have always maintained – mm – mm – mm – it’s latgely a matter of a group decision …’

  While they were talking Marshall limped across to the long window at the end of the room and Dogden went with him. So they had their backs to us. Paul had a talent for making paper darts, which he had passed on to me. We often practised at home, and now, perhaps to assert himself after a bad few minutes, he threw a dart across the room at me.

  It came beautifully – I can see it now – describing a graceful arc like a glider of the future. Hoskin, the boy in front of me, tried to grab it, but I got there first. There was a slight scuffle but the two masters were too occupied with their conversation to notice it. I barely took in that the dart was coloured before I straightened the tail and threw it back.

  At that moment Marshall had opened the window and a fresh westerly breeze came into the room. The dart, homing moderately well – I was not as good at it as Paul – was caught by the breeze, swerved upwards and landed at Dr Marshall’s feet as he turned to walk back.

  All masters are particularly sensitive to anything which goes wrong in front of the Head – particularly anything which suggests they cannot keep their class under control. Dogden went purple. He snatched up the dart.

  ‘Who – is responsible for throwing this – thing?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘Unless the boy who threw this does not immediately stand up, the whole class will come back here after school and do an extra half-hour of maths.’

  There was a groan and a murmur and everyone looked expectantly at me. I stood up.

  ‘You, Grant’, said Dogden ominously. Then he noticed the colouring on the dart and began to unfold it. On the piece of paper, drawn in crayons, was an insulting caricature which even he could not fail to recognize as being of himself.

  The drawing was really of a satyr – though I doubt if Paul had heard the word at the time – in which a naked body covered with red hair from the waist down was surmounted by a head unmistakably Mr Dogden’s. It carried a pitchfork in one claw, and impaled on the prongs was a struggling schoolboy.

  Although I would have taken the blame, Paul was soon on his feet too, to Dogden’s obvious satisfaction. What made matters worse was that, followed by Dr Marshall, who I swear was hiding a faint smirk of amusement under his yellowing moustache, Dogden went to Paul’s desk and instructed him to turn it out. So the sketch-book came to light.

  I had known from the time of his first holiday with us of Paul’s interest in sketching, but it had made no great impression on me. It was similar to knowing a boy who liked strumming on the piano: a quirk of character, a little talent. Sometimes he had shown me his sketches and they seemed rather good. There was one of me on our mantelpiece at home, but I thought I looked too lean in it and too melancholy.

  Of particular interest in the sketch-book turned up by Dogden were crayon drawings of almost every master in the school, and quite a number of the pupils. They were not caricatures in the ordinary sense of the word, being more insulting in their near likeness and their loving care for detail. The most unfortunate part of the matter was that the three lady teachers had been drawn without any clothes on.

  Being in a sense implicated in the first place, I was present at the interview in Dr Marshall’s study.

  ‘What you must appreciate, Stafford’, I remember Dr Marshall saying, ‘is that your father is not paying your school fees with the idea that you should occupy your time making insulting studies of your headmaster and his colleagues. Nor do we exist and draw our salaries for the purpose of acting as models and butts for every young puppy who comes here with a talent for sketching. I trust you will come to realize that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Indeed, I should feel I had failed in my duty if I allowed you to leave this establishment with such an impression. How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen, sir.’

  ‘Old enough to know better. The more offensive juvenile antics should be behind one by then. Where did you learn your drawing?’

  ‘Nowhere, sir.’

  ‘Who taught you draughtsmanship? Not Mr Harper, surely?’

  ‘No, sir. I could draw as long as I can remember.’

  ‘And what did Mr Harper think of you? Alas, I shall not be able to ask him as he has answered his country’s call.’ A pause while the pages of the sketch-book crackled. ‘Ever heard of Adrian Brouwer?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Dutchman. Lived in the seventeenth century. Died in Antwerp when not much more than thirty … The un-beautiul on canvas … One sees the best of him in Dresden and Munich … Tell me, who informed you that I had one shoulder lower than the other?’

  ‘No one, sir.’

  ‘Yet I wear a pad which makes it unnoticeable to outsiders. Or so I thought. A perceptive young man. It disturbs me to punish such diligence.’

  I was there standing just behind Paul, but at this stage I might not have existed. There was a strange concentration between the boy and the man. I remember staring at the ink pots on the desk – there were six or seven of them – and wondering what Marshall did with them all. Different colours for different moods?

  ‘How many boys have seen this sketch-book, Stafford?’

  ‘None, sir.’

  ‘Grant?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You see, Stafford, there are two offences here. One is impudence and an insult may be expiated by a few strokes of the cane. The other is the matter of the – hm – the drawing of Miss Atkins and the other two ladies. And that, is altogether more serious.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You appreciate that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Dr Marshall took out a large grey handkerchief – grey perhaps from blackboards – and wiped his moustache.

  ‘If you go on to an art school – and this would seem the obvious course – you will no doubt come to paint the nude figure many times. All artists do. All great artists have. It is their prerogative, and as an art form it is not considered to transgress the limits of decency. Nor perhaps would I have taken great exception to nude figures in your sketch-book had the faces been merely – figurative. But as it is, drawn with the faces of ladies known to us all, and all recent additions to our staff, it becomes grossly obscene. For that expulsion seems the natural punishment.’

  There was a very long silence, during which the school clock chimed
something.

  Dr Marshall said: ‘I am reluctant to do that for two reasons. First that the sketch-book-was essentially private and there is no actual evidence that you intended to show it to others – though the fact that you had it in the classroom suggests otherwise. The second is that, in this holocaust we are now enduring, the minor indecencies of growing boys are dwarfed by the sacrifices they may shortly be expected to make for their king and country. That giant shadow falls over us all … So I shall cane you, Stafford, and for the moment leave it at that. But I have to warn you that if Miss Atkins or either of the other ladies should learn of this matter I may still have to dismiss you at a later date … Now as to you, Grant …’

  IV

  Thereafter Paul Stafford was a more amenable pupil. If he could never be talented at the more conventional subjects, he was at least no longer idle. His inability to grasp simple principles of learning seemed less evident. I was surprised. I hadn’t thought a mere caning would wreak such a change. It was some months before I learned that Dr Marshall, in the absence of anyone capable of teaching art in the school, was himself taking Paul for two hours a week. It made all the difference.

  I got to know this after Christmas when Paul told me he had been to London and had had an interview with a M. Becker who was the principal of the Grasse School, and that he had the half promise of a place when he was seventeen. When I speculated as to what Mr Stafford thought, Paul said: ‘ Father doesn’t like it. He thinks I’ll end up in the gutter where I came from. But old Marshall has persuaded him to go along with the idea.’ He turned and stared at me with his pale long-lashed eyes. ‘It’s not going to be easy, Bill. But once I’m away from these patronizing louts …’

  ‘They’re not really so bad’, I said. ‘ It comes natural to some people to poke fun at what they don’t understand. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Which is enough’, he said. ‘Which is enough. Well … Marshall’s shown me a way, and I shall take it. I’m told there’s money in commercial art. Maybe that’s the way I’ll go about it. Become the success that Father so earnestly desires. Who knows? Anyway, I’m not going to let anything or anyone stand in my way now.’

  I looked at him and with the confidence of youth believed him. I sensed great purpose in him. It didn’t then seem to me at all a peculiar attitude of mind – an ‘I’ll show them’ attitude – with which to approach a vocation.

  V

  As the war advanced my summer stays with the Lynns became longer. Their company, abnormal on first encounter, became, by failing to change, more normal in an atmosphere of bloodshed and hysteria. The war was scarcely ever mentioned except as a passing inconvenience, a world aberration that even if it could not be avoided was best ignored. Fortunately for Dr Lynn, his work was considered of sufficient national importance for him to be left unmolested. And with the arrival of conscription the white feather ladies disappeared.

  As the Kennet ran almost at the bottom of’ the garden, there was constant bathing for the young and much paddling about the reach in an old rowing boat and a leaky canoe. Mrs Lynn would also immerse herself in the river every morning at seven o’clock. The irreverent Holly, when she was older, said it was her mother’s spiritual Ganges.

  The four of us would scrape together a snack lunch and go off for the day to some shady spot further up the river, to bathe and play wild games and fish for trout. Then we would return about seven, ravenously hungry, to find the kitchen fire out and the breakfast things unwashed. Mrs Lynn, in a much darned jumper, short skirt, ankle socks over lisle stockings, and red morocco slippers, would be in the study playing over one of Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas for the violin; and Dr Lynn would be upstairs in his room working out some theory to do with the relativity of acceleration.

  The strange part of such a discovery would be that Holly would forget her hunger and cling with one arm round her father’s neck wanting to know in simple terms what he was about, and Leo would immediately begin to argue dogmatically with his mother on just how the sonata should be played, leaving the only practical one, Bertie, and myself, to gather together a semblance of a meal.

  When she was eleven Holly climbed an oak tree at school, and fell out of one of the branches. She was laid up for some time and was sent home where she would receive ‘the best attention’. Thereafter she bowled, batted and walked with a slight limp.

  ‘On my birthday too’, she said. ‘ Mummy had sent me a birthday cake she’d made herself. It’d caved in in the middle the way Mummy’s cakes always do, but it was frightfully rich. I got none for a week.’

  ‘I thought your birthday was at Christmas. Otherwise, why the name?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know? It was Daddy’s doing. He decided to call me Horace after his favourite poet. When I wasn’t a boy he made it Horatia, which was the nearest he could get. But the boys thought it foul, so everyone calls me Holly.’

  ‘Yes, Horatia is a bit awful’, I agreed.

  She stared at me a moment. ‘And if you want to know, Bertie is called after Einstein and Leo’s real name is Galileo. Only don’t ever tell them I told you. Who were you called after?’

  ‘My mother’s father.’

  ‘Did he wear a kilt and paint his legs yellow?’

  ‘Don’t be a young ass’, I said.

  Holly was twelve the year Leo and I were seventeen. Boarding school had given her a chance of regular meals – however stark and unappetizing, they were more use to her than what she got at home – and regular hours, and she grew and strengthened under the regime. But she was not remotely good-looking; her legs, it seemed, would always be like the cricket stumps she so regularly bowled at; her face had filled out sufficiently to make her spectacles seem less disproportionate; but her complexion was sallow and her large eyes were a muddy grey. And her hair grew no less lank as the years passed. She would make an excellent teacher like her parents, for she had more brain than the two boys put together, and even a certain sense of responsibility that her parents lacked. Nature had made one of its frequent mal-arrangements; if Holly had had Bertie’s looks and Bertie Holly’s brains they would each have been better fitted for the world.

  But we were the lucky generation. The young men who had been our immediate seniors at school were dying at Passchendaele, La Bassée, St Quentin, Péfonne. It would soon be our turn to fill the gaps. Yet of the four of us, although we were called up, only Paul and Bertie saw active service. Leo and I were training at Kinmel Park when the Armistice was signed. Bertie survived his six months in France, Paul nearly twelve at sea.

  One of Paul’s biographers, A. H. Jennings, has supposed that he had some influence to get into the Navy, for, by the time he was called up it was the Army’s desperate shortage of manpower that overrode all other considerations. That he could have had any influence at all is of course nonsense; nor did we at Turstall even have a branch of the naval cadets. Paul never would tell me how it had happened. I believe he refused any other form of service and was prepared to go to prison as a conscientious objector if he didn’t get his way. In some matters he had a mulish determination, and this must in the end have impressed the authorities. He had a tough time in the Navy, on a minesweeper, but about this too he had very little to say after. I only learned from another source that he had been blown up once and spent some hours on a raft in the North Sea.

  But the Armistice came, and presently we were all ‘demobbed’, and the world began to lick its wounds, to bury its dead, to try to return to sanity after four years of manic-depressive psychosis. And we picked up our lives again, or tried to, from where they had left off. But nothing was the same again.

  Chapter Two

  So the world fit for heroes to live in was born, and the Jazz Age, and the day of the Shimmy, the One-Step and the Charleston. The age of the League of Nations, and Reparations and Disarmament. The age of Unemployment, and Votes for Women, and the Flapper, and the White Russians, the Locarno Pact, the Dawes Agreement. The age of disillusion and the dole.


  Yet for four young men, and for many others like them, it was the beginning of a new life, life unshadowed by prospects of early death or mutilation, a life of opportunity and limitless years ahead.

  Bertie, the first demobbed, showing no particular desire or aptitude for any of the expected things, was offered a job in an insurance firm in Reading and gratefully took it. The prospects were unexciting but, in a world where so many could find nothing, it was work. Leo still rather sulkily wanted to be something in the musical scene, but his mother said he had ideas bigger than his head: he could never become a front-rank pianist; as for composition, he had some talent, he might do some good for himself if he worked hard but it would take time. Meanwhile he stayed at home, desultorily answering advertisements for clerks and bookkeepers.

  At nineteen I got a job as a cub reporter on the Sheffield Daily Telegraph; and Paul, the last to return to civilian life, finally took up his scholarship at M. Becker’s Grasse School of Art in Chelsea.

  Thereafter I lost touch with him for another year, and it was not until a chance assignment took me to London that I was able to look him up. I found him in a lodging house in the Bayswater Road, in which, conventionally, he had a top room with a dormer window and a fan-light. In the room was an easel, a single bed and two tables, everything possible cluttered with sketch-pads, palettes, tubes of paint leaking basic colours, rags, sheets of glass and half-finished boards and canvases. The intervening years had changed him, and there is a self-portrait in the Walker Art Gallery that shows very much how he looked then.