I was last in any alphabetical list, but when the Field Day squads went up it took me a second or two to find myself – there I was, in Morris, under Craven and Manji and half a dozen others, including Hadlow. ‘Oh, god,’ said Giles, when he’d pushed in to the crowd around the noticeboard, ‘I’ve got all the fucking wogs.’
‘You’ve got all the fucking brains, actually, Hadlow, I think is what you mean,’ said Manji. ‘I wonder if you’ve ever considered how it makes me feel?’
‘What, being a wog?’ said Giles.
‘Having such a moronic colleague as you, Hadlow?’
‘Anyway,’ I said, not attacking Giles directly, ‘it’s not Hadlow’s squad. Pinsent’s the captain.’
‘Pinsent . . .!’ said Giles, with a despairing laugh. ‘Anyone feel a mutiny coming on?’
Fascist Harris came through, signalling smaller boys out of his way, and stared disdainfully at the lists. I watched his blue eyes and blond forelock reflected in the glass beside me, his look of outrage when he saw he was in Kent and his vengeful grin as he turned away. Last week he had made a much-quoted speech explaining how he saw his role as House Captain: ‘I have the power. You don’t.’ He must have been hoping he and Giles would get out of school together, as they had last summer, but the master who drew up the squads had more power still, and had sensibly kept them apart.
That evening after prep I did another Jeeves in Blue Commons. The World of Wooster was on TV, and my famous readings were mostly imitations of Dennis Price, and of Ian Carmichael as Bertie. The stories were funny in themselves, and my mimicry tightened the grip of the comedy when I perched on a desk and read ‘The Aunt and the Sluggard’ or ‘Jeeves in the Springtime’ to ten, later fifteen or twenty boys – each time the number went up, the first uncanny proof of success: there was a demand for it. All week, on and off, I was slightly Bertie, with the daft little stammer that Ian Carmichael had added to the role; but it was my Jeeves people wanted to hear, my highly ironical ‘Indeed, sir . . .’ and other phrases I cooked up, ‘Most felicitous, sir’, ‘I think you’ll find it was Shakespeare, sir’ – things like that. Boys I barely knew became Bertie themselves, as we queued for lunch, or got changed for a run. ‘I say, Jeeves,’ they would say, and stand back expectantly as I slipped into character: just three or four words would be enough to set them off. I also had the invaluable knack of raising my left eyebrow all by itself. Bit by bit this gained in significance, until just a hint of it was enough to bring the house down. Perhaps that was the lesson – not just to give something it turned out they liked, but to have them hungry for something I’d given them before: it was stardom.
Tonight for the first time Harris came along, to see what the fuss was about, and stage a kind of passive protest just by being there. He sat in the front row, next to Giles, and stared blankly at me while people were coming in and finding a place. But after half a page of ‘Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch’ he was wriggling and looking round, and soon he was as red as a tomato with laughing. There was something coercive about the looking round, to make sure everyone was laughing as much as he was; he almost stopped it being funny. I thought, ‘I have the power, and you don’t’ – it was an unexpected battle of wills for five minutes, but I held my nerve, and when Harris guffawed I raised my left eyebrow, just a fraction, which made everyone else laugh even more. At the end he hung back, with a devious expression, while people gathered round and talked to me. Then he nodded at me amiably and said, ‘You’re really the perfect little English gentleman, aren’t you, Winny?’ And Giles said, seizing his moment, ‘Well, the perfect little English gentleman’s gentleman, anyway.’
Next morning I woke with a lovely sense of lingering celebrity, and a further half-pleasurable tension about the task just ahead, whatever it was going to be. After breakfast Pinsent, in his premature performance of a weathered old sergeant looking out for his men, embarrassing but reassuring too, got our squad in a huddle by the fives courts and nodded his freshly shaved chin over the list of tasks as he pondered how to split us up. It was one of those moments when leadership is asserted, and personal authority meets natural obedience, and it was specially irksome for Giles. ‘Oh, get on with it, Charlie!’ he said, but appealing to him too, by using his first name, mutiny mixed with sucking up. The Field Day missions were challenging and sometimes surreal. Last year, also with Manji, I’d hitch-hiked to a marmalade factory in Bicester and come back with free samples and a letter from the managing director. Hadlow and Harris had tried unsuccessfully to board an American bomber at Brize Norton aerodrome. Now Pinsent broke us up into three groups, and did the very thing I was counting on him not to do, and partnered me with Giles. We had to team up with Kissing Cousins, in the year below, a sleek little blond who’d been Jessica in The Merchant of Venice last summer, so he and I had that in common, but Giles I think had never spoken to Cousins, except possibly to call him a greasy tart. He nodded amiably at him now, and gave me a strange long look, a half-surprised hint of a smile in which the suspended fiction of our friendship seemed to be reviewed, and assessed for present usefulness.
Pinsent gave me the instructions sheet. It was a carbon copy in blue ink, some letters ghosts, others blotted and blocked in. There was the general rubric, Initiative and boldness will be rewarded, but squad members must bear in mind at all times that they are Ambassadors for the School. I read out our specific task, in the voice of Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky. Your group must report to M.H.S. in the Gym by 1800 hours, and present to him a tape-recorded interview with someone describing incidents in the First World War from their own experience, with a signed letter from the interviewee confirming that the interview took place today. ‘Let’s have a look at that,’ said Giles, and read it out again as if expecting it to say something quite different.
At first I felt weightless – I knew no one. Vaguely I pictured us hanging round outside Woolworth’s in Foxleigh, stopping anyone over seventy and asking them questions. Then Cousins said his grandfather had been in the trenches – ‘Well, there you are,’ said Giles; but it turned out he lived in Shepton Mallet. The signed letter was the catch – otherwise we could just have rung Cousins’s grandfather up, recorded what he said over the phone, and had the rest of the day off. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got anyone, Winny?’ said Giles, irritation disguised by a sympathetic sigh. My idea then was very simple.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what about Uncle George?’ I remembered our talk about the War, three years earlier, the privileged mood of the occasion itself more than what he had said to me. I thought it was odd Giles hadn’t thought of him himself.
‘Where does he live?’ he said.
‘I mean your Uncle George, if he’s still alive.’
‘Of course he’s still alive,’ said Giles, with a puzzled smile, and as if I’d been too familiar in calling him Uncle. Then the smile shifted, he let us see the idea working in him, and responsibility, to our odd trio and to the whole squad, unignorably emerge. ‘We’ll do it,’ he said, ‘this is excellent,’ rewarding me with a canny stare but mainly applauding himself. ‘Old George will talk till the cows come home.’
‘Quite literally,’ I said.
This was lost on Cousins. ‘So where does he live?’ he said. All around us, as we walked back to the house, small groups of boys were talking intently under trees, or running off to hunt for the unexpected items they suddenly needed. Harris was snapping at the boy in his group whom he’d picked on to do all the work. ‘No need to run,’ said Giles to us under his breath. ‘We’ve got all day.’ He gave Harris a cunning look, competition as ever more powerful than loyalty in Giles’s make-up. ‘Let them see we’re quietly confident.’ In the back passage teams were bent over Ordnance Survey maps, and in the changing room and upstairs in the dorm there was a lot of indecisive activity. We wore mufti for Field Day, but the boys who were drawing the portrait of an Oxford don would need different outfits from the ones who were felling a pine tree and sawing it into eighteen-inch pieces. Manji and Craven had got the Oxford job, which I liked the idea of, but the vision of going back to Woolpeck on a warm May morning had a deeper hold on me. I felt I could get something private, almost secret, out of our team effort. Giles went up smoothly to Teagarden to borrow his cassette recorder, but found he’d already loaned it to Harris for ten shillings deposit; so presumably Harris was doing for Kent what we were doing for Morris. ‘Isn’t there a tape recorder at the farm?’ I said, but it was the heavy old thing in the sitting room I pictured, and Teagarden’s Philips 3302 set the standard for ease and desirability. Giles looked briefly stumped, and it was only then that Cousins, with a slow smile and sideways glance, as if offering something much more personal, said, ‘We can use my machine if you like.’
‘Bless you,’ said Giles, and stroked Cousins’s glossy hair.
‘And how are we going to get there?’ I said, giving Cousins a quick rub myself – he raised an eyebrow, smiled at me, mocking or inviting, I wasn’t sure.
‘Where is it?’ he said again.
A queue had formed for the phone, in its small indoor kiosk, where we made our occasional contact with the outside world, reversing the charges. ‘I was thinking,’ said Giles, as we strolled past, ‘that your mother could easily drive us there. It can’t be more than ten miles away?’
‘She hasn’t really got a car,’ I said.
‘Well either she has or she hasn’t,’ said Giles.
‘She has a van,’ I said reluctantly.
‘Right, I see . . .’ said Giles.
‘Can’t we just get the bus?’ said Cousins.
‘Really, Andrew?’ said Giles, personalizing his disappointment. He looked at me. ‘I mean, I can drive, if your mother can lend us the vehicle.’ And it was true, he’d passed his test within weeks of his seventeenth birthday. But still the idea was so risky and worrying that I could only say no.
A minute later I was in the queue for the phone. It was something unaccountable about Giles, about not wanting to disappoint him, in fact wanting to please him as Cousins had done. He made it seem no more than fair – Cousins after all was lending a valuable cassette recorder, he himself was supplying a real live uncle, and it was my duty to contribute the third key ingredient. Giles had emerged in five minutes as the leader of our trio and Cousins and I had submitted. It was just what I didn’t want to happen, and it was already too late to resist. Now I was next in line for the phone, nerving myself for the very tricky call. What I hadn’t expected, as I stood in the stale-smelling booth and dialled 100, was the way Mum too would come round to Giles’s idea. I heard her note of alarm when the operator asked her to accept the call, I seemed to see her before I could speak to her, in the second’s hesitation before her puzzled ‘Yes, of course . . .’ Whatever disaster she imagined in those few moments made the actual request, once I’d steered my way awkwardly round to it, seem so trivial and beside the point that she immediately said no. But then it was also such an odd thing to ask that maybe it merited a second half-humorous look. For her it was part of a pattern of surprises and adjustments, now I was seventeen myself, with needs that she had to face up to. Mum’s reluctance was instinctive, but short-lived: she was a realist. So she ran over what I was saying, and then she was thinking out loud how on earth it could be done, while I stood smiling her onwards and doing my best to ignore DuPlessis and Milsom pulling slit-eyed faces at me through the glass. ‘I’m sure Giles will be careful,’ she said, voicing her anxiety but revealing too her constant awareness of the thing that I often forgot, our unrepayable debt to Giles’s family.
We ambled down the drive and out past the lodge onto the main road with the quietly shocking sensation of slipping the rules and protections of school. We met Mum in the lay-by on the Radstow road, a five-minute walk from the school gates. The van looked terribly small and homely, and I don’t think Giles had expected it to have Wincroft, Dressmaker in red and gold cursive script along both sides. ‘Ah, an Austin!’ he said, warmly shaking Mum’s hand.
I had a sense – perhaps no one else did – of Mum being over-keen to play her part. ‘We must make sure your team wins!’
‘That’s the spirit!’ said Giles. He was six inches taller than her, and was conjuring up rather loosely an adult manner, beaming courtesy with an edge of condescension. I looked at Cousins, who rolled his eyes, and smirked again.
‘I don’t know about the insurance, though,’ Mum said, with a flinch: ‘that might be a problem.’
Giles was already shaking his head, ‘No, no, I’m insured to drive other people’s cars,’ he said, ‘you don’t need to worry about that.’ And somehow, it seemed, she didn’t. He took the keys from her with a tolerant smile.
He drove her back with us to Foxleigh, hand-signals and checking the mirror all the way, while Cousins sat facing me on the floor behind the seats, holding the tape recorder on his drawn-up knees. The light clean smell of new fabric in the van, the sharper notes of chemical dyes, were parts of the air I’d grown up in, a backstage or dressing-room smell I’d never thought I would share with other boys from school. When we all climbed out in the town square, Cousins’s jeans were dotted with lint and bits of thread. I slipped past the threat of a hug and into the front seat, as Mum said goodbye to us. She stood on the edge of the pavement and waved us off as if it had all been her idea.
‘So what’s this Wincroft?’ said Cousins, as we roared up Chalk Street in low gear, me now in the passenger seat, with a tense undisguisable feeling the van had been hijacked.
‘My mum’s business partner’s called Mrs Croft,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder at him.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Cousins: ‘Win . . . Croft!’ There was something very cheeky about him. ‘Yes, I heard someone talking about your mum.’
‘Now, now, there’s no call for that,’ said Giles.
‘She must get a bit lonely, that’s all,’ said Cousins.
‘Does she, Dave, do you think?’ said Giles, protecting me, not sounding like himself. ‘She ought to get married again.’
‘She’s fine as she is,’ I said.
‘She’s got you,’ said Cousins.
‘That’s right.’
‘And she’s got Mrs Croft, her business partner.’
Once we’d left the town and turned off into the narrower lanes towards the Downs, Giles showed he’d got the measure of the vehicle, and put his foot down. ‘Steady on, old chap . . .’ I said, Kenneth More again, doing my best to smile. Giles turned his head and gave me an almost friendly look, and I nodded and glanced forward to show he should follow the road. He did a tight double swerve where a fallen branch of a tree jutted out from the verge; Cousins, on the floor behind, was thrown about. ‘Not a bad little motor,’ Giles said, irony dissolving in simple excitement. My anxiety about the van was hopelessly mixed up with embarrassment, my sense of the sort of car Giles was used to. ‘What does your old man drive?’ he said over his shoulder to Cousins. ‘We’ve got a new Rover 3000,’ Cousins said, with a grunt as the van rode another big bump in the lane. I didn’t look round, I heard his comic note of nostalgia for the Rover, and something else typical of him, a refusal to be impressed, even by his own well-off parents.
‘I suppose Uncle George will be there?’ I said, as we drew nearer the village. ‘Oh, he’s always there,’ said Giles. Ahead of us the hill rose up and stirred its flanks, the Rings two notches in its crown against the sky. I very much wanted Cousins to like Woolpeck, to feel the atmosphere and situation. ‘You get amazing views up there,’ I said, ‘on a clear day you can see five counties.’ But Cousins had turned round, his back against the front bench seat, his view the disappearing lane seen through the small rear windows. Now we were in the village, the old pub, the shop, the sharp turn and then the brief open straight before the entrance to the farm. It was the beeches planted out along the drive that marked the difference now. The pale staked saplings of three years ago, with green leaves pressing through protective mesh, had risen and thickened into free-standing trees.
We parked in the yard and I went round to let Cousins out from the back of the van, like a dog. He stretched and slipped me one of his ironical looks, sweet or sharp, I just didn’t know where I was with him. Giles strode towards the house, gave the bell on the porch a quick clang to announce our presence, and then opened the back door, rather cautiously, peering into the hall and then calling out, ‘Hello . . .?’ I think he’d rushed ahead so that Cousins and I wouldn’t see this moment – it wasn’t his house, after all, but his Uncle Peter’s, however much the Hadlows had made it a home. We came in behind him, stood and gazed down the shadowy length of the hall, all just as it was, forgotten and remembered. The sound of a hoover came from a room at the front. The kitchen door was ajar, and we went in and stood there uncertainly; there was something about the heavy pan left to simmer on the Rayburn that gave me a nerve-racking sense we were trespassers. Giles said, ‘Wait here, chaps,’ and went off down the hall. Cousins set the tape recorder on the table, and we stood looking at it abstractedly. We heard Giles calling, ‘Hello! . . . Mrs Over,’ a little shout and the raw downward scale of the hoover being turned off. Cousins made a funny face at me, and we went out.
As she came along the hall Mrs Over had her old look of exasperated competence, but slightly adjusted to Giles’s new size and maturity. ‘You should have told us you were coming,’ she said, glancing at Cousins and me.
‘I tried ringing,’ said Giles, ‘but I couldn’t get through.’ He looked to us, to confirm this fiction, and Cousins smiled at her so broadly that she briefly smiled back. ‘Is he in from his walk?’ Giles said.
She stopped at the foot of the steep narrow stairs. ‘I don’t know that he’s even been out. It’s his hip, as you know.’
‘Poor old Uncle George,’ said Giles.
‘He’s eighty-two,’ said Mrs Over, with a hint of a reproach. ‘Are you all going to talk to him?’
Giles was politic. ‘Well, if we can . . .’, looking at us again and then glancing upstairs. ‘Shall I just run up and see . . .’
As he climbed the stairs his manner was respectful, his impatience held in. We stayed, gazing upwards at where he had been, until we heard his voice, raised but cheerful, startling and reassuring George at the same time.
‘Well, I’ll get on,’ said Mrs Over, and went back down the hall with no sign that she remembered me, though I knew of course that she did.
In a minute Giles reappeared. ‘Come on up,’ he said quietly. ‘Bring the machine.’ I went first, with a former guest’s sense of showing Cousins the way and being to some tiny degree a host myself, in this house that I’d so often thought of, and dreamt of too. Just before the first-floor landing, the stairs branched off to the right, into the passage of the lower side-wing of the house. There was a bathroom and, opposite, a door with a china sign saying LYDIA in a ring of forget-me-nots. The door at the end was open into old George Pollitt’s room.
We sidled in and stood by the single bed, and it closed about me, very softly, the hour in this room after tea when I’d looked at confusing old maps of the neighbouring farms with George’s arm round my shoulder and the kind unfamiliar smell of his Harris tweed jacket and hair oil confirming the privilege. Now he was moving around, shaking his head out of mild bewilderment and the sudden need to concentrate. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said. He was in shirtsleeves, brown braces crossed between his shoulder blades, and when he turned round, the red tie with its frayed knot half-covered by his chin.
‘Uncle George,’ said Giles, ‘these are my colleagues, Andrew Cousins and David Win.’
‘Colleagues you have now, do you,’ said George as we leant forward to shake his hand. ‘We know each other,’ he said, keeping hold of my hand as he looked into my face, breathing through his mouth.
I said, ‘Yes, sir, I stayed here . . . a few years ago now.’
‘We talked about Burma,’ he said. ‘You’d never been.’
‘Still haven’t, sir,’ I said.
He patted my hand with his other one before he let me go. ‘Well, this is unexpected,’ he said, and looked rather searchingly at Cousins over the top of his glasses.
‘Well, as I was saying, Uncle, we want to talk to you,’ said Giles, and went on to explain the whole thing to him again. George seemed hardly to be listening, but I think he was taking it in as he shifted files about on his desk, lifting them up to read the words written in ink on the cardboard wallets. ‘So we needed someone with first-hand memories of the Great War, and of course the first person I thought of was you.’
‘Well, I can tell you things,’ said George, ‘though as you know I had a very unusual war. I may not be quite what you want.’ There was something in the way he said this, a little tremor of punctilio, an old man’s slight loss of confidence and fear of a misunderstanding, through deafness or debility, that showed me George had aged since my first visit to Woolpeck.
Cousins said, ‘We’ll be really grateful for anything you can tell us, sir,’ in a rather smarmy way.
And so we settled down, George turned his desk chair round, Giles and Cousins sat side by side on the narrow bed facing him, and I perched on the desk to George’s left, holding the microphone in front of him, but strangely abstracted by performing this task, my eyes running over the tall bookcase on the end wall, the framed photograph of men in uniform that hung beside it, and now and then checking the noiseless rotation of the spool of tape inside the machine. When there was a sound of voices outside I could turn my head and see Peter Pollitt in the yard down below, asking Mrs Over about the Wincroft van.
It started out unpromisingly, as it seemed Uncle George hadn’t served in the First World War at all. ‘I was already thirty when war broke out, and your grandfather of course was three years older, but as we were running the farm we knew we couldn’t volunteer: we were needed back here, you see.’ He spoke mainly to Giles, but smiled now and then at Cousins, who sat blinking back at him through his fringe. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of work on this whole subject, as it happens,’ he said, glancing round at the folders as if undecided whether to go into them. ‘I’m writing a history of this side of the county, the western end, it’s been quite a thing of mine.’ He looked up at me and I nodded encouragingly.
‘So what did you do? Something funny happened, didn’t it?’ said Giles, like a barrister with a nervous witness.
‘Well . . .’ said George, perhaps not quite liking his tone, ‘I don’t know about funny. But within a week or two it was decided Bob could run the farm by himself and I was appointed the local HPO – quite a tricky job, I don’t mind telling you. I remember feeling I’d rather have been sent to the Front.’
‘What was it, then?’ said Cousins.
‘HPO? That stands for Horse Procurement Officer. I’m sure it’s hard for you youngsters to imagine how important horses were. But of course we used them everywhere, in town and country alike, and now they were urgently needed for the war effort. In the first two weeks of the war, I’ve been looking into it, how many horses do you think were requisitioned?’ Cousins shook his head, Giles sat with a narrow stare as if working it out, and I made a helpless grimace. ‘Well, I’ll tell you: one hundred and sixty-five thousand. A hundred and sixty-five thousand horses secured in two weeks.’
‘Gosh, sir,’ said Cousins.
‘And that was just the beginning.’
‘So why were you chosen, Uncle?’ said Giles.
George sighed and slumped, and I wasn’t sure if he was irritated or if he thought it such a good question that it needed careful answering. ‘Well, I was here, I knew the country, we were pretty well-known ourselves, respected, I mean, we weren’t landed gentry exactly, in fact for over twenty years my brother Bob rented Woolpeck off old Darcy Denham – that went on until ’29, when the Denhams got into a hell of a lot of trouble and he bought it off him. Now, of course,’ said George, looking up at me and shaking his head, ‘it’s the Denhams who are the big shots again. They’ve even got their own plane, you know, little two-seater Cessna. But there you are!’ – and he sat nodding as if he’d wound up the subject rather than gone off on a tangent.
I smiled back and said, ‘So you were in a good position to be the . . . er . . . HPO?’
‘Oh, ideal – from the Ministry’s point of view. Absolute hell, of course, for me. I had to requisition some of my own brother’s horses, your grandmother’s hunter,’ – he nodded at Giles – ‘that had to go too. We needed to keep some horses, of course, to work the farm, but we couldn’t be seen to be fudging it, in any way. The most difficult days of my life.’ He panted a bit as he thought of it, then looked abashed. ‘Nothing compared to what the boys at the Front were going through, of course. But still . . .’ He looked stricken, for a moment, that his duty had put him in the role of an enemy, almost, to his own friends and neighbours – but I said, ‘This is all really marvellous, Mr Pollitt,’ and he said apologetically, ‘Oh, will it do?’ I couldn’t imagine Fascist Harris, or anyone in the other squads, getting anything as good.
I went out to the bathroom next door, which had George’s kit on the shelf over the basin, his hair oil, razor, old badger-hair shaving brush frizzed up at the ends, white china shaving mug – things never seen at home when I was growing up, until early this year, when I’d slipped into Baxter’s for a razor and a beautiful badger-hair brush of my own. In the cabinet, with its sickroom smell of old medicines and cosmetics, there were packets of soap, Coty talc, a bare-faced box of Tampax, which must be Lydia’s things, left from long ago, like her name on the bedroom door – Lydia herself, according to Giles, had been working in New York for the past two years: she’d done what I always knew she wanted to do, and got away. I pulled back the net curtain and looked down into the orchard where the hens used to peck about, none there now, and the runs and wooden coops overgrown. On the left the high yew hedge screened off the tennis court. I came out and went very quietly along the passage and up into the main part of the house, the square open landing with sunlight through bedroom doors to the front and the shadowy room at the back where I’d slept three years ago. A further narrow staircase led up to the attic floor. I think I’d sensed then it was a big house for two bachelors and a housekeeper, in its ordinary weeks and months, when the Hadlows and their friends weren’t here to liven it up and fill up the beds. Today we had caught it in its unobserved morning, the sunlight fading now across the floorboards and the square of carpet, then brightening for a moment as the cloud moved on. It had an indoor silence like a far-off hum in the ear, outlasting the brief interruptions from outside, crows in the field, fading rumble of a lorry on the hill out of the village. I stood and listened for the missing thing, the quick, incongruous atmosphere of Mark and Cara, gin and Kensitas, talk of Paris and painters, even Elise, in all her difficult glamour. Then I nipped back to join the others.
When I came into the room, Cousins had lowered the microphone inattentively as George hunted through a folder looking for photographs. ‘Don’t worry, Uncle,’ said Giles, ‘it’s really just the tape we need, you know.’
‘You see I thought,’ said George, ‘as you’re so interested . . .’
‘Well . . .’ said Giles, and stooped over him for a minute or so as though he was. I thought Cousins was smiling tartily at Giles, then I realized he was trying to look in the mirror behind Giles’s head.
As we packed up, I said to George, ‘Could you very kindly sign a note, sir, saying you spoke to us today,’ and after a bit more searching round a statement was written on the farm’s headed notepaper in George’s beautiful grown-up hand. ‘Perfect,’ I said, ‘I’ll look after it.’
‘Will you, Dave, thanks,’ said Giles.
I folded it twice and put it in my jacket pocket. The writing had an inexplicable effect on me, in its fluency and competence, its air of decades of professional life I knew nothing about. This was the signature he’d written on the documents taking his friends’ and neighbours’ horses away from them, fifty years ago – ‘All for the greater good, of course, though we knew damn well what their end would be.’ I felt we’d rather used and hurried Uncle George, and that he was panicked and disappointed by us, though he smiled at us now with a touch of gratitude, that he’d been useful, and we of course were sweet and grateful to him as we shook hands and said goodbye.
I hoped we might hang around longer at the farm, perhaps climb up to the Rings, but we’d got what we came for, and Giles and Cousins were in no mood for anything strenuous. George said, ‘Are you boys staying for lunch?’ though not exactly as an invitation. I thought he’d probably had enough of us, and Giles himself seemed keen to press on. He persuaded Mrs Over to wrap up some bread and cheese and fill a bottle with orange squash, and we took this off with us when we left. It was still only half-past one when Giles braked without warning and pulled into a gateway a mile down the road. Of course we were hungry, and the dryish bread and Cheddar had the difference close to luxury of non-school food eaten in term time. ‘The thing is,’ said Giles after a minute or two, chewing and staring ahead through the windscreen, ‘I really have to see Fiona.’
‘Oh, God,’ I said.
‘Who’s Fiona?’ said Cousins.
I said, ‘She’s Harris’s sister. Giles met her in the Easter holidays, and now he keeps getting letters from her.’
‘And sometimes, Winny,’ said Giles, ‘I write back.’
‘Anyway, isn’t she at school?’ I said.
‘School?’ said Giles. ‘She left school last year, for God’s sake.’
‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘so what’s she doing now?’
‘She’s just lying round at home while she looks for a job.’
‘Not looking very hard, then,’ I said.
‘Where is home?’ said Cousins.
‘The Harrises have a place near Highworth,’ said Giles.
Cousins and I both hooted at this.
‘What . . .?’ said Giles. ‘Well, they do!’ and his irritable frown gave way to a smirk and a slight blush, very rare in him, as he heard what he sounded like. He said, ‘I say that because they also have a flat in London.’
‘Whereabouts in London?’ said Cousins.
‘I believe it’s in Tooting,’ said Giles, in a reasonable tone. This meant nothing to me, and Cousins himself seemed undecided about it – he gave his pursed little smile and left it at that. Like Paine and Van Oss and Casserley they both ‘knew’ London, and I didn’t. ‘Look, teammates,’ said Giles, ‘we’ve finished early, we’ve got the ruddy tape recording and the letter, and we don’t have to be back till six.’
‘Let’s go to the pub,’ said Cousins.
Giles gave him a commiserating glance. ‘I doubt they’d serve you, old chap,’ he said. ‘Or you, Winny, actually. I’m the only one of us who could get away with it. No,’ he went on, ‘what I propose is a little diversion via Highworth on the way back. That would really be best for me.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Cousins. ‘And what are Winny and me supposed to do while you’re snogging Harris’s sister?’
Giles made it up ably, as always. ‘You won’t want to be bothered with all that, Andrew,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop you two on the main road – you can easily hitch a lift back to school.’ He turned to me. ‘Dave, your mother trusts me – quite rightly,’ and he gave a little smile, self-mocking and somehow seductive, that was soon to be dropped from his repertoire.
‘So how do we do this?’ I said, as Giles pulled out into the road with a toot on the horn that seemed to sum up all that was worrying about the situation. ‘It’s easy,’ said Cousins, ‘haven’t you hitched a lift before?’ ‘What? – of course,’ I said. It was a straight half-mile of open road, and I watched the van grow smaller as it picked up speed, the indicator came on and then Giles had turned onto the Highworth road and disappeared. I knew just where we were, but it was eerily different to be standing abandoned on a spot that we normally whizzed past, seizing the chance to overtake. Now the intermittent buzz of traffic shook the hedge and dust lifted in the air in the wake of a lorry and settled on the buffeted grass. It was a broad verge, flat but lumpy to walk across, bright bits of rubbish blown under the hedge, pages of a Penthouse with two blonde women kissing on a bed, then a red-haired woman on all fours, glossy boobs pitted by rain. Cousins turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Go on, have a wank if you like,’ he said, and I looked through it gingerly, feeling he was saying it wasn’t his sort of thing, and trying perhaps to find out if it was mine. ‘Nah,’ I said and flicked it over the hedge with a snort and a feeling I was overdoing it. Cousins looked at me as if he knew everything.
Very soon, the odd rhythms of the roadside were making little cycles of anxious attention, the lull as a slow truck or trundling tractor and load of silage kept back a line of cars edging out, once the straight began, to overtake. Of course we weren’t in uniform, and no one speeding past would have known us as ambassadors for Bampton School. Someone taking us in as they approached might have wondered, even so, why we weren’t in school, since we both looked young for our age, and a blond boy standing with a brownish one suggested some further complication it was better not to get involved with. ‘It’ll be best if I do the hitching,’ said Cousins, walking up ahead and standing just off the bank, in the gritty margin of the road. ‘Remember to say something nice about their car, when they’ve picked us up.’ As the first car came into view he cocked his head, flung out his hip, and raised his arm. I couldn’t see if he was smiling or not.
After ten minutes or more, a van appeared round the bend, approached very slowly, and came to a complete halt a few yards short of him. There were two men already in front, and the one on the passenger side rolled down the window. ‘Where you off to?’ he said, narrowing his eyes at the little conundrum of Cousins. The man was dark-haired, round-faced, very young himself, but the question from inside the van seemed to hang in the curious gap between sixteen and twenty-three, between humorous suspicion and level acceptance. A scruffy black dog pushed up panting behind his ear, and whined as I came over.
‘We’re going to Bampton,’ Cousins said smoothly, as if he’d flagged down a taxi.
‘We can’t take two of you, we’ve got the dog an’ all,’ said the man, and the shadowy driver beyond said, ‘Can’t fit two.’
‘Oh, well, never mind,’ I said, ‘thank you, anyway.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Cousins, ‘my colleague can get a lift by himself.’
So the man got out, much taller than I’d thought in stained jeans and a black T-shirt – a rich sweetish smell of oil, apples and dog on the air as Cousins clambered in.
‘You be all right there?’ said the man.
‘We’re not really supposed to hitch-hike by ourselves,’ I said, but as if I didn’t care about the rules.
‘For God’s sake, it’s Field Day,’ said Cousins, squeezing in between the men in the middle of the bench seat, smiling at the driver, and rearing back a bit from the slobbering of the dog.
‘Dorothy, get down, calm down,’ said the man. He gave me a sideways look, friendly enough. ‘You with the Yanks?’ he said.
‘Oh . . .’ I said, searching for his meaning, and shook my head.
‘Be someone along in a minute, anyway,’ he said, and climbed back into his seat.
When the van moved off I almost ran after it, as it lumbered its way up into second gear, and then third, with a tearing noise that grew fainter with distance, till a huge pantechnicon swept past, buffeting me back across the low verge, and blocking my last view of the van; though I pictured Cousins inside it very clearly, wedged snugly between the two working men, in that atmosphere that had nothing whatever to do with school. I felt shockingly alone, and a half-forgotten hatred for Giles, mixed with gnawing regret that I’d let him get away, took hold of me like a panic. I knew where I was, just a few miles from home, but something else had darkened the place, like the mood of a bad dream. I squeezed through a thin bit of the hedge into the field and thought about walking back, cross-country, arriving after lights-out and losing the squad all the valuable points we’d won with Uncle George’s interview. The Penthouse was lying there reproachfully, and I turned the pages with a flinching foot.
Then something changed, I went back to the roadside, a drop or two of the remembered power flowed into my legs, into my raised arm, as I stood with one foot on the verge, and tried out a sequence of faces on the briefly empty stretch of the highway. A smile seemed the obvious thing, and a sign I was pleasant company, but then pressed into a grin it turned somehow presumptuous, even slightly alarming; I thought a tilt of the head, with left eyebrow raised a fraction in polite uncertainty, could do the trick. An unsmiling gaze at driver after driver seemed businesslike, but might also suggest I’d been there a long time, and had low expectations of anyone stopping at all.
No one did stop at all, for the first ten minutes. I saw that on a main road every driver knew another car was just behind, ready to make good their own failure to stop; and one or two of the kinder non-stoppers pulled apologetic faces, or showed they were soon to turn off. Some shook their heads in unspecific rejection. Some seemed to go past without seeing me at all. But then there was a black Austin Cambridge with a couple in front, the woman driving, and someone, a young girl, in the back, turning and gaping as they went past and slowed, and stopped fifty yards further on. I saw myself already in the back of the car with the girl, and heard the friendly conversation as they found out who I was and the interesting things I’d been doing. The car waited there and I ran, nearly laughing with relief, along the rough verge, other big traffic now pounding past and pulling out suddenly to avoid the stationary car. The passenger door opened and the man got out onto the verge, dark suit and tie, a hand smoothing his hair. ‘What are you doing?’ he said, as I came up.
I said, ‘Thank you very much for stopping, sir, I’m trying —’
‘Why are you here?’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’ There was something troubled in his face, not dissolving but hardening at the touch of my good manners.
‘I’m trying to get to Bampton,’ I said. I wasn’t in uniform, I was somehow undercover, but still pretty obviously a schoolboy. I smiled firmly in the face of what seemed to be anger. Through the car’s rear window the girl, a bit younger than me, gazed at me, as though to see if something she’d been told was true. I assumed the man was her father.
The rage, if that’s what it was, that had forced him from the car seemed to have blocked his speech. He waved me away from him, pointed back the way I’d come. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Go back to wherever the hell you come from.’
On the far side of the car the wife, anxious against the traffic, half opened her door, called out to him. The girl seemed torn between them. I turned aside, with a sense of floors giving way, sudden blackness on a clear May afternoon in the heart of the country – I stepped away through the rough grass, heart pounding, heard the woman call a second time, the slam of his door, but he must have opened it again, as the car moved off, to shout something else, that was swallowed up by the thunder of traffic.
I didn’t know what had happened; I sat down on the grass, breathing heavily, and started telling myself the story. For a second as he got out of the car he was a master, unrecognized, looming, who had caught me thumbing a lift by myself . . . but most simply of course he was a man who’d decided to be kind to a total stranger. Then he started shouting and pointing. His aggression had the air of a joke I was slow to get – not a good joke but one I would have to pretend to enjoy. It was Cousins I was telling all this to, and blaming him. Then it was the rest of the squad, back at school, and Giles, of course, and I was turning the events in my mind for some glint of hilarity in them, my brush with a bloody nutter, a story worth wider acclaim in the final accounts of the day. The fear of the attack, the quick sense, in those few seconds, that there were witnesses, passing drivers with a three- or four-second exposure to what was happening on the verge, the grip of crisis: all these instantaneous things could be shopped into the school’s own currency of jokes and gossip. It was only as the story settled and took shape that my own anger came, a kind of delayed revelation. And part of the revelation was that it had taken so long to come. All my life I’d been ambushed, and slow, every time, to stand up for myself.
I got up and went back to the roadside. Then I saw that if I went the obvious way, got a lift to Foxleigh, then another one to school, I might well see people I knew in the town, or even Mum herself, who would want to know straight away where Giles was. So I worked out another route, picturing the road ahead as I knew it, passively but watchfully, from trips with Mum in the van, or in the back of Esme’s Super Snipe. If I went in the other direction, to Buckley, I could take the pretty country lane over to Bampton, and just hope someone stopped for me. It was a longer way and a quieter road. I saw the day running out, and the culpable damage I would do to the squad’s score by coming back late with Uncle George’s letter. All these worries formed a shield round the deeper worry of the Wincroft van, which I saw in unguarded moments buzzing along between distant hedgerows, or parked under trees with Giles and Fiona snogging, or worse, Fiona on all fours on the back seat, like the woman in the magazine.
I crossed the road and stuck my arm out and perhaps the anger and half-defused fear of the raving man still showed in my face when after no more than a minute a blue and white Ford Anglia put on its indicator and came to a halt just beyond me – for five seconds the two things were linked in my mind, the man had reported me to the police, or in a simultaneous story he himself had been reported, and the police were hunting him, not me. The blame hovered, undecidedly. The blue light wasn’t on, but to anyone driving past we looked like an incident; a mute spasm of loyalty made me glad after all that I wasn’t in school uniform. No one got out, and then the policeman on the passenger side half opened his door and called back, ‘Where you going, young feller?’ – I walked up to him, blinking in the gleam of that friendly, contemptuous phrase.
‘I’m trying to get to Buckley,’ I said.
‘Been waiting long, have you?’
I was beside him now, looking down at him as he said something to his mate. ‘Yeah, a bit,’ I said.
‘We’ll take you,’ he said. The Anglia only had two doors, so he had to climb out to let me in to the back. It was an offer with the look of an arrest, and there was no resisting it. He held the door wide, and jerked his head sideways. ‘Get in,’ he said. ‘We’re going that way.’ As I slid into the cramped little space behind, the officer driving barely glanced at me. We moved off, and there I was, on the road, in the unimagined air, the male smells and the radio crackle, of the policemen’s afternoon; there was a folder of papers on the seat next to me, and their headgear, a helmet upright and a hard peaked hat upside down, with an apple in it. I had an awkward outsider’s sense of work-time, the men at a certain familiar point in their shift, and a feeling of listening in on their silence as much as their talk.
‘Where are you from, son?’ said my friend, barely turning, raising his voice.
I thought it best to be clear. ‘I’m at Bampton School,’ I said. ‘It’s our mad day today.’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Oh, it’s Field Day, when we all have to go out of school and perform . . . certain tasks.’
‘That again, eh,’ said the one driving. ‘They kept us pretty busy last year, picking up the waifs and strays.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Well, it’s very kind of you, sir.’ I saw they probably didn’t know about the shouting man, they’d picked me up out of the strange English thing I knew so well, mistrust shot through with cautious hospitality. I knew as soon as I thought about it that I wasn’t going to tell them what had happened.
‘How old are you, then?’ said my friend.
‘I’m seventeen,’ I said.
Now he did turn and look at me. ‘Date of birth?’
‘April the twenty-third, 1948.’
I watched him work it out, nod grudgingly. ‘You don’t look it,’ he said. ‘You’re not Indian, are you.’
A message came through on the radio, and I stared through the window as if not listening. It was something none of us mentioned, but the Anglia wasn’t a car to inspire much respect or fear, not like the old black Wolseleys or the swanky Zephyrs the police were using now. It was a pert English midget with a Lincoln or a Studebaker somewhere on its mind, one of those high-finned miracles as wide as haycarts with US airmen smiling at the wheel, even once or twice saluting as they floated down this very road when I was ten years younger, outdoing everyone in needless scale and glitter . . . Whereas the Anglia, with its anxious little grille and back-to-front back window, seemed eager to be smaller, and fold itself away. A policeman with a solemn or dramatic idea of his job might have hoped for a car with a bit more authority.
On the roadside up ahead a small group appeared, teenage refugees, trudging along, one with his thumb out, another struggling to refold a map – it took me a moment to see the third person walking in front was Harris, followed of course by Priestman, clutching Teagarden’s tape recorder, and Stallybrass the navigator. ‘Some more of yours?’ said the driver.
‘I rather fear they are, sir,’ I said, Jeeves for a moment. ‘Oh, don’t stop!’ And then, ‘I mean, we couldn’t fit them all in, could we.’ We slowed to pull out round them, and I loved the swift sequence of alarm, self-righteousness, and disbelief on Harris’s face at the sight of the police car and then the glimpse of me in it. I smiled kindly, as if at bowing subjects; and turned round, just before the next bend, for a snapshot of them staring after us. I knew what Harris, at least, must have made of it. And I could already hear the laugh of the others when I reached that part in my story.
At Buckley the car stopped to put me out. ‘You can get back from here, then?’ the officer said, when he’d climbed back in. Perhaps they would have taken me the whole way, but an incoherent sense of being set free without charge made me say, ‘I’ll be fine, thank you very much, officer’ – understanding from TV that this was how you addressed a policeman.
It was hot on the long country lane, dead straight for hundreds of yards, then making a small angle and hiding where I’d come from. Now and then hedgerow ashes made lonely patches of shade. I had a new sense of the depth and duration of the day, of the minutes and hours away from school, the astonishing openness of the world outside carrying on as it always did in complete unawareness of our rules and routines. I realized I’d never been all by myself like this before – it was as if I’d run away, and the wide fields and woods didn’t notice or care, whatever ruckus might be caused at school when my absence was discovered. A long unmade driveway led off to the right to a farm that was hidden by trees, and in the field in front a racehorse in a coat was grazing with two donkeys – the horse trotted forward, curved round by the fence in a brief flash of energy and my feeling it was interested in me was followed in five seconds by my sense of its absolute indifference.
I carried on, tramped along, looking round now and then in case a vehicle was coming, but the undisturbed calm persisted for a mile or more; once a tractor and trailer came rumbling and bouncing the other way, and I climbed onto the verge to let them pass. Then I heard a noise behind me, and a shiny red Riley, a One-Point-Five, came round the bend fifty yards back and I flung out my arm, then ran up to the car when it braked quite sharply and stopped. A small dark-haired man leaned across and opened the passenger door, peering out at me and panting slightly, as if he’d been searching for me all afternoon. ‘Well, hop in!’ he said.
The Riley’s dashboard was glossy walnut, reddish brown, with grey forms in it like clouds. It set the tone, somehow, as we moved off. ‘You’ve got a nice car,’ I said.
‘Thanks very much,’ said the man, with a quizzical smile at me as he changed gear and then glanced in the mirror. ‘How long were you waiting there?’
‘Oh, not very long,’ I said.
‘You’re lucky I stopped for you. There’s not much traffic on this road.’ He shifted slightly towards me, as we picked up speed, with his left hand, once he’d changed into fourth, loosely covering the black knob of the gearstick, and his steering arm cocked against the windowsill. His smile, at the road ahead and occasionally at me, grew more friendly. He said, ‘I’m guessing you’re still at school?’
‘Yes . . . I’m at Bampton,’ I said, though glimpsing the chance not to be, to be someone else entirely. ‘I’m going back there now, in fact.’
‘Well, that’s a marvellous school,’ he said. ‘I had a great pal at Bampton, Roger Hamilton.’
‘Was he one of the masters?’
‘Oh, this was years ago,’ he said. ‘Of course, if you live nearby, you’re always aware of a school like Bampton. I should explain’ – an odd courteous tone from a man of forty to a teenage boy: ‘I live at Radstow.’
‘Oh, do you, yes,’ I said.
He gazed ahead as he thought about it. ‘Yes, I’ve got a little cottage there, just over the bridge – thatched roof, you’ve probably been past it dozens of times. People often say how darling it is.’
That was a word to save up for my story. And I knew the cottage – Mum and I used to say, as we waited to cross the long single-file bridge, how we’d like to live there, though the car lights searching through the windows at night might be a nuisance. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘I know you’d like it – if you like those sort of quaint, old-fashioned English things.’ He flashed a grin at me.
‘Well . . .’ I said.
‘My name’s Jeffrey,’ he said, as if the time for full disclosure had come; ‘you can call me Jeff.’ I nodded and looked out blandly at the lane uncurling ahead of us. ‘Are you going to tell me your name, I wonder?’
‘Oh, John,’ I said, as the thought and the voice started working in me.
‘And where are you from, John?’
‘Well, I’m originally from Melksham, but we live in Foxleigh now.’ He gave me an almost teasing look. ‘My dad was Burmese,’ I said, and something went through me at the phrase, the dad and the was.
‘Is that right,’ said Jeff. ‘Well, I think you’re my first Burmese.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘I mean that I’ve picked up,’ said Jeff.
We rode on in silence after this – I soon saw we were nearly there. From time to time he glanced across at me, and when I glanced enquiringly back he smiled as if reassured. It was years since I’d heard him on the phone, before we lost the precious party line, though I’d thought of him often, and I knew, with a feeling both logical and magical, that it must be him. The beauty of it falling into place was as great as the terrible novelty, the squeeze of danger, of being in his car. Now here was the green, the shop, the Willett Arms, with their heightened indescribable presence of places in the free world just outside school. We went through, and onto the Witney road. ‘I won’t actually go into the school,’ Jeff said, ‘if that’s OK.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. I could already see the spire of the wellingtonia above the school woods, and the entrance lodge was round the next bend in the road. Jeff slowed and pulled into a gateway, then switched off the engine and sat smiling at me again. He looked a year or two older than Mr Hudson, darker, thinner-lipped, not sweating exactly but glowing in the warmth of the day, shirtsleeves folded up tight above the elbow, diver’s watch. Suit trousers, lap hidden by the wheel and his right hand resting there.
‘What sort of things do you like getting up to, I wonder, John?’ he said. ‘You know, when you can.’
I saw myself floating above possibilities I only half understood. ‘I like acting,’ I said, ‘and poetry. I’ve started a poetry society at school.’
‘Well, that’s nice.’ His smile had a kind of tactical patience. ‘You’ve probably got a girlfriend or two in tow, haven’t you?’
‘Oh, not really,’ I said, with a feeling I was ahead of him now – but grateful too for this little detour.
‘Good-looking young chap like you.’ I couldn’t help smiling back at him. ‘Is that where you’ve been today, I expect?’
‘God, no,’ I said, startled by my own tone. ‘I’ve been over . . . on the other side of Framley, at a friend’s farm.’ And I told him a bit about Field Day, without mentioning any names.
‘Look, I’ll give you my number, John, in case you ever feel like meeting up. I think there’s a phone, isn’t there, that the boys can use.’
‘Oh . . . all right,’ I said, and waited as he found an envelope in his jacket on the back seat and tore off the pale blue triangle of the flap to write on. I knew he was being extremely reckless, though what threw me, watching tensely as he wrote his number, with no name, was his intuition that with me he might get away with it, it might very well come off.
‘You know where I am now, and obviously I’ve got the motor,’ and he patted the wheel and swivelled his hand round speculatively once again on the knob of the gear shift.
‘Well, thanks for the lift, Jeff,’ I said, and got out and shut the door, then opened it and shut it again properly. I started off down the quarter-mile to the gates, expecting him to come past me, already almost hoping he would stop as he did so and pick me up again, but he stayed where he was – I looked back once and he was sitting watching me, as if wanting to see me safe home. Down the road from beyond the school entrance I saw a knot of three or four boys approaching, and a sense of solidarity overwhelmed me for a second, though I hardly knew who they were. I still had the triangle of paper in my hand, and I stuffed it in my pocket with the all-important letter before I joined them. In the long tree-lined drive there was a sense of gathering, the collective return, rivalry and exhaustion. Of course what I wanted to hear was that Giles had delivered the van safely to Mum, and was even now on his way back to school. ‘Weren’t you with Hadlow?’ someone said, and I said, ‘Yes, he’s coming with the tape,’ in a show of confidence I found myself almost believing.