Old Filth - Jane Gardam [33]
Without him that week the school felt dull and empty and for the first time Eddie realised that he had made no friends. He felt an outsider as he lay in his bed in the dormitory.
“Is Ingoldby some relation?” came a shout in the dark.
“Not of mine,” said Eddie.
“You don’t look like him,” came another shout. “Not like his brother Jack did.”
“I’m not his brother. How d’you know what his brother Jack looks like?”
“In the team-photographs. Holding cups and shields. Head boy in a gown. Hamlet in Hamlet. Just a taller Ingoldby. Good looking, not carroty.”
“I come from Malaya.”
“Do they all have red hair there?”
“Yes. Every one of them.”
“Doesn’t Ingoldby’s brother mind?” someone shouted far down the row of beds, made brave by the black-out curtains.
“Mind what? I’m his brother’s friend, too.”
“Mind your being so important to him?”
A searchlight began to scale the walls, to pierce the black windows. It was joined by another and they danced together for a while, searching for German bombers on the way to Liverpool.
“Why ever should he? Jack’s in the Air Force. He’s got more important things to think about. I dare say,” Eddie added, like Sir.
“What do Ingoldby’s parents think?”
“I’ve never asked them. They’ve always wanted me there.” (And, he thought, they’re mine. Blood of my blood and bone of my bone.)
“Where’s your own family then, Feathers?” shouted an up-and-coming man. “Where’s your own family?” (They were braver with Ingoldby away.)
“My father’s in Malaya.”
“Was he in the Great War? Smashed up?”
“Yes.”
“Why doesn’t he come and see you?”
Pat returned from Cambridge with an assured place to read physics, having decided that history was all out of date—oh joke!
“After this War,” they had said, “you have your foot in the door by being accepted by the college now. You can be deferred if you wish. Volunteer and wait to be called. They’ll give you the first year. Excellent papers.”
But on the way home from Cambridge, overnight at High House, he had managed to volunteer for the RAF at the end of the summer term.
“If I’m spared,” he said to Eddie, in a Methusaleh voice. “Bloody raids, here every night. Why didn’t they evacuate us? We’re going to be clobbered.”
“They think slowly here,” said Eddie. “Sir moved his Outfit the minute Chamberlain wagged the white paper.”
“Chamberlain saved us,” said Pat. “Gave us a year to make more broomsticks to look like rifles. Even the carpet factory’s making tents now. I don’t know where they’ll be using them. Africa?”
“Sir’s gone to America.”
This made them unhappy.
They were lying between damp grey blankets, among rows of other boys in the school’s underground shelters, water running in rills down the walls. Far away a never-ending thunder meant that somewhere was being flattened again. York? Liverpool? Even as far away as Coventry.
The same week, on a night when there had been no air-raid siren, a drenching cold and moonless night and the boys asleep in their dormitories, every alarm bell in the school had begun to ring, followed by hooters, whistles and military cries. The dormitory doors were flung open and every boy ordered to dress immediately and gather by his House front door.
“And uniform, please, if you are in the Corps.”
“What—puttees, sir?”
“Puttees, Ingoldby.”
“They take a good five minutes, sir.”
“Then die, Ingoldby. Or get moving.”
Out from all the seven Houses of the school streamed boys of several ages in various attire. Each one was handed a rifle, Officers’ Training Corps or not, and five rounds of ammunition.
“Invasion. Get on there. It’s the Invasion. Go!” and five hundred boys, some trailing khaki bandages on their legs, some in their pyjamas and without their dressing-gowns (“dressing-gowns”), were quickly lost in the midnight fields and ditches of the North Midlands. Somebody cried “Hark!” and some of them heard the death knell: the cry of the bells from all the muffled steeples. This was later denied.
“Oh,” said Pat, still purring from the Cambridge grown-up claret, “invasion. Five rounds. Bang, bang, bang, bang, finish. Farewell