Drink to Yesterday

2-1

2Michael was sent to Chappell’s School at Weatherley in Hampshire, and though the life undoubtedly had its brighter moments, on the whole he loathed it like poison. For one thing, he had always been a rather solitary boy, who liked being by himself, and here there was no privacy and no solitude, he slept, bathed, dressed, worked, ate, and played in the almost unbroken companionship of numerous others, most of whom he might have liked if he had been able to seek their company voluntarily, but it was thrust upon him at all hours, and often he just ached to be alone and to be let alone. He discovered that languages were easy, and that mathematics were not. The head was a believer in discipline, and visits to his study were frequent and unpleasant; “Come to my study, Kingston,” and you went. Sometimes you deserved it and sometimes you didn’t, and very occasionally you deserved it and didn’t get it, which atoned for a lot. Michael enjoyed cricket, the clean smack of the bat, which is unlike any other sound, and the smell of mown turf, and the sharp definition of white flannels against green, and the sting of a hard catch well held, and the taste of grass when you pull the stem out carefully so that it comes up white and sappy at the end and you nibble it, and the sun is hot on your back as you lie on the ground waiting to go in, and the other fellows are talking and arguing and you hear without listening in the days of thy youth when the evil days come not nor the years draw nigh—God! let me get out of this! Stop. Don’t start that again.

The stuffy mixed smell of the lab on hot afternoons, and particularly that afternoon when he and Chator and Minster were mooning about looking for nothing in particular. Michael leaned negligently against the end of a form and said: “There’s a pump.”

“Ass,” said Chator, “it’s been there simply ages.”

“And there’s some rubber tubing,” went on Michael.

“It might be quite a good wheeze to pump something somewhere,” said Minster.

“And there’s a gas-bracket,” said Michael. “If you pump air into the gas-pipe, what happens?”

“It wouldn’t go in,” said Chator. “The pressure of the gas would keep it out.”

“Not if the pressure of the pump was greater than the pressure of the gas,” said Minster.

“Gas will compress, won’t it? Air will.”

“If you get up more pressure than the pipes will hold there’ll be a bang somewhere, that’s all.”

“It will go back along the pipes to where it comes from at the gas place—”

“Not if there’s some sort of non-return valve—”

“Let’s try,” said Michael; so they connected the pump to the gas-bracket, turned on the tap, and pumped. Whatever became of the gas, it put up no opposition, and for two solid hours they pumped, taking it in turns.

Later on, when they were all doing evening prep, the jets in the big chandelier were lit and threw the usual yellow glow on the usual dog’s-eared books and inky fingers and ragged blotting-paper and variously shaped heads bent over the long table—

“I say! It’s a wash-out,” whispered Chator.

“Wait,” said Michael, and went on with Cæsar having embarked wherever the winds should take him—

“Nothing’s happening,” said Minster in low tones.

“Wait,” said Michael again. “Hang these ablative absolutes, they mean too many things.”

At that moment the lights quivered and sank, rose again, as it were gibbered, and went out. At once all over the school arose sounds of indignation and inquiry and excitement, till the gas was turned off and candles brought and discipline supervened. Next morning the gas company was summoned, and said there was nothing amiss but a little air in the pipes. Michael could have told them that. No, there was no evidence as to how the air got in the pipes.

So they got away with it that time, and later on saw fit to try again, but with water instead of air. Again the lights quivered and sank, but this time little fountains rose and played from each darkened gas-jet, and fell gently upon the upturned faces beneath the great chandelier. This time the gas company protested. Air, they said in effect, was all very well, air in the pipes was a thing that might occasionally happen to the best-regulated supply, but water, no. Definitely not water. They would put it right, certainly, but they disclaimed responsibility, and it remained a mystery.

“That was rather decent,” said Chator.

“Yes, quite decent,” said Michael.

Tommy Hambledon took the Scripture lesson on one occasion. It was not really his job, because he taught modern languages, and his ideas of doing so were not stereotyped. He taught the boys how to talk effectively to taxi-drivers and how to ask for whatever they might happen to want, and not to be obviously British but to adopt the manners, customs, and modes of thought of whatever country they should be in. He always went abroad for his holidays, most often to Germany, and this was curious, for he was a parson’s son with exiguous private means, his pay was small, and his tastes cheerful and expensive. Yet he could always go abroad in the holidays and one would really wonder where he got the money from unless one had an idea that perhaps he sometimes did something else besides teaching languages at Chappell’s School. Of course no such idea occurred to Michael at the time, but afterwards he knew. Hambledon used to say that when he landed at Ostend he stood his stick upright in the sand, and in that direction in which it fell he went forward. Perhaps. Anyway, he was very good at languages, and a good bat, too, and he encouraged young Kingston.

The portion assigned for the lesson was the eleventh chapter of the second book of Samuel. He skated awkwardly but firmly over the highly informal relations between David and the wife of Uriah the Hittite, but when he came to the fighting he had both feet on familiar ground.

So Joab “assigned Uriah unto a place where he knew that valiant men were,” and when the people of besieged Rabbah made a sortie Uriah was among the fallen, as is likely to be the case with valiant men. Others of his party also died from arrows shot from the walls, and from “stones and boiling water and molten lead thrown down from upper windows when it came to street fighting,” said Tommy Hambledon, getting perhaps a little mixed in his periods, for after all it was not his subject. “Boiling oil was another good idea, too, it does tend to discourage people. You know, all down the ages men’s ideas about war have got more and more ingenious and beastly. Better and brighter arrows, and bigger and noisier guns, first solid shot and then explosives. There will be another war soon,” he went on, drawing squiggles on his blotting-paper, “quite soon, and it will be much beastlier than any war ever was before. There will be bombs dropped from aeroplanes, starting fires, and there will be gas. Gas to choke you and blind you and blister you, and high-explosive shells, and shrapnel, which is very noticeably unpleasing. Yes, there’ll be war quite soon,” he went on, looking from one to another with an expression which Michael now recognized as pity, “and you boys will be in it. You will stand firm and take what comes,” he said, “for if a country is worth living in, it is worth fighting for. Let us return to Second Samuel.”

At the end of the lesson he came over to Michael, who was putting his books together.

“You must work really hard at your languages, Kingston. They may be useful.”

“How, sir?”

“There are other ways of making yourself useful to your country besides fighting, boy.”

“I don’t think I understand, sir.”

“Never mind. I can’t do anything about it, but if you asked your people to let you give up classics and take up bookkeeping and modern languages, it might be a help to you some day. Think it over.”

Accordingly, next term Michael found himself learning German as well as French, and sometimes sitting at a desk by himself working at languages instead of other things he should, officially, have been doing. He took to German as to something once loved and temporarily forgotten, and Tommy Hambledon looked on.

Michael joined the O.T.C. and learned to shoot on the miniature range till the day came when he was handed the regulation army long rifle, considerably taller than himself, and told to see what he could do at five hundred yards. Helpful seniors told him to hold the rifle well away from his shoulder as then it didn’t kick so hard; he tried it once. He aimed at six o’clock on the target, shut his eyes, and pulled. After that, things went better, and the five shots went down.

Somebody shouted something, and someone nearer repeated it. “He’s made a four-inch group.”

“What’s that?” thought Michael. “Wonder what I’ve done now.”

But when Hambledon came up and gave him half a crown he gathered that a four-inch group was desirable, and shooting became a hobby of his.

In July 1914 the O.T.C. went to North Camp, Aldershot, Michael being just fifteen, and began for the first time to learn platoon drill instead of company drill. . . . Hambledon was there of course; as well as running the O.T.C. at Chappell’s he was a captain of Territorials. Rumours began to fly about, and were discussed and argued while the boys fished in the canal or bathed in the Mytchett Lake. On one occasion the Public Schools O.T.C. had a night attack and got lost in the darkness and all mixed up, so they gathered into groups of schools and yelled for the others. “E-eton, E-eton! Win-chester! Harrow, Harrow! Chappell’s! Oundle!” till they sorted themselves out and marched in at one in the morning, to drink hot cocoa and munch biscuits and roll into bed feeling like men.

On another day some of them wandered into the artillery lines and watched men loading up ammunition wagons with live shell and thereafter departing for an unspecified destination. That was on Wednesday, July 29, and every day the tension increased.

One night they had a sing-song, and shouted the choruses of “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’ ” and “The moon shines bright on pretty Redwing,” and “Anybody here seen Kelly?” and a tall captain sang “Just a wee deoch-an-doris,” which somehow gave one small boy a lump in his throat. Or perhaps Michael only imagined the small boy felt like that, for the man was killed a fortnight later. And every hour the tension increased.

There was a Daily Mail newspaper kiosk—just a wooden shed—at North Camp in those days, and on Sunday the 2nd of August it did not open, so no news was available. The angry troops turned it over, for every moment the tension increased.

On Monday, August the 3rd, quite early in the morning, the boys were paraded and told they had two hours in which to break camp, proceed to the station, and take themselves home. They were going home, of course, because it was holiday time, and they had to take themselves home because the O.T.C. officers, including Hambledon, had urgent business to attend to elsewhere. With one accord these men vanished from the places where they had been known, and most of them had done with the schools in which they had taught.

After a fruitless attempt to join, as a bugler-boy, an army filled to capacity with bugler-boys, Michael went back to school, but nothing was the same. Tommy Hambledon had apparently disappeared completely; no one seemed to know where he was or what he was doing. Seniors left untimely, and sometimes their names reappeared on a list which the head himself wrote out and himself pinned up on the notice board. Junior masters also left, and their places were taken by queer old gentlemen, some of whose names were a legend at Chappell’s; it seemed impossible that old Quest, who gave Minster’s father such a memorable tanning for blowing the big window bodily out of the lab when making gunpowder, could still be alive. The time went on, the war was not over by Christmas, and Michael was getting more restless every day.