Growing Up

CHAPTER I-2

Though Mr. Beedle was a gentle man, no one dared to speak to him of his losses except General Waring, under whom Mr. Beedle had fought in the last war and who had consented to stand godfather to Henry Beedle.

“I take it kindly of the General,” Mr. Beedle had said to his wife, “to speak to me about the cup and ask about Henry, him having lost his own son. And it’s worse for him, for young Mr. George won’t ever come home and our Henry will, when the war’s over.”

To which in a general way Mrs. Beedle agreed, though she privately wished sometimes that her Henry had been killed, sooner than have to live with foreigners for years on their nasty foreign food and not enough of it and no one to look after his socks, besides his poor dad worrying his heart out all the time. Then she would blame herself for ingratitude, cry quietly, and get on with preparing Mr. Beedle’s next meal.

The tide of evacuees had surged back to London, with the exception of a certain number of the younger children whose parents were not disposed to tempt a Providence which had made it unnecessary for them to take any further financial or moral responsibility for their offspring, and a small gang who found it wise to keep away from the London police. Foreign regiments from counties beyond Barsetshire had been billeted in the town or put in camp in the neighbourhood. The volume of traffic through Winter Overcotes increased as the staff diminished; Mr. Beedle’s gentle face became more lined; but the war showed no signs of ending.

His brooding thoughts were broken by the whistle of the 6.25 from the beginning of the viaduct.

“Here it is,” yelled Doris Phipps to Lily-Annie.

Mr. Beedle shuddered. That anyone should be unconscious of the pervading femininity of a fast passenger train was to him almost criminal and certainly showed a feeble intellect.

“I hope Sid’s in the van,” yelled Lily-Annie to Doris. “He’s a lovely man.”

Mr. Beedle shuddered again. No porter he had known would ever have dared to speak of Sidney Crackman, with thirty years’ service behind him, honoured guard of the Line’s best passenger trains, as anything but Mr. Crackman. And here were a couple of silly girls, wearing trousers too, calling him Sid. If it had been light he would have Given them a Look. But it was dark and he was honest enough to own that if it had been light they probably wouldn’t have noticed the Look, and would only have thought he had indigestion if they had. And after all they were good girls, calling the name of the darkened station loudly and as clearly as it was in their nature to do, answering questions with uncouth goodwill, helping mothers to drag children and suitcases out of the train, and now rallying at the guard’s van where Crackman seemed to be giving them as good as he got. It was a funny world. He moved towards the booking-hall to keep an eye on Bill Morple who was acting-ticket-collector, very much under protest, for at Melicent Halt he had been in the booking-office, and though he had doubled this duty with porter, he felt that he had lost status and that things would have been better ordered in Russia.

This evening all was going smoothly, though Mr. Beedle could not help contrasting the passengers with his pre-war friends. When cars and petrol abounded Winter Overcotes had been the distributing centre for some fifteen miles round. Lord and Lady Bond at Staple Park, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer at Worsted, Sir Harry and Lady Waring at Beliers Priory, Mr. and Mrs. Middleton at Skeynes, all the best people in fact, were as apt as not to use Winter Overcotes, for there was even before the war only one through train a day down the local line which runs to the small junction at Shearings. Now all Mr. Beadle’s friends got out on the high level, stumbled downstairs in the blackout to the low level, waited for half an hour, and steamed slowly and jerkily in cold dark carriages to their various stations. The people who passed through Mr. Beedle’s booking-hall would always be treated courteously, for he knew what was due to himself and to the Line, but they were an alien race without the law, and very often on the shady side of it, trying to use a day return after the legal hours, or get away with a last month’s season ticket, thus driving the new ticket-collector to pale-faced frenzy.

On the other side of the barrier a tall, good-looking, grey-haired woman was waiting for the crowd to go through. Mr. Beedle recognized Lady Waring and touched his cap.

“Good evening, Beedle,” said Lady Waring. “I’m meeting Sir Harry for once, because I’ve been on Red Cross business all day and have a car. Do you think he has forgotten and gone down to the low level?”

“I will go at once myself and see, my lady,” said Mr. Beedle. “Will you wait in my office? I have the stove going.”

“Thanks, Beedle, I’d love to,” said Lady Waring, “but your platform ticket machine is empty.”

“That will be quite all right, my lady,” said Mr. Beedle, shocked that Lady Waring should assume herself to be as other mortals. “Come through. Morple, don’t let that happen again.”

Ever since the staff had been called up, the question of whose duty it was to look after the platform tickets had raged, dividing the remaining staff vertically, horizontally, sideways, causing friction at least twice a week. Willingly would Mr. Beedle have attended to it himself, but none knew better than he the exact point at which prestige is impaired. He could help with parcels, he had even as we know once swept the platform; but the line had to be drawn somewhere and the platform ticket machine was the limit. Unfortunately, Bill Morple also felt that it was the limit. A man who had (to help the war effort) taken a position far below his proper rank and what was more had to put up with sauce from people who thought themselves someone just because they had an out-of-date season to London; such a man, if he had any proper pride, would not fill the platform ticket machine. But unfortunately Mr. Beedle was his superior officer and could be quite nasty (by which Bill Morple meant that Mr. Beedle never lost his temper) if crossed. So as the last passenger had gone, Bill Morple, whistling the “International” rather badly to himself, went and did as he was told, while Mr. Beedle conducted Lady Waring to the station-master’s office, handed her to a chair, and went to look for her husband.

By this time the 6.25 had gone and the station appeared empty. Fearing that Lady Waring might be right, Mr. Beedle walked down the platform towards the steps which led to the low level, when a group detached itself from the darkness and came rather noisily towards him. To his horror it consisted of Sir Harry pulling a large porter’s truck, Doris Phipps and Lily-Annie Pollett, with cigarettes in their mouths, pushing behind.

“Evening, Beedle,” said Sir Henry, “I found these young women in difficulties, so I’m giving a hand. All these heavy cases are too much for girls. What’s in them, eh?”

Mr. Beedle turned a small torch on them.

“Stationery, Sir Harry, for the Barchester Life and General Assurance,” he said. “Their office in Barchester was taken over by the Ministry of Textile Shortage, so they took the Old Court House here where the Town Council had its offices, and the Town Council took over Woolstaplers’ Hall that had been got ready for an army convalescent home, and——”

“Oh, that’s why they took my house for a convalescent home,” said Sir Harry. “I always wondered. Still, I don’t see why an insurance company needs all this stationery when there’s a paper shortage. Well, well. Is her ladyship anywhere about?”

“In my office, General,” said Mr. Beedle.

Sir Harry gave the trolley a strong pull to get it going again. Doris and Lily-Annie, who had been sitting on the back of it, were violently jolted and screamed with delight.

“There you are, girls,” said Sir Harry, stopping suddenly outside the station-master’s office, so that both girls screamed again. “Run along and don’t smoke too much. Bad for you.”

“Thanks ever so,” said Lily-Annie.

“Isn’t he a lovely man,” said Doris Phipps, loudly and admiringly.

“Now then, you girls,” said Mr. Beedle. “That’s enough. It’s Sir Harry Waring that’s been kind enough to help you. Time you went off duty now.”

Both girls said “Ow,” and Lily-Annie remarked that she’d laugh fit to die if she called anyone Sir Harry, to which Doris Phipps answered that it was reelly Sir Henry, but people called him Sir Harry because he was a Bart.

“What’s that?” said Lily-Annie.

“Ow; just what they are,” said Doris. “Come on, or we’ll miss the train. Sid Pollett’s in the van to-night. Hullo, Bill. Lazy boy you are. Why didn’t you give me and Lily-Annie a hand with the truck?”

“Old Beedle made me fill the platform ticket machine,” said Bill Morple. “If we was in Russia things ’ud be different. In Russia they’re all alike and no one gives orders. If we was in Russia old Beedle’d get the Order of the Boot, coming it over me the way he does.”

“There’s plenty of help for them as asks,” said Lily-Annie. “Dawris and me got a ride on the truck. Sir Henry Waring gave us a ride with the parcels.”

“And he’s a Bart and a reel gentleman,” said Doris Phipps.

“He’s a lovely man,” said Lily-Annie. “Quite my ideel.”

“In Russia,” said Bill Morple, “both you girls would be in the Red Army and a good job too.”

“If we was in Russia we shouldn’t be here,” said Lily-Annie, “and then we shouldn’t see you, and that ’ud be a blessing. Come on, Dawris.”

With loud laughter both girls clattered down the steps, leaving Bill Morple to hang angrily about till the 7.5 up had come and gone and he could go off duty. Mr. Beedle put the Warings into their car and retired to his office and his papers, somehow cheered by the meeting.

Beliers Priory, towards which the Warings were driving through the dark, was built near the site of a pre-Reformation abbey of which little now remained but the ground-plan, exquisitely inlaid in green turf by H.M. Office of Works just before the war, and a string of pools known as the Dipping Ponds, probably stew ponds for the abbot’s table. The Priory, so called for no reason, unless the proximity of the abbey ruins was one, was built some seventy years ago by Sir Harry Waring’s grandfather. His wife, a City heiress of considerable beauty, had persuaded him to employ an architect much in favour in her circles. The result was a pile which combined inconvenience and discomfort in the highest form. It was built round a central hall into which a skylight gently dripped whenever it rained, so that Sir Harry’s earliest remembrances were of bowls and basins on the floor tripping up the unwary. The bedrooms on the first floor were approached by a dark corridor, only lighted by leaded casements opening upon the hall. The kitchens were down several hundred yards of stone passage, the housekeeper’s room looked north into a fine laurel hedge, the kitchen, like the hall, was lighted only from the roof and badly at that. Guests, ladies’ maids and valets were often lost for a quarter of an hour at a time. The one bathroom in the original plan was about twenty feet by thirty and fifteen feet high and the bath a massive affair in a wide mahogany surround on a kind of dais, with an apse over the round end. Sir Harry’s father had divided the original bathroom into cubicles for his hunting friends and sacrificed one or two of the smaller dressing-rooms to make bathrooms for the ladies, but the original water system which burnt about twenty tons of coal a week was still in full fling, copper pipes and all.