R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield by To Serve Them All My Days

odds with the honey-coloured local stone used for the extensions.
    There were really two schools here, the tall squarish pile that reared itself four sides of the quad (and even after seventy years of Exmoor weathering, still looked like a baroque folly) and the utilitarian additions added over the years, that had already adapted themselves to the green-brown hillside, a straggle of farm buildings, and unfenced pastures bounded by the sports fields in the south and west, and plantation windbreak to the east, and the crest of the moor to the north. Herries and Howarth were right about the decaying fabric. It had needed extensive renovation long before the war began. Now it was beginning to look seedy, scarred and very shabby.
    Most of the classrooms, together with Big School, and the headmaster's house that occupied the whole of the south side of the quad, were housed in the older block. Big Hall, the kitchens and all but one of the dormitories, were in the newer block. Long, stone-flagged passages connected these quarters with the quad. Branching from it, one floor up, was a wainscoted passage known as the Rogues' Gallery. Here, in a sombre row, hung portraits of Bamfylde's five headmasters, including a younger, cherubic-looking Herries. Opposite them, posed in wide-eyed, dutiful groups, were football and cricket teams, reaching back to the earliest days of the school when nobody wore special clothing for games and everyone played cricket and football in workaday boots and shirtsleeves. There was a veritable warren of music rooms, laundry rooms,a boothole and a stray classroom or two about here, together with a school museum and, on the floor above, a range of attics used as storerooms. There was also a garret where, once a fortnight, the barber from Challacombe, the nearest market town, plied his clippers. One of Algy Herries's aversions was overlong hair and the boys, from the Fifth downwards, were shorn at frequent intervals. For a day or so after the appearance of Bastin, the barber, known and reviled as 'Sweeney' by the boys, everyone on the premises (the Sixth had won an exemption charter) went about with a whitish skull and Bastin was seen to drive away with a sack of clippings. The boys swore that he used them to make hairshirts that he sold to monks, but David later discovered that a condition of his contract was to dispose of his debris after a mass haircut, the school being desperately short of domestic staff.
    Apart from the headmaster's house, which was spacious and comfortably furnished, and some of the quarters occupied by living-in masters, the premises were bleak and daunting to a newcomer. When he left the temporary refuge of the O.B.A. President's room, David was given a sitting-room and tiny bedroom in Havelock's House, ruled by Ferguson, the French master. Mrs Ferguson was a Frenchwoman and reminded David of the black-draped madames he had seen counting their takings in estaminets behind the lines. The Fergusons were a staid, methodical couple, who left him to his own devices in his limited free time, and he grew to like his little sitting-room that looked south over a stretch of moor dotted with birchwoods and the rhododendron forest he had noted on his first walk from the station.
    The aspect of the moor changed dramatically during his first few weeks up here. When he had arrived, in early March, the countryside had a wind-swept, breathless look, as though its hardihood had been taxed to the limit by winter gales and frosts, but even before the summer term opened, spring had enlarged its hold. All the beeches and elms in the two drives began to sprout new leaves, a sheen of bright green varying the mottled pattern of gold and russet, and a rash of primroses appeared in the breast-high banks, relieved every few yards by great plumes of cow-parsley and a scatter of scarlet campion. Soon, in the folds under the copses, where the little river Brent ran to join the Bray or the Barle (it seemed undecided