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

which) acres of bluebells dusted the margins, like early morning mist masking the shallow valley. The sky patterns changed minute by minute, now streaked and dappled with bluish trailers, now a jumble of plumped-up pillows, gashed by gusts of wind that came soughing down from the upper moor. This high land stretched away into the far distance, aseries of brown and grey ridges, broken here and there by the blur of woods where pockets of ash, sycamore, thorn and elderberry had found some kind of refuge from the north-easterlies and south-westerlies that Herries said took turn and turn about from October to May.
    The air and its landscape improved his health, soothing his ragged nerves and inducing a state of suspended dreaminess when he was not occupied in class, or with games, or dormitory supervision. Slowly, week by week, the Western Front began to recede, an old wound he was learning to live with, and sometimes the war seemed so remote that it might have been fought by Wellington or Marlborough. He was helped in this by his growing rapport with the boys.
    He had his favourites or, if not favourites, then his star-performers, whom he saw as he had once seen the section leaders of his platoon. There was a star-performer in every group and round him were gathered his acolytes. The mystique of leadership was as obvious here as in the trenches and he found he could soon spot the rankers marked down for a stripe. Boyer, of the Lower Fourth, was such a one, with Dobson as his runner-up. Blades, in the Upper Third, was another, a handsome boy who took the leadership of his group for granted and was said by Howarth to have an original mind. 'Might even write some good verse when he matures,' Howarth said, and then, as though unwilling to forgo the characteristic touch of acidity, 'Poor devil!' Below Blades, in the Remove, was Bickford, a lumbering fourteen-year-old, lazy as a mastiff in the sun and attended, wherever he went, by his two henchmen, Rigby, a farmer's son, and Ford, whose father was said to be a bookmaker. Bickford, although indolent, was a bit of a bully, much feared by the urchins of the Lower Third and Second Form, over whom he held sway, a slothful, medieval despot, who could be mollified by tribute or subservience. The sort of boy, David thought, who needed watching, although his grin was infectious and he could sometimes exhibit a certain inventiveness. David discovered this one day when Bickford made use of a warped floorboard to set the stationery cupboard rocking without apparent agency, declaring that the manifestation was proof of the existence of the Remove ghost, a failed master of Bull's era who had, so the story ran, swallowed salts of lemon and been buried in Stonecross churchyard with a suicide's gravestone placed at a different angle from all the other monuments.
    He grew to like some of the older boys in the Sixth, most of whom would be leaving to join one or other of the Services at the end of summer term.Cooper, Fosdyke and Scrubbs-Norton were typical of this cadre, boys who had come to Bamfylde in the last year of peace, and were now prefects and far better at keeping order than some of the younger masters. Their eagerness to get into uniform touched David as nothing else was able to. He already saw them in their Sam Brownes and British warms, seeking an opportunity to prove themselves as men, and while he was often tempted to introduce them to the stark realities out there, he never did. It would have been like telling five-year-olds that Father Christmas was a myth. He did get as far as accepting their shy invitations to take cocoa with them in their studies after prep, and would sit there discussing the war news with them, news that came to Bamfylde a day late in a bundle of papers from Challacombe. Luckily it was getting progressively more cheerful, with the successful British counter-attack at Villers Bretonneux, a unified Allied command and, in the first days of July, the beginning of the Le