For an otherwise blank hour of the week Barney the English master, who had served as a pilot on the Western Front, read to them from a Penguin Book called Caged Birds, about RFC officers imprisoned by the Germans during the Great War. Barney may have been one of them, since he related their adventures with such feeling, but nobody bothered to ask. Herbert borrowed the book, to go through it by himself, as if to memorize the cunning mechanics of escape. Dominic scorned such interest in boring anecdotes of compasses hidden in jam stones, and maps concealed between the linings of overcoats, or secreted inside cucumbers which were sent to the prisoners in Red Cross relief parcels.
Herbert was enthralled by the deception played by the grounded fliers on their captors during months of patient labour. Their plans incorporated the tiniest details, as little as possible left to chance or luck. Those who tried were the elite, and the ones who got clean away were the heroes. He finished the book in his favourite refuge of the library, then took down the large twenty-year-old Times Atlas and turned its pages to various countries of the world, but came back to the double sheet of southern England to mull over the place names and decide on what dot he would most like to be.
Parents who could spare themselves from work of national importance came for a quick look at their sons, bringing what food or comforts they could. To Herbert they appeared gaunt and miniature, out of place among the paths and high-up crenellations, people from the outside, another world.
Dominic’s people drove up the lane in a Vauxhall Kingston Coupé, an elegant vehicle admired and wondered at by all the boys. When his sister Rachel also stepped down from the running board the car seemed even more the right motor to call at their gloomy school. Herbert wondered where they had found so much black market petrol, as he pressed against a bush to view them across the V for Victory Garden.
Rachel seemed angelic compared to her squat, pimply, ginger-haired brother. Staring was not done but, unable to resist, and though his jacket was wet with dew, Herbert fixed on her peachy cheeks, crane-like neck, and tied-back blonde hair swaying between slender shoulders as she strolled along the path.
A year younger than Dominic, she looked down on him by height, and also no doubt in spirit. Then she spotted Herbert and, quicker than any lizard, pushed the point of her tongue out and back, forcing him to wash away the tide of crimson at being caught like a dismal snooper.
Schoolwork clocked the weeks along, time he thought could be better spent though he did not know how or in what place. Rachel’s face glowed in front of his eyes, a phantom to induce restlessness and longing, which detached him further from a system more oppressive than any German prison camp. He became less boisterous, even taciturn, which he supposed was due to something called growing up.
The precision of Latin, maths and history enticed him into high marks at every test, though he scored the minimum in French. Barney the English master occasionally praised his essays, especially a sparse yet colourful few pages on his reaction to the D-Day Landings called ‘The Taking of Treasure Island’. Herbert described a skilful campaign fought by the crew of the Hispaniola, gave them Allied names and armed them for mutual slaughter with modern weapons. The Hispaniola was a tank-landing craft, and Ben Gunn commanded the French Resistance on shore.
Barney smoothed his bald head, and tapped his artificial leg with a ruler. ‘Such comparisons shiver the timbers of credibility, but the imaginative exercise, plus the writing, keeps it afloat. However, in places there’s a little too much striving for Johnsonian orotundity — but, nearly top marks.’
A convoy of cumulonimbus clouds blackened a wide track from the hill in the west, and an autumn storm played over the school as they were leaving the sports field for tea. A cloudburst at the same time as the lightning sent hailstones like shrapnel to pepper the science sheds and make the lawns dance. Herbert paused, sheltering in the colonnade, and the sudden all-illuminating flash seemed meant for him alone. His eyes didn’t flicker, his firm gaze ready for another which, in his exhausted state after the game, lit his interior sufficiently for an idea to be planted and begin to grow.
A sulphurous explosion, synchronized with a bolt of lightning, shivered the windows, recalling the storms of Simla and his infant nightmare of a world divided, when the tree-covered sphere hovered as if to fall on his cradle and crush out all life. He could smile at such fear because the split had merely parted the bedrock of his existence and enabled him to see himself as two people instead of one.
The effect was to lighten the weight he seemed always to be carrying, though too many pictures went through his mind for him to pull out any that were connected, or even made sense, and he didn’t at first respond to the call of Simpson the games master: ‘Come on Thurgarton-Strang! Get a move on!’ Realizing that the name was his, Herbert sprinted after the others, wondering the strange thought as to how much longer he would either run when commanded, or recognize the name thrown over him like the disabling net of a gladiator in the arena. He laughed so loud in his strides that Dominic, trying to keep up, wanted to know what it was all about, and got a sharp elbow for his unanswerable question.
The Cadet Force did no campaigning because there was too much snow, followed by floods. An uninviting frontier of lapidary green lay between Herbert and the outside world. Even the birds looked as if they needed a tonic. Waterlogged fields beyond the trees made him shiver to look at them. His only diversions were trips with Uncle Richard to the Abbey Hotel in Malvern, and he afterwards treasured the pound note, which he kept in reserve with others for better weather.
The deepest gloom of the season was to be illuminated by a theatrical performance in the games hall, organized by the ingenious Latin master. Herbert joined the group to avoid the embarrassment of being co-opted, and fancied there might be some interest in acting a person he most certainly was not, on being given the part of Phaeton, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ‘I have to give a lecture by Phaeton on Fate,’ he quipped to Dominic.
His sky-blue coat was fitted together by the matron from old curtains, and the golden horned helmet made out of papier-mâché painted by Barney. A cluster of bulbs backed by a suspended mirror lit up the Sun God’s palace. Dominic, wrapped in an unused skirt of the secretary’s, was to play Clymene the mother, which part made his life a misery for weeks.
Herbert’s recitative, ‘as befitted a mythological character’ — said the dramaturge, designating his pompous self — was to be spoken with panache, a style which came easily once Herbert had been through the tedious work of memorizing, and learning how to fit in with the speech and action of others.
Transforming himself into the pampered and irresponsible Phaeton, he assumes a privileged strut when his mother informs him, now that he is grown-up, that Phoebus Apollo the Sun God is his father. After much boasting to Epiphus of his descent from a deity — no less — he swaggers off to the Sun God’s Palace of Light to be acknowledged.
Phoebus Apollo tells him it’s true that he is of divine origin, and Phaeton is so in love with the golden words, even more perhaps than he is with himself, that he wants to hear them again and again. His father, to convince him that he is indeed of a godly line, decides to prove it by telling him he has the power to grant any wish he cares to make.
Phaeton expatiates on the golden precision of time, and declaims on the Sun God’s control of the calendar, without which the earth would exist in eternal gloom. The only wish he could possibly make is to have a go at driving his father’s chariot of the sun across the heavens, from dawn in the east to darkness in the west.