The Tall Girl from Somerset Chapter 4 ´Harvey and Anne. September to June´ and Chapter 5 ´Henry back at School

 

Chapter 4

Harvey and Anne.  September to June.

Saturday came at last though it was only hours away.  Harvey´s car, of course, would not start!  Such is the cussedness of machines! He cycled to Anne’s college, apologized about the car, and they walked from there, through the Parks, slowly by the river, down to the centre of the city, had a coffee and then walked back again. They could have carried on walking together for hours.  And then on Sunday they met again.  The days passed, the weeks passed and then the months. That year went by too fast, too fast for both of them for it was Harvey’s last in Oxford.  For Anne it was the realisation of all that she felt that “university” would be when she had thought about it at school. At school the sixteen year-old looks forward to “university”.  It is the Promised Land, where anything can happen. It fulfils the hopes for some.  For many, it is a terrible disappointment. For Harvey it was the very happy culmination of four happy years.  He had gone through university easily, one of the lucky few to ride carefree over the mountains of youth.  He hadn’t wanted to change the world, he hadn’t wanted to feed the hungry masses of Africa at a stroke or to bring down the government in one massive demonstration in Trafalgar Square.  Managing a reasonable pass in his exams and making it into his college rugby team, playing cricket in the summer and then some acting and a lot of parties: this had been enough for him.  The world was OK as it was.  If he could enjoy it and help one or two people around him to do the same, then that was as much as he wanted.

The university year is short anyway, but for Anne and Harvey it seemed a matter of weeks.

They met in November.  Autumn fell into winter, and it rained and it was muddy.  The frosts came and went through the rugby season.  Spring grew into summer, the hedges turned green and when summer came, so did the exams.  And that is the university year at Oxford.  Like youth, it is very short.  And like all wishes, you only have three.  Just three years.

There had been many happy drinks and walks.  There had been hours spent together in the consuming business of the day-to-day: shopping and eating, going to the cinema and mending punctures on Anne’s bike.  ‘Why do his tyres never puncture while mine always do?’   Writing essays, looking for books in libraries and talking late into the night.  ‘He took me to films and I took him to concerts.’

But next September, in September when the year becomes serious again, they parted. Yes, they parted.  “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”  He wanted to be a teacher and went to Manchester for his year of teacher training.  Why?  Why didn’t he do this year in Oxford?  He told Anne he just needed a change and that, he felt, was true.

What could Anne do except look forward bleakly to her second year, a year on her own.

A secondary school in the early sixties did not equip its sixth formers for a love life. Double maths, double French.  No double tactics of love. And Greek and Latin?  What had Anne learned from that?  Dido deserted by Aeneas?  Ariadne dumped on Naxos?  Not much encouragement there!  She had no resources to fall back on, no way of making him stay, and so Harvey went, up to Manchester.

‘I’ll never forget the day he left though I hate remembering it.  It was a Tuesday, and it was a wet and misty Tuesday. Tuesday, of all the days of the week, is the day I hate the most.  When has anything good happened on a Tuesday?  I was OK while I helped him pack.  I could find things, sort out things and then pack them up.  If you’re doing something, you’re OK. It’s doing nothing that’s fatal.  That’s when the mind opens and the worries rush in, when you’re doing nothing.  There were even one or two bright moments, I remember.  One was when I counted 23 single socks.  I made a pile and counted them.  Yes, he had 23 odd socks. But then it was finished, the bags were done, and the last tea was drunk, and the mugs were washed and that was it and he left.  The Mini went up the road and round the corner and that was it.  Don’t watch him out of sight!  That’s bad luck!  Who said that?  It was Grandma.  I remember she used to say that.’

And she watched the smoke of the exhaust as the overloaded Mini struggled up the road, and she felt sick.  Her head was heavy, her stomach was weak, and life stretched ahead.  She tried to keep busy.  Going through all the steps of making a meal was a help, but then the meal was made and it was eaten, or some of it was eaten, and she was alone, and life had to be faced again.  “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Where’s the sweetness?   Only when there is a tomorrow.  The line needs the rhyme. Sorrow needs a tomorrow, and people need something to look forward to.  You must have something on the horizon. 

A night’s rest helped, and so did the things that had to be done next day.   But love is never fair. It lifts you up for a time, and then drops you down again, and then you’re worse off than you were before.

Two more years to go.  Two more years to do for her degree.

So during those sad days in late September, when the mornings and evenings are damp with autumn, and you think you can cross the lawn without getting your shoes wet, and you try it, and you come back to the kitchen with them soaked, in late September then, Anne slowly packed her suitcases for the new university year.

‘Why shouldn’t I meet someone else.  I don’t want to meet anyone else.  Work, work work.  That’s always the solution, isn’t it?  How do retired people manage?  Or have they learned to face life by then?  Yes, that’s the way forward.  Work.’

 

 

Chapter 5

Henry back at school

 

It was right, that old school book.  Can’t remember the name of it now, but it had a blue hardback cover.  All the school books were hardback then. And the part in between was hard too!

In spite of page after page of solid text there were still some writers who could inspire.  There always are.  I remember the opening of a chapter in a history book.  It was about Egypt.  I still remember it.  I read it when I was 8 and over 70 years later it’s as clear as clear.  The chapter began:

 

“The time has come,”  the Walrus said

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax

Of cabbages and kings.”

 

The book began, “We are not going to talk about cabbages in this chapter but we will have something to say about all the other things that Lewis Carroll mentions.”    What a way to start a history lesson!  Of course we all looked through the chapter to find sealing wax and shoes just to check the book hadn’t made a mistake.  That’s good teaching isn’t it?  Getting the reader hooked! Anyway, this writer planted a little flower by the highway of the history syllabus. It’s a pity that he didn’t mention cabbages, though.

 

Going back to the blue book, chapter two was ‘The Seven Ages of Man’.  There was the text, you know, ‘All the world’s a stage’ and so on, but the pictures on the other page showed each of the seven ages with little drawings.  How boring the text books were in those days.  ‘Text’ was the right word!  Normally they were text and nothing but text from start to finish.  And it was heavy stuff, not the lively prose of Bryson.  Far from it, I’m afraid!  Not many illustrations at all, so you appreciated the few that there were.  And no colour.  Definitely no colour.  That came later.  It was page after page of black text.  Now, where was I?  Ah yes, there was the schoolboy, then the lover and so on. And the pictures went in a circle.  The poor old chap sans teeth, sans eyes and sans everything was right next to the mewling, puking baby.  Full circle, you see.  We end up where we start.

Well, we do if we’re lucky.  What’s so sad is when the thread is cut half way.  A road accident or something.  Half the road untravelled.  That’s what’s sad. Life should be circular, you see.

I was at school at Waterbury.  It’s a small city with a big cathedral.  The cathedral brooded over the rest of the houses like a mother hen over her chicks.  The city was so small that not much of it was outside the sphere or even the shadow of the great cathedral.

Ah yes, school.  Rugby on Monday afternoons, Thursday afternoons,

 

Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons.  Even then, Friday was the best

 

day of the week.  I don’t know why, because the weekend, looking back,

 

was hardly two days of freedom.  School on Saturday morning, rugby on

 

Saturday afternoon and then more prep.  Anyway, where was I? Ah yes,

 

rugby on Monday.  Down on the rugby field, a furlong of level meadow,

 

near the edge of the city by Mount Woods.  The city was very small.  We

 

walked from the school which was by the cathedral to the rugby field in 10

 

minutes, and the rugby field was in the country.  November evenings, and

 

in a pause in the game, when the scrum was down and we in the backs had

 

a second to ourselves to think about life in general, you could see in the

 

distance St Aidan’s with its tower.  The tower had windows and turrets, 

 

and looked like a grey owl in the distance. The two windows were the eyes

 

and the turrets were the ears.   That’s what it looked like in the November

 

mist. An owl looking across over the low red roofs of the houses to where

 

we were playing.  The ball’s out now, concentrate, scrum half, fly half, me,

 

look for the gap, always look for the gap, go for it, through it, now there’s

 

only the full back to beat, on with the game!

 

The school was in many different buildings, old buildings scattered around

the liberties.  Each building was a young bird’s flutter, as Keats would  

 

have it, from the cathedral, and the cathedral dominated the life of the

 

school.   How many times did we walk up and down the Liberty!  Even

 

between classes. 

 

Everything at school changed with the seasons.  In the

 

December evenings the air was crisp and cold and at 4 o’clock it began to

 

get dark.  The day was closing down and the evening was saying, ‘Go

 

inside now.  Go home!’  The lights of the houses all said, ‘Come in!’  The

 

fields, the hedges and the lanes were all shutting up for the night.  The

 

birds had given up and turned in long ago.  All life had moved inside. 

 

The houses were turning on their lights, making the rooms as cheerful and

 

cosy as possible.  Well, I’m wrong there.  The houses of the good folk of

 

Waterbury may have been cosy but our dormitories had no heating all the

 

winter through.  They were enormous fridges.  You went to bed and waited

 

for what seemed to be hours, and was probably twenty minutes or so, for

 

your feet to warm up.  They were long minutes though, very long. 

 

Rugby finished at half past four.  Then back, shower, change.  Always in a rush.  There was no time to hang around.  No time for melancholy.  Ten to five.  Ten to five in the afternoon.  I would be in the passage at school queuing for tea. Ten to five in the afternoon. Stands the cathedral clock at 10 to 5?  We would join the queue in the corridor and shuffle forward to the hatch that opened from the big high kitchen. At the hatch we collected a mug of tea, six slices of bread with a small cube of butter and a little jam and, on Sundays only, a slice of cake.  On Sundays only, remember.  Then up the stone steps and left into the dining room.  After tea it was prep, chapel, supper, prep and then a few minutes of free time before bed. And that was the evening, week in week out, term after term.   

That was the Waterbury day, and even now, after 70 years, I still go by parts it.  It’s 5 o’clock now, so I’m late for tea.