Sail Upon the Land (8 page)

Armishaw’s stood on the Downs above Eastbourne, its high clock tower dominating the skyline and causing grumbling resentment among certain elements in the town. Bert had always been aware of the school, but without taking any kind of personal interest. Before he had ‘gone up the hill’, he had seen the senior boys out of uniform and on their superior bicycles on Sundays, circling aimlessly, going to the pictures or looking at girls. Their accents gave them away. To begin with it was strange to be transported up there himself, leaving his old friends down below.

It was all so odd that Bert didn’t dare open his mouth to begin with, but Payge was friendly and put him at his ease. He was what Bert imagined himself expected to be at some cloudy point in the future, used to the whole business of public school, a country house sitting there in the background not mattering too much. Bert had never seen his house, and had no clear ideas about what his random inheritance meant to him or his future. He didn’t know how he was meant to behave in this new world, so he got on with copying Payge’s manners and demeanour.

Payge’s bottomless appetite for fruit cake was the mortar that cemented their friendship, but it was Bert’s anguished confession that he had inherited a title, and that there was a house somewhere, that sealed their bond. Without fruit cake, Payge would undoubtedly have wandered back into his own year, having done a bit of perfunctory showing Bert where the lavs were in those first few weeks.

After a term of getting used to school, he felt he could trust Payge enough to confide. He waited until Payge was quite stupefied with food one autumn evening, and began stumblingly to explain himself.

‘Not Albert Hayes then. Mount-Hey? We should call you by your real name. But it’s a bit of a mouthful, is it pronounced like that?’

‘I don’t know. I never met any others. Everyone else is dead.’

He tried to recall what the solicitor had said, but only remembered the novel taste of cold Coca Cola sucked up a straw.

‘Well they would have to be, wouldn’t they? Otherwise you wouldn’t have inherited. Much more straightforward in my family. Lots of sons in every generation, including mine.’

Payge stopped, thinking.

‘We should shorten Mount-Hey, it’s sort of awkward sounding. Knock off the corners, wear it in a bit. Like St John is always called “Sinjin”.’

He rolled the name around his mouth, muttering the syllables over and over again. ‘Mount-Hey, Mount-Hey, Munt Hey, Munt-hay, Muntay, Munt, Munty.’

Bert sat quietly, not wanting to interrupt the process of his re-christening.

‘I think Munty,’ pronounced Payge at last. ‘It’s easy to say, and sort of amusing sounding. Could be the making of you. Goodbye, Hayes. Hello Munty.’

And he shook the younger boy’s hand, clapping him on the shoulder.

Munty, the cornucopia of decent tuck, now had a nickname too. His acceptance was assured. The name caught on as crazes run through closed communities, and it helped him to accept his new identity for himself. Shortened and tightened, it was less alarming, more friendly. He was grateful.

One evening, a couple of townies (as he had learned to call them) attacked a chap named Melville who had gone out for a smoke in the sheep pastures around the school. He was small but they had miscalculated, as Melville was the school’s best flyweight. Both townies had to be unstitched from barbed wire by the neighbouring farmer.

This marked the beginning of a series of skirmishes. Boys from the town would come loping up the Downs intent on mayhem and a little light sabotage, breaking windows and attacking isolated groups of smokers, gathered in the evenings under cover of the scant woodland on the south-facing side of the school. Bert didn’t smoke, but he liked to saunter down with the others. It was sociable, before it became exciting with the prospect of a battle in the ongoing war.

Boys who were used to them – usually farmers’ and landowners’ sons – had permission to keep shotguns in their housemaster’s gun cupboard. They were allowed to sign out their guns and go after rabbits in the gloaming among the woods and fields around the school. Payge was one of them.

One June evening when he was sixteen, Munty was preparing to go out in the company of a loose alliance of shooters and smokers, as they chatted idly about the prospect of an attack by townies.

‘It’s getting worse, you know,’ said Atkinson, displaying a healing split lip.

‘What did you do to him?’ Munty asked. He half dreaded meeting someone he knew up from the town in these encounters. Luckily it was unlikely, as the grammar school boys believed they were above ‘going up the hill’. It was the technical college lot who were rowdier and always spoiling for a fight. There was still a chance that one of his fellows from Mixed Infants might appear. Not only that, but he had to live in Eastbourne during the holidays and was visible in his grandparents’ shop. So far, no one had recognised him in the few years he had been at Armishaw’s. But still he didn’t have the confidence to go in, fists flailing, as he saw the other boys do.

‘I couldn’t get close enough, he had a longer reach,’ Atkinson was saying. ‘They don’t seem to care what they do now.’

Payge, his broken gun resting on his forearm, chipped in: ‘Perhaps we could give them a fright. Guns might be more effective than hockey sticks.’

Eggy, high-stepping in his nervy way past the group just outside the House Study doors, overheard.

‘Ha!’ He let out a barking laugh. ‘Why don’t you let off a couple of rounds over their heads? That’ll show the beggars who’s in charge.’ Grinning, he lurched onwards, leaving a trail of winks and sniggers in his wake. Bert wandered off with the smokers, the shooters choosing to go in another direction.

It was getting darker, and after an hour of peaceful chatting, the boys spotted shapes moving up the steep fields that separated the southern extreme of the school grounds from the outskirts of Eastbourne.

‘Here they come, lads,’ said Atkinson, touching his lip. ‘What shall we do tonight?’

Nothing, as it turned out – the pearly evening was rent by a series of loud bangs, followed by screams and yelps. The shadowy figures were galvanised and running very fast down the hill.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ yelled Munty. ‘Stop! You might kill someone.’

Then he recognised Payge coming towards him through the gloom.

‘No chance of that, old Munty,’ grinned Payge. ‘We swapped the shot in a few cartridges for rice and salt. My father told me about it, Burma police used to do it to disperse a crowd. Hurts like hell but can’t kill you. But we only used it to remove any risk as we were strictly firing over their heads. Didn’t hit anyone, I promise.’

He had a wild look in his eye and Munty recoiled. It had all been over in a matter of moments. The townies had scattered far and wide, and the shooters broke their guns and strode back towards Reynolds House with the smokers. In the distance could be heard the siren of first one, then more than one, police car. The boys climbed the stone steps to the veranda of the House Study, where they were met by an incandescent Eggy accompanied by several grave policemen.

‘What the hell’s been going on?’ the housemaster raged at the boys.

The police officer beside him said simultaneously, ‘What’s been going on here? There are reports of shotguns being discharged.’

‘But Sir,’ said Payge to Eggy, ‘We were only doing what you said, Sir. You told us to show ’em who’s in charge, Sir, by letting off the guns over their heads. Sir.’

Eggy fell silent and his bright red face drained to putty. To Munty’s relief, he was gone within days, taking his random violence and obsession with the classics with him. But also removing his sweet wife, who had befriended the fish-out-of-water new boy and encouraged him to come to her sitting room for tea in the early, homesick days.

The house settled down after that under a calm and quiet man called Mr Rawlings, and became much like the rest of the school – increasingly sporty and thoughtless, smelling of feet and armpits. Munty had long since adopted the Armishaw’s camouflage of the drawling accent and special language. A football was a bladder, a bicycle a bagger, trousers toggers and exams zaggers. The townies never again came up the hill, and the smokers and their friends were left in peace.

Munty risked joining his two worlds together by taking Payge to meet Pearl and his grandparents. Payge was charming, and his appetite for high tea filled the family with awe. Then Payge began inviting Munty to stay with his parents Lord and Lady Grangemere in the holidays, and Munty discovered a comforting world of friendly grubby chaos that was nothing like his image of how the upper classes behaved. Payge’s family home was a large, flat-fronted Georgian barracks of a house. Parts of it were uninhabitable with damp. It was full of animals and children, and everything was covered in a fine layer of dog hair. The food was inedible, and Munty understood why Payge loved his tuck so much. There was no particular formality, and certainly no luxuries, and Munty grew more comfortable with his inherited identity. He knew his mother would be horrified and bewildered by what she would see as squalor. Having a clean tidy house was a daily preoccupation for Pearl. Munty found the mess soothing.

Payge had asked Munty about Castle Hey, what it was like. Munty had no idea, and decided that he ought to find out. He wrote to his mother, who contacted Mrs Jenkins. The house was still under the jurisdiction of the military, although they had moved out. Mrs Jenkins’ reply mentioned that the house was in poor condition and its future uncertain and that they would have to wait until the War Compensation Office decided on their award before they did anything at all.

Other families had cut their losses and pulled down the scarred remains left by military use, as compensation was not generous and dry rot had run riot during the war years. A visit was arranged for mother and son but they were warned that they would not be able to go inside. They took a taxi up from the station, asking it to wait and stepping out on the overgrown carriage sweep looked up at the crumbling façade with mixed feelings.

It was as if Castle Hey had died, probably killed in the war, thought Munty. The pink brick bled green from overflowing gutters. The windows looked blank. An uninvited buddleia flourished above the front door. He hesitated, the pull of history for him was very strong. He noticed the pretty ogee arched windows and the toy battlements. It was undoubtedly romantic but also overwhelming, so big and decayed. He wanted to go away and think about it, and soon succeeded in persuading his mother to leave. They caught the next train back along the coast to Eastbourne. When Payge asked him about it again, he just muttered that it was a ruin.

Munty did his school certificates and then his National Service, and came out at the other end with his shoulders back and his muscles toned, but without much idea of what he wanted to do next. He was Lord Mount-Hey of Castle Hey, but the trustees had still not told him what that entailed, if anything.

Pearl had remarried soon after he’d left school. Her new husband was Reg Grigson, who was also widowed and also worked for his grandparents. Munty went home to live with his mother and stepfather, and to work in the family business. He began to learn buying, and soon was doing well enough to please the family. The only change was that they stopped calling him Bert and started calling him Munty, as it suited him. But soon he found Eastbourne stifling. He wanted to move out of his home and start a more grown-up kind of life, but didn’t know how or where.

Then Mrs Jenkins wrote to him, suggesting that, as there was some money available now he was twenty-one, he should move to London. She didn’t have realistic suggestions about where to get the capital from to do up Castle Hey, and when he went to see her she had joked that he needed a rich wife. He didn’t like the idea, but he agreed that it might be worth looking for a nice girl to marry, and the best place to find the right sort, according to Mrs Jenkins, was still the London Season.

Castle Hey was shut up and made as secure as it could be against further deterioration, using the War Department compensation money. An ex-soldier caretaker moved into the North Lodge, and indoor plumbing was provided for him. Munty took a room in a little cramped court near St James’s, and looked for a job to tide him over while he looked for a wealthy wife, won the Pools or found some other means to help him get a firm hold on his bewildering future. None of which seemed remotely likely.

Man and boy, what Munty knew best was the grocery trade. From babyhood, his mother had taken him to work with her, and as soon as he could walk, his grandparents had encouraged him to help out in the stockrooms.

It was no good thinking he could be a stockbroker or something else suitable for his acquired station in life, when all he knew about was coffee and tea, cheese and bacon. Luckily close to his rooms was Penrose & Quinn, the grandest of grocers and florists, founded in 1820 after the death of George III. His plain queen, the royal princesses and all the ladies-in-waiting demanded daily wreaths and nosegays and, according to royal etiquette, they had to be fresh every day all the year round.

Mrs Quinn, from a grand but impoverished family and one of Queen Charlotte’s women of the bedchamber, developed a secret formula for perking up wilted flowers. She and Penrose, her equally secret footman lover and eventual husband, made their fortune selling the royal floribundance second-hand, which provided the original capital for their shop. Luckily for Munty, there were as many titles behind the counters as in front of them. Working at P&Q wouldn’t damage his fragile and recently acquired caste at all.

Honourables straight out of Eton and on their way to Oxford, Cambridge or Sandhurst would walk the floors during the Christmas rush, and Ladies would serve rose and violet creams without ruining their marriage prospects. Royals came in all the time. Nobody tried to stop the debutantes on the staff from slipping into luxurious customers’ cloakrooms to put on their cocktail frocks and ball dresses before leaving for the day.