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

he had to say about the castles, the men who built them, and the men who garrisoned them before they were made obsolete by gun powder.
    'My stars!' she exclaimed, when he told her about the Roman invasion of Mona, and the last stand of the Druids in Anglesey, 'where on earth do you put it all, David? I mean, you don't have to look it up! You hardly glanced at that guide we bought,' and he replied, chuckling, 'You'd be astonished how much I have to mug up when I'm taking the Upper School in a period I'm not familiar with. It never does to let them see you at it, of course. They have to be bluffed. Like you.'
    'But you must have read a tremendous amount, in spite of all those years in the war when reading couldn't have been easy. Don't you ever want to write?'
    Unconsciously she had touched on an ambition dormant in him since he was a child, something unfulfilled in his personal awareness that had surfaced from time to time in the years leading up to the summer of 1914, and again, but infrequently, in rest periods behind the lines, when he was looking for an escape from ennui.
    'It's odd you should ask me that. No one else ever has. It's something I've often felt I could do, within limits.'
    'What kind of limits?'
    'I don't think I could write fiction or verse. Maybe I could have, if things had been different, but any creative impulses I might have had were shelled out of me long ago.'
    'But soldiers did write poems, didn't they? I remember one of our staff-nurses was engaged to a boy who sent poems to her. Poems about the war, I mean.'
    'Yes, some of them did, and marvellous poems they were too. Sassoon and Owen and Rosenberg were three, and I've already introduced their work to the seniors. But they were articulate. With me it was always as if I was experiencing it secondhand. Maybe that's why I survived. Owen and Rosenberg didn't.'
    She must have noticed the change in his tone and expression for she said, quickly, 'I'm sorry, David. I didn't mean to make you remember,' but he said, taking her hand, 'I don't mind talking about it to you. In a way it helps. It's not good, keeping it bottled up, the way I have to with the boys. They always seem so terribly young to me. Babies almost.'
    'But I don't?'
    'No, and that's curious too, for you're only a year older than Simmonds, our head boy. Can you explain that?'
    'The job, maybe. A nurse, even a pro', is always in charge. She's mobile and her patients aren't. It makes us seem bossy.'
    She would be a wonderful person to have around in the common room at Bamfylde, he thought, poised to puncture all those balloons of complacency and pomposity. He said, thankfully, 'No man in his senses would mind being bossed by you, Elizabeth,' and kissed the top of her head, but she was not to be dismissed in this way and said, 'Save that, Davy, and go on with what you were saying. If you did write what would you write? Would it be plays?'
    'Good Lord, no. Plays require a very special technique, and most playwrights serve an apprenticeship as actors. I'd write historical biography, but in a different way from academics. Most studies of the past are written by professional scholars, and dry as dust unless you've done your homework on the background. The ordinary reader has got to see historical characters as flesh and blood.'
    'But how would you discover human touches after all this time?'
    'I suppose by putting two and two together. Fashions and attitudes change every generation but people don't.'
    She seemed to ponder this. Finally she said, 'I think you'd do it splendidly, David. Who would you like to write about ?'
    For possibly the first time in his life he gave his potential subject matter serious consideration. 'Well, now that you raise the question, the royal tigress for one.'
    'Who on earth was she? Boadicea?'
    'Someone much nearer our own time. Margaret of Anjou, the French wife of Henry VI.'
    'Never heard of her. Tell me about her.'
    He gave her a potted history of Margaret of Anjou, as