§ 4
But the regular teaching was the least important thing in the life of the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. It existed largely in order to be put on one side.
Miss Murgatroyd had the temperament of a sensational editor. Her school was a vehicle for Booms. Every term there was at least one fundamental change.
The year when Joan and Peter joined the school was the year of the Diamond Jubilee, and Miss Murgatroyd had a season of loyalty. The “Empire” and a remarkable work called Sixty Years a Queen dominated the school; Victoria, that poor little old panting German widow, was represented as building up a great fabric of liberty and order, as reconciling nations, as showing what a woman’s heart, a mother’s instinct, could do for mankind. She was, Miss Murgatroyd conveyed, the instigator of such inventions as the electric light and the telephone; she spread railways over the world as one spreads bread with butter; she inspired Tennyson and Dickens, Carlyle and William Morris to their remarkable efforts. The whole world revered her. All this glow of personal loyalty vanished from the school before the year was out; the Queen ceased to be mentioned and the theme of Hand Industry replaced her. Everything was to be taught by hand and no books were to be used. Education had become too bookish. “Rote learning” was forbidden throughout the establishment and “textbooks” were to be replaced by simple note-books made by the children themselves. Then two bright girls came to the school whose father was French, and, by a happy accident, a little boy also joined up who had been very well trained by a French governess. All three spoke French extremely well. Miss Murgatroyd was inspired to put the school French on a colloquial footing, and the time-table was reconstructed with a view to the production of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme on St. George’s Day, the anniversary day of the school.
A parent who could paint was requisitioned as a scene-painter, the stage was put up in the main schoolroom, and those who could take no other part were set to help make the costumes and distribute programs at the performance....
These things happened over the heads of Joan and Peter very much as the things in the newspaper used to happen over our heads before the Great War got hold of us. They went about their small lives amidst these things and with a vast indifference to all such things. They played their little parts in them—the realities of life were not there.
To begin with, Mary used to take them to school; but after a year and a half of that it occurred to Aunt Phyllis that it would cultivate self-reliance if they went alone. So Mary only went to fetch them when there was need of an umbrella or some such serious occasion. The path ran up through the bushes to the high road past the fence of Master’s paddock where Peter had once covered himself with tar. Then they had to go along the high road with a pine-wood to the right—a winding path amidst the trees ran parallel to the road—and presently with a pine-wood to the left, which hid the hollow in which the parents of young Cuspard had made their abode and out of which young Cuspard would sometimes appear, a ginger-haired, hard-breathing youngster, bareheaded and barefooted and altogether very advanced, and so to the little common where there would be geese or a tethered pony. Joan and Peter crossed this obliquely by the path, which was often boggy in wet weather, and went along by the Sheldrick’s holly hedge to the open crest of heather from which one could run down to the school. One could see the playground and games going on long before one could get down to them. And if it were not too stormy the school flag with its red St. George and the Dragon on white would be flying. There were no indications of the Venerable Bede on the Flag, but Joan had concluded privately that he was represented by the red knob at the top of the flagstaff. For a year and more Joan thought that the Venerable Bede was really a large old bead of profound mystical significance.
Joan and Peter varied with the seasons, but except when Joan wore a djibbah they were dressed almost alike; in high summer with bare legs and brown smocks and Heidelberg sandals, and in winter like rolls of green wool stuck on leather gaiters. When they grew beyond the smock stage, then they both wore art green blouses with the school emblem of St. George on the pockets, but Joan wore a dark blue gym skirt and Peter had dark blue knickerbockers simply. The walk altered a little every day. Now the trees were dark and the brambles by the roadside wet and wilted, now all the world was shooting green buds except for the pines, now the pines were taking up the spring brightness, now all the world was hot and dusty and full of the smell of resin, and now again it was wet and misty and with a thousand sorts of brightly coloured fungus among the pine stems. Joan and Peter learnt by experience that throwing pine-cones hurts, and reserved them for the Cuspard boy who had never mastered this lesson. Peter started a “Mooseum” of fungi in the playroom, and made a great display of specimens that presently dried up or deliquesced and stank. When the snow came in the winter the Cuspard boy waylaid them at the corner with a prepared heap of snowballs and fell upon them with shrieks of excitement, throwing so fast and wildly and playing the giddy windmill so completely that it was quite easy for Joan and Peter to close in and capture his heap. Whereupon he fled toward the school weeping loudly that it was his heap and refusing to be comforted.
But afterwards all three of them made common cause against a treacherous ambuscade behind the Sheldrick holly hedge.
It was on these journeyings that Joan began to hear first of the marvellous adventures of Uncle Nobby and Bungo Peter. She most liked Bungo Peter because he had such a satisfying name; Peter never told her he was really the newel knob at home, but she always understood him to be something very large and round and humorous and richly coloured. Sometimes he was as big as the world and sometimes he was a suitable playmate for little children. He was the one constant link in a wandering interminable Saga that came like a spider’s thread endlessly out of Peter’s busy brain. It was a story of quests and wanderings, experiments and tasks and feuds and wars; Nobby was almost always in it, kind and dreadfully brave and always having narrow escapes and being rescued by Bungo Peter. Daddy and Mummy came in and went out again, Peter and Joan joined in. For a time Bungo Peter had a Wonderful Cat that would have shamed Puss-in-boots. Sometimes the story would get funny, so funny that the two children would roll along the road, drunken with laughter. As for example when Bungo Peter had hiccups and couldn’t say anything else whatever you asked him.
After a time Joan learned the trick of the Saga and would go on with it in her own mind as a day-dream. She invented that really and truly Bungo Peter loved her desperately and that she loved Bungo Peter; but she knew, though she knew not why nor wherefore, that this was a thing Peter must never be told.
Sometimes she would try to cut in and make some of the saga herself. “Lemme tell you, Petah,” she used to squeal. “You just lemme tell you.” But it was a rare thing for Peter to give way to her; sometimes he would not listen at all to what she had to say about Bungo Peter; he would smite her down with “No, he didn’t do nuffin of the sort, not reely,” and sometimes when she had thought of a really good thing to tell about him, Peter would take it away from her and go on telling about it himself, as for instance when she thought of “Lightning-slick,” that Bungo Peter used to put on his heels.
Peter listened to her poor speeding-up with “Lightning-slick” for a while.
Then he said: “And after that, Joan, after that——”
“Oh! lemme go on, Petah. Do lemme go on. The fird time he was runned after by anyfing it was this.”
“He put it on his bicycle wheels,” said Peter, getting bored by her, “instead of oil.”
“He put it on his bicycle wheels instead of oil,” said Joan, accepting the idea, “and along came a Tiger.” (She had already done a Mad Dog and a Bear.)
But after that Peter took over altogether while she was waving about rather helplessly and breathlessly with “the Forf time Bungo Peter used Lightning-slick, the forf time—” and hesitating whether to make it a snake or an elephant, Peter could stand it no longer.
“But you don’t know what Bungo Peter did the Forf time, Joan—you don’t reely and I do. Bungo Peter told me. Bungo Peter wanted the holidays to come, so Bungo Peter went and put Lightning-slick on the axles of the Erf.”
“What good was that?”
“It went fast. It went faster and faster. The Erf. It regular spun round. And the sun rose and the sun set jest in an hour or so. ’Cos it would, Joan. It would. Yes, it would. There wasn’t any time for anyfing. People got up and had their breckfus—and it was bedtime. People went out for walks and got b’nighted. Then when the holidays came Bungo Peter just put a stick in the place and stopped it going fast any more.”
“Put a stick in what place?”
“Where the Erf goes round. And then, then the days were as long as long. They lasted—oo, ’undreds of ’ours, heaps.”
“Didn’t they get ’ungry?” said Joan, overcome by this magnificent invention.
“They ’ad free dinners every day, sometimes four, and ’s many teas as they wanted. Out-of-doors. Only you see they didn’t ’ave to go to bed, ’ardly ever. See, Joan?...”
There had to be a pause of blissful contemplation before their minds could go on to any further invention.
“I believe if I had the fings I could make Lightning-slick,” said Peter with a rising inflection of the voice.
He did believe. As soon as it was really said he believed it. Joan, round-eyed with admiration, believed too....
This Saga of Bungo Peter did not so much end as die out, when Aunt Phyllis got little bicycles for her charges after Joan’s seventh birthday, and they began to ride to school. You cannot tell legends on a bicycle.