Джозефина Тэй: The Daughter of Time

Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.

When The Midget came to tidy him up for the night Grant said: ‘You don’t happen to have a history book, by any chance, do you?’

‘A history book? No. What would I be doing with a history book.’ It was not a question, so Grant did not try to provide an answer. His silence seemed to fret her.

‘If you really want a history book,’ she said presently, ‘you could ask Nurse Darroll when she brings your supper. She has all her schoolbooks on a shelf in her room and it’s quite possible she has a history among them.’

How like The Amazon to keep her schoolbooks! he thought. She was still homesick for school as she was homesick for Gloucestershire every time the daffodils bloomed. When she lumbered into the room, bearing his cheese pudding and stewed rhubarb, he looked at her with a tolerance that bordered on the benevolent. She ceased to be a large female who breathed like a suction-pump and became a potential dispenser of delight.

Oh yes, she had a history book, she said. Indeed, she rather thought that she had two. She had kept all her schoolbooks because she had loved school.

It was on the tip of Grant’s tongue to ask her if she had kept her dolls, but he stopped himself in time.

‘And of course I loved history,’ she said. ‘It was my favourite subject. Richard the Lionheart was my hero.’

‘An intolerable bounder,’ Grant said.

‘Oh, no!’ she said, looking wounded.

‘A hyperthyroid type,’ Grant said pitilessly. ‘Rocketing to and fro about the earth like a badly made firework. Are you going off duty now?’

‘Whenever I’ve finished my trays.’

‘Could you find that book for me tonight?’

‘You’re supposed to be going to sleep, not staying awake over history books.’

‘I might as well read some history as look at the ceiling which is the alternative. Will you get it for me?’

‘I don’t think I could go all the way up to the Nurses’ Block and back again tonight for someone who is rude about the Lionheart.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m not the stuff that martyrs are made of. As far as I’m concerned Coeur-de-Lion [2] Lionheart (Fr.) is the pattern of chivalry, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, [3] Knight without fear and without reproach (Fr.) a faultless commander and a triple D.S.O. [4] The Distinguished Service Order is a military decoration of the United Kingdom, and formerly of other parts of the Commonwealth, awarded for meritorious or distinguished service by officers of the armed forces during wartime, typically in actual combat. Now will you get the book?’

‘It seems to me you’ve sore need to read a little history,’ she said, smoothing a mitred sheet-corner with a large admiring hand, ‘so I’ll bring you the book when I come past. I’m going out to the pictures anyhow.’

It was nearly an hour before she reappeared, immense in a camel-hair coat. The room lights had been put out and she materialized into the light of his reading lamp like some kindly genie.

‘I was hoping you’d be asleep,’ she said. ‘I don’t really think you should start on these tonight.’

‘If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep,’ he said, ‘it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience.’

‘I’m going with Nurse Burrows.’

‘You can still hold hands.’

‘I’ve no patience with you,’ she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.

She had brought two books.

One was the kind of history book known as a Historical Reader. It bore the same relation to history as Stories from the Bible bears to Holy Writ. Canute rebuked his courtiers on the shore, Alfred burned the cakes, Raleigh spread his cloak for Elizabeth, Nelson took leave of Hardy in his cabin on the Victory , all in nice clear large print and one-sentence paragraphs. To each episode went one full-page illustration.

There was something curiously touching in the fact that The Amazon should treasure this childish literature. He turned to the flyleaf to see if her name was there. On the flyleaf was written:

Ella Darroll,

Form III

Newbridge High School

Newbridge,

Gloucestershire.

England

Europe,

The World

The Universe.

This was surrounded by a fine selection of coloured transfers.

Did all children do that, he wondered? Write their names like that, and spend their time in class making transfers. He certainly had. And the sight of those squares of bright primitive colour brought back his childhood as nothing had for many years. He had forgotten the excitement of transfers. That wonderfully satisfying moment when you began the peeling-off and saw that it was coming perfectly. The adult world held few such gratifications. A clean smacking drive at golf, perhaps, was the nearest. Or the moment when your line tightened and you knew that the fish had struck.

The little book pleased him so much that he went through it at his leisure. Solemnly reading each childish story. This, after all, was the history that every adult remembered. This was what remained in their minds when tonnage and poundage, and ship money, and Laud’s Liturgy, and the Rye House Plot, and the Triennial Acts, and all the long muddle of schism and shindy, treaty and treason, had faded from their consciousness.

The Richard III story, when he came to it, was called The Princes in the Tower , and it seemed that young Ella had found the princes a poor substitute for Coeur-de-Lion, since she had filled every small O throughout the tale with neat pencil shading. The two golden-haired boys who played together in the sunbeam from the barred window in the accompanying picture had each been provided with a pair of anachronistic spectacles, and on the blank back of the picture-page someone had been playing Noughts and Crosses. As far as young Ella was concerned the princes were a dead loss.

And yet it was a sufficiently arresting little story. Macabre enough to delight any child’s heart. The innocent children; the wicked uncle. The classic ingredients in a tale of classic simplicity.

It had also a moral. It was the perfect cautionary tale.

Well, it was neat but not gaudy. Reporting at its simplest.

He turned to the second book.

The second book was the School History proper. The two thousand years of England’s story were neatly parceled into compartments for ready reference. The compartments, as usual, were reigns. It was no wonder that one pinned a personality to a reign, forgetful that that personality had known and lived under other kings. One put them in pigeonholes automatically. Pepys: Charles II. Shakespeare: Elizabeth. Marlborough: Queen Anne. It never crossed one’s mind that someone who had seen Queen Elizabeth could also have seen George I. One had been conditioned to the reign idea from childhood.

However it did simplify things when you were just a policeman with a game leg and a concussed spine hunting up some information on dead and gone royalties to keep yourself from going crazy.

He was surprised to find the reign of Richard III so short. To have made oneself one of the best-known rulers in all those two thousand years of England’s history, and to have had only two years to do it in, surely augured a towering personality. If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people.