A Summer in the Twenties Read online

  Table of Contents

  Hendaye, 6th April, 1926

  Sillerby, 8th April, 1926

  Market Weighton, 16th April, 1926

  Oxford, 27th April, 1926

  Leeds, Selby, Hull, 5th May, 1926

  Oxford, 16th and 17th June, 1926

  Brantingham Manor, 6th July, 1926

  Holme on the Wold, 8th July, 1926

  Hull, 23rd July, 1926

  Rokesly Hall, 4th August, 1926

  Hull, 24th August, 1926

  Hull, 30th August, 1926

  Brantingham, Selby, Hull, 2nd, 3rd September, 1926

  Biarritz, 6th June, 1929

  About the Author

  More Peter Dickinson

  SMALL BEER PRESS

  A SUMMER

  IN THE

  TWENTIES

  Peter

  Dickinson

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  By the Same Author

  Skin Deep

  The Old English Peep Show

  The Seals

  Sleep and His Brother

  The Lizard in the Cup

  The Green Gene

  The Poison Oracle*

  The Lively Dead

  King and Joker

  Walking Dead

  One Foot in the Grave

  The Last Houseparty

  Hindsight

  Death of a Unicorn*

  Tefuga

  Perfect Gallows

  Skeleton-in-Waiting

  Play Dead

  The Yellow Room Conspiracy

  Some Deaths Before Dying

  Children’s Books

  The Weathermonger

  Heartsease

  The Devil’s Children

  Emma Tuppers Diary*

  The Dancing Bear*

  The Gift

  The Blue Hawk

  Annerton Pit

  The Flight of Dragons

  Tulku

  City of Gold

  The Seventh Raven*

  Healer

  Eva

  Merlin Dreams

  AK

  A Bone from a Dry Sea

  Shadow of a Hero

  The Kin

  The Lion Tamer’s Daughter

  Touch and Go

  The Ropemaker

  The Tears of the Salamander

  The Gift Boat

  Angel Isle

  Earth and Air*

  In the Palace of the Khans

  Picture Books

  The Iron Lion

  Hepzibah

  Giant Cold

  A Box of Nothing

  Mole Hole

  Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

  Chuck and Danielle

  *Available or forthcoming

  from Small Beer Press.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  A Summer in the Twenties copyright © 1981 by Peter Dickinson (peterdickinson.com). All rights reserved. First published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton, London. First Small Beer Press edition published in 2014.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  www.smallbeerpress.com

  www.weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickinson, Peter, 1927-

  A summer in the twenties / Peter Dickinson.

  pages cm

  Summary: “A young man has to choose who to love, who to leave in the 1926 General Strike in Britain”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61873-084-8 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-085-5 (ebook)

  1. General Strike, Great Britain, 1926--Fiction. 2. England--Social life and customs--20th century--Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6054.I35S9 2014

  823’.914--dc23

  2014019956

  First ebook edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  Text set in Minion.

  Paper edition printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper by the Maple Press in York, PA.

  Note for railway enthusiasts

  The author is aware that historically the Hull & Barnsley Line (referred to in this book as the Wold Line) crossed the N.E.R. line by a bridge at Eastrington, and that there was no junction.

  1

  Hendaye, 6th April, 1926

  ‘EVERYTHING’S CHANGING so fast,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it stunning to wake up every morning and feel that the whole world’s brand-new again, a present waiting for you to unwrap it?’

  For emphasis she stabbed her foot-long cigarette holder towards the Pyrennees, to declare them part of the present, with the snow-glitter along the peaks a little tinsel to add glamour to the gift.

  ‘It’s all yours,’ he said, generously including in his gesture not only the mountains but the nearer landscape, and the cubist spillage of roofs down the slope below the terrace and the two crones in black creaking up a cobbled alley, and nearer still the elderly three-piece band nobly attempting a Charleston while their souls still pined for the Vienna Woods, and even the braying group of young French rich, already into their third cocktail at half past three.

  She threw back her head and laughed like a boy. Her teeth flashed like the sudden glimpse of brilliance along the wing-front of a White Admiral when it snaps its wings open and shut again. He felt woozy with love for her. Three days ago, when he had first met her, she had seemed to be just the kind of pretty flibbertigibbet you would expect Bertie Panhard to fill his villa with for Easter. Then chance had paired them in the foursomes against the great Joyce Mallahide and Bertie himself—Mrs. Mallahide ageing now but implacably steady, and Bertie wild with his drives but deadly with his putter. Incredibly the match had gone to the twentieth, with side-bets accumulating which would bite deep into next quarter’s allowance. Then she had sliced her drive into the rough, leaving him a foul lie, but he had swung with a sudden exhilarated ferocity as though past and future were pivoting around the instant when the niblick shaft whipped between the coarse tussocks, and he had watched the ball climb endlessly into the blue, curve, fall, bounce twice on the green and trickle over the far lip. She had nodded approval, pursed her lips a little when they found the ball bunkered, but without fuss put him within nine inches of the hole. And at the same time laid Bertie a perfect stymie.

  From that moment she had been Artemis, even when her hunting-spears—the golf-clubs—were put away and she had only her cigarette holder to brandish like a ritual dart. And now here they were, the impetus of celebration having lasted through the hours of sleep and whirled them up in her rowdy Frazer Nash to see the famous sunset, alone together all afternoon apart from the waiters and the band and the braying French.

  ‘But I’m serious,’ she said. ‘About things changing, I mean. Don’t you feel it—since the War, I suppose—how old were you when it ended?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  It seemed another measure of their intimacy that he could answer without stiffness or shame at the introduction of this half-tabu subject, which so permeated the ideas and talk of Father’s generation, and his brother Gerald’s too, but was so deliberately ignored by his own.

  ‘I was twelve,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t think people our age have always felt the world was changing, even when it wasn’t?’

  ‘Of course they have. But really they knew what was going to happen next week, next year, next . . . what’s the word for ten years?’

  ‘Decade.’

  ‘I never went to school, you know. Yes, they knew what was going to happen next decade, who the
y were going to marry, which house they were going to live in, how they were going to die, even. We don’t.’

  ‘I don’t care. Now’s enough.’

  (Oh, the talks with Father over the cigars, and the mapped future, and the painstaking staff-work to ensure that the long campaign of a career should trundle victoriously forward, and produce and rear a fresh generation of Hankeys to inhabit Sillerby and maintain it!)

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s so stunning. If there’s no point in worrying about tomorrow, then you’ve got to squeeze everything you can get out of today. Thou shalt not waste one instant—that’s the first commandment. I bet you hadn’t guessed Daddy’s a parson.’

  ‘Great Scott!’

  ‘Mummy inherited a shipping line, luckily for me. It’ll be mine one day I suppose, and I shall have to start grinding the faces of the workers, except that I’ll copy Mummy and pay people to do it for me.’

  ‘But that’s tomorrow.’

  ‘Exactly. As a matter of fact I do know who I’m supposed to marry, and where I’m supposed to be going to live, but I bet I don’t. So now I’m not even going to think as far forward as the sunset. What shall we do now? What would you do, supposing you were alone up here?’

  ‘Climb further up the hill and look for butterflies.’

  ‘All right. I don’t know anything about them. You’ll have to tell me.’

  There were clouds of them in the warmth of the western slopes. The fine spring must have brought on the hatchings. They flickered among the scrub and over the slants of shale like flakes of light. He told her their names—only the common sorts, various blues and coppers and some early orange-tips and painted ladies, and a surprising number of pearl-bordered fritillaries—nothing that was needed for the Collection. Suppose there had been . . . he had his net and bottle in his satchel and could have taken specimens, and so far he had done only one afternoon’s hunting since coming to France. But he sensed her mood, that the butterflies were a part of the whole ecstasy of living in the instant, and that to touch or kill one would have blurred its purity. For once the notion did not seem to him sentimental.

  They wandered to and fro along goat-tracks, then sat on a bank of nibbled grass to watch the sunset. It performed for them as promised, like some grand old actor dying on his sword for the thousandth time in bronze and blood. Then they climbed back down the hill and drove towards the sea down steep white tracks. The air still prickled with the aftersense of heat, but dusk and nightfall drew out fresh scents of growth from the barren-seeming hillsides, Twice she pulled into caves of shadow under pine trees so that they could kiss and fondle for a while, lightly, skimming above the surface of their sensuality like martins fly-catching along a river-reach. They timed it all well and got back to the villa as the gong was sounding.

  ‘That you, Tom?’ called Bertie from his “study” at the foot of the stair.

  ‘Hope we’re not late. That was only the first gong?’

  ‘Simply stunning sunset,’ she added. ‘We had to see it all, really we did.’

  Bertie lounged out into the hall, already dressed for dinner in the purple jacket which added a characteristic note of near-caddishness to his persona, a conscious assertion that he could afford to take the risk, thus making it no risk at all. Despite his taste for rather loud clothes Bertie always looked preternaturally neat and clean, especially when he had changed for dinner. Snub-nosed, large-mouthed, black hair slicked back, skin so smooth and creamy that it might have been painted, he had the perky look of a ventriloquist’s dummy or the hero’s asinine friend in a comedy thriller.

  ‘Wire for you, Tom,’ he said, his grin somehow incorporating both malice and benevolence.

  The envelope refused to tear tidily. Minutes seemed to pass before he could scrumple the message free and unfold it.

  CAN YOU PLEASE COME HOME STOP SORRY STOP FATHER

  He stared at it, quite dazed, so that he was not conscious of having handed it across to her. Bertie craned, unabashed.

  ‘Oh,’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘That’s a bit rough,’ said Bertie. ‘Rows with the parents must be hell—we orphans have all the luck. What about it? Going to do what Daddy tells you?’

  ‘Asks, not tells,’ she murmured.

  (Cyril dead at Polygon Wood, Gerald still quite unpredictable eight years after the Armistice.)

  ‘’Fraid I must,’ he said.

  ‘Right-oh,’ said Bertie. ‘Too late to book a sleeper, but there’s no point—you’ll only be two hours later at Dover if Fletcher drives you in to the 6.20 tomorrow morning. I’ll fix that now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and went up to dress, not daring to look at her.

  He lay in the dark, rotating excuse after excuse to send home, but knowing he would have to go. It had not crossed his mind, even as a wish, let alone a hope or possibility, that she should come to his room, but she did.

  2

  Sillerby, 8th April, 1926

  ‘MORNING, MASTER TOM,’ said Stevens, holding the front door. ‘Don’t you bother about your traps. Pennycuick and me’ll get that lot in.’

  ‘Thanks. Where’s the General?’

  ‘In the Collection Room. We got your wire yesterday, so he’ll be expecting you. Good journey, Master Tom?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  In fact in the undiminishing daze of love Tom had barely noticed the battering French trains, or the crossing, or the somehow less heavy-breathing English engines. The only part of the last two days that had been free of the unreality of dream had been the evening in the Smoking Room at the United University, spent writing a nine-page letter to Judy. He didn’t go in at once but stood under the portico looking round. Even Sillerby was less solid than usual. The first faint bloom of weeds was beginning to show in the sickly rose-beds that ringed the turning-circle of gravel. The paint was flaking on the billiard-room window. Usually these dilapidations, and the difficulty of getting them all attended to with Sillerby’s diminished and increasingly arthritic staff, oppressed him; but in this glittering noon they became part of his mood, symbols of growth and of transience, of the need to snatch the instant.

  ‘Any news of Master Gerald?’ he said casually.

  ‘Not that I have heard, Master Tom. Still with Miss Nan, I believe, and doing well as can be hoped.’

  ‘Oh . . . Right, I’ll go and find the General, That middle-size case is all laundry so it might as well go straight out to Mrs. Bird. And I’ve torn my green plus-fours, so don’t hang ’em up.’

  ‘I have a suit of the General’s to go to London. I’ll send the plus-fours with them.’

  ‘Right oh.’

  Climbing the stairs Tom began to realise a mild unease, almost shock, at the news that Gerald was ‘doing well’. This was the family euphemism for his not having broken out into some drunken uproar to offend yet another unwilling host, and perhaps even get into the local papers, but being still with his sister Nan in the isolation of her Scottish island. Tom had assumed all through the last two days that the message from Father meant that Gerald had got loose, but now he saw that his reasons for this belief were concerned not with its probability but with the level of family duty involved. It had to be a need of that order to make the parting from Judy tolerable, reasonable, inevitable. As he stood and held the handle of the great mahogany door a weird horror flowed through him—he had been sent for for no reason at all, other than to separate him from happiness. He shook the nightmare from him and pushed the door open.

  Like an enormous egg perched on an intricate brass stand, Father’s bald and freckled cranium floated above his microscope, exactly as Tom knew from experience he would find him. Lieutenant-General Lord Milford, CB, DSO, at work on his Collection.

  ‘Tom? Be with you in a brace of shakes.’

  Nothing seemed changed. Sillerby continued to drag itself out of the dream-world, to assert its absolute and independent reality, by presenting Tom with objects and facets he had known and accep
ted as the one reality since childhood. Father’s tone was exactly what it always was, very level and soft. The Collection Room too had its usual air of permanence. It was a Long Gallery with black linen-fold panelling and diamond-paned windows and the portraits of ancestors staring, heavy-eyed with brooding ennui, from beneath obscuring layers of varnish and candle-smoke; but before Tom had been born the collection cabinets had been moved in, fifteen blocks of pale mahogany running down either side of the gallery beneath the portraits, each containing its eighteen glass-topped drawers, four feet wide. Sixteen thousand dead butterflies had taken over from the dead ancestors as the primary occupants of the room.

  ‘Well?’ said Father, straightening from the microscope. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Not much, sir. The hatchings were early, but . . .’

  ‘So were you. Quite, quite. Nothing at all, then?’

  ‘Zerynthia rumina—two very nice ones.’

  ‘A bit out of their range, weren’t you?’

  ‘That’s what I mean, sir. I was surprised to find them over there at all. And I’m not sure there isn’t something a little unusual about the dots on the hind wing.’

  Father was a very old-fashioned collector, displaying only perfunctory interest in matters such as the range and habits of specimens, but any hint of a variation—which might indeed be associated with an unusual locality, was the breath of life to him.

  ‘And I took half a dozen of the spring form of Pontia daplidice,’ said Tom. ‘Isn’t one of ours a bit rummy?’