A Perfect Spy

The arrangement at Mr. Grimble’s was the perfect flowering of this relationship. Their world was inside their heads, but it was also contained in a brick-and-flint gardener’s cottage at the end of Mr. Grimble’s long drive, designated the Overflow House and occupied by the Overflow Boys of whom Pym was the newest recruit. And Lippsie, his lovely lifelong Lippsie, their best and most attentive mother. They knew at once they were outcasts. If they didn’t, the eighty boys up the drive made it plain to them. They had a pallid grocer’s son without an “h” to his name, and tradesmen were ridiculous. They had three Jews whose speech was spattered with Polish, and a hopeless stammerer called M-M-Marlin, and an Indian with knock-knees whose father was killed when the Japanese took Singapore. They had Pym with his spots and wet beds. Yet under Lippsie they contrived to glory in all these disadvantages. If the boys up the drive were the crack regiment, the Overflow Boys were the irregulars who fought all the harder for their medals. For staff, Mr. Grimble took what he could get, and what he could get was whatever the country didn’t need. A Mr. O’Mally punched a boy so hard across the ear he knocked him out cold, a Mr. Farbourne beat heads together and fractured someone’s skull. A science master thought the marauding village boys were Bolsheviks and fired his shotgun into their retreating rumps. At Grimble’s, boys were flogged for tardiness and flogged for untidiness, flogged for apathy and flogged for cheek, and flogged for not improving from the flogging. The fever of war encouraged brutality, the guilt of our noncombatant staff intensified it, the intricacies of the British hierarchical system provided a natural order for the exercise of sadism. Their God was the protector of English country gentlemen and their justice was the punishment of the ill-born and disadvantaged, and it was meted out with the collaboration of the strong, of whom Sefton Boyd was the strongest and most handsome. It is the saddest of all the ironies of Lippsie’s death, as I see it now, that she died in the service of a Fascist state.

Each leave-out day, on Rick’s standing orders, Pym presented himself at the entrance to the school drive in readiness for Mr. Cudlove’s arrival. When nobody appeared, he hurried gratefully to the woods in search of privacy and wild strawberries. Come evening he returned to the school boasting of the great day he had had. Just occasionally the worst happened and a carload would appear — Rick, Mr. Cudlove, Syd in private’s uniform, and a couple of jockeys crammed in anyhow — all well refreshed after a pause at the Brace of Partridges. If a school match was in progress they would roar support for the home side and hand round unheard-of oranges from a crate in the boot of the car. If none, then Syd and Morrie Washington would press-gang any boy who happened to be passing on his bicycle, and mount a handicap race round the playing fields while Syd belted out the commentary through his cupped hands. And Rick personally, dressed in the Admiral’s suit, would start them off with a mayoral wave of his handkerchief, and Rick personally would present an unimaginable box of chocolates to the winner, while the pound notes changed hands around the court. And when evening came Rick never failed to install himself at the Overflow House, bringing a bottle of bubbly along to cheer old Lippsie up because she seemed so glum—“What’s got into her, son?” And Rick cheered her up all right; Pym heard it going on, thump, creak and scream, while he crouched outside her door in his dressing-gown wondering whether they were fighting or pretending. Back in bed, he would hear Rick tiptoeing down the stairs, though Rick could tread as lightly as a cat.

Till a morning came when Rick did not leave quietly at all. Not for Pym, not for the rest of the Overflow Boys, who were greatly excited to be woken by the clamour. Lippsie was bawling and Rick was trying to quell her, but the nicer he was to her the more unreasonable she became. “You made me to be a teef!” she was yelling between great big whoops while she took another gulp of air. “You made me teef to punish me. You were bad priest, Rickie Pym. You made me to steal. I was honest woman. I was refugee but I was honest woman.” Why did she speak as if it was all last year? “My father was honest man. My broder also was honest man. They was good men, not bad like me. You made me to steal until I was criminal like you. Maybe God punish you one day, Rickie Pym. Maybe He make you to weep, too. I hope He will. I hope, I hope!”

“Old Lippsie’s having a touch of her wobblies, son,” Rick explained to Pym, finding him on the stairs as he made to leave. “Slip in there and see if you can make her laugh with one of your stories. Is old Grimble feeding you up there?”

“It’s super,” said Pym.