The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley — Read

We have left all the hills behind; our faces are turned towards the long strands, salted and whistling, of the North Sea. Here, the land is a great saucer, patterned with dykes and arrowy roads. To the north and to the south are smudges of smoke, the bright webbing of railway lines, towers that are older than the distant fields they chime to, Peterborough, Ely, Cambridge. We are on the edge of the Fens. It is a place plucked from the water. Only here and there remains the old darkly gleaming chaos of marsh and reeds, alders and bulrushes, the sudden whirr and scream of wildfowl. All else is now deep pasturage and immense fields bright with stubble, feeding the windmills and the scattered redbrick farms. It is a country to make a farmer fat; these are fields to put beef and pudding and ale on a man's table. Yet it seems to be still haunted by its old desolation. Perhaps the sky, which can show a spread of cloud and blue by day, a glitter of stars by night, not to be matched elsewhere between Berwick and Penzance, is too big, too masterful, for a man's peace of mind, unless, like so many in the old days, he comes here simply to worship God. Perhaps too much is heard of its bitter neighbour, the North Sea, and of winds that come from the Steppes. Perhaps it is only because it is a hollow land, which every darkness turns again into a place of spectral marshes and monkish ghosts. Something desolating certainly remains, a whisper not to be drowned by the creaking of the heaviest harvest-wagons. The little farms seem lonelier than lighthouses. The roads go on and on, one ruled mile after another, but would never appear to arrive anywhere. The very trains, cautiously puffing along a raised single track, seem to be without either starting-places or destinations, and so wander undramatically across the landscape, only heightening, by their passing, the long silences. The vague sadness of a prairie has fallen upon this plain of dried marshes. Like a rich man who gives but never smiles, this land yields bountifully but is at heart still a wilderness.

Somewhere in the middle of this region, a narrow side-road finds its way to a hamlet, made up of about twenty houses, a tiny shop, and an alehouse, and then wanders on another mile or so in order to arrive at a house of some size, where it stops, despairingly. This is easily the largest house in the neighbourhood, a redbrick building in no recognizable style of architecture, and perhaps sixty or seventy years old. It was built by a strange gentleman from Australia, who had for years dreamed of a country mansion, and, once he was installed in it, proceeded very quietly to drink himself to death. Now, as certain sheds and newer outhouses, goalposts and worn fields testify, it is no longer a country mansion. It is some years since James Tarvin, M. A. (Cantab.), married a woman ten years older than himself, bought with her money the desirable property known as Washbury Manor, and transformed it into Washbury Manor School, in which some fifty or sixty boys, preferably the sons of gentlemen, are prepared for the public schools and whatever else may befall them in this life. Letters from all over the world arrive now at Washbury Manor. Men and women in far-distant bungalows receive little scrawls from there and are very proud and boring about them. Quite a number of the small boys at Washbury have parents who are in India and Africa and such places, and not a few of the rest have no parents at all but merely guardians, persons who are conscientious enough but cannot be expected to discover the relative merits of all the preparatory schools in England. Not that Washbury Manor is a bad school; but, on the other hand, it is certainly not one of the best. One visiting uncle, a master in the merchant service, put it to himself and to anybody who might be listening: "It don't smell right. " But he himself was not the kind of person that Mr. Tarvin -- it is his own phrase -- wished to have associated with the school. Mr. Tarvin could afford to be contemptuous of such criticism. He had references from public men, including a Colonial Bishop; some scholarships to the school's credit; pure air and water, a bracing atmosphere, perfect sanitation, good playing fields; and a teaching staff of three university graduates, Robert Fauntley, M. A. (Oxon.), Inigo Jollifant, B. A. (Cantab.), Harold Felton, B. A. (Bristol); a matron, Miss Callander, with a diploma in the domestic sciences; and an ex-regular noncommissioned officer, Sergeant Comrie, to take drill and carpentering. Moreover, the health and comfort of the boys are the care of no less a person than Mrs. Tarvin herself, the daughter of the Rev. George Betterby. If you are a parent in India, is it not worth cutting things down a little, depriving yourself of a few holidays in the hills, we will say, merely to know that your boy is in such hands as these? Term by term, Mr. Tarvin received tribute from the very frontiers of our Empire, and rarely had he to complain that one of his little iron bedsteads was without its weight of boy.