Bilgewater Read Free Page B

well-known is Paula. When anyone is waiting for exam results it is Paula who prises them out. She’s down at the Post Office at dawn. They expect her now. And when there is any trouble or excitement in a boy’s family she knows the minute it has happened, and sometimes before.
    â€œWhy d’you stay here?” asked the patient of the day after I’d told her she was like the warm South.
    â€œThe dear knows, my lover.”
    â€œWho’s the dear?” asked the boy. It was probably Terrapin or Boakes. They were forever slurping cocoa the first year or so.
    â€œWell, not you and that’s for sure.”
    Terrapin (or Boakes) lay comfortably warm within, just out of sight through the sick-room door. I sat on the floor, by Paula’s sitting room fire. Paula sat in the rocking chair, straight upright under her hair, Keats on her knee.
    â€œFull of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.”
    The fire blazed up. There was a raw, bleak wind outside and a black branch tap-tapping on the glass, sea-gulls shouting miserably at each other, the sea noisy. On the mantelpiece was a picture of Paula’s family—a farmer on a hay-cart and a lot of little children grinning and squinting against the sun in floppy hats. Somewhere near Lyme Regis apparently, wherever that was. Dorset. Wessex. The warm South.
    â€œWhy d’you stay here, Paula?”
    â€œBecause you’re always askin’ for stories,” Paula said. “I’ve been taken kind-hearted. Seems to me I’m a very nice woman.”
    She went on with the
Ode to a Nightingale
and Terrapin—I remember now that it was Terrapin—made faces at me of peculiar horror from the sick-room bed, leaning out of it from the knees so he could see me and looking fit as a flea.
    I never felt that Paula found me very important though. Far from it. She never had favourites. There is a great sense of inevocable justice about her and although one had the sensation that her devotions and emotions ran deep and true you never found her ready to discuss them—not the loving emotions anyway.
    Whether it were ridiculous Terrapin, friendly Boakes or wonderful divine and heavenly Jack Rose, the hero of the school, she treated them all alike. For me she had had from the start a steady unshakeable concern that wrapped me round like a coat. She never fussed me or hung about me and since I was a little baby I don’t remember her ever kissing me or hugging me. Every night of my life she has looked in on me at bedtime to tuck me in, and when I had the measles or the chicken pox I had them over in the Boys’ Side with her and I knew absolutely for certain though I never asked that she would always be within call.
    But she has never tried to mother me. She’s not a soft woman, Paula. She cannot stand slop of any kind and again and again she says—it is her dictum, her law unquestionable— BEWARE OF SELF PITY .
    Yet you can tell her anything. She is never shocked, she is never surprised. She accepts and accepts and accepts. Puffy Coleman keeps falling in love with the very little boys (“Well, it’s not as if he
does
anything”); dear Uncle Edmund Pen HB climbs ladders and weeps for love of anything vaguely female (“He’s romantic the dear knows”); one of the boys gets howling drunk at The Lobster Inn after failing all his O levels (“He’s to be sobered and pitied and set to do them again at Christmas”). And she never thought that it was in any way odd that I could not read at the age of ten. “If the eyes are right,” she said, “and we have now got them right, the reading will come. I’ve no opinion of these mind-dabblers and I.Q.s and dear knows.” And the reading did come. In the end.
    And Paula never, ever, gives me the impression that I am ugly and once when I said something of the kind she went off like a bomb. “You get no sympathy from me on that score, my