The Broken Chariot Read Free Page A

as abruptly as if he had been touched by fire.
    â€˜He was just being a manly chap,’ Maud told him, after Herbert had gone to bed. ‘Anyway, it’s his age.’
    Hugh paused between the measuring out of his whisky. ‘I remember being like that as a boy myself,’ he said with regret, ’and would have given anything not to have been.’
    She held his hand, that strong pragmatic hand perfectly in harmony with the eye of his sharp intelligence. ‘He’ll learn to love us when he grows up. In the meantime, my dear, we’ll make do with each other.’
    â€˜That’ll always be so.’ He put down the glass to fill his pipe, ‘but it’s a shame children can’t realize that parents aren’t much beyond children themselves, in certain ways.’
    â€˜I often wonder if I shouldn’t have had another child or two. Then we wouldn’t need to dote so much on Herbert.’ She recalled her feelings after his birth: No more of that. He tore me to blazes.
    Hugh stood up before going out to close the shutters. ‘No regrets. One child’s enough with which to surround Blue Force by morning!’
    The new blazer needed some name tapes, and Maud picked up the needle. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll take him to the cinema tomorrow. They’re showing Fire Over England again.’
    â€˜Good,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen it myself.’
    Herbert was sustained by the hope of one day getting revenge on his parents who callously condemned him to a school which, without experience of any other, he thought was the worst in the world. They deserved to pay even for sending him home to any school at all. Having waited for him to be born, he imagined them gloating over the ease of his first years, then springing this deadly trap. What other explanation could there be? Everyone knew what they did, and if they didn’t the crime was all the greater. He evolved a potent fantasy of luring them to a valley in mountains as remote as those of Baluchistan seen from the top deck after leaving Karachi. The boulder behind the tree on the left bank of the stream was so vivid he could almost touch the moss. Taking an axe from his rucksack, he chopped them bloodily down, no pity at the look of horror as they died.
    He wrote the daydream as a story, every stark detail sketched in words of fiery resentment, and the English master said it was an excellent piece of composition, though moving his head from side to side, as if in his experience he had read much similar work. Then with his tone laced by a threat he told Herbert to put it in the dining hall stove and never to pen such a whining screed again. ‘In any case, don’t you know, boy, that you may never see your parents more? There’s a war coming on. In the meantime, write five hundred lines for your lack of filial love. Exodus chapter twenty verse twelve first line.’
    Thereafter the scene of carnage came to him less frequently, for which he was glad, because living the murder through in his mind had left him weak and ashamed, though the sense of injustice against grown-ups took a long time to go away.
    When the Second World War began there was a change of teachers, and his school was evacuated to Gloucestershire. The buildings were an even gloomier pile, all the boys listing gleefully its apparent illnesses of dry rot, rising damp, and deathwatch beetle, wondering how long it would be before the whole lot collapsed and buried them in a mound of dust.
    It was as if the war had been sent especially to enthral them. Sitting in the library every day to hear the six o’clock news was like being in a cinema, and Herbert craved to take part in the glorious actions being fought. He performed well enough in class to keep ahead of many, but his greatest interest from the age of thirteen was devoted to the Army Cadet Force. The khaki uniforms were made out of last war misfits, but