In Youth Is Pleasure
VISION PRESS LTD
Callard House
74a Regent Street
London W1
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAN BRITAIN
BY THE REPLIKA PROCESS
BU LUND RUMPRESS & CO. LTD LONDON & BRADFORD
M C M L
One summer, several years before the war began, a young boy of fifteen was staying with his father and two elder brothers at a hotel near the Thames in Surrey. The hotel had once been a country house, and before that a royal palace. But now the central courtyard was glassed over to make a huge tea-lounge; there was a glistening range of downstairs cloakrooms, and a whole new wing with ballroom, and little box bedrooms above.
The hotel still stood in charming parkland, with terraced gardens and lawns sloping down to a little artificial lake almost entirely surrounded by huge overgrown brambles. Only the lake and its banks were neglected; the rest of the grounds, with the fountain, the grotto, the cottage orné, and the elaborate pets’ cemetery, were kept in very trim order.
The young boy, whose name was Orvil Pym, wandered out into these trim gardens on his first night at the hotel. He and his father had arrived that afternoon in one of those large black polished Daimlers which the suspicious always imagine have been hired.
Mr. Pym, home from the East for six months, had gone up to the Midlands to fetch Orvil from school. Orvil had been ill for the last few days of term. Being already very uneasy and anxious about life, he was one of the first to show signs of food-poisoning; but soon two wards in the Sanatorium were full of other boys from his House showing the same signs. A little fever, a little sickness, a little diarrhoea, that was all. The boys were merry and bright, rolling the white china pos along the boards, swearing and telling stories and abusing one another in the stillness of the night.
The poisoning upset the Housemaster’s wife far more than it upset its victims. The food was good in her house, the boys knew it, everyone knew it. She did not scrimp or save to put money in her husband’s pocket for their retirement. Why, only last Sunday there had been salmon and cucumber, and trifle with real cream!
She went about ashamed, turning red suddenly for no outward reason. She hated to think of the things the other Housemasters’ wives were saying. The mean ones would be delighting that she, who gave good food generously, should poison half her boys; and the kind ones would be pitying her. Both the imagined exulting and the pity gave the poor Housemaster’s wife a great deal of pain.
What could it have been? she kept asking herself. Could it have been the potted meat at tea?
Orvil was delighted and relieved when he knew that he was physically ill at last. His first year at a public school had been so alarming and disintegrating that he found himself longing, all the time, for a very quiet room where he could go to sleep.
At first the Sanatorium had been quiet, and he had enjoyed himself; but then the other boys had begun to arrive and the place was turned quickly into a bear-garden.
One evening Orvil could stand no more. His face and arms had become bluish, with ugly spreading red blotches. This condition was due to three things: the poisoning, his anxiety, and the large amount of a drug, like aspirin only stronger, which the nurse had given him. He got out of bed, seemingly in a trance; then he hopped on all fours round his bed, croaking, “I’m a frog, I’m a frog, a huge white frog.”
There was a silence for a moment in the ward; then a large boy, with black hair just beginning to sprout in his nose, shouted out in a frightened voice, “Nurse, nurse, come quickly; Pym has gone queer and is hopping round the floor saying he’s a frog.”
The nurse ran in and raised Orvil up in her arms. Although she was so small, her body was very strong andhard, and she held Orvil’s weight against her with ease. She was laughing quietly to herself as she led him back to bed.
“Fancy thinking you’re a frog!” she said, trying to smooth back his thick coarse curly hair, and doing up the top button of his pyjama jacket which he always left undone. She bustled away to get water and towels for a tepid rub-down.
Orvil still pretended to be in a dreamlike state. When she returned, he heard the boys whispering, “Pym’s delirious, he’s seeing things!”
The nurse took off his jacket and began to sponge his chest and arms with the tepid water. He kept his eyes closed; he did not like to see her looking at his chest. She held up one of his hands gently, and let the water trickle down till it tickled his armpit. He gave a little shiver and she laughed.
“You’ll be better after this,” she said, “you’ll feel cooler.”
When she had dried the top half of his body she popped on his jacket and pulled down his trousers almost in one movement; then she flung a towel expertly across him and began to wash under it, between his legs. Orvil was hot and sticky there, and the cool spongings made him tremble, but he did not mind her quick hands darting about under the towel. He felt safe with his jacket on.
‘I wonder if Florence Nightingale taught this way of doing things.
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