Contributors Club: W.A. RATHKEY

He had scarcely reached the Prep, School age before he realised that, if life was to be bearable, the other chaps must never know how much he felt things. Just one or two people, perhaps, might understand how beauty could give you a “queer, gulpy feeling as if you wanted to cry; how séeing little things hurt could make you feel sick and black furious at the same time. His mother, perhaps, might understand, though she was too near to confide in ~ too much always there. If he told her secret things at bedtime, he would he would have to face her at breakfast, so it were better not, though it was comforting to feel that she would understand if he ever dared put it in words.

 These others - -  this shouting, football-kicking crowd, they were different, they would laugh, jeer, point him out as soft. (He shuddered sway from a memory of a soft, furry body mangled tin the road, of curious eyes and loud jokes, of himself the focus of those eyes “Look, young Keyhole's going to be sick!") Somehow he must hide it, 

Valiantly he tried, the little chap, building an armoured wall round his sensitive observation, pretending so hard that he was as thick-skinned, as insensitive as his mates.

 As he grew older, he found refuge in books; he could meet there maturer minds, and there too, like a revelation, his salvation came to him. What was it he reed? Who knows? Some such phrase as :"When an Englishman really  believes in a thing; he makes a jest of it.

It was true and he knew it. Did not even the most thick -skinned of his mates - call the school "a rotten hole“ to hide his pride in it? Then here was his way of escape. He would go one better, he would be the jester of jesters, there should be nothing sacred from his scandalous tongue.

 With his head flung high, he hurled his cynicisms and his lampoons, and the mob cheered and a claimed him. 

"Soft? Not he!" said they, admiringly, as his latest libellous verse went secretly round, andy secure behind his cynic mask, young Rathkey treasured his love of home and beauty, his hatred of cruelty and beastliness.

 It stood him in good stead when he passed from school, and in better stead when beastliness sudden became all pervading and that innate love of England, which was to him as a flame, flung him into the war. How he loathed it - -  but how he jested through it! Just as the school mob had respected and admired his wit, so his men jerked their heads as he passed and whispered behind their bands: 

"E's a rare ‘un. Did you hear what ‘e said when …?”

 it is over now, the great adventure, and he is older and more mellowed. Cruelty still has its power to hurt, but the cynic mask has become a habit, and his mouth now twists itself, without effort, into the shape needful to give full effect to his dry comments on war-makers and armamenteers. 

Seated in his garden, he writes contemptuously of its foulness then, sealing the envelope, rises with a stretch: 

“Another vile parody, my dear,” he drawls to the wife who, Heaven be praised, understands him, “but some nit-wit of an Editor may think it clever." 

Then, as his eye catches a distant spike of green, the pose drops. "Good Lords Mary, there's a daffodil - one of those special ones from Telkemp! Let's go and gloat over it." 

They do , on their knees - for no neighbours are looking?