R.F. Delderfield > Quotes

“The best thing for the inside of a man, is the outside of a horse.”
― R.F. Delderfield

“One of these days the entire Western world will grind to a halt, its apparatus clogged with forms, files and memoranda.”
― R.F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days

“surely some of a nation’s wealth ought to be ploughed back into its population. From what I’ve seen since I came home precious little of our industrial profits are being invested in the welfare or the fabric of the country. Isn’t a compulsory education the key to a nation’s progress?’ ‘It’s”
― R.F. Delderfield, Long Summer Day

“He was thrown from his horse, and Englishman never falls off. ( roughly)”
― R.F. Delderfield

“When you want to say what is in your heart you can’t say it because, as the words take shape in your head, you find yourself despising them as clichés.”
― R.F. Delderfield, The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon

“père was an excitable little man, prone to rush from behind the”
― R.F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days

“chinless girl crept in with coffee, laid the tray on the desk like an apprentice priestess tending an altar and crept out again.”
― R.F. Delderfield, The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon

“he envied men like Raleigh their deeply-rooted faith in an all-seeing, all-caring Creator, universal at the time, he supposed, before tiresome fellows like Darwin and Huxley set about confusing everybody.”
― R.F. Delderfield, Give Us This Day

“not”
― R.F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days

“They were, David decided, a very colourful lot, but apart from Herries himself he was unable, during those first weeks, to strike up a friendship with any one of them. It was as though he had joined a band of castaways on a desert island, the lone survivor of a subsequent wreck, and at first he was inclined to view his isolation as the inevitable result of his own mental confusion. In the end he took his problem to Herries.

'In a sense you are an outsider, my dear chap,' he said, 'and that's the reason I grabbed you the moment you showed up. You're the bridge, don't you see? A passage over a generation gap, and it isn't the conventional generation gap we all have to cross if we know our business properly. Your gap, caused by the war, is semi permanent. It might take twenty years to close.'

'But some of the chaps on the staff are only a year or so older than I am,' David argued. 'There's the C.3 men, and Carter.'

'It's not a matter of years, but of experience, don't you see? What are our casualties to date? Not far short of three million, I'd say, and a third of them dead at eighteen-plus. No one who hasn't been out can imagine what it's like. Mentally a man like you must have aged about a year every month, and that makes you immeasurably senior to theorists like me, and faithful old buffers like Cordwainer, Acton and Gibbs.
Someone
has to tackle the job of nudging all those young rascals over the threshold into what I sincerely hope will be an entirely new world.
We
can't do it because we're even more adrift than they are and haven't a compass reading between us. In a year or so I daresay we can find you some help. Hang it all, everyone in his early twenties can't be dead or maimed or gassed. In the meantime you're on your own, lad.”
― R.F. Delderfield

“gold”
― R.F. Delderfield, Long Summer Day

“briefly how she had managed to unlock the back door and why she should have seemed so resentful of him. She had, he decided, been musing and had made her way to this particular room for that purpose. Her pose over there by the window had betrayed as much and his sudden appearance breaking into her reflections, had startled her, so that, in a sense, her anger had been counterfeit. He remained standing where she had stood, wondering if she would circle the west wing and appear at the crest of the drive, but when he heard or saw something of her he fell to thinking about women in general and his relations with them in the past. His experience with women had been limited but although technically still a virgin he was not altogether innocent. There had been a very forward fourteen-year-old called Cherry, who had lived in an adjoining house in Croydon, when he came home for school holidays and Cherry had succeeded in bewitching but ultimately terrifying him, for one day when they were larking about in the stable behind her house, she had hinted at the mysterious differences between the sexes and when, blushing, he had encouraged her to elaborate, she had promptly hoisted her skirt and pulled down her long cotton drawers, whereupon he had fled as though the Devil was after him and had never sought her company again, although he watched her closely in church on successive Sundays, expecting any moment to see forked lightning descend on her in the middle of ‘For all the Saints’. Then there had been a little clumsy cuddling at Christmas parties, and after that a flaxen-haired girl called Daphne whom he had mooned over as an adolescent and had thought of a good deal in the Transvaal but now he had almost forgotten what Daphne looked like and had not recalled her name until now. Finally there had been an abortive foray”
― R.F. Delderfield, A Horseman Riding By: The Complete Series

“Café coffee? Not on your life!’ said the Clerk. ‘I’ve got the best coffee-maker in the West. She’s a dreadful typist but I keep her on for elevenses. How about it then?”
― R.F. Delderfield, The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon

“still thought of him as Jack-o'-Lantern, a soubriquet he had acquired when he eloped with Joanna Swann) was a fine salesman and a very amiable man, and he and George had always seen eye to eye.”
― R.F. Delderfield, Give Us This Day

“He had to admit that there remained, in his heart and head, scarcely one good, honest, pre-war conviction! He had been, successively, an ardent trade unionist, a militant striker, a Socialist of the Centre, a fire-eating pacifist, a fanatical anti-Fascist, a jingo, a pro-Churchill vanguardist, a pro-Russian extremist, and was now inclining towards left-wing Liberalism! He was still, thank God, actively anti-Fascist, and as such could still regard the war as justly waged and justly won, but what would emerge from all this rubble and blather? How had his ancient dream of the Brotherhood of Man and the final renunciation of war been furthered by the overthrow of Hitler and all that overthrow had cost the suburb in blood and treasure?”
― R.F. Delderfield, The Avenue Goes to War

“He sat down beside the boy, saying nothing for a moment, but then he saw Briarley's lip quiver and lifted his arm, resting it gently on the boy's shoulder. He said, at length, 'Was he a professional, Briarley?' and when Briarley nodded, 'We couldn't have held out this long without them, lad. They taught us everything we knew in the early days,' and then, when the boy made no reply, 'Do you care to tell me about him? I've served in the Lys sector twice. Maybe we met, spoke to one another.'

He could not be sure whether his presence brought any real comfort but it must have eased Briarley's inner tensions to some extent for presently he said, 'I didn't see a great deal of him, sir. When I was a kid he was mostly in India or Ireland. He came here once, on leave. Last autumn, it was. We… we sat here for a bit, waiting for the school boneshaker to take him to the station.'

'Did he talk about the war, Briarley?'

'No, sir, not really. He only…'

'Well?'

'He said if anything did happen, and he was crocked and laid up for a time, I was to be sure and do all I could to look after the mater while he was away.'

'Are you an only child, Briarley?'

'No, sir. I'm the only boy. I've got three sisters, one older, the others just kids.'

'Well, then, you've got a job ahead of you. Your mother is going to need you badly. That's something to keep in mind, isn't it?'

'Yes, sir. I suppose so, but…'

He began to cry silently and with a curious dignity, so that David automatically tightened his grip on the slight shoulders. There was no point in saying anything more. They sat there for what seemed to David a long time and then, with a gulp or two, Briarley got up. 'I'd better start packing, sir. Algy… I mean the headmaster said I was to go home today, ahead of the others. Matron's getting my trunk down from the covered playground…' And then, in what David thought of as an oddly impersonal tone, 'The telegram said “Killed in action", sir. What exactly – well, does that always mean what it says?'

'If it hadn't been that way it would have said “Died of wounds", and there's a difference.'

'Thank you, sir.' He was a plucky kid and had himself in hand again. He nodded briefly and walked back towards the head's house. David would have liked to have followed him, letting himself be caught up in the swirl of end-of-term junketings, but he could not trust himself to move. His hands were shaking again and his head was tormented by the persistent buzzing that always seemed to assail him these days in moments of stress. He said, explosively, 'God damn everybody! Where's the sense in it…? Where's the bloody sense, for Christ's sake?' And then, like Briarley, he was granted the relief of tears.”
― R.F. Delderfield

“of Number Four. “Well now,” she thought, “things seem to be in a terrible muddle, but there are always the pictures. Whenever things get unbearable I’ll slip down to the Odeon, even if I have to come home before the supporting picture and the news.” Judith returned to the Avenue when she had official confirmation of Tim’s death. She would have returned soon enough in any case, for Maud Somerton engaged a new assistant when Judy put her wedding forward from New Year’s Day to September, on account of the war, and Tim’s enlistment. But now, like everything else, the riding-school business was in the doldrums, and Maud was talking of selling off horses, and economising all round. When she was told that Tim had been drowned in a troopship off the Western Approaches, Judy had been unable to cry. Instead she had saddled up Jason, the big chestnut, and ridden out to the corner of”
― R.F. Delderfield, The Dreaming Suburb

“He remembers this and will never forget it, not even when he is an old, old man, dying in some impersonal nursing home, watched by impersonal mutes.”
― R.F. Delderfield, The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon