A Solitary War Page 6

  David, so happy to see sister Roz again, was rolling himself with amazing speed across the floor of the room towards the open hearth where split logs bigger than himself were burning.

  “Can’t the two boys come, too?”

  Another problem, another decision. What to answer Mrs. Richard Cheffe? Jonathan was standing beside his mother, holding her hand silently. The four-year-old boy looked up at his mother with eyes which were at times so darkly serious. Phillip did not know what to reply to Mrs. Richard Cheffe. He was conscious of the little boy holding his mother’s hand tightly. This child was himself over again. What dark forces were tearing him apart? Into a split: Father one fork, Mother the other fork—the devil’s fork. Thus the little boy Hitler … And while he stood there, void of himself, there was a sudden humming in the wide chimney; a bomber at practice flying over the house.

  “I would take both boys, if you like, at quarter-fees.”

  Still he did not know what to say. A sense of disgrace filled him, that his literary earnings since the beginning of the war had been less than half the pay of a labourer on the farm; that his bank overdraft was nearly a third the value of the land he owned.

  “If the fighting begins, of course, we may have to close the school and go. They are making airfields all around us.”

  David was now rolling up the stairs. He paused to say hoarsely, “Cor, I like this place, I do.”

  “Would you like to see how we planned the school buildings?”

  David rolled himself rapidly down the stairs, aiming at their feet. A black Labrador came and rolled beside him.

  Mrs. Cheffe led Lucy to the courtyard. Phillip followed with the children. Here the old stables and coach houses had been made into dormitories, a lecture room with stage, two bathrooms, several bedrooms, a class-room. All so economical, simple and just, thought Phillip; what a contrast to his own building efforts. The waste of working capital, the mess that had been made by hoping Ernest would be business-like; the same pattern repeated as in the Boys’ Works years before. And now Lucy was going to have a long rest with Tim.

  He had no hope that, with Teddy Pinnegar, things would be different. Yet he was right to abdicate. In the new life the children would have a chance of better schooling, and not run wild, ragged and formless about the village street. He would send Lucy all he earned, and get his own living off the farm. And if it were taken over by the War Agricultural Committee as a ‘C’ farm, he would rejoin the army as a private soldier—obviously he wasn’t wanted as an officer.

  *

  It was time to be moving. He promised to call for Rosamund when the Christmas holidays came. The small girl stood beside Mrs. Cheffe. How beautiful she was, he thought, what poise, what breeding: this is what Mother would have been, had she the chances Rosamund had had.

  “Goodbye, Jonny darling. Look after Mum, Davie. Goodbye Mummie darling. Goodbye Dad.” Roz with glowing cheeks, shining dark hair and eyes, waving from the doorway.

  *

  And so south between wide fields and around grey curves, seldom seeing soldier or sign that the nation was set in a grapple which was not yet locked, not yet bleeding Europe to death. He went on as fast as he dared, dreading the black-out, an unfamiliar way at the end of the journey.

  They stopped to eat sandwiches and drink from Thermos flasks in the lee of a hedge by the roadside. A subdued meal: the little boys sitting silent by their mother, munching the unsweetened cakes of the one-man village bakery: the dull cakes of a long-impoverished agricultural district. How rich and active was the West Country by contrast. And, incidentally, the migration of Money from London to the West Country had already begun. He had heard from his friend Piers Tofield that the peasant owners of a labourer’s cottage in Rookhurst had been offered a bonus of £100 for vacant possession, and double rent thereafter; the new occupier paying for all improvements and repairs. Many rich evacuees with stores of wine and spirits and hundredweights of tinned food had migrated to the safe West Country from London with its congestion of streets and factories, fleeing from the terror of that which they had helped to raise. They jostled one another in the streets of country towns, the wives of the smart ones of Hampstead and Golders Green who had run away from the bombs which hadn’t yet fallen; who went from shop to shop to buy and buy and yet again buy, while yet the stocks of tinned and glassed food remained.

  Sitting apart, Phillip opened The Daily Crusader and read the banner-line across the front page.

  WE ARE WINNING THE WAR COMFORTABLY

  a quotation from Mr. Hore-Belisha, Minister for War, pictured smiling from behind the impregnable Maginot Line. Blockade, starvation of a nation, blockade, blockade, 1914 mentality, 1919 child-prostitution for soap, minotaur of usury behind the mask of the British Lion.

  “A practically non-combatant major of the Army Service Corps in the 1914–18 war had just told the nation that we are winning the war comfortably,” said Phillip bleakly, as he got back into the car. “He must be thinking of his own desk job in London during Passchendaele. Lucy, please try to remember that a trailer should always be loaded with the weight forward. Otherwise it rolls at speed and gets up a dangerous swing. I daren’t go faster than thirty-five, and we’ve at least three hours’ travelling before us. We’ll be caught in the black-out. Oh what is it, Jonathan? Why are you looking so subdued? Heavens, can’t anyone laugh for once?”

  He caught sight of his own face in the car-mirror and despair struck him.

  Jonathan hung his head. His brother David announced anxiously, “He wants to sit in front with Mum.”

  “Do you, Jonny?”

  Jonny hung his head lower.

  “Do please answer.”

  “I’m afraid you cannot,” murmured Lucy. “You worry Dad, in front.”

  An almost inaudible whimper from the child. He was crying. “He easily gets heart-broken, you know, Dad,” said David, earnestly. “The trike sticks in his leg behind here. I’m all right, I like it in the back, I pretend I’m a bomber, see?” he added with a note of optimism.

  Once again it was borne upon Phillip that in his words and actions were sorrow or happiness for the little children, and their mother. It all depended on him. During the past days he had convinced himself they would be happier away from him, in the care of the equable Tim; yet he knew the truth was that he was turning them out. He could bear no longer the sight of muddy floors, piles of wet boots, jumble of toys in play-room, new paint dirty with marks of hands, cooking splashes on the new kitchen walls, cupboards disordered with cleaning cloths—shoes, brushes, empty bottles, jam-jars lying askew. He was wearied out in the struggle to make order out of chaos; yet the pain of visual disorder was, he knew, the pain of his own inner disorder. Or was the reverse the truth? What was the truth of the war? If a man with the gift of tongues could resolve his own truth, he could resolve the world’s. He had been born with that talent; but he had buried it away, to follow other ways. He was self-ruined.

  “Why did we bring that damned tricycle? It’s always been left out to rust! Look at the handlebars, turned the wrong way. And why that piece of old iron tied to it? Why bring all this junk? Aren’t we overloaded mentally and physically already? Will you never have any sense?” he turned to Lucy.

  In a hoarse and anxious tone, his blue eyes wide open, David pleaded for clarity.

  “That piece of iron is Jonny’s harrow, you see, Dad. And the trike’s a Case tractor, and the handles are turned round because when Billy comes home off the Dicker he plays with us and rides it and his knees get in the way when he pedals, so he turned them round.” He added, “It isn’t Jonny’s fault. He loves the trike. He always greases the harrow with water before putting it away, don’t you Jonny? He’s really a neat little boy, and wants to be a farmer when he grows up, and can’t bear getting in a muddle, can you Jonny?”

  Phillip got out of the cockpit and walked across the field, feeling blank as the shallow furrows of indifferent ploughing over which he moved. When the poignant mood h
ad passed he returned, and seeing Lucy’s face he went to her and asked her forgiveness, saying that soon she would be in a clean new house, well-planned for labour-saving, with Tim.

  “Of course Jonny shall ride in front. I’ll put the trike on the trailer, it doesn’t matter if it sticks up. It was only through the village that I didn’t want us to look like a diddecais’ scrap-metal migration. You see, I’m really deeply ashamed of the mess I’ve made of everything. Now I’ll reload the trailer with the weight forward and we’ll get on. I hope the hens in the crate won’t catch cold, the sugar-beet-pulp sack is very thin. I must get a green canvas cover made specially for the trailer. Now I’ll shift these boxes forward, and then we can go faster——”

  Having done this he sat Jonathan on his mother’s lap and said to David, “Thank you for helping me, David. You are a good boy, you are like my father in face, and please always speak out when by doing so you can help anyone.”

  *

  It grew colder, the drab hues of winter field and hedge were fading. The Brecklands and Heathmarket were behind them, the crowded streets of Cambridge run through without stopping. Even David had ceased to ask when they would get to Uncle Tim’s house. It would have been a break to stop for tea; Phillip wanted to for Lucy’s sake; but with only two side-lights each the size and colour of a brass shilling behind tissue paper and one headlamp fitted with the regulation black slatted mask it would be unwise not to press on.

  They went past the green traffic-lights of a Huntingdonshire town, through the wide square and over a narrow stone-bridge crossing the Ouse; and travelling onwards, turned south into the main London road, noisily grim with heavy lorries thundering north. They passed the back-to-the-land settlement of detached houses for ex-Servicemen of the 1914–18 war—hen-houses and market-garden produce looking as though their owners had not made ends meet—and came to the remembered fork in the road.

  Some of the grasslands—all rushes and thistles—had been ploughed up; without zest, he knew. Farmers subdued by their experience of the past twenty years had no real confidence in the words of those, spoken and written, in Whitehall, urging that never again would British agriculture be allowed to fall into decline. They were not easily to be seduced by advertisements depicting, usually in wood-cuts by town artists, horses of unknown breed with jocund ploughmen, on mathematically straight furrows, smiling with the exhortation to Defeat Hitler with the Plough. They remembered the last-war promises; their dead sons had served with the Gaultshire Regiment; then had come the post-war betrayal, with Hereward Birkin shouting his head off in the wilderness, preaching to the wind.

  *

  Gaultshire, country of heavy clay-lands—the dreaded blue gault—where for centuries his maternal grandmother’s forebears had farmed. Many of mother’s Turney cousins, first, second, and third removals, had given up during the ’twenties and ’thirties. One farm, after four hundred years from father to son, had lost heart when corn, mutton, and vegetables had ceased to pay. Like Phillip, the son had fought with the regiment in France, but had been defeated after the war by the importation of cheap food—the the interest on foreign loans. Howard ploughs had rusted in idleness; the teams of heavy horses sold to Belgium for food; the last thin stubble tumbled down into weeds and after a year or two were that substitute pasture, called rough grazing. Farmers could fight the blue of gault, but not the blue of Tory Government.

  Now, in another war, the Government was offering grants of half-cost for tile-draining of those heavy clays—digging narrow trenches with branch-lines and switches leading downwards to the main ditch, patiently laying pipes or angle-shaped tiles at the bottom, before covering them again. Such heavy burdens of work could not be undertaken by any doubting heart. Farmers were men who worked naturally and therefore honestly; they did not think like the speculators of the towns. The repeal of the Corn Production Act in 1923 had shaken them; they were not true believers in Carlton Club or Transport House, both illaqueated in an obsolescent financial system. They were loyal, because they were truly English; but they had no faith in any Government. They would serve their land to the last drop of their blood; but they did not want to lose that last drop—when the war was over. What would it cost to re-lay the tile-drains in Thacker Park? Ten p’un an acre, that’s five p’un out o’ my pocket. I owe the bank nigh on a thousand p’un already. (The farmers of that county alone owed the banks eight million.) Think I’ll wait, and see how the Government fixes the price o’ wheat. When a man’s wages are a sack of wheat, then things are right. What’s a sack of wheat today? About twenty-seven shillings; and a man’s wages are thirty-eight bob. Turn me out, will they, if I don’t drill the acreage of wheat they order me to? We’ll see.

  Farmer shakes his head. Grandfather last laid the tiles under the eighteen acres of Thacker Park. The old account book at home, with marbled end-papers, and pages covered with fading ink, record the cost of just over three p’un the acre. Worm-workings have choked the drains long since; ’twould be nice to see the tiles laid again, and the furrows turn up a bit crumbly like, the old vinney clay tamed a bit; but what’s the use if Tom in the Yeomanry don’t come back from Hitler’s war? I ain’t got the heart I had once. If only they head-ones would fight it out for themselves. ’Tes a pesky old war. Well, I got a new tractor but I can’t get a breast, I’ll dig for victory all right, but the breast’s bin on order for two months now and no knowing when ’twill arrive. A proper muddle, oh well, I don’t unnerstan’ such things. Booger, I copped it droo me leg on the Somme, now ’tes come gain. ’Tes a rum’n. I don’t understand.

  You will, farmer, you will. Or will it then be too late? With Asia to the coast of Brittany?

  And into Phillip’s mind came a phrase of Hereward Birkin’s printed message dated 1st September, 1939, which he had pasted into his Farm Diary.

  We enter now a period when the people will bearoused by events. When we have awakened sufficient of the people to the truth, peace will be won and the people will be saved for a glorious future.

  They were approaching Gaultford. He dropped into third gear, thence to second. Ochreous spots of light on dusky shapes moved in tenebrous streets. Sudden shades arose near the curb-side wing. Walkers could see moving yellow spots, a driver could not see them. The High Street was a canal of blackness with tiny lights all flashing downwards like luminous fish through which he moved, a dark shark. At last—relief. Over the bridge and to the right by the shaded green traffic light: past dim buildings and more yellow-moving spots and there were the Barracks suddenly looming—the Regiment! Would any of the names of his day be known there now? Captain (temp. Brigadier-General) ‘Spectre’ West? Mowbray? Harry Gotley? Denis Sisley? Ghosts had no names.

  Along the road and past shops, on for a mile or two; and at last to the edge of the wood behind which stood, in his memory, rows of little neat houses, with concrete roads; and the last one on the right at the end was Tim’s—or would be Tim’s after one thousand three hundred weekly payments of 19s. 6d. which included rates. And that waiting form was Tim himself uttering a gentle Hullo in the darkness, a form behind discreetly shaded torch ready to guide travellers past the somewhat awkward upended herring-bone border of artistic burnt yellow bricks to the front door.

  “Well, well, well,” said the form, with quiet satisfaction. “Lulu—I can’t tell you——”

  “Tim-o!”

  “Hello, Uncle Tim.”

  “Be careful, everybody. Someone fell on those bricks and broke a tooth the other day. Well, come along in. Glad to see you, Phil. Put your clothes anywhere, drop them on the floor, it doesn’t matter. Tea, I think, Lucy? The electric kettle takes six minutes. Bath water, all hot. And a water-softener!”

  What a relief to be inside: how strange to feel that it was not really wrong if one ceased to feel worried.

  “You go and sit by the fire, my dear Phil, you’ve been driving. Lucy and I will get the tea.”

  Beyond the half-closed door Tim was saying to Lucy, “Well!—Wel
l!—Well!” Then the door shut.

  In the front room were rows of remembered books on the shelves of Pa’s old desk, with its paper-weights, letter-scales, seals, brass duck’s head with one ruby eye and brass bill to hold papers—the remembered knick-knacks of the home he had vainly tried to save from disintegration fifteen years before. There was the armchair, worn and cat-scratched, wherein Pa had sat at night and read Fox-Davies’s Heraldry and then turned to crossword puzzles in the Morning Post, followed by a reading of detective stories. And there was the sofa where Lucy had sat between himself and Tim, and the two elder brothers sat wherever they could. As soon as Pa rose to leave the room his chair was silently occupied by one or the other of these two sons, who after a pause, and in silence, slid into it. Nobody had any money, nobody worried, nobody asked questions—not even about crossword puzzles. The cat was trained to eat currants instead of wild birds, and the birds were so tame that wire-netting frames were fitted over the open windows in summer, because they were a nuisance, flying to Pa’s plate and stealing his food. “Hi!” Pa would call. “You be off, you thief.”

  On the walls of the hall were the otter pates set on carved oaken shields with white-painted details of weight and place of kill. In another room with bare floor and walls stood the wood-turning lathe by Holtzapfel, a five-hundred-guinea Victorian affair with its hundreds of cutting tools arranged in drawers and cabinets of mahogany. That lathe was capable of work so fine, Tim had told him enthusiastically, all those years ago, that three hollow ivory balls of diminishing sizes could be turned on it, the lesser contained within the greater. The lathe had been one of Pa’s hobbies before the first war which had made him poor, since much of his money had been invested in Russian stock which the Archangel Expedition in 1919 had failed to recover. Here were the visible signs of the inner spirit of the old home, where never an angry or declaiming voice had been raised until he himself …