A Solitary War (14 page)

What to do during that hour? There was some beer and whisky, but if they drank it then, there would be none for lunch. Dogs squirmed by his legs.

“Well, let’s hang on a bit, shall we, Luke?”

“Right you are, sir.”

At least he hadn’t mentioned wet-weather work to Luke. It had been coming to his tongue. A day’s shoot was a sporting event. To have revealed anxiety about money would have been in poor taste. His guests were expecting to show them sport, to entertain them: and how near had he come to revealing his hollow anxiety. Perhaps Cabton had, through nervousness and ignorance of the form, made a
gaffe
: and his rudeness was but a stammered
cover-up
? Go easy; relax; smile like the Commander of the 1st Corps on the Menin Road on 30 October, 1914, when the Alleyman had taken Gheluvelt and the survivors of the Coldstream were
streaming
down towards Ypres, ‘having lost cohesion’.

“My chap thinks the weather will clear in about an hour. Would you care to hear something written during the last century on the state of English farming seventy years ago, and how the writer forecast certain world trends? I think it has some bearing on events in our present time.”

Polite murmurs. Perhaps he would bore them worse than the rain: however, he was committed; keep his end up, go through with it now. Over the top. He was trembling as he opened one of the three-ply boxes, and took out the bound journals of his grandfather, turning pages until he came to one of his favourite passages concerning the industrial revolution; and began to read. At the end of the section he stopped; the rain was still falling outside.

“Shall I go on for a bit? Or is it unbearable?”

“Please go on.”

At the end of the hour the diary entries were finished, and so was the rain. He had lived in the scenes, the feeling of their authenticity had been communicated to the listeners sitting on barrels and
three-ply
boxes. There were murmurs of approval.

“Absolutely hits the nail on the head.”

“Damned interesting, I must say,” said Teddy. “Your
grandfather
prophesied both bloody wars. In nineteen-fourteen a trade war for exports, and this one for the Golden Calf. I’ve got a
wonderful
idea while you were reading, Phillip! But I won’t tell you now.” Teddy’s face was beaming. Stout fellow, as always in trouble, Teddy Pinnegar.

“Well, the rain god at last seems to be propitiated,” Phillip said, in the language of the military sportsmen of
Blackwood’s
Magazine
, as he opened the door, to see blue sky between thinning vapours, and a shine of the sun among low clouds.

Cheerfully he set out with the others for the distant wood by the river.

*

The boundary ‘stops’, carrying white rags on sticks, had been out since dawn. Many birds roosted in River Wood. Upon the field beyond the boundary, mustard had been sown in a strip thirty yards wide, out from the hedge ‘to draw the bards’, in Matt’s words. Charles Box, his neighbour, would begin his day’s
shooting
by lining the boundary with guns and beaters; and at the sound of his copper horn the line would walk forward, thus driving any pheasants in the mustard away from the wood.

The stops, two of Phillip’s men, had walked inside the boundary since dawn, waving rags on sticks and sometimes shouting to keep pheasants from flying across the meadows into the mustard.

*

The wood lay narrow and curving beside, and a little above, the river. Otters loved its wilderness of fallen fir trees, willows, thorns, and ash which grew on land that was almost an island. On its south side moved the river; on the north lay a dyke in which the tidal press of water moved sluggish or fast according to the height of the river and phases of the moon.

When the moon was full or new the spring tides of the sea kept back fresh river-water behind sluice-gates in the sea-wall; and the fresh-water, moving back along the dykes, came after a mile or more to the River Wood and adjoining meadows. Phillip had watched the water rise as much as fifteen inches as it crept back up the lesser drains and along the serpentine grass-grown guts in the meadows, spreading out over areas of grazing until those areas were like lagoons. There the grass became what Matt called water-slain.

He had a plan to replace the fallen-in and rotten
wood-and-chalk
‘bridges’, which connected the meadows, with culverts made
of concrete reinforced by old iron bedsteads and odd lengths of angle-iron bought at auctions for a few pence before the war. These new culverts would carry lorry and tumbrils and also be crossing-places for cattle. Two-foot-wide pre-cast concrete pipes to carry the water under the culverts. One way flaps on the lower ends of the pipes to stop back-flooding. Then plough the meadows: wheat and sugar-beet on that rich deep soil, once the sea-bed before sea-wall and sluice-gates were built a hundred years ago. Meanwhile, whenever he saw the flooded meadows, his thoughts were depresssed like the water-slain grasses there.

*

The beaters went in among the trees of River Wood. Birds flew out, fifty or sixty in succession. The semi-circle of guns on the meadow hit three out of every five pheasants that flew over. After the shooting Billy led Beatrice and the game cart to the meadow. He had been waiting on the Scalt field with ffondent-Jones, the improver. The tumbril had been washed and oiled, its red shafts and green body glistened as it moved on big rubber tyres scrubbed black. Under a green canvas cover lay clean wheaten straw; and on that straw after the first stand twenty-seven pheasants, two
moorfowl
, and one pigeon were laid.

“Jolly fine shoot, I say,” said Teddy to Phillip as they led the way across the pasture to the boundary of the Brock Hanger, to climb the steep chalky slopes among the beech trees and reach the edge of the Lower Brock field, with its thigh-high mustard—that stalky, tough, unploughed and unploughable mustard which on Matt’s advice had been left to ‘hold the bards’.

Walking round the edge of the Lower Brock they came to the Great Bustard Wood.

As Phillip said later, had it been a fine day the sport of that drive would have been considerable, for the twenty acres of
mustard
had attracted pheasants from many fields around. But at the time all he saw was the frightful spectacle of plants three feet high, bedraggled and part-rotted by frost after most of them had shed their seeds; and now for years to come those seeds would be growing in the corn, helping charlock or wild mustard to choke the barley crops. Why had he not ploughed it under when he had wanted to, when it was only a foot high in September? Matt’s ‘hold the bards’ idea had been like an ichneumon fly on his winged purpose to help give that poor, exploited soil a little humus. And now, the fall ploughing missed. Spring ploughing would cause most of the sub-soil moisture to evaporate, also the sticky soil would
have neither rain nor frost to help refine it to the soft, loose tilth that barley needed for an even and continuous growth. Oh, why was he so weak that he could never order his own life and work but always be a vehicle for the ideas of other people?

Drenched figures pushed through the jungle of mustard, to drive the birds into the Great Bustard Wood. Six of the eight guns were set at sixty-yard intervals around three sides of that central wood. The beaters, accompanied by the two remaining guns, went to the far end of the Bustard field, there to about-turn and spread out across the field, to drive any birds from hedge or stubble before them into the wood.

Weeks previously Luke and Phillip had scattered tail-corn and weed-seeds, from a threshed stack, among the trees of the Great Bustard. Teddy, too, had gone among the trees, broadcasting what he imagined to be pheasant feed—some mustard seed discovered in a sack in the granary and taken without asking.

“Yar’ll see,” Luke said, “there’ll be a lot o’bards that we drove out of the mustard hiding in the Bustard. Do you send that Mr. Vinegar to flank the beaters with us, and another gun on the opposite flank, to get any bards breaking back.”

So Teddy and a Fusilier walked to the far end of the field, while the six remaining guns faced the pines of the lower edge of the wood, standing well down on the grassy Scalt field. It was the best stand of that little shoot, with the northern view behind them of meadow, marsh, and sea; and before them dark green pines.

The rain held off. They waited. Some rested on shooting sticks. Across the unseen stubble beyond the far boundary of the wood the beaters moved slowly.

Phillip was waiting on the Cold Old Land, a pightle narrow and sloping between Great Bustard Wood and Meadow Wood below.

Were there any birds to come out? Had they been in the
mustard
, driven into the wood? Minutes passed. No sound of urgent crowing, no rocketting of wings. Not even a pigeon flew out and across the Cold Old Land.

*

A wan white disc appeared to be moving through clouds to the south. The vapours polished it to silver, to quicksilver, to gold—the sun burst upon the day. How warm and welcome its rays on face and body! He drew a deep breath and felt the dullness lifting from him with the buoyant air.

Glowing now in sunlight was the yellow of the mustard below the slope of the Cold Old Land. There was his sheep-fold, snug
between the two woods; hurdles enclosing an uneaten square of mustard for the ewe flock in the evening. Oh, that piece of the farm was now good! Before, the pightle had grown only grey thin grass, thistles, moss, and ragwort: now, fine feed for sheep. How good and healthy looked that mustard, the grazed patches nicely covered with dung. He resisted a desire to give a sharp shout of relief. Oh, things would come all right, things weren’t so bad. Lucy had written that Tim’s new house was a dream, and the children were happy in their new schools——

Yet once again he realised how—away from confining
house-life
, and in the open air—mental burdens usually dissolved
themselves
. The entire farm would one day be in order. He would hold on; be like Haig when it seemed that Ypres, and so the Channel ports, would be lost. When he had first come Luke had said that nothing would grow on that ‘cold old land’, and advised against ploughing. Even ‘Lordy Nelson’, the one-eyed labourer, had agreed. Phillip could hear the words in his head now: he could mimic the tone of ‘Lordy’s’ voice perfectly on occasion.
I’ve
a-worked
here
thirty
years
and
more,
and
even
under
old
Buck,
the
best
farmer
this
land
ever
had
,
better
than
the
old
Karnel,
this
land
warn’t
no
good.
Cold
old
land,
it
wor.
Yet it had a southern slope. What was the mystery of its infertility?

*

Phillip had ploughed the three acres of the Cold Old Land and received
£
6 as subsidy from the Government. After cultivating he had drilled mustard in spring and broadcast some basic slag, then folded sheep on the mustard, which had looked not too bad a growth. He had ploughed the pightle again in September of the same year, and drilled it with wheat in October. Hardly a plant had remained on those acres after the following winter. Cold old land it certainly was. The seed had germinated in November, but had made no growth. Most of the plants had died in the wet and sickly rains of December and January. He had dug out plants and looked for signs of wire-worm—teeth rasping root-stocks away—had found none, only decay and rottenness. For a third time the land was ploughed and sown with mustard during the
following
July; and now in December it was a thick healthy crop and his ewes were eating it off night after night, and running on the sward of the Scalt field by day. His plan was to plough after the sheep had fed it off, and drill barley there in the spring. He would show them that the Cold Old Land could grow a proper crop.

As he stood there in the noon sunshine of that December day of 1939 there came from the wood the exciting rocketting of wings and grating cries of cock-pheasants. Almost at once birds were flying out in two and threes—frenzied circular sweepings of wings and long tails rippling as they climbed to clear the tall trees of the Meadow Wood below. High birds indeed! The reports of guns were all around the higher unseen field, for most of the birds were flying straight through the northern pines and over the semi-circle of guns on the Scalt. None came Phillip’s way. He stood there, glad that his visitors would not be disappointed, happy to stand in the sunlight amidst the glowing flowers of the mustard—doing nothing.

The line of beaters had not yet entered the Bustard wood. He could see Teddy advancing among them, to take any birds breaking back. The upper half of Teddy advanced over the
skyline
hump, on the edge of the wheat-stubble. More cries, more shots, Teddy turning away from the beaters, hurrying down the slope towards him, to stop in the area of mushings of cloven feet and dark green droppings which were to transform the Cold Old Land.

“My G-god,” he cried. “What a beautiful shoot you’ve got! It’s the best in England.”

“I’ll go to the top, Teddy.”

From his new stance he watched Teddy. He was a good shot. Other birds were crowing and wing-whurring among the trees above. Then a near clatter of wings as a pheasant flew out of the hedge between the two fields and he saw it tumble, and while it was falling he heard the crack of Teddy’s Purdey. Another bird flew out, a cock this time, grating urgently. It flew higher and faltered and there was another crack and it flew on and then
somersaulted
in the air and fell cart-wheeling and the report reached him after it had thudded on the stubble.

He braced his feet, opened his gun to see if it were loaded, snapped the breech, opened it again and pulled out the cartridges, glanced down barrels to see if they were clear (for they were
somewhat
worn and a dead leaf in the end of one might have caused a burst) then reloaded and stood ready. He shifted the strap of the leather cartridge bag over his shoulder to feel less encumbered. More shots on the right flank, out of sight. More cries of beaters.