A Solitary War (6 page)

They had tea in the parlour and stayed to supper despite—or perhaps because of—a bottle of Algerian wine (which, although twenty years old, and warmed before being drunk, could fill one with pessimism).

When they had driven away to the hotel in Crabbe, Lucy started to pack. She finished packing a few minutes after two a.m.
Phillip had no heart to help load the trailer which stood in the yard shackled to the towing bar of the Silver Eagle. Memories of previous loadings, unloadings, reloadings of the lorry in Dorset with Lucy’s brother Ernest were too painful. Lucy, who had witnessed those past loadings, said that she and Mrs. Valiant could manage very well if they were left alone.

As the two women were tying the canvas cover over the trailer at 10 a.m. next morning Pinnegar and Mrs. Carfax arrived. They had already deposited their heavier luggage in the parlour, the fore feet of the elephant standing beside the open hearth.

While Phillip was trying to start the Silver Eagle the newcomers disappeared inside the farmhouse to look around their new home. The starter of the motor was liable to jam in the teeth of the
flywheel
. Would this mean that the damned thing would have to be pushed back in top gear, to free the cogs? Then up the slope of the yard to the road, and down the hill to Horatio Bugg’s yard? Thank God the engine fired. He put up the hood. It was a raw, grey day. The back seats were stuffed with packages, bags, bedding, and the remains of a rusty tricycle. It was not easy to fit the two small boys into all this clobber, but at last they were packed in. During this operation the part-ruined tricycle had to be taken out and replaced several times.

With leather coat buttoned up, Phillip prepared to squeeze his way into the driver’s cockpit. Two small faces side by side peered forth from the eiderdowns and suitcases behind him. Having lifted in one limb after another followed with his body, he got out again to examine the split-pin of the towing bar. As he had imagined, only one bifurcation of the split-pin was through the hole in the tow-pin. He must never again leave such a safety detail to anyone else. Would the engine re-start? The self-starter, to his immense relief, gave its raucous cock-crow. The cogs were, as Luke would say, coggin-in. The engine fired.

“Well, goodbye, Billy, write sometimes,” said Lucy to her
stepson
standing silently by the car.

“All right,” Billy muttered.

“Look after your chilblains when they come, and wear gloves in the cold weather, won’t you?”

“I suppose I will,” he said mournfully.

“Oh, do try and speak brightly and alertly,” Phillip cried, while thinking remotely, Poor Billy, oh if only Barley had not died. “Sorry, Billy.”

“It’s all right, Father, thank you.”

“Don’t worry, old boy,” said Teddy Pinnegar softly and kindly, to Phillip. “Have a good time, and when you come back, things will be very different, I assure you.” His voice dropped. “I’ve been looking round the bedrooms. They’re absolutely filled with dust and dirt. No wonder you have felt as you have.”

Lucy heard what was spoken, but said nothing.

“Look after Billy until I return, Teddy. God, if we were only going over the top at Cambrai, Skipper. How simple life was in those days.”

“You’re telling me, old boy.”

They shook hands. Phillip worked himself back into the seat and they drove away through the drab village and along the narrow winding road to Crabbe, turning under the railway bridge for Great Wordingham.

They passed a threshing scene: draggled straw and ragged smoke and filled sacks standing by a lorry; then a shooting party, keepers leading black retriever dogs, beaters sticks in hand and sacks on shoulders.

Farther on, labourers were sitting under a hedge eating their dinners, bottles of cold tea beside them, horses feeding from
nosebags
made of old sacks. It was the same unfeeling countryside he had known for nearly three years. Seldom a sign of war, which to the labourers meant 38
s
. a week instead of 34
s
. and their Union asking for 50
s
. The labourers had no feelings about the war; they used themselves naturally every day in a slow rhythm of the
everlasting
war with and against nature. They were used to doing what they were ordered, and if they were ordered to report to the regimental depot they would go without complaint, endure what was before them and if ‘lived and spared’ would return to the decrepit flint and brick cottages of their forefathers and work as before until they were too old—‘all wore up’—with no substantial complaint.

Three-quarters of an hour later they drew up outside the manor house wherein Rosamund was at school. And there stood
dark-haired
Roz, large-eyed, self-possessed, already changed from the little gabbling maid who had gone to the village school. There life had been raucous and competitive; here they were learning to be self-contained. Mrs. Richard Cheffe worked with, and led, her staff.

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.

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 had 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.