A Solitary War (7 page)

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.

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 19
s
. 6
d.
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!—Well!—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 …

No wonder Lucy’s eyes were shining and her cheeks flushed with happiness. She was home again after fifteen years in the wilderness.

*

Yes, he was homeless, and had been ever since Hallowe’en on the Messines Ridge twenty-five years before. Yes, that was the breaking away point, he thought, as he had his tea alone in the old armchair by the fire, books at his back, fire at his feet,
hire-purchase
radio by his elbow, shaded electric light flooding the tray by his side, windows framed with black paper over his shoulder. Shoes off, not bothered to find slippers. It was good to sip tea and read a different newspaper and turn on the wireless by his side instead of having to go up into his bedroom to listen to the news—no news, as usual.

And as he sat there his mind strayed into the past, to the cottage by a moorland stream of pellucid water where the pale green olive duns hatched from the clear running rills at noon, to shed their pellicle-dresses in the afternoon and assume another of tawny hue, to rise and fall in the motion of a spinning shuttle, laying their eggs on the water until the trout took them in the runs.

How often had he watched them by the bridge at
Monachorum
. How simple a life that had been; yet it had not satisfied. Why was that—not enough to do? No: no likeness of thought. The mayfly swimming up as a wingless nymph—meditating deliriously as it waited for its pellicle to split, its winged essence to mount the bright heaven of all being—no melancholy, no shadow of itself. To love—to lose oneself in beauty—to be calm, to be happy. Then, and only then, might a man be able to say within himself, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Otherwise, man was an object offset from life, mislaid in the flow of time. Was it true that his isolation had begun when he grew apart from his mother, in that hollow-wasted home? The sense of being completely outside time had been strong almost from infancy. This sense had taken care of him sometimes in the
war, when all sense of danger or fear had lifted, and he had walked into the hissing flêches of machine-gun bullets, exposed and
indifferent
, not from bravado, but to be calm, to be free, apart from his body.

Whatever the cause, this sense of misplacement in time, this sense almost of predestination had brought him to where he was now. He had never really wanted to be a farmer. He had just let it happen to him, driven on as by a sort of doppelganger in opposition to his real self. He was not by nature a man of action, he was a contemplator of action. That was why he always
preferred
to watch things happen rather than make them happen. He could describe in words, without effort, anything he had observed; it always had given him pleasure, provided there were no ulterior necessity to force on the writing, such as the need for money.

That was the solution to his self-made impasse: he was not a farmer, but a writer. So all he had to do was to sell the farm, and buy or rent a little house like No. 2, The Glade, not too far from town, on a ’bus route, so that he could shop and meet friends and go to the pictures without trouble or waste of energy; and his problem was solved. No more sleepless mornings, no more lying awake at 3 a.m. and wondering what to order for
wet-weather
work for three men, should it be raining at 7 a.m. How wonderful not to have to think anything in terms of necessity.

“Hullo, my dear,” said Lucy, coming into the room with her brother.

“By Jove, Phil,” said Tim, “it’s good to see you sitting in Pa’s chair again.”

“It’s good to sit in it, Tim. How about the talkies, when the trailer’s unloaded? Or need we unload tonight?”

“I’ve got the bags out already,” said Lucy. “Let’s leave the rest till tomorrow. Pictures? Certainly! Tim says a neighbour will come in periodically and listen if the little boys are all right. Pictures, Tim-o?”

“By Jove, yes, Lulu! I’ve not been for weeks. How jolly nice to ride in a car again. I’m sick of my bicycle, every morning going to work in the dark, and returning every night to an empty house in the same dark. I say, how absolutely splendid it is that you have come!”

The two boys ran into the room, uttering cries of enjoyment, Jonathan as usual following and imitating David. “Gee whizz, I like Uncle Tim’s house,” cried David. “I’m so glad we’ve left the farm. Hurray.”

“Hurray,” echoed Jonathan.

*

Lying relaxed in bed that night, Phillip wondered how Teddy Pinnegar and Mrs. Carfax were getting on. Mrs. Carfax had spoken of the possibility of her two hunters coming to the farm. What would that mean, ten pounds of crushed oats daily for each hunter? ‘The Bad Lands’ could hardly support its own livestock. Teddy had assured him in a letter that he had very simple tastes: four hundred a year in the country would be sufficient to satisfy those tastes, he had declared; while asking, Would there be that return from two thousand pounds invested in the farming
business
? Four hundred was a normal return for a working partner from two thousand invested in an ordinary business, he said.

Phillip had replied that it might be possible with new and improved methods: a pedigree milking herd instead of nine cows rearing three or four nondescript market calves each, in a year; the meadows drained, ploughed, and re-seeded to feed the herd; the arable enriched to grow better hay, beans, for silage; an increased flock of turkeys and perhaps hundreds of hens in fold units to improve the pastures. In a phrase, high farming.

But was high farming possible in a siege war when submarines began to attack British shipping seriously? The import of feeding stuffs and fertilisers, particularly potash, would be cut down, rationed, and finally unobtainable. There were the several big compost heaps as potash-makers on the farm; but it was a
long-term
system. As cultivations improved, so would the crops; more straw and better meadows meant more dung because there would be more bullocks to tread the straw in the yards in winter. But
£
800 a year profit from
£
4,000 invested in the arable of ‘the Bad Lands’ and 90 acres of indifferent grassland was asking a lot to begin with. He had said all this to Teddy; adding that it depended entirely on the ability, drive, and vision of the partnership.

*

During his stay at No. 2, The Glade, he walked in some of the places he had known as a boy, pretending he was farming the fields which he passed, while knowing that those heavy lands had broken many a farmer. His farthest walk was to a spinney where with his cousin Percy Pickering he had found his first chaffinch’s nest, in a low hawthorn hedge of the country lane within bicycling distance of Beau Brickhill. Rooks had cawed against the windy April sky, but neither he nor Percy had dared to climb up. They
had stood under the trees, regarding the long upper boughs on the slender tops of which the mysterious nests swayed against white clouds riding high above the blue halls of the wind.

The boy who had gazed upwards with him had been dead a long time, killed on the Somme; but Phillip could see his rosy face, Eton collar resting on shoulders of Norfolk jacket, hear his voice in the shadows of April leaves speckling the white dusty lane to the gay song of the chaffinch. It was hard to imagine Percy further: for the essence of him, so real once, had gone out of his life. Percy was dead, too far away for any feeling of him to remain under the trees; and the spinney, once so remote and enchanting, was changed also, for just down the tarmac road were great pits of excavated blue-clay with miles of elevated lines and steel trucks slowly moving along them, travelling laden to the furnaces whose tall pale yellow chimneys were visible some miles away. The
former
meadows and fields, covering several thousands of acres, were now part of an immense brick-works; perhaps half of Greater London was once lying under the song of the chaffinch when Percy and he had bicycled to Brogborough Spinney.

A queer sight, the trucks trundling above that deeply excavated grey landscape, where not a human being was to be seen: only the steel trucks trundling on their miles of raised causeway, some empty and returning, other awaiting at switch-lines for the more important laden ones to pass in their wide-spaced procession above a hollowed-out countryside whose horizon was set with viaducts, causeways, and tall cranes.

The queerness, the unreality of this world was heightened by the sight here and there of a derailed truck which had fallen clear of the track, to lay on its back like a huge robot-louse of Martian industry, on a planet become soilless and worked-out, void and dead—discarded by the invisible power whose direction it had lost. I do not like this voided world, with its whiff of acid air coming from that white vapour straying out of the distant rows of tall chimneys; and so thinking, he hastened away through the flat and colourless fields, his thoughts shut in upon himself, and arrived back at No. 2, The Glade in darkness, feeling himself alien to modern life, and now indeed homeless, as he sat in Pa’s chair, for he had severed himself from these romping children, and the amiable brother and sister who were talking so happily together in the adjoining room. In their soft voices they were talking of the happy things they would now be able to do together. The next day he was going back to the farm.