A Solitary War (9 page)

*

The drift of Siberian air which had moved down from Northern Europe over the North Sea to the island of Britain held all East Anglia in snow and ice. Foot-marks frozen hard in the mud-path outside the black-curtained farmhouse seemed to have been there for ever. A walk at night to the bathroom in the built-on
stone-and-brick
annexe was a cautious groping through darkness which at any moment might end in a slip, a thud, a cry.

The open fireplace in the farmhouse permitted only the tiniest fire, and then only if the wind outside was not blowing, the sticks kept back against the wall, the door open, and the flames not more than six or seven inches high and about ten inches wide. At night Teddy, Billy and Phillip sat by its meagre cheer, listening to Teddy’s portable radio set, often to the nasal voice of ‘Lord
Haw-Haw
’ speaking from Germany, and to symphony concerts wherever they could be found on the medium and short wave-bands.

On one such evening of comparative harmony, when Billy had bicycled to the pictures in Crabbe, Phillip brought up the subject which had by now become heavy upon him.

“Well, how do you feel about things, Teddy? The trial month is up, I fancy.”

Teddy hesitated; then in his slow, soft tones he said, “I’m not quite sure I know, Phillip. It’s rather early to decide. I’ve tried
to talk to ‘Yipps’, but I don’t seem to be getting any farther
forward
. You see, it’s not easy, because there’s some trouble about my getting capital out of my old business, as I mentioned to you.”

Teddy passed his hand several times over his forehead as though to smooth away worry.

“And another thing, Phillip. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. You see, apart from the dubious question of capital, there doesn’t seem anything for me to do here.”

He went on, stuttering slightly, “‘Yipps’ accuses me of doing d-damn-all. In fact, she accuses me of no ambition. Well, what the hell is there for me to do? Work as a labourer, for a bob an hour? I want to do better than that. Why, in my old business, before those Jews swindled me out of it, I used to take up to a couple of thousand, even more, every year. I don’t want so much nowadays, four hundred would do me, but I can’t see myself working for the rest of my life for a bob an hour, as you have been for the past two years and more. The question is, where is it leading to?”

“Well, I’ve made a rough valuation, and would be prepared to consider fifteen hundred to two thousand for a half-share in the farming business. That is to say, for a half-share in the live stock, the dead stock, and all the covenants—hay, straw, muck, and growing crops. The crops at the moment consist of the wheat in one field, the Nightcraft, and the sugar beet.”

“What’s that wheat worth?”

“If it comes to a crop of, say, ten sacks an acre, at the
Government
price of 15
s
. 9
d.
a sack, plus subsidy of a few shillings, say,
£
10 an acre—the field is about thirteen and a half acres—I’ve reckoned that the gross yield from the field will be, say, one hundred and thirty-five pounds.”

“And what did it cost you?”

“For an acre, before the war, roughly one pound for rent, one pound for seed, one pound for fertiliser, one pound for ploughing and cultivation, one pound for harvesting and threshing. Five pounds an acre costs; say, six pounds today; receipts, ten pounds. I won’t count the chalking, for that’s supposed to last thirty years, although strictly a proportion of it should be allowed. Also the muck—ten tons an acre, five shillings a ton to haul, that’s fifty shillings an acre, plus another five for spreading. Say two pounds fifteen shillings an acre.”

“How many acres have you, did you say?”

“Nearly two hundred of arable.”

“Two hundred quid a year profit.”

“Then there are the meadows and the cattle.”

“What ought the meadows to make?”

“Nothing at present. They need draining.”

“Who pays for draining, you as landlord or you as farmer?”

“I as farmer.”

“What does it cost?”

“To dig out the dykes used to cost six shillings a chain of twenty-two yards. But mine are bad. They will cost ten bob, at least. There are four thousand yards. The dykes are choked with reeds and mud, and about one thousand yards are a jungle of fallen dead trees, growing thorns, and elderberries. Ten bob a chain as average, for some are wider than others. One hundred pounds.”

“A year’s profit to drain the meadows. My God!”

“The mud we’ve pulled out has a value. It’s excellent black stuff, rotting leaves and water-plants, with water-snail shells thick in it.”

“How much do you reckon is the value of the mud?”

“Ten bob a ton, dry. The compost is equal to five tons of
well-rotted
yard muck.”

“Aren’t artificial fertilisers cheaper?”

“They don’t supply humus. They’re a short-term means of growing crops, when used solely. They lead to dust bowls,
dereliction
and damnation.”

“But other farmers use artificials in this country and make a good profit without wrecking the land. After all, a man isn’t farming just for his health, is he? Anyway, what will the
mudcarting
cost?”

“At fifteen tons an acre, half-a-crown a ton, say two pounds an acre. The increase in crops will pay for it, easily. Though some of the men think I’ve more money than sense to cart mud, actually it is a long-term improvement of land. The war will provide good prices, you know.”

“If it goes on. It’s a phony war. Hitler won’t fight, why should he? He’s not just a bloody fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache as the cheap newspapers make out. He knows if he sits still and builds up his trade in Europe, while we rely on the blockade and continue trying to buy up stuff we don’t really want in Central Europe, our financial system will just fall to pieces. We daren’t begin to bomb his industries, he’d retaliate. Supposing the war ends next year, what will happen to farming?”

“If it ends as you say, there will be a great change in this country, and a policy to preserve home agriculture.”

Teddy Pinnegar considered awhile. “Well, there’s another thing. I don’t know if I can get any capital until I’ve been to London to see my solicitor.”

“I see.”

“As a matter of fact, my engineering business was swindled from me, as I’ve told you. Also, I’m a bit fed up the way ‘Yipps’ is treating me. She complains all the time. I say it’s because she won’t eat a damned thing. She’s starving herself, I tell her, just to keep slim. Look what she eats. A cup of coffee for breakfast, no lunch, a cup of tea in the afternoon, and nothing for dinner. Then about eleven o’clock, as I’m going to bed, she usually starts on me. Why don’t I
do
something, she asks. What the hell can I do? I’ve ploughed half a dozen furrows, and then the frost came. I’ve sawn some wood, but we can’t burn it, the bloody chimney smokes so. I fetch the eggs and I feed the turkeys, as I arranged to do, and get a laugh out of Billy’s cockerel scrapping with the whole damned flock of ’em. What else is there to do? I ask her. Sometimes I wish I’d joined the R.A.F. I was on the waiting list, but cancelled my application to come down here and help you.”

“Well, I appreciate your help, Teddy, but it wasn’t exactly a sentimental arrangement, you know. It was a trial partnership, made at your request. Anyway, let’s go over the farm tomorrow. I must look at the Nightcraft wheat. Luke prophesied that, as the field was set out—or marked out for ploughing—on a Sunday, no good would come of it. The strange thing is, the wheat
does
look pretty poorly.”

In the morning they walked up the gulley to see the wheat. The yellowish-green points looked bleak and sickly. There was a partial mid-day thaw; the going was heavy with a top crust of
half-frozen
sticky soil which lifted off with their footsteps, clogging their boots every few steps. Some of the wheat plants came away in the crust. They were half-rotten at the base. It seemed to Phillip that the plants were dead. Other fields, he had noticed when passing, had more developed plants; or, the seed sown deeper, the plants had not yet appeared above the ground. His plants, caught very young by the chilly rains, were delayed in growth, and later had been blasted by the frost-winds sweeping over the bare field.

“Doesn’t look too good, Teddy. In fact, it may be a failure.”

Teddy offered Phillip a cigarette. “About ‘Yipps’, you see, she had a bad time when her husband was killed in Kenya, on safari. She’s been more or less like that ever since. I’ve——”

“That explains the look in her eyes.”

“No, let me speak,” went on Teddy nervously. “I’ve given her friendship and companionship, and though I say it myself,
consideration
. In fact, I’ve devoted myself to her in every way, but it all seems to have ended in nothing. I say, just look at those two cock pheasants over there—we ought to have a shoot, you know.’

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about a shoot. This wheat looks bad, doesn’t it? I think it’s done for.”

“What will you do about it, if it is?”

“Well, wait and see how it looks in March, and then drill spring oats over it. We’ll lose, then, only the cost of seed, drilling, and harrowing. This coastal air is raw, isn’t it?”

“You’ve said it. I think I’ll go back. How about coming down to get a duck? I saw some flighting over the dykes the other evening. You don’t mind me going, do you?”

“Gun-shots make the pheasants leave the coverts, you know. They run over the boundaries.”

“I suppose,” said Teddy, smiling to conceal a suggestion of timidity, “I ought really to have asked your permission first, when I went out with my gun? But there seemed such a lot of birds about, and it was a pity to waste them.”

“Yes, I know how you must have felt. But, as a matter of shooting technique in this locality, as I’ve said, I’m told it’s considered a wise thing to leave the woods quiet until the day of the proper shoot. One shot will upset the birds. They’re very wild and shy, and any disturbance will send them running away. They probably go over the boundaries anyway. Billy told me he saw one of my neighbours’ keepers, the other day, scattering tail-corn all along the boundary hedges. So perhaps it would be better if, for the time being, you went only after the duck on the marshes—they’re free shooting, by the way. Keep away from the meadows, d’you mind, at any rate until after we’ve had our shoot? I do hope you’ll not mind me asking you?”

“Of course not, old man. I’ll only go on the meadows after dusk. I don’t think that will interfere with the pheasants roosting in the coverts. Well, I’ll be going. By the way, I’m out of cartridges. Can you lend me a box of twenty-five? There’re some in the gun cupboard in the granary, only someone’s taken away the key. I asked Matt where it was, but he said he didn’t know. It used to be on the inside ledge of the broken window. Like an old
watchdog
, Matt was.”

“I’ll come down with you and give you a box. Now, I must look over the next field, Pewitts. Oh, while I remember it, you will try
and get ‘Yipps’ to let us have the housekeeping accounts, won’t you? They’re overdue now, and I don’t like to owe her money.”

“Okay, I’ll ask her again. Well, I’ll go home now and get on with the painting of your cottage.”

“I’ll leave the cartridges on the bench downstairs. No. 4 shot? They’re best for duck.”

“Thanks. Well, see you later.”

When Phillip got to Pewitts to see how the sugar beet was going, Luke was about to return to the stables with the horses.

“You’ve got a good crop up on that field,” he said. “Fourteen ton an acre, maybe fifteen, I reckon. We’ve got only about two acres left to clear. The ground is sumpy, but we won’t be in no muddle. Good thing I ploughed the beet out when I did, else the roots would be fast in the ground. The thick tops will protect it, though it’s the frost-winds I’m afeared of most. Blast, the horses feel the pull across the field. But ’twill rain tonight, there’s a change coming. Yew’ll see I’m right. If it dries later and we don’t get no frost, we ought to get the beet off by Christmas. Father says the tarkies aren’t doing. That new man, what’s he called, Mr. Vinegar or suthin’, sometimes forgets to feed them. It worries Father. They’re not doing—they’re shrinking, Father says.”

“But Mr. Pinnegar’s in charge, Luke. That’s the arrangement. He used to be a business-man—he built up his own business.”

“I don’t know about that,” replied Luke, “but when yew come to sell your tarkies yew’ll know about business or no business. They won’t be so fat as the bards—or the wild ducks,” he added significantly.

The first scare of war, immediate and devastating bombing of London, was over. The features editor of
The
Daily
Crusader
wrote to Phillip, suggesting an article on the lines of Farmers being in the Front Line of Defence. So he went to London to call on Chettwood. Arriving in daylight, he saw barrage balloons floating at their cables over the mirk of the city. Having parked the Silver Eagle outside his club, under the plane tree where often it had stood before, he walked down The Mall to Charing Cross and so to Fleet Street.

“Well,” said John Chettwood, in his glass-walled office, “how nice to see you, Varmer. How wise you were to get in on the ground floor. First things first. What are you doing tonight? Will you dine with me?”

Phillip was glad to accept. He had heard little from his friends since the war, and had been prepared to spend the evening by himself, perhaps at the pictures, and so forget himself in visions of beauty and love.

“A young man came here this morning wanting your address. We didn’t give it, of course. He’s followed what we printed of yours before the war, and wants a job on your farm.”

“Oh.”

“I must say he didn’t quite look the Dummerset type, but on the contrary seemed keen and intelligent. I liked what I saw of him—brown face, lean, lithe, recently finished two years at Wye Agricultural College.”

“Eighty pounds a term fees——”

“I know what you’re going to say, but I think he may be good. Said he had done a year dairy-farming, and wanted arable farming experience as an ‘improver’. An ‘improver’, I gather, is paid thirty bob a week, and finds his own board and lodging. Anyway, I got his name and address. I told him you were coming, and he said he would telephone you at your club.”

Chettwood put a memo, before him, with
Nugent
ffondent-Jones
and a Wiltshire address written on it. “If you like him, bring him to dinner tonight. The paper will stand it.”

Chettwood asked for a number, and spoke briefly in his usual restrained tones before putting down the telephone.

“Good, that’s fixed. I’d like you to meet the girl I’m going to marry. She shares a studio with another friend of yours, who visited your ‘Bad Lands’ just before the war.”

Could it be Felicity? “Does this friend of mine’s name begin with an ‘F’?”

“Most names begin with that,” Chettwood murmured. “No, it’s the one who helped you guard the hybrid roseate tern you wrote about in an article we printed. Melissa Watt-Wilby, your wife’s cousin, isn’t she? She’s staying with Dolly, my girl-friend. Well, there’s the editorial conference now. I must go. We’ll meet in the long bar of the Café Royal about half past seven? And bring the young farmer if you think he’ll be amusing.”

At the Barbarian Club the young man was waiting: alert, bright-eyed, sharp of face, but the sharpness controlled by good humour. He was neatly dressed, and wore a long, serviceable macintosh.

The hall porter said, “I offered him a drink, but he didn’t want it.”

Coming forward, the visitor said in a clear and confident voice, “I feel I am imposing on your time, sir. I do hope you will forgive me not writing to you first, but my keenness got the better of me when I heard from Mr. Chettwood that you were in town.”

Phillip, liking his bird-eyed manner, took him up into the bar, and over pots of beer he and Nugent ffondent-Jones got on better and better.

According to the young man he was being frustrated on the dairy farm of his pupilage. The farmer there did not wish to improve his methods in accordance with the facts of the Wye Agricultural College.

“The food for cows, if you will credit it, sir,” he declared, “is not given to each beast on a principle of the more milk she yields, the more food she receives, to the limit of a cow’s digestive tracts, of course. No, sir, the milk of each cow is never weighed. There is no recording. Poor, screwy passengers are fed as much concentrates as the good’ns. In addition, the concentrates are never rationed. My present employer has apparently never heard of the Avoirdupois Scale of Weights. He is a Saxon, sir, you see, and has never
properly got used to the system introduced at the time of
Domesday
. ‘What the hell d’you mean, Avoir dew Poor?’ he enquires, and I try to explain that there are such comparatively recent inventions as weights and measures, and for the past few centuries William the Conqueror’s ‘To Have of the Weight’ has been the standard in this country. He replies that double-handfuls are good enough for his cows, so I can keep my ‘Have of the Weight’.”

“Sounds like my farm.”

“Oh, hardly sir. Well, I have continued to plead for recording, for the rationing of concentrates in accordance with milk yields, for Avoirdupois to replace the double-handfuls. In vain I have pointed to the upholstered hatstands that are mere passengers among his cows, giving so little milk that they do not pay for themselves, let alone give the farmer a profit for his work. So I decided to learn the Art and Mystery of Arable Farming with the potentially Keenest Agricultural Mind in England, if I may say so, sir.”

“If on your present farm you hear Avoirdupois, that ‘theory’ brought over by William the Conqueror, discredited, on my farm you will discover a cowman who not only doesn’t use
double-handfuls
, but refuses to wash either the cow or himself before milking. As for the milk, most of it at present goes back, several gallons a day, after superficial cream-skimming in the kitchen, to two sows. So if you come you must be prepared to learn nothing except negatively. You will sit at a long oak table with others and eat mallard, teal, and occasionally pheasant. Locally my farm was known as the Bad Lands, now it is renamed the Convalescent Home.”

“It sounds the very place for entirely new management, sir.”

“By the way, the features editor you saw asked me to bring you to dinner, if you cared to come, and were free. Perhaps he sees in you a future contributor to his paper, now that Farming is News. We’re to meet at seven-thirty in the long bar of the Café Royal.”

Shortly afterwards, having swallowed his quart, ffondent-Jones took his departure, and Phillip went into the reading room to try to sleep. His mind remained tense, so he took from the shelves some old and bound volumes of
Punch
,
and looked at the humour and cartoons of the 1914–18 war, which soon wearied him, so he went to see a film, and for a couple of hours lived in semi-darkness and warmth on hope and desire.

*

Walking up from The Mall that evening, with an hour to spare,
he thought of the poem of D. H. Lawrence,
Gentians
,
as through the soft crepuscular night upon the town shadows strangely silent moved past, while yellow spots of light slowly approached in the blackness, becoming shadows of taxicabs gliding amidst the rippling marionette effect of tiny brighter light-splashes about the feet of those who walked through Pluto’s halls.

And yet, there was a gentle kind of feeling everywhere, not of death, but of life. It was the slower rhythm that darkness gave to the people. Gone was the garish raucousness of metropolitan night life, together with all striving. People were easier; the strain had gone out of them—at least in the streets.

Chettwood and ffondent-Jones were seated with Melissa and another girl. Before them on a table were glasses containing a dark, frothy liquid.

“Hullo,” said Chettwood, rising with the bird-quick youth. “Come and sit down. May I introduce you to Dolly. We’re drinking black velvet, an appropriate tipple, don’t you think?”

“What a welcome sight your four faces are, to one coming out of a night of Byron’s London. Chettwood is my patron,” he turned to the girl called Dolly. “Before the war he kept nearly half a square mile of land going for two years, by printing my articles.”

“John and I plan to use your farm as a hide-out when the war really starts.”

“Will the war really start, d’you think?” he asked Chettwood.

“Some people think it’s already started.”

“In Poland, yes. But isn’t that a mere local recovery of lost German territory?” He sat beside Melissa, and took her hand.

The waiter turned a bottle of champagne in the ice-bucket, and then opened a Guinness. While they were drinking healths Dolly said, “How fortunate you are, to have all those beautiful children.”

“Yes, they’re a good little covey, all due to their mother.”

“Melissa told me how you sported together in the sad sea waves. Were you really among the seals and sea-trout, and were they all phosphorescent, like yourselves?” asked Dolly.

“I’m still phosphorescent.”

“What a lovely man it is,” said Dolly to Melissa.

Chettwood was saying, “Do tell me, Phillip, is it true that there are so many seals on the sandbanks of the Wash that they take more fish than the professional fishermen?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And they shoot the seals?”

“Yes, but the older seals usually disappear at the flash.”

“Good for them. Well, your health!” said Chettwood, raising his glass.

“Prosit!” said Phillip raising and draining his. He was happy, happy. “John, do you seriously think Hitler will attack the west?”

“Well, Phillip, all I know is what comes into the office. The panzer divisionen have all been transferred from Poland, and are now aligned in depth behind the Dutch frontier.”

“The
Dutch
frontier? Then it must be a feint. To lure the B.E.F. into the Low Countries.”

“I know nothing about strategy. Indeed, I’m more interested in your seals. Are you factual when you say that they dive at the flash of a rifle?”

“Not when on a sandbank, of course, where they have to flap off clumsily. But in the sea, when they have experience of men
shooting
at them, yes.”

“I’ve only seen them at the Zoo. Will you write me about five hundred words on them, from the angle of the food they take? I’ll pay you fifteen guineas.”