Rule Britannia (27 page)

“Here, what do they think they’re doing?” he said, and Emma noticed that his hand went instinctively to the flick-knife he always kept in the belt of his jeans.

“Keep quiet,” said Mad sharply. “Just behave as if nothing was happening, and leave the talking to me.”

The voices were joined by Dottie’s in the kitchen overhead. She was protesting, and everyone seemed to be speaking at once.

“Put some more wood on the fire,” said Mad. “It will give us a little light, but not much.”

Sam threw on some smaller logs, and shavings too, that Joe had cut for kindling. As the shavings caught the shadows of the group about the fire grew monstrous on the grimy ceiling. The voices and the clatter became louder, as the invaders descended to the basement and burst into the old kitchen.

“Hi, there, on your feet, and your hands behind your heads,” shouted someone. He was carrying a torch, which he flashed onto the faces of the group around the fire. Nobody moved. The only one to obey the command was Ben, who with hands clasped on top of his head moved forward and launched a miniature wave with his foot in the direction of the marines.

“Somebody grab that kid,” said the man who was giving the orders.

Emma reached out and pulled Ben beside her. She did not know how many of them there were. It could have been four or five, but the firelight did not reveal the number as they flashed the torches they were carrying upon walls and windows, peering into the old scullery where the apples and the beetroot were stored.

“Nothing but a bunch of kids and an old woman,” said the marine in charge. He sounded disappointed, even disgusted. “Who the hell owns this place anyway?”

“I do,” said Mad. Her voice was cold as ice, and very clear. “And if you would kindly turn that torchlight off my eyes so that I’m not blinded, I may be prepared to speak to you.”

Whether the man was officer, sergeant or corporal, Emma could not tell. They all looked alike anyway in combat dress. He was certainly not Captain Cockran, who had come when Pa was in the house, or indeed anyone she had seen before.

“Okay, what’s your name?”

Mad told him. “This is my granddaughter,” she continued, “and these are four of my adopted boys. Because we have no other light and no water, except what we are able to draw from a well, we are obliged to do the family wash here, where you see us. We cannot get to the town as we have no transport, and we are existing on a diet of cabbages and beetroot. Anything else you want to know?”

“Sure, lady.” The leader’s manner, if somewhat milder, was still offensive. “We have information that you have two boys under your roof who have turned eighteen. Where are they?”

“I’ve no idea. Probably in the garage, trying to find out why we have no electricity. And the younger boy is only seventeen.”

“Right. Go get them.” The marine in charge snapped his order to two of his men, who clattered away.

“What do you want with them?” asked Mad.

“All adult males, lady, are wanted for questioning. We’re making a house-to-house search throughout this district, and yours is just one of hundreds on our list. The faster a guy tells us what we want to know, the sooner he’ll come home.”

He was chewing the inevitable gum. Why did they do it, and why the glance down at her, Emma wondered, half-familiar, half-contemptuous, as if he had only to jerk his head towards the cellar and he’d expect her to follow him?

“Do you mean to tell me you are taking away for questioning every able-bodied man in the Poldrea area?” asked Mad.

“You’ve guessed right, lady. And you’re lucky we don’t take away kids younger still. It’s time some of them learned respect.”

“Respect for whom?”

The leader didn’t answer. He was looking around him at all the clothes hung up to dry.

“Some wash day,” he observed. “Do you always have as much as this in your weekly tub?”

“It depends on who’s polluting the air we breathe,” Mad replied.

Emma could hear Joe’s voice at the side door. “Ah-ha…” exclaimed the commando, “here they come. We’ll return them in the morning if they behave themselves.”

He and the other marines moved across the room towards the passage.

“The younger boy has a leg in plaster and is on crutches,” said Mad. “He’s under the doctor’s care, and has been in hospital. He was due to go back to hospital today to have the plaster removed, but we couldn’t get him there.”

“He’ll have to wait, then, until your Cornish medicos come to their senses,” replied the commando. “Maybe you didn’t know they’ve gone on strike, and your local hospital has shut down, along with others. Public-spirited lot, aren’t you, in this God-darn peninsula?”

Joe and Terry, a marine on either side of them, appeared at the turn of the passage.

“I’m afraid we couldn’t locate the fault, Madam,” said Joe. “The electricity is cut.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” repeated the leader mockingly. “No water, no light, no transport, ma’am, you’re back in the old times, ma’am. Maybe it will do you all good to live hard for a time, ma’am, like we did one hundred years ago on the frontier. Come on, let’s go.”

Colin, who had turned very white, planted himself in front of Joe and Terry. “If you take my brothers away I shall kill you,” he said.

“You don’t say?” The marine bent, picked up Colin by the collar of his jersey and dropped him neatly in the tin bath. “They breed killers young in this part of the world. Maybe we’ll come back for you tomorrow.”

It was the way he pushed Terry ahead of him so that the boy stumbled, one of the crutches slipping from under his armpit, that drove Emma to her feet.

“For God’s sake be careful,” she said. “Can’t you see he can’t walk properly? And if you’re taking him down to the camp, and Joe as well, they’ve already been questioned last week. Ask Captain Cockran, no, ask Lieutenant Sherman, he knows them both, he knows my grandmother, he knows us all.”

The man turned and looked at her. His companion’s torchlight shone on his face. The expression was no longer contemptuous, only hard.

“Listen, girlie, maybe he did, but he doesn’t know you now. Captain Cockran and Lieutenant Sherman, along with a couple of hundred more of our buddies, were blown sky-high out of your bay last night and we haven’t even recovered the bits and pieces yet. So if we don’t love you very much, and have nothing to celebrate on what was meant to be Thanksgiving Day, just remember that when you sit here in the dark.”

He and the rest of the marines went along the passage and out of the side door, driving Terry and Joe ahead of them. The door slammed. In a moment or two there came the sound of the lorry starting up and the grind of the wheels as it backed along the drive. Folly, disturbed from sleep and finding nobody about, began to howl at the top of the basement stair. Sam crept from the silent group around the grate and went to comfort her.

“Why didn’t we stop them?” cried Colin passionately, kicking aside the tin bath. “Why didn’t anybody do anything?”

Nobody answered for a moment. Then Mad threw another log onto the fire.

“Because there were more of them than there were of us,” she replied.

Andy came forward and put his hand on her shoulder as she crouched there by the fire.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll look after things while Joe and Terry are gone. I’ll be the man in the house, and Sam and I will do their work, saw the logs, bring in the vegetables. I’m sorry if the marines have lost a lot of men in that explosion, but it doesn’t mean we have to give in, does it?”

“No.” Mad looked up at him, her face haggard in the firelight. She looked all of her eighty years. “No, Andy, we won’t give in. Never… never… never…”

It wasn’t the darkness one minded, thought Emma, or the doubt about the water lasting—though indeed, as she peered down into the well, the round pool at the bottom seemed to have got lower, with a layer of scum—or the now inevitable beetroot or cabbage soup and boiled potatoes, varied by what remained in tins on Dottie’s shelves, all cooked on the old basement grate, but the anxiety of what had happened to Joe and Terry, where they had been taken, what was being asked. Nor was it any consolation to know that the Trembaths were suffering too; fourteen-year-old Mick had come running up to Trevalan the following morning to report that his father had been taken once again.

“Mr. Hawkins has been taken from Pendower,” he said, “and Bill and Dick Rundle from Hilltown. Mr. Willis is going round every farm he can offering to help with the milking and anything else. We’d all be lost without him. Not many know how to milk by hand these days. Mother has sent you up these eggs, but Dad didn’t have time to kill the pig.”

Communications were completely cut. There were no vans, no buses, no transport other than army vehicles on the road. The shops in Poldrea were closed. There was no question of the boys attending school because nobody knew if the schools had opened or not, and anyway there wasn’t a school bus to take them. The only link with the outside world on the Friday, and again on the Saturday, was the district nurse, who walked up to the farm to console her sister, and out of the kindness of her heart crossed the field on the way there to visit Trevalan.

“I had to see if you were all right,” she said, “and if there’s any message I can take to anyone I’ll do so.”

“Is it true the doctors aren’t on duty and the hospital is closed?” asked Mad.

Nurse Bennett shook her head slowly. “I just don’t know,” she replied. “My phone is cut like everybody else’s, my car has run out of petrol, and the garages are still closed. I can’t get to anyone except on foot. Nobody knows what’s going on anywhere. People are bewildered. Poldrea is completely cut off from the outside, roadblocks between us and St. Austell and Liskeard. The worst thing is the way they’ve been going from house to house taking off the men.”

“Where are they taking them to?”

“Nobody knows. They say there’s a great area up round the clay pits with barbed wire and dogs, a regular concentration camp, but it could be lies, couldn’t it?”

Joe, Terry, Mr. Trembath… It wasn’t possible, thought Emma, that they, and hundreds of others, could be held prisoner indefinitely, having done nothing, without being able to protest or demand their legal rights. This was the sort of thing one had always imagined only happened in the Soviet Union in the past, and years ago, before she had been born, in Nazi Germany in the nineteen thirties.

“If only,” said Nurse Bennett, “we could get proper information on the news, but our battery set isn’t working, and this goes for lots of others as well, and anyway, I’m told nothing is said on the radio about our plight. It’s just ignored.”

“The police,” asked Mad, “what are they doing?”

“I haven’t seen any panda cars on the road,” replied Nurse Bennett, “and the local police station is an army post, or marine post, I should say. It’s all due to the explosion on the ship. They blame every man, woman and child, and we’ve got to be punished. None of this would have happened but for that.”

“I wonder,” said Mad, “I wonder…”

Emma knew what was passing through her grandmother’s mind. It was Mad’s theory that the measures adopted to cut off all news, all movement among the local population, would have come about anyway, quite apart from the explosion on the ship. Tighter restrictions had already come into force after the death of Corporal Wagg, and even if the explosion had never occurred the disruption caused by the small episode of Operation Dung Cart would have triggered off punitive measures and house-to-house arrests, if not on quite such a wide scale as they had turned out to be.

“It’s loss of face and loss of nerve,” Mad told Emma. “You remember what Vic said when he was here? The marines can’t afford to lose either. Nor can our Coalition Government, which is backing the whole enterprise of USUK. The population must appear to back the union, they must be cajoled, bribed, coerced, whichever works best. Sabotage must be punished, that’s what the Prime Minister said. And I dare say if this explosion had happened in Suffolk, instead of in our own bay, we’d be agreeing with him.”

“Some would,” Emma suggested, “but not you. You took your stand from the very first day. I’ve not forgotten the look on your face when Spry was blown to pieces in the plowed field, and you’d have felt the same whether a farm dog had been shot in Cornwall or on the Isle of Man.”

No denial came. Her grandmother had turned away, saw in hand, for tree-felling in the shrubbery had been the order for Friday afternoon, with the older boys pressed into service. A dog had been killed, a man had been killed, a ship had been destroyed, a small township had been isolated from the outside world and its male population had been arrested… and for what? So that more and more men like Pa could jet around the world juggling with currency? So that more and more people, frustrated, unfulfilled, jobless, might emigrate, in the vain hope that the grass was greener elsewhere, while those who remained sought never to share but to compete, never to help their neighbor but to go one better? There must be an answer, Emma thought, but nobody has it. And it’s useless going back in history and talking of the fall of Rome and how society was sick two thousand years ago, men and women lolling about quaffing wine and watching gladiators, while Christians crouched in catacombs; the Christians were no better when they became top dog, burning people at the stake, putting them on the rack. Even the Sermon on the Mount got you nowhere; the saying about “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness” gave such a picture of crowds of men and women on their knees in a gloomy church praying like mad, and then looking terribly disapproving afterwards if anyone as much as held hands or fumbled in the dark. And suddenly she thought of Wally Sherman, poor, harmless Wally Sherman, who had only meant to be kind, who even on the beach at the firework party had only intended warmth and get-together in the usual fashion of the young of both their countries, Wally Sherman who had taken the trouble, possibly at danger to himself, to warn her about the restrictive measures to come, and now… nothing left. One moment talking, perhaps laughing, perhaps having dinner on board and due to go ashore afterwards, and the next… fragments, all gone, like Spry. If a lot of men get killed at one go, does it make the killing of one man less of a crime? I don’t know, Andy, I don’t know. I’m only twenty and they say today the world is ours, but Pa was twenty once and felt the world was his, and long, long ago Mad was twenty too, laughing at applauding audiences, smiling from picture postcards, and when I am as old as she is nothing will have changed…

These thoughts, fragmented, passed through Emma’s mind before Nurse Bennett’s visit and after she had gone. She walked part of the way with her across the plowed field but not to the farm itself, there was too much to do at home, and as she stared after the blue-coated, rather stout figure who had climbed the muddy track from the cliff road, showing her nurse’s pass to a reluctant, sulky sentry, in the cause of family feeling and common humanity, Emma wondered if it was because of women like Nurse Bennett, multiplied a thousand-fold throughout the country, that they would survive, someone who brought children into the world and comforted the dying. Nobody but their neighbors ever knew them, when they had gone they were forgotten, they never became rich, never became famous, these were the meek who inherited the earth, never to hold it themselves but to pass it on, as a sort of trust, as a way of life.

“You’re another one,” she said to Dottie, whom she found kneading the last bag of flour to make bread for the four boys. And when it had been baked in the cloam oven in the basement that probably hadn’t been used for a hundred years or more she would spread some of Joe’s apples upon it, stewed in a pot in the old grate.

“I’m another what?” asked Dottie, her usually plump face streaked into lines of fatigue, because how were they going to manage tomorrow, next week, if there were still no supplies, no light, and no water but what came from the stagnant-looking well, every drop of which had to be boiled, and no Joe, no Terry—how were they going to endure?

“You’re one of the blessed,” said Emma, “you’re one of the meek.”

Dottie stared at her over the dough. “Meek?” she repeated. “Blessed? What’s meek or blessed about trying to make a bag of flour satisfy four growing appetites? I’ll go on until I drop, but I don’t call it meek. As for blessed, that’s for the saints, and I’ve never been one of them.” She shook the flour from her hands and suddenly her body sagged, her face crumpled. “I can’t bear to think what they may be doing to my boy,” she said.

My boy… Terry, the first-adopted, the spoiled one, the nurseling. Emma, stricken, her own tears near the surface at the sight of the older person breaking down, dear Dottie of all people, put her arms around her and held her close.

“They won’t hurt him, they won’t,” she said. “He’ll be back mocking and laughing as he always does, teaching Colin worse swear words than ever, I promise you.”

“You can’t promise, you don’t know,” said Dottie. “We none of us know. I thought the marines were meant to be our friends, they were here to help us, but the way they spoke to me, the way they pushed through the house, through my kitchen down to the basement, and took our boys off in their lorry as if they were cattle… What’s our own army doing to protect us, where’s our police, what’s happened to the government? You hear of such things happening in other countries, but not here. Not to us.”

It can’t happen here, thought Emma, it can’t happen here, that’s what people in England have always said, even in wartime when they were bombed, because they were all together on their own ground. Not anymore.

“We must try and be brave,” she said aloud. “We mustn’t give way. We’ve just got to take each moment as it comes, each hour, each day.”

Two days only since Joe and Terry had gone. It seemed like two years. The dragging awful fear when one awoke in the morning that something more terrible yet was going to happen, that the news would come that the marines were going to make an example of two out of every dozen prisoners and shoot them, and the two would be Joe and Terry. The fear that Pa would never come back again, would settle in Brazil, believing this country was finished. The fear that one of the children would fall ill, awake in the night with appendicitis, and without a telephone they couldn’t send for Bevil Summers. The fear that he too had been taken away in the lorry by the marines and there was no one, but no one, who could come, who could help…

Stop it, she told herself, stop it. This was the way to breakdown, to hysteria, and if she, at twenty, young and strong, gave way, what would happen to the very young, the very old?

“Show me what to do,” she asked Dottie, putting her hands into the dough. “I have no skills, I’ve got to learn. If I can’t bake bread what use am I to anyone?”

Dottie wiped her eyes and tried to smile. “You put me in mind of a song they used to sing when I was a kid,” she said. “ ‘Poor little rich girl’—Noel Coward, I believe it was. What about those expensive cooking classes your Pa sent you to a few years ago?”

“Soufflés and crème brûlée,” replied Emma. “Nothing basic.”

“That’s half the trouble with the world,” said Dottie. “Everything frozen and sold in a supermarket, no time anymore for people to grow stuff and cook it themselves in their own home. My mother passed on what she knew to me, and I never thought I’d need it working in the theater all those years, going from place to place, but thank the Lord I remembered when it was needed, and what I don’t remember I do by instinct.”

This was it. Whatever we do is done by instinct, some pointer from within. Eating, drinking, loving, hating, these were the basic urges driving humanity forward, anything else was transient.

“The thing is,” said Emma, speaking half to herself and half to Dottie, “we should all live in small communities, sharing each other’s work and needs. The farmer growing grain, the miller milling it, butter, milk, vegetables, fruit, everyone supplying their neighbor and getting something in return, but no money anymore.”

“I don’t think it would work, Emma,” said Sam, who had come into the kitchen, his narrow face serious. “There might be someone in the next community who had a bigger and better breed of cow giving more milk, or whose land grew more grain. Then the people who hadn’t such good cows or such good land would be jealous, and try and take it over. The fighting would start all over again.”

“Not if there was a good leader,” said Andy, the kitchen rapidly filling with hungry boys who were beginning to grow restive under a diet of beetroot and apples. “A good leader would have such authority he’d say, ‘You just stop talking and do as you’re told,’ and the people would have to get on with it, and be content with their own cows and their own land.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” said Colin, who had entered dragging Ben after him, “not if the people were very hungry and greedy too, like Ben. They would see the fat cows in some other farmer’s field and they just couldn’t wait until they got them, and the leader would be killed and a greedy man take his place. That’s what you would do, wouldn’t you, Ben?”

Ben nodded aggressively, and reaching up to the kitchen table snatched a piece of sticky dough and thrust it in his mouth.

“Now then, none of that,” cried Dottie. “You wait until the bread is baked and then you shall have your share. Spit it out, you’ll be sick else.”

“Nurse Bennett did bring some eggs,” murmured Emma, “if he’s very hungry…”

“Eggs are for lunch,” said Dottie. “If they have eggs now there’ll be nothing later. That’s right, isn’t it, Madam?”

Mad, who as far as her granddaughter knew hadn’t breakfasted at all, stood by the kitchen door. “They’ve been working so hard,” she said, “they ought to have something. We’ve plenty of Folly’s biscuit in the store-cupboard, and you know her poor teeth can’t get through it nowadays. Suppose we soak some of that?”