The Green Gauntlet (11 page)

‘Good God. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. You mean, seriously?’

‘Well, as seriously as he ever does anything,’ Mary said, ‘and he must have known what he was doing because as soon as he came back four years later, he took up the option. As a matter of fact he was seventeen and from that moment I stopped feeling three years older. There was never anyone else, but I imagine you always knew that.’

‘Yes,’ he said thankfully, ‘I always knew it. It bothered your mother a little but it never bothered me.’

He had his own memories of the spot and they were more poignant than hers. In the early days of his first marriage, several centuries ago it now seemed, he had crossed over to the islet in a punt with Grace one blazing summer noontime and they had mended a long and bitter quarrel by making love in the bracken like a couple of precocious adolescents. He said nothing to her, however, remembering that she had never set eyes on Grace, and that no-one, not even Grace’s son Simon, mentioned her in the Valley nowadays. She and her suffragettes were as outmoded as the Lollards and Anabaptists, belonging to an age of voluminous, dust-raising skirts, picture hats and croquet parties on the lawn. Twice since then the world had torn itself to pieces and in between there had been the long dismal haul from slump to agricultural convalescence.

They turned north-west along the path that ran beside the Mere, passed Sam Potter’s cottage on the right, crossed a shallow stream and picked their way through tree stumps to a rabbit run that wound across the shoulder of the highest point of the woods to an open space crowned by a great slab of sandstone. It was not a good place to bring a horse and he seldom rode this way, but he had always known it was here that Hazel Potter had lived wild from April until late autumn.

He had forgotten how lonely it was, and how attractive too in a desolate way, the long slope studded with dwarf jack-pines and a sea of rhododendrons screening the margin of the Mere. Spring, it seemed to him, was late this year. The primroses were out and lower down there had been marsh marigolds and a few wild daffodils but no bluebells showed in the open patches below and if he remembered rightly there was always an April haze of bluebells on this south-facing slope. It was a grey, sunless day, with tattered clouds drifting slowly east and the breeze lacking its usual tang of the sea. He said, as though addressing himself, ‘Funny thing, wars always seem to shuffle the seasons. The rhythm changes when there’s a war on but I’ll promise you something more cheerful. The summer it finishes will be a scorcher. They had wet summers right through the Boer War and the Great War but in 1902, the year I came here and again in 1919, the heath caught fire and every stream went dry.’

‘How about the summer of Dunkirk?’ she asked, smiling at his tendency to hark back over the years whenever they were alone, but he said this too conformed to pattern because it demonstrated Jerry’s weather-luck. ‘They always have fine weather for their offensives,’ he said, ‘whereas whenever we launch one, everything is bogged down in the mud.’

They had reached the bend in the path opposite the jutting slab of sandstone and he suddenly recollected that the cave was somewhere close by and poked around in the stiff screen of gorse that ran along under the rock. Then, congratulating himself on his memory, he found a tiny tunnel that ran north straight into a short slide of stones and flints and called over his shoulder, ‘Here, Mary! I thought I hadn’t forgotten. I haven’t been up here in ten years but there it is,’ and he made room for her to brush past and then followed her into a shallow excavation under the spur, reflecting that he was now standing on the exact spot where Rachel Eveleigh delivered Hazel Potter of the child who was to sire his first grandson. It brought the past very close and for a moment he fancied he could see Ikey Palfrey’s swift grin and the bloom on Hazel Potter’s cheek, could even hear Ikey’s laugh and soft, muffled burr of Hazel’s brogue. ‘Now what the hell induced Rumble to send us on this goose chase?’ he demanded, looking round the empty cave and sniffing the dank air of the place. Then he noticed that she was smiling and that her eyes, ‘spaniel’s eyes’ he always thought of them, were shining with excitement as she touched the dry earth walls where a root broke through the crust and curled into a question mark.

‘It’s just as I imagined,’ she said, ‘it’s got a terrible privacy, as though it was the very heart of the Valley. Do
you
feel that?’

‘No, I don’t but I can imagine that was how Hazel Potter and Ikey thought of it. Nobody ever once saw them together until he married her early in the war, so they must have been intensely private people. But me, I like sun and a broad vista. My centrepiece is the edge of French Wood, looking south. What’s this pact Rumble talked about? Do you mind telling me?’

‘It’s to do with his survival,’ she said, ‘and I don’t care how ridiculous it sounds it makes sense to me. This is where he began and this is the hub of where he’ll finish. It’s the gypsy in him. He
knows,
don’t you see? And he wants to convince me, so that I won’t be jittery all the time he’s away. He began in the Valley and he’ll come back to the Valley in the end.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘Sentimental tosh?’

‘To anyone but you, me or Rumble,’ he said, and it occurred to him that, over the years, he had done her an injustice, imagining that even she, the most fanciful of the brood, had never shared his sense of communion with the Valley.

‘You want to stay up here a bit?’

‘Yes, a few minutes but first there’s something I can tell you that I haven’t told Rumble. You’ll be having another grandchild before Christmas.’

‘You let him go? Without telling the boy? But that was crazy. He would have …’

‘Backed down? Yes, I imagine he would. That was why I didn’t tell him. Nobody hobbles Rumble, not even me. He’d made up his mind and I didn’t want to be the one to bring more pressure on him. You brought all you could and I wasn’t holding him to ransom. Do you imagine I don’t know him by now?’

He stood just inside the entrance of the cave looking and feeling foolish, so much so that she laughed at his chapfallen expression and said, ‘Run along, Dad, I’ll find my own way back. And don’t fuss! I’ve got seven months to go and I hope it’s another boy. That’ll give you that much more insurance, won’t it?’

He took her hand, pressed it, and blundered back along the gorse tunnel into the open. The heaviness that had dragged at him all through the scurry of Rumble’s departure was gone but it was not wholly as a result of the news she had passed to him so casually but rather her awareness of his desperate need for some kind of reassurance in the future. They must, he told himself, have often discussed his obsession with this tangle of woods, fields and streams that had been his being for so long, and it therefore followed that their estimate of him, and his involvement with the place, was not the rich joke it was to the rest of the family. It was comforting, he thought, to be tolerated to this extent, and his step as he descended to the clearing surrounding Sam Potter’s cottage was almost jaunty.

‘If I’m looking for continuity,’ he told himself smugly, ‘it’s there I’m most likely to find it! I only hope to God that some damned U-boat doesn’t make fools of us all.’

Old Sam Potter came out of his back door carrying a bowl of chicken mash and Paul hailed him gratefully. Despite years of axe-swinging and constant plodding in clumsy boots about the bogs and coverts at this end of the estate, Sam had put on weight and Paul judged he would turn the scale at seventeen stones. ‘Hi, there!’ he shouted, ‘Mary and I have just seen Rumble Patrick off. Any news of your boy?’

‘Giddon no,’ Sam said, ‘Dick doan put pen to paper any more than I ever did but ’er phoned his Uncle Smut a—month or two back, asking for fags. They’m short of ’em out yonder it zeems.’

‘Out yonder’ Paul reflected, might mean anywhere at all to Sam Potter, who still thought of Cornwall and Somerset as foreign countries. He declined Sam’s invitation for ‘a dish o’ tay’ and leaned his elbows on the fence that surrounded the cottage. ‘Ah, they’re a footloose lot, Sam,’ he commiserated, ‘but they’ll grow tired of it I wouldn’t wonder, and settle here like the rest of us,’ but Sam had no faith in the stability of Shallowfordians born after the death of Queen Victoria and said, scattering the mash among lean, long-legged hens, ‘Dornee believe it, Squire. They baint happy in one place more than an hour at a time, not none of ’em. And if they do come backalong they’ll turn the bliddy plaace upzide down, you zee if they don’t.’

At any other time Paul would have confirmed Sam’s prophecy but today, despite Rumble’s departure, he felt optimistic and turning away passed down the long side of the Mere to the point where he could find the shortest ascent to the spot where they had left the car. As though to encourage him the sun at last broke through the canopy of cloud and a beam struck the underside of a giant beech, sprouting a hundred thousand new leaves. The lesson of renewal could not have been lost upon him for he thought, ‘We’re a couple of old cart-horses, Sam and I, and it’s high time we were put out to grass. It’s just an accident that we’re both still at it but I’m damned if I do more than potter the moment the war’s over,’ and he tackled the last ten yards of the wooded slope and began, thankfully, to descend to the level of the road.

III

M
ary emerged from the cave and climbed the lip of heather to the flat surface of the rock, asking herself whether her serenity had been assumed for the benefit of her father, admittedly the Valley’s most persistent worrier, but deciding that it had not and that she did indeed feel confidence in the future. To that extent Rumble Patrick’s notion of sending her here had succeeded more than he could have hoped. It was curious, she thought, but not more so than their association, their long partnership as children, his solemn proposal at seventeen, his sudden reappearance four years later and a marriage that had resulted in the safe, unexacting life she had always promised herself. He would almost certainly return as he had promised, and within hours they would pick up the threads of their life, exploiting his sense of purpose, rebuilding Periwinkle to his design, and steadily adding to their family and stock; another Paul and another Claire, caught up in the rhythm of the Valley.

She sat there a long time looking down on the spread of farms between the southern rim of the woods and the blue-grey line of the heath and dunes where Four Winds and Home Farm borders met the sea. Down there, she reflected, were innumerable Pittses and Craddocks and Stokes and Eveleighs, and some of them had been there a very long time but none as long as the Potters whose blood ran in her children, born and unborn. It increased her sense of kinship with him to reflect that when he had emerged, bawling and brick-red from under this very slab of sandstone, she had been toddling about the Big House yonder, almost as though she expected and awaited him. Now she could contemplate him as boy and man, as husband and lover, and think herself more fortunate than most. She wondered if seven years as Rumble Patrick’s wife had not left her a little smug and decided, with the minimum of self-reproach, that it had but why not? Their marriage had been modelled on that of her parents and this was her doing, not his. Her relationship with her mother was more that of a younger sister than a daughter and when all the others had gone their several ways, and she had stayed on awaiting Rumble’s return, she had had a better opportunity to assess the Big House partnership than any of the others who dismissed man, wife and way of life as hopelessly old-fashioned. Perhaps they were and perhaps it was, but the point was it had worked, and so had her own marriage, a carbon copy of the original, so who cared a damn about sex equality as proclaimed by poor old Rachel, or pursued by the sophisticated wives of The Pair?

It might have raised a blush on Claire’s cheek to know how closely her eldest daughter had checked the simple arithmetic of her relationship with Paul, and how faithfully the answers had been applied at Periwinkle. For the first time in years Mary recalled her mother’s blunt advice on the subject of marriage, offered only a week or two before Rumble had whisked her off to the little farm on the far side of the Valley. ‘The way to make it work is to be cheerfully available morning, noon and night, and go along with his major decisions, no matter how damn silly they seem at the time. If you do quarrel don’t sulk but make it up in bed. In ten minutes you’ll both be back to normal.’ That was about it, for Claire with thirty-four years’ experience behind her, and for Mary with a mere seven. Looking back on those years she could remember no more than an occasional tiff, always resolved by mother’s prescription.

In her new-found serenity she could ponder the family as a whole, sparing a thought for the marriages of her brothers, and it seemed to her that all three of them would have benefited by closer observance of the old couple—a partnership, with the man a short head out in front, and any little differences resolved horizontally. Well, there it was and there was nothing very complicated about it. For mother and daughter it had meant fulfilment and that, she supposed, was an end in itself.

Down on the nearest grey stub of a sawn pine a dog fox looked up at her and showed his teeth. Peace and certainty warmed her breasts and belly and she called, in the brogue of old Sam Potter, ‘Hullo there, you ole varmint!’ The fox lifted a forepaw as though prepared to meet the challenge but suddenly changed his mind and padded unhurriedly down the long, sandy slope. In a moment, moving as jauntily as her father, she had slipped off the spur and followed him down to the Mere.

Chapter Four

Birth of a Legend

I

B
ecause he was rooted, because, apart from a two-year stint in Flanders he had lived his life here as community leader, Paul Craddock was as sensitive to the shifts and trends in local loyalties as the commander of a beleaguered garrison. As the war entered its third year he noted a steady diminution of what he had always thought of as the tribal impetus of the people around him.

In times past, both in peace and war, a Valley crisis had never failed to awaken that tribal instinct, promoting collective action and a dedicated pooling of skills and resources under his leadership. It was as though, in moments of stress, the people of the Valley were able to reach out and pluck the threads of initiative from the hedgerows and pastures and follow them wherever they might lead. Always they had led to achievement and sometimes to glory.

Such an occasion had been the rescue operation mounted for the survivors of the German merchantman wrecked off Tamer Potter’s Cove in March, 1906. This (apart from the instance of a Craddock girl’s election as Dairy Queen and her death in an air disaster) was the only occasion the Sorrel Valley made national headlines.

Now, well into the year 1942, Paul had lost his hold upon this ultimate handrail. The present war did not promote this kind of collectivism. Its alarms, sacrifices and manifestations were too regimented to sustain local individualism and too widespread to earn Shallowford more than a couple of paragraphs in the County Weekly. The hit-and-run raid, involving two civilian casualties, had passed almost unnoticed in the world outside, for what were two deaths matched against the hecatombs of Coventry and Merseyside? The bodies of Harold Eveleigh and his sister Rachel were two dead leaves on a flood that had now spread from the Coral Sea to the Newfoundland Banks, from the jungles of Malaysia to the Forest of Dean. Anonymity masked the exertions of Sorrel men and women in uniform. In the First War as people now called it, the Valley had been rich in heroes, men like Smut Potter, who hid out behind the German lines for almost a year, and Jem Pollock, of Lower Coombe, who won a posthumous medal supporting the splintered timbers of a blown mineshaft. There were no local heroes in this war. No garlands were heaped upon men and women leaving the train at Sorrel Halt to begin their nine days’ leave. Mostly they were greeted by indifferent civilians with ‘Hello. Home again?’

What was badly needed, Paul reflected, was a sharp boost to Valley morale and this, in the absence of heroes, could only be achieved by a collective endeavour of some sort that was not only revitalising but was seen to be so by the world north and east of the main road. He could not see where it was coming from. The tribal spirit was dead.

In this, of course, he was mistaken. It was not dead but dormant, awaiting the right set of circumstances to galvanise it into organised endeavour and, in so doing, eject an even more unlikely hero than Smut Potter or Jem Pollock. Such a set of circumstances lit a fuse in July and the resultant explosion not only boosted morale, and made national headlines, but added chapter and verse to Valley folklore. The chapter was the usual Sorrel compound of high drama and low comedy; the verse emerged as a piece of lewd doggerel to be chanted by Valley schoolboys long after the circumstances that had produced it had been swept away with the debris of the Third Reich. The hero this incident produced was Henry Pitts of Hermitage. The heroine was Claire Craddock herself. The villain, as sinister as any in Victorian melodrama, was Otto von Shratt, an ex-U-boat lieutenant, who capered across the Sorrel stage for one summer afternoon and evening before disappearing into obscurity. What made this incident memorable however, was not its circumstance but its shape. It had, in retrospect, an almost classic form in that its cast included not only a hero-clown, a heroine, and a cleanshaven Victorian villain, but a maltreated child plus any number of walk-on parts, most of them armed to the teeth. It was this that caught the Valley’s fancy, for Sorrel people liked their drama in black and white. They were confused by subtle shades and subtle interpretations; even in 1942 few of them had heard of Professor Freud.

Inspector Everett, of Paxtonbury, rang the Home Guard Command Post at ten a.m. that morning, warning the duty unit to look out for a desperate character who had jumped the train en route for Plymouth, his port of embarkation for a Canadian P.O.W. Camp. Paul, getting a garbled message during his morning round, at once rang back for more information and Everett was able to supply it. The prisoner, a dedicated Nazi who had given the authorities a great deal of trouble since his capture the previous year, was called Otto von Shratt. The ‘von’ was deemed to be spurious but Otto’s reputation was not. He was, according to the inspector’s information, a very truculent character, and a man of considerable strength, agility and ingenuity. He had already escaped twice and on one occasion had been free for nearly a week. This, in fact, was why he was being shipped overseas but his escort, bringing him south-west, had been foolish enough to sanction a visit to the lavatory whilst changing stations and he was now at large again and had last been seen heading for the coast. The military, he said, were not unduly alarmed for it was deemed impossible for Shratt to leave the country but they thought it not unlikely that he might attempt a little sabotage and were extremely anxious to lay hands on him without a moment’s delay.

‘He’ll almost certainly make for cover and lie up for a spell,’ Everett told Paul. ‘My instructions are for your people to beat the woods, working north and joining up with the Paxtonbury Home Guard moving south-east. How many men can you get together in the next hour or so?’

Paul said no more than a dozen or so but that number, he felt, would suffice. ‘Someone is sure to see him and ’phone in,’ he added, ‘and once they do we can pinpoint the area and concentrate. He won’t be likely to put up a fight, will he?’

‘Not if he has any sense, but how many of those hairy apes have? This one is a real beauty. He might tackle a single individual unless he found himself looking down the barrel of a rifle. I’ll send a detailed description and picture the minute I get one. It gives me blood pressure to think of those clots at the camp entrusting a man like that to a couple of recruits and a middle-aged corporal. They won’t ask for our co-operation. They prefer to fight the entire bloody war on their own, like all the Services!’

Paul was rather elated by the assignment and so, when he rode over to the Command Post at Coombe Bay to organise the hunt, was the rump of Valley originals and their teenage troops. The local Home Guard had made appreciable strides towards military perfection since the days of Dunkirk when it had consisted of a scratch group of volunteers manning a coastal strip six miles long and three miles deep. Today every man had a uniform, a rifle and plenty of ammunition. Training was still sketchy and discipline often depended on mood and variations in weather, but every volunteer possessed the merit of enthusiasm and a thorough knowledge of the local terrain. The prospect of flushing a real live Nazi from Shallowford coverts was one that promised not only adventure but kudos. Even Henry Pitts, a courtesy sergeant again at sixty-plus, begged to be numbered in the posse, and that despite the fact that he was not on duty and had left his rifle and ammunition at home.

‘Giddon, Maister,’ he protested when Paul relayed the Inspector’s warning, ‘us worn have no trouble flushing the bugger out o’ yer! I can borrow Smut’s rook-rifle and follow on zoon as I pick up the car. ’Er’s havin’ carburettor trouble and I’m waitin’ on ’er!’

Paul left it at that and assembled, by means of the telephone and boy-runner, some fifteen men, including Henry’s son David, Harold Eveleigh’s boy, three Coombe Bay servicemen home on leave, and the pot-bellied Francis Willoughby, of Deepdene. In three cars they drove to the point of departure, the head of the Coombe, and set off in a north-westerly direction, forming a long, ragged line and moving within hailing distance of one another. Latecomers had instructions to move forward on the same line of march about a mile behind the vanguard, if possible covering the gaps. The reserve was placed in nominal command of Henry and all were warned to work in pairs and rendezvous on the main road that formed the northern boundary of the woods.

Shallowford Woods were ideal cover for a fugitive at this time of year. Every beech, oak, ash and sycamore was in full leaf and the bracken between the trunks of the older trees was waist high. The going was comparatively easy up to the crest of the southern slope and down the far side to the margins of the Mere but from here on, inclining north, the way was very rough and Paul, passing Sam Potter’s cottage, reflected ruefully that he would need at least a hundred men to search the vast rhododendron thickets and fir coppices at the northern end of the Mere. He checked the beaters in order to consult with Sam, whose knowledge of this part of the Valley was unsurpassed, even by his brother Smut, the ex-poacher. Sam was not very sanguine about their hopes of forcing the Nazi to break cover.

‘Tiz a praper old wilderness about yer,’ he grumbled. ‘Us have done little or no cuttin’ back zince the start o’ the war. You could hide an elephant upalong. If you’ll taake my advice, Squire, you’ll shorten your line an’ go over the ground dree or fower times, leavin’ markers to show where us’ve been. I got a stack o’ flags in the shed us used for the sports, backalong. Lend me a couple o’ men to hump ’em and us’ll go about it methodical-like.’

They went about it methodical-like, narrowing their field and planting markers every hundred yards or so as they pushed their way through bracken, gorse and blackberry bushes to the higher ground known, from time immemorial, as the Badgers’ slope, for badgers had occupied setts here for centuries.

Paul, handling some of the flags, remembered the last time they had been used in a collective exercise, the occasion of the sports promoted to celebrate King George V’s Silver Jubilee in Big House paddocks, and he could recall the occasion before that, the local junketings that marked the signing of the Peace Treaty, in 1919. Many of the poles were old and rotten, with no more than a shred of rag adhering to the blunt ends but they served to narrow the field and enable the beaters to work with some kind of precision. Gradually, moving slowly and toilsomely in blazing sunshine, the Shallowford Home Guard worked its way up the sandy slope and over the crest into the last belt of woodland approaching the main road. An occasional rabbit scuttled ahead of them. A wide-eyed roebuck broke cover and dashed for the rhododendrons and at least a dozen pheasants flew squawking into the south, rising like heavy bombers and struggling madly to gain height. It was, for most of the beaters, a pleasant if tiring way of spending a summer afternoon and the general air of expectancy inclined them to keep in closer touch with one another than Paul had intended. Grunting along in their wake he said, ‘Tell them to spread out a bit, Sam. We’re not covering nearly enough ground,’ and Sam, whose stride had not been shortened by age, hurried on ahead waving his arms and shouting directions to the younger men. In obedience to his directions they fanned out so that the couples were separated by more than a hundred yards. It was this dispersal that gave the fugitive the opportunity he had been awaiting since he first spied their approach shortly after noon.

II

He had holed up in a bramble-sown crevice at the very top of the Badger Slope, within fifty yards of the ridge where Hazel Potter had once kept her little house. It was a unique vantage point for he could remain unseen by anyone passing within yards and yet observe in detail the sweep of the woods as far as the Mere and the movements of at least half the men searching for him. It seemed to him that his best course at the moment was to wait for the last of them to pass the crest of the escarpment and move down into the heavy timber beyond. Then, he reasoned, he could break cover with reasonable safety, gain the security of the rhododendron forest below and from here work his way round the western side of the lake and find a secure place to await darkness.