The Green Gauntlet (31 page)

Whiz wrote one of her formal, slightly prissy letters from India about the same time and it was clear that she too was developing into a person with whom a conventional mother-daughter relationship was unlikely to survive the war. Claire found that she could accept this with equanimity for Whiz, alone among the Craddocks, pursued her objectives untroubled by emotional doubts. Ian, her husband, was now firmly entrenched among what the American Rangers called the Top Brass, and Whiz wrote as though this was no more than the right of a professional kingpin in a pyramid of amateurs. She had two children and a third expected, an announcement that caused Claire to comment, when reading her daughter’s letter aloud to Paul, ‘She doesn’t so much tell us these things as to make them public, like royalty!’, to which Paul replied, with a chuckle (for his second daughter’s pomposity always amused him) that a diet of curry must have gingered them up a little and if this happy state of affairs continued the Craddocks would contribute substantially to the population explosion the newspapers were prophesying.

Andy, Simon and Whiz Claire could adjust to without much difficulty, and even that curious, last-minute transformation of Stevie had been simplified by Margaret, but she knew little about Mary, or Mary’s relationship with that genial oddity, Rumble Patrick. Mary had always been Paul’s responsibility and Claire had never challenged his unrepentant favouritism of their eldest daughter.

Thus it was that she remained in ignorance of the slight shift in the balance of the former Periwinkle team, and the anxieties that had beset her daughter before that shift became apparent. Paul was not unaware of them but said nothing until the day Mary confided in him and shocked him by admitting that her principal worry over the last two years was not that Rumble would be killed but that he would outgrow his tribal loyalties to the Valley.

It should not have jolted him as much as it did. He remembered Rumble’s guarded admission at the time of the destruction of Periwinkle, a confession that he still cherished a curiosity about faraway places, but he did not appreciate the significance of this until the day he and Mary saddled the horses and rode over to Periwinkle to survey the prospects of rebuilding as soon as the authorities issued the building licence.

They spent an hour or so on the site but Paul noticed that Mary seemed preoccupied and not much interested in his proposals. He said, offhandedly, ‘You and Rumble do intend to return here, don’t you? He isn’t hankering after one of the other farms?’ and she said, equably in the circumstances, ‘No, Daddy, I imagine it’ll be Periwinkle or nothing but until yesterday’s mail I was half convinced it was going to be nothing.’

He stared at her in amazement. Of all his children he had regarded her as the most permanently rooted and had often consoled himself with the fact that one at least had married someone who shared his own dedication to the Valley.

‘Now what the devil do you mean by that?’ he demanded. ‘Rumble isn’t thinking of chucking the land is he?’ and she said, patiently, that she had suspected so for some time past but that suddenly they were almost back to normal and this would be Rumble’s last voyage if he could terminate his engagement as soon as his ship returned from the Far East.

He said, unhappily, ‘You and Rumble—you always seemed to me to belong. There’s nothing wrong is there? I mean, nothing like the kind of thing that happened to The Pair?’

She smiled, kicking her feet free from the stirrups so that he saw her as a rosy-cheeked girl again, jogging along beside him after a day’s hunting with the Sorrel Vale.

‘It’s not that kind of “wrongness”,’ she said. ‘Rumble has his own rules and lives by them, pretty strictly I should say. I’ve never had an hour’s worry about other women, even though I’ve only had him a month or so in more than two years. No, it’s the gypsy in him I daresay, and also the fact that he married young—too young. I suppose I was to blame for that but you remember how it was that time he came home unexpectedly, when we were all so miserable about little Claire being killed.’

‘I remember perfectly,’ he said grimly. ‘Tell me the rest, providing you want to.’

She said, surprisingly, ‘Very well, but we’ll have to stop somewhere. The fact is he jumped at the chance of going to sea after the Germans bombed Periwinkle. In a way it was a last-minute reprieve and had the advantage of a built-in excuse to go with it. Farmhouse gone—prospect of seeing out the rest of the war as a lodger at the Big House—that didn’t suit our Rumble’s book at all! So he prattled a little about wanting to do his bit, like Stevie and Andy and Simon, and went off grinning all over his face.’

‘You mean you realised that at the time?’

‘In a way I did, but I didn’t admit it until after that one time he came home between voyages. I saw then that he wasn’t really cured, that he had to see what was left of the world before he was ready to settle for Shallowford. I suppose I resented it in a way but I tried to make allowances. Like I say, he was a husband at twenty-one and a father a year later. He was also a Potter, and although the Potter generation you knew were content to squat in the Dell there’s inherited wanderlust there, and always will be. Have you ever heard of a poet called James Elroy Flecker?’

‘Surprisingly I have,’ he said. ‘I’ve got one or two of his poems in an Anthology.’

‘One called “Brumana”?’

‘Yes, the one where he realises that the pine trees that talked him into leaving England were damned liars. I liked that.’

‘Ah, you would,’ she said, ‘it’s right up your street! Well, here’s the connection—Rumble came across it in a magazine in a barber’s shop in Auckland and it so fitted his mood that he sent the late Mr Flecker home to do his dirty work for him!’

‘How do you mean?’

She dismounted and he followed suit, sliding the reins over the cruppers and leaving the horses to crop the hedgerow grass in the lane that led over the shoulder of Hermitage Wood. She took out a letter that must have been a long time reaching her, for it was marked ‘June 7th, Sydney’.

‘You don’t mind me reading it?’

‘Good heavens no! Rumble couldn’t write a love-letter! I settled for that years ago. Go on, read it, and then the poem he tore out of the magazine. It must have impressed him no end, when I last saw him
The Farmers’ Weekly
was his literary high-water mark!’

He sat down on the bank and read pages of scrawl. The letter, it seemed, had been prompted by the D-Day news-bulletins and Paul got the impression that wide horizons had blurred Rumble’s sense of geography, for he seemed to assume that Devon and the Normandy coastline were almost within hailing distance of one another and was in mortal fear of them being hit by stray shells. ‘
I feel,
’
he began, ‘
the victim of a crazy practical joke! By my reckoning you are no more than a hundred miles north-west of the beaches, and here am I, polishing a gun I haven’t fired for eight months and nearly thirteen thousand miles from the nearest Jerry! Remember to tell the Gov he was spot-on when he accused me of dodging the column! I was, by twelve thousand nine hundred miles!
’

‘Is that what you meant? He feels out of it all, despite the Japs?’

‘No, read from page four, the bit about Flecker. Read it aloud.’

‘“
I met an old friend of yours the other day. Name of Flecker—James Elroy Flecker. At least, I think he’s a friend for the name rang a bell while I was browsing through a mag. in a barber’s shop, in Auckland. It made me remember you before the fire at Periwinkle on a winter’s night, with your ‘Just listen to this …’ routine, and me trying to tot up a column of figures! I had to travel this distance to make the connection. Read the lines I’ve marked. It’s how I feel right now and I couldn’t have put it better if you had been right beside me. My God, I miss you and the Valley and can’t get home quickly enough! Catch me straying out of Devon after the war and you can shoot me and start fresh with someone who can recognise a good thing when he sees one
”
.
’

Paul looked up quickly and saw laughter in his daughter’s expression.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he may not write much of a love-letter but at least he doesn’t beat about the bush,’ and Mary chuckled saying, ‘Read the poem and notice the bits he’s underlined. I’ll hold that in reserve for the rest of my life. A spare shot in my locker if he gets itchy feet in his middle-age!’

He read the poem and was moved by it, remembering very clearly some of the passages that had half-remained in his memory.

‘Oh shall I ever be home again?

Meadows of England shining in the rain

Spread wide your daisied lawns …’

And

‘Old fragrant friends—preserve me the last lines

Of that long saga which you sang me, pines,

When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree,

I listened, with my eyes upon the sea …

Oh traitor pines, you sang what life has found

The falsest of fair tales …’

He was chuckling himself now so that Mary chimed in with the final underscored passage—

‘Hearing you sing O trees,

Hearing you murmur “There are older seas

That beat upon vaster shores …”’

‘Well, there you are. He’s cured! But if he comes home quoting that poem you never heard of James Elroy Flecker and his traitor pines, understand?’

‘I am not quite the bumbling old fool that you, your mother and your brothers sometimes take me for,’ he said, returning letter and poem and reaching for the bridle of the grey.

Chapter Twelve

Booby Trap

I

H
e was by no means infallible. Even after forty-two years he was still capable of grievous misjudgements of character but he would admit to these with a kind of wry humour when he had got over the shock. Such an error was the one he made in respect of Noah Williams, Coombe Bay longshoreman—in the winter of 1944–45.

For a long time now the authorities outside the Valley had accepted his leadership and had never hesitated to delegate responsibility to him, sometimes with a readiness that made protest. For all that he would have resented them going elsewhere for help and advice, for he thought of himself as the God-appointed custodian of far more acres than he owned.

Coombe Bay jetty came within one of these areas for, although he had scattered properties in the village, the bay at the mouth of the Sorrel was not under his jurisdiction, particularly since the military had moved in to set up a gun position there in the early autumn of 1940.

The gun was no longer there but the mock café that had housed it at the end of the jetty was still used as a Home Guard Command post. On this side of the estate and beyond it, where the sandbanks almost closed the channel at low tide, the military still had a network of weed-trailing beach obstacles that were sown in the summer of panic following Dunkirk.

Paul went down there two or three times a week, partly for the ride and partly to consort with one or other of his old cronies, Smut Potter, whose bakery was just along the quay, or Alf Willis, the wheelwright who had lost his sight at St Julien in 1917, but had refused to surrender the post of telephonist he had taken when the local L.D.V. unit was formed in the first spring of the war.

Paul was on the point of setting out for the village one gusty February afternoon when Claire called him back into the house to answer a call from the R. M. Camp on the Moor. It was Trubshaw, the adjutant, who gave him the gist of a message just received from the naval sub-depot at Whinmouth regarding a possible danger east of the landslip from floating mines. Neither the Navy nor the marines seemed much concerned.

‘They’re ours,’ Trubshaw said offhandedly, ‘and they’re about as useful as fishermen’s floats as far as coastal defence is concerned. Two of a dozen or so, laid outside the estuary early in the war. Judged on some of the stuff pressed into use about then they might even date from World War I. The Navy had orders to take them in months ago but you know Jack Ashore when it comes to paper work. They’ve probably been writing letters to one another about them since Dunkirk. Now they’ve recovered all but two that slipped their cables in last night’s gale.’

‘Old or not they can still do a hell of a lot of damage. Has their position been plotted since daylight?’

‘About an hour ago. They were drifting east towards the sandbanks at midday. Pretty well nudging one another I hear and moving out of our patch, thank God.’

‘Well, what the devil am I supposed to do about it?’ Paul demanded and Trubshaw said, soothingly, ‘Oh, nothing, old boy, nothing at all. Just warn the civvies down near the quay. The Navy are coping. They’re sending a cutter along. It’s probably there now.’

‘Well, thanks for telling me,’ Paul said, unable to keep the irony out of his voice. ‘If the village has gone up in smoke by the time I’ve driven over I’ll fill in a form and post it to the Admiralty.’

‘You do that, old man!’ Trubshaw said genially, ‘and I’ll back you up in triplicate.’

Paul was not over-concerned by the news for his knowledge of the strong currents off the Bluff told him the scour would probably catch the mines west of the harbour mouth and push them on to the Conger Rocks two miles out to sea. There, at low tide, they would either explode harmlessly, or half-submerge themselves on the eastern tip of the sandbars, and he assumed that a disposal unit was on board the cutter and equipped to defuse them on the spot.

His irritation stemmed from another source. He had not ridden for a week owing to an accumulation of work and had been looking forward to a trot down the river road and a canter home across the dunes before dusk. Now, he supposed, he would have to go by car, and turn the unclipped grey loose in the paddock. He unsaddled, gave the halter-end to Thirza, and climbed in the old station waggon that had replaced Claire’s Morris as the estate runabout. He not only begrudged the loss of exercise but the petrol. Notwithstanding his Home Guard and agricultural allowances, the authorities were very miserly with their coupons.

He was just passing Mill Cottage, about half-way to the coast, when the explosion echoed up the Valley and its blast rattled his windscreen so vigorously that he was amazed it withstood the shock. The Valley was well accustomed to sudden bangs by now but this was a particularly heavy one. Feeling certain it must be one of the mines he pushed the accelerator as far as it would go. Then, as he rounded the last curve in the road, he saw the pall of brickdust rise over the village and shouted, involuntarily, ‘Good God, it’s washed ashore!’ and swept into the steep High Street, aware of scurrying figures moving towards the harbour at the double.

Down outside The Raven, where the dust-cloud was thickest, all was confusion and outcry. He scrambled out of the car and ran across to the quay where he almost collided with Smut Potter, hatless and coatless in the thin rain that had begun to fall as Paul set out.

‘Tiz a bliddy gurt bomb o’ some sort!’ he shouted. ‘Us didden zee nothin’ go over, did you, Squire?’

‘It’s a mine,’ Paul said, ‘one of two loose from Whinmouth. I just got word from the camp,’ and before Smut could comment he pulled him out of the mainstream of village women and children and into the porch of The Raven. ‘We’ve got to get all these people inshore before the other one drifts in and we’ve got to do it before we check for casualties. Who have you got to help?’

Smut’s instincts as ex-poacher and ex-trench veteran showed at once. His blue eyes narrowed and his stocky body seemed to contract so that Paul saw him as he had first seen him, balanced on his toes ready to run.

‘Be the other one handy then?’ Smut demanded, and Paul said they had been close together when last sighted off the landslip.

‘Then you take a good look while I put the fear o’ God into these yer gawpers, Maister,’ he said and moved off, thrusting his way among the knots of sightseers and shouting, at the top of his voice. ‘Everyone inshore! Tiz a mine an’ there’s more of ’em out there!’ Reaching in the glove box for his binoculars, Paul saw him shoving his way along the quay and almost at once there was a general movement away from the water that began as a drift and ended as a mild stampede. At the same time the cob-dust began to settle and Paul, moving to the quay wall, was able to make some kind of assessment of the damage.

Fortunately, almost miraculously it seemed to him, it was negligible. The mine, reaching the harbour mouth on the turn of the tide, had drifted in on the swell and exploded against the wall of the jetty, blowing a gap ten yards wide. The mock café, at the end of the gimcrack structure, was now an island, and although its concrete walls seemed to have withstood the blast, its roof was stripped and its foundations had tilted so that it now looked like a grey box resting on a criss-cross of half-submerged piles. Apart from this, and a great many broken windows, there appeared to be no quayside damage and no casualties. People addressed him as he scanned the harbour but all he replied was, ‘Get off the beach. Get up behind the town,’ and trained his glasses on the grey waste of water between the shattered jetty and the nearest of the beach obstructions half a mile out to sea.

At first he could see very little. Rain continued to fall and visibility was bad owing to the mist that almost invariably accompanied damp weather at this time of year. Then, making a sweep of the sandbar, he saw the Whinmouth cutter and improbably it seemed to be anchored just outside the bar. He was trying to improve the focus when Noah Williams touched his elbow.

‘They’m stuck,’ he said, with an element of glee in his voice. ‘They gone aground in shallow water and they’ll have to bide until the tide’s run an hour.’

Paul lowered his glasses and stared into Noah’s broad, gap-tooth face. ‘This is no time to be funny, Noah,’ he said sharply, for Noah had a reputation as a practical joker, but the longshoreman replied plaintively, ‘I baint ’avin’ ’ee on, Squire. They’m stuck I tell ’ee. You got to be right smart to catch that harbour at turn o’ tide and they should ha’ waited on for a spell. It happened bevore and I told ’em but they bliddy vorriners alwus knows best.’

‘Take a closer look yourself,’ Paul said, passing his binoculars but confirmation came at once, a rocket soaring from the cutter and arching its way over the western slope of the Bluff. The bomb-disposal team, it would appear, were themselves appealing for help.

‘Well, for God’s sake …’ Paul began, but Noah, taking the glasses said, ‘’Tiz blowin’ up rough too. They’d better not hang around out there, the gurt vools!’ He might have been talking about a Nazi landing party.

Noah Williams, almost the last of the seafaring Williamses of Coombe Bay, was not a fisherman in the sense that his forbears had been. He still followed the trade of the sea but his status was that of a semi-amateur. He sold fish from his quayside cottage and in the summer he made some kind of a living conducting trips in the bay, but his intense dislike of salt-water was a local joke and had been ever since, as a boy, he had been almost drowned when caught in a summer squall off the landslip. His Uncle Tom and his brother Dan, who had been with him on that occasion, had been lost at Jutland but long before that Noah, basically a loafer, had all but renounced his ancestral calling. He still had a boat but he would never venture beyond the sandbars, and only then on a windless day. Even his summer traffic was carried by his only son, Jaffsie, who also did a little fishing.

Jaffsie, a young man with a slack mouth and a furtive manner, joined them now. For three centuries the Williamses had given their children biblical names and Jaffsie had been christened Japhet. Paul, who knew the personal history of everyone in the Valley, did not have much confidence in father or son.

Smut rejoined them, shoulders hunched against the rain. ‘I been the length o’ the quay and give orders to keep everyone upalong,’ he said. ‘Voysey’s takin’ over in the High Street and they’ll tak’ more heed o’ him than they will o’ me. Be that bliddy cutter at anchor?’

‘No, ’tiz aground,’ Noah crowed, ‘an’ will be until the tide lifts her.’

‘Have ’ee spotted anymore, Squire?’

‘No. You’ve got the keenest sight of any of us. You take a look, Smut.’

Smut took the glasses and began a methodical sweep of the little harbour, beginning at the foot of the Bluff and swinging the binoculars as far west as the landslip. Then he returned over the same field of vision and when he was two-thirds of the way round he stopped and remained rigid for nearly half a minute.

‘’Tiz there all right,’ he said at length, ‘low down, about dree hundred yards out. Take a bearing on what’s left o’ the jetty and you’ll zee it bobbing like a bliddy gurt vootball.’

For a long time Paul searched the area and at last picked up a small, dark object that he had previously assumed to be a piece of driftwood.

‘Are you sure that’s a mine?’

‘Certain sure and ’er’s goin’ to drift in and strike within yards o’ where t’other bugger went off. If you keep ’er in view you can zee the trailin’ end o’ the cable fallin’ away from the bracket.’

Paul tried again and saw that this was so. The mine was nine-tenths submerged but the trailing cable-end, bent in a wide loop, could be seen threshing mildly in the swirl of the tide a few yards to the right. From here the mine looked almost stationary. Paul said:

‘How is the tide, Noah?’

‘It turned less’n half an hour ago. Tiz slack out there now but it’ll speed up any minute, especially if the wind gets up.’

‘Do you agree with Smut about where the other mine is likely to strike?’

‘Arr I do,’ Noah said equably, ‘and a bliddy good job too. The Government’ll ’ave to build us a new jetty, as well as pay for all the windows stove in, so us looks like makin’ a praper old profit out of it, dorn us?’