The Green Gauntlet (35 page)

He went out and back across the paddock feeling better for the exchange. ‘What’s really needed around here is a thorough stocktaking and some new blood,’ he told himself, ‘but I’m too old and too set in my ways to bother with it! Let her generation tackle it when they get tired of traipsing!’

PART TWO

Conditional Surrender

Chapter One

Marchout with Banners

I

V
.E. Day celebrations, marked by an open-air lunch in Coombe Bay High Street, was the first communal event of the Valley in ten years. It was also, had Paul known it, the last but one of the sponsored, convivial occasions any of them were to witness, for the tradition, notwithstanding the importance of the occasion, was dying and had, indeed begun to decline as long ago as 1935 when the Valley assembled to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of King George and Queen Mary.

In the old days long before the Craddocks settled in the Valley, all national events of this kind were marked by a ritual that was obligatory on the part of every man, woman and child in the area, including babies in arms. Even the semi-feudal Lovells, who had preceded the Craddocks as Squires, had felt obliged to demonstrate local loyalty on national occasions. There had been, so Paul had been told, a very bibulous Trafalgar Supper, a costly (and destructive) Waterloo Bonfire Night, a rustic ball to celebrate the ascension of young Queen Victoria, and even a day of national mourning to mark the death of the Grand Old Duke, in 1852.

In his own time he had celebrated the coronation of King Edward VII with the first social event of his tenure, a grand ball and firework display in the grounds of the Big House, and there had been an even more spectacular jamboree and sports rally to mark King George’s ascension, nine years later. Because he was essentially a traditionalist he went to some trouble and expense to organise this kind of festivity, a Victory Sports Meeting in June 1919 to celebrate the Treaty Signing, and the Silver Jubilee open-air banquet that really was a banquet and not a prolonged snack like today’s event, but by 1945 sophisticated changes, and an accompanying falling off in enthusiasm, were not lost upon him and were not wholly the result of rationing restrictions.

For one thing, whereas all the other celebrations had been based on the Big House this one was staged in Coombe Bay, an indication that the fulcrum of the Valley had already shifted. For another, there was an atmosphere of enforced jollity about this event that had been absent from its predecessors. In 1911, for instance, he himself had taken part in a chariot race round the Home Farm meadows and teams of athletes, wrestlers and horsemen had travelled from as far away as Paxtonbury to compete for local prize money. There were no Paxtonbury folk here today and even the coastal town of Whinmouth was conducting its own celebrations in the square. Among those present, dutifully making merry at the long trestle tables, were many strangers, mostly evacuees from bombed cities, or families who had sought the imagined security of the Valley during the Baedekker raids of 1942 and 1943. Thirty, even twenty years ago, Paul had known everyone between the Heronslea boundary and the Bluff by their given names. Today he recognised barely one-third of those present, and when his eye did find a familiar face among the paper-hatted revellers it only reminded him of older faces and the half-remembered eccentricities of tenants and craftsmen now lying in neat rows behind Ypres, or in the churchyard behind the eastern façade of High Street cottages.

The hard core of the old community was well represented. Henry Pitts was there, guzzling cider by the quart, smiling his slow, rubbery smile, and exulting over the recent demise of Mussolini and his final public appearance on a lampbracket in Milan. Smut Potter and his French wife Marie were there, the one looking as waggish as in his poaching days, the other an unsmiling, rustling, black-draped mountain, as though she was still in mourning for her country’s miserable performance in 1940. Bon-Bon, their only child was there too, home on leave from Germany where, they said, he had been one of the first to enter Belsen and had had the pleasure of locking one of the camp guards in a large refrigerator and forgetting all about him until the following morning. Dick Potter, the estate forester’s eldest son was there too, miraculously intact after nearly five years in the Royal Armoured Corps. Among the other tenants Paul saw Francis Willoughby, looking as old and bent as his preacher father had looked in King Edward’s reign and Paul, reckoning his age, found to his surprise that he could give him a year or two. Young Eveleigh was present with his grey-haired mother, Connie, and his brother and sister, and so was the arty-crafty family from High Coombe, the elder among them looking disdainfully at this display of chawbaconry. Jumbo Bellchamber and his wife (Violet-Potter-that-was) appeared to be enjoying themselves for Paul heard Violet’s shrill laughter and its note took him back more than forty years to a time he had seen her and her wanton sisters making periodical disappearances into the shrubbery on the night of the Coronation supper. Frail old Parson Horsey was still alive to pronounce grace, encouraged by Simon’s wife Evie, without whose ministrations, Paul thought, the old chap would have died long since. For the rest there were a few of the old Coombe Bay craftsmen, a Tozer or two, a Stokes or two, but thinly spread among so many townees. His own family was represented by Claire, Rumble Patrick, home at last, his daughter Mary and her two children, and his daughter-in-law Margaret, but Andy was off on one of his piratical land surveys, Whiz was still in India, and Simon was with S.H.A.E.F. Headquarters in Belgium. John, his youngest boy, was also absent, for this was his first term at High Wood and there seemed little point in unsettling him so soon after his arrival.

Toasts were drunk, tables were cleared and blackouts ceremonially burned although this, the constable told him, was premature and could still lead to proceedings in court. As Chairman of the Committee he did his duty but his heart was not in the business. Towards evening, when the dancing began, he voiced his disappointment to Henry Pitts, who was watching the antics of a couple of sixteen-year-olds currently engaged in what looked like an African witchdoctor’s dance.

‘“Jiving” they calls it,’ said Henry, ‘but it baint dancing be it? Back along, as I remember, there was on’y one point in taking a maid on the dance floor and that was to cuddle ’er up and veel cosylike as you moved around, but they doan zeem to ’ave that in mind, do ’em? They jigs about all over the auction but they stays apart-like as if they was afraid o’ catching zummat! I dorn get it, Maister, unless they’m workin’ up an appetite fer after dark!’

Paul laughed, his first real laugh of the day.

‘There’s more to it than that, Henry. In our day dancing the polka or the bunny-hop was as close as we ever got to a woman in public and I suppose we took advantage of it. They don’t have to watch their step as we did and can indulge in fancy steps if they feel inclined.’

He left Henry pondering this and had a word with Young Bon-Bon, Smut’s boy, who told him a little of the macabre shambles that had greeted his unit on entering Belsen. ‘Well, it’s done with now, thank God,’ Paul said, ‘and I suppose it justifies the war, if that’s what is needed. The more publicity it gets the better I’m pleased, but it still staggers me to discover that the Germans I fought against in Flanders could behave in that kind of way. Orientals yes, but not Europeans.’

Suddenly he felt the urge to get away from them all and pay the dead of an earlier war the compliment of remembering them on such an occasion. Nobody else would—he could be quite sure of that—so he said to Claire, ‘When you’re ready to go Rumble will drive you back. I’m going to stretch my legs for an hour or so. Don’t wait up.’

She didn’t ask him where he was going because she guessed. She had noticed, earlier in the day, that he was in what she recognised as his ‘patriarchal mood’.

II

S
imon, as it happened, was not in Brussels for the celebrations but home in time to witness them in London, having been sent back with a report on repatriated prisoners. He found the responsible department at the War Office disinclined to sacrifice its holiday and attend to him so he wandered off, happily enough, to see the sights if there were any to be seen.

Like his father, he could detect the false note in the orchestra. It suffered, he thought, from its sponsors in rows of government offices along Whitehall where lived the men who had been handing down decrees concerned with lighting restrictions, rationing, careless talk and various other excuses for the exercise of bureaucracy for years on end. Now they had issued a final edict—‘You will now celebrate, and no nonsense about it!’

He saw, with interest, a smartly-dressed Aneurin Bevan watching sailors splash in the Trafalgar Square fountains and then made his way towards the Mall where listless-looking crowds were drifting up and down in the hope that the King and Queen would reappear on the balcony of the Palace. There was a good deal of scuffling, some strident laughter, and some uninhibited embracing in Green Park, but the sense of compulsive enjoyment persisted, even when, in Piccadilly Circus, he watched an impromptu strip-tease act on top of some scaffolding over a subway entrance.

The crowd here was very thick and every now and again forlorn little processions, headed by some desperate character, would march away carrying improvised banners and using dustbin lids as drums. He wondered if the absence of real gaiety was due to the shortage of beer in the pubs and decided, sadly, that it probably was, because the English were never very good at spontaneous merry-making and needed at least three pints to shed their inhibitions. He remembered carnivals rather like this in Whinmouth when he was a boy, events that had seemed to revolve around half-a-dozen town drunks dressed as tramps or pierrots, whose antics were solemnly performed in the presence of solemn kerb-watchers. And then he had another thought, wondering if the damp-squib effect could be traced to years of underfeeding and deprivation, to say nothing of broken sleep and bombing. He had been present at the liberation of Brussels and had witnessed rejoicing that verged on hysteria, but then, the Belgians had something to celebrate. If London had been under the Gestapo for five years it was probable that the Cockneys would erupt as joyously as had the people of Paris and some of the other towns en route to the Rhine.

In contemplative mood he went down Haymarket, back to Trafalgar Square and then to Westminster again, where he looked across at the House and noted that a bomb splinter had struck and bent the upraised sword of the equestrian statue of Richard I. The bent sword diverted the current of his thoughts, so that it left the present and doubled back across the plain of history. Richard, he reflected, had no right to be waving a bent sword outside Parliament. The man had never given a thought to England, except as a milch cow for his Crusade and his ransom. Simon de Montfort had a far better right to that plinth and surely the claims of John Pym, John Hampden and Tom Paine could not be ignored?

He moved along towards the bridge and stopped at the Boadicea statue to look back at the rambling, gothic building, remembering how much energy he had expended in the ’thirties trying to win entry there on behalf of Staffordshire miners, or Newcastle shipyard workers. What, he wondered, had driven him on, apart from the fanaticism of his first wife, Rachel? Had he really believed that a few men like himself, self-committed to the cause of the underprivileged, could change the face of British politics and usher in a new era? Looking back it seemed a futile gesture, for in 1940 it hadn’t mattered a damn who was inside to rally the country. After the German breakthrough in the Lowlands everyone except a few eccentrics like Mosley had put their backs into it and here they were at the far end of the tunnel, with Hitler and Mussolini dead, Germany in ruins, and the Hammer and Sickle flying over the Chancellery in Berlin. What the hell would happen now, he wondered? Who would win the next election? And how was anyone going to set about the thankless job of redrawing European boundaries?

Abruptly, as though withdrawing from the argument, he turned away and went down Whitehall towards his Club. Whatever happened in the Commons now was still his business but not, he decided, his responsibility. War had taught him at least one important lesson—to limit his objectives and this, one way or another, was what he had resolved to do as long ago as D-Day whilst awaiting Lovat’s Commandos at the Orne bridge. The question was how, and in what particular sphere? He had a degree but he also had a wife, and a child was expected in the autumn. The prospect of more politics, he discovered to his surprise, bored him. The process of disenchantment, beginning nearly ten years ago in Spain, was now complete, so that he could make an unconditional withdrawal from the hustings. He would never fight another election, not even if the party dug him out and offered him a safe seat. And this, he thought, had something to do with the sensation of coming home and was nourished by a yearning for the remoteness of the Valley.