The Green Gauntlet (55 page)
Paul had heard Henry refer to hundreds of Shallowfordians as ‘poor ole toads’ but had never thought to hear him apply the phrase to himself and it made him sad to reflect that his oldest friend in the Valley must, indeed, be on his way out. Henry, for his part, was willing to concede this but without sacrificing his grin. ‘Truth is, Maister,’ he wheezed, ‘us ’ave diddled ’em pretty smartlike, you an’ me, when you think on that bliddy ole mudbath in Flanders, and all they bliddy aeroplanes that come near blowin’ us to tatters twenty-year after that. I made eighty-six, didden I? And I baint gone yet.’
He was gone, however, before the spring, and Paul, attending the popular funeral in the Overspill, reflected that he was now virtually the only survivor of the old brigade, for Smut Potter had died the previous year, after having opened a betting-shop in Paxtonbury with the proceeds of an insurance policy, and his brother Sam had died about the same time. The transition from old to new faces, however, had now become so gradual that Paul was beginning to think of comparative youngsters like Rumble Patrick and Nelson Honeyman as veterans.
Eveleigh—still ‘Young Eveleigh’ to Paul—made a great success of Four Winds, once the unluckiest farm on the estate, winning prizes at County Shows as far away as Bath and Hereford. Connie, his mother, lived on in one of the cottages and the only worry in this corner was Eveleigh’s bachelor status that must have bothered his mother for she confided to Paul that she was ‘on the lookout for a nice wife for the boy’, saying it as though she was thinking of taking the ’bus to Paxtonbury to buy him a pair of gumboots. He said, musing ‘I wouldn’t bother if I was you, Connie. Funny thing about the mating instinct in the Valley. It’s usually the girls who make the running and corral the men like bullocks. You only have to think back a bit to see my point. Old Arabella Codsall cornered Martin in this very kitchen. And you were always the brains behind your boy Harold, just as Joannie Potter ran Sam, and that Frenchwoman took over Smut when he was cut off behind Fritz’s lines and hid out in her bakery. I could give you plenty of other examples. There was my Whiz and that Ian of hers—she picked him coldbloodedly from the entire male field of the Sorrel Vale Hunt, and there was my Claire, who didn’t give me up even when I married Grace Lovell. She was the best example of all, because the summer I came here, long before you were born, she took me on what I thought was an innocent ramble down by the Mere and came damned close to seducing me. And me only weeks out of hospital.’
Connie was very intrigued by this story and asked for more details but he called her a nosey old woman and wouldn’t elaborate, except to say, ‘Leave it to natural selection. Some smart young filly already has her eye on your boy, I wouldn’t wonder.’
He was right yet again. That summer, whilst showing a prize bull in the Vale of Evesham, Farmer Eveleigh was carefully singled out by the daughter of one of the judges, a very pretty brunette in her late ’twenties who had, so they said, been a model and had actually played small parts in films.
Connie, caught on the hop, was not at all sure that the girl would prove the right kind of wife for a dedicated farmer living in the remote provinces but Paul, after looking her over, said, ‘Damn it, Connie, you’re even more old-fashioned than I am. What kind of woman do you want? A slabsided, rosy-faced milkmaid, with a tie-on bonnet and hands the colour and size of hams? Farmers’ wives don’t come that way anymore. They go into Paxtonbury once a week for a hair-do, and if you saw them driving their Hillmans and Wolseleys to a Point-to-Point you’d think they were young duchesses. That girl might set local tongues wagging but she’ll also lead women’s fashions and I wouldn’t be surprised if she isn’t well dowered into the bargain.’
They had an old-fashioned local wedding, disposing of seven dozen bottles of champagne, for Eveleigh’s bride, with a townee’s starry-eyed approach to the country, pretended to fall in love with Coombe Bay’s fourteenth-century church, and decided to marry there instead of on her home ground. Actually her choice was dictated by the fact that in her own locality lived hundreds of ultra-smart and highly sophisticated women, whereas down here she was certain to create a sensation. Bob Eveleigh, knowing little of women, thought her preference a good omen and told Paul, in a rare burst of confidence, ‘Judith seems to think a local wedding will help to play her in because she doesn’t know a soul around here.’ Paul, not so easily hoodwinked, still thought of Judith as showing good sense.
He did not go as far as Coombe Bay very often nowadays, except to attend an occasional function at Simon’s school where the boy (‘the boy’ was approaching sixty) seemed to have established a close personal contact with all the new families who had drifted there after the flood damage was repaired and the western half of the town rebuilt. Then, to his own surprise, Simon got a headship at a new school in Whinmouth and comparative freedom of action enabled him to develop theories about the processes of educating under-sixteens. You would often see him, with some of his boys, at the local police court and even an inquest, or out on the cliffs examining the geological strata at the landslip, and every Easter he took a party to Paris and sometimes headed a summer jaunt to Normandy or Flanders. He ‘got up’, as he said, an astonishing variety of object lessons, including visits to Stratford-on-Avon, tours of the Civil War battlefields, and even a trip to the Eddystone lighthouse. He spent his own money freely and lived on overdrafts. It seemed to Paul, however, that he not only enjoyed himself but aged very gracefully.
John, the most eccentric of the family, made a modest reputation for himself in television, specialising in the kind of programme Paul liked to watch,
‘The Source and Course of the Thames’, ‘A Cobbett on Wheels’, ‘The Rape of Staffordshire’
and kindred subjects, all presented with a whimsicality that softened a sharp social comment on John Bull’s transition from farmer-industrialist to bankrupt ex-Imperialist. John, having more humour and rather more tolerance than any of the Craddocks, was able to strike an exact balance between missionary and clown and his programme received good ratings, but when Paul tried to pin him down on objectives he was evasive and said, ‘For God’s sake don’t label me, Gov’nor! The one thing I can’t wear is a label. Just say I make a living the most entertaining way I know.’
When he was twenty-four he married, without saying a word to any of them, and during the first leg of a touring honeymoon he turned up with his bride, a quiet, softly-spoken girl, with a slim figure, jet-black hair and an air of decorum that placed her, in Paul’s mind somewhere between Jane Eyre and Mrs Copperfield. When he got over his astonishment he was delighted. She was exactly, he told himself, the kind of wife suited to a free-ranging, self-contained person like John, but he was astounded when John told him that she had been married before to an actor whom she had just divorced on grounds of cruelty.
‘That’s why I kept it dark,’ he said, ‘for this chap is well-known as a sick comic and a notorious lush.’
‘What’s a lush?’ Paul asked and John explained that it was an alcoholic and that Anne, his wife, had taken a beating during the two years she had tried to cope with him.
‘Where the devil did you run across her?’ Paul asked, curiously. ‘She doesn’t strike me as an actressy type.’
‘She isn’t,’ John said, ‘do you think I’m nuts enough to marry an actress? Good God, I’d sooner marry a woman journalist. At least she could be professionally useful. As a matter of fact, I met her in an all-night chemist’s near Shepherd’s Bush. I went in for a hangover cure and we got to talking about the effect of booze on the soul. She had some interesting things to say on the subject, one thing led to another and we sort of chummed up. You know how it is.’
‘I don’t,’ said Paul, indignantly. ‘People didn’t pick their partners like that in my day. Was
she
there for a hangover cure.’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said John, laughing, ‘she was working there, as a dispenser. It was that that did it, really. She looked rather sweet in her little white overall and I’ve always had a bit of a yen for chemists’ assistants. They all look so competent and almost all of them are shy-violet pretty, in Anne’s kind of way.’
Paul gave up. It sounded so casual, rather like he or Claire might have chosen somebody to partner them in a waltz or a turkey-trot, and he contented himself with saying, ‘Well, she is pretty and I must say it is a relief to hear a girl with a subdued voice.’ And then, to his relief, he discovered that her father had been a veterinary-surgeon and that she knew about horses, so he showed her the Valley from the saddle on a golden September afternoon, reflecting, as he rode along, that he had been singularly fortunate with his in-laws. There was Rumble Patrick and Evie and Margaret, and now this shy little thing, and between them they more than offset Whiz’s patrician-type husband, Ian, and that daughter of the Archdeacon, Monica, who had turned her back on Stevie during the war and indirectly caused all that upset between the boys.
He had no favourites among his grandchildren and godchildren in the way that Claire had favoured Vanessa. He would sometimes, however, contemplate the impressive list of their names and birthdates in the old estate diary that was still clamped between the hinged covers of the Bible that old George Lovell, his predecessor, had used to camouflage his gallery of local nudes. There were so many of them now—for seven godchildren dated from his first decade in the Valley, and after them came Simon’s three, Stevie’s one, Mary’s four, and Whiz’s five. It was difficult to believe that there had been a time when he had felt cheated of descendants.
Maureen Rudd, still known in the Valley as ‘The Lady Doctor’, lived on until the summer of ’62, when she was eighty-eight. She died, to Paul’s great regret, in Edinburgh, at the home of her son who had been named for him back in 1912, and Paul much appreciated Paul Rudd’s gesture in sending her back to be buried in Overspill, among so many of her old patients.
It was, as it happened, the last funeral he attended in the Valley and because it was a warm, sunny day he lingered after the other mourners had dispersed and took a look at the higgledy-piggledy array of mounds and headstones both here and in the older part of the churchyard.
He found he was able to do this without sadness for none of them seemed dead to him, not nearly so dead, for instance, as the Valley men who went west in Flanders between 1914 and 1918 and even these he identified with trees in French Wood.
He pottered about here a long time, looking at Old Tamer’s memorial, at ‘Preacher’ Willoughby’s grave, at the Eveleigh plot where lay Norman, of Four Winds, Marian his wife, and their children, Harold and Rachel. He stopped for a moment at the fresh mounds representing Henry Pitts, Smut Potter, Sam Potter and several others, including the older graves of Parson Horsey and his predecessor, Parson Bull, whose headstone was garnished by a particularly insipid angel, the sight of whom, had he met her in the hunting field, would have caused old Bull to bellow one of the oaths he reserved for those who got between him and the fox. Paul contemplated the angel a long time, smiling to himself and thinking how Maureen Rudd and her husband John, or Henry, or Smut, would have appreciated the incongruity of the memorial had he been able to share the joke with any one of them.
Then, whistling under his breath he went through the lych-gate and got into his car. One last memory pursued him as he backed into the lane abutting the High Street. It was here, at this lych-gate, that his first wife, Grace Lovell, had tried to persuade him to withdraw his proposal a few months short of sixty years ago.
Chapter Seven
Snow, and Garrison Alliances
I
T
hey were nearly all home for Christmas 1962, so that Paul, chuckling in private, suspected that Mary or Simon had asked each of them to make a special effort because this might be his last. He did not think it would be, and neither was it, but those final days of December and the months that followed were to provide him with a uniquely awesome aspect of the Valley. It was the hardest winter he could recall, the hardest, they said, since records had been kept. Snow held off until the late afternoon of Boxing Day but the ground was already under a hard frost and hunting had to be called off. By the next day, when everyone was getting ready to leave, the snow lay in eight-foot drifts under the banks. Twenty-four hours later the Valley was a sealed white stocking laid between sea and the shoulder of the woods.
This, in itself, was not unique. Several times in living memory the Sorrel had frozen hard enough for skating and often, in the last six decades, wagons had been unable to tackle the steep, winding road that skirted the moor between the main highway and the river. But now the coastal link between Whinmouth and Coombe Bay was also cut and the new tarmac road lay buried beneath four feet of snow, with banks of up to fifteen feet in the hollows under Whinmouth Hill.
It was, Paul thought, a magnificent sight as he took a constitutional down the drive and along the iron-bound margins of the river. Nothing had passed or could pass this way since the last eight-hour fall and a great blanket of virgin snow stretched as far as the eye could see, with the sun hanging like a tangerine over the long sweep of the woods. Only French Wood, resting on a steeply angled spur, reared itself out of the enveloping sheet like a young colt in the act of standing upright, and Paul eyed it with satisfaction for it now showed as a real wood and not a coppice and the trees here, none of them much more than forty years old, had done remarkably well considering their exposed position.
It was difficult to get used to the silence. Always, even in high summer, the Sorrel hummed a lively tune about here and when Four Winds pastures were shrouded in mist and soggy with mud you could still hear the suck of cows’ hooves in the socketed soil. The wind was usually gossiping in Home Farm elms but today the wail of a single gull carried right across the Valley, a plaintive acknowledgment of the world’s inability to go about its business.
He thought, ‘My God, but I’d like to make the rounds today and see it all again,’ but he realised that this was impossible, for the grey’s hooves would ball up and bring him down before he had ridden as far as the lodge and he was too old to attempt the circuit on foot. He compromised, however, by retracing his steps through Home Farm strawyard (where Mary’s two youngest were tobogganing down the incline of the aeroplane field), cutting across the paddock to the orchard, and thence to the back lane that ran the length of the woods.
Up here it was sheer magic. Drifts had filled the cutting and frozen hard so that it was possible to walk across almost level ground to the first of the big beeches and the oldest of the oaks. The birds were already tamed by hunger and several of them had succumbed to starvation. Robins, bright-eyed and ridiculously puffed, followed him hopefully, skipping from twig to twig and setting the long icicles flashing ruby red in the heatless rays of the morning sun. He went down again for some scraps and Margaret and Andy, who were staying on for a few days, returned with him to the stile carrying a basket of pasties. Sparrows, finches, rooks and one crow coasted in for their share and before they left they strung strips of fat on the apple boughs for the tits, Paul counting four varieties.
Margaret, watching him, cautioned him against catching cold and he told her not to be an old woman and that he had never minded snow in the Valley so long as passing traffic didn’t convert it into yellow slush.
‘Mother couldn’t stand it,’ said Andy, suddenly, and Paul agreed that this was so, and that Claire had been an April–October person, although he did not see why, seeing that she had always had more flesh about her than any of them, even in her early twenties. Then they all three went in and drank a hot toddy and Rumble ploughed his way across the paddocks to borrow suet, bringing with him a warning that there would be a great deal of lending and borrowing before this lot was over, because isolated farms like Hermitage and Four Winds would be unable to replenish stores in the way still available to farms within easy walking distance of Coombe Bay.
Rumble was both right and wrong. Requests for help soon came from Ellie Pitts, who lived on at Hermitage, and from the new Mrs Eveleigh, having her first experience of rural isolation in Four Winds. Both, it seemed, had exhausted their larder stocks over Christmas and not anticipating anything like this had delayed making a dash for Paxtonbury. Rumble, trying to deliver a few essentials, got as far as Codsall Bridge in his tractor but there the trailer had to be unloaded and its contents carried by hand up both farm lanes.
By the evening of the next day even a tractor trip was out of the question for snow had fallen steadily for another twelve hours and communication between the farms ceased except by telephone and the occasional message delivered on foot.
It was as though, before he was quite through, the Valley gods, older and more capricious than Jehovah, were eager to show him everything in the celestial repertoire. He would have thought that they could not surprise him but they did and he enjoyed being surprised, for it gave him yet another opportunity of exercising his suzerainty over the community, just as he had on so many previous occasions at times of drought, flood, cattle plague, slump and war.
His estate office became once again a battle headquarters, with its stream of telephone calls and red-faced runners who came in and out blowing on their fingers and stamping their boots. He got a load of cow-nuts for Jerry hauled up the Coombe by sledge, groceries for Prudence Honeyman and Dick Potter by the same means, and then mounted an emergency rescue on behalf of Home Farm lambs. He got a vet to High Coombe by dictating over the telephone a means of access from the nearest point of the main road and over the north-eastern corner of Shallowford Woods, pinpointing a list of landmarks that nobody but himself would have remembered, much less been able to describe in recognisable terms. He did all kinds of things within the immediate vicinity of the Big House, including making a snowman for Mary’s youngest and co-operating with Andy and Margaret, marooned along with him, in a nonstop mercy mission among the hundreds of wild birds picqueting the orchard and stableyard.
‘My reward for these terrible exertions,’ he told Andy, ‘will be to have every damned raspberry and gooseberry stolen by them in the summer. Repairing those fruit cages is one of the jobs Claire and me and old Horace Hancock have been putting off since 1914. Now I’m the only one alive to do it and I shall have to buy what fruit I need from tenants.’ He revelled in every moment of the exercise for not only did he enjoy his usefulness but also the sense of the Valley drawing together as an interlocked community that had been such a feature of his early days here. The peak of that terrible winter, however, was not scaled until mid-February, when he conceived and organised the airlift.
II
N
obody, not even the gloomiest among them, had expected it to endure so long without the least sign of a break in the weather. Soon communication between the farms, even on foot, became very difficult and it was essential to keep in touch with headquarters and one another by daily exchanges of information over the telephone. No milk had gone out of the Valley since the New Year and the surplus was being fed back to the pigs, the only living creatures in the Valley to benefit from the freeze-up. Thousands of eggs lay in their square cartons awaiting collection and soon proteins began to run short, particularly at Four Winds and Deepdene, where Eveleigh and Nelson Honeyman maintained sizeable herds. It was after watching bales of hay being dropped by helicopter to New Forest ponies on his T.V. set that Paul, saying nothing to anyone, made a calculation of the most urgent needs at these two farms and then added a few hundredweight of poultry food, mostly for Jerry at Low Coombe, who specialised in hens. Then, to Andy’s amazement, he blandly suggested telephoning the County Agricultural Office at Paxtonbury and laying on helicopters.
‘Good God,’ Andy said, ‘they’ll never wear that, Gov.’ But they did, and within forty-eight hours the ‘choppers’, as Andy called them, were sailing in over the desolate slopes and dropping carefully-packaged supplies ordered in Squire Craddock’s name from Paxtonbury suppliers who had snowplough access to the R.A.F. training base further along the coast.
He watched them arrive like a boy gazing up at his first aircraft—‘Almost gobbling with glee,’ as Andy told Margaret that lunchtime, adding, with a grin, ‘I’m glad we got marooned out here along with him. I wouldn’t have missed it for a tax-free year. It’s absolutely fascinating to see all the threads leading back to that office of his, just the way it did when I was a kid growing up here.’
And then Paul came in, his face glowing and his eyes bright with mischief as he said, sitting down to a plate of Margaret’s vegetable stew, ‘Well now, I never thought to see the day when I could watch those damned things earn their keep. My God, I wish old Henry Pitts had lived to see them arrive with their cattle cake and pellets. I can imagine his long whistle of surprise and his “Gordamme, Maister, they vound a praper use for they bliddy ole contrapshuns after all, didden ’em now?”’
The helicopters came in again an hour before sunset, pivoting on the Coombe and hammering their way across the sky. Andy, watching them remembered that he had never flown a helicopter but had always wanted to. He wondered if he could manage one with his artificial hand and then recalled Douglas Bader and his tin legs in the Battle of Britain days. The only regrets he ever had nowadays centred on flying.
The frost held on until the first days of March but when the thaw set in it seemed to happen very quickly. By the end of the month the only reminders of the ten-week siege were pock-marked drifts under north-facing and east-facing hedgerows. The wind was still keen but Paul, standing on the half-moon sweep outside the porch to see Andy and Margaret make their belated departure, could sniff the spring and said he hoped she wouldn’t dawdle south of the sandbars.
That same afternoon he threw his favourite Souter saddle across the fretful grey and rode across the sloping field to the woods, feeling his way cautiously, as though it was his first excursion here. He got as far as the rusting remnant of the German bomber on the downslope to the Mere but had his work cut out to hold his horse on a tight rein because the gelding had been brooding in loose-box and yard ever since Christmas. It wasn’t time yet, Paul decided, to have a thorough look around, so he trotted back along the lane to drink a cup of tea with Ellie Pitts at Hermitage, and discuss the last few weeks as two old soldiers might talk of a campaign that had just ended in triumph.
The right moment came about a month later, when the last of the mottled drifts had blown away and green shoots of new grass were revealed beneath them.
This time he made ready for a longer foray, filling his hunting flask with whisky and water and descending the drive between the two rows of candlesticks (for that was how he had always thought of the prim chestnuts in either paddock) turning left instead of his customary right, and making his first call on Jerry at the Dell.
Before he reached there, however, he had to ride along the path of the landslide and pass the naked foundations of Mill Cottage and was pleased that he could regard them without a pang. In bright sunshine, with the hedges full of dandelion, campion and stitchwort, he did not feel isolated from Claire. She was still somewhere close at hand, in the salty tang of the breeze blowing in from the Dunes, or in the green-gold fastness of the beech hedge to his left. The Sorrel was down to its normal width, despite the enormous amount of melted snow it must have carried down to to the sea in the last few weeks, and its current was singing again as a variety of river birds flitted among the iris stems of the ox-bows. Low down on one of the very few original elms about here a blackbird sang and high above him, centred on Codsall stubble fields, a lark entered into competition but soon withdrew from the contest.