A Solitary War

On the Sunday morning Phillip said to Lucy that she and all the children must come to the wireless set in his cottage to hear the Prime Minister’s declaration of war against Germany. It was a morning that would alter all their lives, he told them, as the four small boys, less their sister, entered the green door. He had made a sudden decision that Billy, the eldest, now in his fifteenth year, would not return to school after the summer holidays, but stay and work on the farm.

“Your Uncle Willie, who died soon after the last war, declared that the London Matriculation was the logical emanation of a system which condemns youth to frustration in the classroom before the final frustration of the battlefield. That system is about to pronounce its own doom. The yeoman farmer will have a rosy face when the white-faced European middle-classes are peering into the rubble-heaps of their towns. London may disappear under the explosion of rockets, and become a swamp again, with willows and rushes growing upon the low-lying land beside the Thames. Richard Jefferies wrote a book about it, called
After
London.
”

The children waited, wondering what this was all about. Their father sometimes spoke like this, but usually it ended in some fun.

“Well, all this boils down to the fact that Billy, your big brother, has left school.”

“Me? Really, Dad? Hurray!”

“That’s a rum’n,” said Peter, who was already talking in the local idiom. His voice was becoming higher-pitched in imitation of the natives whose voices were surely an effect of the high and clear Polar air. “Shall I have to leave school, too?” he enquired hopefully.

“I don’t want to go to beastly old school, either, so I think I’ll leave, too,” cried David. And Jonathan, the youngest, tried to repeat what David had said, but got confused, and exploded in a sudden shout.

“Am I going to plough with the Dicker?” asked 14-year-old Billy, with suppressed excitement. This was a new and little known revolutionary type of light tractor to which the plough and other implements were attached by a hydraulic mechanism.

“If you like.”

David, quick and lively, cried hoarsely, “Coo, I bet Billy makes the Dicker scrap!”

Dicker was the East Anglian word for donkey. The new tractor was painted grey.

Jonathan, catching the excitement, went red in the face, while his tongue sought to announce importantly, “Coo, I bet Billy——” but with a frown Billy growled, “Be quiet, little oafs. This is no time for fooling.” He winked at Peter as his father switched on the radio and tuned-in to Droitwich; but seeing his father’s face, Billy became the prefect.

“Where’s Rosamund?”

“She’s helping Mum, sir!” exclaimed David, in his hoarse voice.

The boy was anxious lest his father’s face take on the strained look that all the children dreaded.

“It’s nearly eleven o’clock. Why aren’t they here?”

“‘Oh, for the wings, for the wings of a dove’,” sang Peter, who was at a Choir School.

“Quiet, boy!” said Billy, frowning.

“Billy, you like to mob poor old Peter,” exclaimed David.

David was the third son. He had fair hair and the wild blue eyes of a poet, he was nearly six. He lived for the mystery and glamour of words. He saw stories in nearly all he heard. His wildest activity could be stilled by the least suggestion of a story. Then the eyes would fix their sight on space and the mouth open. The child’s imagination and sympathy were available for anybody or anything. Once Penelope, the family’s friend and neighbour, had given him a pound box of chocolates. David announced his glee in a cawing voice as he ran to give double-handfuls to all he saw in the village street. The box was soon empty. An affectionate and realistic upbringing would, his father hoped, bring David’s imagination into harmony with his body’s quickness. He dreaded the effect of conventional teaching on this child, who resembled his own father whom he rarely saw nowadays—Father who had lived alone, ever since Mother had died. Nearly three years now, how time passed …

“Where
is
Mother, and Roz?”

He looked at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room.
It was two minutes before eleven o’clock. Soon Neville
Chamberlain
, the Prime Minister, would announce that they were at war with Germany. He sat still. After
all
those years—of First Ypres—Loos—Somme—Passchendaele—March 1918, and the
annihilation
of the Fifth Army … who would have thought
then
that the world would revolve to the same happenings over again?

“Napoleon said that Great Britain hung upon the neck of Europe like a vampire. He had prophesied in 1815: ‘Great Britain will rue the day she rejected co-operation with me and my system.’ And he said, further, that Britain would be confronted by the German tribes in a struggle for the supremacy of Europe. That was in 1815. He was a year out. Did they teach you that at your school, Peter?”

“I bestways don’t remember, sir,” going pink in the face.

“War was declared by France on Germany in 1870; again in 1914; and now for the third time. Winston Churchill wrote in his autobiography, some years ago, that the policy of Great Britain for four hundred years had been to ‘divide and rule in Europe’. In other words, to prevent any nation trying to create a United States of Europe.”

“Yes, sir,” said David.

He felt suddenly weary. Why am I talking to the children like this? I must be only a farmer in this war. I must not think about it, out of my neurotic weakness. A working man wears out like a horse, they say in the village; but tormenting ideas wear out a man quicker than body work. And the children suffer …

“Hurray! Good old Mum!” cried David, with a toothy smile.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Lucy, coming into the cottage. “I’ve been trying to get the butter to set. It’s rather slow today. I’ve fed the hens, and when we’ve listened to the broadcast I must hurry back and get the dinner going. Don’t think me uninterested if I appear to be, will you? There is such lots to do, really, with all the windows to cover up with black-out cloth, and there’s the washing to be got ready for tomorrow. However,” she said cheerfully, “we’ll manage somehow. I’ll do your room after, so don’t think you’re neglected.”

“On the contrary, it’s I who neglect you.’

*

Slowly and sadly, as though brokenly, the husky voice of an exhausted man told them that His Majesty’s Government was at war with Germany. ‘We are fighting against evil things.’ When
the voice had died away Lucy said, “He sounded so tired, poor dear. He did so hope for peace, didn’t he?”

“There was death in that voice.”

David’s eyes were opened wide. “Was that a dead man
speaking
, Dad?”

“He’s tired out, David, for he hates war and did his best to prevent it, in his own way. He thinks of others all the time.”

“He really loves fishing better than anything else, I read it in the paper,” said Rosamund. “Just like you do, Dad. Only not in our polluted stream of course.”

“Oh well, I suppose farming will be a respected thing in
England
for a year or two now. Matt said barley in the last war went to sixty shillings a coombe—think of it, sixty shillings a sack of four bushels! I expect the price will be controlled this time, but at least all corn will be wanted. Anyway, we’ve got our farm to live on, if things go badly against us. Nearly two hundred acres of arable, and more when the old tired grass is ploughed up.”

“First you’ll do the Scalt, Dad?”

“Yes, Billy. That’s fifteen acres. Ploughing grant thirty pounds. A good thing we’ve already got it chalked and those gravelly, or ‘scald’, places covered with compost from the grupps. I wish we’d had time to cart all the black mud from the dykes on to that thin grass. The rest will have to wait, I’m afraid. You’ll have to plough the Scalt field, Billy.”

Billy looked excitedly at Peter. David cried:

“Cor, Billy on the old Dicker will go br-r-r-umph,
crash
go the gears! Dad will mob you then, my old fellow.”

“Shut up!” cried Billy. Then turning to his father, “How will you plough it, Dad? In tops and furrows, or on the round? Luke says on the round is best.”

“I don’t know yet. It’s a good thing we’ve got the
Aberdeen-Angus
bull, and the cows. And the ewes, too. I expect everything will be commandeered, or controlled in price, which is the same thing.”

Billy was not listening. He was rapt in a picture of himself driving a thunderous engine, the earth behind him turning up in twin furrows. Through the boundary hedge he would see his hero, Jake Oldstead, on a huge Case tractor, the earth rearing in triple waves behind the demon driver who was so tough that the mud and oil of many years seemed to lie on the wheels and crankcase of his mighty outfit. He, Bill Maddison, was going to drive the Dicker, and perhaps become as grimy and tough as Jake! The
boy’s bedroom was filled with tractor catalogues, farming magazines, and pieces of old iron that the blacksmith had given him.

“Luke said it was a waste of money to have chalked the Scalt last year. But the dressing we gave it will last thirty to forty years. Chalk spread ten tons to the acre leaches away at the rate of seven hundredweight an acre each year.”

“Peter, keep the kids quiet,” frowned Billy, giving Phillip his attention.

“Oh, no more farm! It’s Sunday, let’s all go for a walk on the marshes. I want to get away from the village.”

“All right, my dears,” said Lucy, contentedly. “You enjoy yourselves while I cook the dinner. Half past one suit you?”

“Yes, we’ll be back. I’ll carry Jonathan if he gets tired. How about going to Gibraltar?”

“Hurray, Gibraltar!” cried David. “I’ll bathe. Quick, where’s my bathing costume?” He looked anxiously about. “Oh, down at ours it is.”

“You want a bathing suit—costume is a clumsy word.”
Someone
had used that very phrase to Phillip seventeen years before.

“No, I don’t want a bathing costume—I mean clumsy suit,” cried David. He looked anxiously at his father for a moment; and a shadow entered Phillip. So they were a little afraid of him. Family history repeating itself … He must be easier, quieter. Perhaps he could be, now that ‘the curtain was down’.

*

The place Phillip called Gibraltar, for which he and the children were making, was a small promontory of salted turf, grown with sea-lavender and blite, jutting out into the creek which carried the river through the marshes to the sands beyond. The way led through fields of thin stubble, set with sheaves of poor barley and oat stalks choked with weeds, chiefly spurrey.

“This light sandy soil is acid. It needs marling or chalking. Sugar beet grown in this soil would curl up and writhe upon itself, if it didn’t entirely wither away. Wheat would be poor and thin, barley a wretched growth.”

In the old days, he told the children, farmers used to dig down into pits and bring up the chalky marl and spread it on their light land to thicken and enrich it, so that wheat would find a firm and healthy root where before all except acid-liking weeds fed
miserably
. In one of the fields they passed, as they ran on the grassy sheep-walk between the cultivated land and the marshes, lay a
bowl-like depression, smoothed by many ploughings, thirty yards across and five yards deep.

“This is where, of olden times, marl was dug and spread. Now as you can see it is grown with thorn and bramble, a hide for wild pheasants.”

Phillip was standing still as he spoke. The children waited. They knew what was coming.

“Billy, take command, will you? I must go back—I’ve just remembered something—be careful about the guts, won’t you? And watch the tide coming in—it races at this time of the month.”

He turned about, and hurried to the farm.

*

The war had come before Phillip’s plan to chalk all his arable fields could be carried out. Only fifteen acres of the field called the Scalt, sloping to the meadows and the river, had been dressed with his own chalk, picked down from the big quarry by the farm premises.

The Land Fertility Committee had approved his chalking plan, and agreed to pay half the cost of digging and carting it into heaps on the field. There was a smaller quarry at the eastern boundary. It stood under the beeches of the Hanger, the wood which rose steeply from East meadow. A track or drive under the woods led to the lower entrance of the Scalt field. It would save distance, and time, to re-open that little quarry. Later, it could be used for chalking the meadows.

What the Scalt also wanted, judging by its thin grass, was more humus. Hundreds of tons of good compost were lying at the bottoms of the grupps: black mud and thick lumps of sedge which kept the water-level high, so that the grass of the meadows was
water-slain
during eight months of the year So they had pulled out and made heaps of mud and sedge from those dykes, leaving them to drain and dry, before carting and spreading. Scores of ton-loads had already been spread upon the field, and it was not long before those heralds of rejuvenation appeared: wild white clover
springing
up with the ryegrass. Bullocks from the East meadow walked through the open gateway to graze it.

“Poor land,” the valuer had said, advising against purchase of Deepwater farm, when the two men were walking over the Scalt. “Hungry land.” He stirred the gravel with his toe. “Look at those thin trees in the wood at the top. This field to rent is hardly worth a crown an acre.”

A rent of 5
s
. an acre each year meant a capital value of
£
5 an acre; but the tithe on each acre was 7
s.
annually.

“Capital value? Possibly
£
2
an acre. If you pay more for these Bad Lands it will be against my advice.”

Phillip had paid
£
8, more from weariness than judgment. The family must go somewhere.

This fact, becoming known, had confirmed a ‘theory’, belonging to Horatio Bugg, the village dealer, that the land had been bought for reasons other than farming. And the mixed lot that had come there to start a community—some openly pro-Hitler and
anti-Semitic
, had caused Mr. Bugg to declare that ‘the Bad Lands’ had been bought by a ‘spy-ring’.