A Solitary War (42 page)

And in late April and again in early May Matt and he had walked among the dark clovers and luxuriant grasses to spud the few thistles, only half a dozen to the acre remaining—the cleanest field in the county, and the best layer, Matt had declared.

The car sped on. Looking over the driver’s shoulder, he saw the speedometer needle trembling at 75. Would Father read of it in his
Daily
Trident
—Father who had not replied to his last
half-dozen
letters? What would the Maddison Aunts say? They too had given him up—or he them—years before. Viccy had taken the trouble to write, just before the war, and tell him that the family was ashamed of him. A queer, lonely lot: each one living in a house alone—Father—Uncle Hilary (his wife Irene had gone as a lay-sister in a French convent)—Aunts Theodora, Isabella, and Victoria. Every one living in an authentic world, based on temperament, warped by experience, limited by the arc of personal imagination: personal judgments all affected by personal
frustration
. And not one of them realised it. They were the last
animate shadows of the set sun of Victorianism appalled by the dissolution of their worlds.

Perhaps he would be taken to Falmouth: a grey ex-liner, cages of expanded metal between decks, and across the Atlantic to Canada—or into the depths of the Atlantic wherein, Chettwood had told him, many Italian waiters of London hotels, some resident in England for a dozen and more years, some with sons in the British fighting services, had already gone; torpedoed. He
wondered
how Lucy would react if one day, long after the war was over, someone found his last manuscript in the pillow.

The curtain was down, even as the quiet voice long ago in Smith Street, Westminster, had hinted in that dim and remote-seeming past. If the manuscript was discovered by the police now, would it be a shroud? Or did they put a traitor’s body directly into lime?

The car drew up in a road quiet with trees and empty pavements.

“Will you please come with me.”

He followed the constable on duty into a waiting room.
Photographs
on walls. Soon another constable came into the room and with a smile asked him to follow. A door opened. He was in a room with a solitary occupant sitting at a desk. About fifty years of age. Large cavalry moustache. Inviting Phillip to sit by him, saying that he was the Chief Constable and had asked him there to have a talk with him. His manner was forthright and courteous. Phillip felt himself returning to his body.

“Well, we’ve searched your place, and have found nothing of what we were led to suppose we might find. This is a difficult time, and as you will imagine, we have a great many cases to investigate. At a time like this there are many rumours, and
although
most of the allegations which come into the office turn out to be unfounded, we cannot afford to disregard any, you
understand
.”

“I understand, sir.”

“In your case we have received a great many communications of one kind and another,” the Chief Constable went on. “The result has been that we have detained you under the new
Regulation
18b. We have looked over your papers and books, and have taken some for examination. Your diaries, for example, and some letters written to you. We are retaining these letters, and some of your own writings, and if we find it necessary to take proceedings they will be used as evidence against you. The letters and writings will be returned to you after the war.”

The Chief Constable leant back in his chair. Somebody came through the door and gave him a dossier. He glanced at it and laid it down; picked it up again and considered it. Phillip looked at the polished brass objects on the shelf, all gleaming brightly—pickelhauben spikes, Christmas 1914 Princess Mary tobacco box, shrapnel-fuse, caps, clips of cartridges and other souvenirs of a dead-and-gone war. The Chief Constable looked at him and said in the same conversational tone, “Now tell me, what would you do if you saw parachute troops coming down on your farm?”

“I should run as fast as I could and report them.”

“You are an old soldier, aren’t you? However, I ought to tell you that there is a very strong feeling against you here in East Anglia. In fact,” he added, with a deprecatory wave of the hand, “your name is Mud.” He went on, “Rumours impede our work, clog it up. You were in the last war, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Chief Constable fingered his moustache, and appeared to fall into reverie. Then looking directly at Phillip he said, “What was your regiment?”

“I served with the London Highlanders in nineteen-fourteen. Then with a Special Branch of the Royal Engineers, in
nineteen-fifteen
, at Loos. On the Somme with the infantry, where I was wounded. I went back in December nineteen-sixteen with the Machine Gun Corps, for twelve months, being invalided in
December
nineteen-seventeen. In February I rejoined my regiment, the Gaultshires, and after the March retreat we went north to Ypres, where I was knocked out in the second German push in April. That ended my war, sir.”

“Yes, I have your record here.” He looked at other papers. “You appear to have blotted your copybook after the war. I see you served a month in prison in the Second Division.” He stroked his moustache reflectively. “Of course you understand that nothing of this is to be communicated to the press, so the less you say, the sooner it will be forgotten. We found a lot of cartridges in your house. You are a shooting man, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” he said, looking Phillip in the eye, “I believe what you say. My men report that you and your wife gave them all the help you could. I have decided to send you home. Now be a good fellow, and don’t get into any trouble, will you? I don’t believe you’re a spy. Lots of people do, you know. I shall get it in the neck if you are, after releasing you.”

“I am not a spy‚” said Phillip, repressing a flooding exuberance. He thought that if he found himself suddenly in Germany he would say or do nothing to injure England, even if he knew any vital facts, which he did not; just as if, during his visit before the war to Germany, he had learned anything vital about them, he would not have told anyone in England.

“Have you any sympathy for Hitler?”

Phillip said, in his rising relief, “Only the traditional British sympathy for the under-dog, sir.” When the Chief Constable laughed he went on, “I’ve always tried to understand the German point of view, ever since the Christmas truce of nineteen-fourteen.”

“Oh, were you there? What brigade?”

“The First Brigade. I was with the London Highlanders at Messines. We joined the First Brigade at First Ypres afterwards.”

“Oh yes, your Colonel was killed, wasn’t he? Let me see, what was his name?”

“The Earl of Findhorn, sir.”

The Chief Constable nodded. “Well, this action we’ve taken will at least have cleared the air for you. I’m going to send you home now. You’ll be busy with the hay, I expect? Don’t give any trouble. Some of your fellows were rather silly, you know, shouting out Heil Hitler when they were detained. Good morning.”

Phillip felt that his sinews had been replaced, tautened, and charged with vital force. The street had colour and the sky was shining. The car seemed smaller, less bulky, with normal doors which now he could open and help to shut.

Joy bubbled up inside him. The motorcar sped away. Might he have a window open? Certainly. Would he care for a cigarette? Thanks very much. Would you care for a pint of beer? Not on duty, thanks all the same.

The journey usually took him thirty-five minutes in peace time, the last ten of the twenty miles being a narrow lane with several blind curves and abrupt turns; but this car got there in thirty minutes and without sense of speed. It showed how old the Silver Eagle really was. It over-steered. The springs were laid. The kingpins were loose. So were the shackle bolts. Steering probably out of track.

The narrow village street, strangely quiet in the dinner time sunshine.

“Well, goodbye, and thanks for the lift.”

He went through the gate past the draw-well and round by the
brick-and-flint bathroom. Up the three steps and under the arch. One of the swallows which nested there dived just past his head.

Lucy was alone, eating lunch of bread, cheese, and tea.

“Hullo,” he said, casually.

She stared at him.

“The
Road
to
En-dor
did the trick.”

She actually went pale.

“I left them all in a spiritualistic trance. Took their revolvers away, what’s more.”

She went red in the cheeks. “Really?” Then she lost colour again.

“No, I’ve scared you. Sorry. I’m released. ‘Only the truth can set ye free.’ I told them the truth, and they let me go.”

“I’m so glad,” she cried. Normal colour came again into her cheeks. “I was worrying about you. You looked such a poor one, coming out of that little dark cell when I came to see you.”

“I was chiefly worried because of England.”

“Yes, I know, my man. I’ll get you a glass of beer. Sit you down. I am afraid there is only bread and cheese and onions.”

“I’ll be back shortly. I’ve just remembered something
important
.”

He went down to the blacksmith’s shop, where he had left the grass-cutter. The elder blacksmith brother was working at his forge when he walked in.

“Has the cutter been done? I want to get the weeds on the meadows cut.”

The blacksmith began to say something, and stopped. He had been blowing the bellows, working the cow-horn on the wooden handle with one hand, while with the other hand he stirred
slack-coal
with a little iron shovel. He wiped his hands on his leather apron. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked pale. “You took me by surprise,” he went on.

“The Chief Constable has examined my case, and set me free.”

Down the street he saw Horatio Bugg walking briskly—Horatio usually walked briskly, although he never appeared to get any work done. Phillip watched him turning towards the smithy. Bugg saw him; stopped; stared; came forward a couple of paces; stared again, adjusted his beret, then walked back determinedly across the street and into his yard.

“Can you have the cutter-bar done by three o’clock, please? I want to have a go at the rushes. I think the snipe and the meadow pipits have hatched off by now.”

“I’ll get it done for you,” said the blacksmith. He was the gentlest man in the village, and completely honest. He once said to Phillip, “I never make any money.” But he had a good garden, he was happy with wife and small family, he was that not
uncommon
thing, a Christian who did not rant about the behaviour of others. Phillip had always felt entirely safe in his company.

When he got back Lucy said, “I had a letter from Felicity this morning. I am afraid it contained rather sad news about her father.”

“Tell me quickly.”

“Brother Laurence was killed at Dunkirk, while helping the wounded.”

The hay of one field was safe in stack: odorous, pale green, dry, a delight to rest against. Phillip came home to breakfast happy. He stood with his youngest son by the jamb of the open farmhouse door.

“My favourite bird is the swallow. Do you know, Jonny, I owe the two letters ‘1’ in my name to the bird when I was born—and to my mother’s inability to spell.
Phil-lip
—the cry of the swallow in alarm. They are the most tender of birds, I think. And how trusting. See how one passes within an inch or two of our faces—you can feel the little wind of its zoom up to the nest.”

With a sigh-like sound a blue barbed body curved past their eyes.

“Do you know,” said Lucy’s voice from within the parlour. “The young birds left the nest exactly a month after hatching. Aren’t they darlings?”

Five young swallows, yellow gaped, were perching on the purlin beside their nest of grey mud, awaiting food from their parent.

“There is the history of an entire human life on and beside the jamb of this door,” said Phillip.

The jamb, the upright post against which the door shut—was of oak. It had been painted many times. By its roughness under the paint it looked to have been part of a ship’s timber. So did the threshold—the wooden bar across its base. The stouter length across the top, the lintel which bore the weight of the brick-
and-flint
wall above, looked to have been part of the same ship.

“What scenes of human hope these timbers have borne, Jonny. What a story they could tell. See, beside the jamb, the brick is worn hollow, where the old man living in the cottage before we came sharpened his knife for Sunday’s dinner. Probably it was cow beef, and tough, judging by the concave in the brick.”

The old man, white-whiskered, pale lined face engrained with woeful dirt, was still to be seen moving about the village, usually
on his way to receive a weekly pension at the post-office. Had swallows nested under the porch all the time he had lived there? Phillip liked to think that the birds were of the same family. Lucy thought she recognised one of last year’s parent swallows by the white feather in one pinion.

*

When they had come there, the porch was an open arch through which winds blew and noises of cars passing up and down the village street were amplified. Phillip had had the western end bricked up to make a larder of the space, and so dull out some of the traffic noises. George the village bricklayer filled up one side of the arch with a flint wall, and the carpenter fitted some shelves and a little rack eighteen inches above the tiled floor to hang
game-birds
. When electric light was put in a bulb was hung a few inches below the site of the swallow’s nest. Would the light, switched on at night when the birds were roosting, disturb them, so that they forsook their ancestral nursery? If so, the light would be shifted.

“After all,” he said to the children, “the swallows have the first claim to the rafters.”

Apparently the pair did not mind the light. They had reared their first family above the old porch in the spring before the war. After the corn harvest the swallows left the fields and the village streets and evening flights above the river to begin their long flight across sea and plain and mountain to Africa, their winter home, he told Jonny. Would they return through all the icy cold that had bound Europe? To his relief—for the swallows were almost talismanic in his mind—they had reappeared while George the bricklayer was making a path of pavers where frozen foot-marks had clotted to a dangerous cobble during the hard winter. He had felt it to be an omen of good hope when a swallow had flown past his shoulder, twittering excitedly, and he recognised the white feather in one wing. Soon it was fluttering by a rafter, and diving away again, sometimes with its mate. Another pair of swallows followed them a few days later.

“Then you and the family came back, Jonny. Do you remember the four parent birds roosting side by side at night? How tender their twittering talk was on the purlin, and they were happy
together
. Truly love is likeness of thought. That’s what Richard Jefferies wrote, Jonny. You must read
Bevis
one day.”

“Ah, ’bor,” said Jonathan.

Something had happened to one of the hens when the nests
were only half an ounce or so of drying mud, for a nest remained unfinished. The lone cockbird roosted always beside the remaining hen brooding her eggs at night, while her mate roosted on the other side. The solitary swallow sang sometimes: a startlingly loud trickle and plash of music falling from open beak and quivering throat.

“He had become a poet,” said Phillip. “Loneliness had made him dream. He was singing from a broken heart. His mate must have been killed, for swallow does not forsake swallow. Perhaps a hawk killed her, or a chance bullet from the anti-aircraft range on the marshes struck her.”

“Perhaps she hit the wire of a target being towed,” suggested Rosamund, who had quietly joined them. “Anyway, he helps to feed the young birds. Oh, look!”

Five young birds had been perching on the purlin supporting the rafters. Now one after another fell with open wings, in little swoops which took them under the brick arch and so to the open sky.

“They must feel strange in the brightness of a new world,” said Phillip. “Even I did, when I was set free the other day.”

After making small circles and indecisive turns the young birds lit on the green-painted gutter of the kitchen, and there the three old birds flew to them, to poise fork-tailed for a moment as they thrust beakfuls of flies and midges into open mouths. The fledglings stayed on the gutter, and were fed in turn.

At moments during the day one or another flew to their old home. At sunset Phillip again stood by the jamb of the door and watched them, standing beside his youngest son, and thinking that the child had almost the face of his cousin Willie. Jonathan had his large brown eyes which sometimes seemed to glow with a light of wonder, of the Imagination. He gazed at the little boy’s face as one bird fluttered less than a foot away from his eyes. Jonathan was greatly excited.

Phillip said softly, “Can you see how it is
thinking
to reach the beam above, in the enclosed space? Its wings are beating rapidly to delay progress until it has gauged the distance and gotten confidence to alight. Ah, it has dropped away and gone. You see, Jonny, it isn’t easy to enter a space of less than half a cubic yard, to pause, and then to fly up at an angle of sixty degrees,
slowly,
and so to perch on a length of wood the top of which is less than an inch and a half from the sloping plaster ceiling. The older birds, if you notice,
swoop
up; they know to half a wing-and tail-brake what momentum is needed to bring them to the moment of stillness
opposite the beam. Now let’s stand still, for that little fellow will be back again soon, I fancy.”

The young bird seemed timorous. It came in, hesitated, lost confidence, turned, and perched itself on Phillip’s shoulder.

“O,” cried Jonathan, his eyes wide. He kept still like his father. They were part of the landscape. An old swallow flew in, saw what had happened, circled noiselessly, then flew out, uttering a ringing
Phil-lip
!

Phillip said softly, “The father bird should have known better than that, I think, Jonny. Do you think that alarm was necessary? After all, my name hereabouts is MUD, and that should be a homely enough association for swallows.”

“He’s talking to you, Dad!”

Phil-lip,
cried the old bird outside, as another fledgling flipped in, hesitated, and perched itself beside its brother. A moment later both parents returned, with what the children called the Uncle Swallow.

“‘Ah yes, my dear, it is the man whose name is MUD, but after all he is scarcely human,’ they are saying. Don’t move, Jonny,” as the three adult birds pitched on the purlin above and peered down at the two young ones. Phillip moved his head slowly to touch one flightling with the lobe of his ear. With a soft throw of wings it was gone, followed by its brother.

The sight of the swallows made the meal one of ease and
happiness
in the parlour. The children sitting at table twittered like swallows.

“Isn’t it perfect weather?” said Lucy.

“Indeed,” said Phillip. “It is what for some years now in
Germany
has been called Hitler weather. Dr. Goebbels has exploited even the elements to be working for the Führer’s cause. It certainly seemed like it, often enough. During the mammoth parades and rallies the sun shone and the rain kept away. For millions of ordinary Germans, with shining eager faces as they spoke of the man they loved, Hitler could do no wrong. I saw them at
Nürnberg
and elsewhere. To them his intuition was that of the spirit of all beauty and art in Western culture renaissant. Providence blessed him, they believed. There would never be another war. Hitler would always
be
so that no war could break out. All the lost German comrades would return to the Reich, and without a drop of blood being spilled. That is what nearly all the German youths and young men and women believed, all those I met, anyway. They—and I —believed him to be the only true pacificist
in Europe. He had freed the farmers from the mortgages which drained the land, cleared the slums, inspired work for all the seven million unemployed, got them to believe in their greatness, each one a German to do his utmost in whatever was his work—in the Arbeitsdienst draining swampy land or making Europe’s new autobahnen, stripped to the waist—the former pallid leer of hopeless slum youth transformed into the sun-tan, the clear eye, the broad and easy rhythm of the poised young human being. All creative, strong, natural, plain truth: Hitler weather, lovely weather! I could sense it everywhere. And when I returned to Croydon by air from Germany, I felt like weeping, to see the faces of my own countrymen in London and the suburbs. It was like coming out of sunlight into shadow. I felt that the international financial masters of this country were trying to destroy that
renaissance
.”

The children sat in silence.

“Then,” he went on, “the man who was two men, the true man and also the self-built man, suddenly lost his head, and started the war. Hitler betrayed his true self—the man who did not drink or smoke, who loved nature and wild birds—the man who loved swallows.”

He got up, and walked about the room.

“At the same time, he knew he was faced with more than
negation
. He had put his country on its feet after the horrors of defeat in nineteen-eighteen; but he had no money. So he was forced to burst out. But I wish he had not. He told his nation that ‘Germany must export or die, and Germany
shall
not die!’ Or rather he screamed it. Even so, it was true. No one would buy their manufactured goods. Their barter system failed. If massed unemployment returned, there would be a Communist revolution and Germany would have civil war. So he went East over the border in a big way.”

A swallow flew through the open door, circled the room, and flew out again.

“Now for us Hitler weather means a daily, hourly dread of invasion. Oh, God, what a tragedy.”

“Have your breakfast, my dear,” said Lucy.

“I cannot eat,” he said, and left the room.

When he came in to supper that evening, he said, “The spirit of fear flees over the land like a hare with the head of a tortoise. The entire company of Local Defence Volunteers has proposed resigning in protest against my release by the Chief Constable.
The argument, propagated by Horatio Bugg, goes something like this: Aren’t we fighting for freedom and free speech, for the liberty of the individual? If we are, then why isn’t the quisling-spy, this
gauleiter
locked up? ‘Ah,’ says Horatio, ‘the police are too afraid to hold him, for his master Hitler will have them all shot when he comes!

“Do eat your omelette before it gets cold,” said Lucy.

“Newsprint is the fodder of the tortoise-head. In terms of the newspapers these people read, I am a fake farmer and a spy. I drive a long black car of the kind gauleiters drive in Germany. I have made a special road leading to the upland fields where aircraft carrying parachute troops and special vehicles can alight. My money must have come from Germany for it didn’t come from the farm, and all my talk of farming was a bluff. Ah, says Horatio, the police didn’t find any maps on the premises, but why? Because he had already burned them! Well, if the police won’t do their duty, why should you fellows serve in the Defence Volunteers? Where is the sense of that? So they have called a meeting about it in the wooden hut. They’re in there now. I think I’ll go and
address
them.”

The resolution died in an empty stomach. Later, Mrs. Valiant came with the news that those who had enrolled in the local company had agreed to sign a round-robin and send it to Mr. Churchill.

“Horatio told Matt that you had told him, sir, that when Hitler came you were to be paid six pounds a week for life.”

“‘Six pounds a week for life,’ Mrs. Valiant? I suppose that is Horatio’s idea of wealth.”

*

The Rector who had been a chaplain in the Royal Navy preached a sermon in church on the following Sunday when the Volunteers paraded there for service. His theme was that to continue to believe or to spread rumours about one of their own countrymen whose name and character had been cleared by the police, and one who moreover had in youth fought for his country, was to continue to help the enemy by creating Alarm and Despondency.

The Rector was in pain from arthritis, but he found time to say to Phillip, as he stood by the Church door after the service, “Things will come right in the end.” Phillip was so moved that he could say only, “Thank you, Rector.”

Once more in the parlour, he recovered his tongue, and
addressed
the assembled family at Sunday dinner.

“Our local worthy, Horatio Bugg, does not, apparently, want to take advantage of events today to gain the experience of military or naval service that he avoided as a young man during the Great War. As he is not a church-goer, he has missed the Rector’s sermon. Apart from his A.R.P. arm-band, he pursues his
war-aims
alone, giving advice to all and sundry who will listen to him as he leans against the wall of his old desiccated property.”