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Authors: Clare Francis

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BOOK: Homeland
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‘But it’s rationed. You don’t understand, Billy, everything’s rationed. We’ve had to cut down.’

‘But you’ve plenty of tea. The caddy’s full.’

‘It’s the sugar that’s short.’

‘Ah, and you always loved your sugar, didn’t you, Old Man?’ Billy said indulgently.

The watery eyes softened a little. ‘I did, too.’

‘Well, you’ve got two heaped spoons in there. Make the most of them.’

The old man sat down obediently. ‘It’s worse than in the war, I tell you – a lot worse. They keep telling us that things’ll ease up soon, but I can’t see no end to
it, not for a long while yet.’

‘What’s the problem then, apart from the sugar?’

‘It’s the bloody rules and regulations, that’s what. Can’t move without coupons and points and permission for this, that, and the other. The Ministry of Food go and stick
their noses in everything. They went and prosecuted a farmer over Axbridge way for slaughtering a pig the day
before
his permit allowed for it. A whole day! I tell you, if you didn’t
laugh you’d bloody cry.’

‘Is that why you’ve no coal – trouble with the regulations?’

But the old man was too busy peering at the cigarettes Billy was offering him. ‘Player’s,’ he said dubiously, but took one anyway. ‘It was different in the war,’ he
said. ‘Oh yes, we expected to go without. And the rations stretched all right in those days. We never went short. Your Aunt Flor made sure of that. A witch with the cooking, she was.’
He squinted at Billy through the smoke. ‘You ate all right in the army, I’ll be bound.’

‘Can’t complain.’

‘Which lot did you join then?’

‘Fifth Tanks.’

Stan raised an eyebrow.

‘Chased the Jerries up through Belgium and Holland and over the Rhine.’

‘Did you now?’

Billy added, as if it mattered, ‘I made it to driver-mechanic.’

‘Always had a way with machinery, you did.’

It was their first and last conversation about Billy’s war.

Billy said, ‘You had a quiet time of it then, did you?’

‘What, in the war? If you mean did Adolf himself come marching through the village complete with brass band, well then, yes, I suppose you could say it was quiet. But we had the airfields
at Churchstanton and Westonzoyland. Planes all night, every night, buzz, buzz, like blooming hornets. And then we had the German bombers trying to blow up the munitions factory at Puriton. Never
did hit it, thank the Lord, otherwise the whole of Somerset would have known about it, that’s for certain.’ He gave a brief guffaw. ‘One time we had this German bomber drop its
load over King’s Sedgemoor way. Boom! Boom! Stirred everyone up a fair treat, I can tell you. It was different then, oh yes . . . everyone in the same boat, everyone pulling together. It was
a good time. When all’s said and done, yes, a bloody great time.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Billy murmured drily.

‘Oh, don’t go thinking it was
easy
,’ the old man retorted. ‘I’m not saying it was
easy
. No, it was bloody hard work. But we got by. Kept a couple of
pigs. Chickens. And your aunt growing vegetables – cabbages and potatoes by the barrowload. And the apples – the merchants were buying our Tom Putts for eating,
eating
mind, not
cider, because the city folk had nothing else in the way of fruit. Well, we couldn’t believe it. Selling our apples for eating! Had to sort them, of course. Keep the bruised ones back. Bloody
hard work. But the cider tasted the best ever. All that rot in it – never better!’ The old man gave a deep bronchitic laugh.

‘And the withies? You find a market for them too?’

‘Oh yes. Nothing like it, couldn’t get enough of them. But it’s all different now.’

‘What, no demand?’

‘It’s not the demand, it’s the blooming labour.’ Stan’s voice rose on a note of grievance. ‘Can’t get it no more. They’re all too busy feathering
their own nests, and to hell with the next man. That’s how it is now – every man for himself. I tell you, this war’s gone and changed everything, and it ain’t for the
better.’

But then nothing would ever be for the better in Stan’s eyes, thought Billy derisively. He wouldn’t recognise progress if it came and stared him in the face.

Going outside again, Billy got a more accurate measure of how the war had been for Stan and Flor. The mess in the yard and the woodshed was only the start. In the willow shed he found stacks of
unstripped withies amid a sea of stripple, while in the centre of the floor the magnificent diesel-powered brake that Stan had bought just before the war stood abandoned and encrusted with muck,
the drum coated an inch deep. The mechanic in Billy eyed it longingly: less than a day, he reckoned, to get it cleaned up and running again. Moving on, he found a bunch of old hand-operated brakes
in a corner of the shed, their prongs rusted and blunt, while along the far wall the gleam of stagnant water reflected up at him from the sorting pits.

Wandering into the vegetable garden, he found plants that were blowsy and bolted or gone to rot, while at the top of the orchard the withy boiler, a retired ship’s boiler acquired from a
nautical salvage yard, was little more than a barrel of rust. The chicken house contained eight evil-eyed bantams and no eggs, the pigsty was empty of all but muck, and when he delved around the
back there was the scuttle and streak of rats.

Pricked by a strange unformed irritation, Billy started down the orchard through tall matted grass run to seed and stumbled over the carpet of rotting apples beneath. The few leaves still
dangling from the trees were peppered with black spot. On the orchard boundary, the line of pear trees carried half-formed fruit, feeble and overcrowded on the boughs. Reaching the drove, heading
down towards the moor, he saw ten or twelve dairy cows grazing on the meadow. They were big Friesians and he didn’t need to read the ear-tags to know they didn’t belong to Stan.

At the old rhyne, he found the water clogged with duckweed, frogbit, bur-reed, and sedge, but it was the sight of the withy bed that heightened his strange undirected anger. For as far as he
could see, the withies were sprouting every which way from horny untrimmed stocks amid a tangle of weeds. He walked the length of the one-acre bed, counting the damage, and reckoned that one in ten
stems, maybe one in eight, would fetch any sort of price, while the rest were good for nothing but hurdles and kindling. This tally might not have seemed so dismal if it hadn’t been for the
contrast with the neighbouring bed, which contained rank after rank of well-tended withies standing tall and lush and fullblown, not a stem that wasn’t top rate.

Taking the drove-road that ran the length of the moor, Billy found an altered landscape. Where there had been a scattering of withy beds on the edges of the moor there was now acre after acre of
withies, interspersed by the occasional field of grain, stretching in a wide band along the northern border of the moor. Just as striking, there wasn’t a withy bed that didn’t look top
notch, not till he reached another of Stan’s one-acre plots, where he found the crop choked with withy wind, nettle and vetch. With a sense of wasting his time, he trudged another two miles
to the last of Stan’s West Sedgemoor beds, a series of half- and one-acre plots under the banks of the River Parrett. If anything these beds were even more unkempt than the ones before, with
most of the stocks looking half dead.

A van passed on the Langport road. Tracking it for a moment, Billy made out an unfamiliar structure perched high on the banks of the Parrett and realised with the jolt of the obvious how so much
of the wetland edge had come to be under cultivation. The sturdy brick building with its industrial chimney could only be a sodding great pumping station. And they had always said that West
Sedgemoor, the wettest, soggiest wetland of them all, wasn’t worth the effort.

Starting back, Billy’s obscure annoyance of the last hour swelled into a blister of irritation. While Stan’s problems were none of his concern, the sight of so much neglect still
managed to exasperate him, not least because he had put so much back-breaking toil into each and every one of those beds. To let them go to waste was just plain stupid. But then, that was Stan all
over. He muttered aloud, ‘Stupid old bugger!’

Striding fast along the drove, he spotted a group of figures on the open moor to the south. It was a gang clearing a rhyne and, standing over them, two armed soldiers. Getting a little closer,
he made out German POWs. The prisoners were taking every opportunity to dawdle. They cast their ditch-crooks sluggishly, skimming the surface weeds, getting no drag over the lower reaches, leaving
the iris and rush more or less undisturbed. They hauled the weeds up the bank in a halfhearted manner and frequently stopped to lean on their crooks until ordered to get started again, when they
resumed work with a sullen air.

It had never occurred to Billy that he would see Germans again, and on the moor of all places. He couldn’t help wondering if any of them came from Hamburg, because if so they had a hell of
a shock waiting for them when they got back. But perhaps they knew that already; perhaps that was why they worked with such open contempt. If in the thick of the war someone had told Billy that he
would live to see German soldiers undergoing this kind of punishment he would have felt a savage triumph, an exultant sense of justice, but watching them now he was aware only that they
didn’t belong here. Their presence was an intrusion. If the authorities had any sense they’d have sentenced them to the far worse punishment of going home.

He took a different route back, crossing the old rhyne by the meads, eventually joining the path that followed Stan’s upper boundary. As he came within sight of the track to Crick Farm he
heard the roar of an engine in the lane ahead and saw a bright blue tractor approaching from the direction of the village. He quickened his pace, hoping to cut down the farm track before the
tractor reached the gate, but it was coming too fast and he realised with a sudden surge of fury that there was no chance of avoiding it, not unless he made a complete fool of himself by turning on
his heel and walking back the way he’d come. Worse, he was to be denied any chance of going unrecognised: as the tractor grew closer he made out an older stockier version of Frank Carr.

‘Hello there!’ Frank shouted above the rattle of the engine as he pulled up in front of Billy. ‘Heard you were back.’

With a glare, Billy walked briskly past and turned down the track. Behind him, the engine clattered to a halt and rapid footsteps sounded in pursuit.

‘Heard you were back,’ Frank called again as he attempted to catch up.

Billy bristled with an antagonism that had lost none of its heat for stretching back ten years. ‘Not for long.’

‘You’re not stopping then?’

‘Not likely.’

‘They said you were stopping.’

‘Well, they were wrong, weren’t they?’

Billy remembered with a cold and deadly heart the scene outside the smithy during his first summer at Crick Farm. He’d been running an errand for Aunt Flor and, coming round a corner, had
spotted too late the line of young people sitting on the wall ahead. In snapshot he saw again the turned faces, the curious stares, he heard the hush as Frank’s taunt rang out into the
silence. The words came back to him with the merciless accuracy of humiliation:
Watch your pockets, everyone – it’s Billy Lightfingers.
He remembered with equal clarity the way
Frank had continued to bait and chivvy him throughout the rest of that summer, how in typical weasel fashion he had been too cowardly to take Billy on in front of other people but had waited for a
dark night to spring out from the shadows and land Billy a crack on the cheek.

Frank was closing the gap. ‘You got work elsewhere then?’

‘Plenty.’

‘Pity.’

‘Why’s that?’ said Billy, quelling the urge to make up for lost time and clout him sharply round the head.

‘Your uncle needing a hand.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that, would I?’ With another cold beat of his heart, Billy veered sharply off to the right and, vaulting the fence, strode into the upper orchard. Behind
him, he heard a puff and pant as Frank clambered over the fence, then the swish of grass as he began to follow. Frank was shorter than Billy by a good four inches, the untrammelled grass was high
and littered with fallen apples, yet somehow he managed to catch up and keep pace, bobbing along at Billy’s side.

‘I’ve offered to buy the withies off his Curry Moor beds,’ Frank gasped, ‘but he won’t have it. I’ve offered a fair price, as fair as any, but he won’t
see sense.’

‘Well, he’s the one to speak to, isn’t he? Not me.’

‘But if I’ve tried once, I’ve tried a hundred times, Billy. I warned him he’d never reach his price at auction – I told him time and time again – but he
wouldn’t listen.’

Billy didn’t mean to slow down, still less to flick a quick glance Frank’s way, but he did both.

‘His were the only withies that didn’t sell. Everyone else managed to sell theirs, no trouble at all. And now – well, if he’s not careful, he won’t get no one to
cut them, not till it’s too late.’

‘I’ve told you – you’re talking to the wrong person.’

‘But I thought you were staying.’

Billy gave a savage laugh. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that?’

Frank came to an uncertain halt.

Billy turned to take a proper look at him, and saw a burly man with fair wiry hair, soft plump skin mottled pink and white, white lashes and small brown eyes that were still and animal-like.
Billy was irresistibly reminded of an overfed porker.

‘Didn’t get to the war then?’ Billy asked.

‘Reserved occupation.’ If Frank felt the smallest stirring of shame or embarrassment about this, he didn’t show it.

‘What – withies needed for the war effort, were they?’

‘Not at the outset they weren’t. Arable and dairy was what they wanted to begin with,’ Frank said stolidly. ‘We went and worked on arable farms, arable or dairy. But then
they went and announced that they wanted withies after all. For parachute baskets and those panniers for the land girls.’

BOOK: Homeland
11.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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