Pied Piper (2 page)

He said: ‘Yes—it’s a very great pity. I had to come
away before the water was fit to fish. It’s not much good out there before the very end of May. Before then the water’s all muddy and the rivers are running very full—the thawing snows, you know. Later than that, in August, there’s apt to be very little water to fish in, and it gets too hot. The middle of June is the best time.’

I turned my head. ‘You went out there this year?’ Because the end of May that he had spoken of so casually was the time when the Germans had been pouring into France through Holland and Belgium, when we had been retreating on Dunkirk and when the French were being driven back to Paris and beyond. It didn’t seem to be a terribly good time for an old man to have gone fishing in the middle of France.

He said: ‘I went out there in April. I meant to stay for the whole of the summer, but I had to come away.’

I stared at him, smiling a little. ‘Have any difficulty in getting home?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’

‘You had a car, I suppose?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have a car. I don’t drive very well, and I had to give it up some years ago. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be.’

‘When did you leave Jura, then?’ I asked.

He thought for a minute. ‘June the eleventh,’ he said at last. ‘That was the day, I think.’

I wrinkled my brows in perplexity. ‘Were the trains all right?’ Because, in the course of my work, I had heard a good deal about conditions in France during those weeks.

He smiled. ‘They weren’t very good,’ he said reflectively.

‘How did you get along, then?’

He said: ‘I walked a good deal of the way.’

As he spoke, there was a measured
crump … crump … crump … crump
, as a stick of four fell, possibly a mile away. The very solid building swayed a little, and the floors and windows creaked. We waited, tense and still. Then came the undulating wail of the sirens, and the sharp crack of gunfire from the park. The raid was on again.

‘Damn and blast,’ I said. ‘What do we do now?’

The old man smiled patiently: ‘I’m going to stay where I am.’

There was good sense in that. It’s silly to be a hero to evade discomfort, but there were three very solid floors above us. We talked about it, as one does, studying the ceiling and wondering whether it would support the weight of the roof. Our reflections did not stir us from our chairs.

A young waiter came into the room, carrying a torch and with a tin hat in his hand.

He said: ‘The shelter is in the basement, through the buttery door, sir.’

Howard said: ‘Do we have to go there?’

‘Not unless you wish to.’

I said: ‘Are you going down there, Andrews?’

‘No, sir. I’m on duty, in case of incendiary bombs, and that.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘get on and do whatever you’ve got to do. Then, when you’ve got a minute to spare, bring me a glass of Marsala. But go and do your job first.’

Howard said: ‘I think that’s a very good idea. You can bring me a glass of Marsala, too—between the incendiary bombs. You’ll find me sitting here.’

‘Very good, sir.’

He went away, and we relaxed again. It was about half-past ten. The waiter had turned out all the lights except for the one reading-lamp behind our heads, so that we sat there in a little pool of soft yellow light in the great shadowy room. Outside, the traffic noises, little enough in London at that time, were practically stilled. A few police whistles shrilled in the distance and a car went by at a high speed; then silence closed down upon the long length of Pall Mall, but for some gunfire in the distance.

Howard asked me: ‘How long do you suppose we shall have to sit here?’

‘Till it’s over, I suppose. The last one went on for four hours.’ I paused, and then I said: ‘Will anyone be anxious about you?’

He said, rather quickly: ‘Oh, no. I live alone, you see—in chambers.’

I nodded. ‘My wife knows I’m here. I thought of ringing her up, but it’s not a very good thing to clutter up the lines during a raid.’

‘They ask you not to do that,’ he said.

Presently Andrews brought the Marsala. When he had gone away, Howard lifted up his glass and held it to the light. Then he remarked: ‘Well, there are less comfortable ways of passing a raid.’

I smiled. ‘That’s true enough.’ And then I turned my head. ‘You said you were in France when all this started up. Did you come in for many air raids there?’

He put his glass down, seven-eighths full. ‘Not real raids. There was some bombing and machine-gunning of the roads, but nothing very terrible.’

He spoke so quietly about it that it took a little time for me to realise what he had said. But then I ventured,

‘It was a bit optimistic to go to France for a quiet fishing holiday, in April of this year.’

‘Well, I suppose it was,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘But I wanted to go.’

He said he had been very restless, that he had suffered from an urge, an imperious need to get away and to go and do something different. He was a little hesitant about his reasons for wanting to get away so badly, but then he told me that he hadn’t been able to get a job to do in the war.

They wouldn’t have him in anything, I imagine because he was very nearly seventy years old. When war broke out he tried at once to get into the Special Constabulary; with his knowledge of the Law it seemed to him that police duty would suit him best. The police thought otherwise, having no use for constables of his age. Then he tried to become an Air Raid Warden, and suffered another disappointment. And then he tried all sorts of things.

It’s very difficult for old people, for old men particularly, in a war. They cannot grow accustomed to the fact that there is little they can do to help; they suffer from frustration, and the war eats into them. Howard fell into the habit of ordering his life by the news bulletins upon the wireless. Each day he got up in time to hear the seven o’clock news, had his bath, shaved, and dressed and was down to hear the eight o’clock, and went on so all day till after the midnight news, when he retired to bed. Between the bulletins he worried about the news, and read every
paper he could lay his hands upon till it was time to turn the wireless on again.

He lived in the country when the war broke out. He had a house at Market Saffron, not very far from Colchester. He had moved there from Exeter four years previously, after the death of his wife; as a boy he had been brought up in Market Saffron and he still had a few acquaintances in the neighbourhood. He went back there to spend the last years of his life. He bought an old country house, not very large, standing in about three acres of garden and paddock.

His married daughter came back from America and lived with him in 1938, bringing her little boy. She was married to a New York insurance man called Costello, Vice-President of his corporation and very comfortably off. She’d had a spot of bother with him. Howard didn’t know the ins and outs of it and didn’t bother about it much; privately, he was of the opinion that his daughter was to blame for the trouble. He was fond of his son-in-law, Costello. He didn’t understand him in the least, but he liked him very well.

That’s how he was living when the war broke out, with his daughter Enid and her little boy Martin, that his father would insist on calling Junior. That puzzled the old man very much.

Then the war broke out, and Costello began cabling for them to go back home to Long Island. And in the end, they went. Howard backed up Costello and put pressure on his daughter, in the belief that a woman who is separated from her husband is never very happy. They went, and he was left to live alone at Market Saffron, with occasional week-end visits from
his son John, a Squadron-Leader in the Royal Air Force.

Costello made a great effort, in cables many hundreds of words long, to get the old man to go too. He wasn’t having any. He said that he was afraid of being in the way, that a third party would have spoilt the chance of reconciliation. But his real reason, he admitted, was that he didn’t like America. He had crossed the Atlantic to stay with them when they had first been married, and he had no desire to repeat the experience. After nearly seventy years in a more equable climate he found New York intolerably hot and desperately cold in turns, and he missed the little courtesies to which he was accustomed in our feudal life. He liked his son-in-law, he loved his daughter, and her boy was one of the great interests in his life. Not all these motives were sufficient to induce him to exchange the comfort and security of England grappling in battle to the death for the strange discomforts of the land that was at peace.

So Enid and her boy sailed in October. He took them to Liverpool and saw them on the boat, and then he went back home. From then onwards he lived very much alone, though his widowed sister came and stayed with him for three weeks before Christmas, and John paid him several visits from Lincolnshire, where he had a squadron of Wellington bombers.

It was lonely for the old man, of course. In the ordinary way he would have been content with the duck-shooting and with his garden. He explained to me that he found his garden really more interesting in the winter than in the summer, because it was then that he could make his alterations. If he wanted to move a tree, or plant a new hedge, or dig out an old one—that was the time to do it. He took
great pleasure in his garden, and was always moving things about.

The war spoilt all that. The news bulletins penetrated every moment of his consciousness till he could no longer take pleasure in the simple matters of his country life. He fretted that he could get nothing to do, and almost for the first occasion in his life the time hung heavily upon his hands. He poured his mind out irritably to the vicar one day, and that healer of sick souls suggested that he might take up knitting for the troops.

After that, he took to coming up to London for three days a week. He got himself a little one-room flat in bachelor chambers, and took most of his meals at the club. That made things easier for him. Travelling up to London on Tuesday absorbed the best part of a day, and travelling down again on Friday absorbed another one; in the meantime odd duties had accumulated at Market Saffron so that the week-end was comparatively busy. In this way he created the illusion that he had enough to do, and he grew happier in consequence.

Then, at the beginning of March, something happened that made a great change in his life. He didn’t tell me what it was.

After that, he shut up the house at Market Saffron altogether, and came to London permanently to live mostly at the club. For two or three weeks he was busy enough, but after that time started to lie heavy on his hands again. And still he could get nothing to do in the war.

It was spring by then, and a most lovely spring it was. After the hard winter we had had, it was like opening a door. Each day he went for a walk in Hyde Park and
Kensington Gardens, and watched the crocuses as they came out, and the daffodils. The club life suited him. He felt as he walked through the park during that marvellous spring that there was a great deal to be said for living in London, provided that you could get away from it from time to time.

As the sun grew stronger, the urge came on him to get away from England altogether for a while.

And really, there didn’t seem to be any great reason why he should remain in England. The war in Finland was over, and on the western front there seemed to be complete stalemate. Matters in France were quite normal, except that upon certain days of the weeks you could only have certain kinds of food. It was then that he began to think about the Jura.

The high alpine valleys were too high for him; he had been to Pontresina three years previously and had been very short of breath. But the spring flowers in the French Jura were as beautiful as anything in Switzerland, and from the high ground up above Les Rousses you can see Mont Blanc. He wanted passionately to get where he could see mountains. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ he said, ‘from whence cometh my help.’ That’s how he felt about it.

He thought that if he went out there he would be just in time to see the flowers come thrusting through the snow; if he stayed on for a month or two he would come in for the fishing as the sun got warmer. He looked forward very much to fishing in those mountain streams. Very unspoilt they were, he said, and very fresh and quiet.

He wanted to see the spring, this year—to see as much of it as ever he could. He wanted to see all that new life
coming on, replacing what is past. He wanted to soak himself in that. He wanted to see the hawthorn coming out along the river-banks, and the first crocuses in the fields. He wanted to see the new green of the rushes by the water’s edge poking up through the dead stuff. He wanted to feel the new warmth of the sun, and the new freshness of the air. He wanted to savour all the spring there was this year—the whole of it. He wanted that more than anything else in the world, because of what had happened.

That’s why he went to France.

He had much less difficulty in getting out of the country than he had expected. He went to Cook’s, and they told him how to set about it. He had to get an exit permit, and that had to be done personally. The man in the office asked him what he wanted to leave the country for.

Old Howard coughed at him. ‘I can’t stand the spring weather in England,’ he said. ‘I’ve been indoors most of the winter. My doctor says I’ve got to get into a warmer climate.’ A complacent doctor had given him a certificate.

‘I see,’ said the official. ‘You want to go down to the south of France?’

‘Not right down to the south,’ he said. ‘I shall spend a few days in Dijon and go to the Jura as soon as the snow is off the ground.’

The man wrote out a permit for three months, upon the grounds of health. So that wasn’t very difficult.

Then the old man spent a deliriously happy two days with Hardy’s, the fishing tackle makers in Pall Mall. He took it gently, half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon; in between he fingered and turned
over his purchases, dreamed about fishing, and made up his mind what he would buy next.…