Post of Honour (82 page)

‘When down to dust we glide

Men will not say askance,

As now; “How all the countryside

Rings with their mad romance!”

But as they graveward glance

Remark; “In them we lose

A worthy pair, who helped advance

Sound parish views.” ’

Dullish and perhaps a little pie-faced, he thought, smiling at his vanity, but an apt epitaph for both of them. ‘Sound Parish views!’ No more and no less. It was about all he had ever striven after.

III

I
t seemed to him, as he watched them all at supper that night, that the tensions of the world were reproduced round his own dining-table. On the left sat Simon and Rachel and on the right the conventional Whiz and her rather stuffy husband, Ian. Simon would be thinking, perhaps, of pitiful processions of fugitives and refugees trudging ahead of the victorious Fascists in Spain, whereas Whiz and Ian, if they thought of Spain at all, would dismiss it as none of their business. In between were his other children, The Pair, who almost certainly regarded the prospect of a collision with Hitler as a tremendous lark, and Rumble and Mary, who, like himself, would see their contribution to any struggle for survival in efforts to coax the last blade of wheat from Valley soil. Nobody discussed politics, Simon having been briefed by Claire to keep his views to himself lest they should promote strife between him and his brother-in-law, Ian. The atmosphere remained cordial but the tension was there all right, as he could see when they listened to the nine o’clock news-bulletin. When they broke up and went their several ways the next morning he had a brief word with Simon, whose opinions he valued, but he took care to do it out of earshot of the others. It was Simon, in fact, who promoted the conversation while he stood waiting for Rachel to bring their single hand-grip down.

‘It will be a long time before we’re all here together again, Gov’nor,’ he said, watching The Pair stow their wives’ luggage in the boot of the big Wolseley. ‘Fact is, I doubt if it’ll ever happen, for the whole damned lot of us are standing on a fused bomb. I gather, however, that you are one of the few who admits as much.’

‘Yes Si, I admit it and have done for some time but I don’t think Ian and Whiz do, and I don’t think The Pair regard it as anything more than an excuse to play with balloons at weekends. Could you give an approximate date to it?’

‘No,’ Simon told him, ‘and neither could anyone else but it shouldn’t be long now. That mad bastard Hitler has to keep moving in the same direction and Franco’s triumph will encourage him to prod us that much harder! I never thought of myself as a man who would look forward to flashpoint but delaying it isn’t going to help.’

‘What will you do when it does come? Have you made any plans?’

‘I shall join the foot-sloggers, I suppose,’ Simon said, ‘the RAF is too jazzy for me, I’m afraid.’

‘Could you get a commission?’

‘I wouldn’t have one as a gift. In any case, my International Brigade associations would put paid to that. They might be compelled to fight Fascists but, taken all round, they prefer them to Bolshies!’

Paul said, without challenging the dubious logic of this, ‘If it does happen would you like Rachel to come here for the duration? She grew up on a farm and could make herself very useful, both to me and Rumble Patrick.’

‘Yes,’ he said, brightening a little, ‘I’d like that very much,’ and as Rachel appeared with Monica and Margaret he gave Paul a swift grin and added, ‘So long, Gov! You’re a spry sixty and I doubt if any of us will make it without a bath chair!’ It was meant as a joke, Paul thought, but to a man like himself, who had seen thousands of shattered men occupying invalid carriages in two wars, it was singularly unfunny. He watched them drive off, all six of them piled into Stevie’s car and the girls squealing as Stevie, ever a madcap driver, careered round the sharp bend of the drive and skidded a couple of feet on the canting gravel. Then Whiz and Ian said their good-byes and after that Mary and Rumble wandered off hand in hand across the orchard, moving slowly like a couple of village lovers.

‘Well,’ said Claire, and he could not miss the note of thankfulness in her voice, ‘That’s that until Christmas, I suppose!’ and he replied, slipping his arm around her, ‘Let’s hope so at all events. Glad as I am to have them all under one roof occasionally, a little goes a long way!’ but he said this because he knew she needed his corroboration. Secretly he felt a little sad, even frightened, for it occurred to him that although nothing was likely to occur until the harvest was gathered all over Europe, a lot could happen between the end of August and the first snow. Harvest-thanksgiving, he recalled, was the traditional season of war, always providing mountebanks like Adolf Hitler followed traditions.

Even then he was caught on the hop; not quite as ludicrously as in August 1914 but ludicrously enough, after all his months of planning and worrying. Either he had resigned himself to another Munich, or Simon and Rachel had laid too much stress upon Hitler’s hatred of Communism. Or perhaps, like Henry, he found it very difficult to believe that a generation of Germans who had shared the mud of Passchendaele would actually start another war. He had relaxed during July and early August but when Hitler began to threaten Poland he called a meeting of the Valley co-operative and laid his plans before them in detail, a pooling of resources on a scale not even practised in 1917, and every farm in the area, tied and freehold, operating as a unit under a standing committee composed of Brissot, Honeyman, Harold Codsall, David Pitts, Willoughby and himself. He had invited Felton, the county agricultural adviser, to attend the meeting and Felton was impressed, ’phoning later to say that he would appreciate Paul’s co-operation in fostering similar co-operatives north and east of Paxtonbury. By then, however, the harvest was upon them and because the weather was patchy everyone, including himself, was too busy to pay overmuch attention to the screaming threats from Berlin, or the cocksure rantings from Rome. In any case, the cacophony had now continued so long—ever since the autumn of 1935, when Mussolini had attacked Abyssinia—and everybody had become so bored with it, that it acted on them like the beat of surf on the shore throughout an overlong winter. It was not until the evening of the 23rd August, that the telephone bell rang and he heard Simon say, ‘Well Gov, this is it, I imagine!’ and when Paul admitted that he had been out helping Rumble Patrick until dusk, that Claire was away fetching young John from the annual Sunday School treat, and that he had not heard a news-bulletin for twenty-four hours, Simon said, with a bitterness the telephone could not disguise, ‘Germany and Russia have signed a non-aggression pact! You’d better listen to the next news and then ring me. Make it tonight, I’ll be off tomorrow.’

‘For God’s sake—off where? There’s no war yet, is there?’

‘Camp. Local Terriers. We were going anyway but this will almost certainly mean mobilisation.’

‘I’ll ring,’ Paul promised and hung up, hurrying back to the library and switching on just in time to hear the news delivered as though it had been part of a sports commentary. He heard it out and went back to the ’phone, finding that his steps dragged a little and suddenly feeling the tug of tired muscles after twelve hours in the fields.

‘When would Rachel like to come?’ he asked as soon as Simon answered, ‘Will she wait until something actually happens?’

‘She’s packing now,’ Simon said and then, after a slight pause, ‘I’d better say good-bye, Gov. God knows where I shall end up or if I’ll be able to ring. There’s some talk of actually landing chaps on the Continent as a kind of peace force, if you’ve ever heard anything so bloody silly! Keep an eye on Rachel, as well as the home fires burning!’

‘Good luck wherever you go—if anywhere,’ Paul said hoarsely and quickly replaced the receiver. He was not given to premonitions but he had one now. In the half-hour or so before he heard the scrape of Claire’s car on the gravel he was as sure as he had ever been of anything, that he would never hear Simon’s voice again. All the others’, possibly, but not the voice of Grace’s son.

Chapter Twenty

I

A
bout half-past five, on the last morning of May, 1940, Paul emerged from Crabpot Willie’s cabin in time to see his relief, Henry Pitts, top the rise and descend the shallow tail of the goyle on his pony. He looked, Paul thought, exactly like a burgher commando rider moving down into a donga. The pony was far too small for him and his legs swung barely a foot from the ground. Over his shoulder, supported by a length of whipcord, was a 12-bore and the Boer touch was heightened by the shapeless trilby hat he wore, a hat that had weathered the Valley sun, wind and sleet ever since it had been issued as part of Henry’s demobilisation togs in the long dry summer of 1919.

It was strange, Paul reflected, that all the important pattern changes of the Valley were signposted by what the locals called ‘a praper ole scorcher’. The sun had burned the grass a dark brown in 1902, the season Paul settled in, and the Valley had withered under its non-stop glare in 1914. The first year of the peace had been just as hot and airless but between then and now, a matter of twenty-one years, he could not recall a dry spell lasting more than a fortnight or so. Perhaps they had come and gone without him noticing but now, with the rhythm of the seasons broken more finally than ever before, one took note of the weather. Somehow the brassiness of the sky, and the windlessness of the dunes above the beach, had within them elements of mockery to men condemned to play soldiers when they should have been making the very most of such sunshine.

He called, ‘You’re ahead of time, Henry, I didn’t expect you until six!’ and Henry, sliding down without disturbing the creases of his habitual grin, replied, ‘I was woke by they bliddy aircraft passing over. Taaken all round ’twas too early to get up but too late to drop off again, zo I slipped out without wakin’ Ellie an’ brewed meself a cup o’ ray!’

‘I was just about to put the kettle on,’ Paul said, ‘but seeing you’re here I’ll leave it to you. I’m off along the beach to the fort, then over to Bluff to check with Francis. It’s been very quiet, nothing but the aircraft. Blenheims I think they were, off bombing somewhere I imagine!’

‘They all gives Ellie the jitters!’ Henry said, ‘and tidden a particle o’ use me zayin’ they’m ours. She knows bliddy well I can’t tell the diffrence. Who be inside, Maister?’

‘Only Robbie Eveleigh. He was relieved by Noah Williams just after three o’clock when I came on but you send them both home at seven. Nothing’s likely to happen now!’

He looked down the gully to the sea, as flat and motionless as he had ever seen it, with its eastern edges turning whitish pink as the sun hoisted itself clear of the Bluff. Birds were chirping in the thicket beyond the pines and a solitary gull dipped over the criss-cross of iron stanchions, sown along the outer edge of the sandbanks, a token of discouragement to Wehrmacht landing-parties.

‘Tiz a funny thing,’ Henry said, passing his hand over his unshaven jowls, ‘you remember us always said in France that ole Jerry could pick his own weather. If ’er maade up ’is mind to pay us a call he could get ashore without gettin’ ’is veet wet, an’ what’s more the lass zays it’s zet fair, zame as it’s been for a month or more a’ready!’

‘And a damned good job too,’ Paul reminded him. ‘If we had had our usual summer Dunkirk would have been a fiasco and I doubt whether we should have fished the half of them off.’

‘Arr,’ Henry agreed, ‘that’s true, but then, if us had had the kind o’ weather you an’ me had to put up with over there, I dorn reckon his bliddy ole panzers would o’ crossed our old stamping ground so fast! Not nearly so fast!’ he added, emphatically and then seriously, ‘I suppose you baint heard nowt o’ your boys?’

‘No word so far,’ Paul told him, ‘but as far as I know only Simon was over there. The Pair had switched to Air-Sea Rescue and Ian, Whiz’s husband, was still out East last time I heard. Will you be free to take on tonight, same as usual?’

‘Ah, I’ll do that. Tiz worked well enough zo far baint it?’

‘It’ll work a damned sight better when the telephone people give us the outside line they’ve promised,’ Paul said. ‘Imagine having to rely on word-of-mouth alerts in this day and age! I can’t see Jerry doing it if he was in our shoes!’ and he went round the cabin to the lean-to shed where his birthday grey was saddled and tethered, Henry following and tethering his pony in its place at the hay net. The animals accepted the routine as though it had begun a year ago instead of a matter of days, dating from the formation of the coastal patrol of Churchill’s LDVs, or Lame-Duck-Vagabonds as Henry designated the Local Defence Volunteers. Valley men were responsible for guarding the coast from a mile west of the landslip, where their right-hand man was in contact with the Whinmouth group, to a mile east of the Bluff, where Francis Willoughby’s patrols were in touch with the next section. They were thinly stretched, a mere dozen or so, operating over more than four miles of coastline. As Smut Potter said the first night he took station, ‘It baint much more than a bluff, be it? If Jerry was minded to come ashore in the dark he’d be eatin’ his bliddy breakfast at The Mitre, in Paxtonbury, bevore us knowed he was around!’ Yet the group took themselves seriously. At least they were better armed than the majority of the lookouts around the coasts, having, between them, eight shot-guns and three .22 rifles, as well as Paul’s Smith & Wesson revolver. They might, as Henry said, blow a few hats off before they ran for it.

Paul turned east directly into the sun, shading his eyes as he walked the grey along the tideline towards Coombe Bay and perhaps because the morning was so sparkling and he had enjoyed two hours’ sleep in the cabin after Noah Williams had reported, he felt reasonably encouraged, despite the incredible tale of disasters that had been theirs since the invasion of Norway, in April. To a man who had spent more than eighteen months on the Western Front it was hard to believe France had been overrun in a month, that Poland, Holland and Belgium had thrown in the sponge, that Paris was already occupied by jubilant, jackbooted Nazis, that British ships had fired on the French fleet, and that all that remained of the British Expeditionary Force was about a quarter-million shaken men lacking guns, transport and every kind of material. Already, however, they were calling Dunkirk a triumph, instead of the disaster it undoubtedly was. Already people like Smut Potter and Henry Pitts, who should know better, had slipped into the easy optimism that had swept down the Valley in the first weeks of the 1914-18 war, when everyone, scrambled into uniform for fear it would be over by Christmas. Nobody, or nobody he had encountered since the news of the breakthrough, considered defeat by Hitler a possibility, although surely the speed and terrible finality of recent events made even temporary survival unlikely. They might, he supposed, fight some kind of delaying action, that would harden as it was edged northward, but after that, when the men who had frightened Uncle Franz in Munich and Nuremberg, had overrun the entire island, the war could only continue from Canada and how could such a war, even if it resulted in ultimate victory, save the Valley from the bombs of the Luftwaffe and tanks that had carved their way from the Rhine to the Biscay coast in less than a month?

That was the overall picture. What of the personal tragedy, as it affected him and Claire? Of his four sons and two sons-in-law four were already involved, The Pair (tiring of playing balloons, as he knew they would once they realised their role was static) were now sea-based; Ian was flying Gladiators in Egypt, and Simon—it would be poor old Simon—was probably already dead, or a prisoner marching into endless captivity! So far the Valley had not fared too badly. Only one man, a reservist from Coombe Bay, had been certified dead, after a submarine had found its way into Scapa Flow and sunk the
Royal Oak
,
but others would soon qualify for another page at the back of the estate record book. Young Eveleigh, Harold’s boy, of Four Winds, had his name down for the REs, and Smut’s lad, ‘Bon-Bon’, who had helped farm the shrunken High Coombe holding, was waiting to be called into the RAF. Paul Rudd, Maureen’s only son, had written from Scotland to say he was joining the RAMC, and Albert Pascoe, whose real name was Timberlake, had left a week ago to join the Devons. ‘God knows!’ Paul told himself, as he kicked the grey into a trot, ‘I’ve enough to make me despondent but for the life of me I don’t
feel
despondent! Is it because the entire bloody shambles has passed beyond the bounds of sanity, or has the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ had the same effect on me as on all the others, notwithstanding the dictates of ordinary commonsense?’

The question interested him deeply and he continued to ponder it as he headed for the harbour slipway and the bizarre structure beyond that was now known as ‘The Fort’. It was not really a fort but a cafe, idiotically disguised as a pillbox, of the kind that had caused the deaths of so many men in the morasses about Pilckhem Ridge, Passchendaele. Someone had had the notion of painting it battleship-grey and knocking a loophole or two in the seaward side, but to anyone with poor eyesight and second-rate binoculars it still looked like a café and a gimcrack one at that. As he rode along the last stretch of beach Paul found himself pondering the curious contradictions of the British race, indolent to the point of national suicide in the face of so many stark warnings, and then, given a lead from Westminster, in such a hurry to make up for lost time that they became eager victims of ten thousand bureaucrats. Two months ago, apart from the tiresome (and, to Paul, useless) blackout, no one could have supposed the country committed to a war. Today the entire countryside was in an uproar, with signposts torn down, the names removed from such tiny stations as Sorrel Halt, tank-traps showing their teeth all the way to Paxtonbury, sandbars covered by a
chevaux de frise
of tubular ironwork, and finally, this absurd little sea-front café disguised as a pillbox! And in a way everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely, as though it was a vast relief to face the prospect of meeting heavy tanks and dive-bombers with a few rabbit-guns and petrol bombs made out of ginger-beer bottles. It was commendable, perhaps, this illogical upsurge of defiance, but it was also pitiful. A people who had survived the Somme and Third Ypres should be waging total war with a better prospect of winning it.

The beach looked deserted so he clattered up the slipway along to the fort where he dismounted and tethered the grey to the guard-rail of the sea-wall. Then, hearing the rattle of stones below, he looked over the top into the sunburned face of Rumble Patrick, perhaps the best beloved of all the males in the Valley, and the current freeholder of Periwinkle. Rumble, as usual, wore nothing but singlet and shorts and still, thought Paul, looked more like a boy than the master of a farm and the father of two children.

‘Lovely morning, Gov!’ he called, cheerily. ‘Saw you a mile off but you didn’t spot us, did you now?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ admitted Paul. ‘Where were you? Playing in a sandpit?’

‘Getting warm!’ Rumble called back and then, with a knowing grin, ‘Okay! Come out Uncle Smut and show the Gov the welcome we’ve prepared for Jerry!’ and Smut Potter suddenly materialised from a rash of pebbles, all about the size of a clenched fist, so that Paul, looking closer, saw that a cunningly constructed tank-trap now protected the approach to the wall under the pillbox, a trench about ten feet deep and two yards wide, screened by a huge boat-tarpaulin strong enough to bear the weight of camouflage shingle.

‘That’s not bad!’ he said, admiring, ‘but suppose Jerry resists the invitation and prefers to tackle the slipway?’

‘We’ve got a better one down there,’ Rumble said. ‘Smut organised local slave-labour yesterday and my guess is that anything leaving a tank-landing craft would either try the slipway or head straight up the beach to bring point-blank fire on the Fort. He’d want to get over the sea-wall in the shortest possible time, wouldn’t he?’

‘I daresay, and in any case it’s better than sitting waiting and playing cards in the cafe, as Smut was last time I looked in. Are you two the only ones on patrol over here?’