The Green Gauntlet (2 page)

II

T
hey came in at wave-top level, driving out of the sea-mist like three starving hawks; unlike hawks they did not hover over their target but skimmed up into the wind currents that slipped between the Bluff in the east and the slope of Blackberry Moor to the west. Then they parted company, all three disappearing into low cloud but reappearing again within seconds, this time heading separately out to sea, perhaps to their base at Le Mans, perhaps further east to Orleans. In the meantime, at about five hundred feet, they had dropped six 250-pounders that erupted like six small volcanoes, casual visiting cards of a race of grey toads currently squatting on every province between Biscay and the Caucasus.

Four of the bombs fell on stubble or in hillside thickets, two on Home Farm land, two more on the lower slopes of the moor. Each dug a fifteen-foot crater, blasting every blade of grass and every shred of bracken within fifty yards but all they killed was a rabbit that had run under the lip of a heather terrace as soon as it heard the roar of the engines, a sound it had mistaken for the juggernaut approach of Farmer Pitts’ tractor. It was a different matter with the two other bombs. One scored a direct hit on Periwinkle Farm, half-way up the second fold of the moor, the other blew Harold Eveleigh to pieces seconds after he had left the ditch he was digging to relieve flooding in the yard of Four Winds and had crouched, staring skywards, against a stack halfway between his farm and the brown flood of the Sorrel.

It was odd that Harold Eveleigh should be the first civilian casualty of the Valley in World War II because, as a boy of seventeen, he had survived some of the most murderous fighting on the Western Front in World War I, emerging with no more than a flesh wound. After that he had gone to Palestine and fought Turks and had been decorated for gallantry before he was twenty. He was now forty-two, the father of a family of two boys and a girl, and one of the most dedicated farmers in the Valley, even though he did not return to the soil until he was a casualty of the 1931 Slump. A war had claimed his brother Gilbert as long ago as 1916, and now Harold had met an almost identical death, for Gilbert had died from the blast of an inexpertly-thrown grenade without even getting to France. Their mother, who dabbled in spiritualism, might have seen the finger of fate in this coincidence but she had died in the first winter of the Second War.

There was another coincidence about that hit-and-run raid of February 12th, 1942. The only other casualty in the Valley was another of the long family of Eveleighs, who was also killed outright over at Periwinkle. Rachel Craddock, née Eveleigh, had been there by chance, sharing the farm with her sister-in-law, Mary Palfrey, elder daughter of Squire Craddock. Rachel’s husband, Simon, was an infantry sergeant, serving somewhere in Britain, and he had sent Rachel to the west for safety and also to give her something to do while the war lasted. Rachel was reputedly the brainiest of the Eveleigh tribe and had an economics degree, but Valley folk said she had not made much use of it having spent a rather cheerless life campaigning for Socialism in the drab citadels of the Industrial North and Midlands. Then, when these curious activities were seen to be as profitless as Valley folk had always considered them, she came home and helped Mary and Mary’s husband Rumble Patrick, about the farm, not exactly digging for victory but at least poultry-rearing to the same end.

Now she lay under a pile of rubble a mile north of her brother’s unrecognisable corpse and everyone came running, convinced that the bomb had also killed Mary, her only child Jerry, and possibly Rumble Patrick as well. They were relieved to learn that Rachel had died alone, washing eggs at the scullery sink. They discovered this as soon as they scrambled into the yard, calling to one another through a fine rain of cob-dust, for Mary, clutching her six-year-old son, crawled from the ruins of the small barn, her dark hair powdered with dust, her overalls in ribbons. Both she and the boy were unmarked but they were shuddering from the effects of the shock. David Pitts and his wife from Hermitage, on the further slope, shouted with joy when they saw mother and child stumbling towards them but Mary only pointed distractedly to the pyramid of cob and splintered timber that had been her home since her eccentric young husband had come home from Canada and rebuilt the old Codsall smallholding with his own hands.

People began to arrive in twos and threes, all breathless, all eager to talk about their own miraculous escapes until they saw the havoc in Periwinkle Yard. Then they stopped and poked about in an aimless way, not caring to look Mary Palfrey in the face. They did not start digging for Rachel until Squire Craddock himself arrived with old Henry Pitts, some of the elderly labourers and two Land Army girls from the Home Farm. By then Mary had collapsed and she and the child were driven away in the landrover, to be put to bed at the Big House.

Squire Craddock, at sixty-two, was still an active man and so was Henry Pitts, a year or two older. Together, with the minimum of talk, they set about clearing a way through to the kitchen. They were both trench veterans and houses demolished by high explosives were not as novel to them as to their helpers. Henry said: ‘Us’ll have to come at it from the back, Maister. It’ll take us all day to get through from this side. Is ’er dead would ’ee say?’

‘She’s dead all right,’ Paul Craddock said. ‘Some of these beams are nearly two feet across. We’ll go in from the scullery yard as you suggest.’

They had cleared as far as the scullery window when reinforcements arrived from the camp on the moor and half-an-hour later Rachel Eveleigh was lifted out and laid in the hen-house, the only outbuilding that remained standing. Squire Craddock and Henry Pitts looked down at her. She was not much marked and must have died instantly. She looked, Paul Craddock thought, her severe, humourless self, a woman who had been in arms against the ordered life of industrial and rural communities ever since she took up with that studious son of Parson Horsey. That was half-a-lifetime ago—back about the time of the old King’s coronation when she was a chit of about seventeen. And then Young Horsey had been killed stretcher-bearing in Flanders and she had gone on crusading for what she called social justice, and had ultimately married another Valley misfit, his own son, Simon. Well, here was an end to all her traipsings, and she didn’t look as if she minded all that much. Her hair was as grey as his own and the eyes were old and tired. A corporal of the Marines touched his arm.

‘There’s been another incident at that big farm, sir, the one nearer the sea.’

‘Four Winds?’

‘Yes, sir. They missed the farm but killed the Gaffer. Name of Eveleigh. They were after our lot I imagine. Pretty poor shooting. The nearest was nearly a mile off target.’

Paul only heard the first part of his comment. He was thinking how persistent was the ill luck of Four Winds, the largest of the Shallowford Farms and, over three generations, the most prosperous.

When he had come here, a raw, city-bred lad seeking a purpose in life, Four Winds had been occupied by the Codsalls and within two years crazy old Martin Codsall had killed his wife Arabella with a hay knife and hanged himself. Then Codsall’s foreman, Norman Eveleigh, moved in and for a spell everything prospered, but Eveleigh’s eldest son had been killed in the war, and young Harold had run off and enlisted, and Rachel had married a conscientious objector against her father’s wishes, so that the unity of the large family was lost in a swirl of discord and anxiety, and Norman Eveleigh solaced himself with a land girl who created more scandal. Then, when that was smoothed out, Eveleigh had had a stroke and his second son Harold had come limping out of the unemployment queues and returned to the land but the curse of Four Winds could not, it seemed, be exorcised, for here was the new master dead in one of his own ditches while Fate, sparing the Four Winds’ tenants nothing, had also struck at Rachel a mile to the north.

Suddenly he felt tired and angry, his spirit at one with the lowering skies and the bleak, wintry look of the countryside. It was all so pointless this deadly game that everybody was playing all over the world, and the pattern of order and progressive change that he had been at such pains to establish twice in his lifetime was again broken up by the drift of events over which nobody, least of all himself, had the slightest control. He wanted to go back over Codsall Bridge and up to French Wood, where he had often found courage in the past among trees planted in remembrance of men killed in the 1914–18 war, but a luxury like that would have to wait. There was his son Simon to be told and brought home for the funeral, and there were Connie Eveleigh and her children to be comforted. Neither duty could be put upon anyone else for both, son and tenant, had watched him at work over the years and would look to him for reassurance. For possibly the ten-thousandth time since he had ridden into the Valley as a young man he cursed himself for having taken up such a packload of obligations.

He took a final gloomy look at the rubble, wondering how his daughter Mary would take the loss of her home, even though her life and her son’s life had been spared. Henry Pitts, still at his elbow, said, ‘Where’s The Boy, then?’ He meant Rumble Patrick, Mary’s husband, whom many of the Valley folk still called The Boy, although he was now twenty-eight and had been master here for seven years. Paul said he had gone into Whinmouth for seed and left word that he was to be contacted at once through Whinmouth police, and as he said this he remembered how Rumble Patrick’s hands, and perhaps his love for Mary, had transformed this gimcrack little farm into a pretty little home. The thought comforted him a little. ‘Good old Rumble,’ he muttered, ‘I can leave Mary to him. He’s got Potter blood in him and those Potters can survive anything.’ He turned and climbed into the station waggon, driving it back on to the old dust road and down as far as Codsall Bridge where he turned into the muddy lane leading to Four Winds.

He had expected outcry but there was none. The pitiful remains of Harold had been gathered up by some unlucky wight and covered with sacking to await the ambulance. Connie Eveleigh was alone in the parlour, sipping tea made by one of the land girls. Everybody had a frozen face and spoke in undertones but Connie wasn’t weeping, or railing against the Luftwaffe. He remembered then that she had come from the North and would know how to conduct herself, a pretty, chubby woman, not easily daunted. It was to her, rather than to her husband, that he had given the farm when they came to him penniless, for she had spoken up honestly and fearlessly, asking a favour but holding on to her pride. Harold had been a bit of a show-off but she had kept him at work and contented and would have courage to spare for the weeks ahead. She looked up hard-eyed when he came stumping in, his boots leaving a trail of cob-dust across her patterned carpet.

‘The other one got Rachel, didn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but at least the blast killed her before the roof fell in.’

‘Two bombs, two Eveleighs,’ Connie said. ‘They don’t have much luck, do they? Thank God Mary and Jerry escaped.’

It was strange. He wasn’t thinking of the Eveleighs, or even of his own daughter and grandson, but of the original tenants, the Codsalls. Arabella Codsall had clacked at him endlessly in this very room and he had ridden over here with Martin, drunk as a fiddler, shortly before the man went off his head and committed murder. He it had been who had come here on the wings of a south-westerly gale the night his own boy Simon was born, to find Martin hanged in the barn and his wife an even worse mess than Harold Eveleigh outside. A damned unlucky farm but one that continued to fight back, as Connie was fighting now. He said, ‘How did the children take it?’

‘They don’t know yet. Bob went off with Rumble. Hughie and the girl won’t be home from school until—the camp ’bus gets in at teatime. Shall I meet it and break the news on the way over?’

‘Yes,’ he said, after a moment’s thought, ‘and I’ll send Claire over to go along with you. The Marines are getting in touch with Whinmouth police, so the elder lad will be back in an hour or so. You can rely on him, can’t you?’

‘He’s a good boy and a first-class farmer. He takes after his grandfather more than Harold. The younger one is more like Harold, full of enthusiasms that don’t last long.’

Her calmness astonished him, neither did he miss the hint of defensiveness in her praise of the elder boy. She was wondering, no doubt, if the tenancy would now pass to him. The disposal of Four Winds’ tenancy had been discussed here twice before.

‘Keep him at it, Connie,’ Paul said, ‘and don’t let him do anything damned silly, like enlist. We can’t afford to have anyone else go.’

‘The Government wouldn’t let him enlist.’

‘They should have had that much sense in the last war. Then we shouldn’t have had so many trees in French Wood, or such a hell of a struggle to get going again through the ’twenties when you were so-high.’

‘I was a bit higher than that,’ she said, with a twitch of a smile. ‘Harold and I danced the Charleston the first night we met. He was a wonderful dancer, did you know that?’

He saw now that a tear glittered under the eyelash and crossing over he laid his hand on her shoulder.

‘It was all over in a flash. He couldn’t have known a thing. He died worse deaths in France after any number of near-misses. There’s some comfort in that I suppose. He wasn’t the kind of chap who could have faced a half-life if he had been maimed.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ Connie said. ‘I knew our Harold.’ And then, almost as a challenge, ‘It was a good marriage. We had a lot of fun, Squire!’ The word ‘Squire’ did not come naturally to her as it still did to the old stagers, like Henry Pitts. ‘Our Harold’, of course, was pure Lancashire. No-one in the Valley would use a possessive pronoun in that way. Musing on this, and a little fortified by her dignity and courage, he was able to get the dire results of this lunatic hit-and-run raid into perspective. It might, he supposed, have been worse. Six bombs and two deaths. If one bomb had veered a little to the west fifty Marines might have been blown to pieces in the N.A.A.F.I. on the crown of the moor.