A Solitary War (35 page)

He was weak and diffident: seeing every point of view except his own. He was not a man of character.

What character had Shakespeare? Apart from his plays and poems, what
was
Shakespeare?

*

He ploughed all that day. The land was in temper; it came up and fell apart like crumbly cake behind the shiny breast of the
deep-digger
plough. The sun went down, the stars came out, a
wind-tear
hung on his lashes; another, another, through the night.

The morning star was dimming when he went round the
headlands
, turning in the last furrow; he was tired, but content;
knowing
that the seed-bed would be good. He was a farmer, this was his land.

At the end of the decorating there remained little less than half a pailful of distemper; and in relaxed mood after his work, being pleased with it, and pleasantly tired, Phillip went outside and upon the area of new bricks in the northern wall of the cottage, where window space had been filled in, he painted the sign of Birkin’s party of Imperial Socialism. It was a nice design upon the bare brick, he considered, stepping back to observe Theseus slaying the Minotaur.

There being some more wash left, he walked up the street and in large letters began to form along the drab back wall of the
farmhouse
the slogan

While he was forming the letters, somewhat roughly on the uneven brick and flint surface, he was aware of children playing near; but, absorbed in his work, he had not noticed that they had skittered away. It was a Sunday afternoon. As he was putting the last of the wash on the final letter E of PEACE he realized that they were around him, twittering like finches and tomtits at the presence of an owl in daylight, and that several people were coming up the village street. Horatio Bugg, the semi-retired totter or scrap-merchant, was staring up from his corner by the petrol pump.

Phillip decided to remain where he was, leaning amiably against the broken gate of River View.

The children began a kind of shrill jeering, and in the midst of it a young soldier came up to Phillip, fixed him with his eye, and said, “Did you write that up?”

“I did.”

The young soldier stared at him for several moments. Then, as with an effort, he said, “Take it down.”

Phillip assumed an air of amusement; he thought awhile; then he
said, conversationally, addressing the little crowd of villagers, “What is your authority for ordering the suppression of free speech, or alternatively, in a country alleged to be at war for the principles of political liberty, do you wish to suppress that liberty? On the other hand, is there any law, local or otherwise, to dictate to a man how he shall, or shall not, decorate his own house? And even on ethical grounds, why should I not be allowed to put a text for peace, when on the board outside your Chapel down the street, there is a biblical quotation about Jesus as the Prince of Peace?”

This last was for the benefit of the blacksmith and his brother, two earnest and sincere Christians, whose work in the Chapel was locally well-known and, in their own circle, esteemed. Phillip noticed in the eye of the younger brother a grim look. He was a gentle, Tim-like man.

“Well,” said the soldier, uncertainly. “We’ve been told to report anything suspicious.”

“You are quite right. I expect this does look a bit suspicious. I wonder if it will look so suspicious in, say, thirty years’ time?”

Having said this, and before argument could develop, he went indoors, feeling rather quivering inside. Also he felt that his action, like the remark about Captain Runnymeade being a drunkard, had been somewhat silly; from any aspect, it was ineffectual.
Probably
none of the objectors to the lettering had ever met Birkin, or heard him speak. They had heard only the insinuations made against him during many years of his near-hopeless struggle to create in the country he loved a superlative civilisation, where in Britain sixteen million people were permanently undernourished and in the Empire sixty million and more were starving—in the midst of the Great Estate of one-fifth of the world—the Greatest Empire, potentially, ever known—

In the past only its outstanding individuals had developed. Under Birkin the races of the Empire would be so treated and led that they would be proud and eager in their co-operation as they never could feel under the old obsolescent financial system,
indirect
spawner of world wars.

As Phillip sat on the stairs, listening to the babble outside, he thought of the irony of it, but did not worry. He had not gone against tradition: only the effects of decadent tradition. All the same, perhaps he had been rather idiotic in creating a direct hostility; for had not Birkin told him that the curtain was down?

Should he open the spare tin of distemper, and, after dark, block the letters out? He decided to do so; but when he went out later on, he found that someone had been before him. Every letter, together with the badge, had been coated with tar. Now it would remain, and not his doing! What was the idea of the tar? To obliterate a sign for hostile aircraft? The tar must have come from the blacksmith.

*

The next morning he took a final look round the farmhouse before setting off to fetch Lucy and the children. Lucy had offered to come back. Mrs. Valiant, who occupied the cottage next to Mrs. Hammett’s, had scrubbed and tidied the rooms. Each bedroom had its new carpet. On the parlour floor were two large rush mats from Java, the last two remaining at the Stores. New brushes and brooms, bathroom fittings—that enamelled corner cupboard, rack for toothbrushes and glasses, looking-glass, dozen large bath towels—dozen each of best quality drying-up cloths for dishes, glass and silver. Coconut mats of the best quality to filter and contain the dust, each one specially made to fit various sunken places inside doors. Also roll-up blinds, each one to the measure of its square of glass tiles which had been let into the coving ceilings of the roof over the bedrooms. There was a special security fastening to prevent them snapping up if accidentally touched at night.

The next afternoon the Silver Eagle, drawing the small brown trailer with its new green canvas cover, loaded with suit cases, rolls of blankets, crate of hens, Rosamund’s dolls’ house, Jonathan’s trike, and other
impedimenta
drew into the yard of River View and stopped.

“Welcome home again! I’m afraid the place isn’t as cosy as No. 2, The Glade, but the hearths should not smoke, and there’s a new floor of wood put in the next cottage for the children. As you can see, we had to throw the chalk from under the new floor’s foundation on the garden beds, but the chalk will be dug in
sometime
when I can spare men from the farm. No more mud—and with this broom and pail, the kids can keep the paved path clean.”

Even so, when she went inside the parlour, Lucy sat down a moment. She looked pale, her eyes were dark. Obviously she felt bad on coming back to such a place, apart from the loss of happiness in leaving Tim and the little social unit of The Glade.

“One thing I must say,” she said. “It has been on my mind for a long time. Do you remember repeating to me what Captain
Pinnegar said to
you as we were leaving? That ‘never had he seen such an awful mess in any house’?”

“Yes, I remember he said it, and I repeated it.”

“Did he say also, and did you tell him, that he and Mrs. Carfax arrived two days
before
they said they would arrive? And
therefore
I had no time to clean up as I had planned? And that I was packing until 2 a.m. the morning we did leave, in order that they might get in?”

“John Galsworthy once wrote that there was no justice for men in this world. And I should think that you have suffered more
injustice
from me than I have suffered from all the people I have known put together.”

He felt the place to be cold and gloomy. When he had left the day before the parlour had seemed to have a new life in it, waiting to welcome the family home. He lit a fire to prove how nice the parlour would be. But what could have happened? Smoke poured steadily into the room! When the flames broke through the smoke, they too came out below the lintel of the hearth.

“It burned quite well the other night. I tested it. David always said there was a witch up the chimney. She has apparently
returned
with you lot.”

“Well, it’s not your fault, don’t you worry. I was feeling a bit tired just now. I’ll make some tea.”

At least the electric cooker in the kitchen worked. They had supper there of eggs and bacon, washed down with cups of milky tea. The boiler in the wash-house was already glowing, the water in the tank was hot.

“It’s a poor place to come back to, I know, but the bedrooms look better with the new carpets. Now tell the truth, Davie. Are you glad you’re back again?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you, Jonny?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, thank you for the truth, gentlemen. Up the old school tie.”

“We haven’t got one, sir.”

“Still you can call yourself Old Boys.”

“I’m still too young,” said Jonathan, seriously, “to be an Old Boy.”

The food had put new life into Phillip, and he tried to raise their spirits.

“The circular saw is fixed by an excellent young man who
volunteered to come and help me, so we’ll have a lot of wood. The fire in your boudoir, Lucy, at least will burn properly. I swear I’ll cure the down-draught in this chimney. I’ll get on the roof and with a rope tied to a bar across the square brick of the chimney, let myself down, and examine it all the way to the hearth. Davie can come with me, and look for secret passages. There
must
be a reason why the smoke billows into the room. It’s very wide just above the beam over the hearth, seven feet at least, and the air in that big expansion chamber probably acts as a buffer, or
rebounding
surface. The hot air and smoke curl round and back like the horns of an Exmoor ram, and so out into the room.”

David looked mystified. “Is there
really
a ram up the chimney, sir?”

“A wind ram, Davie, butting the smoke back. Not your witch, but a great old smoky ram, with sparks for eyes and soot for wool. When you look up the chimney in daytime you see scores of glistening black fleeces hanging there, for the ram is a cannibal—a butcher!”

“Yes!” cried David. “The butcher skins the wind-sheep in our chimney!”

“You’re a writer, David. But to be serious; what our hearth needs is the cavern immediately up the chimney being filled in, and a regular flue being built there, slowly tapering to the top, slowly accelerating the upward flow of the smoke. I’ll get some pipes of a foot-diameter, and build them up inside the chimney.”

Jonathan sat pale and still.

“What’s the matter with you, Jonny?”

“He wants to see the great old smoky ram up your chimney, sir.”

“There isn’t anything up there, Jonny. It’s only pretend. It’s really because the chimney is too wide to let the smoke go up quickly. So don’t be afraid.”

Jonny looked more unhappy.

“He’s not really afraid,” said David. “He really wants to come looking for secret passages with me. You didn’t ask him, sir.”

The journey had taken six hours, during which Lucy had nursed her youngest child. Phillip had been late in starting, and had hastened to be home before the black-out, as the new
regulation
mask fitted on the off-side headlamp (the other headlamp must not be lit) gave no illumination at all. A driver at night saw a soldier walking in the road less than half a second before the late-shifting form was about to be struck by tip of near-side front mudguard: most pedestrians could not put themselves in the place
of the wretched driver of a car proceeding even at the maximum speed permitted by law of 20 miles an hour, with a lamp scarcely giving the glimmer of one candle-power.

“This house will be all right one day, Lucy. I hoped to get an extra window in your room, facing south, only the frost made it impossible. It would have disintegrated the mortar. Would you like a herb garden? I cut out the plan for one from
The
Times.
And I want to buy some Cox’s apple and plum trees. The bees I expect are killed by the frost. I had the well cleaned a week ago, the moss scraped from the brickwork, and whitewash brushed on. It took two men two days. And soon, I hope, the children will be able to go to a decent school again.”

Lucy’s eyes were unfixed from her surroundings. With a sudden start she said: “Oh, I’m sorry, were you talking to me?” She sighed. “Well, I suppose I must wash up.”

The small boys went out into the village street to renew old acquaintance.

Phillip helped her wash up. Then he went back to his cottage, to get into bed and read the local newspaper before
The
Times‚
as was his habit. There was a pile over three feet high of them against the wall, on the boards of the bedroom floor. But halfway through
The
East
Anglian
Daily
Press
he thought of the promised fees for schooling, and getting out of bed again switched on the electric fire, put on his dressing-gown, turned on the radio and the electric kettle for tea and continued with the last revision of his book until an hour after midnight.

*

The swallows came back to the porch, and as in other years, a nightingale sang in the lilacs around the draw-well outside Lucy’s kitchen door. The bird sang there, despite the chill east winds, for several days before leaving for softer inland groves and thickets. Rosamund went back to Mrs. Richard Cheffe’s school, taking David with her. “Zippee!” he cried, as soon as he got inside the house; and flinging himself on the carpet, began to roll swiftly across the floor.

There was an airfield near the Manor house, but the dark-green Whitleys seldom rose into the air, and then only for the dropping of propaganda leaflets over Germany.

After his book had been revised, Phillip flinched from physical work. In this vacuum he felt acutely that things were ill with Empire, England, farm, family, himself. Or was it in reverse order? Should it have been: Things were ill with him as with
millions of other men, and therefore with family, farm, England, Empire?

Behind the blackout curtain he read in
The
Times
that the Advanced Striking Force of the R.A.F. in France was ready, and at any moment the industrial Rhineland would go up in spouts of flame and flying debris. The French were on German soil, the Ruhr under the fire of their guns.

In another newspaper he read that at any moment Hitler’s cardboard house, and cardboard dummy tanks in the West Wall, would collapse. As for the West Wall, the dug-outs after the hard winter were damp and wet. The concrete, of inferior aggregate, was already crumbling. He read that British agents were buying up, for high prices, the future harvests of the Balkans; and so the Germans, who had no gold to buy anything in competition, would feel the effect of the economic war.