A Solitary War (39 page)

Phillip returned from the hayfield, where he had asked Luke to turn the swathes with the tedder. The day was becoming brighter and hotter. He was expecting a new hay-and-corn elevator to arrive at Crabbe station, and had telephoned to make enquiries. It had arrived. Good! He would send Luke in with a horse. It was nine o’clock, he had been out since seven. Things were going well, so he returned to the farmhouse.

While Lucy was cooking his breakfast he went outside to listen to the nightingale in the lilac bush by the draw-well. He was leaning on an arm of the frame supporting the roller and chain which in former days had raised wooden buckets from the well when five men walked into the yard. He knew at once why they had come. He stood still. The leading man gave him quick glances. He had a large, pinkish face. All the five men wore felt hats with turned-down brims. The leader, with the open pink face, had his right hand in his coat pocket. Other hands went casually to pockets as they stood, two before him, two on either side, one behind him.

“Is your name Phillip Sidney Thomas Maddison?”

“Yes.”

“I have an order for your detention under Section 18b,
paragraph
a,
of the Defence Regulations.”

“I wondered when you were coming.”

“You’ve been expecting us, then. Why?”

“The papers for days have been printing names of members of the Imperial Socialist Party who have been arrested, and I wondered if my turn was coming.”

“Then you are a member of the Imperial Socialist Party?”

“Yes.”

“You will have to come with us. You should pack a small bag for immediate necessities only.”

He felt distress behind the kaleidoscope of his thoughts lest the
hay, the good clover hay of Steep and Bustard fields, be left to bleach away its goodness; or, if Luke picked it up sappy, it would go mouldy in the stack.

“I’ll come along in a moment,” he said, meaning to tell Lucy what to do about the hay; and also thinking to change his clothes. He wore only vest and shorts. The pink-faced man followed immediately behind him through the kitchen into the parlour.

The other two men on his flanks. Obviously they were taking no chances. He felt calm under his discomposure about the hay. He wished they wouldn’t behave like that. It was unnecessary.

“Where are you going?” said the pink-faced man.

“To tell my wife about the hay. If it’s not treated properly when I’m away, the cattle will starve next winter.”

Lucy was mending a pair of Billy’s overalls. He told her quietly that he was going away, and she must do the best she could with the farm. He was sorry to have it put upon her, especially at this time. Did she remember what he had often told her about the hay being either brown and bleached, or green and mouldy?

Lucy looked dismayed. Then she said, “Oh!”

Suddenly he thought wildly, O Christ, is it all going on like this to the end of my life? Controlling himself, he said, “And there is the new elevator at the station to be fetched. Tell Luke, will you, to fetch it. You and Billy must do the best you can.” He heard his voice from far away.

His things, he told the detective-sergeant, were in the adjacent cottage. He went through the kitchen to go there. They followed closely. The face of Mrs. Valiant looked pale and thin. He smiled at her. The garden which he had not yet been able to begin to tidy up was still a tangle of nettles and buttercups and old bicycle frames and wheels and heaps of broken glass and crockery
deposited
over the hedge at the bottom by Horatio Bugg, whose garden adjoined. This was the real England: not Birkin’s: not his own little books, or Ralph Hodgson’s
Song
of
Honour,
or Shelley’s poems, or Wilfred Owen’s, or the prose of Richard Jefferies, or the music of Delius. The real England was based on the deflowered Thames below the Pool of London.

He walked up bare narrow wooden stairs. Lucy was about to follow to help him pack when the detective-sergeant moved swiftly in front of her, to follow close against his back, hand in pocket.

He wanted to say, I am not the sort of person who will draw a gun, or run away; but he said, “I call this my lighthouse room,” while hoping that they would not look under the blue carpet where
he had hidden back numbers of
Union
which he wanted later on for a record of the time he was living through.

It did not take long to put pyjamas, slippers, dressing-gown, with razor and toothbrush into a bag. He said, “If you’re going to make a search, I’d better tell you now that there’s nothing here, or anywhere else, of a traitorous nature, to be discovered. There are many manuscripts and books, for I’ve been a writer for twenty years. My life is an open book—in a way, I suppose.”

To Lucy he said, “Will you please give these gentlemen every help, and explain where the keys are. They’re all labelled. They are in the top middle-drawer of the tall-boy. Show them how to open those three little top drawers—you know—they open when you press the wooden catch underneath. And there’s a lot of manuscripts and letters in tea-chests in the workshop.” To the detective-sergeant he said, “The manuscripts have been there since nineteen thirty-seven. Mice have eaten into some. May I take a pen and paper with me? I want to revise the latest manuscript of a book I’ve written about this farm.”

“You’ll be allowed what is necessary.”

He took pens—fortunately each was filled with its coloured ink, red, green, and brown—and paper, as they were necessary to him, and led the way downstairs.

Outside in the road stood two large black saloon motor cars. The sergeant of the Crabbe police station stood by them. He wore a black holster at his waist, and looked smart and severe. He had been a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. P.C. Bunnied, the local policeman, stood beside him. Both avoided looking at him.

Phillip had often discussed things with the local copper before the war. Recently P.C. Bunnied had reported that, in 1938, Capt. Maddison had told him the war would start in September, 1939. Phillip had merely repeated what Birkin had told him.

Now P.C. Bunnied got in the back of the leading black car, to be followed by the prisoner and the sergeant. The
plain-clothes
men followed in the second car. Down the narrow village street, its shabbiness sliding back out of sight, to the cross-roads. There stood Horatio Bugg, his mouth open. Phillip flipped a hand at the familiar face, part of receding life.

In his mind he saw Horatio hurrying to tell others, to be first with the news. He would feel important at last in the eyes of the village which did not think much of him, since he had let the rag, bone and rabbit skin business, inherited from an industrious father, go more or less to pot.

The convoy drew up outside a sandbagged brick building in a lower street of Crabbe. A sense of unreality was now beginning to envelop the prisoner so that one or two people in the quiet sunlit street were seen as insubstantial figures, as flat surfaces without purpose in the eyes’ retinae. He hoped he was not looking white, that he would not turn dizzy as he passed through the door with several men enclosing him, depriving him of conscious being, detaching him from the light of the sky, himself motivated only by their will.

If only he had rejoined the Gaultshires at the beginning of the war. Now he was standing by a varnished counter, emptying his pockets as he had been ordered to do—pulling forth a piece of string, a leather button, a magneto spanner, eight matches in a broken box, a halfpenny with a hole in it tied to a bootlace with which he sometimes played with kittens.

He remembered the black-jack in the bottom drawer of the chest-of-drawers in his bedroom—a whippy affair of rubber and black leather covering a leaden knob, with a leather loop to fasten round the wrist. He had bought it for a joke, together with a silver bootlegging hip-flask, several years before. And would they find the white swastikas on the bonnet of the Alvis under the coat of black paint? Should he speak of them now? No, lest he involve ‘Boy’ Runnymeade.

His bag was being turned out. Pyjamas, slippers, tooth-brush, shaving things, writing pad, three fountain pens and BBB pencil for sub-editing. The items were entered in the record book together with the piece of string, the button, the spanner, the box of matches, and the halfpenny with bootlace. A touch on the arm, and he followed his gaoler down a dark passage. Pause before door, while keys jingled and rattled. He entered, door was shut behind him, keys rattled again.

Well, back again for more ‘porridge’. Would they have the record of that month of October 1919 in Wormwood Scrubs? He sat on a trestle bed and swung his legs. He told himself that the whole thing was amusing. Then to relax he made a pillow of the brown blanket and stretched himself on the boards, hands under head. Remain calm. Practise deep-breathing, induce slow rhythm to keep the mind from racing like a hare.

Deep-breathing brought a feeling of giddiness so he got up and looked about him. The door was of rusty sheet-iron, covering wood. It appeared to have been kicked and banged many times. There was a square aperture about ten inches wide and deep in the
top centre. An unpleasant door. In the corner beyond it was a cubic affair of tongue-and-grooved wood with a thicker wood lid in its centre, and probably a pail under it.

The cell was vault-like with an arched brick roof from which hung an electric light bulb. The trestle-bed and the fixed commode were the only furniture. He walked about, and, inspection
completed
, lay down on the trestle again, closing his eyes to relax, trying to void himself of thought. He recalled the story of General Sir Hubert Gough awakened by an A.D.C. when the barrage first fell on the Fifth Army front at St. Quentin at 4.40 a.m. on the 21st March, 1918, to be told that von Hutier’s assault with six thousand guns had begun. He decided to sleep for the next five hours, knowing he could do nothing until reports from corps began to come in. Unflappable ‘Goughie’, faced with an
overwhelming
, out-numbering assault upon his few divisions, composed himself to sleep; and he did sleep—the last sleep for several days.

*

The prisoner tried to compose himself, to remain calm, and to ignore the hare-doubling mind. For about a minute he lay deliberately inert, then the whistle of a train made him remember that the new elevator was at Crabbe Station, the hay was lying in windrows on Bustard and Steep, the day was fine, the sun outside was shining, and who but himself would know when to pull the rows into heaps with the horse-toppler, to make those heaps into cocks when neither claggy nor bleached of their goodness. Nobody cared about his way in any big or small detail; not a soul inside or outside the family. Perhaps after all he was a man with a warped mentality.

Yet he had only asked for things to be done in the spirit of truth. The Steep hay was fine hay, with plenty of bottom—red suckling and Dutch white clover—the only proper hay ever grown on the farm in years, properly drilled on a proper seed-bed—but at what nervous cost of opposition. The elevator, too, in the truck would be ‘subject to demurrage’—rent at perhaps 10
s
. a day while the truck in which it stood in the ‘goods’ siding remained idle. It was Friday, to-morrow was Saturday. Would Luke take the mare and bring it home? The cast-iron wheels must be oiled before the 4-mile journey. It was new, why should axles ever wear out if always properly oiled?

Of course all this opposition was the effect of causes. From the beginning of conscious life the labourer’s child had learned to be evasive in order to avoid distress. Its mind was formed in an unreal
world wherein most parsons preached what they did not practise, most schoolmasters uttered unlistenable stuff, and most people with money tried to get as much as they could out of the working man who was chucked out of work the moment he fell ill or some new bit of machinery came along to save labour.

Poor Hodge. He thought that the masters didn’t care. A labouring man might starve for all they cared. Part of the bosses’ creed was to get labouring blokes to do all sorts of tiddling little things, to save labour, to get more money into their pockets. Luke’s point of view was logical. Wasn’t there enough hard graft about already without tiddling little things such as greasing this, oiling that, and wanting stables to look like a Heathmarket set-up?

A
£
10 million loan to Rumania at the top, an ungreased axle at the bottom—that was the System. Dear Hereward Awake, imprisoned because he believed that machinery—some other man’s thought and heart made material—should be properly looked after: because he declared his belief that the man who worked it should also be properly looked after. Birkin who had said, ‘I cannot see my country sink without trace’: Birkin silent and still in a cell and nothing he could say or do now, nothing, nothing, NOTHING would alter that fact.

Phillip paced up and down the cell telling himself to be quiet, to be like General Gough, who had been dismissed by Lloyd George from command of the Fifth Army after forty-seven German divisions under von Hutier had over-run eleven under-strength British divisions in line with only six divisions in reserve. A week of constant fighting across the old grass-grown Somme battlefield, the Red Fox dragging a mud-balled brush in retreat and then the Cur of Downing Street had done what the German hounds hadn’t be able to do—broken up the Red Fox—and ‘Goughie’, despite Haig’s protest, had been sent home.

If ‘Goughie’ could remain calm under all that fell upon him, so could he: though mental anguish was perhaps worse in inaction than in action. In fact, there was no anguish in action, not for the troops, anyway. Desperate tiredness, but no anguish.

*

Thus an idle mind harassed its physical vehicle all the afternoon, moving from cause to effect, from effect to cause, from trade-clash to bomb-crash, hovering over Vimy Ridge with its new dead, its crumpled German and English bodies lying as on that ninth day of April long ago, exposed grey belly-muscles bullet-ripped with ragged vest, some with shell-burnt tunics, others with dark red
suffused bruises of the hurt-to-death bodies asprawl in the clover grass and wild wheat in the long and lark-flittering slope before Arras; and perhaps another poet of England lying dead, another mirror of England shattered.