Post of Honour (37 page)

She emerged from the sensual reverie praise of this kind induced and forked a shaft of mischief at him, the instinctive provocation of a woman secure in the tenure of her lover.

‘No one else ever has looked at me like this. If they ever do I’ll get the verdict endorsed! After all, one as flattering as that deserves corroboration!’, and then the mischief died and moved by an impulse his commendation stirred in her she pressed his face to her breasts, saying, ‘I’m only beautiful as long as you remember me like this, Paul! As long as the memory, of our time alone here is vivid and close to you! For as long as that nothing can change for us dearest, not even if everything and everybody around us changes!’

He was to remember that cry of hers at a moment when the world around him was not merely changing but disintegrating in an everlasting series of thunder flashes and the reek of cordite filled his lungs.

V

A
lthough it was not for want of trying on Paul’s part he had never succeeded in establishing a relationship with Simon that he had achieved with the other children, or, for that matter, with some of his numerous godchildren in the Valley. The boy hedged himself about with a special kind of privacy that rebuffed most people and only Ikey, and, to some extent Claire, could overcome. He was on friendly terms with most of the tenantry, and some of the craftsmen and hired labourers, so that it had sometimes irritated Paul to admit to himself that Simon would talk more freely to Sam Potter, the woodsman, or the hare-lipped dairymaid at the Home Farm than he would talk to his father. In Paul’s presence Simon was respectful and noncommittal.

One of the by-products of Paul’s 1917 leave was a partial bridging of this gap, for Paul was lucky to catch Simon with some of his defences down, moping through his first term at a sadly disorganised High Wood, staffed by an asthmatic temporary headmaster, invalided trench veterans and Grade III civilians.

Paul was depressed by the boy’s dispirited manner when summoned to the Headmaster’s study to meet his father and at once his heart went out to him, for he was reminded very sharply of Grace as Paul had last seen her in Béthune. He knew Claire had told Simon of her death and wondered if the boy was grieving, notwithstanding the fact that he could have no memory of her. There was no transport available so at the Head’s suggestion the two of them set out across the moor to an isolated inn near Five Barrows, an ancient Celtic monument four miles from the school.

At first Paul thought it was going to be a miserably embarrassing expedition, for Simon answered his questions regarding school life with mumbled monosyllables. As they were threading their way through a beech grove, however, heading for the open moor, Paul succeeded in breaking the ice by chance when he said, ‘I’ve really come to tell you what a brave woman your mother was, son!’, and the boy stopped, looking up at him with a trembling lip and saying, in a cracked voice that Paul recognised as half-broken, ‘Mrs Handcock said you were there when she was killed, sir, but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t see how you could be but that was what she said. I—I’d like to know if that was true, sir.’

Paul found to his embarrassment that his own voice was unsteady. They stood together on the edge of the wood, overlooking a tumbling moorland stream and then, by common consent, sat down side by side on a broken piece of fencing, Paul began, ‘I didn’t know how much you’d been told—’ and then, impatiently, ‘Look here, you don’t have to call me “sir”! Ikey always called me “Gov’nor”. You can call me Gov’nor if you like.’

The boy grinned and Paul realised what perfect teeth he had and how, just like Grace, he was able to dissipate any impression of surliness or distrust by a smile. He put his hand on Simon’s shoulder and when the boy did not withdraw, as he half-expected he might, said, ‘Well, it so happens that old chatterbox had it right for once! I
was
there when your mother was killed. She was driving badly wounded men from Advanced Dressing Station to hospital, and I came on the scene a few minutes after it happened but before that we’d met by chance and had dinner together and we talked about you. She was coming to see you when she came on leave.’ The lie, he thought, could be classified as snow-white, for somehow it seemed important he should draw them together in this roundabout way. Simon said, ‘Do you mind telling me about her . . . Gov’nor?’

‘Not in the least. I always had a great respect for her courage but after meeting her again in France, and talking to some of the girls she was working with, I came away with a tremendous admiration for her! She was as much a heroine as any chap with the VC and don’t ever forget it! That was her second trip under fire that day and she volunteered for it.’

He told as much of the circumstances as he thought the boy could absorb without feeding him material for morbid reflections but Simon surprised him none the less, for after Paul had told him Grace had been given a military funeral, the boy said, ‘Why did she leave us in the first place? Did you quarrel over me?’

‘Good God, no! Why should we do that? You were only a few months old at the time.’ He sat thinking hard, wondering how to explain such an unlikely set of circumstances to a thirteen-year-old child and finally compromised, saying, ‘It’s difficult to put into words, old chap, but I suppose the truth is your mother was never in love with me, not in the way your stepmother is. It had to do with our aims in life. You see, she wasn’t a “country” person, so we ought never to have married. If we hadn’t we should have stayed good friends, the way we ended up in France. Then she got a bee in her bonnet about votes for women and in the end this became more important to her than—well—me or the estate.’

‘Were you against votes for women?’

‘No, I wasn’t, and neither was our MP, Jimmy Grenfell, who also admired her but the odd thing is I’ve come to believe your mother left because, in a funny sort of way, she thought it was unfair to me to stay.’ He looked sideways at the boy. ‘Do you find that hopeless to understand?’

‘No,’ said Simon, ‘I believe I can see what you mean, Gov’nor.’

‘Then try and tell me,’ Paul said, gratefully, and Simon went on, ‘She must have thought you ought to be married to someone keen on the Valley.’

‘That’s exactly it!’ said Paul, excited by the boy’s perception, ‘she told me I ought to have married a farmer’s daughter in the first place but what I’d really like to get home to you is that just because we got divorced she wasn’t a mother to be ashamed of but rather the opposite. She didn’t run off with anyone else, she just had to give herself to politics and she was prepared to go to prison for her beliefs which is a damned sight more than most politicians are!’

‘Some of those Labour chaps have,’ Simon said, unexpectedly, and Paul wondered how, in a conservative school like High Wood Simon could have known this and commented on it without labelling Socialist MPs ‘dirty conchies’.

‘Yes, that’s so,’ he replied. ‘Some people feel about the war that way and most of the fighting men respect them for it.’

‘They do?’ He saw that he had astounded the boy at last and went on, ‘Yes, they do, because people at home haven’t any real idea what it’s like, so they can’t help talking nonsense about it like the newspapers and politicians. Did Ikey tell you about his friend Keith Horsey, the parson’s son? He was a CO but he’s out there in the thick of it stretcher-bearing.’

‘Yes,’ said Simon thoughtfully, ‘I know about Horsey. Fellows here are ashamed he was a Highwodian you know, so I wrote to Ikey and told him and he wrote back saying they must be chumps because Horsey was braver than anyone if the truth was known!’

‘Did you pass that on?’ asked Paul, curiously.

‘No,’ Simon said, ‘because I’d get hell for sticking up for a CO. You don’t go around looking for trouble as a first-termer!’

Paul laughed and felt a rush of affection for the boy, thinking how badly he had misjudged him in the past.

‘I see your point,’ he said, ‘it must be damned difficult to hold an unpatriotic point of view in a place like this!’

‘What do
you
think about the war, Gov’nor?’

This was almost as difficult as explaining why Grace had exchanged home and husband for Holloway, for Paul feared to express himself too freely on the subject in case Simon quoted him in an unguarded moment.

‘I
don’t
think about it any more than I can help, son,’ he said, realising he was evading the question, ‘I just get on with it, like most of the chaps out there,’ but the boy was not to be fobbed off with this and again reminded Paul of Grace when one of her principles was challenged.

‘But you must know whether you think it right or wrong.’

‘Well then, it’s wrong,’ Paul said, reluctantly, ‘it’s the biggest crime against humanity that’s ever happened but I daresay some good will come out of it, at least, that’s what most of us out there like to think, the Germans as well as the English.’

‘If everybody fighting thinks that why isn’t it stopped?’ Simon persisted, with his mother’s maddening logic.

‘Because, for the moment, neither side is ready to give in. The men in the trenches would be very happy to call it a day but the war isn’t directed by them. They just do what they’re told and all the orders come from older men, most of them wanning their backsides beside a comfortable fire. That’s why it has to be fought to a finish.’

‘It seems a stupid way to carry on,’ the boy said and Paul agreed that it was indeed but that when the men came back they intended to make certain nothing like it would happen again so perhaps it would benefit their children and grandchildren.

After that they spent a rewarding day, talking easily of all kinds of things but when they parted in the quad as the bell rang for tea he realised Simon had absorbed every word he had been told about Grace for he said, shaking hands and pocketing Paul’s tip, ‘If they give my mother a medal could I have it? To keep?’

Paul had difficulty concealing the extent to which the request moved him but promised he certainly could keep the medal if there was one and the boy went off then, cheerfully enough Paul thought, envying the ability of the young to discard emotional problems in the struggle to adapt themselves to their immediate surroundings. The tedious journey home, however, was not wholly depressing, for at least he could congratulate himself on having got nearer to Simon than ever before and as he crossed the moor in the ramshackle motor-cab he had engaged at Paxtonbury he thought how small a part environment played in promoting character and how manifestly clear it was that Simon’s personality was the legacy of the sallow, exhausted woman he had last seen lying under a groundsheet on the road to Messines Ridge. ‘They can talk as much as they like about influences of social backgrounds,’ he told himself, ‘but what’s in the blood stays there! Look at Ikey and that crazy marriage of his? And look at the way Eveleigh is making a fool of himself over that damned shop-girl! Come to that look at Simon—his stream of political thought already veering left at thirteen!’ The rain slashed against the canvas hood of the cab and the darkness deprived him of his favourite view of the Valley.

Chapter Nine

I

J
anuary, 1918; snow blanketed the entire Valley, from the farthest fold of Blackberry Moor to the bleak, crusted dunes, from the blur of Shallowford Woods down through eight-foot drifts to the frozen Sorrel where the ice was said to be six inches thick. The frost had held fast since Boxing Day and even those with menfolk in the ice-bound ditches of Flanders were too cold, too tired and too discouraged to spare them much sympathy. For this was the fourth winter of the war that would never end and external pressures had shrivelled souls to the size and toughness of dried peas, sometimes putting an impossible price on neighbourliness.

Claire, depressed by this collective withdrawal, fought it wherever she could, for it seemed to her a loss more painful and damaging than the drain on Valley manpower. From time to time she went out of her way to marshal the survivors, reviving their flagging spirits with reminders of the approach of spring and the promise of a record yield from meadows now gripped fast by the frost and scoured by an east wind that searched through the heaviest garments a person could wear and still waddle up and down the lifeless lanes. The Valley, she would remind herself, was not only more populous but more productive than it had ever been. There were never less than two thousand men in the hutted camp at Nun’s Bay, and often a hundred convalescents at Shallowford House. All seven farms had a record number of acres under the plough and were supporting twice as much livestock as in pre-war years and although so many familiar faces had disappeared, some of them for ever, their places had been taken by others not all of whom came into the category of foreigners, like the soldiers in camp or the German prisoners in the depot north of the woods. Men and girls had drifted in from the neighbouring estate of Heronslea which had lost impetus since Lord Gilroy had been killed on the Italian Front leaving no heir and two Whinmouth conscientious objectors were now employed by her brother Hugh at High Coombe, Hugh having neither the patriotic scruples of Eveleigh nor his preference for buxom land-girls. Yet the shifts and changes in the tempo of life were so various and manifold that Claire had great difficulty in keeping track of them all when she sat in the library late at night writing to Paul, or keeping the estate diary up-to-date. She applied herself to these tasks religiously, for the one was her sole emotional outlet and the other seemed to her a bridge to post-war continuity. The list of Valley soldiers and Valley casualties had now entered upon a second page. Dick Marlowe, the sexton’s younger son, had gone down somewhere off the west coast of Africa bringing home a cargo of maize from Capetown, and news crossed the Teazel of the death in action of Dave Buller, Gilroy’s keeper, who had carried the scars of Smut Potter’s gunstock to his grave in a shell-hole on the slopes of Vimy Ridge. Then, as January passed, and the hard frost held on into February, news came of Parson Horsey’s loss. His son Keith had been blown to pieces when a Minnenwerfer scored a direct hit on a stretcher party passing down a communication trench in front of St Quentin, and this time Claire had to do more than record the casualty, feeling under an obligation to call on the little rector.

She always hated these duty visits to the bereaved for whatever could one say to a broken old widower, whose hopes for years had been centred on an only son who had taken a double-first at Oxford and whose brains were now at the bottom of a French ditch? Expressions of sympathy had been all very well in 1914 and even in 1915 but they were fatuous after years of slaughter and the actual presence in the Valley of so many maimed men. She made the effort, however, borrowing Maureen’s battered Ford, for she was now close on five months’ pregnant just as she had predicted, although it no longer seemed a subject to joke about. A baby on the way was just one more responsibility at a time when she needed the maximum freedom of movement.

She found the rector at work in his glacial, book-filled study and although he looked tired and ill he seemed to her to have derived some kind of fortitude from his faith which was more than could be said of most of his flock in identical circumstances. He seemed also to have acquired a kind of pride in his son’s share in the war, for he said, after showing her Keith’s last letter praising the courage of some of the wounded he had tended, ‘I was against him going to begin with, you know, but I realise now that he was right and I was wrong! I’ve since wondered if the early martyrs wouldn’t have made their point just as forcibly by electing to serve in the arena, perhaps attending to wounded gladiators and animals. I always knew Keith would justify me but I never imagined it would occur in this roundabout way!’ Claire, somewhat puzzled, asked him to explain and he went on, earnestly, ‘Oh come, Mrs Craddock, you and your husband have never had any illusions about me being a failure here, just as I was in my last parish and the one before that! I was never unaware of it but I could at least say to myself, “I fathered a first-class scholar, whose personal impact may be as feeble as mine but whose brains will win him a real place in the world!” And they would have done that, you know. Now, I suppose, I must find consolation in the thought that his presence out there must have been instrumental in bringing a hundred or so back from the dead and I could hardly think that if Keith had been just one more man with a gun.’ He smiled, politely and nervously, just as he did every Sunday on ascending the pulpit to begin sermons that were barely tolerated by his war-time congregations, and then he pointed at a large framed photograph of Parson Bull, his predecessor, still hanging over the fireplace. Bull had had himself photographed in hunting rig and contemplating the former rector’s Hogarthian build, and insolent, bulging eye, it occurred to Claire that one could spend a lifetime looking for two more dissimilar priests. Horsey said, ‘I keep it there to remind me there are various ways of preaching the gospel, Mrs Craddock. Bull’s way was a century or more out-of-date but it worked far more effectively than mine. You have to admit that!’

‘No,’ said Claire, beginning to assess the parson’s true stature for the first time. ‘I don’t admit it! Bull’s way wouldn’t work any longer and I think people about here are going to need your methods in the very near future. My husband never has thought of you as a failure, for at least you achieved something he always wanted by reconciling the Anglicans and the Nonconformists in the Valley. All Bull ever did was to hold them apart by brute strength!’ Horsey accepted the compliment with a slight inclination of the head and thanked her for calling. At the door she said, suddenly, ‘Look here, Rector, why don’t you come up to the house and hold a non-denominational service for the convalescents? I daresay most of them are beyond any parson’s reach but you might catch the odd lost sheep. Anyway, even the scoffers would like a change. The camp padre doesn’t impress them very much.’

‘Then I’m sure I should impress them less, Mrs Craddock. After all, can you wonder they’ve lost their faith? I don’t think we parsons have come very well out of this war. Keith wrote saying every German has the words
“Gott Mit Uns”
emblazoned on his belt. Besides, what would I talk to them about?’

She had a sudden inspiration. ‘Your son!’ and he looked at her sharply, saying, ‘Wouldn’t that be parading a personal grief, Mrs Craddock?’

‘No, I don’t think it would. Many of them wouldn’t be alive now if they hadn’t been brought in by stretcher-bearers.’

He seemed vaguely impressed by this and stood holding the door, his eyes on the yellow slush that had accumulated on the step.

‘Well, I’ll think it over,’ he said at length. ‘Anyway, it was kind of you to ask and kinder still to call.’ She went down the path to the car and heaved herself in, relieved to be done with the visit. ‘Poor little beggar,’ she thought as Marlowe, the sexton, who had lost two sons swung the engine, ‘he’s putting a brave face on it but I think this has about finished him.’ But the Reverend Horsey was far from finished. Within the week he not only surprised Claire but several hundred others, including himself.

When the sound of the car had died away Parson Horsey went back into his study and sat down at his desk, poking about among the mass of papers until he found a closely-written sheaf of manuscript left by Keith after his last leave, in December. Horsey studied each page carefully, sitting there until the light faded. Then, lighting the lamp, he put the manuscripts away and began to re-read his son’s letters, more than a score of them, written from France. When the housekeeper came in with his cocoa he was writing to Claire and his letter, delivered by hand the following morning, puzzled her. He said he would accept her offer to conduct a non-denominational service in the big ward next Sunday, subject to two conditions; attendance was to be optional and she must on no account circulate news of Keith’s death among the patients. She sent a message to Nun’s Bay camp informing the resident padre that the local rector would conduct a service on the following Sunday but was already half-regretting have invited Horsey to preach. The men, as she well knew, had shed what religious beliefs they held in France, and their approach to parsons was at best negative and sometimes hostile. ‘We on’y saw a few o’ the RCs up the line,’ one of the men told her. ‘Them others, they’d slip across during a quiet spell, dish out a few Woodbines an’ nip orf ruddy quick! It’s nice to ’ave one ’andy when you’re buried they say but me, I don’t, go much on ’em! Sooner put me money on Jumbo I would,’ and he showed her a small ivory elephant attached to his identity discs. Because Horsey was coming at her own invitation, however, she felt responsible for his reception and knowing that most of the more mobile patients would make themselves scarce before the service began she filled a couple of benches in the ward with household staff and a few of the VADs who had been allocated to her before Christmas. She was not really Commandant now, although she kept the title by courtesy. Her pregnancy had curtailed her nursing activities and a professional matron was due to arrive any day to cope with an influx of more seriously wounded men.

Horsey arrived about ten-thirty and the tepid service began, attended by no more than half-a-dozen of the active convalescents and, perforce, by those confined to bed. After the second hymn Horsey walked briskly behind the table they used as an altar and stood midway between the two nearest beds, blinking and fumbling with some notes he held in his hand. One of the men at the far end of the ward began to cough and deliberately prolonged the spasm but the rector waited quietly and when there was silence began, in an unexpectedly firm voice, ‘I daresay most of you chaps are familiar with stretcher-bearers! I’m not going to bore you with a sermon and I haven’t even thought of a text. All I want is to read you a piece of writing sent to me by a young man who spent a year in France and has since died. He calls this piece
“Truce, 1917”
and it tells of an incident that happened on the edge of a place called Pilckem Wood, near Ypres.’

There were several men present who had unpleasant memories of Pilckem Wood and one of them, who had lain under it a day and a night with a broken thigh, involuntarily advertised as much by exclaiming, ‘Christ!’, and left it at that. His exclamation had an unlooked-for effect on some of the others, who scowled and hissed, ‘Shh!’ whereas the man who had shown Claire his elephant charm, sat up and said, very sternly, ‘Stow it, mate!’ Claire, sitting on the end of the form under the window, glanced at Horsey and noticed that he seemed unruffled by the stir. He cleared his throat and at once began to read.

It was a straightforward piece of prose telling a simple, factual story of a fifty-minute cessation of hostilities towards the end of the Passchendaele battle, when men of both sides came out into the open to collect the wounded. There was nothing remarkable about this, Claire decided. Paul had told her that it often happened but it occurred to her that the writing was remarkable for its restraint. It made no attempt whatever to imitate the purple passages of a magazine story and, what was even more unusual, it contained no irony so that it was neither a conventional ‘call-to-arms’ nor an indictment of war but simply an account of what actually occurred during the lull, as seen from the point of view of someone grubbing about in the shell-holes in search of men with a chance of recovery. The dying, it said, were given morphine and the dead were left lying where they had fallen in the morass. Time was an essential factor in the operation. Every man in the open knew that the firing would begin again at any moment and soon enough it did when the infantrymen on both sides fired shots over the stretcher-parties’ heads, warning them to return to their own lines.