Post of Honour (60 page)

It was in an enclosed garden above the forge that he was made aware of other changes since he had passed this way. The village seemed to be extending up the hill and, whereas evening loiterers had usually gathered under the one roof of The Raven, tonight a group of them, all men, were standing in the soft glow of the forge that spread beyond the open door. He went closer and looked directly down on them, their taint reaching him like an advancing wall, their cigarettes glowing like a scatter of watch fires. Some he recognised and some he did not, according to their occupations and habitat. Abe Tozer, the aged smith, was there, leaning on a long-shafted hammer, his white whiskers reaching the top of his leather apron and close by two or three of Abe’s cronies—Morgan, the pot-bellied builder, Noah Williams, the sailor who never went to sea, and Thorn, the new sexton whom Traveller had often watched at work on the churchyard. With them was a sprinkling of younger men, like the hideously disfigured Gappy Saunders, and the blind man, Willis, who walked with a white stick. The rumble of their voices came up to the fox as he rested and again the pattern of change was revealed to him for not so long ago this street would have been empty under the stars at this time of night.

He circled the forge, crossed the street and climbed the hill to the dunes where the smell of the sea vanquished every other scent until he caught the reek of gorse growing among the marram grass. Then he turned inland along the river bank as far as Timberlake’s sawmill, a place where he had often refuged from hounds and watched them overrun his scent among the newly-sawn logs before he doubled back to the nearest covert. The house behind the sawpit was silent and shuttered, as though its occupants had turned their backs on the Valley like Elinor Codsall and Farmer Derwent, and for the third time that evening Traveller sensed change and a shifting pattern, so that suddenly, from being merely curious he felt uneasy, despite the reassuring scents of resin, dry sawdust and woodsmoke and leaving the yard hurried on his way, crossing the river at the ford and taking a short cut across the stubble to Four Winds. Here, to his relief, nothing had changed at all. The yards were still tidy and spotlessly clean, the fences in repair, barns and byres bolted. There were no rat-holes in the weather-boarding and lights burned behind the neatly-curtained windows; all the same he went on through to the watershed without pause. The fat Boxer kept by the new landlord was a pet and was therefore almost certainly asleep beside the fire in the kitchen but all his life Traveller had feared the Four Winds cats of which there seemed to be a baker’s dozen, all as aggressive as stoats. By the time the moon was high he was safe across the Teazel and heading through Heronslea coverts and within minutes of reaching his culvert beside the tower he was curled muzzle to brush, or what little remained of his brush, but before he slept the changes he had marked during his circuit had been filed away in his memory. Hunting had finished until autumn but when it began again every scrap of information acquired that night would multiply his chances of outwitting hounds and the tyrant who fed them as a reward for betraying every other beast of the field.

II

T
he changes Traveller had marked during his fact-finding foray seemed abrupt to him for, alone in the Valley, he and Squire Craddock were half-rebel, half-conservative. To most people in the Valley post-war changes were accepted as the wear and tear of years—incidents like the death of old Arthur Pitts, or the decision of Mary Willoughby to close her little school and spend the remainder of her days sharing a bungalow with an elderly cousin, in Dawlish. Everyone had noted, of course, the inroads of Codsall’s shock troops at High Coombe, and some of them smiled and shrugged when they heard the story of the irascible old farmer’s assault on his son Hugh at the time of the sell-out, but for the most part they did not share the resentment of father, sister and brother-in-law. A man was entitled to do as he liked with land bought and paid for and the bungalows Codsall’s partner Tapscott built in Top Warren were soon sold, the row of shops in Coombe Bay High Street soon let. The proposal to build a permanent camping site for tents and caravans, with its own row of shops in Eight Acre, caused, a somewhat wider ripple of comment but once the site was cleared and the foundations that had so mystified Traveller marked out, few were outraged by what was happening along the eastern border of the estate. Farms were being sold off everywhere nowadays and it was accepted that there was no future in agriculture. Young men like Dick Potter, and Will Codsall’s younger son Mick, who clung to the industry were the exceptions. Maybe they were too idle to leave the Valley and learn a trade in Paxtonbury, maybe there were too stupid.

Most of the young ones had left by the end of 1932, some to look for work in the cities, others to marry and one or two, despairing of finding regular jobs, to join the Services or go abroad like Rumble Patrick Palfrey. The Valley was not at all surprised to learn that he had sailed away to Australia ;-anything might be expected of a child born in a cave above the Shallowford badger sets but as the Depression deepened, and the national tally of unemployed topped the three million mark, some of Rumble’s contemporaries had second thoughts about his hereditary daftness and themselves wrote away for details of Government-sponsored emigrant schemes. Young Sally Pascoe, for instance, the younger daughter of Walt Pascoe and ‘Pansy-Potter-that-was’, left in 1931, writing within six months to say that she had found herself a husky husband in Ontario. Brother Albert (the hidden persuader of Pansy’s second marriage) soon followed her and after him went Esther Eveleigh and her husband George, only son of the blind wheelwright, Willis. Yet somehow the broad outlines of the Valley did not change much, at least not along its northern and western boundaries. Periwinkle remained derelict; nobody would be fool enough to move into Elinor Codsall’s farm, where the acres Will had reclaimed from the moor were already waist-high with dock and thistle and the farmhouse, never much shakes as a dwelling, was partially roofless and soggy with damp. In the south-east the Willoughby holding continued to prosper, Francis Willoughby having proved that it paid to specialise and his success with beef had attracted two local youngsters to sign on with him at the new agricultural rates. Deepdene was a very democratic farm these days, Francis and his two hired hands (one a Potter and the other a Timberlake), living a carefree life with a daily woman to cook and clean for them. Master and men made regular jaunts to Paxtonbury where, it was rumoured, Francis learned to lose his woman shyness in the roystering company of young Dick Potter, his foreman. Whether this was true or not Francis must have mellowed since his trip to the Argentine for when teased by Claire on the subject of his bachelor status he had shocked her by quoting the famous Churdles Ash quip—that the act of taking a wife at his age was akin to leaping into a river to quench thirst! Claire thought this evidence that Francis’ success had done much to enlarge the son of Preacher Willoughby, the old prophet who had once stalked the Valley warning the unrepentant against an eternity of hell fire.

Lower down the long slope, where the unlikely partnership of the lame French Canadian Brissot and the Cockney Jumbo Bellchamber had now entered its second decade, there was hope that the Dell would continue to hold its own, for Brissot was a good farmer and his talkative friend a better salesman. The two Potter girls had sobered beyond local recognition and had even been known to express disapproval concerning the shameless behaviour of girls like Prudence Pitts, who, to some extent, had inherited the Potter reputation of tasting every dish in the Valley before making a final decision. Prudence’s mother, the once tawny, now greying Gloria, was outraged when the comment reached her as it did within hours. Like everyone else among the older generation she had vivid memories of the Potter girls’ reputations up to the moment they had married at the end of the war and it seemed to her grossly hypocritical on their part to quarrel with her daughter’s efforts to make the most of the shrinking supply of men in the Valley. She carried her complaint to Henry, demanding that he confront the slanderers but Henry only laughed and said, ‘Dornee talk so bliddy daaft, woman! Us dorn mind what the Potters zay an’ never did! Besides, tiz true baint it? I baint zeed ’er with the zame chap three times in a row!’ Gloria complained that he was deficient in family loyalty but she had regarded herself as the dominant partner but the shearing episode, in the disordered kitchen of Elinor Codsall in 1917, had taught her otherwise. Since then she had made one or two half-hearted attempts to regain the ascendancy but all they had earned her was the traditional penance of a valley shrew, a profound reluctance to sit upon anything unupholstered for a day or so. Apart from an occasional flare-up between man and wife, and a brief sulk on the part of Prudence when she was between boy friends, life pursued an uneventful course at Hermitage. Henry’s son David, now twenty-six, had his father’s and grandfather’s reverence for large whites and saddlebacks and in the main he upheld Henry’s refusal to abandon traditional tools for one or other of ‘they bliddy machines’. Paul declared that Hermitage was the most old-fashioned farm in the county, a holding that had never heard the stutter of a tractor, or the clatter of the muck-spreader but deep in his heart he counted Henry Pitts his most reliable tenant. Their relationship, always cordial, had now ripened into friendship and they would sometimes ride the rounds together, talking of old friends and old adventures that led all the way back to the rescue of shipwrecked sailors in Tamer Potter’s cove. Paul was not alone in his affection for Henry. Everyone in the valley welcomed his broad, rubbery smile and his high-pitched, ‘ ’Ow
be
’ee then?’ His aged mother, Martha, still treated him like a child but she respected his judgment as she had never minded that of her amiable husband, Arthur.

Over at Four Winds Harold Eveleigh had made good his pledge to regard farming as a way of life rather than a temporary alternative to the dole queue. The farm had almost regained its pre-war rhythm for Harold’s wife, the pretty Lancashire girl, was quick to learn from Marian and from Deborah, her sister-in-law, whereas Harold brought to his new occupation the serious application that had promoted him from private to captain in three years of active service in the East and afterwards in Ireland. It heartened Paul to see Four Winds surface again and shake off its gloomy reputation, and when Harold’s son Norman was born he broke his resolution to cease adding to the long roll of his Valley godchildren. Mary, his daughter, and Harold’s wife Connie, became close friends and Whiz, his second daughter, taught Connie to ride. Paul never had cause to regret his snap decision; from the time Harold took over his western flank was secure.

The fox’s uneasiness when he paused outside the silent, shuttered sawmill was justified, for that very day Dandy Timberlake had died, indirectly as the result of the lung wound he had received in the Dardanelles seventeen years before. He and Pansy Potter had made a good marriage and Walt Pascoe’s children found him a tolerant and conscientious stepfather. Walter’s eldest son, Tim, stayed on at the mill as sawyer, assisted by Dandy’s own child, who bore the name of Pascoe notwithstanding the fact that everyone in the valley was aware that he was the product of a walk home in a storm on the night of the Coronation fête, in 1911. The boys were both single and after Dandy’s death their mother lived on at Mill Cottage, where Hazel had settled after bearing Ikey’s child in the woods. In spite of having had a largish family and two husbands Pansy held middle-age at bay more successfully than either of her sisters. At forty-nine she was still a very handsome woman, with enormous reserves of Potter vitality, and although she regretted Dandy in the way she had regretted Walt, she made no secret of her intention to marry a third time as soon as opportunity presented itself.

‘I made two of ’em comfortable and I baint ready for the rocking-chair yet!’ she told Claire, the day after the funeral. ‘Poor old Dandy was only half the man ’er was before ’er was shot about be they ole Turks but the poor ole toad did his best, bless ’un! Las’ thing ’er zed to me bevore he give up was, “Panse midear, dornee wear no widow’s weeds for me! You show a leg an’ get yourself a bit o’ winter comfort zoon as may be! Youm too lusty o’ woman to run to waste and youm not fifty yet so get out an’ about midear, and dornee mind what the gossips zay!” ’

Pansy took him strictly at his word. That summer, by means of Dandy’s insurance money, she transformed herself and then took a job as barmaid in The Raven where, at first glance, even her oldest associates had some difficulty in recognising her. Her hair, that had been a dead-leaf brown flecked with grey at the time of Dandy’s death, now shone like sun-kissed brass and her mouth was as red and welcoming as a coal fire on a cold night. She disdained the slimming diets urged upon her by her daughters but settled for the policy of making the utmost of what she had, lacing herself into a pair of pre-war stays that induced a pink and permanent flush on her cheeks without recourse to rouge. Pansy’s new self, indeed, was a study in pink. She wore coral-pink earrings and tight pink blouses that revealed a bewitching cleavage. Round her waist she wore a patent leather belt of piratical design, relieved by a pink rose the petals of which were proof against fading for they had been made by Pansy herself from part of a window-blind, a trick learned in one of the many women’s magazines she read. Her black shiny skirt was so tightly stretched across her hips that it would never have remained there when she leaned over to draw beer had she not equipped it with press-studs as large as the bosses on a suit of mail. Her shapely legs were encased in flesh-pink stockings and the heels of her patent leather shoes obliged the new landlord to renew the bar linoleum every six months. He did not complain, however, for the new barmaid proved a transfusion to an establishment that had been going downhill since it was rebuilt to look like a Tudor tithe bam. Bar profits took a sudden upward leap and there was soon civil war between the regular patrons of private and public saloons, both of whom clamoured for Pansy’s ministrations. She was an enormous success from any point of view and, next to her figure, the male clientele admired her endearing trick of pretending to be shocked at the remarks tossed at her when she was teetering across the floor with a tray of drinks balanced on the tips of vermilion finger nails. Men began to drift back again from Abe Tozer’s forge in ones and twos so that old Abe and Eph Morgan, who were both lifelong teetotallers, soon had it to themselves again and resumed their interminable games of draughts on the anvil. Among the reclaimed was Alf Willis, the wheelwright, who had been blinded by gas on the Somme and had recently become a widower. Alf (christened ‘Reginald’) was thankful that he had learned a trade before losing his sight and was still able to pursue it as well as draw a disability pension. His wife had been a rather anaemic woman and the strain of living with him during the difficult period of his readjustment had exhausted her, so that now he was looked after by his thirteen-year-old daughter Bessie and occupied one of the new bungalows at the top of the village. Willis could not see Pansy’s late-flowering charms but he had not lost his sense of touch and because he was sightless, and everyone pitied him, she went out of her way to be especially kind to him, allocating him a reserved seat in a corner where she had to brush against him every time she served the tables under the window. Her sidelong passage past Alfie became a regular source of Raven ribaldry as the weeks went by for every time she lisped, ‘ ’Scuse me, Alfie!’ and pressed herself against him, his broad face glowed with unabashed pleasure and Alfie’s cronies would pretend to offer cash for his seat. Encouraged by this, or by Pansy’s thoughtful offer to relieve his daughter Bessie of the nightly walk to The Raven to fetch Father home, Alfie soon proposed and Pansy promptly accepted, so that Smut, whose experience of his sister went back a very long way, declared, ‘ ’Er had it in mind from the day she took the job, the crafty bitch!’ but at once qualified this implied criticism by adding, ‘She’ll play the game by ’un tho’! Panse usually does, pervidin’ o’ course, that Alfie’s minded to keep ’er served!’ Presumably Alfie was for, to the delight of The Raven’s regulars, Pansy presented her astonished husband with a ten-pound boy thirty-seven weeks to the day he led her to the altar. It was her sixth child and she celebrated her fiftieth birthday two months before delivery. Although inclined to be a trifle vain of her record (three husbands and progeny by each) she worried over the possibility of being replaced at the pub but her employer hastened to reassure man and wife that Pansy was irreplaceable and promised to keep open her job if she liked to come in and serve five evenings a week. Her wages and tips, added to Alfie Willis’s earnings and pension, were more than enough to offset the cost of a regular baby-sitter so she soon made a triumphant reappearance, still in pink and showing, if anything, rather more cleavage. Dandy would have been delighted and so, perhaps, would Walt, whose happiest hours had been spent in the court where Pansy now reigned.