Post of Honour (79 page)

‘Nay,’ Francis said, slowly, ‘I don’t need time to think on that. Tiz right to give the lad the chance, for I’ve not forgotten you gave me mine backalong. I can make do on the land I’ve got, I’ve managed well enough so far!’ His last sentence was a challenge and Paul, recognising as much, said, ‘You certainly have and there isn’t a man in the Valley who isn’t proud of you. Should I put it to Dick or would you like to sound him?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Francis said and heaved himself off his five-barred gate, ‘but I wouldn’t bank on him accepting. There’s a lazy streak in the Potters but us’ll zee what us’ll zee!’

Paul never learned what took place between Francis and Dick Potter, son of his woodsman, but the upshot of it was that Dick set about repairing the Derwent farmhouse and outbuildings and somehow contrived to find time to do some spring sowing on the neglected acres inland from the cliff fields. Paul and Claire went over in late April to see how he was getting along and found him with Smut Potter’s lad, the impish, seventeen-year-old son of the ponderous Fleming, who had clasped Smut to her corseted bosom in 1917 and never let him go. Dick favoured his father, Sam, a tall, rangy young man, with the Potter trademarks of brown, impudent eyes, stiff unruly hair and bouncing, spring-heeled gait. Paul handed the new tenant of High Coombe his lease and learned that Dick proposed to specialise in dairy products.

‘Not Friesians, Guernseys,’ he told Paul. ‘There’s a big local demand for clotted cream in Coombe Bay and Whinmouth and it’s growing all the time. ‘Bonbon’ is going to work for me, so he says, but I doan reckon he’ll stay; he’s always cracking on about Australia!’

Paul remembered then that Smut’s boy was known in the Valley as ‘Bonbon’, a name derived from his mother’s impatient response to all enquiries when she first came here, soon after the Armistice. He recalled also that the two cousins had always been close friends, notwithstanding the eight-year gap in their ages. It was comforting, he thought, to have two Potters at work in the Coombe area again and asked if he could see what sort of job they were making of the inside of the farm. Repairs were obviously rough and ready and Claire must have noticed as much, for she said, ‘This is well enough for men who don’t mind pigging it, Dick, but you’ll have to get a real builder in if you ever think of marrying!’ and Dick said, grinning, ‘Bless you, Mrs Craddock, I got no time to think o’ marrying now, and no one in mind either! I shall have all my work cut out gettin’ this place in shape!’

‘I’ve heard you young chaps talk like that before,’ Claire said, ‘but you all come round to it sooner or later!’ and she looked round the big kitchen, adding rather wistfully, ‘This is a place for children. Rose and I were happy here and if my brother Hugh had married at your age he would have been poorer but a good deal happier I think.’

She was thoughtful on the way home and it occurred to Paul that she resented seeing the old farm change hands but he was wrong, for when he asked if this was so she said, with a chuckle, ‘No, I wasn’t brooding on that! I was just thinking it’s lucky Father didn’t live to see it; if people really do turn in their graves the poor old chap must be positively threshing about to witness a Potter on his land! He feuded with them for years, remember? It was only old Preacher Willoughby who kept them from tearing each other’s throats!’

‘You can say what you like of the Potters,’ he replied, ‘but you have to grant them staying power! They were hanging on by their fingertips when I came here thirty-five years ago and look at them now! One grandson farming at Periwinkle and married to our daughter, two other grandsons reclaiming High Coombe and two of the originals still rooted in the Dell! Damn it, they practically dominate the Valley and I daresay it would have astonished old Tamer, bless his heart!’

The Coronation junketings that year were so tame, Paul thought, as to be hardly worth organising. Everybody went through the usual motions—public luncheons, a service in the parish church, some tepid sports in the water-meadows, and the ritual distribution of mugs to schoolchildren, but the heart had gone out of the cult of royalty-worship and it seemed to him that people found it laborious to light fire-crackers and get drunk in honour of the new King. Victoria had been an awesome figure, a kind of arch-priestess deputising for the Almighty and even prompting Him on occasion, whereas her son, the portly Edward, had been a man licensed to gamble and womanise and hobnob with bookmakers without losing his dignity. Then came Squire George, Vicky’s solemn grandson, and everyone respected his rectitude, even though he never enjoyed the prestige of his father, and after that everyone had been prepared to welcome the cheerful young man who had outraged them by running off with a handsome divorcee, but for George VI, perhaps because of his shyness and slight stammer, there was little more than tolerance tinged with sympathy and somehow this did not add up to reverence or even enthusiasm. In any case, by this time the front of the stage was cluttered with clowns, the noisiest and most grotesque troop anyone in the Valley could remember, not excluding the Kaiser, who had always been seen with an eagle perched on his helmet. The clamour from across the water grew louder and louder as more and more grotesques, with sinister-sounding names and extravagant characters, claimed attention. There was Dr Goebbels, with his big head and clumping foot, Goering with his chestful of medals, Himmler, who was said to cause those who displeased him to disappear in puffs of smoke, The Duce (whom the Valley folk knew as ‘Musso’) with a chin that jutted like a ledge of the Bluff but, dominating all, the ringmaster himself, with his lank forelock, Charlie Chaplin moustache, hysterical oratory and extraordinary reputation for gnawing carpets when thwarted. Altogether an extravagant and totally ridiculous bunch thought the Valley, and their opinion of Squire Craddock’s good sense dropped a point or two when the word went round that he thought the nation was threatened by them and was reported to have spent thousands of pounds on farm machinery and pedigree stock at the County Show, and also (could caution go further?) in digging a huge concrete-lined pit in the dip between the big house paddock and Home Farm rickyard, rumoured by some to be an air-raid shelter and by others a fuel-storage tank against the day when storm-troopers would come goosestepping up from Coombe Bay.

It was a combination of factors that encouraged Paul to prepare for the worst. He had never forgotten Franz Zorndorff’s infallibility in these matters, nor the fact that even Franz’s nerve had been shaken by his visit to the Continent just before his death. Then there were Simon’s letters, full of a kind of desperate bitterness against the democracies for continuing the farce of non-intervention in Spain, when it was obvious to a child that the war was being won for Franco by Germany and Italy. There was also his deep distrust of waffling politicians like Chamberlain, who behaved like startled chickens in the face of any demand for a show-down but perhaps his most unnerving conclusions were those reached after reading books like Koestler’s
Spanish Testament
,
and other first-hand accounts of life in Spain, Italy and Germany, sedulously fed him by his daughter-in-law Rachel, with whom he had formed a regular postal-link since Simon had sailed away on the coaster,
Hans Voos
.
Until then, notwithstanding the war to end wars, Paul’s politics had been largely parochial and his overall policy had been to conserve most of his energy for use in a purely local sphere but now, as the months went by, he found his sympathies inclining more and more towards the militant Left and he began to wonder if, after all, there might not be something to be said for Simon’s theories. When men he respected, like the dapper Anthony Eden, resigned from the Government in protest against a policy of weakness towards Mussolini, he found himself chafing under the smart of humiliation but he had come to realise that his anxieties were not shared among the Valley people, not even by men whom he would have expected to favour a stronger line at Westminster. Henry Pitts, for instance, openly laughed at his fears and made him feel a little like old Horace Handcock, the ultra-patriotic gardener, when he admitted the true purpose of the new fuel-storage tank.

‘Giddon Maister,’ Henry had said, ‘whatever be thinking of? You dorn honestly reckon Old Fritz wants another basinful, do ’ee? Why, damme, I mind the poor toads I swapped fags with between trenches, the day us stopped popping off at ’em, and I dom care ’ow much that bliddy Hitler rampages, I’d lay a pound note to a farden ’ee worn’t get they into the firing-line again! They got more bliddy zense, I c’n tell ’ee! and as for the Eyeties—Gordamme, you baint zayin’ youm scared o’ they, be ’ee?’

Smut Potter, it seemed, held similar views but in this case they were fostered by the policy of playing down his French wife’s anxieties regarding a resurgence of the hated Boche, who had already robbed her of a husband. Marie Potter was one of the few people in the Valley who shared Paul’s disposition to fear the worst, as he discovered when he called at the Coombe Bay bakery on the morning soon after Hitler’s invasion of Austria. She was building a pyramid of cakes in her window and emerged thinking his shout from the bakery was that of the representative of a wholesale sugar firm with whom she did business. When he saw, in the adjoining store, mountains of bagged sugar and remarked on it she only said, with a frown, ‘It will disappear one morning and then,
poof
.
No cakes! No business! No cash to carry to the bank! Today they are glad enough to sell it in bulk. Tomorrow they will sell it by the half-kilo, M’sieur!’

He talked to her of current affairs and was surprised to find that unlike himself, who was no more than uneasy, she was convinced that Germany would invade France within a matter of months.

‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ she said, ‘the Boche will come seeking
revanche
,
and my people will be the first to suffer; as always!’

‘You’ve got the Maginot Line, Madame,’ he reminded her but she said ‘
Poof
again, as if the new fortifications were made of sugar-icing. He said, with a shrug, ‘Well then, if they do come I daresay we will give them another thrashing. After all, we managed it well enough the last time.’

‘At a cost!’ she said, buttoning her heavily moustached lip. She had great respect for him, not because he was her landlord but because he had the Croix de Guerre, and she did not berate him for lack of realism, as she did every other Englishman who came here talking politics.

In the spring of 1938 news came that Simon was a prisoner-of-war, captured at a place called Teruel and Paul, learning of this through Rachel, who got it from a source she would not disclose over the telephone, asked what they could do to help the boy. She said there was only one thing they could do, contact the local Member of Parliament and ask him to make representations to Franco’s people at Government level, for she understood some kind of machinery had been established for exchanging non-nationals captured by one side or the other. Paul saw the new MP without much hope but was cheered by the kindness and cordiality of his reception. Major Harries, MC, who had recently taken Sydney’s place as Member for Paxtonbury, was a retired gunner and it might have been Ikey’s association with the Artillery that helped for they had served together as subalterns in India, and later on the Western Front. Paul said, when he was introduced, ‘It’s only fair to tell you, Major, that I’ve been opposing your party all my life but I daresay you’re aware of that already.’

‘You’re one of my constituents whether you like it or not,’ said the ex-gunner cheerfully, ‘so don’t let’s hear any more of that! I’ll do what I can and be glad to! I’ve been watching that bloody business closely and frankly, irrespective of any political views your son holds, I think he’s right when he says the Italians and Germans are flexing their muscles for something a little more ambitious! I’m in a minority up there, of course, just as anyone is who heeds Churchill’s warnings!’

Paul found himself warming towards the man and over lunch at The Mitre repeated Zomdorff’s warnings and spoke of his own modest insurances against war. The Major approved wholeheartedly: ‘I was in Germany six months ago,’ he said, ‘and I was scared stiff by what I witnessed. It goes against the grain to be forced, on pain of being rough-housed, to have to salute that little bastard, but that’s what happened to me while I was watching a procession in Bremen. I’ll do everything I can to get your boy turned loose and if I’m successful I’d like the privilege of hearing a first-hand account of his recent experiences.’

Major Harries was as good as his word or better. He rang Paul within the week saying that contact had been established with the British Consul in Burgos, and that negotiations had already begun. ‘Don’t expect rapid results,’ he warned, ‘you know how long it takes a Spaniard to make a decision but we have ways and means of putting some heat on so maybe the boy will be home for Christmas. He’s unwounded, I’m told, so that’s something to be thankful for!’

Paul thanked him and ’phoned Rachel, inviting her down to await further developments, but before she arrived he had another ’phone call from the Member to say that a batch of about a dozen British prisoners were being sent home via Gibraltar, and that Simon might well be among them.

Rachel arrived the next day, looking close to breaking point Paul thought and Claire packed her off to stay with Mary at Periwinkle. There had always been a close link between Rachel and Rumble Patrick after Rachel had personally delivered the boy in Hazel’s cave one summer evening, in 1913. She was still staying there when Simon arrived, weighing about nine stones and suffering from the after-effects of three months in a verminous Spanish gaol in daily expectation of being marched out and shot with batches of Basques and Catalans. He was stunned, Paul thought, by the miracle of his delivery and it was during their wordless drive across the top of the moor from Paxtonbury that Paul said, ‘You owe your release to a Tory, Simon. He went to a great deal of trouble and wondered if you could find time to see him and give an account of what happened over there.’