Post of Honour (83 page)

‘We were six strong last night,’ Smut said. ‘Brissot and Jumbo Bellchamber turned up, as well as Mark Codsall and Willis.’

‘Willis?’ Paul queried. ‘What the hell is the good of a blind chap on this sort of job?’

‘Just what I thought, Squire,’ Smut said, apologetically, ‘but the fact is I didn’t have the heart to turn him away. Panse brought un down, zoon as it was dimpsy, and he said he could sit inside and relay messages when us got the phone laid on. He could too, I reckon, and you can’t help admiring his pluck!’

No, Paul thought, you couldn’t; a man of over fifty, blinded by mustard gas on the Lys in 1918 but still anxious to prove to himself that he wasn’t utterly useless in an emergency.

‘Tell him this is his post from now on,’ he said. ‘I’m going to blitz the GPO people the moment I’ve had breakfast. We should have the ’phone link-up between here, the Bluff lookout, and shanty HQ within twenty-four hours.’

Smut waved his hand and disappeared under the shingle again, Rumble swinging himself up the short rope-ladder that connected rampart and tank-trap to sit dusting the sand from his long, dark hair while Paul untethered the grey and swung himself into the saddle. So often Rumble had reminded him painfully of his father, Ikey Palfrey, but never more so than this morning, with his overlong hair, smooth brown skin and easy good humour that was encouraged, no doubt, by being early abroad on such a pleasant morning.

‘Mary all right?’ Paul asked and Rumble said she was although he had the impression she considered the LDV lark a male excuse to indulge in children’s games and evade serious work.

‘Claire has much the same viewpoint if that’s any comfort,’ Paul told him, ‘but to my mind it’s somebody’s job to keep a close lookout early evenings and early mornings. If a German aircraft skims over it wouldn’t do for the pilot to report that there was nothing awake but gulls. If I were you I’d slip back for your breakfast now. He isn’t likely to try it in broad daylight and until we’ve got a gun here there’s no sense in maintaining day and night patrols. Love to Mary!’ and he trotted on, turning left off the sea-front at the junction of High Street and climbing the steep street to the church.

No one else was astir as yet and he remembered the first time he had ridden along this road in the early morning, the second day he had arrived here, now almost exactly thirty-eight years ago, when he was a lame young man of twenty-three madly in love with a girl he had met by chance in the Shallowford nursery the previous evening. He smiled grimly, recalling the flutter in his breast as he rode past her house on the hill and wondered, not for the first time, if he would have bought the estate at all had it not been for Grace. Probably, although John Rudd always declared she had been the deciding factor, and as he thought of old John and Grace he remembered other old faces and dismounted at the lych-gate of the churchyard, again tethering the horse and making his way between grass-grown graves to the west door, then hard left to the section of the yard where lay most of the men and women of his first decade in the Valley.

They were none of them really dead to him, and never would be so long as there was breath in his body. He glanced across at the granite obelisk marking the grave of Old Tamer that might so easily have been his own. Close by lay Preacher Willoughby who should, by rights, have been buried in the Nonconformist patch but somehow had not been, and remembering the rosy, saintlike face of the former master of Deepdene he thought of Elinor, his daughter, and wondered how she would fare now, an Englishwoman married to a German and living somewhere in the Württemberg area. Behind Willoughby’s grave was the Codsall family plot, man and wife quiet at last, and beyond them, the grave of Arthur Pitts and that of Edward Derwent, his father-in-law, who had always been gruff and uncommunicative but had proved a trump once his ruffled pride was soothed by his pretty daughter’s elevation to Squiress. He grinned, recalling Edward’s honest, shamefaced acceptance of him as a prospective son-in-law, the day of old John Rudd’s wedding in the fall of 1906. Dear Heaven! It all seemed so long ago and so improbable, like pondering the dynasties of Plantagenets and Tudors. Could any one of the people lying around him have dreamed up this summer, with a raving madman bestriding Europe and Britain the only country between him and a very promising bid for world domination? Perhaps that was just possible. Some of them had known the Kaiser’s ambition but surely there was no real comparison, for not even Horace Handcock, the Valley fire-eater who had so hated Germans had envisaged concentration camps and the deliberate destruction of open cities, like Rotterdam and Warsaw.

He stood for a moment over John Rudd’s grave, wondering what kind of advice John would have given him this morning. ‘Hold on’ perhaps; no more and no less for what else was there to do anyway? He circled the church and went past the Rectory, his riding boots striking hard on the asphalt path so that a dormer window opened and the snow-white head of Parson Horsey appeared, like the head of a gnome emerging from a crooked little house in a fairy-tale book illustration.

‘You’re up and about betimes!’ the old man called. ‘Coast-watching, I imagine?’

‘Doing the rounds,’ Paul told him, ‘I can’t sit waiting for it at home.’

‘You never could,’ Horsey threw at him, with a chuckle, ‘and I envy you! The only good thing about this war is that one doesn’t have the obligatory tussle with one’s conscience over participating. I don’t think my Keith would have been content to be a stretcher-bearer in this flare-up!’

‘I don’t think so either!’ said Paul, and then, ‘What’s the latest on the evacuee situation?’

‘Another batch of thirty due on Saturday to replace some of those who have gone back, pining for fish and chips!’ said the rector. ‘I imagine this lot will stay, however. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if that dreadful little man didn’t start bombing London any day now. I hear there’s talk of sending shiploads of children to the States and Canada. Would you consider sending your John and Mary’s babies if you get the chance?’

Paul had already made his decision on this and had his answer pat. ‘No! Saving your presence, Rector, I’m damned if I would! This is where they were born and this is where they belong. They can take their chance with the rest of us and if they come through they’ll grow up with more self-respect than if they sat it out three thousand miles away! That may sound vainglorious but it’s how both Claire and Mary look at it. Besides, there’s the U-boats!’

‘I see your point,’ said Horsey and waving his hand withdrew, leaving Paul to remount and take the cliff path to the head of the Bluff, then down the gentle eastern slope of what had been Edward Derwent’s cliff meadow as far as the coastguard hut where Francis Willoughby had his lookout post.

Francis was there, sunning himself, with an old briar gripped between his teeth and close by was ‘Bon-Bon’, Smut’s only child by his French wife, brewing tea on an open fire. The boy seemed glad of Paul’s arrival as a break in the monotony of the long watch.

‘Have you two been up here all night?’ Paul asked and Francis said they had, taking turn and turn about because no reliefs were available.

‘Can’t you find a couple in the village?’ Paul demanded and Francis said perhaps but he was ‘not minded to go begging for help from townsfolk.’

‘You’ll have to find somebody when Bon-Bon’s deferred service expires,’ he said. ‘When do you have to report, Bon-Bon?’

‘Saturday,’ the boy said, ‘at Cardington. Basic training and then I’m down as an air-gunner.’

‘I’ll rustle up a couple of tradespeople,’ Paul told Francis, ‘it’s ridiculous you sitting here all night and then trying to run your farm in the daytime. You didn’t see anything unusual I suppose?’

‘Only a rabbit!’ said Bon-Bon with a grin and held up a largish buck by its ears. ‘I know you said not to waste ammo, Squire, but this one sat up an’ begged for it!’

‘You’re your father all over again!’ Paul said, and turned northwest, crossing the fields over which Tamer had once hurried with news of the wreck and striking the head of the Dell path short of the well Jem Pollock had dug when, as Lord of Low Coombe, he exercised dominion over two captive wives. From here he could have descended to the river road but it was still very early, not quite six-thirty, so he skirted Dell Wood, and the corner of the sloping meadow that had been added to the reconstructed Derwent holding, and rode along the southern crest of Shallowford Woods until he passed the buddleia bush with its hovering cloud of butterflies. Everything looked much the same, he decided, as though Hitler’s storming advance across Europe should have changed the very landscape, and he entered the woods near Hazel Potter’s squirrel oak and coaxed the big grey down the steep, tree-studded slope to the mere.

The bird chorus was deafening and behind it, like the wash of a distant sea, he could hear the summer insect murmur, always audible about here whenever the temperature rose above the sixties. As he rode he looked about him sharply, noting the great banks of foxgloves that grew in the clearings and the last of the bluebell drifts under the trees. Suppose they were not playing soldiers? Suppose, on a morning like this, next week or the week after, German parachutists should crash into this cover and Panzers storm ashore to batter the Coombe Bay cob and thatch into rubble? He forced himself to review the possibility. Where would they run and what would become of them? How and where could the enemy be stopped or even checked? There was no kind of precedent for such a calamity. Men of the Valley had gone out to fight in wars over the last thousand years but no fields and woods nearer than Normandy had been their battleground, if one excepted the local brawls, like the Wars of the Roses, the Great Rebellion, and Monmouth’s sorry venture in the west. There was, he supposed, some kind of parallel here. Getting on for three hundred years ago Jeffreys and Colonel Kirke had ridden into Paxtonbury, with their summary justice and hangman’s ropes, but today a far worse threat hovered over every man, woman and child living hereabouts. The Bloody Assizes had been a very short-lived tyranny, whereas Hitler and his Nazis promised to establish themselves for all time and boasted of a Reich that would last a thousand years! Nobody, not even the most optimistic in the Valley, had any illusions as to the kind of future that faced them if the Nazis did establish a permanent bridgehead. There would, no doubt, be murder and rape and pillage, on a scale that had not been practised in civilised countries since the Thirty Years War. And as he thought this and dropped down the last terrace to the mereside track, the heat went out of the sun and he shivered, finding the entire situation too terrible to contemplate. One would fight, he supposed, fight with shot-gun, Service revolver and pitchfork, with Molotov cocktails and brickbats, but what would it avail in the end? Up in Westminster Churchill was breathing fire and slaughter and undoubtedly people had taken heart from his words, but who among them had heard Winston’s ironic aside after making his famous fight-on-the-beaches oration? Paul had, having passed the time of day with the local. MP when he went into Paxtonbury to buy ammunition a week since. The Member had been close to Churchill when he sat down and claimed to have heard him say, in that curious, slurred growl of his, ‘I don’t know what we’ll fight with—bloody axes and pick-handles, I imagine!’

About half-way along the track, almost opposite the ruinous Folly and the island, he met Sam Potter, spare, grizzled and well into his sixties but still swinging along with the stride of a man half his age. Sam, he learned, had made an early call on Harold Codsall, also in search of 12-bore ammunition and the sight of him injected Paul with confidence. Sam, he thought, would defend his cottage to the last gasp and it would take more than a squad of stormtroopers to eject him. He said, ‘Any news of the family, Sam?’ and Sam told him that his daughter’s husband, an anti-aircraft gunner, had been among those rescued at Dunkirk the previous week and was due on leave any day. He seemed in need of reassurance himself for he hesitated when Paul was on the point of moving off, saying, half-apologetically, ‘What do ’ee maake of it, Squire? Tiz a bliddy ole mix-up, baint it? Do ’ee reckon they’ll try their luck at comin’ yer?’

‘They might,’ Paul said, ‘but if they do I daresay they’ll get more than they bargained for. The Army will need time to reorganise but we’ve still got a Navy and an Air Force!’

‘Arr!’ Sam said, brightening, ‘a man forgets that, but for once in my life, Squire, I’d welcome grey skies and a choppy sea outalong. If the Channel turned nasty I reckon us’d maake mincemeat o’ the bastards. ’Ave ’ee got enough chaps to cover the landslip-Bluff stretch night times?’

‘Francis Willoughby will need a partner when young Bon-Bon goes this weekend. Would you take on, until we can get properly organised and the police let us have some rifles?’

‘Arr, I’ll do that an’ glad to,’ Sam said, with a sigh. ‘I’ll walk over an’ fix it up with un after Joannie has put up a bit o’ breakfast.’ Then, looking up at him earnestly, ‘Tiz a real bliddy upset at our time o’ life, baint it?’

‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘it certainly is, Sam, but I don’t doubt we’ll come through it, the same as we did all our other troubles and you and I have seen plenty in the last forty years. My regards to Joannie!’ and he rode on, reflecting that, of all the Valley men, his link with Sam Potter was the strongest, for the instalment of Sam, as woodsman-gamekeeper, had been his first independent act as Squire of Shallowford.

He emerged from the woods and rode down the sunken lane to the stile at the top of the orchard. Looking at his watch he saw that it was ten minutes to seven and suddenly he felt both tired and hungry, ready for one of Claire’s generous breakfasts and maybe an hour’s nap in the study armchair. ‘I’m getting too old for this kind of larkabout,’ he told himself, ‘and so are most of us around here. Surely to God it’s time we had leisure to enjoy this kind of weather, without gadding up and down the Valley half the night!’ And then, bracing himself, he succumbed to the spur of vanity, putting his grey at the two-rail fence beside the stile, clearing it easily and recalling, as he swung erect in the saddle, a phrase about ‘young men skylarking over fences on their way home after a blank day in the hunting field’. It had not been such a blank night. He had seen the tribal spirit of the Valley at work again, with almost every able-bodied man from Blackberry Moor to the far side of the Bluff caught up in a collective task that reached back and back to the days when Celts and Normans had put themselves in a position of defence against French sea-raiders and Napoleon’s flat-bottomed barges. He unsaddled the grey and put him up in the stable, going in through the kitchen and putting the big iron kettle to boil for tea that he would take up to Claire. As he did so, however, he heard the telephone bell shrill and his heart missed a beat, although he told himself sternly that it was probably only the Whinmouth police, checking up on his local organisation. He went into the hall and lifted the receiver, and then his heart began to hammer and his eyes misted a little, for the voice at the end of the line was Simon’s and within it was a crackle of cheerfulness that was uncharacteristic of the boy. He said, breathlessly, ‘
Simon!
It’s really
you
! You’re . . . you’re home and dry, lad?’