Saville (32 page)

‘To your left. Left,’ Stafford called to the boy, who was spraying them with his feet behind.

They scrambled ashore as the dinghy reached the bank,
Stafford leaning up to grasp a branch. He held the boat while the other boy climbed out. The third figure, still in the water, was slowly clambering to his feet: black mud stains marked his shoulders.

Stafford, releasing the branch and taking the paddle, pushed off the dinghy into the middle of the pond.

‘Ay! Neville,’ the other two had said. ‘
Ay, Neville
,’ they called, ‘come back.’

Stafford leaned on the oar, still standing. His laughter echoed beneath the branches of the copse.

‘Ay! You rotter,’ the two boys called.

The whiteness of their legs and bodies showed up against the darkness of the trees behind.

‘Ay, Neville. Bring it back.’

Stafford pushed the oar into the pond, found the bottom, and pushed the dinghy on.

‘Ay, Neville.’

The boat rocked with the momentum of Stafford’s laughter. The two boys began flinging spray across.

‘Ay, Nev. Bring it back.’

Stafford shook his head, kneeling in the boat, still laughing..

‘It’s too muddy to get back,’ the boys had said.

‘Swim, then,’ Stafford said.

‘It’s too shallow,’ one of the boys had said.

Stafford got up; he wiped his eyes.

‘Go on, you rotter: bring it back.’

‘Come and fetch it.’

‘Go on, Nev: be a sport,’ they said.

‘How much is it worth?’ he said.

‘How much do you want?’

‘How much have you got?’

‘Go on: we’ve got nothing.’ They gestured at their trunks.

Stafford, having reached the bank, had sat down by the boat.

‘Go on, Nev. Be a sport.’

Perhaps Colin had moved, or one of the two boys on the island had glanced across.

Stafford turned; for a moment he gazed up, confused. He shielded his eyes.

‘Hi,’ Colin said. He nodded his head.

Still confused, Stafford got up; the two boys on the island had called again.

‘Who is it, Nev? Come on, then, bring it back.’

‘Oh, it’s you, then,’ Stafford said, his voice quiet now and suddenly flat. ‘What’re you doing here?’ he added.

‘I’m working,’ he said. He gestured to the field behind.

‘What at?’

He gestured to the field again.

‘Stooking,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘Money.’

Stafford turned to the boat; he scarcely glanced at the field at all.

‘Are you working, then?’

He nodded his head.

‘I’ll see you, then.’ He climbed into the boat. He pushed it off.

From the field, the bony man had called: the car, in a cloud of dust, was bouncing along the track from the direction of the sheds.

He went back across the field and was already stooking, stooping to the sheaves, by the time the car pulled up and the farmer, with the foreman and the bow-legged man, climbed out.

They worked into the evening; the farmer stooked as well. At six o’clock he went to the car and got out a flask of tea. They sat in the shade of the hedge, drinking the tea from metal mugs and eating sandwiches which he’d also brought.

Earlier, shortly after the arrival of the car, Stafford and the two boys had emerged from the edge of the copse, carrying the boat between them. They’d glanced over to where he and the four men worked, Stafford walking some distance ahead, the two boys gazing over, Stafford scarcely glancing once he’d reached the track. He disappeared beneath the trees in the direction of the house, the two boys, white-skinned against the shadows, labouring to lift the boat across the fence. ‘Nev? Nev,’ he heard them call.

It was growing dark by the time he got back home. The bike had no lamp; he cycled in the coolness, his eyes half-closed. A
new momentum had taken over his life. All he could think of now were the lines of stooks, the glimpse he’d had, in the half-darkness, of the field they would work the following day, the stooking of the first field now completed; having washed off the sweat and dust, he went to bed, brushing aside his mother’s complaints, his father’s questions.

He sank down in a daze and fell asleep.

He worked for seven weeks at the farm; eight fields were opened up, cut, stooked: men from another farm came with a red-painted thresher driven by a tractor with a fly-wheel as large as the rear wheels themselves. Once he saw the two boys who’d been wearing costumes cycling along the track that led from the large house past the sheds to the near-by road; they gave no sign; both had auburn hair and whistled cheerfully to one another as they pedalled past. On other days occasionally, he could hear their shouts coming from beyond the trees that surrounded the house.

The corn was threshed; at the end of the seventh week, late on Saturday after working overtime, the farmer told him he wouldn’t be needed again.

‘Not that I couldn’t use you, mind. But I’ve no more fields to cut round here.’

He gave him his money as he left the field.

The following day he set off on the bike again; he visited the farms he’d been to before. He found new ones farther afield, but late that evening, cycling home, he’d passed a field only a few miles from the village where a tractor and binder were working with no one stooking, and he had gone to the farm building a few hundred yards away and got a job to start the following day.

The farm stood at the foot of a hill; a stream ran past its door; a foot-bridge led across the stream to the farmhouse itself: the farmer’s name was also Smith.

‘Tha mu’n be on thy own,’ he said, ‘unless I can get som’body in by tomorrow. I’ve two fields cutting and nob’dy to stook,’ and yet, the next morning, when he started work, two men in dark brown uniforms were standing by the gate: one was tall and thin, with long, black hair, the other small and broad-shouldered, with blond hair cut short, and colourless eyes.

‘This is Fritz,’ the farmer said, indicating the shorter of the two, ‘and this is Luigi,’ he added. He indicated the other man, who stooped down and shook his hand. ‘They’re prisoners of war, so if they try to escape you’ll let me know.’ The farmer laughed, the two strangely contrasted prisoners laughing with him. ‘They’ve to be back in camp, tha knows, by six, so if there’s any hanky-panky tha mu’n march ’em to the gate.’ He turned with a wink, thickening his accent. ‘They’re all right,’ he added. ‘I’ve had ’em afore: but tek no notice of the way they wuk.’

He spent the next two weeks working with the Italian and the German. The former had been a soldier, captured in the desert, the other a pilot shot down in southern England. They spoke, in his presence, a made-up language of signs and gestures, but whenever he was alone with either one they spoke English fluently with a slight, half-mocking, thickened accent.

His father had cycled past the field one day. Colin saw him leaning by the hedge, his bike propped up against the gate.

He went across, slowly, wiping his face.

‘This is where you work, then, is it?’

The field was up the road from the farm, on the lower slope of an adjoining hill. In the farthest distance, on a clear day, were visible the buildings of the town, the cathedral spire, the wedge-shaped tower of the town-hall. Now, with the day overcast, all that was visible was the broad sweep of the field itself.

‘That’s thy two prisoners, is it?’ His father gazed down the field, between the stooks, to where the tall Italian and the stocky German were lifting sheaves, arguing, flinging them down. Sometimes they’d dismantle a stook in fear that one of their own sheaves had been incorporated by the other; they always worked separately, but never far apart.

Even as his father watched they had begun to quarrel.

‘You no good.’

‘
You
no good.’

‘You bad.’

‘
You
bad.’

‘
Schweinhund
.’

‘
Bastard
.’

They started fighting, their gestures as stylized as their conversation.

His father laughed; he watched them with a slow amazement, the tall, boneless figure of the Italian coiling and uncoiling around the squat, muscular outline of the fair-haired German. ‘Sithee, then.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘It’s a wonder they do any work at all,’ he said.

‘I do nearly all of it,’ Colin said. It was really the stooks he wanted his father to see, the straightness of the rows, the way they ran down the profile of the field. His father smiled.

‘I can see they’ve got their heads screwed on,’ he said.

The two figures now were rolling on the ground: they disappeared behind the sheaves, re-appeared for a moment, the German on top, then, a moment later, the Italian.

‘Don’t they ever have a guard?’ his father said.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ Colin said.

‘They mu’n escape, tha knows, if they don’t watch out.’

‘I don’t think they want to,’ he said, and shook his head.

The prisoners’ camp was a mile up the road. He’d cycled past it one evening, on his way to Saxton: rows of wooden huts ran back from the road, surrounded by barbed wire and overgrown hedges. Only one soldier was visible, stooping down by a car, in his shirt-sleeves, examining its engine.

‘Do they spend all day doing that?’ his father said.

‘They work sometimes, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose they have any need to, though,’ he added.

‘Nay, they’ve been caught fighting this country, lad. I hope thy’s not forgotten it,’ his father said.

The two men now were standing up; one was dusting down the other’s clothes; then, as a final gesture, ceremoniously bowing to one another, they both shook hands.

‘They might be all right on a stage, but this is a war-effort they’re supposed to be helping.’ His father gestured to the fields around. ‘Every bit done here leaves space in a ship.’

He gripped the gate between his hands.

‘If they mu’n not help the ones who’re looking after them they mu’n lock ’em up: that’s my view,’ his father said. A sudden smile, nervous, half-expectant, crossed his face as the two men, seeing him by the gate, called to Colin and came across.

‘This is my father,’ Colin said, and added, almost as a provocation, ‘He’s come to see you work.’

‘Work?’ The broad, tanned face of the German turned to gaze up at the long, mournful face of the Italian beside him.

‘Work?’ the Italian said, imitating the German’s accent.

‘We leave all the work to Colin, Mr Saville,’ the German said, his accent now so casual that his father looked at him in some alarm, almost as if, mentally, he’d stood to attention and begun to salute.

‘Aye, he works very hard,’ his father said, glancing at the field. On numerous occasions since his first week of work, his father had said, ‘They’re paying you a boy’s wages for a man’s work: I know what bargains these farmers get.’ Now he added, ‘The only trouble is people take advantage of how hard he works,’ and repeated ‘advantage’ as if uncertain that the German had understood his meaning.

‘Oh, we help him all we can,’ the German said, and added, ‘We help Colin all we can, Luigi. Help.’

‘Help,’ the Italian said, bowing slowly to his father, his dark eyes examining him now in some confusion.

‘Back to work, Luigi,’ the German said, and added, ‘Work.’

The Italian bowed; he examined his father a moment longer then turned back slowly towards the field.

‘I suppose you have to make allowances,’ his father said. ‘If we were prisoners on the other side I don’t suppose we’d work too hard. They do summat, I suppose,’ he added.

He turned to the bike.

‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ he said.

Colin watched his father ride off along the lane; he could see him some time later, riding along the road that led off across the fields, his small figure stooping to the bike, unaware perhaps that he was still visible from the field for he never looked back.

‘Your father is a farmer, too?’ the German said when he went back to the sheaves.

‘A miner.’

‘A miner?’ He added, ‘He’s not a farmer, Luigi. He works underneath the ground.’ He made a shovelling motion with his hand, pointing down, then fanning his hands out slowly either side.

‘Ah,’ the tall man said. He spoke in Italian for several seconds.

‘Luigi says: does he dig for gold?’

‘For coal,’ he said.

‘Coal,’ the German said. He added, ‘Carbon.’

‘Ah,’ the Italian said again and with a mournful gesture shook his head.

‘And when you grow older, will you become a miner, too?’ the German said.

‘No.’

‘What will you become?’ His light-blue eyes gazed steadily at him.

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said.

‘A farmer?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘A soldier?’

He shook his head.

‘Will you leave your beautiful land? Will you travel the world?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Never go to Italy. Italy bad,’ the German said.

‘Germany bad,’ the Italian said.

‘Go to the Mediterranean,’ the German said. ‘Blue seas, blue skies.’ He gestured around. ‘Nothing at all like you have it here. Go to Africa. Go to
Greece
. But not to Italy. Italy bad.’

‘Germany bad,’ the Italian said and, as Colin stooped to the sheaves, the two men fought again.

He worked at the second farm until two days before he started school. He called at the farmhouse in the evening to collect his wage. The door to the kitchen had been standing open; the farmer’s wife was baking at a stove inside.

She was a small, stoutish woman, her face inflamed from the heat of the fire. On some evenings, when they were working overtime, she’d come to the field with tea and scones, bringing the tea in a metal jug, already sweetened and mixed with milk. Now she came across with a large round cake.

‘I’ve baked this for you, love. Just something to remember us by.’

‘He lives on fresh air, this lad,’ the farmer said. ‘Just look at his muscles. He’s grown a foot with us at least.’

The cake was slipped into a paper bag. He put it in his own bag, along with the wage.

‘And he’s kept a guard on them prisoners an’ all,’ the farmer added.

‘Has he?’ The farmer’s wife came to the door to see him off.