The Green Gauntlet (14 page)

When Henry Pitts reached for his rook-rifle outside Sam Potter’s gate and found nothing more lethal than a bunch of stinging nettles he did not, at first, suspect theft but was inclined to attribute the absence of the gun to his own absent-mindedness and Sam’s homebrewed scrumpy. The latter consideration did not engage him for more than a moment. He had been drinking cider all his life and had been known to down eleven pints at The Raven on national occasions, such as Mafeking Night and the collapse of the General Strike in May 1926. Sam’s cider, of course, was powerful stuff but he had only swallowed three half-pint mugs and his head was clear and his gait steady.

After a moment’s puzzled reflection he returned to Sam’s kitchen and made a thorough search and when it failed to produce the missing weapon he went down on his hands and knees and crawled the length of the picket fence. Then, growing more puzzled every moment, he crossed the path where his countryman’s eye noted a fresh tear in a rhododendron stalk exactly opposite the gate. Muttering ‘the bliddy young thief’, and suspecting now that his gun had been borrowed by one of the youngsters following him as rearguard beaters, he pushed into the bushes where he found a far more sinister clue in the marshy ground adjoining the lake.

It consisted of four patterned depressions, two round and shallow and two, a calf’s-length away, sharper and deeper. Henry had floundered in mud for nearly three years on the Western Front and he recognised the tracks for what they were without any difficulty at all. The shallow depressions were made by knees and the ones behind them by toecaps. They told him that whoever had taken his rifle had been crouching there when he put it aside to open the gate and from this fact he deduced that the theft had been furtive and deliberate and not a casual act of borrowing as he had at first supposed. Having decided this he made an identification in a single leap. Only a hunted man would crouch in the bushes and watch for a chance to steal a weapon and the realisation of what his carelessness had achieved made him break out in a cold sweat.

‘By Christ!’ he said aloud, ‘tiz that bliddy Nazi! He’ll do mischief and I’ll be to blaame vor it.’

The certainty of being pilloried up and down the Valley as an accessory to nameless Nazi outrages acted as a spur to his powers of deduction. Having, albeit innocently, armed a truculent escaped prisoner, Henry took upon himself the full responsibility for recapturing the miscreant. On the assumption that Shratt would have turned away from the line of beaters he waddled along the margin of the lake looking for evidence of route and because the ground here was soft his search was rewarded by a whole series of footprints that recrossed the track about two hundred yards west of the cottage.

He was about to tackle the long timbered slope to the ridge when it occurred to him that he was weaponless so he hurried back along the path hoping to find one of the fire brooms stacked close to the fence and thinking he could use the stave as a quarterstaff. On reaching the rack, however, it struck him that Sam might have a much handier weapon in his tool shed and so he had, a massive, six-foot pitchfork, with curved wooden prongs, the kind of agricultural implement that had been out of fashion in the Valley when Henry was a boy. He seized it gratefully and returned to the islet at a stumbling trot, plunging up the overgrown slope without the customary breather that he accepted as obligatory between all bursts of energy these days.

The ascent nearly killed him. At the point where the trees fell away his heart was pounding against his ribs and he was bathed in sweat but he saw something that made him redouble rather than slacken his pace on the easier slope down to the Big House. It was the stealthy retreat of Otto Shratt from the forecourt to the stableyard after his initial reconnaissance of the car.

Henry Pitts knew his limitations. He was sixteen stone and badly out of condition, even for a man nudging sixty-five, but he also knew his duty and was aware that, in the absence of visible allies, he must tackle this man alone, notwithstanding the disparity between a loaded rook-rifle and a wooden-pronged pitchfork. At the same time the lessons of the Somme and Passchendaele returned to him in his hour of need and he checked his pace somewhat, deciding on the indirect approach. Instead of setting up a view-halloo and rushing upon his quarry he took advantage of the eastern side of the hedgerow and worked his way down through the Shallowford rose-garden and across the edge of the eastern paddock to the double gates at the foot of the drive. There was no doubt in his mind that Shratt intended to steal Claire Craddock’s runabout and that he was even now searching the stables for petrol. There was only one vehicular exit from Shallowford House and for this reason the big iron gates had never been closed in Henry’s memory. He would shut them, wait in ambush for Shratt to get out of the car, and then attack him before he could regain it, preferably whilst his back was turned.

Laying aside his pitchfork he grabbed hold of the rusted ironwork on his side of the drive but he had not bargained for the seals of the years The heavy gate, sunk on one hinge and disconnected from the other did not yield an inch. Weeds anchored it to the ground and its sagging weight had dug a deep furrow in the gravel. Desperately he ran across the drive and put shoulder to the other gate reasoning that half a barrier was better than none but this was as rooted as its fellow. Lacking crowbar there seemed no hope at all of implementing his plan.

At that moment, when he was exerting his not inconsiderable strength on the lodge half of the gate, his attention was distracted by an outcry from the head of the drive. A woman was shouting and a second or so later there was a crash of glass and a single shot backed by the thin roar of a motor-engine. The sounds injected guilt into Henry with the thrust of a blunt hypodermic needle. Someone—Claire Craddock most probably—was being shot down in her own house by a Nazi, and that Nazi had been equipped to kill by his—Henry Pitts’—carelessness. The realisation of this caused him so much dismay that he stopped heaving and stood forlornly in the centre of the gateway staring up the drive and at a loss what action to take.

Then the decision was made for him. Two more shots and a soft explosion prefaced the appearance of the bull-nosed Morris as it lurched round the first curve of the drive, mounted the grass verge and regained the roadway in a matter of yards. It approached him uncertainly but at a surprising speed and it is to his credit that he did not leap behind the gate pillar but stood his ground, as though he intended to use himself as a living barrier to the car’s further progress.

Then another unexpected thing happened. The car began to lurch, first to its offside then to its nearside, and finally appeared to continue its descent almost broadside on to within about five yards of where Henry stood. Lacking even his pitchfork Henry resorted to the only means of aggression left to him. He began to make threatening gestures and hurl abuse at the approaching enemy, prancing up and down like an elderly witch-doctor in personal combat with a legion of devils. Improbably his incantations seemed to have some effect for the car, now seen to contain not only the German but also young John Craddock, sheered away to Henry’s right, mounted the verge again and crashed broadside on into the gate pillar after which it bounced back and canted over at an angle of forty-five degrees.

To his immense relief Henry saw John scramble out, duck through the paddock railings that were now supporting the car, and run diagonally across the paddock at what Henry later described as ‘a bliddy hell of a lick’. At the same time the German bobbed up from the shattered offside of the car and he too seemed to be unhurt for he glared at Henry and at once reached back into the debris for his rifle.

Henry himself was never specific on what occurred from that moment on. All that is certain is that Henry found his pitchfork and the German found his rifle so that they confronted one another at a range of about twelve feet. Something made the German hesitate. Either he was dazed by the impact or sufficiently clearheaded to reflect upon the dire penalties of shooting a civilian whilst on the run. Whatever the reason he turned aside, scrambled from the wreckage of the Morris and made a dash for the hedge abutting the lodge. Henry knew that pursuit on foot was out of the question. Even had he not been blown by his previous exertions he would have lost his man in a hundred yards. So he did what seemed to come naturally to him and used his pitchfork as a javelin, hurling it across the width of the drive with the full strength of his arm.

It was the luckiest toss imaginable. Its prongs enclosed Shratt’s neck just as he was gathering himself for a leap down from the hedge and the terrible weight of the blow not only precipitated him head over heels into Maureen Rudd’s delphiniums, but almost broke his neck into the bargain.

Henry, hardly able to believe his good luck, gaped at the hedge for half a minute before running across to the gate and entering the garden. When he saw his adversary flat on his face, and Smut’s rook-rifle backsight-deep in the soft soil of the aster bed, he roared with triumph. He had every right to exult. Shratt was the first man brought down by a javelin hereabouts for more than a thousand years.

Claire, still holding the deer-rifle, was beside him in a moment and together they stared down at the prostrate foe. He noticed that her face, ordinarily a pleasing pink, was the colour of clotted cream and that her hands shook so violently that they had no business to be holding a loaded firearm. Taking the rifle he said quietly, ‘Did ’ee do any mischief upalong?’

‘No,’ Claire said, ‘the boy is all right and Thirza just fainted. He is a German, isn’t he?’

‘Aar,’ Henry said, ‘’Er jumped a train backalong but I dorn reckon he’ll try it again for a spell.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘No, he baint dead but he’s out cold. I’ll watch un while you go an’ ring the Command Post an’ police.’

‘I can’t. He ripped the phone out when he took John away.’

‘Did ’er now? Well then, us’d better drag un inzide the lodge. Tak’ his heels, will ’ee?’

But in the event there was no need to manhandle the prisoner for at that moment, horn blaring, a squad of Royal Marines raced up the river road, the sergeant explaining breathlessly that they had heard shots whilst beating the edge of the Moor.

‘We’ll take over, Ma’am,’ he said, jubilantly, as though he personally had made the capture. ‘Who knocked him out?’

‘I did,’ said Henry, without pride.

‘With your bare fists, gaffer?’

‘No, with that bliddy pitchfork.’

‘Christ!’ said the sergeant and left it at that.

Henry gathered up pitchfork and rook-rifle and stayed until they had lifted Shratt into the troop-carrier and driven him away. Then, with Claire, he walked up the drive to see how young John was faring. The boy did not seem much the worse for his adventure. In retrospect it seemed a splendid thing to have participated in such a dramatic incident and he was careful to remind them of his own contribution to the climax

‘I pulled the wheel round,’ he said. ‘Mother made it easy by pooping the tyre and he was having to use both hands to keep her on the road.’

‘That was right smart of you,’ said Henry, but sadly, for somehow he did not feel that his javelin throwing at the gate squared his idiocy in leaving a loaded gun about in the presence of a dangerous fugitive. It was several days before the deadly accuracy of his cast obliterated the magnitude of his folly but this line of reasoning was not general in the Valley. Nobody but Henry remembered how Otto ‘von’ Shratt had acquired the weapon but the manner of his capture passed into Valley legend within a month. Anyone passing the asphalt playgrounds of Coombe Bay or Whin mouth in the next year or so might have heard vulgar little boys chanting four lines of doggerel composed, within hours of the incident, by some unknown Shallowford jester with a sense of occasion and no particular regard for accuracy. Like ‘The Ram of Derbyshire’, and other strictly localised folklore, it was an attempt on the part of provincials to ensure that their achievements were not entirely lost to posterity. It ran:

‘Jerry come to Shallowford

Us woulden let un pass

Us stuck a wooden pitchfork

Right up his arse.’

Henry never challenged the implied arrogance of the ‘us’, or the regional accuracy of the impact but sometimes, in his declining years, he would pass the Shallowford entrance and pause awhile, glancing at the delphinium bed and murmuring, with intense pride, ‘Bliddy spot on, it was! Coulden’ve done better with a twelve-bore, I coulden.’

Chapter Five

Tour of Inspection

I

O
n the first Saturday of the holidays John Craddock, eight years old and probably the most self-contained person in the Sorrel Valley, packed his knapsack, slung his binoculars and box camera, and without telling his mother where he was going set off across the pasture land behind Home Farm in the direction of the Royal Marine camp on the moor.

Claire watched him go, restraining an impulse to call and ask his destination, for she had long ago come to terms with the inscrutability of her youngest child and had never, from the moment she had realised she was carrying another child at the almost indecent age of fifty, understood his place in the pattern of family life. Paul, she suspected, was equally baffled, although father and son got along well enough, and sometimes seemed to her like a couple of elderly relatives making polite conversation. He did not even look like any of the others, although there were moments when she thought she could see the stamp of a boyish Paul Craddock in the long face, serious eyes, and slightly mutinous set of the jaw. As for the Derwent half it was nowhere to be found, and Claire sometimes found herself looking at him with the same puzzled exasperation as she had experienced when Doctor Maureen assured her, with hoots of laughter, that the second honeymoon she and Paul had stolen just after their silver wedding anniversary had resulted in this unlooked-for bonus.

She said, as Paul came in and sat down to a late breakfast, ‘That boy is off again. Where do you suppose he goes with all that equipment he lugs about?’

‘God knows,’ Paul said, ‘bird-watching probably. You’re not worried about him losing himself, are you?’

‘Of course I’m not,’ she replied, indignantly, ‘I should think any child of mine would have enough sense to find his way home by dark but there is something about him … something I can’t put a name to … what I mean is, he never seems to need anyone!’

‘Lucky chap!’ Paul said, and returned to his toast and newspaper, but this morning she was not disposed to be shrugged off and said, ‘Oh, put that paper down, Paul! It’s all rubbish anyway and you can hear far more up-to-date news on the wireless. What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t seem normal. I asked him if he’d like a friend to stay for a bit, or if he would like to go up to his aunt’s in Gloucestershire where he could ride with some of her pupils, but he looked almost outraged at the idea. None of the others were the least bit like him at that age. The Pair had each other, and Whiz and Young Claire were always filling the house with young people, and even Mary tagged along behind Rumble wherever she went. But that boy lives in a world of his own.’

‘It’s our world as well. There isn’t a soul he doesn’t know by Christian name between here and the main line, or a bush either, judging by those sketches of his.’

‘You mean you’ve been prying up in his room?’

‘Not prying, just looking about a bit. He’s got so many enthusiasms. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t need friends.’

He had forgotten his newspaper and customary fourth cup of tea. ‘Have you got a minute? I’ll show you what I mean.’ He filled his mouth with toast and lunged out of the room before she could protest but she trotted after him, saying, ‘I’m not sure I like rummaging among his things behind his back, Paul,’ but Paul only laughed and said, ‘Rubbish! We’re entitled to know something about him and he’ll not volunteer much. Besides, he knows I look at his books and drawings. I had quite a talk with him up there after we had that letter from his headmaster with last term’s report.’

She remembered the letter, a guardedly phrased communication, stressing the boy’s preoccupation with what seemed to the Reverend Oliver Bowles, headmaster of the Paxtonbury Preparatory School, time-wasting and unorthodox subjects, among them free drawing, ornithology, photography, and even entomology. It had not been a critical letter but had contained tacit advice to them to bring the boy’s mind to bear more directly upon subjects that would enable him to pass Common Entrance.

‘Well, he’s certainly got brains,’ Claire said reluctantly, ‘but what kind of brains exactly? Will he ever make a farmer, do you suppose?’

‘Now how the devil can I tell you that at his age?’

She knew she was probing a tender spot and did not care to pursue this line of enquiry. With Simon spending his entire youth immersed in politics, and The Pair making a fortune out of scrap metal, she was aware that Paul put small faith in transmitting his enthusiasms to any of their children, and this, in itself, was odd for the Derwents had farmed High Coombe for generations and Paul himself hardly gave a thought to anything not rooted in red Devon soil. She followed him into the surprisingly tidy bedroom that had once been Simon’s, and after that Rumble Patrick’s, deciding that neither of the previous occupants had used it as anything but a sleeping place whereas John, whom she still thought of as hardly more than a toddler, had converted it into a cross between a library, a studio and a museum.

‘“I converse with myself alone and with my books”,’ Paul quoted and pointed to two rows of volumes devoted to British birds, woodcraft, fieldcraft, butterflies, fossils, amateur photography and other specifically outdoor subjects. There were two other books seldom found on the bedside shelf of an eight-year-old. One was White’s
Natural History of Selborne
,
the other some second-rate reproductions of the French Impressionists. Paul, who seemed to know his way around up here, showed her round like a professional guide. Under the window was a glass case containing more than fifty eggs, and on the dressing-table a collection of what seemed at first glance shapeless pieces of stone but on closer inspection were seen to be fossils. He had even rigged up a cupboard as a darkroom and some unsuccessful prints lay on the shelf among an assortment of jay’s feathers. For some reason the wide range of interests advertised here comforted her and she said, ‘Well, of the whole lot of them he’s obviously the most likely to take after you. Did you direct his attention to these kind of hobbies?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he said emphatically, ‘and I didn’t have to either. He already knows far more than I do about birds and insects and when did you see me grubbing for fossils? But this isn’t what I wanted to show you.’

He pulled out a drawer and took out a sketchbook, opening it at random and showing her a vigorous drawing of two men at work with a double-handed saw. It had nothing in common with the kind of pencil-sketches Claire remembered making as a child; there was truth and vitality in every line, and the back muscles of the sawyer turned away from the artist were seen as ripples under the taut skin. She knew nothing about drawing or painting but she did not have to be told that here was proof, not only of close observation, but of creativity. She said, once again confused, ‘It seems remarkable at his age. Oughtn’t we to do something to encourage it? I mean, those school reports of his weren’t anything to write home about, and perhaps he should go to a place where he could be taught this kind of thing properly? There are such places, aren’t there?’

She had, he reflected, a rather naïve faith in his erudition and judgment in these matters and he knew its origin. She had seen him derive a good deal of pleasure from books left behind in the library by their predecessors, the Lovells, and had stood beside him at local auctions when he had put in a bid for a piece of porcelain, or a picture that took his fancy.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there are such places but I wouldn’t care to let him plough a furrow of that kind at eight. It seems to me that he hasn’t yet made up his mind what dominates his interests and he’ll have to make that discovery for himself. Most kids, growing up in a place like this, have passing obsessions with birds and eggs and insects and even cameras, but it’s too early to head him in any one direction. I can only tell you one thing about him that’s rare. He has a genius for organisation. Look at those hand-printed labels under the eggs, and the things he has written about the fossils. He got the idea from the local natural history museum of course, but the point is the pains he has taken to docket and arrange. Look at these sketches. Each of them is dated, and most of them are titled. That’s far more unusual at his age than sketching and collecting, and I’m wondering if there is any relevance in what old Parson Horsey was telling me the other day after John had got him to show how brass rubbings were made. Horsey is quite taken with the kid and says it proves a theory.’

‘What theory is that?’

Paul said, with a broad grin, ‘The child of mature parents is always the brainiest. Something of the experience of life is supposed to be transmitted to a latecomer. It isn’t just Horsey’s notion, of course. I’ve heard it before but in our case it fits. He’s certainly the most original of the litter! Do you remember how outraged you were when you realised you were having him?’

‘I was thinking of it only this morning when I saw him mooching off with his little knapsack but I rather hoped you had forgotten!’

‘Not me,’ he told her, ‘I don’t forget things like that. It was just before we lost young Claire and I always thought John’s arrival helped us ride that one out, but don’t imagine I associate him with sadness. As a matter of fact I want to smile whenever I think of it. Do you remember that glorious romp we had up in Anglesey, the one that produced him? It was like being given a week of our youth back. We’re not likely to have that experience again.’

‘You don’t do so badly for sixty-plus,’ she said and as always when they were alone she felt a surge of affection for him and reaching out grabbed his shoulders and kissed him. ‘Let John find his own way around like we had to,’ she said, happy to dismiss the problem. ‘At least we can depend upon him being the final presentation! By God, you’ve had your moneysworth, haven’t you? Six, and all nicely spaced over thirty-four years.’

‘It’s often puzzled me that there weren’t twenty-six,’ he said, catching her mood and they went down to finish a leisurely breakfast, glad of the privacy of the house and the sudden stillnesses that came to it these days.

II

B
efore the days of wireless and the regular delivery of London newspapers in the Valley, Paul had made a habit of riding the rounds like a leisurely despatch-rider charged with acquainting his tenants and their dependants with the substance of national events. Nowadays, of course, it would have been a pointless occupation. Every farm and cottage had its radio set and there were more than a score of telephones in the Valley, excluding those at the camp on the moor. Since Local Defence Volunteers had been upgraded to Home Guard urgent messages were passed through the camp exchange to the Observer Corps lookout post on the Bluff that had a line connecting it to the permanently manned Home Guard depot and the resident constable’s house, in Coombe Bay. It was all very sophisticated compared with the old days. For every horseman you saw in the Valley there were at least three motor-cyclists. Paul took his turn of duty with the Home Guard and sometimes spent a night in the eastern outpost, half-way along the bay to Whinmouth, but whenever he rode nowadays he did it for exercise and went inland through the woods.

‘Squire’s Rounds’, as they had once called them, were still made by a Craddock but in the person of young John, and during school holidays he covered a great deal of ground on his short, sturdy legs. Old timers like Henry Pitts and Smut Potter thought him rather comical, a parody of his over-conscientious father, but some of the womenfolk, and even some of the men training up at the camp, were concerned at the amount of gear he always carried and tried to reason with him, sometimes going so far as to employ googoo talk in the attempt, as though he had been three instead of eight and more familiar with the terrain than the best of them. He would never show impatience with their questions but would listen politely and then plod on his way, his head moving from side to side, as though to ensure that he missed nothing of interest.

Perhaps Paul knew him better than he supposed for he was close to the truth when he told Claire the boy had yet to find an overriding interest. He was interested in everything and in everybody, in colour patterns and sun patterns, in the sedge blades that guarded the shallows of the Sorrel like a forest of short, Roman swords in the travelling ‘V’ of a vole’s progress downstream, in soldiers at drill and soldiers at ease, in the cackling sneer of the gull prospecting the camp dump, in the brilliant flash of the kingfisher and the monotonous call of the cuckoo. He knew both the common and local names of every wild flower that grew about here, and where and when it could be found. He knew the many eccentricities of the older inhabitants, the emphasis they put into their favourite swear words and the kind of thing that made them swear. He could have described the badges of rank on the sleeves and shoulders of every man up at the camp and he knew, from the speech idioms of new drafts, the county from which they had been recruited. Whatever he missed with his eye or neglected to memorise, he recorded with his camera or sketchbook that he usually carried along with his sandwiches and bottle of cold tea in his knapsack. He haunted the lanes and hedges and coppices of the area like an industrious but unhurried bee prospecting each foxglove bell for the nectar of knowledge, and when he returned home, tired but modestly triumphant, he would empty his box camera and his knapsack on the bed and arrange his day’s haul into some kind of order.