The Green Gauntlet (39 page)

Paul looked at him so bleakly that the lawyer shifted in his chair. ‘All right, let it pass but I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t put forward these ideas. You wouldn’t like anything of that kind to happen, I suppose?’

‘Only over my carcass,’ Paul said, ‘and not even then, for I’m damned if I’d rest easy. Some of those oaks have been growing there since the Wars of the Roses and even the beeches are half-way through their second century. Who the hell am I to chop them down for cash and replace them with rows of little pink boxes? The next thing you’ll suggest is we make a Lido out of the Mere, or hack a golf course out of Blackberry Moor.’

‘I daresay it will come to that,’ Wonnacott said seriously, ‘but not in our lifetime. You’d better sit down and listen to this covenant. I’ve called the company ‘Shallowford Estates Limited’. Does that suit you?’

‘Yes,’ Paul said, his humour restored by the man’s obvious sympathy with his outlook, ‘it has a dynastic ring and my wife will enjoy the joke. She’s always telling me I see myself as a biblical patriarch!’

He settled himself and listened to the lawyer’s sermon, marvelling at archaic words like ‘messuage’ and ‘appurtenance’, but the terms of the document were simple. Shallowford Estates Limited was now, nominally at least, to be administered by a board of directors, consisting of himself as Chairman, Simon, Andy, Rumble Patrick (representing Mary) and Whiz, who would serve more practical purpose on the board than her husband, for at least she had hunted the country. There were, in all, ten thousand shares, Paul holding three thousand, the remainder being distributed equally among the other four or their nominees. Claire was paid secretary and Young John, too young to hold shares, was named in the new will as heir to that part of the estate Paul retained for his own use or ‘enjoyment’ as Wonnacott put it. All in all Paul left the office feeling that he had achieved something lasting, especially when Wonnacott reminded him of the amount of tax liability he had shed.

As he went to collect his car in Whinmouth Square he saw Smut Potter and Henry Pitts emerging from the Maltster’s Arms, Henry wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and at the same moment they saw him. ‘Us was just havin’ a quick pint on V.J., Maister,’ Henry said. ‘Shall us go back and ’ave another?’

‘No,’ Paul told them, ‘I’ve got an afternoon’s letter-writing ahead of me. I’ve just come from Wonnacott, the lawyer. I’ve been forming a Company of the estate but don’t spread it around until I’ve had a chance to talk to Rumble Patrick. He’s one of the shareholders.’

He saw that Smut was the more interested of the two. The floating of a private company, he decided, was beyond Henry’s limited comprehension. Smut said, ‘Ah, us heard you’d sold off they Coombe Bay lots, Squire. Tell ’ee the truth, the Missus was on at me to tackle ’ee and buy our bakery. ‘Squire’ll let ’ee have it cheaper than he’d zell to a vorriner!’ she said, but I wasn’t ’avin’ any. As long as I’m a tenant youm zaddled with all the repairs, baint ’ee?’

‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘but Marie was right. You could have had it cheaper if you had come to me. Who bought it? Do you know?’

‘Not zo far I don’t,’ Smut said, ‘but I baint bothered. They can’t stick the rent up more’n a shillin’ or two and they can’t shift me so long as I’m a zittin’ tenant.’

‘I ought to have given you the chance, Smut,’ he said, ‘but I left everything to Wonnacott,’ but Smut only grinned and said, ‘Aw, dornee worry, Squire. Us all knows you woulden diddle a Valley man but even you have to watch out for yourself these days.’

‘I never knowed Smut when he didn’t,’ said Henry and then went on to talk with relish of the enormous blasting power of the two bombs that had just finished the war in the East. After they had parted, and Paul was driving up the hill to the crest of the moor, he thought it odd that a genial soul like Henry, who had been outraged by the order against fraternisation with the Germans after the 1918 armistice, should find so much pleasure in the thought of thousands of Japanese civilians being, in Henry’s quaint phrase, ‘blowed to tatters’ and supposed it had to do with the unspeakable way the Japs had treated their prisoners. ‘It’s also the times,’ he told himself, ‘for everyone around here is getting tougher and tougher and Smut was right when he said a man has to look out for himself. After all, I’m doing just that, for this handing over of the estate to others is no more than a tax-fiddle and I’ve made damned sure of my own home and the woods behind it. I wouldn’t part with those while there’s breath in my body.’

Then, as he coasted down from the moor and saw the silver thread of the Sorrel gleaming in August sunshine, he felt surprise and relief that he had lived to see yet another war relegated to the history books. In the summer of 1940 it had seemed impossible that one among them would have a chance to begin over again, as they had in the long, hot summer of 1919, but at least this war hadn’t exacted such a fearful toll from the Valley as its predecessor. It had claimed one of his sons, and part of another; it had destroyed Simon’s wife Rachel and Connie Eveleigh’s husband; it had blasted Periwinkle to rubble and, here and there, in the Coombe Bay area, a familiar young face had been blotted out, but this was not an impossible price to pay for preventing some thick-necked German from establishing himself at Paxtonbury and sending his thugs to hammer on Valley doors in the middle of the night. What, he wondered, would happen now? Would there be the same optimism as there had been in 1919, when everyone had looked to the League of Nations to prevent the same thing happening again? He doubted it very much, for people—even simple countrymen like Smut Potter—had grown cynical and who could blame them? The best one could hope for was a long respite, long enough to last him out, and by then politicians and people generally might have learned a little sense. He stopped ruminating, put his foot down and hurried home to write his V.J. letters.

VI

T
he reactions, when they reached him, were interesting, for they emphasised the psychological differences of his children.

Whiz wrote in her usual formal prose, thanking him very politely on behalf of Ian and herself, and saying that when Ian retired he would ‘probably like to build a nice house somewhere on the estate and keep a couple of hunters’. That was all; nothing about the farms, the crops or the machinery, so that it was clear from her letter that neither she nor her husband regarded themselves as anything but sleeping partners in the enterprise.

Simon’s letter surprised him by its warmth and he was even more surprised by Evie’s news, when she brought him the letter that had arrived from Germany, enclosed in one of her own. Simon, she said, was to be demobilised in a month and go straight into a teachers’ training college, and when Paul asked what kind of job he would seek when qualified she said he would apply for a post at a local elementary school, in Paxtonbury perhaps, or Whinmouth.

‘That’s not very ambitious, is it?’ he said and she told him Simon had lost interest in party politics, notwithstanding the recent triumph of the Left. All he seemed to want now was to live in the country or by the sea and do some kind of worthwhile job, and perhaps write in the holidays. It looked as if he was going the right way about achieving these modest ends.

‘You think so too, don’t you?’ she said, clearly anxious to have his approval, and he said that he did, adding, ‘I think Simon will make a damned good schoolmaster. The income from the company should help you along, providing, of course, that you don’t go in for a family of my size.’

She looked down at her thickening figure with satisfaction and he thought again how lucky Simon had been to meet a girl like her when he was tired, disillusioned and getting on for forty.

‘I don’t suppose we’ll run to that,’ she said, ‘we started too late, but I daresay I’ll add one or two more to your score before I’m through. I mean to try, anyway. Simon is marvellous with kids. What are you hoping for this time?’

‘A girl,’ he said, emphatically, ‘and as like you as possible, my dear,’ and she kissed him and left him reading Simon’s comments on the formation of the Company. They were more generous than those of his daughter Whiz but here again it seemed unlikely that Simon would play more than a passive part in the Board room.

Andy wrote from London with enthusiasm, giving as his opinion that it was a first-class idea on somebody’s part (clearly he found it difficult to believe it had been Paul’s) and should ‘save him a packet in the long run’. He had, he said, a number of ideas for increasing the estate income but he would not enumerate them until he had sounded out the others.

Paul, smiling grimly, was not in much doubt as to what those ideas were. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t want to build a blasted hotel on the Dunes,’ he told Rumble, ‘but if he does he’ll have to wait a year or two before he starts browbeating me about that. I don’t mind parting with income, but any changes around here are going to be strictly agricultural, and not so many of those if I can help it.’

In the event the only immediate change resulting from the formation of the Company occured at Home Farm. Rumble Patrick and Mary moved into the vacant farmhouse that autumn, taking in the much smaller unit of Periwinkle and bulldozing the ruin that had begun to look like the monument of a dead generation, with mitre-shaped walls pointing to the sky and a riot of nettles, trefoil, dock, campion and tall yellow stichwort jostling for space in the kitchen where Rachel had died four years before.

Paul and Rumble went over there to see it done and Rumble winced as the great lumbering machine crashed through into the fireplace, like a mastodon stalking prey. Paul, hoping to reassure him, said, ‘You’ll soon have Home Farm as cheerful as this place when you and Mary married and moved in,’ but Rumble said, glumly, ‘Sure we will, and it’s a better farm in every way, but I didn’t build Home Farm, Gov’nor! It was there two hundred years ago.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Paul said. ‘You don’t like parting with the tools you handled when you learned your trade. That’s the male equivalent of a woman’s feelings about her first lover, but there’s another way of looking at it.’

‘Such as?’

‘The way one ought to learn to look at everything inanimate. The soil is still here and every particle of it is alive. Bricks, mortar, tools, cob, thatch are all expendable. Even if they serve you a lifetime they’re only a loan, like the pictures and china and furniture I’ve accumulated up at the house. In the end what happens to it? A stranger walks in and carts it away but you can’t do that with this,’ and he bent down and picked up a handful of dry, red soil, letting it run through his ringers and ricochet from the toecaps of his gumboots.

Rumble grinned, his humour restored. ‘This Company you’ve launched,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how it’ll work. There’s built-in rivalry to begin with—you and me, a couple of nostalgic sentimentalists, Andy and Whiz, who think of places like the Valley as sites rather than farming land, and finally old Simon, conditioned over the years to juggle with abstracts. Won’t we fall out over fundamentals?’

‘I daresay,’ Paul said, equably, ‘most family concerns do but they survive when other enterprises don’t. Blood is still thicker than all that champagne they guzzle at business luncheons.’

‘Good old Gov,’ said Rumble, laughing, ‘long live the feudal system,’ and he went down the slope to have a closer look at the bulldozer’s progress, leaving Paul to sift the last dry grains of soil in the hollow of his hand. ‘Long live the feudal system,’ he muttered, ‘and not all that much of a joke either. It served its purpose a damned sight better than the one we have now, where policy decisions are handed down to us by civil servants. They’ll take us over lock, stock and barrel in the end, I suppose, but not yet, not quite yet’ … and he waved goodbye to Rumble and went down across the long tussocky slope to the foot of the Hermitage plateau.

Chapter Two

Routine Reconnaissance

I

O
n the first Saturday in August, 1947, Paul Craddock saddled his aged grey, vintage horse of the Valley, and set out on his first circular sweep for nearly a year.

Most of the interval had been spent far from the Valley and this, in itself, had been a local talking-point through the long and excessively severe winter, for it had not gone unnoticed by Shallowford originals that this was the first time Squire Craddock had spent more than a fortnight out of sight of the Sorrel since 1918, when everyone but his wife had given him up for dead. Paul had, in fact, surprised everyone, including himself, by taking his doctor’s advice in February and setting off on a world cruise via Gibraltar, Suez, Tasmania, across the Pacific to San Francisco and Vancouver, then over the Rockies to Montreal and home by the
Queen Elizabeth
to Southampton.

Early in the New Year, when snow began to build into twenty-foot drifts on the eastern slopes of the moor, and the Sorrel froze harder than it had in the lifetime of Henry Pitts and Smut Potter (both of whom could remember more hard winters hereabouts than the Squire himself) he had gone down with bronchitis, his first real illness, discounting war injuries and accidents since boyhood. It had frightened Claire very much to hear him wheeze as he sat reading before the library fire and there had been some brisk exchanges in the kitchen when she had seen him lumber out into the stableyard and hoist his saddle on to Snowdrop’s unclipped back.

By mid-January, when the Valley was cut off from Whinmouth and Paxtonbury by almost Alpine walls of packed snow, he was in bed with a temperature of a hundred and four degrees, and even the aged Maureen Rudd, who still attended a few of her original patients, expressed anxiety to the family and called in a specialist. Within twenty-four hours of the specialist’s arrival, however, Paul unexpectedly rallied and asked Claire what all the fuss was about. She soothed him with invalid talk that at first made him very irritable but then, fortunately for everyone, reminded him of the days shortly before their marriage when she had come rushing back to the Valley to nurse him through injuries received in the sea-rescue off Tamer Potter’s Cove. His memory of the occasion, it seemed, was extraordinarily vivid and it pleased him to see her sitting over by the tall window again after all these years. He said:

‘Funny thing, I remember opening my eyes after Maureen operated on me on the kitchen table for those broken ribs, and wondering how you and poor old Grace had changed places. It was summer then. The sun played games in a wisp of hair behind your ear. I remember watching it for a hell of a long time before I spoke. Then you got me some tea and played that tuneless piano we had in the dining-room, remember?’

‘In great detail,’ she said, having to make a big effort to hold back tears of relief, for she had been more frightened than she cared to admit.

After that he mended very quickly and Maureen was able to talk him into a Mediterranean cruise for the early spring but somehow—after being informed that an overlooked insurance policy for nearly two thousand was due—the jaunt had enlarged itself into a world tour and because, at that time, he had to be humoured, Claire pretended to be enthusiastic and everything was arranged in a great hurry so that they were basking in Sicilian sunshine by March.

It was getting on for half a century since he had been so far afield and Claire had never even been to Calais, so that to their astonishment they began to enjoy themselves, particularly when they reached Egypt and took the traditional camel-ride to the pyramids, and then, in a hard, dry heat that never scorched the Valley, sailed down the Arabian Gulf and across to Colombo, and on to Hobart where Claire had a very hospitable cousin holding high rank in the police force.

Paul liked Tasmania because it had so many physical similarities to Devon and they stayed there nearly a month before moving on to Samoa where he paid his respects to the late Robert Louis Stevenson, and after that to San Francisco, a city that appealed to him as a sparkling, vigorous place in great contrast to the more sultry parts of California they visited. He also enjoyed his trip across the Rockies although he told Claire that mountain scenery of this kind made him homesick for the tree-hung hills of the Westcountry. This was his first admission of homesickness and she was glad they were well on their way home, for although he now looked as tanned and fit as she ever remembered, she sensed that he was getting restless and had noticed that he needed no provocation to bring the Valley into their conversation.

She said, when they sighted the Eddystone, ‘Well now, there you are, and I don’t imagine we’ll ever catch you west of Plymouth again,’ and he replied, fervently, ‘By God, you won’t!’ and then, hastily, ‘Not that I haven’t enjoyed it, old girl. It was time we shook the straw out of our hair and I’m not at all sorry we went.’ But from that instant he was in a ferment to be home and the Valley could hardly have put on a better show for him, for the long, hot summer he had predicted was longer and hotter than anyone remembered, to offset a winter that had been longer and colder.

As they drove down the slope of the moor to their first sight of the Sorrel he was like a boy returning home from his first term at boarding school and when, early next morning, she saw him foraging in the cupboard for his riding breeches and tall boots, she did not have to be told what he intended doing but said, hiding her smile, ‘What time lunch?’ and he replied, ‘Any old time. I want to have a good look round and get myself up-to-date! I’ll probably make do with a sandwich and a beer in The Raven.’

She could indulge herself in a long chuckle the moment he had clattered out of the yard and said to Mary, who had dropped in for breakfast, ‘He’s been on a lot of day excursions in the last few months but he’ll get a bigger kick out of this one than his trot around the Pyramids on a camel.’ Then, forgetting him, she pumped her daughter for all the family gossip and spent a pleasant hour or so hearing progress reports on her numerous grandchildren.

Paul walked the grey across the field paths to the door in the park wall that he always thought of as ‘The Postern’ and dismounted to pass it. It had been relatively cool in the paddocks but out here, facing the open fields of Four Winds that stretched as far as the dunes, the full strength of the morning sun struck his face and flies began to pester Snowdrop so that he flung his big head to and fro. Eveleigh’s harvest looked very promising from here, acres of wheat nearest the river and further over barley and rye. The early summer months must have been exceptionally hot to produce such results and Paul reminded himself to ask Rumble to tell him how many hours of sunshine they had had since April. He could only recall two summers in his life when the sun had this strength at 9 a.m., that of 1902, the year he had settled in, and later in 1919 when he had returned to a depopulated Valley after the war. He was sorry for Snowdrop, but for himself he always enjoyed a blazing sun and as he went along under the park wall he made his usual observation of the pattern of wildflowers growing there, huge glowing dandelions like picquet lines of miniature suns, splashes of crimson campion, honeysuckle he could inhale from the saddle, yellow toadflax, vetch, yarrow, and the one that few thought of as a flower but had always impressed him as majestic—the huge, gently nodding umbrellas of cowparsley, a growth that Gypsy Meg had dignified by the name of ‘Ladies’ Lace’. It was a fine show but he supposed farmers like Eveleigh and Rumble Patrick never thought of it as anything but a vast crop of weeds. The river was down to a trickle and the mud along the margins was baked hard and seamed by a thousand cracks.

He crossed Codsall Bridge and stopped for a moment to greet Young Eveleigh, now not so young, for he must be at least twenty-eight although he was still a bachelor. Bob Eveleigh, not a notable conversationalist, confirmed his hopes of a bumper harvest and as he rode on down the lane Paul wondered if the young man was conscious of standing on the exact spot where his father, in local parlance, ‘had been blowed to tatters’ in February, 1942. He thought not, for the Eveleighs, one and all, were an unsentimental breed who concerned themselves with the present. Connie was pleased to see him and came out wiping her hands on her apron, asking conventional questions about his travels.

‘I didn’t see anything to compare with this, Connie,’ he told her and she said that didn’t surprise her for he was generally reckoned a stay-at-home, but if someone gave her the opportunity to sail round the world she would soon be off and away. She told him about her younger children, the boy studying accountancy in Bristol, the girl, married to a G.P.O. telephone engineer, who had presented her with a grandson ‘looking exactly like a snap I kept of Harold at the same age’. He rode on, wondering at his abiding interest in such trivia, keeping the river on his right as he ascended the long heathery slope of the moor to the abandoned R.M. Camp, still, he noted, a blot on the landscape and the abode of squatters Andy had urged him to send packing last autumn.

There were about half-a-dozen families living in ruinous Nissen huts, presenting the same kind of picture as the Potters of the Dell forty years ago. One of the men, a pale, unshaven Londoner, with an accent that Paul placed as Hounslow or thereabouts, looked at him apprehensively, but when Paul smiled and nodded he approached hesitantly, his wife and two or three children peeping from the hut doorway.

‘Hasn’t anyone at Whinmouth done anything for you people?’ Paul asked. ‘It must have been damned cold up here last winter,’ and the man said, sulkily, that it was at least a roof and a stove, and that everyone here had their name down on the Council lists but were told, whenever they went into the town, that there were scores of local residents ahead of them. He looked at Paul speculatively, trying to assess his interest in the situation, and finally added, ‘Couldn’t you ginger ’em up a bit, sir? I wouldn’t care to spend another winter up here. If I’d have known what we was in for in that bloody desert I woulder let old Rommel chase the Wogs round Cairo, and good luck to him!’

It was, Paul reflected, a perennial problem. He had heard almost identical comments from trench-veterans in the early ’twenties and it did seem monstrously unjust that a man who, had devoted years of his life to saving the country from a thug like Hitler could be at the mercy of tinpot officials when he demanded a home for his children. It was no use asking the fellow why he had left his own area and wandered down here among strangers. There were probably any number of reasons, all of them complex. He could have chased them off last year, he supposed, and that might have compelled local government to do something on their behalf, but somehow he hadn’t the heart when their spokesman had called on him and asked for time. Instead he had turned a blind eye to the little community, ignoring Andy’s advice ‘to boot the buggers off’. He said, ‘How many of you are here? How many units?’ and the man said there were now five, nineteen people in all, eleven of them kids. ‘I’ll have another go at the Housing Committee,’ he said, ‘but in the meantime make some kind of effort to keep the place tidier and if the constable calls refer him to me.’

The man thanked him and he rode away feeling shamed. ‘That’s patronage if you like!’ he told himself, ‘and a generation out of date. But what else could I say? It isn’t as if any one of them up here is ready to learn farming, and I wouldn’t wonder if most of them aren’t layabouts who wouldn’t stick at a job in the cities!’

The encounter took a little of the brightness out of the morning and, as he crossed the edge of the moor and headed past the scar of Periwinkle, it struck him as ridiculous that civilisation could evolve, when necessary, the means of destroying a city the size of Hiroshima with a single bomb and then fall flat on its face when asked to find homes for five English families. The answer, he supposed, was an economic one, for Japan had been blasted because the Japanese had threatened commerce and these people did not constitute a threat. So long as they kept out of sight and didn’t brawl or steal they were nobody’s business. They talked a great deal about the Welfare State these days and he supposed recent progress had been spectacular in some areas, but it obviously took more than talk at Westminster to vanquish the good old British slum mentality and make people admit their responsibility towards the inevitable misfits. There was a time when he would have made an issue of the squatters but his days of political campaigning were over. Someone else could worry about the solution. At sixty-eight he hadn’t all that much time left to enjoy the sun, the wildflowers and the distant prospect of Shallowford Woods.