We sat under it, Keig, Donald Fayrhare, cheerful Fred Quiddie, solemn Francis Crowe and myself on the one hand, with the others of our party posted as sentries a little way along the road in either direction, and on the other hand the farmer and his three sons with half a dozen girls—daughters, cousins or maids—coming and going from the house, wide-eyed and giggly with the glamour of these strangers.
There beneath that great tree with its flaunting promise of richness to come drawn up from the thick roots plunging into the soft earth beside us, I felt an overwhelming sense of the goodness of life.
I said something to the farmer about how magnificent the blossom was. He grunted appreciation.
‘I’m lucky to have this old tree,’ he said, ‘If she’d been an oak Mr Mylchraine would have had her long ago.’
‘Mr Mylchraine?’
‘I can see you’ve been away from the island all right. Don’t you know he’s had nearly every oak there is. Shipped ’em all off for timber inside ten years. To help pay for all that whiskey they bring in, so they tell me.’
Yes, I thought, the old boy here’s quite right. I haven’t seen a single oak tree that I can remember since we came down from the mountains.
‘Caused no end of bitterness, that did,’ the farmer went on. ‘No one can’t get wood for their pieces of furniture no more. We’ve been having to make shift with all sorts of bits and bobs of timber these last years, and they won’t serve.’
‘I remember country furniture,’ I said. ‘From when I came out from Lesneven as a boy. I used to watch the old men making it when we visited these Parts for the summer.’
It was a tradition in the country districts of the island. No self-respecting householder expected to have in his home any furniture that had not been made by himself or by his fathers before him. And oak had been the wood that was always used. It made attractive pieces too, all carved to age-old patterns.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘let’s hope it won’t be long before what’s left of the island’s safe.’
And at that instant the sound of fast-running steps rang out on the hard surface of the road and our sentry came pelting towards us.
‘Keepers,’ he called out the moment he came in view.
‘Where?’ Keig snapped, jumping up.
‘Coming along the road. In sort of cars or tanks. I didn’t spot them because of the hill, and they’re on the look-out for something.’
While the sentry had been gasping out his news of this development Keig had been steadily looking round about.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You all know what to do. Get your guns out of sight and make as if you’re working. Go at it quietly.’
And he slipped off his belt and dropped his own revolver and its holster deep into the sprouting grass by the edge of a little wooden fence that separated the farmyard from the road. Then he picked up his long axe, knelt down and began tapping at a sagging post in the fence.
He looked round.
‘You, lad,’ he said to the panting sentry who seemed to be too bemused to know what to do. ‘Up that ladder there and start taking some slates off the barn roof. And you, Quiddie, get your head into that binder.’
But Fred Quiddie had other ideas. He ran across to the group of hovering girls, seized on the prettiest, tumbled her down on the ground and spread her wide skirt over his gun.
By now we could hear the rumble of the approaching vehicles, whatever they were. Donald, perhaps finding it difficult to throw off his naval officer self in favour of something rustic, sensibly hurried over to the ladder which the sentry had climbed, put his foot on the lower rung and turned his shoulders to the world. I ran across to the binder Fred had neglected and plunged my head into its machinery in what I hoped looked a businesslike way.
After a moment I took a sweaty cautious glance to either side. The whole farmyard was a scene of simple activity, with as a prize touch tubby Francis Crowe. He had run across to the open window of the farmhouse, gathered up a table cloth, swished it round the farmers’ youngest son, a tough lad in his early teens, and had sat him down on the chair Keig had occupied. Now with a pair of scissors whipped from a pocket he was busy cutting the boy’s hair.
And then round the gentle bend of the road there came the first of the vehicles that had caused the alarm. I saw at once that it was some sort of lightly armoured scout-car. Standing up in it there was a green-uniformed Keeper complete with cockaded perky hat. He had a pair of binoculars in his hands and was using them methodically to scan the countryside on either side. In his concern to miss nothing he scarcely gave a glance at the farmyard so close to the road.
Hot on the heels of the first car another followed, and then another and finally a fourth. Each had, I saw in giving them a casual glance as they roared by in low gear, a crew of five and they were armed not with the Keepers’ customary shotguns but with rifles. Yet something of this sort was what we had expected, and I did not feel much downcast.
It was fully three minutes after the last of the cars had disappeared along the road north before Keig straightened himself up from where within two or three yards of the passing Keepers he had been tapping solemnly at his fence-post, his head studiously bent to show only the round orangey-red cap that Margaret had knitted for him, a garment that one day would be as much of a shoot-on-sight target for the Keepers as a man facing them with a gun, but which at present was simply Keig’s invariable headgear.
I thought when he got to his feet that it was typical of him that the loose fence-post should now be trimly in place. I had not so much as wiped the dry mud from my binder.
Gratefully we all abandoned our mock tasks and went over again to the big chestnut tree to resume our interrupted talk.
‘I think I had just better finish this young gentleman’s hair,’ Francis Crowe said. ‘We can’t have him looking a sight, can we?’
With a mild sense of shock I realized he had slipped back into his barber’s shop voice which I had not heard for weeks. Assiduously he applied himself to a little fancy work round the solid neck. No doubt the boy was getting the best haircut he would ever have in his life.
Under the big spire-magnificent tree our talk with the farmer and his two grown-up sons became more businesslike. Keig had his eye on the little town of Carnack about five miles away to the south where there was reported to be a considerable concentration of Keepers.
‘If Mylchraine has his men there,’ he said to the farmer, ‘it won’t be long before he has money there to pay them. If I anyway can, I mean to get hold of that before they do.’
The farmer’s eyes widened.
‘But they’ll keep money like that in the bank,’ he said.
‘The bank? There’s only the one in Carnack?’ Keig asked.
‘Yes. But—’
‘Then we’ll know where to go.’
In the next hour Keig gravely extracted from all three of his listeners every item of information he could about the town and the bank and the situation of all the Keepers in the area. And just over a week later, in spite of the presence of the new scout-cars, he led a raiding party that carried away a decidedly hefty sum from that bank. I never learnt the details of the exploit: Keig, judging rightly that the law-abiding residue in my middle-class nature would be made uneasy, told me nothing.
Yet our visit to Chestnut Tree Farm, as I always think of it, was not the complete success it might have been. A faintly disturbing circumstance marred it.
It concerned the farmer’s youngest son. When our discussions were over his father laughingly called him over to show everybody what he looked like with his new haircut. The lad had rather gloweringly come up and, reluctantly obeying his father’s boisterous commands, had turned this way and that in front of us all. He appeared lumpishly embarrassed by the whole business, and I hardly wondered at it. He was a big youngster and sturdy as could be and he obviously had an even larger share than usual of the contempt for the niceties of personal appearance that most boys feel.
Keig must have sensed his discomfort as much as I had, because he abruptly leant forward with an unusually broad smile—perhaps as warm as any I had ever seen on his dark face—and spoke.
‘Never mind, lad,’ he said, ‘it won’t be long before a great scutch of a fella like you’ll be out and about in the world and all your own master.’
The effect of the remark on the boy was singular.
He swung round from the position his father had last ordered him into and marched straight over to Keig. His eyes were shining with the most blatant hero-worship.
‘Could I come and fight that Mylchraine with you now?’ he demanded.
There was a roar of laughter headed by the boy’s father.
‘What,’ he bellowed approvingly, ‘you want to go and give old Mr Mylchraine a bloody nose, do you?’
But if the father was delighted by this display of bellicosity the boy’s mother, who had appeared a moment before carrying an enormous tray of cups of tea surrounding a tall fruit-cake, was by no means pleased.
‘What d’you mean by poking your nose in?’ she demanded of the lad. ‘You’d be better worrying after your schoolbooks than thinking of going off robbing folk and ending up in gaol.’
This in turn incensed the farmer.
‘No, no,’ he shouted. ‘The boy’ll go, blast it. He shall. Mr Keig’s no outlaw.’
His wife rounded on him, holding the big brass-handled tray out in front of her steady as a rock for all its load and for all her indignation.
‘Then what are all these guns for, I should like to know,’ she said. ‘Going out shooting folk’s no life for a boy only just turned fourteen.’
‘Those guns are to put some sense of reason into Mr Mylchraine, woman,’ the farmer replied.
And the boy, who I was surprised to find, considering the size of him, was as young as fourteen came in lustily with his whack.
‘Anyhow I can use a gun too, can’t I, Dad?’ he asserted.
And then he swung round to poor inoffensive Francis Crowe.
‘I bet I can shoot straighter than you,’ he said.
‘That’s as may be,’ Francis answered, with a little toss of his head. ‘But this business of ours is no job for youngsters.’
But now the boy’s mother, with that superbly illogical changeableness some women possess, veered sharply to the other side of the argument.
‘If it’s decent men you’re wanting,’ she snapped at Keig, ‘then my Alan’s as fit as any. He’s strong as an ox already.’
‘But you didn’t want him to go,’ her husband exclaimed exasperatedly.
‘That was when I thought Mr Keig was only just such another as that Dirk Gilhast, you lummox,’ she answered him.
‘What Dirk Gilhast is this?’ Keig asked, his thirst for intelligence of all sorts intervening.
‘Why, he’s a different sort of case altogether,’ the farmer said dismissively.
‘No. I want to know,’ Keig persisted. ‘Has he men under him?’
‘Oh, he has, he has,’ the farmer conceded. ‘There’s a band of them hiding in the Trigastell Hills. But they’re not honest, Mr Keig.’
I smiled at the unconscious compliment to Keig: scarcely five minutes earlier he had been discussing how best to rob a bank, yet he was honest. Every penny of the money he would seize would go to pay for food for our rapidly growing force.
However this side-issue was not at all to the liking of the farmer’s young son.
‘Dad,’ he said, ‘shall I go and get my good boots on? I am going with Mr Keig now, aren’t I?’
I expected Keig, for all that such resolute sticking to the point must have answered to his own natural directness, to intervene here and say that Francis Crowe was right and ours was indeed no life for a youngster. But it was in fact Donald who, after a short pause, stepped up to the boy and said what had to be said.
‘Listen, laddie,’ he explained, ‘it isn’t only a matter of shooting straight in the sort of work you get with us. What counts in the end is learning to be patient and keeping a good watch when absolutely nothing’s happening.’
‘I could do that too,’ the boy claimed instantly.
Donald smiled.
‘It’s not so easy, you know. I had to do it when I was a middie, what they call a midshipman in the Navy, and I found it hard enough, though I was fully sixteen.’
The boy looked sharply crestfallen. And then to my utter surprise Keig simply cut the ground from under Donald’s feet.
‘No,’ he said, ‘let the lad try it. Off you go, boy, and find those boots. And you’ll need a change of clothes and a blanket too. Nothing else, mind.’
It was a disconcerting thing to have done, running as it did clean contrary to the commonsense Keig had been so notable for hitherto. For a long time after we had left the farm I was at a loss to understand what had made him do it.
Only that night, lying in our distant barn headquarters wrapped in my single borrowed blanket waiting to go to sleep and contrasting my situation there with the well-sprung double-bed of my old London flat, did the probable explanation suddenly arise in my mind.
The lad, Alan, was exceptionally sturdy and strong. He was aged fourteen. If Keig and his Margaret had had a son, he might have been just such a boy as that.
5
With Keig recognized now as a full-blown rebel and not merely another bandit like the Dirk Gilhast we had heard about, the days were coming to a close when our activities could be confined to modest operations like ambushing a single armed motor-cyclist or gangster-like raids on Letter Offices, activities in which, thanks to our Chestnut Tree Farm mergings into the landscape, we had so far been without even a single casualty while the Keepers’ losses already ran well into double figures. But though I had hardly realized it, the time had come when, if we were to keep up our policy of never failing to hit back at oppression, a large part of our group—which now numbered about seventy all told—was going to have to be engaged in something approaching full battle with Mylchraine’s newly militarized forces.
Keig, brooding on our whole enterprise I really believe in every waking minute, knew this. And, as I was beginning to expect as a matter of course of him, he had been busy with appropriate plans.
The day they were put into effect came in July. It was actually on the fourteenth that our battle was fought: the literary coincidence of its being Bastille Day could hardly escape me, even in the almost dateless limbo in which I lived.
Our first intimation of the test to come was the arrival just before midnight twenty-four hours beforehand of a girl courier from further south. Keig had adopted a system already, which he was later to use over the whole island, of relying for the gathering-in of information on numbers of couriers, mostly girls who could go about without causing the same suspicions as men. Messages went through a series of rendezvous points culminating in a midnight arrival at our headquarters, wherever that happened to be. It was remarkable how quickly information and news travelled to us in this fashion in the days when we had no other means of communication at all at our disposal—no telephones, no radios, no post service.
So that night first we heard the low challenges of the sentries and then two or three minutes later the courier herself appeared, a solid-looking country girl of seventeen or eighteen, her dark orangey shawl—or was it her mother’s perhaps?—wrapped right round her to make her less easily seen in the dark.
‘Good girl,’ Keig said to her, standing up and shaking her by the hand.
Her eyes glowed with rewarded pride.
‘Now, your message?’
The girl crinkled her broad forehead for a moment and then brought the whole message out, memorized word for word.
‘A column of Keepers left Lesneven yesterday. They have six scout-cars, forty motor-cycles, a hundred men with fresh horses and sixty remounts with twelve lorries for stores including tents. From talk heard in a drink-shop it is believed they are to go somewhere north of Carnack. They camped last night after going thir
ty miles. That is all.’
Keig, sitting on a log in our barn headquarters with a candle stuck on a beam above his head, had been jotting down these figures on a big piece of slate he used for any calculations he had to do. The squeak of the slate-pencil had sounded like a dancing obbligato to the girl’s low monotonous voice. Now he looked up.
‘Thank you,’ he said to the girl. ‘They’ve been keeping a meal for you in the farm kitchen. Good night now, and good luck.’
She left in a positive daze of pleasure at such consideration. Another follower of Keig for life, I thought.
For a few moments Keig himself sat thinking, the slate with its scrawled figures on his knees in front of him. Then he turned to me.
‘With as many Keepers as that,’ he said, ‘they could go sweeping through the country and be bound to pick us up.’
He relapsed into thoughtfulness. After a little I put a suggestion more, foolishly, for the sake of having something to say than for any other reason.
‘So we withdraw well out of the way?’ I asked. ‘We’ve plenty of time.’
‘No, we don’t,’ Keig said. ‘Get out of the way if you’re going to be hit, but hit first yourself if you can. What’ll people think if we stop hitting Mylchraine?’
‘Attack a force of that size? But surely—’
‘We’ll have to go for them when they’re weakest,’ Keig said. ‘That’s sure and certain.’
‘We could pick off the outliers when they start their sweep, I suppose,’ I replied. ‘But it’ll be damn risky. Once they know where we are they can bring men up in minutes in those cars.’
‘No,’ Keig said. ‘There’s a time when they’re weaker than that.’
He glanced up at me, his eyes glowing darkly in the candlelight.
‘When they’re asleep,’ he said. ‘That’s when we’ll do it. Tomorrow night. Have you got the map?’
I produced our only map, which had proved to be a woefully badly detailed affair, and Keig got to work measuring out where it was most likely the approaching column would camp for tomorrow night.
‘Here,’ he said at last.
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