The Dearest and the Best

by Leslie Thomas

  ‘Well . . . no, it doesn’t seem very promising,’ agreed Harry uncertainly. ‘But the new regulations mean that everybody will have to pull their weight. No more dodging the war effort.’

  ‘Not before time either,’ replied the man sagely. ‘Not one bit.’

  Harry stared at him. It seemed pointless to ask him if he were going fishing. ‘Catch much these days?’ he asked eventually, giving the tackle a nod.

  ‘Fair bit. Not so many people at it nowadays. More for the rest of us. There’s quite a few salmon in the Avon. Best salmon river in the south of England, the Avon, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I heard that.’

  ‘Do much fishing yourself?’

  ‘No. There’s not a lot of time . . .’

  ‘Not unless you trawl a line over the stern of the ship, eh?’ The man nodded at Harry’s uniform and laughed in a jolly way. ‘Mind you, there’s plenty in the services and in the ARP and the fire service and all the rest of the rackets who have plenty of time for fishing. I mean, there’s nothing to do, is there. Nothing.’

  Harry was angry but unsure. ‘It looks like it will all change soon,’ he ventured. ‘With the Germans right on the doorstep.’

  ‘Never,’ said the man airily. ‘Never in a million years. Mark my words, son, they’ll sit on that side of the ruddy Channel and we’ll sit here and nothing will happen. Nothing. In the end everybody will get fed up and go home. The war will be finished. We’ll probably have a few air raids, just token attacks, you see, but they won’t set foot here.’

  He was so convinced that Harry felt that he might have some inside information. ‘What do you do?’ he asked diffidently. ‘That’s if you can tell me.’

  The big man guffawed. ‘Tell you? Of course I can tell you. I fish. I fish nearly every day. Retired early, see. I’ve had to give up the car because of the petrol, but I still fish. Nothing’s going to stop that.’ He looked gravely at the younger man. ‘I’m a provider of food. I’m doing my bit in that way.’

  Harry swallowed hard, but any retort he now felt compelled to make was choked back by the arrival of the train at a forest halt station and the fisherman’s preparations for disembarking. He said a cheerful goodbye and Harry, abandoning the protest as too late, timidly returned the words. The man had to transport his equipment in relays to the wooden platform. Harry was almost tempted to help him. The umbrella was the last item. As the man closed the door finally he grinned quickly and half opened the umbrella to show Harry that the cover was camouflaged in green and brown whorls like a military vehicle.

  ‘In case of air attack,’ the fisherman laughed. ‘Cheerio!’

  Harry sat bemused as the train puffed away again. His hand went to his pocket and he fingered the three identification discs. Perhaps Thurston G., Smith D., Wilson N., had been fishermen.

  At Portsmouth he handed the discs, at last, to a nonchalant leading seaman seated at an inquiry window.

  ‘I’m a bit late with them,’ said Harry apologetically.

  ‘Don’t matter, sir,’ said the man taking the discs and, without a glance, throwing them on a pile of similar tags in a box with ‘Ovaltine’ and the picture of a country maid with a sheaf of corn on its side. He saw Harry’s expression as he looked towards the pile. ‘We get quite a few,’ he said. ‘It can’t have been cleared for a bit.’ As if it needed some excuse or explanation, he added: ‘Sometimes people lose the discs, and sometimes the discs lose the people.’

  Nine

  ALAN STEVENS, THE schoolmaster who had arrived in Binford at the start of the summer term, lived in the stone house behind the village school, beneath the same roof that had sheltered his predecessors since the small, walled school was built in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  Few of the people had learned much about him. He taught single-handed at the school with music lessons being taken by John Purkiss, the church organist. There were only twenty pupils, up to the age of nine. After that the children went each day by bus to the school at Lyndhurst.

  A solitary sort, the villagers decided, the type that would come out of his shell only when he was ready. Although he was only in his thirties, he had a grave, middle-aged air about him and he smoked a pipe. In the evenings he was sometimes seen walking alone by the river or gardening behind the wall of his house. The children liked him. They said he could make them laugh. Ma Fox decided that he was hiding away from the world after a tragic marriage. For once she was nearly right.

  Petrie was one of the few people who had become even casually acquainted with him. They had conversed one evening near the coastguard look-out and Stevens had said that the poet William Allingham had once been a customs officer at Lymington and had written that on his first night of duty there he had heard the nightingale four times.

  ‘Go and see him, will you,’ suggested Robert. ‘Ask about the playground and see if you can find out something more about the chap. He’s able-bodied as far as I can make out. He ought to be helping out, not hiding himself away.’

  They were squatting in the LDV guard post, usurped from the air-raid wardens against much protest. It had once, in Victorian times, been the village schoolroom, a little stone building with a pot-bellied iron stove and a bleak ceiling. In addition to their training evening in the village hall they manned this post. It had two beds, lanterns, a trestle table and chairs, a teapot, kettle and enamel mugs, a map of the forest, and a morse tapper and receiving earphones. Tommy Oakes and some of the other village boys had politely inquired if they could use it as an outlaws’ den when the LDV were not in occupation.

  Petrie went to see Stevens in the evening, after his meal, leaning his motorcycle against the school wall and walking around to the cottage at the rear. It had rained that day, the sky was dull and dusk seemed early.

  The coastguard was astonished as he entered the garden. It was lined with growing vegetables, minutely tended; onions, carrots, lettuces, peas and beans climbing the sticks, and potatoes in flower.

  ‘You’ve certainly got this organized in a few weeks,’ Petrie complimented him.

  Stevens had been sitting on a wooden box, smoking his pipe. ‘Gardening,’ he said, ‘is the one thing that keeps you really busy, tires you out so you sleep, and, in the end, provides you with sustenance. Would you like a beer?’

  Petrie thanked him. He remained in the garden while Stevens went under the low lintel of the kitchen door and returned with two dusty bottles of beer. He wiped them off with a teacloth and, having given one to Petrie, returned to the kitchen for some glasses. ‘Found it tucked away in the loft,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s secret store, I suppose. There was a whole crate. Years old, probably, but it tastes all right.’

  They drank and Petrie agreed. ‘You won’t be able to eat all that,’ he said, nodding at the garden over the rim of his glass.

  ‘I’ll give it to the kids,’ said Stevens. ‘Or the hospital or the donkeys or something. It’s my war effort.’

  ‘That’s why I came to see you,’ said Petrie. ‘Robert Lovatt, you’ve met him, big chap, retired solicitor, parish councillor, all that. We’ve got a Binford unit of the Local Defence Volunteers now, you may have heard, and he asked me to ask you if we could use the playground in the evenings for drills and training.’ He leaned forward with a grin. ‘We could use the sports field but I think he wants to hear the boots, when we get boots, sounding on something noisier than grass. And the school wall means that it can all be done in private.’

  ‘Why in private?’

  Petrie looked embarrassed. ‘Well, we’re all beginners, amateurs, and we don’t even have any proper weapons. One or two of the lads are worried that people will laugh at them. It looks a bit strange standing guard with a garden fork.’

  Stevens shrugged. ‘It’s all right with me,’ he said. ‘I suppose the county education office ought to be asked really.’

  ‘We didn’t want to do that,’ confessed Petrie. ‘It would take a month of Sundays to get an answer from them.’

  ‘W
ell, as I say, I don’t mind.’

  There was an awkward pause. ‘I can’t see the Belgians holding out for long,’ said Petrie eventually. ‘And the way the Germans are going through northern France doesn’t hold out a lot of hope does it? It all looks a bit unpleasant.’

  Stevens shook his head. ‘Yes,’ he said with care. ‘I’m afraid it does.’ To Petrie’s surprise he picked up a packet of seed and eyed the print on the packet. ‘Look at that,’ he said pointing. ‘Excellent, it says, for growing on air-raid shelters. Would you believe it? Old Josh Millington gave them to me. Said he wasn’t going to dig an air-raid shelter just to grow these.’

  They both laughed. Petrie finished the beer. ‘I must be off,’ he said. He grimaced. ‘Weapon training tonight. We’ve now got two service rifles, a tommy-gun and a dozen rounds of assorted ammunition.’

  Stevens said nothing but walked with him to the garden door set into the high stone wall. Petrie said as casually as he could, ‘Why don’t you come and join in? The LDV, I mean. We could do with some younger men.’

  There was a hesitation. Then Stevens shook his head. ‘No, thanks,’ he said quietly. ‘Tell Mr Lovatt I’m sorry but I can’t.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I’m a conscientious objector. I don’t believe in fighting.’

  ‘A conchy!’ bellowed Robert. ‘A conscientious objector! Here? Teaching our children?’

  Petrie restrained a grin at the wrath. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘He made no bones about it. Said he didn’t believe in fighting.’

  Robert’s disbelief caused him to sit abruptly and heavily. They were on the bank of the creek above John Lampard’s paddle steamer, waiting for old Jeremiah Buck and Tom Bower to bring the secret weapon, the punt gun, in from the river. It was a piebald evening and again it had rained in the day.

  ‘I simply cannot believe it,’ said Robert. ‘I mean, the education authorities must have known, blithering fools.’

  ‘He’s in a reserved occupation, anyway,’ Petrie pointed out. ‘A teacher. He seems a nice enough chap. Perhaps he’s got a reason.’

  Robert regarded him as if he had uttered a treachery. ‘Reason? What reason? What reason has any Englishman got for refusing to fight for his country? What’s he doing for the war effort?’

  ‘Well,’ offered Petrie defensively, ‘he’s grown some wonderful vegetables. Lettuce, carrots, onions. They look a treat.’

  ‘Onions!’ exploded Robert. ‘What’s he going to do – throw them at the Germans? God, I’ve never heard anything like it.’ He calmed suddenly. ‘Ah, here they are now.’

  Petrie had already seen them moving slowly on the mottled water behind a bank of reeds. John Lampard came down the path from his house with the pimpled boy, Willy Cubbins. Between them they brought the punt and its two men to moor at the stern of the paddle steamer. The London boy stared at the great-mouthed gun, its ten-foot barrel occupying most of the length of the low punt. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s the biggest bleedin’ gun I ever seen.’

  Robert looked at him disapprovingly. ‘If we are going to allow you to join the LDV,’ he said severely, ‘you’re going to have to moderate your language. This is not some London street gang, you know.’

  The boy said he was sorry, adding, ‘But it is a big bugger, ain’t it?’

  The men looked at the odd weapon with instant affection. It had been holed up in a rotten boathouse on the far side of the river for years. Jeremiah had remembered it and he and the shipwright had recovered it and had taken it to Tom Bower’s slipway for repairs.

  ‘She was in good condition, surprising,’ said Tom. ‘Considering where she’d been.’

  ‘What’s the boat like?’ asked Petrie, peering through the gloom. ‘She doesn’t look too bad.’

  ‘Needed a few boards ’ere and there,’ said Jeremiah. ‘Punt ’as to be strong. Fire that thing and you could blow yourself out o’ the water.’ He suddenly said kindly to the still staring boy, ‘Used to use that to shoot water fowl, see. Sitting and waiting for them all night, just waiting, and when they start up at daybreak – bang! You could get twenty at a time. You ’ad to because you only got the chance of one shot.’

  Robert’s big head nodded with satisfaction. ‘Pick off a section of Jerries with that,’ he said. ‘Lie in wait among the reeds and – bang!’

  ‘But you only get the chance of one shot,’ observed the boy still not taking his eyes from the gun.

  The Binford LDV were grateful for the screen of the school wall as they paraded. Their initial training evenings had been held outside the cricket pavilion, which doubled as the village hall, and the muffled stampings of mixed shoes and boots on the grass had occasioned mirth and ridicule from villagers, men, women and children who were not involved but had come to watch.

  They did undoubtedly appear a strange and motley formation. Some had steel helmets and some bulbous berets sent from the army depot at Winchester. Most wore dungarees although Sid Turner, the forester, wore his gaiters because he thought they looked more warlike. Weapons were equally nondescript, the odd old army rifles, the tommy-gun tucked under Petrie’s arm, shotguns, air rifles, forks and pikes made from iron railings. Robert wore a khaki shirt, grey plusfours and a webbing belt to which was attached a huge, flop-eared revolver holster, which, in the absence of a revolver, was stuffed with cardboard.

  Drill had been hideously embarrassing for all. Purkiss and one or two others had some notion of the movements, but there were many collisions and stumblings. Most of Binford seemed to be watching, criticizing and guffawing. The men were scarlet-faced. George Lavington said he wanted to go home. Robert fiercely refused and then, at the height of the remarks from the spectators, he had rounded on them powerfully. ‘You people may laugh,’ he shouted. ‘Go on, get it out of your system. You’ll laugh the other side of your faces when we’re all that’s between you and the Gestapo!’

  That had sobered them for a while, but the hilarity had restarted immediately military training exercises had commenced. The sight of grown men, whom they had known for years, creeping on their stomachs through the long grass at the back of the cricket field was too much for the crowd. ‘See if you can find that ball we lost last summer,’ taunted a voice. Livid, Robert rounded on the caller but was at once defeated by the arrival of Tommy Oakes in his cub uniform. ‘Mr Lovatt,’ he said loudly, cheekily. He pointed to the perimeter of the field. ‘Kathy Barratt’s old dog has just cocked his leg on one of your snipers.’

  In the school playground there was at least some concealment. The members of the unit had been sworn to secrecy about the new rendezvous – a promise they gladly kept – and crept into the school one by one. The effect of the drill, however, was spoiled by Purkiss, who had been promoted drill instructor, much against his wishes, having to keep his voice to a near whisper while giving the simple orders.

  From outside the wall soon came signs, however, that the secret had travelled. Heads began to peer and leer over the stonework as the squad mounted an attack on the school lavatories which stood innocently in the playground. Howls of laughter were provoked by Malcolm Smith throwing a tennis ball into the cubicles and shouting ‘bang’. Some watchers were so convulsed they fell from the wall.

  At the end of the training Robert called his tattered squad, sweating, dusty and embarrassed, to attention. They tried their best to stand straight and serious but not even their LDV armbands were level. ‘Men,’ he said, ‘the German Propaganda Chief, Goebbels, said on their wireless last night that the men forming our Local Defence Volunteers would be regarded by the German forces as “franc-tireurs” . . .’ He waited. Puzzlement clouded the eyes in front of him. ‘Franc-tireurs,’ he repeated. ‘And if captured would be shot by firing squad.’ The Adam’s apples went up and down. ‘In the light of that, I have orders to give an opportunity for any man who wishes – to resign now.’ No one moved. Robert eyed George Lavington. ‘Lavington?’ he asked.

  George looked shocked. ‘Me, Mr Lovatt?’
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  ‘You said you wanted to go home the other night.’

  ‘Ay, yes, Mr Lovatt, but that was because they was laughing at us. I just didn’t like them laughing, that’s all.’

  Robert brought himself up to his powerful height. ‘Squad!’ he bawled. There was no point now in whispering. ‘Squad. Right turn!’ They turned less raggedly.

  ‘Squad, by the right – quick march.’

  ‘By the right, quick march!’ came the juvenile echo from outside the wall.

  Stevens, who had watched some of it sadly from his window, went to the garden door and saw the green-capped and jerseyed Tommy Oakes, shouting the orders to himself and marching stiffly up and down.

  After the drill the men went almost shamefacedly home. George Lavington and the brothers Wilf and Malcolm Smith trudged in their habitual silence down the road to Binford Haven. An owl sounded over the fields. Eventually George sighed. ‘Never thought I’d ever be one o’ they franc-tireurs,’ he said.

  Elizabeth drove from her house into the morning serenity of the village. Surely nothing would ever change it. People who had lived there two hundred years or more before would have recognized it without difficulty and would have been greeted by their descendants. Sunlight lay across tiled and thatched roofs and gathered in pools between the trees and along the single street. A handful of children paddled in the stony stream as it wandered through the ford. Three of them belonged to Mary Mainprice. She called to them to watch out as she drove the car through the water, causing a small wave, and they laughed and jumped as the water reached them.

  People were working or walking. She waved to Dr Brinton from Lymington making his unhurried round and to other everyday housewives. In Hob Hobson’s grocery shop there was a quietly talkative queue as women waited, ration books in hand. She joined the end of the line and chatted with the rest. The talk was, as it had always been, children, weather, ailments and husbands, but hardly a mention of the nearing war danger. Then, swiftly and suddenly, an aircraft appeared low across the village, its shadow flickering over the roofs. Its roar set the shop trembling and the dark shape loomed with fleeting menace over them. Everyone in the shop ducked, Hob behind its counter, the girl assistant beneath a pile of empty egg boxes which she brought tumbling down. Some of the customers fell on their knees, like women at prayer. The plane had gone by the time they had all reached their prone positions, swooping off towards the coast. Hob regained his feet and his proprietor’s assurance. ‘One of ours, ladies,’ he announced, picking up the wooden pats he used to square the fats. They rose raggedly, laughing. You could never be too sure, they agreed among themselves.