Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  The full moon of the previous night was partly obscured by cloud so Sarah found it hard work climbing the slope on the other side of the valley without a torch or a lantern to guide her. The bracken was thick and every time she lost the path her legs got caught up in the tangle of its stems. Eventually she rose high enough above Maggie’s farm to begin walking along the western wall towards the valley’s mouth. As she passed above The Court, she paused and looked down at the thin rectangles of light cast from its windows across the orchard and vegetable garden. She could just make out some voices from inside, but nothing else. Then she saw Alex, standing at the front of the house, looking up towards the valley’s head, motionless in the faint moonlight as if it had cast him into stone.

  It took Sarah another half hour of scrambling over the scree to reach the cleft in the Red Darren. Even in the deepening night she could make it out as she approached; a dark slit tapering up the face of the cliff looming silver grey above her. She paused at the entrance to catch her breath and take off her coat. She was sweating from the climb, strands of loose hair sticking to her forehead and cheeks. Reaching behind the boulder she found Albrecht’s torch then walked into the shadow of the crevice. Once she was deep enough inside, she turned the torch on. As before it looked as if the split in the rock ended before her in a sheer wall of moss-streaked stone but on reaching this stone she saw again the wooden struts and brattice leading deeper into the man-made cavity scooped from the soft sandstone of the hill. Edging herself through the narrow gap, she came out into the hollow, the torch beam lighting up the jagged damp walls before landing upon the smoother folds and pleats of the sacking cloth and tarpaulin.

  Putting the canvas bag down at her feet, Sarah pulled the cloths from off the packing crate to reveal the map within its frame inside. She didn’t want to risk damaging the torch so she kicked at the earth at her feet until she dislodged some fragments of rock. Bending down, she picked one up and felt its weight in her palm, turning it in her hand until its sharpest edge protruded from the bottom of her fist. Holding the torch in one hand and the stone in the other, she stood and stepped up to the map. Standing so close to it again she couldn’t help casting her eye over its details once more, passing her own reflection over its strange creatures and towered cities. Whichever part of its half-imagined world she looked at she misted with her own breath, obscuring the cartographer’s ink, the gold leaf, under brief patches of clouded glass. She didn’t look too long, however, worried that, as with the rooms of Upper Blaen, she might be weakened by memories no longer of any use to her in her altered world. Lifting the stone to the top right-hand corner of the case, she brought it down with all her strength against the glass.

  The first time she hit the glass the stone left no more than a granular smudge and a long fracture, running southwest across the map as far as the Red Sea. The second time, however, the glass splintered, tiny shards showering down between the map and its frame. The third time it shattered completely, with more shards falling at her feet and then larger pieces peeling away like the slabs of ice she’d pulled from the frozen troughs over the winter.

  Sarah stood back from the crate. The map was entirely exposed, and for the first time she could shine the torch over its surface without the reflected light obscuring her vision. It was beautiful, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Kneeling to her bag she took out the box of matches.

  The first match she struck guttered and extinguished in the breeze that came channelling through the narrow rift in the rock behind her. She moved closer to the parchment, so close she could smell its scent of musty hay and the tang of ammonia used to preserve what colours it still held. She lit a second match, this time cupping the flame in her palm as she lifted it carefully to the bottom right-hand corner of the map.

  The centuries-old parchment took with the sound of autumn leaves burning on a bonfire. It curled and blackened before the flames, the faint blue dye of the rivers bleeding from their imagined banks before disappearing completely. As the fire reached the brown seas its flames flickered green, as if the heat had released the spirit of their original colour. The gold leaf of the compass points burnt brightest, cracking and peeling away like shavings of pure light.

  The heat was sudden and strong and Sarah had to shift herself quickly backwards, the constellations of broken glass crunching under her boots as the flames tore up the rest of the map, washing over the score-marked Paris, the cog of Jerusalem, and on up towards the circle of paradise at its eastern head. By now the cavity was filling with billows of thick grey smoke and Sarah was worried the light of the flames might somehow be seen in the valley below. Picking up her bag, she made her way out of the man-made hollow and on through the natural split in the rock, the sound of the world burning and splitting behind her.

  As she came out into the cool night air, Sarah saw the headlights of two cars and a truck tracing the ribbon of the lane up towards the mouth of the valley. She watched them shudder over the rougher parts of the track then slow and swing around the tight corners, sweeping their beams through the hedges and over the fields. As the truck ground its gears up an incline its headlights shone into the sky; two soft pillars of light briefly rising and falling in the otherwise motionless night.

  Sarah didn’t want to see them drive any further, so shouldering her bag she turned her back on the valley and began climbing up towards the ink black horizon of the Hatterall ridge. The slope on this side of the Red Darren was steep and covered with shale and scree that gave under her feet. Each step she took sent a running sigh of stones down into the valley below. As she rose higher the fragments became larger, unsteady stepping-stones, tipping and swaying under her weight. She stopped and looked back just once to see the three sets of headlights part as the truck and one of the cars took the lower lane towards The Court and the other drove higher towards The Firs and Mary’s farm. She turned back to the hillside and carried on climbing, using her hands as well now, grasping at fistfuls of rock, her face so close to the slope she could smell the rivulets of water trickling beneath her and the young ferns and mosses fed by their flow.

  As she rose higher towards the horizon of the ridge Sarah saw a sudden point of light up the valley. It was, she realised, one of The Gaer’s windows shining out onto the blackness of the upland slopes. She climbed on, her own breath hard and fast in her ear. As she climbed she thought of Edith, barefoot on the mountaintop looking for her son; her startled face above that board and upturned glass. She paused, her chest heaving, then bent to the slope once again, thinking now of the ponies she and Maggie had found frozen together on the plateau, and then, as she finally crested the ridge and the night wind came at her, throwing her hair around her face, about another of the poet’s stories. It was one of the earliest ones he’d told her, about the Iron Age people who’d first lived in these hills; how they’d built their forts on these promontories and how they’d only ever walked between them along the ridges and high places. Where they could see clearly, where they knew they were safe.

  Sarah stood on the top of the Hatterall ridge and looked back towards the valley, but she could no longer see it. There was nothing but the night below her and the stars and clouds above. Adjusting the strap of her bag and tightening her coat about her waist, she walked on, northwest along the ridge, along the border of two countries, the wind flinging itself around her. She hadn’t brought any food or water and the summer nights at this height were still cold. She knew she didn’t have much time, a couple of days, perhaps, but she also knew this was no longer important. It was the looking that mattered. The belief and the looking. These were all that were left now, and that was why she walked on along the ridge, blind into the night, clutching her bag tightly to her chest with the accounts book of her letters inside, the last of its pages still unwritten.

  Private Jonathan Stevens of the newly formed SS Albion Division stepped over the bodies of the two dogs they’d found last night, then cautiously pushed open the front door of the farmhouse
with the barrel of his rifle. It was the morning after the raid and most of the company had already left the valley. Just a small unit had stayed behind to go back through the houses looking for intelligence or any documents that might be used as evidence at the court martial. He stood in the doorway, scanning his rifle across the room before moving through the kitchen to look over the range and the sink. Standing at the dresser he slung his rifle over his shoulder and began to take down the books off the top shelf, fanning their pages over the table then throwing them aside. He came to the Bible last. It was heavy with a partly broken spine, so he laid it on the surface of the dresser instead. Opening the front cover he saw the list of names and dates on the inside page, the copperplate fading back through the centuries to the late 1700s. He was about to move on into the other rooms of the house when the final entry stopped him. He checked the date on his watch, June 11, then looked back at the final name and the numbers written beside it. The last date was written in a darker ink, fresher than any of the others.

  Sarah Lewis, March 15, 1918–June 10, 1945

  AFTERWORD

  This novel is a work of fiction set in an alternative recent history. The seeds of the fictional past I’ve imagined, however, are sown in what many feared to be, at one point in time during the summer of 1940, an all too possible future.

  I first heard about the plans for a British resistance organisation one summer when I was working for a builder in the Llanthony valley. We were taking the stone tiles off a barn, loading them onto a trailer behind a tractor, driving them through the valley, then fitting them to the roof of a new conversion. It was hot, repetitive work, but over those weeks, between the lifting, loading, and unloading, our conversations had the space and time to range and wander freely. One day Charles, the builder, told me how during the war some farmers in the area had been given caches of arms, which they’d hidden in underground bunkers in the hills. Should the order have come, these farmers were to leave their homes and wives and take to the Black Mountains to resist the occupying German army. It was a seductive tale and from all the stories told over those summer weeks, it was this one that lived with me as others fell away over the following years.

  I was reminded of Charles’s story on the morning of September 11, 2001, when I heard a radio interview on the Today program. Papers had recently come to light detailing the real plans that had lain behind his tale of farmers as a resistance force-in-waiting. The presenter, Sue MacGregor, was interviewing George Vater. As a young man farming near Abergavenny during the war, George had been recruited into the Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section, a network of farmers, vicars, and other local people trained and prepared to run messages and spy on an occupying German force. At the end of the interview, Sue MacGregor said, “So you have no doubt, had there been an invasion, you would have repelled the lot of them?” “No,” George replied, releasing laughter from the studio. After a slight pause he continued, speaking clearly and steadily, his words cutting through, then silencing the laughter. “I’m very sorry to say, no. We were told that perhaps we would work for fourteen days, and that was our full lifetime, I presume.”

  I knew George Vater. His family farmed near my parents’ house in Llanddewi Rhydderch. They also ran the local school minibus service. For seven years I was picked up at the bottom of our lane by one of George’s sons or daughters, and sometimes even by his wife or George himself. For the last four of those seven years George’s grandson sat on the bus beside me. As a lifelong supporter of the Pontypool rugby club, George had recruited me for their Colts side when I was seventeen.

  George’s reply at the end of that radio interview haunted me for many years after I heard it. Eventually, together with the story Charles had told me, the idea of a British resistance organisation and what they’d been expected to do in the event of a German invasion got the better of me. Taking the opportunity of a weekend visit home, I called George and arranged to meet him the following morning at his family farm in Llanddewi.

  Sitting in his living room, surrounded by cuttings, maps, and photographs, George told me that morning how, in the summer of 1940, he’d been approached by a man calling himself Tommy Atkins. He explained how Atkins had given him a sheet of German insignia to learn and told me what would have been expected of him as a member of Atkins’s Special Duties Section. George also told me where I could still find the locations of several Auxiliary Unit “operational bunkers” in the surrounding area, and he showed me a photograph (opposite) of the inaugural meeting of the Monmouthshire Auxiliary Units Association, taken after the war in December 1945.

  George and the men in this photograph never had to put their training into practice as part of a British resistance force, nor did they have to test whether their forecasted life expectancy of two weeks was accurate. My conversation with George did, however, enable me to imagine a world in which the plans for such an organisation had to be realised. I’d hoped that one day George would be able to read the novel I wrote partly inspired by his experiences, but unfortunately I’m writing this on the morning of George’s funeral. I can, however, still thank George. Not just for being so generous with his memories, but also for being willing, along with the thousands of others like him, to risk everything in what would have been the darkest days in the struggle against fascism.

  Inaugural meeting of the Monmouthshire Auxiliary Units Association, December 1945.

  There were, of course, many other influences upon this novel, and among them are some more seeds of fact that may be of interest. The Mappa Mundi really was removed from Hereford Cathedral and, after a stint in the cellar of Hampton Court, kept in a coal mine in Bradford-on-Avon for the duration of the war. The poet and artist David Jones, meanwhile, did live in Eric Gill’s artistic community at Capel-Y-Fin between the years of 1924 and 1927. Similarly, both von Brauchitsch’s “Proclamation to the People of Britain” and the “Guide on How Troops Are to Behave in England” are taken from a series of real Most Secret draft orders and decrees issued to senior Wehrmacht officers in September 1940.

  While these notes of fact, and others, have been woven into this novel, apart from Upper Blaen and The Court, the positions, names, and number of houses in the Olchon valley, along with the characters living in them, have all been imagined. To borrow from Lawrence Durrell’s note upon the city in The Alexandria Quartet, only the valley is real.

  June 29, 2006

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to the staff and administrators of the following institutions: The Museum of the British Resistance Organisation; The Usk Rural Life Museum; Duxford Radio Society; The London Library; and the British Library.

  Many books informed this novel, but David Lampe’s The Last Ditch and John Warwicker’s With Britain in Mortal Danger: Britain’s Most Secret Army were both particularly invaluable sources of information on the background, training, and operational details of the Auxiliary Units. Of Wet and Wildness by Odie Robey and The Farming Year by J. A. Scott Watson provided crucial insights into 1940s rural life.

  I am also indebted to the many individuals who helped with my research, including: Nancy Selwood, William Gwyn, Ruth Parry of the Longtown Historical Society and her mother Mrs. Lewis, George Vater, Edward Main, and Juliet Gardiner.

  For their support and guidance, I’d like to thank Lee, Angus, and everyone else at Faber; Zoë and Susannah at Rogers, Coleridge & White; Trevor Horwood for his accurate eye; Luke Epplin, Eric Chinski, and Dilwyn; and Lisa, for her unfailing encouragement and advice; and of course, my ever resourceful parents.

 

 

 
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