Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  V

  On June 1st, 1919, the day of his fortieth birthday, he went out into the yard and asked old Chivers if Snowdrop, twenty-one by his calculation, was still capable of an hour or two of walking exercise and Chivers asserted that he certainly was and was even good for a trot on level ground, so Paul watched the old man saddle the mild-eyed grey and then hoisted himself up and climbed the orchard path through a forest of bluebells to the gap near the stile that gave on to the high-banked lane connecting Hermitage with the western edge of the woods.

  There seemed to him promise of a long, baking summer, with everything far forward after a warm and windless spring. He skirted the fringe of Hermitage Wood and picked up the narrow, circular bridle path that led to the little plateau that was his favourite vantage point. As he jogged along he looked up into a cloudless sky, enjoying the sun on his face and thinking that the weather was doing its best to make up for early autumns and long winters that had depressed the troops more than the shelling in France but then, he reflected, Flanders always had had a reputation for all-the-year-round drizzle and no matter where you dug out there you were bound to strike water a couple of feet below the surface. Then, as he had learned to do in the last six months, he was able to put France and the war out of his mind. Profit, he reminded himself, lay in the future and it was no use regretting an era when every child returning home from Mary Willoughby’s little school would automatically tug his cap, or drop a dutiful little curtsy whenever he or John Rudd rode by. Not all that had disappeared was bad and surely patronage of that kind was something country life could do without in the years ahead. There were, of course, uglier trends, like the steady infiltration of men of Sydney Codsall’s type into the coastal area east of Nun’s Bay, war profiteers who seemed determined to disfigure the entire countryside with gimcrack bungalows, most of them in cahoots with faceless allies on local and county councils. ‘Development’ they called it, pretending their object was that of providing homes for old people and ex-service men but having watched Sydney Codsall grow from a toothy child into a scheming young shyster Paul had no confidence in this theory. Sydney now owned almost a third of Coombe Bay, including the old inn, The Raven, which he had already ‘developed’ into a Tudor sham but Paul made up his mind that he would see murder done before Sydney’s tide pushed inland beyond the old brickyard, reflecting that he was nicely placed to hold it at bay for he was a war profiteer himself and a far more successful one than Sydney Codsall or any of his partners, not excluding Codsall’s father-in-law, reported to have made a fortune in sugar.

  The comforting reflection slammed a door in his resentment so that he found he could indulge himself in the luxury of a chuckle. All the time he had been wrestling with estate problems, all the months he had spent in France and in hospital, money had been piling up in his bank, the harvest of other acres he owned within a penny tram-ride of Tower Bridge. Its total had staggered him when Franz had come down with his ledgers and balance sheets in the spring and for a week or more Paul had gone about with a Bunyan’s pack of guilt on his shoulders. It was not a very pleasant thought to realise one might have enriched oneself at the expense of the blood and bones of men like Ikey Palfrey and Big Jem of the Dell and his first impulse had been to get rid of it in a single dramatic gesture, as the politician Stanley Baldwin had done when he returned a third of his war profits to its source. Then he had a better idea and nothing Franz could say could make him drop it. He made over his holdings in the firm of Zorndorff and Craddock to the National Fund for War Disabled and afterwards transferred two-thirds of his accumulated capital, something like a hundred and twenty-thousand pounds, to a special Trust Fund earmarked exclusively for estate development. Not Sydney Codsall’s development but real development, the restocking and re-equipping of every farm in the Valley, the rebuilding of every cottage over fifty years old and the purchase of stocks of fertiliser and tractors for all who would use them and plough teams for diehards like Henry Pitts who would not. Not one penny of this money, Paul told Claire and a sceptical John Rudd, would ever be rechannelled to his personal account, or be included in legacies to his children or grandchildren. Capital and incidental interest would be used to rehearten and reclaim land and modernise each of the seven farms. In the meantime (and this was what sent Uncle Franz away tapping his forehead) the Craddocks, one and all, would live on rents frozen at pre-war level plus the yield of pre-war investments and whatever the Home Farm produced under the management of Honeyman’s nephew.

  He had expected opposition from Claire, if only in defence of her children but she made no protest. She understood, far better than he realised, the compulsions under which he acted and being Edward Derwent’s daughter she had always accepted land as the only true wealth, notwithstanding all the fortunes made by speculators and Paxtonbury tradesmen in the last four years.

  It was signed and settled now, less than six months after his discharge and today was the first morning in over a month that he had deserted the office. The doctors at Rhyl had not lied to him. His headaches were now spaced by weeks instead of days and the worst discomfort he suffered from wounds in two wars was the occasional nag of rheumatism in the small crater left by a Boer bullet at the turn of the century.

  The magic of the morning began to work on him as his shoulder brushed the lower branches of the elms overlooking Hermitage and at last he reined in on the spur of turf at the extreme edge of the escarpment. It was all under his eyes, more than ten miles of it, with the silver sliver of the river curving south-east like a bent rapier aimed at the heart of the Bluff. To the left and behind stood the big timber of Shallowford Woods, trees he had nearly lost in 1916 but which had miraculously survived while every wood in north-eastern France had been shredded to bare poles. To the south he could just see a grey-blue strip of water where the Channel lapped the edge of the dunes; to the west was Four Winds, squatting snugly among green wheat and well-trimmed hedges, and beyond, three miles or more, the gentle slope to the Teazel watershed rising more steeply as it curved north to melt into the moor. This was the outlook, south-east, south and south-west but there was as much to savour within yards of where old Snowdrop stood like a pipe-clayed veteran, comfortably at ease. A towering elm marked the precise corner of the wood, its green buds clothing the hole as far as the lowest branches. Ferns had come creeping out of the wood to seed themselves on the extreme limit of the shade and among them was a riot of colour, jostling for space. Foxgloves stood there, some of them six feet high and already shaking out pink mittens a month earlier than usual; campion ran along the southern margin of the wood like a belt of crimson fire and lower down the bank grew clusters of dandelion, daisy, periwinkle, stitchwort, bugloss and buttercup. There was only a pretence of silence up here. If you listened and thought about listening, there was subdued uproar, an orchestra of buzzing and whizzing and whispering and a rich, heady scent, the overall smell of everything that grows in England in the months of May and June.

  He sat there with slack reins until Snowdrop began to shuffle and arch his neck and then he went on slowly down the escarpment to the point where the footpath joined the approach lane of Hermitage Farms. Clouds of flies followed him, seeking Snowdrop’s eyes and the heat haze lay on the Valley like a blue, trembling veil. Prudence Pitts, Henry’s girl, saw him approach and shouted, ‘Me Dad be upalong wi’ the pigs, Mr Craddock!’ but he only smiled and lifted his hand. Of all the people in the Valley, save only Claire and possibly John Rudd and his wife, he preferred Henry’s company but today he wanted to make the circuit alone, without having to wrench his mind from contemplation of the Valley as a domain rather than a community.

  He reached the river road and let the grey nose the shallows, waiting while he drank his fill. A kingfisher flashed by and he remembered seeing one on this same reach the very first evening he passed here in the company of old John Rudd. Deliberately he counted both years and phases; that first hectic season when everything was new and strange and the
whole Valley burning a sackcloth-brown under what Mrs Handcock called ‘a praper ol’ scorcher’; the false dawn of his first marriage and all the grief and confusion that came of it; the long, rewarding period with Claire that endured until another and more catastrophic ‘scorcher’ was over, and finally the interminable war years, with everything falling to pieces and hardly any of his former allies surviving to pull them together again. Well, it had been a long haul, getting on for a fifth of a century of ups and downs, but he was still here, sitting the same horse in the same river bottom; there was time enough, at forty, for the fulfilment of lingering dreams.

  Chapter Eleven

  I

  On the afternoon of September 1st, 1929, the eve of the twins’ 21st birthday, Paul saddled the sedate skewbald (who had replaced Snowdrop as his estate transport) and rode up to French Wood, the young plantation now growing up on the extreme south-western corner of the Hermitage plateau. He told himself he was going there with the object of calling on Henry Pitts and making one more attempt to convert him to tractor ploughing, but this was no more than an excuse to escape from the frenzied upheaval accompanying preparations for the all-night dance The Pair had organised, with the active connivance of their mother and sisters.

  The house was already full of young people, most of them strangers to Paul, who bustled round and about him carrying armfuls of decorations, chairs, trestle tables and weird-looking band instruments and maintained a ceaseless hammering that made work in the office an impossibility. He said to Claire, standing on a stepladder with her mouth full of tacks, ‘I’m going over to Hermitage, I won’t be long!’ but she only nodded absentmindedly. Clearly she had no thoughts for him today and neither, it seemed, had anyone else, for even Mary, the quiet one, had been sucked into the whirlpool of the first big-scale social event at Shallowford since Simon’s twenty-first, more than four years before.

  Paul rode up the orchard to the sunken lane, noting that the apple crop promised well and that Young Honeyman and Henry Pitts had almost done with harvesting. He never rode to the new wood without a feeling that he was going to church, for French Wood, which had been his own way of commemorating the Valley dead, was a kind of church, much more of one than the precincts of all the other war memorials in the district—plain granite crosses and pseudo-heroic statues of glaring infantrymen, without the vitality or validity of his private memorial to the eighteen local men who had died between August 1914 and November 1918.

  He remembered as he rode across the plateau how the eccentric notion had come to him the week of his fortieth birthday in June, 1919, when he had sat Snowdrop on the crest overlooking the Valley and thought of all the cheery souls who had turned their faces to the sun at this spot and now lay in tidy graves in Picardy and Gallipoli. He thought too of the maimed, of poor devils like Reg Willis the wheelwright’s son, who had lost the sight of both eyes and Davy Tozer, the smith’s son, who had come home minus a leg. There had been talk of memorial stones and statues in all the papers just then, for the Armistice was only seven months behind them but now, as he entered the little wood growing up around him, he was very glad he had planted a free for each man instead of carving their names on a lump of granite in the churchyard. A living tree was surely more pleasant to behold than most of the conventional war memorials up and down the country and here, in ‘French Wood’ as the Valley folk insisted on calling it, every man had individual representation, so long as a comrade lived to come here and remember them once in a while.

  The plantation was fenced with a stout wooden paling to keep out the wild deer and against all the predictions of the local wiseacres it was prospering, as though the wood spirits favoured the idea. Paul had chosen each young tree with care—a mountain ash for Ikey; oaks for the older men like Tremlett, the huntsman and Tom Williams, the fishermen; an elm for Jem Pollock already as thick as the Dell giant’s thigh and a small cluster of silver birches for the younger set, men like Tod Glover who had once flown low over this spot showing off his wind-riding skill like a buzzard. In the centre of the wood was a flowering cherry for Grace, killed hauling wounded back from Vimy and as he crossed the turf Paul was not much surprised to find his eldest son Simon sitting there, with a cherrywood pipe in his mouth contemplating the metal plaque which read: ‘Grace Craddock, ambulance driver, killed April 1917,’ and underneath the only Scriptural quotation inscribed on a plaque—‘Greater love hath no man . . . ’ Simon said, without looking round, ‘You should have done your bit of Bible thumping under Tom Williams’ tree, Gov’nor! He was a Methodist and would have thought it fitting.’ Then, with laughter in his eyes, ‘She never had much truck with organised religion, did she?’

  ‘No,’ Paul said, aware that the boy was teasing him but not resenting it in any way, ‘she didn’t! As a matter of fact she didn’t have much truck with anything except Women’s Rights and Compassion.’

  The boy looked at him in a way that Paul had learned to associate with his questing, mildly cynical nature, akin to his mother’s but more tolerant and far less likely to give offence.

  ‘It was a sentimental idea, this wood of the dead,’ he said, ‘but taken all round it does you credit, Gov’nor.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Paul with a grin, for he suddenly remembered after all these years when and where he had invited Simon to call him ‘Gov’nor’—sitting on a fence near his school, during a hurried visit on Paul’s leave from the Front in the autumn of 1917. He thought of reminding the boy and then decided not. Simon affected to despise the past and to regard everything that had happened up to the Labour Government’s first term of office, in 1924, as a pitiable failure of all human achievement. He said, instead, ‘What made you come here, today of all days?’

  ‘For the same reason as you; to get away from the racket! Anyway, I had some thinking to do. I’ve had a letter from Ned Stokes. He wants to know if I’d care to take over the literary editorship of The Forum. It’s a new magazine his uncle is backing. Might have a future now that Labour is back again.’

  Paul was resigned to Simon’s false starts and news that he was contemplating a journalistic career, after turning his back on teaching and forestry, had no power to irritate him. He said, tolerantly, ‘You’re old enough to dispense with my advice, Si. I daresay you’d find it amusing for a time but those magazines don’t last long as a rule, do they?’

  ‘No,’ Si said seriously, ‘but what does?’

  ‘Land,’ said Paul, not unexpectedly, and Simon smiled and shook his head as though he had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the estate, his father was slightly off his head and everybody in the Valley acknowledged as much.

  ‘I suppose your mob will want to nationalise us,’ Paul said and without waiting for an answer, ‘Well, I daresay it’ll come to that in the end but until it does I’m staying put! It will take more than your precious Ramsay Mac’ to shift me.’

  Simon took his pipe from his mouth and ran his hand through his dark hair. It was a gesture that always reminded Paul vividly of his first wife, one of the many quirks she had passed on to the child she had abandoned for the Women’s Suffrage Campaign, when he was no more than a few months old. He said, resignedly, ‘You might just as well go over to the Tories, Gov’nor. You’re a Tory in everything but name you know.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned patronising!’ Paul told him. ‘Jimmy Grenfell and I were the two people who showed the Tories the door round here before you were born!’

  ‘Oh, I know about the 1906 landslide and all that,’ Simon said, ‘but for all your sound and fury you Radicals are as deeply rooted in the past as eighteenth-century landlords. Even the Tories subscribe to something new if there’s a quick profit in it but you and Jimmy Grenfell don’t. Surely you can see we’ve taken your places as Progressives?’

  ‘I can’t see anything of the kind,’ Paul said, but genially, for secretly he never cared to quarrel with Simon’s championship of the underdog, not ev
en when it was larded with left-wing jargon borrowed from dull-looking books translated from the Russian. ‘The fact is we were content to nibble whereas you lot will overeat yourself and give the electorate chronic indigestion. As soon as you begin to burp all your reforms will emerge as hot air and the Tories will be more firmly entrenched than ever! You see if I’m not right! However, I don’t propose to spend a pleasant afternoon discussing politics with you, I’m going over to Hermitage to see Henry Pitts. Do you want to come along?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Simon said. ‘I’d better go back and give The Pair a hand. Do you know how many those idiots have invited to stay with us overnight? Seventy-four! Where the devil are they going to sleep?’

  ‘I don’t suppose they will until the sun gets up and then they can doss down in the barns for all I care,’ Paul said. ‘Your mother and I are going to the shanty after the midnight toasts. You’ll be in charge from then on!’

  ‘An honour,’ said Si, grinning, ‘but one I could easily duck! The twins’ set are morons but come to that so are the twins themselves. Have you talked to them since they came back from town yesterday?’

  ‘Good God, no!’ Paul said, ‘they never talk to me! Mary is the only one of you who regards me as anything more than an amiable old-stick-in-the-mud with a fortune in loose change!’ and he sauntered out of the enclosure and swung himself in the saddle, setting the skewbald at the steep path down to the river road and turning right towards the Hermitage farm track. Simon moved clear of the trees and watched him until he passed out of sight behind the Hermitage elms. ‘Well, Gov,’ he said to himself, ‘Steve and Andy will be “talking” tomorrow or the day after and I daresay they’ll succeed in knocking you more than I ever have! I’ve always been odd-man-out here and had time to get used to it!’ He lit his pipe again and stood puffing thoughtfully and then, as he turned away, he passed the young beech planted for Keith Horsey, the parson’s son, whom he remembered as an old boy of High Wood and sometime school friend of his boyhood hero, Ikey. He stopped to read the words on the plaque: ‘To Keith Horsey, R.A.M.C. Killed February 1917.’ He recalled that Horsey had once been the Valley’s conscientious objector and also that Number Ten Downing Street was now occupied by another. He thought, ‘You should have held on a bit. Who knows? A chap with a good degree might have had a place in the Cabinet and then every damned flag-flapper in the Valley would have licked your boots!’