Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  II

  By the time Quarter Day came round he had other things to think about and so, for that matter, had most people. The alarm bells of national bankruptcy were ringing in Fleet Street and urgency ruffled the bland voices of radio announcers so that even in the Valley, where people were very slow to panic, folk became aware of the crisis and the possibility of a general election, ‘To Give the Government a Mandate For Economy’. That, thought Paul, was how it was always projected, in stunning capitals, with the emphasis on what was expected from the governed rather than what could be expected from the governors. Henry Pitts must have noticed as much for one morning, meeting Paul on the river road, he shouted,’ ’Ave ’ee ’eard the latest, Maister? We’m goin’ broke, on account of all that bliddy cash you an’ me ’ave been sploshing about zince us was demobbed, backalong!’

  That was about it, thought Paul. The men in charge muddled along, bickering one with the other and trying this and that expedient until the machine slithered to a halt. Then, like the feckless head of an improvident household, they announced that there would have to be a cut in housekeeping, sacrifices all round and no more pocket money for anyone. His cynical attitude towards politics, fostered by a decade of agricultural depression, had been deepened by the arrival of Jimmy Grenfell, with the benefit of thirty years’ close-range experience of professional politicians. Sentence of death had put a cutting edge on Grenfell’s sense of humour and he beguiled some of his sleepless hours in front of the library fire after Claire had gone to bed sketching for Paul a gallery of lively portraits of the shady, the earnest and the pompous with whom he had hobnobbed since he first entered ‘The Club’, as he called it, about the time the Tsar’s fleet fired on British fishing smacks in the belief that they were Japanese warships. Listening to him Paul began to doubt the practicability of democracy but when he admitted his doubts Jimmy only said, with a shrug, ‘There are really only two choices, Democracy and Muddle, or Dictatorship and Tyranny. I admit I’ve sometimes wondered which is preferable but I’ve always come down in favour of muddle, if only because it can always be temporarily tidied without a blood bath. I daresay we shall stagger on for another decade or so, but as for finding the right answers, as we believed ourselves capable of doing in 1906, that’s just a pipe-dream! The Holy Grail was lost long ago and it’s not likely to turn up in Westminster.’

  Paul went along, accompanied by Henry Pitts and Smut Potter, to Sydney Codsall’s adoption meeting in the Paxtonbury Drill Hall and found it a less humiliating experience than he had anticipated, largely on account of his companions’ lively commentary. The prospect of Sydney Codsall as a Member of Parliament struck Henry as so uproariously funny that all that shushing on the part of rosetted stewards could not prevent him from expressing opinions that would have led to him being thrown out in days when Paxtonbury folk took their politics seriously.

  ‘Giddon, tiz a bliddy miracle!’ he kept muttering. ‘Marty Codsall’s boy, zitting up there like a tailor’s dummy, askin’ us to zend un to Parlyment! Why damme, I never zeed ole Marty in collar an’ tie in his life and all the politics he ever knowed was how much water to add to ’is milk!’

  When Henry was only warned to keep quiet, and not expelled from the meeting, Smut joined in, saying that they ought to have had his mother, Arabella, up there on the platform. ‘ ’Er voice could carry furthest of anyone in the Valley,’ he added, half-way through Sydney’s personal promise to build the League of Nations into an effective instrument for peace. ‘You could have heard Arabella from the far zide o’ Cathedral Close and I can’t catch no more’n the odd word o’ the boy’s, can you, Henry?’

  ‘No,’ said Henry, ‘but I’m sure o’ one thing, I baint missin’ much!’ and Smut’s barking laugh made so many people turn that Paul hustled them out and they adjourned to the public bar of The Mitre where Henry, suddenly more serious, said, ‘Lookit, Maister, is us goin’ to let un get away with it? Tiz the daftest thing ever happened yerabouts, a toad like ’ee standin’ for farmers! Baint there nothin’ us can do about it?’

  ‘Not much,’ Paul told him, ‘for we still haven’t got a candidate. He won’t be unopposed, however, a Labour chap is putting up, a University lad sent down to get experience.’

  Smut said, with a picturesque oath, ‘A bolshie is wastin’ his time yerabouts. If you stood us’d ’ave a sportin’ chance anyway. Dammit, we voted solid Liberal here nigh on thirty years, so why have us let this happen? Politics never bothered me much, apart from the larks us got up to in the old days, but to see Marty Codsall’s boy standing gives me the gripes, I can tell ’ee!’ to which Henry added, ‘Why dornee ’ave a go, Squire? ’Twould liven things up any road.’

  It was not the first pressures that had been applied to him as the weeks passed and still no acceptable successor to Grenfell presented himself. Liberal farmers from the villages north of Paxtonbury made approaches and some of the Old Guard, who had helped to send Jimmy back to Westminster several times in succession, seemed to resent his steadfast refusal to involve himself. He continued to stand aloof until mid-September, when the date of the election was announced and the Socialist party split down the middle with the Premier, Ramsay MacDonald, and others making common cause with the Opposition. Grenfell said, on hearing this news over Claire’s new four-valve radio set, ‘Well, there’s an end to the Liberal Party. We’ve been slowly bleeding to death ever since Lloyd George knifed us, in December, 1916. Now we shall have to choose Right or Left, with no hedging of bets! Thank God Asquith didn’t live to see it!’

  It was Grenfell’s comments on this occasion that reminded Paul of his own broadly-based faith in Democracy, a credo that, in his view, offered few fireworks but rather a steady promise of improvement for those dedicated to the ideal of personal liberty practised within a framework of disciplined free enterprise. It was very difficult for him to stand aside altogether and see a man who despised farmers as clodhoppers seek to represent the Valley in national councils, yet nomination day would have come and gone without him taking positive action had not Claire done a sudden right-about-face and ranged herself on the side of Henry, Smut and all the others urging him to take up the challenge.

  They were sitting before the library fire one night listening to the midnight news-bulletin when she said, without preamble, ‘Do it, Paul! I was wrong! You won’t win but do it anyway, as a gesture!’

  He was amused but also slightly alarmed at her insistence. It was not losing he feared but losing ignominiously. He said, ‘You weren’t wrong, you know; all the arguments you used against my standing were valid. Why this sudden change of heart?’

  ‘I think Hugh has something to do with it, Hugh and the man who bought him. I went over there today to help Father and Liz pack up.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It was pitiful, not just the old couple having to leave but the place itself, so empty and lifeless, with the stock sold off and not even a hen scratching about in the nettles. It was a kind of death.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection between the write-off of Hugh Coombe and me standing for Parliament.’

  ‘There is a connection,’ she insisted, ‘but I’m not clever enough to state it. It has to do with standing up for our way of life, a banner that has to be picked up and waved by someone, if only for a few moments!’

  He pondered this and with it the issues, most of them unconnected with the everyday life of the few hundred people living between the main line and the sea—far wider issues, involving tariffs, overseas payments, war debts, the League of Nations, the guilt of Germany, the truculence of France, on which he would be asked to pronounce and in which he was not, and never had been, deeply interested. If he stood at all it would be as a candidate in the old-fashioned sense, a local man seeking to represent local causes which was a role not even Jimmy Grenfell had been able to play for much of his time in Westminster. And yet, she was right again, even if she did stand in flat contradiction to
herself. ‘A banner to be picked up and waved, if only for a few moments . . . ’

  ‘All right,’ he said, finally, ‘if you’re behind me I’ll have a go and to hell with it! Do we go up and tell Jimmy now? He’s probably awake and reading.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it can keep for tonight!’ and then she did something she had not done for a long time, kicking off her shoes, coiling herself on his knee and saying, ‘I know I’m a good deal heavier but you’ll have to put up with that! After all, it’s an occasion!’

  It was a brief, breathless campaign, waged, for the most part, in thin rain that seemed now to have been falling for months, ruining the harvest and converting the Sorrel streams into brown floods that burst their banks and spread far across the flats, greatly hindered movement from one point to another. Looking back on that autumn election Paul found his memories of it fragmentary and insubstantial, a succession of dashes to and from draughty village halls and littered committee rooms, of open-air meetings in a dripping raincoat, and intervals of talk and endless cups of tea in steamy kitchens. He remembered the smells after he had forgotten the occasions, a salad of drying laundry, wet macintoshes, stale dust rising from the cracks of Institute platforms, and the sharp, schoolroom smell of freshly-printed leaflets and election addresses. His speeches were short and factual, concerned almost exclusively with the heavy slack of farm economy since the all-too-brief boom of ten years ago. He warned listless audiences of the steady drift from the land, urging the necessity of a sound agricultural policy if the country was not to become completely dependent on imported food. It was, he supposed, a very parochial campaign, with little appeal to voters living in the suburbs of the cathedral city, or elderly couples who had retired on fixed incomes to bungalows in places like Nun’s Bay but it won over a sizeable number of the farmers who had been Tories all their lives and it detached from Labour’s interests some of the unemployed who, in better times, had been rooted in local crafts like coach-building, shoeing, fishing, thatching and brick-making. He had a very zealous committee headed by Henry Pitts, Sam and Smut Potter, Marian Eveleigh, Parson Horsey and a few of the faithful living north of Paxtonbury. He also had a number of unexpected allies whom he used as supplementary speakers, men like the humourist, Jumbo Bellchamber, and Rose’s aged husband, Major Barclay-Jones, who came down from Gloucestershire and cantered about the Valley like a vintage Paul Revere, scorning the use of committee cars. Mary, his eldest daughter, was with him heart and soul, endlessly addressing envelopes and answering the telephone, or waiting for him with a Thermos flask of coffee in the brief intervals between one meeting and another, and Claire’s enthusiasm touched him even more for she had always professed to regard politics as a bore, as though to emphasise the contrast between herself and Grace. The constant rushing to and fro, and the vast expenditure of nervous energy listening to constituents’ grumbles and remembering so many names and faces, made him feel his age but with only a few days to go he began, almost subconsciously, to rate his chances far better than at the outset of the campaign. He met, and made friends with, the young Socialist candidate, a rather forlorn figure who reminded him a little of his son Simon, and he found it possible to admire the earnestness of a lad whose deprived youth in a north-eastern shipbuilding town had made him an apostle of militant socialism. The Socialist candidate was called Hardcastle and his appearance in the Valley was a forlorn hope on the part of Labour but he fought cleanly and doggedly, and Paul went so far as to put him in touch with Simon and Rachel, currently campaigning in a Welsh mining area. He did not come face to face with Sydney Codsall during the campaign. It was not until all the ballot boxes had been collected in Paxtonbury Town Hall that he saw him, outwardly smug but showing nervousness when the counting began, and wondered what attitude he would take if Sydney was disposed to be patronising. He was spared a decision; Sydney and his agent kept their distance while he stood waiting with young Hardcastle, watching the votes pile up on the long trestle tables, three creeping stacks, his own and Sydney’s maintaining a level advance and Hardcastle’s almost a non-starter. He was familiar with the tense atmosphere of a count, having attended any number in the past and was surprised at his own indifference. He had picked up the banner and waved it, and that was all that mattered. When Claire and Mary joined him, and Claire (far more concerned with the result than he was himself) sought his hand for comfort, he said, with a grin, ‘You needn’t worry, old girl! It isn’t going to be a walkover!’ and shuttled her on to Hardcastle, who looked as if he needed mothering.

  The result was far closer than anyone had anticipated having regard to the landslide in favour of the National Government all over the country. They told him the totals but he was almost too astonished to take them in and at one p.m., with everyone congratulating both leading candidates, the Returning Officer went out on to the balcony where a crowd awaited the result in the eternal drizzle. Only at the very last moment did Paul feel a void in the pit of his stomach and a parched feeling in the back of his throat that reminded him of nights behind Vimy, when he had been on the point of moving up to support areas with a convoy of shells or wire. Then, as he pulled himself together, he heard the fruity voice of the Returning Officer challenging the steady hiss of the rain:

  ‘ . . . Codsall, Sydney Algernon; thirteen thousand, one hundred and forty nine . . . Craddock, Paul; thirteen thousand . . . ’ but the next words were drowned in the roar that ascended from a crowd raised to a pitch of enthusiasm by the obvious closeness of the contest.

  ‘ . . . Craddock, Paul; thirteen thousand, one hundred and one!’ Sydney had won but by so small a margin that it was nothing to crow about and certainly not so when his massive organisation was taken into account. To Paul it was better than a victory, for it meant justification without the horrid necessity of turning his back on the Valley and his relief was so great that he felt almost sorry for his opponent faced with the prospect of making good his electoral promises and discovering, as Grenfell had prophesied, that attendance at Westminster called for a great deal more stamina than the old-pals atmosphere of County and Urban politics in the provinces. Perhaps Sydney already realised this; his formal speech of thanks was delivered in a high, piping voice and interrupted by a volley of catcalls, organised, Paul suspected, by stalwarts like Henry and Smut. He left them at it and went back into the hall where Claire, pink with excitement, said, ‘You don’t look like a defeated candidate!’ and plucked his sleeve nervously when he said, with unabashed heartiness, ‘I don’t feel like one either, old girl! Don’t you ever push me that near the cliff again!’ He shook off a swarm of supporters, saying, ‘For God’s sake let’s get on home and pick up where we left off! Codsall can keep the seat warm until we can find someone who means business!’

  Claire remained in what old Mrs Handcock always described as ‘a bit of a tizzy’ for the rest of the day but when the house was quiet, unnaturally so after the turmoil of the last three weeks, he poured her a double brandy and stood watching her sip it. He said, thankfully, ‘My God, it’s like coming home from the war! Like being turned loose again from hospital or the trenches! Why did we ever take such a risk?’

  ‘We neither of us realised it was a risk. Frankly I thought you’d poll about a third of his total. It only goes to show.’

  ‘To show what?’

  She turned her back on him to set down her glass, at the same time throwing a glance at him over her shoulder that somehow reminded him of the saucy, provocative girl who had once helped him decorate this room for King Edward’s Coronation­ soirée. ‘It’s like Father always says! There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye!’

  ‘Well,’ he said, crossing to her, slipping his hands behind her and genially pinching her bottom, ‘you should know! I suppose you would call this another of your famous “occasions”?’

  ‘Look here,’ she protested, ‘all our married life you’ve been hard at work convincing yourself that I was a wanton! I daresay it flatters y
ou but it isn’t true!’

  ‘Oh yes it is,’ he said, ‘and you’ve got six children to prove it! Do you want another drink?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘and neither do you it seems!’ and disengaged herself to throw a log on the fire and switch off the light.

  ‘You’re a lusty fifty-two, Paul,’ she told him, ‘so maybe I’m lucky you didn’t win and get yourself a London fiat and an admiring secretary!’ but as she said this her mood shifted again and holding his face between her hands she said, ‘We’ve been wonderfully lucky in spite of everything and we ought never to forget that when we run into the occasional bad patch! I was beginning to and so, I think, were you,’ but his relief was too deep to share her sudden earnestness and all he replied was, ‘Stop preaching, woman, it doesn’t become you!’ and began to treat her as though they had just returned, laughing and half-tipsy, from one of old Arthur Pitts’ Hallowe’en parties in days when fashions in clothes made this kind of frolic a far less casual enterprise than it was today.

  III

  The long run of back luck ended almost at once. Within days of the landslide election, when supporters were still pointing out that he, alone of Westcountry candidates, had increased the Liberal vote notwithstanding a massive Coalition victory, Claire came into the office and said that young Eveleigh wanted to talk to him. Paul looked up, expecting to see Robbie, the baby of the family, now huntsman to the Sorrel Vale pack but it was Robbie’s elder brother, Harold, whom he had not seen since Norman Eveleigh’s funeral. Harold, the war hero who had been commissioned in the field and decorated for gallantry, looked apologetic and declined a drink, saying, ‘Perhaps later, Mr Craddock, I’d prefer to talk first. The fact is, I’m in the fashion—on the dole and have come to you with half an idea.’