Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  ‘I had it in mind to suggest we slipped off and did some overdue honeymooning ourselves,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s all this nuptial syrup we’ve been dosed with lately! Suppose we “go back”, just for the weekend?’

  She knew what he meant by ‘go back’. Never, in the twenty-six years of their marriage, had they revisited Anglesey, where they had spent their first fortnight together in 1907, and now, Heaven help them both, it was 1933, and the same season of the year. She said, eagerly, ‘I’d love that, Paul! And Mary and young Claire have never seen the mountains. Why not drop a line to Honeyman . . . ’ but he interrupted her, saying, impatiently, ‘Don’t be so damned silly, woman! Do you want to hawk proofs of fruitfulness all over the island? Mary and Claire can tour the mountains under their own steam if they want to and if not they can go home by train!’ and he went downstairs to telephone the Home Farm and tell Honeyman that he would not be back until early the following week. In the meantime Claire had collected the two girls to tell them of the change of plan and was annoyed to find herself blushing when she said, in response to her youngest daughter’s ‘Why can’t we come along?’ ‘I don’t think your father wants that, my dear­ . . . it’s . . . well . . . it’s his idea of a Silver Wedding trip, and you know what a sentimentalist he is!’ and she was vastly obliged to Mary when she helped her out by saying, ‘I think it’s wonderful for you both! Come on, Claire, we’ll check the trains and if there’s one tonight we’ll take it, no matter what. I only hope North Wales is a bit less dingy than South, Mother!’

  ‘Believe me, it is!’ Claire told her. ‘From what I recall of it it’s not unlike home!’ and she hurried away to redistribute the contents of the cases.

  They set off that same evening, driving almost due north, putting up for the night at a little hotel among the low hills of Radnorshire and moving on after an early breakfast along the southern valleys of Snowdonia. She took her turn at driving the big Austin so that he could look around a bit and sometimes they travelled for miles without exchanging a word but both, in their own way, were enjoying the experience of being cut off from the Valley, with the family turmoil of the last hectic months behind them. As they crossed Menai Bridge, meeting a stream of returning Easter traffic, he said, ‘I don’t recall seeing anything but a horse and trap up here in those days. One might think it was a century ago judging by externals!’ and she said, with a smile. ‘How about internals? Do you feel your age? No hedging, tell the truth without bragging!’

  ‘Mentally I do,’ he admitted, ‘but not physically. That’s the result of making the effort to ride and walk as much as I could. The youngsters will have to pay for this tearing around in cars when they come up to the fifty mark. No, I don’t feel more than forty. How about you?’

  ‘Forty-one,’ she said, ‘and a year or so younger after dark!’ and he gave one of his sudden schoolboy laughs and pinched her knee as they turned inland towards the north-west corner of the island, where they had stayed the second and more rewarding week of their honeymoon in a farmhouse, after making an excuse to vacate a hotel full of Methodist clergymen assembled for a conference. Over here there were changes to be noted but they were not remarkable, a limited amount of new buildings on what had been open country, a few caravans in fields on either side of the unsurfaced road leading to the bay where, twenty-six years before, they had bathed and picnicked all day, without seeing anyone but children with shrimping nets. The old Roman road beyond Tynygongl had not changed at all and wild flowers, rarely seen in the Sorrel area, still grew in profusion among the outcrops of rock about the Druids’ Circle. Everyone about here spoke Welsh and used English­ with difficulty, and, to their delight, the old farmhouse was still there, overlooking the bay, a snug, Tudor homestead, squatting so close to the soil it looked as permanent as the rocks that broke the shallow soil and made ploughing here a tedious business. They knocked on the door with some trepidation and the old woman who answered them, and gave them a polite Welsh greeting, was the same who, as a woman in her early forties, had bustled about her unexpected guests seven years before the war. She did not recognise them, of course, but when Paul explained who they were she broke into a torrent of Welsh, rushed to the dresser and produced a photograph album containing a yellowing snapshot taken with Paul’s box camera on the porch, a picture of himself and Claire taken at his direction and with, he recalled, a great deal of fussing on the landlady’s part. They all peered at the blurred images and Claire said, ‘My goodness! Look at my waist in those days! And I’d quite forgotten you had a moustache, Paul!’

  The woman, Mrs Hughes, told them that her husband had died several years before and Paul said, ‘You had a son. He was called . . . wait a minute . . . David, and couldn’t speak a word of English! Does he still carry on farming?’

  ‘No, David was took,’ the farmer’s wife replied, unsentimentally, ‘he was took an’ never come home, you see!’ and she pointed to a photograph standing on the oak sideboard showing David in khaki presenting bayoneted rifle in the inevitable pose of Kitchener’s volunteers, when they rushed into studios within hours of being kitted out. ‘There’s not so many of the younger ones left around here,’ she went on. ‘Those who come back look you had different ideas, and crossed over to the mainland. There’s no money to be earned farming and Evan’s land iss sold off, mostly. My daughter Dilys’s man, Owen, he works what iss left, but there are no children whateffer! There’s a pity it iss but things is that changed, don’t you know?’

  Paul consoled her by saying his part of the world had changed too and from similar causes and it consoled him to think that post-war problems were universal among the farming communities. The old woman asked if they had a family and when Claire told her two boys and three girls she exclaimed with delight and patted her, as though she had been a prize-winning cow, so that Paul had to turn away to hide his grin and leave them together, lifting the cases out of the car without asking if the farm still accommodated visitors.

  It was soon arranged, however, and he was directed to the same low-ceilinged bedroom with its enormous, locally-made oak bedstead and view of the sea through the mullioned window. He thought, as he began to unpack, ‘I suppose, taken all round, we’ve been a damned sight luckier than most! Hardly more than one in three of the chaps who were young then would be alive now, or, if they were, sound in wind and limb,’ and then Claire came in and said, practising Simon’s thought-reading trick, ‘I felt desperately sorry for the old dame, Paul. It’s almost as though we were flaunting our survival! That boy of hers married before he went off and got killed but she hasn’t any grandchildren and no prospect of any.’

  ‘She’s still got the farm or what’s left of it,’ he said, ‘and that’s more than some of them have. Do you really want to stay?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but more for her sake than ours. It’s all rather chastening, don’t you think?’

  ‘It always is,’ he replied, ‘and I imagine that’s what they mean when they say one shouldn’t look back.’ Then, seeing her raise her arms to take off her little straw hat and noting, notwithstanding her continual complaints regarding her waistline, that her figure was very trim for a woman a few months short of fifty, he was glad they had returned and catching her round the waist, said, ‘I don’t give a damn if I do feel smug about us! We’ve earned the right to preen ourselves a bit, Claire!’ and he spun her round and kissed her mouth with an urgency that was communicated to him not only by an awareness of where they stood but also by the thought that there was a limit to the span when a man could kiss his wife as though he was still courting her.

  It was this thought, and the deliberate nostalgia they were invoking, that injected a special kind of gaiety and youthful abandon into the brief period they remained in hiding at Tynygongl. Paul, for his part, found himself recalling some of the spring tides of the years. As he lay in bed watching her undress, for instance, he remembered with amusement his impatience with the fiendish complexitie
s of her 1911 Coronation finery, in the hotel room overlooking Green Park and again, when she teased him by prolonging her going-to-bed ritual involving creams and lotions, he saw her as the laughing girl who had thrown her cap at him in the long, dry summer of 1902. He did not communicate these memories to her, preferring to enjoy them in private but deduced from her lightheartedness that she had equally stimulating memories of her own, for she came to him each night with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the time they had spent together in Crabpot Willie’s cabin during his final leave from France, encouraging him to use her not gently and diffidently, as he had done when they first lay in this room together, but as though she too had heard a clock ticking in the bowels of the old house.

  It was within these terms of reference, or something like them, that she communed with herself while he slept. Had their marriage never had much more than a strong, physical basis, and if so would the colours fade altogether when time finally caught up with them and remembered ecstasy was all they had? It was a sombre thought but the terminus still seemed immeasurably far off, for they derived more satisfaction from one another than when they were thirty and far more than when they had first come here, she as nervous and gawky as a Valley milkmaid, he curbed by the failure of his first marriage. How quickly and finally those initial handicaps had been overcome! And how smoothly had they arrived at a stage where intimacy was achieved on her part with the uninhibited enthusiasm of a Potter wench, and on his with the casual expectancy of an uncomplicated creature like Henry Pitts? Well, if that was all there was to it, a bed and the procreation of healthy children, she couldn’t help it and, what was more to the point, she didn’t care! Not a hoot! Not one of his hearty smacks on the bottom signifying his impatience to have her naked in his arms caressing every part of her body. It was not quite what she had expected of marriage in that beginning but it had worked and that was all that mattered.

  She turned over, tucking his arm under her breasts and returned the wink of phosphorescent light in the bay.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I

  The year of weddings ended with a funeral. Paul and Claire arrived back in the Valley on May Day, the first anniversary of the wedding of Prudence Pitts, to learn that Jimmy Grenfell had persuaded Mary to shift him to a Paxtonbury Nursing Home, declaring that there were limits to the hospitality one man could claim from another, and that it was bad taste to die in an old friend’s bed. He must have know that Paul would never have agreed to him going, and would, indeed, have done all in his power to dissuade him from submitting to another operation, so he took advantage of his hosts’ absence and convinced Mary that her parents would have fallen in with his plan. Paul hurried over to see him the day before his operation and found him very weak but as cheerful and resigned as ever. The history of the Chartist Movement was proofed, he said, and all that remained now was for Paul to send the MSS to the publishers and countersign a document he would find in the drawer of the desk on which it lay.

  ‘What is it, Jimmy?’ he demanded. ‘I must know what I’m signing before I promise anything.’

  ‘Only some mumbo-jumbo drawn up by the agent,’ Grenfell told him, ‘allocating the royalties, if any, to you.’

  ‘Dammit, man,’ Paul protested, ‘I don’t want to profit by your death! Haven’t you any relatives you want to pass it to?’ But Jimmy said all his relations were staunch Tories who would be embarrassed by a book on a revolutionary movement. ‘In any case,’ he added, ‘the money isn’t a straight bequest, it’s an endowment. I’m told the book is expected to do well, both here and in America, and I had an idea that I could flatter you and, at the same time, make a post-mortem gesture! It ought, over the years, to produce enough to give one boy, or girl for that matter, a decent education and send them on to university. It’s laid down in the deed that if any such person is found, and named by you, that they read modern history and philosophy. You’ll administrate, of course, so I leave it to you to see the clause is followed.’

  ‘That alters things,’ Paul said, ‘and I think it’s a splendid idea! What kind of geographical limits had you in mind?’

  ‘Only that whoever takes advantage of this is the child of one of your tenants, or, if there are no local takers, the child of one of our old stalwarts in the constituency, someone who stood with us through the heat of the day.’

  ‘Well,’ Paul said, ‘let’s hope you can tackle the paper work yourself, Jimmy,’ but Grenfell said, ‘You don’t believe that, Paul! I’m a gonner and you know it; I only agreed to this operation because I knew it would mean curtains. There’s really no point in hanging around any longer and becoming a damned nuisance to everyone. I’ve already had a couple of years more than I expected and I owe that to you, to Claire, and that charming daughter of yours. I’m afraid this is good-bye, Paul.’

  Paul said nothing. He was aware, more than anyone, of the pain Jimmy had endured over the last few years and could no more regret his release than he had regretted old John Rudd’s more merciful death not so long ago. Both men, he reflected, had been bonny fighters and it was pitiful to see them grow entirely dependent on others. He said, finally, ‘It’s been fun, Jimmy, and an adventure in its way, ever since you bowled up the drive in that yellow trap, wearing that damned silly billycock hat and looking more like a squire than I ever did! I’ve learned a lot from you; it was you who kept me in touch with what was going on outside and stopped me from becoming dangerously parochial.’

  ‘Taken all round you had the right idea from the beginning, Paul,’ Grenfell said. ‘I didn’t always think so but I do now.’

  ‘Well, I believe we’re getting on top of things, Jimmy,’ and as he said this it struck him that, in his final moments old John Rudd had also been concerned with the future of the Valley, as though each of these men had donated part of themselves to a task that had absorbed his own interests throughout the greater part of a lifetime. He left then, with the uncertainty that he would never see Jimmy Grenfell again and neither did he. Within twenty-four hours they rang through to say the patient had died under the anaesthetic.

  Parson Horsey called as soon as the news got around and said Grenfell had asked him if he could be buried in the Valley and Paul was more impressed by this than by Grenfell’s eccentric legacy.

  ‘He wasn’t a local man, he belonged up North,’ he told Horsey. ‘Jimmy didn’t set foot in the Valley until he got himself adopted as Liberal candidate at the beginning of the century. What did you promise him?’

  ‘I told him we would certainly find room for him when his time came,’ Horsey said. ‘He’s one of the few politicians I ever met who based his election addresses on the Sermon on the Mount. There aren’t so many of his kind left, Mr Craddock. Will Wednesday suit you? His grave will be the first in the new annexe, beyond the wall.’

  Paul remembered then that Horsey had recently acquired a triangular plot east of Churchyard Lane, directly behind the church and its overcrowded graveyard. It brought home to him that the rate of wastage in the Valley was accelerating and, for the first time perhaps, he realised that the Craddocks, when their turn came round, would not lie in the same acre as old Tamer Potter, Edwin Willoughby, John Rudd, and Norman Eveleigh, of Four Winds.

  He completed arrangements with the parson and went into the office to record Grenfell’s death in the diary but when he turned the book to its first blank page he saw that Claire had anticipated him and had written, under Monday’s date, ‘Today James Grenfell, MP (with a single brief break) for Paxtonbury from 1904 until 1929, and who spent his last years in Shallowford writing his “The History of the English Chartists”, died at the age of sixty-five years. He was a good man, genuinely regretted by everyone in the Valley, and particularly so by the Squire, whose close friend he was during the whole of that time.’ The entry touched him. Claire had never been one for politics and what she had written underlined the respect and affection she felt for Grenfell as a man, rather than as a po
litician. There was nothing he could add to the entry so he went upstairs to the room Jimmy had occupied since retiring to Shallowford. To his surprise he found Mary sitting at the desk, so absorbed in the proofs of Jimmy’s book that she did not hear him come in. He knew his eldest daughter was an enthusiastic devotee of lyrical poetry (she was the only female member of the family, he would say, whose mind strayed outside a woman’s magazine) but he had never before seen her reading a political book.

  She said, rioting his smile, ‘All right, so it’s a new field! But it’s one of the most absorbing books I’ve ever read. Have you read it?’

  ‘In manuscript. What makes it specially interesting to you?’

  ‘The way people lived, the working people and the fight they had. You don’t hear about that kind of thing in school history lessons, at least I never did—just kings, battles and treaties.’

  ‘You must have had a very old-fashioned history teacher!’

  ‘No, seriously,’ she went on, folding her hands and clasping her wrists, a gesture he always thought of as Mary’s equivalent to putting her hands in pockets, ‘what staggers me is that it wasn’t all that time ago, less than a century. Your father, and Grandpa Derwent, must have been alive, and realising that makes everything so much—well—relevant, even things about here if you see what I mean?’

  He did not but he was anxious to; he had never held a conversation like this with any member of his family except Simon and Simon always retreated into bluebooks and party pamphlets.

  ‘How do you mean, “even things around here”?’

  She said cautiously, ‘Well, you know how we’ve always teased you about having a bee in your bonnet as regards the Valley . . . ?’

  ‘You don’t have to apologise. As regards that my skin is several inches thick! How does the Valley come into it?’