Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  His sense of isolation joined forces with the wind-driven sleet that rushed at him across the open moor and he pressed on over the border like a tired fugitive on the run.

  III

  Simon wrote within the month, giving a Madrid address but no personal news beyond the fact that he was well. For progress of the war Paul had to turn to the newspapers and one needed a good’ deal of ingenuity to thread the maze of prejudice implicit in the reports. Even the names of the antagonists were interchangeable. To Right-Wing journalists Franco’s Moors were ‘Nationalists’ and the elected government ‘Reds’; to others, who shared Simon’s dress-rehearsal theory Franco’s side were ‘The Fascists’, or ‘Insurgents’, and their opponents ‘The People’s Army’. Paul hardly knew what to make of it and was still trying to puzzle it out when, in common with everyone else in the Valley who read newspapers or listened to radio bulletins, he was caught up in a different kind of civil war, one of words raging around the bachelor King whom everyone had assumed would replace his father in the days when there was still a real, personal relationship between Monarch and subjects. Here was an issue, he thought, that did not require Fleet Street guidance and Paul came down heavily in favour of the morganatic marriage to Mrs Simpson (whoever she was) and was mortified to find himself in the minority when the topic was discussed in the Valley. Only Henry Pitts and Smut Potter proclaimed their allegiance to ‘The King’s Party’, whereas people like Marian Eveleigh, Thirza Tremlett, and even the former Potter girls (whom he would have thought could be relied upon to take a tolerant view) ranged themselves alongside Baldwin and the Pharisaical Archbishop of Canterbury, Violet Bellchamber declaring, ‘Us dorn want the likes of ’Er for Queen, do us? ’Er’s been divorced twice and if he can’t do no better’n that then he should bide single and vind his bit o’ comfort where he can, zame as King Teddy did!’

  At first Paul found this attitude amusing, especially when it was adopted by women who seemed to have forgotten their own carefree youth but as the crisis mounted, and the cleavage of opinion became sharper, their intolerance exasperated him and Claire, sensitive to his moods, called him to task when he admitted losing his temper with Harold Eveleigh’s wife on the subject.

  ‘You’re getting everything out of proportion these days,’ she told him bluntly, ‘and if you don’t watch yourself you’ll develop into a real old griper in your old age! What on earth does it matter to you whether he marries Mrs Simpson or not? You never had much time for royalty in what you’re now pleased to call the Good Old Days just because they’re behind you!’

  ‘I had a lot of time for him!’ he countered, ‘and it makes me vomit to hear people discard loyalties like sweaty socks! Damn it, there was a time when that chap was the most popular man in the world, and unlike most of his kind he bloody well earned it, traipsing all over the world advertising the damned country! I remember him in France too! He wasn’t like all the other Brass Hats, warming their fat backsides at a fire at Supreme Headquarters. He did everything he could to get up to the front and the chaps loved him for it! Now, because he happens to fall for a mature, intelligent woman, everybody suddenly becomes a bloody Sunday School superintendent! I tell you, it turns my guts sour!’, and he flung himself out of the house and took it out on the skewbald in a breakneck gallop across the dunes where, as luck would have it, he ran into Maureen driving her ancient Morris up from the red-tiled bungalows in Nun’s Bay. Maureen had news that took his mind off the troubles of the King and Mrs Simpson. She braked and hooted the moment she saw him and shouted:

  ‘Hi! Hold on there! I’ve just heard a rumour that will set tongues wagging! Sydney Codsall is flat broke and resigning his seat. Have you heard anything to confirm it?’

  It was not quite true but had elements of truth, as everybody between Whin and Sorrel soon learned. Sydney’s business associate, Tapscott, the builder, had gone bankrupt for what seemed to Valley folk the astronomical sum of £28,000, but it soon leaked out that Sydney, although partially involved, had saved his bacon by withdrawing capital before the crash. It was true that he was resigning the Parliamentary seat, won in 1931 but this, it seemed, was due to domestic rather than financial difficulties for his wife was suing for divorce on evidence gathered by a private detective, so that the Valley soon found itself in the Sunday newspapers for the first time since the wreck of the German ship off the Cove, in 1906. It made, as Vi Potter declared, ‘tolerable gude readin’ ’, particularly in one of the Sunday papers that featured a picture of Sydney’s alleged mistress and horsefaced wife side by side, under the banner headline, ‘MP flees Love-Nest by Fire Escape’ and below, ‘Nude Woman hits Photographer with Table Lamp’.

  In the resultant scramble for details the King and Mrs Simpson departed for France almost unnoticed and Paul, never a malicious man, nonetheless commented to Claire that weekend, ‘Well, he’s been sailing close to the wind twenty years and was due to capsize! I wonder if Tapscott would be interested in an offer for what’s left of High Coombe? It would be a feather in our cap to get it back, don’t you think?’

  She could not be sure whether or not he was joking so she temporised, ‘What would you do with half a farm if you got it? They’ve already built all over Eight Acre and Cliff Warren. I don’t suppose there’s more than a hundred acres left of the original.’

  ‘Periwinkle was smaller than that to begin with,’ he said, rubbing his hands and looking so pleased with himself that she felt ashamed for him. ‘There’s no harm in getting Snow & Pritchard to put out a feeler!’ and he left the table whistling between his teeth so that she thought, a little ruefully, ‘He’s hardening up! There’s no doubt about that, and I’m not at all sure that I like it!’

  Tapscott was only too eager to sell and before the New Year was a fortnight old the rump of the old Derwent Farm had been repurchased, a parcel consisting of the original farmhouse, some ruinous outbuildings and about ninety-five acres between the tail-end of Tapscott’s bungalows and the north-eastern tip of Shallowford Woods. Paul got it, he told Claire, for a song—less than half the price paid to Hugh Derwent by Sydney five years before, and not much more than Paul had been paid by Hugh two years before that. She drove out there with him one windless March day and they poked about the farm and grass-grown yards, finding that the old building was still in reasonable repair, Sydney’s agents having used it as an administration centre for the caravan camp inland from Eight Acres. For all that the air of neglect depressed Claire so much that she said, pointing at the cracked and peeling paint on what had once been Rose’s stables, ‘I wish I hadn’t come. It’s revived all my anger against Hugh! I suppose we shall have to pull it down and include what’s left in Willoughby’s farm.’

  ‘Not a bit of it!’ he assured her. ‘I’ve got an idea but it’ll need time to work on. Anyway, I’m glad some damned speculator didn’t jump in ahead of us, for this is like recapturing occupied territory. High Coombe was always my private Alsace-Lorraine!’

  He went to work at once, making an appointment with Francis Willoughby that same evening and when Francis, guessing why he had called, asked, ‘It’ll be about what’s left of High Coombe, won’t it?’ he said that unless Francis was desperate for more pasture he had a plan that required a sacrifice on the part of Deepdene and he would appreciate Francis speaking his mind, notwithstanding the landlord-tenant relationship between them.

  They made an appointment and Francis was awaiting him at the extreme southern end of his land when he rode up from the Dell about ten o’clock the following morning. He looked, Paul thought, about as unlike his father, Preacher Willoughby, as was possible. The preacher had been tall and spare, with a saint’s halo of soft white hair, whereas Francis, broad-shouldered and grizzled, looked precisely what he was, a middle-aged man who had never had a thought unconnected with cattle-rearing. He was short and square, his thick calves encased in spotless leggings and a hard hat wedged firmly on his round head, as though to advertise that in
side there was no room for frivolities of any kind. He was respectful, however, greeting Paul with the grave politeness that still lingered among the older tenants.

  ‘I came downalong to saave ’ee the journey up to the house,’ he said. ‘My two varmints are upalong in the rickyard and they stop work if I bide talking to anyone!’

  ‘It’s about one of your varmints I’ve called,’ Paul said, dismounting. ‘How would you feel about young Dick Potter branching out on his own? I’m sure a chap with your reputation wouldn’t have trouble replacing him.’

  Francis looked blank and then thoughtful. Not given to making snap judgments he took his time answering.

  ‘Dick’s got the makings of a good farmer,’ he said at length, ‘which is surprising, considering the blood that runs in him but then, you can’t judge by that, or not entirely. That Potter son-in-law of yours over at Periwinkle is a lively spark and may do well once he’s outgrown his fancy notions! Where would you be thinking of zettling my cowman? On what’s left of old Edward Derwent’s plaace?’

  ‘Why not? There’s over a hundred acres if I threw in the sloping meadow that backs on the Big House. It’s small I know but he’d be on his own, except for a boy if he could get one and I believe he’s a good man with dairy cattle?’

  ‘Arr!’ said Francis, guardedly, ‘he is that! Better than he be wi’ the beef. If he hadn’t been I wouldn’t have kept him all this time!’

  It occurred to Paul that this eastern side of the estate bred an altogether different kind of man than the west or south. Within living memory Edward Derwent, Tamer Potter, Willoughby Senior and now Willoughby Junior had all grown to maturity on the exposed side of the Bluff. Perhaps the eastwinds, sweeping across the Downs, had tempered them in a way that it had not tempered amiable families like the Pitts, the Honeymans and the younger Eveleighs.

  ‘Dick Potter, by my reckoning, is twenty-six. If he stays on with you another year or so he won’t want to shift and he’ll be a hired man all his life. I’ve already had a word with Sam, his father, and he’s desperately keen we give the lad a chance, Francis. I’d appreciate it if you’d part with him and forgo any hopes you had of enclosing High Coombe within your own borders. However, I’m not going to do more than put it to you. If you’re opposed to the idea then we’ll forget it and say nothing to him. You’ve been a first-class tenant ever since your father died and I wouldn’t want to upset you. Take a day to think it over.’

  ‘Nay,’ Francis said, slowly, ‘I don’t need time to think on that. Tiz right to give the lad the chance, for I’ve not forgotten you gave me mine backalong. I can make do on the land I’ve got, I’ve managed well enough so far!’ His last sentence was a challenge and Paul, recognising as much, said, ‘You certainly have and there isn’t a man in the Valley who isn’t proud of you. Should I put it to Dick or would you like to sound him?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Francis said and heaved himself off his five-barred gate, ‘but I wouldn’t bank on him accepting. There’s a lazy streak in the Potters but us’ll zee what us’ll zee!’

  Paul never learned what took place between Francis and Dick Potter, son of his woodsman, but the upshot of it was that Dick set about repairing the Derwent farmhouse and outbuildings and somehow contrived to find time to do some spring sowing on the neglected acres inland from the cliff fields. Paul and Claire went over in late April to see how he was getting along and found him with Smut Potter’s lad, the impish, seventeen-year-old son of the ponderous Fleming, who had clasped Smut to her corseted bosom in 1917 and never let him go. Dick favoured his father, Sam, a tall, rangy young man, with the Potter trademarks of brown, impudent eyes, stiff unruly hair and bouncing, spring-heeled gait. Paul handed the new tenant of High Coombe his lease and learned that Dick proposed to specialise in dairy products.

  ‘Not Friesians, Guernseys,’ he told Paul. ‘There’s a big local demand for clotted cream in Coombe Bay and Whinmouth and it’s growing all the time. ‘Bonbon’ is going to work for me, so he says, but I doan reckon he’ll stay; he’s always cracking on about Australia!’

  Paul remembered then that Smut’s boy was known in the Valley as ‘Bonbon’, a name derived from his mother’s impatient response to all enquiries when she first came here, soon after the Armistice. He recalled also that the two cousins had always been close friends, notwithstanding the eight-year gap in their ages. It was comforting, he thought, to have two Potters at work in the Coombe area again and asked if he could see what sort of job they were making of the inside of the farm. Repairs were obviously rough and ready and Claire must have noticed as much, for she said, ‘This is well enough for men who don’t mind pigging it, Dick, but you’ll have to get a real builder in if you ever think of marrying!’ and Dick said, grinning, ‘Bless you, Mrs Craddock, I got no time to think o’ marrying now, and no one in mind either! I shall have all my work cut out gettin’ this place in shape!’

  ‘I’ve heard you young chaps talk like that before,’ Claire said, ‘but you all come round to it sooner or later!’ and she looked round the big kitchen, adding rather wistfully, ‘This is a place for children. Rose and I were happy here and if my brother Hugh had married at your age he would have been poorer but a good deal happier I think.’

  She was thoughtful on the way home and it occurred to Paul that she resented seeing the old farm change hands but he was wrong, for when he asked if this was so she said, with a chuckle, ‘No, I wasn’t brooding on that! I was just thinking it’s lucky Father didn’t live to see it; if people really do turn in their graves the poor old chap must be positively threshing about to witness a Potter on his land! He feuded with them for years, remember? It was only old Preacher Willoughby who kept them from tearing each other’s throats!’

  ‘You can say what you like of the Potters,’ he replied, ‘but you have to grant them staying power! They were hanging on by their fingertips when I came here thirty-five years ago and look at them now! One grandson farming at Periwinkle and married to our daughter, two other grandsons reclaiming High Coombe and two of the originals still rooted in the Dell! Damn it, they practically dominate the Valley and I daresay it would have astonished old Tamer, bless his heart!’

  The Coronation junketings that year were so tame, Paul thought, as to be hardly worth organising. Everybody went through the usual motions—public luncheons, a service in the parish church, some tepid sports in the water-meadows, and the ritual distribution of mugs to schoolchildren, but the heart had gone out of the cult of royalty-worship and it seemed to him that people found it laborious to light fire-crackers and get drunk in honour of the new King. Victoria had been an awesome figure, a kind of arch-priestess deputising for the Almighty and even prompting Him on occasion, whereas her son, the portly Edward, had been a man licensed to gamble and womanise and hobnob with bookmakers without losing his dignity. Then came Squire George, Vicky’s solemn grandson, and everyone respected his rectitude, even though he never enjoyed the prestige of his father, and after that everyone had been prepared to welcome the cheerful young man who had outraged them by running off with a handsome divorcee, but for George VI, perhaps because of his shyness and slight stammer, there was little more than tolerance tinged with sympathy and somehow this did not add up to reverence or even enthusiasm. In any case, by this time the front of the stage was cluttered with clowns, the noisiest and most grotesque troop anyone in the Valley could remember, not excluding the Kaiser, who had always been seen with an eagle perched on his helmet. The clamour from across the water grew louder and louder as more and more grotesques, with sinister-sounding names and extravagant characters, claimed attention. There was Dr Goebbels, with his big head and clumping foot, Goering with his chestful of medals, Himmler, who was said to cause those who displeased him to disappear in puffs of smoke, The Duce (whom the Valley folk knew as ‘Musso’) with a chin that jutted like a ledge of the Bluff but, dominating all, the ringmaster himself, with his lank forelock, Charlie Chaplin mo
ustache, hysterical oratory and extraordinary reputation for gnawing carpets when thwarted. Altogether an extravagant and totally ridiculous bunch thought the Valley, and their opinion of Squire Craddock’s good sense dropped a point or two when the word went round that he thought the nation was threatened by them and was reported to have spent thousands of pounds on farm machinery and pedigree stock at the County Show, and also (could caution go further?) in digging a huge concrete-lined pit in the dip between the big house paddock and Home Farm rickyard, rumoured by some to be an air-raid shelter and by others a fuel-storage tank against the day when storm-troopers would come goosestepping up from Coombe Bay.