Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  ‘You all had a hand in it?’ Paul said at length. ‘Everyone here?’

  ‘Giddon no,’ Henry said, ‘us baint all here! There was nigh on fifty subscribed and I got a list here if you can read my writing!’ and he presented a soiled sheet of foolscap, containing a long list of names, each of them familiar and representing not only the tenants but all the local craftsmen, men like old Aaron Stokes and Abe Tozer’s son. Goss, the new sexton, had contributed and so had Willis, the blind wheelwright, and there were a couple of names from outside the Valley, Ben Godbeer, the Paxtonbury seedsman, and ex-Police Sergeant Price, long since retired, from Whinmouth.

  He was too moved to make adequate response but they seemed to understand his confusion and silently made way for him as he walked round the gelding, noting a broad back and heavy quarters proclaiming it a stayer who would carry him over rough ground all day and still be good for a turn of speed towards dusk. It was, he thought, one of the best all-rounders he had ever seen and he did not need to be told it had good manners. Even Snowdrop would have stood chafed at standing unsaddled in the midst of such a crowd, all of them strangers.

  He said, quietly, ‘He’s magnificent, and I can’t thank you all enough. It’s . . . it’s quite the kindest thing anyone ever did for me . . . ’ and he trailed off, feeling that anything he said in the way of acknowledging their loyalty and generosity would sound trite. Henry came to his rescue with—‘Put ’un away in the loose-box, Mark boy! Let’s drink Squire’s health and get about our buziness!’ and they all trooped into the kitchen where Claire was drawing tankards of ale and The Pair and Simon were on hand to serve them, each of his sons displaying a jocularity suitable to the occasion. Then they drank his health, mercifully without speeches and presently, after wishing him Many Happy Returns, they drifted away so that he was left alone with Simon who said, with a smile, ‘I wouldn’t have missed that, Gov! It was quite something in this day and age!’ and Paul, automatically collecting tankards and piling them into the sink, agreed that it was but he could find no words to convey to the most perceptive of his children the warmth of the glow in his heart but went quietly upstairs to shave, glad of an excuse to take his time over dressing. ‘Some of the older ones used to say there were compensations in passing the sixty-mark,’ he reflected, ‘but I never believed them until this moment,’ and he paused in the act of scraping his chin with the open razor he had bought in Cape Town on his twenty-first birthday and glanced out of the little window across the fields, already shimmering in the morning heat-haze. ‘I’ve got this place by the tail at last,’ he thought, ‘and it’s taken me close on forty years to do it! They would never have done a thing like that for the Lovells and I’m damned glad all the children were here to see it!’ He wiped the lather from his face and looked hard at himself in the glass, noting the mop of iron-grey hair and brown, lined face that now had a permanent ‘Tudor look’. He wondered if the marks of the struggle were as obvious to others as they were to him and then, lowering his glance, noted with satisfaction that he had no paunch, that his body looked more youthful than his face. He pulled on boots and breeches and drifted into the bedroom, hearing the babel from below as his family assembled for breakfast but feeling no immediate inclination to join them. He threw wide the window sniffing the air like a pointer, playing his old game of identifying its components—dew-soaked grass, clover, the scent of roses from Grace’s sunken garden and the overall tang of the sea. Well, there it was, looking precisely as it had looked when he first came here limping from the effects of a Boer bullet and as it had looked on all his other birthdays. Many of them he had forgotten but he could remember the notches of successive decades—the day he was thirty for instance, when he and Claire had taken the eight-months-old twins to Coombe Bay in the waggonette and the day he was forty, when he had ridden alone up to the spur of Hermitage Wood and picked the spot for the memorial plantation. On his fiftieth birthday, just before the twins’ coming-of-age, he had gone the rounds with old John Rudd, bless his heart, and now that he was sixty they roused him from bed to present him with a hunter that reminded them of Snowdrop, thus underlining the fact that they too, in their way, clamoured for continuity. He looked from the rumpled bed to Claire’s portrait, still leaning against the dressing-table, and the memory of last night’s frolic made him smile. He didn’t feel sixty and he didn’t act sixty but then, why should he, with a fine woman like her in his arms and the Valley calling to him outside? And as he thought of Claire and the Valley in relation to one another he reminded himself that they were indivisible, that the vitality they fed him sprang from the same source. The knowledge that it was there, would always be there, put a spring in his step as he went along to the head of the stairs listening to the clatter-clatter from the dining-room. A verse occurred to him and he fumbled for it as he went down to the hall—something of Hardy’s that he had read recently and had memorised because it seemed to him to epitomise the life he and Claire had shared in this house and would, he supposed, continue to share throughout their remaining years:

  ‘When down to dust we glide

  Men will not say askance,

  As now; “How all the countryside

  Rings with their mad romance!”

  But as they graveward glance

  Remark; “In them we lose

  A worthy pair, who helped advance

  Sound parish views.” ’

  Dullish and perhaps a little pie-faced, he thought, smiling at his vanity, but an apt epitaph for both of them. ‘Sound Parish views!’ No more and no less. It was about all he had ever striven after.

  III

  It seemed to him, as he watched them all at supper that night, that the tensions of the world were reproduced round his own dining-table. On the left sat Simon and Rachel and on the right the conventional Whiz and her rather stuffy husband, Ian. Simon would be thinking, perhaps, of pitiful processions of fugitives and refugees trudging ahead of the victorious Fascists in Spain, whereas Whiz and Ian, if they thought of Spain at all, would dismiss it as none of their business. In between were his other children, The Pair, who almost certainly regarded the prospect of a collision with Hitler as a tremendous lark, and Rumble and Mary, who, like himself, would see their contribution to any struggle for survival in efforts to coax the last blade of wheat from Valley soil. Nobody discussed politics, Simon having been briefed by Claire to keep his views to himself lest they should promote strife between him and his brother-in-law, Ian. The atmosphere remained cordial but the tension was there all right, as he could see when they listened to the nine o’clock news-bulletin. When they broke up and went their several ways the next morning he had a brief word with Simon, whose opinions he valued, but he took care to do it out of earshot of the others. It was Simon, in fact, who promoted the conversation while he stood waiting for Rachel to bring their single hand-grip down.

  ‘It will be a long time before we’re all here together again, Gov’nor,’ he said, watching The Pair stow their wives’ luggage in the boot of the big Wolseley. ‘Fact is, I doubt if it’ll ever happen, for the whole damned lot of us are standing on a fused bomb. I gather, however, that you are one of the few who admits as much.’

  ‘Yes Si, I admit it and have done for some time but I don’t think Ian and Whiz do, and I don’t think The Pair regard it as anything more than an excuse to play with balloons at weekends. Could you give an approximate date to it?’

  ‘No,’ Simon told him, ‘and neither could anyone else but it shouldn’t be long now. That mad bastard Hitler has to keep moving in the same direction and Franco’s triumph will encourage him to prod us that much harder! I never thought of myself as a man who would look forward to flashpoint but delaying it isn’t going to help.’

  ‘What will you do when it does come? Have you made any plans?’

  ‘I shall join the foot-sloggers, I suppose,’ Simon said, ‘the RAF is too jazzy for me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘C
ould you get a commission?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have one as a gift. In any case, my International Brigade associations would put paid to that. They might be compelled to fight Fascists but, taken all round, they prefer them to Bolshies!’

  Paul said, without challenging the dubious logic of this, ‘If it does happen would you like Rachel to come here for the duration? She grew up on a farm and could make herself very useful, both to me and Rumble Patrick.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, brightening a little, ‘I’d like that very much,’ and as Rachel appeared with Monica and Margaret he gave Paul a swift grin and added, ‘So long, Gov! You’re a spry sixty and I doubt if any of us will make it without a bath chair!’ It was meant as a joke, Paul thought, but to a man like himself, who had seen thousands of shattered men occupying invalid carriages in two wars, it was singularly unfunny. He watched them drive off, all six of them piled into Stevie’s car and the girls squealing as Stevie, ever a madcap driver, careered round the sharp bend of the drive and skidded a couple of feet on the canting gravel. Then Whiz and Ian said their good-byes and after that Mary and Rumble wandered off hand in hand across the orchard, moving slowly like a couple of village lovers.

  ‘Well,’ said Claire, and he could not miss the note of thankfulness in her voice, ‘That’s that until Christmas, I suppose!’ and he replied, slipping his arm around her, ‘Let’s hope so at all events. Glad as I am to have them all under one roof occasionally, a little goes a long way!’ but he said this because he knew she needed his corroboration. Secretly he felt a little sad, even frightened, for it occurred to him that although nothing was likely to occur until the harvest was gathered all over Europe, a lot could happen between the end of August and the first snow. Harvest-thanksgiving­, he recalled, was the traditional season of war, always providing mountebanks like Adolf Hitler followed traditions.

  Even then he was caught on the hop; not quite as ludicrously as in August 1914 but ludicrously enough, after all his months of planning and worrying. Either he had resigned himself to another Munich, or Simon and Rachel had laid too much stress upon Hitler’s hatred of Communism. Or perhaps, like Henry, he found it very difficult to believe that a generation of Germans who had shared the mud of Passchendaele would actually start another war. He had relaxed during July and early August but when Hitler began to threaten Poland he called a meeting of the Valley co-operative and laid his plans before them in detail, a pooling of resources on a scale not even practised in 1917, and every farm in the area, tied and freehold, operating as a unit under a standing committee composed of Brissot, Honeyman, Harold Codsall, David Pitts, Willoughby and himself. He had invited Felton, the county agricultural adviser, to attend the meeting and Felton was impressed, ’phoning later to say that he would appreciate Paul’s co-operation in fostering similar co-operatives north and east of Paxtonbury. By then, however, the harvest was upon them and because the weather was patchy everyone, including himself, was too busy to pay overmuch attention to the screaming threats from Berlin, or the cocksure rantings from Rome. In any case, the cacophony had now continued so long—ever since the autumn of 1935, when Mussolini had attacked Abyssinia—and everybody had become so bored with it, that it acted on them like the beat of surf on the shore throughout an overlong winter. It was not until the evening of the 23rd August, that the telephone bell rang and he heard Simon say, ‘Well Gov, this is it, I imagine!’ and when Paul admitted that he had been out helping Rumble Patrick until dusk, that Claire was away fetching young John from the annual Sunday School treat, and that he had not heard a news-bulletin for twenty-four hours, Simon said, with a bitterness the telephone could not disguise, ‘Germany and Russia have signed a non-aggression pact! You’d better listen to the next news and then ring me. Make it tonight, I’ll be off tomorrow.’

  ‘For God’s sake—off where? There’s no war yet, is there?’

  ‘Camp. Local Terriers. We were going anyway but this will almost certainly mean mobilisation.’

  ‘I’ll ring,’ Paul promised and hung up, hurrying back to the library and switching on just in time to hear the news delivered as though it had been part of a sports commentary. He heard it out and went back to the ’phone, finding that his steps dragged a little and suddenly feeling the tug of tired muscles after twelve hours in the fields.

  ‘When would Rachel like to come?’ he asked as soon as Simon answered, ‘Will she wait until something actually happens?’

  ‘She’s packing now,’ Simon said and then, after a slight pause, ‘I’d better say good-bye, Gov. God knows where I shall end up or if I’ll be able to ring. There’s some talk of actually landing chaps on the Continent as a kind of peace force, if you’ve ever heard anything so bloody silly! Keep an eye on Rachel, as well as the home fires burning!’

  ‘Good luck wherever you go—if anywhere,’ Paul said hoarsely and quickly replaced the receiver. He was not given to premonitions but he had one now. In the half-hour or so before he heard the scrape of Claire’s car on the gravel he was as sure as he had ever been of anything, that he would never hear Simon’s voice again. All the others’, possibly, but not the voice of Grace’s son.

  Chapter Twenty

  I

  About half-past five, on the last morning of May, 1940, Paul emerged from Crabpot Willie’s cabin in time to see his relief, Henry Pitts, top the rise and descend the shallow tail of the goyle on his pony. He looked, Paul thought, exactly like a burgher commando rider moving down into a donga. The pony was far too small for him and his legs swung barely a foot from the ground. Over his shoulder, supported by a length of whipcord, was a 12-bore and the Boer touch was heightened by the shapeless trilby hat he wore, a hat that had weathered the Valley sun, wind and sleet ever since it had been issued as part of Henry’s demobilisation togs in the long dry summer of 1919.

  It was strange, Paul reflected, that all the important pattern changes of the Valley were signposted by what the locals called ‘a praper ole scorcher’. The sun had burned the grass a dark brown in 1902, the season Paul settled in, and the Valley had withered under its non-stop glare in 1914. The first year of the peace had been just as hot and airless but between then and now, a matter of twenty-one years, he could not recall a dry spell lasting more than a fortnight or so. Perhaps they had come and gone without him noticing but now, with the rhythm of the seasons broken more finally than ever before, one took note of the weather. Somehow the brassiness of the sky, and the windlessness of the dunes above the beach, had within them elements of mockery to men condemned to play soldiers when they should have been making the very most of such sunshine.

  He called, ‘You’re ahead of time, Henry, I didn’t expect you until six!’ and Henry, sliding down without disturbing the creases of his habitual grin, replied, ‘I was woke by they bliddy aircraft passing over. Taaken all round ’twas too early to get up but too late to drop off again, zo I slipped out without wakin’ Ellie an’ brewed meself a cup o’ ray!’

  ‘I was just about to put the kettle on,’ Paul said, ‘but seeing you’re here I’ll leave it to you. I’m off along the beach to the fort, then over to Bluff to check with Francis. It’s been very quiet, nothing but the aircraft. Blenheims I think they were, off bombing somewhere I imagine!’

  ‘They all gives Ellie the jitters!’ Henry said, ‘and tidden a particle o’ use me zayin’ they’m ours. She knows bliddy well I can’t tell the diffrence. Who be inside, Maister?’

  ‘Only Robbie Eveleigh. He was relieved by Noah Williams just after three o’clock when I came on but you send them both home at seven. Nothing’s likely to happen now!’

  He looked down the gully to the sea, as flat and motionless as he had ever seen it, with its eastern edges turning whitish pink as the sun hoisted itself clear of the Bluff. Birds were chirping in the thicket beyond the pines and a solitary gull dipped over the criss-cross of iron stanchions, sown along the outer edge of the sandbanks, a token of discouragement to Weh
rmacht landing-parties.

  ‘Tiz a funny thing,’ Henry said, passing his hand over his unshaven jowls, ‘you remember us always said in France that ole Jerry could pick his own weather. If ’er maade up ’is mind to pay us a call he could get ashore without gettin’ ’is veet wet, an’ what’s more the lass zays it’s zet fair, zame as it’s been for a month or more a’ready!’

  ‘And a damned good job too,’ Paul reminded him. ‘If we had had our usual summer Dunkirk would have been a fiasco and I doubt whether we should have fished the half of them off.’

  ‘Arr,’ Henry agreed, ‘that’s true, but then, if us had had the kind o’ weather you an’ me had to put up with over there, I dorn reckon his bliddy ole panzers would o’ crossed our old stamping ground so fast! Not nearly so fast!’ he added, emphatically and then seriously, ‘I suppose you baint heard nowt o’ your boys?’

  ‘No word so far,’ Paul told him, ‘but as far as I know only Simon was over there. The Pair had switched to Air-Sea Rescue and Ian, Whiz’s husband, was still out East last time I heard. Will you be free to take on tonight, same as usual?’

  ‘Ah, I’ll do that. Tiz worked well enough zo far baint it?’

  ‘It’ll work a damned sight better when the telephone people give us the outside line they’ve promised,’ Paul said. ‘Imagine having to rely on word-of-mouth alerts in this day and age! I can’t see Jerry doing it if he was in our shoes!’ and he went round the cabin to the lean-to shed where his birthday grey was saddled and tethered, Henry following and tethering his pony in its place at the hay net. The animals accepted the routine as though it had begun a year ago instead of a matter of days, dating from the formation of the coastal patrol of Churchill’s LDVs, or Lame-Duck-Vagabonds as Henry designated the Local Defence Volunteers. Valley men were responsible for guarding the coast from a mile west of the landslip, where their right-hand man was in contact with the Whinmouth group, to a mile east of the Bluff, where Francis Willoughby’s patrols were in touch with the next section. They were thinly stretched, a mere dozen or so, operating over more than four miles of coastline. As Smut Potter said the first night he took station, ‘It baint much more than a bluff, be it? If Jerry was minded to come ashore in the dark he’d be eatin’ his bliddy breakfast at The Mitre, in Paxtonbury, bevore us knowed he was around!’ Yet the group took themselves seriously. At least they were better armed than the majority of the lookouts around the coasts, having, between them, eight shot-guns and three .22 rifles, as well as Paul’s Smith & Wesson revolver. They might, as Henry said, blow a few hats off before they ran for it.