A Hurricane came zooming out of the blur of the woods, one of the Paxtonbury-based Polish fighters in tardy pursuit of the raiders and he realised how deeply he resented all aircraft as representing a hateful challenge to all that was predictable, slow and safe. His first wife, Grace, had been killed by a Gotha on the pavé road behind Ypres; his youngest daughter, Claire, Dairy Queen of the West, had died in one off the Dutch coast, as long ago as 1934; and now they menaced the slopes and river-bottoms of remote streams like the Sorrel. God curse the fool who had first invented them, and as he thought this he remembered how he had set his face against all mechanical gadgets right through the early morning of the machine-age, when old King Teddy had been ruling an England of three-horse ploughs and leg-o’-mutton sleeves.
Then, as always, his obstinacy reasserted itself and he stood up, dusting his breeches. It didn’t pay to brood about it. There was plenty to be done, here and elsewhere, and he had looked down on this Valley too many times and in too many contrasting moods to be fooled by the desolation of winter, even a wartime winter. The Valley had looked deceivingly cheerful from here in the summer of Dunkirk but things were far more hopeless then, with everyone waiting for the first German parachutists and only a few shotguns and rook-rifles to oppose a landing of Panzers. There had been many setbacks and more to come he wouldn’t wonder, but at least that madman who raved and frothed and bit carpets had been held, and the chances of invasion now were remote, notwithstanding this morning’s escape of the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst that had probably touched off this piddling little air-raid. He descended to the road, driving along it until he came to the two stone pillars that marked the drive and accelerating over the loose gravel between leafless chestnuts.
His wife Claire was awaiting him on the step and he felt better for seeing her there. At least she hadn’t changed, or not that much in all these years. She was fifty-nine but looked about forty-three and it cheered him to reflect that Claire had always had magic at her command to adapt to any fashion that found its way this far west. In what people now called the Edwardian Afternoon she had been a buxom, laughing girl, with a wasp waist and flowing hips and bosom and in the period now called The Gay ’Twenties she had changed herself into a flapper showing shapely legs half-way up the thigh and cropping her lovely, corn-coloured hair in order to be at one with her daughters. Then, during the ’thirties, she had compromised between these two extremes and it was only when she was undressing to go to bed that he realised she was steadily losing the battle against excess flesh. But now a fourth compromise had been achieved for the kind of things that put weight on her belly and buttocks were difficult to get, so that recently she had been able to make a virtue out of necessity and had begun to slim in all the right places. Through all these changes her features and characteristics had remained the same, her fresh, pink and white complexion as unblemished as a girl’s, her slightly prominent eyes reminding him of inshore water off the Coombe Bay sandbanks on a summer’s day—those two things, plus her optimism, steadfastness and strong sexual attraction for him, that persisted even now, so that there never was a time when he was not in some way stirred by her presence. She said anxiously, ‘Where on earth have you been? I phoned poor Connie and she said you left an hour ago!’
He was tempted to lie but thought better of it. ‘I had to pull myself together, old girl. I went up to French Wood,’ and was a little touched to see her smile.
‘I might have known it. Did it work?’
‘More or less. How is Mary and the kid?’
‘Both scrubbed and sound asleep. Doctor Maureen came over and gave them something to counteract the shock. The police phoned from Whinmouth. They’re looking all over for Rumble and Connie’s boy. I didn’t know what to say to Connie, poor kid.’
‘You don’t have to worry about her,’ Paul said, ‘she’s got more guts than any woman about here! And don’t run away with the idea that it’s because she and poor old Harold weren’t close. They were, in their own kind of way.’
Her teeth came over her heavy lower lip in a way it usually did when she was about to admit a shortcoming.
‘If it had been you or Mary someone would have had a hell of a job comforting me!’
She went into the hall and he noticed she had avoided mentioning Rachel’s death, or the need to contact Simon. It wasn’t fear of making a fool of herself in front of him, and it wasn’t lack of affection for the woman who had married her stepson. It was something more fundamental and he acknowledged it to himself as they passed into the library and she poured him a tot of whisky. ‘She doesn’t give a damn about anyone except me,’ he thought, ‘and she never has.’ He said, feeling better for the whisky, ‘I shall have to wire Simon. They’ll almost certainly give him compassionate leave, no matter what he’s doing,’ and he began to move into the hall where the old-fashioned telephone was still bracketed to the wall, occupying the same place as when it was first installed in the days before Shallowford House had been a wartime convalescent home.
‘Leave it!’ she said suddenly and when he looked shocked, ‘Rumble will attend to it, it’ll give him something to occupy his mind. After all, he was closer to Rachel than any of us.’
He had forgotten. The shock of the morning’s events had made him overlook yet another coincidence about the two-minute swoop of those damned Fokker-Wulfes. Rachel Eveleigh had actually delivered the boy in the year before the First War, stumbling upon his half-witted mother in labour in the cave she sometimes occupied over the badger slope in Shallowford Woods and ever since, not unnaturally he supposed, there had been a strong bond between Rumble Patrick and the childless Rachel Eveleigh.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I’ll let Rumble handle it,’ and sat down again, stretching his legs and suddenly feeling his age.
‘What was the point of it anyway?’ she asked, irritably. ‘It doesn’t make any kind of sense, does it? A woman washing eggs at a sink. A man digging a drain in his fields. Is that going to get anyone anywhere? It’s not even as if there was a terror element about it, like blitzing London or one of the ports. Do we do this kind of thing to their farms and villages?’
He explained that the Luftwaffe was aiming at the camp and that, in all probability, the German airmen had been trainees on a practice run to gain experience. She seized on the last word as though it had been a blasphemy.
‘Experience!’ she mocked. ‘You men are all the same! There isn’t one of you, English, French, German or Jap, who can think straight! Experience of what for God’s sake? Reducing human beings to pulp, in order to see how your silly machines work? Rumble rebuilt that home with his two hands and Mary made it pretty and cosy and exciting. It was like … like a doll’s house! What kind of sense is there in blowing it to smithereens like that?’
Her indignation was so typical of her, and so true to the form of her grumpy old father, Edward Derwent, once master of High Coombe, who had never had a moment’s patience with anything he could not touch, sniff, eat, or sell. ‘Derwent-commonsense’ Paul had always called it and there were times when it had stood him in good stead. She had never seen any point in the First War and for a long time he had agreed with her, but they had had many arguments about this one, for whilst he was convinced that it was just, she blamed it on the vanities and inefficiencies of male animals from Plymouth to Pekin. It need never have happened, she said, and whilst granting that it had to be won at all costs, she had no confidence that the world would be any the better for it when the rubble was cleared away. To her it was the ultimate negation of commonsense and demonstrative proof of the obsession of men with inessentials. All that mattered to a Derwent was good food, warm clothes, a roof that didn’t leak, regular harvests, and the pleasure of sharing a double bed with your partner in all these things. She had never once bothered herself about politics, having seen what they had done to her predecessor, who left a good husband and a good home to march about London breaking
windows and waving banners. Her detachment sometimes irritated Paul but today it brought a gleam of humour to the sombreness of the day.
He said with a grin, ‘I might have known the violation of Mary’s chintzy little bedroom would have outraged you far more than the fact that two German battleships have got clear.’
‘Damn the battleships and damn the war! I’m terribly upset for that nice girl Connie, and for Simon as well, but for me the entire stupidity of everything that’s happening is pinpointed by some fool hundreds of miles away making a bomb to drop on a home two people built for themselves out of nothing. I daresay it’s illogical but there it is. I remember Periwinkle in the days before even you came here. It was nothing but a ratty old shack, and Rumble and Mary created it, but now it’ll never be the same for them. It’ll always be the place where somebody they liked was killed.’
‘Have some whisky yourself, old girl,’ he said tolerantly, and was crossing to the decanter when Rumble Patrick came in, having dropped Young Eveleigh at Codsall Bridge. He had been given the gist of what had happened at Periwinkle and Paul was puzzled by his phlegmatic approach to the destruction of the farm and the narrow escape of his wife and child. When Paul told him how they had found Rachel in the ruins of the scullery he shrugged. ‘I’m more upset about Harold Eveleigh,’ he said. ‘At least he still thought life was worth living.’
‘Didn’t Rachel?’
‘No. She was fed up and has been ever since Simon brought her here.’
‘She missed him that much?’
Rumble looked at him shrewdly, drawing his brows together in a way Paul remembered his father Ikey Palfrey had done, on the few occasions Ikey had wanted to say anything serious.
‘How much do you know about Simon and Rachel, Gov’nor?’
‘Practically nothing,’ Paul admitted, ‘except that they seemed to get along.’
‘Get along is about right. Like a couple of elderly workmen digging a trench. They haven’t been man and wife to one another for a long time. Rachel told me that herself, although I guessed it when Simon had his last leave.’
‘You mean they quarrelled?’
‘Not quarrelled, just parted company. Spiritually you might say. She was a pacifist.’
‘I knew she was once. She never really got over her first husband’s death in the First War but Simon was always very ‘anti’ himself.’
‘Not since he fought in Spain. He’d kill every bloody Fascist he met with a spanner, or anything handy! That was where they split. She believed in Gandhi’s theory of peaceful absorption of invaders, even Nazi invaders, and Simon thought that was damn silly. Most men and women could agree to differ on an abstract issue of that kind but they were political animals. It was in their veins—pamphlets, speeches, attitudes, ideals, the lot. They’ve spent their whole lives at it, poor devils. I can understand Simon—it’s inherited from his mother I imagine—but Rachel was a farmer’s daughter, Valley born and bred. It’s difficult to know why she was so intense.’
Paul, remembering other times, thought he did know but he was too tired to argue the point. Instead he said, ‘You can get a licence to rebuild Periwinkle. It’ll come under essential works.’
‘Let it wait,’ Rumble said, offhandedly and then, more thoughtfully, ‘Mary and the kid can stay here for the time being, can’t they?’
‘As long as you like,’ said Paul and then, a new worry suggesting itself, ‘You aren’t thinking of leaving and …’ but Rumble grinned and said, ‘Well, certainly not tonight, Gov’nor!’ and was gone, and Paul, finishing his drink, heard him run up the stairs, along the passage and open the door of the room Mary had occupied all her life until she married. He found himself thinking about the mutual attraction of these two, his hot favourites among all his sons, daughters, and in-laws. It went right back to their earliest childhood and he had watched it grow from a tiny seed and flower into the wholly satisfactory thing it had become. They were the complement of one another, Rumble a boisterous, happy-go-lucky extrovert, Mary a gentle, affectionate introvert. Of the lives and marriages resulting from his own theirs alone had been safe and predictable. Neither one of them—and he would swear to this—had ever held another man or woman in their arms, and somehow, at this moment, he was able to see through ceilings and doors into that little room of hers and know, with a sense of relief, that Rumble was already comforting her and that soon their bodies would fuse, as though anxious to replace life obliterated by the bombs. It was strange and a little indecent, he thought, that a man should find such reassurance in the physical possession of one’s own daughter but he did, relating it directly to the extreme pleasure he had always found in the body of the girl’s mother.
He poured himself some more whisky and took it over to the fireplace, kicking a log there until a splutter of blue flame devoured the sullen spiral of smoke. Fancifully he saw the shooting flame as a symbol of Rumble Patrick’s virility, and deep inside him there stirred the vague promise of a great tribe of grandchildren. He felt himself starved of grandchildren. Mary had one son but so far neither Simon nor The Pair had produced any and the baby daughter of Whiz, born in India, had been trapped there by the war. He sat on musing about his children collectively and individually, wondering why none of them save Mary seemed to belong to this great sprawling house, or professed loyalty to the fields and woods outside. He supposed everybody threw down their own roots and that those roots need not necessarily be based in soil. They might—as he suspected in the case of Simon—be anchored to ideas or, in the case of The Pair, to money and machines. He wondered whether he would ever see them congregate under this roof again and doubted it, for they seemed to have lost touch with his way of life and Claire’s. Well, for the meantime, there was nothing to do but hold on and he was good at holding on. Anyone hereabouts would vouch for that.
Outside the light began to fade over the leafless chestnuts and overhead, invisible above low cloud, one of the Paxtonbury-based Polish aircraft buzzed in from the sea.
Chapter Two
Craddocks at War
I
Sometimes the musings of Valley-based people like Paul had the power to travel telepathic paths, spreading like sound waves half-way across the world where they were picked up in billet and bivouac and contemplated, sentimentally or unsentimentally, depending upon the strength of the pre-war ties of those who received them. Distance had no bearing upon their interpretation. Those preoccupied with their own pursuits and surroundings could disregard them but there were others who, in peacetime, had thought of Shallowford as a dead-and-alive backwater, but were now having second thoughts about it. News from home used them as a sounding board, producing pangs of homesickness and impatience with new scenes and new faces.
Paul Craddock’s sons and his absent daughter Whiz were not of this latter group. To each of them the Valley had never been more than a jumping-off place where, years ago, they had eaten, slept, and exchanged sly jokes about their father’s dedication to the land, or their mother’s Victorian approach to their father.
Simon, the eldest, had disappeared into the murk of the Northcountry after a number of false starts in life. The Pair Stevie and Andy, had followed him although, unlike Simon they had made a success of their exodus. Whiz turned her back on the Valley the day she married and had rarely visited it since. Her home now was the Service and if she thought of the Valley at all it was as a rustic backwater where there had once been some good hunting. Now it was as dead to her as Atlantis. Like Stevie and Andrew she had always lived for the present.
With Simon it was different again. He did not see his father’s patriarchal pretensions as ridiculous, or his stepmother’s devotion as naïve, but he could see neither one of them as having, in this day and age, a meaningful place in the structure of Western civilisation. They were pleasant anachronisms, clinging to a way of life that had crumbled as long ago as the summer of 1914. They had been unable to adapt t
o the demands of his own generation, currently facing the most dire threat since the westward surge of Attila. Possibly this was why he was able to read the wire informing him of his wife’s death without much sense of shock. It did not surprise him overmuch that, here and there in the process of total war, a civilian living in a remote agricultural area could be blotted out. He had fought in Spain and he had fought in France and in each campaign he had seen dwellings reduced to rubble and women and children reduced to pulp. Such things no longer horrified him, they only fed his hatred of a system that had accepted a policy of drift through the ’thirties and braced itself when it was all but too late. He had been a professional hater of privilege since his youth and now he was a dedicated hater of Fascism who found himself temporarily allied to bankers, merchants, and other former enemies. He had compassion, too much of it perhaps, but he could no longer waste it on an individual, not even when that individual was the tight-lipped woman who had been his wife and comrade in the long prelude to this cacophony. Thus he was able to ride out the shock of the news they brought him when he came in dripping from the grenade range on that winter’s afternoon. Anyone watching him might have assumed him to be reading a posting signal. His reactions were limited to a blink or two and a swallow of saliva. Then, very abruptly, he left the mess and went out into the thin, pattering rain to the cookhouse where his chief crony, Sergeant Rawlinson, was serving tea to recruits.
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