Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  ‘Presumably people still had to eat and the U-boats were doing a pretty useful job, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they were, and farming was just as vital to survival, but suppose I told you that, looking back, I see now that I was a damned fool? I could have done a far better job here and saved myself a hole in the head into the bargain.’

  ‘Well, I’ve gone one better already,’ Rumble said, ‘I’m not signing on for the Army, the R.A.F. or even the Navy. I’m going into the Merchant Service.’

  It occurred to Paul that there might be a clue here for Rumble, having knocked about during his adolescence, had acquired a taste for odd corners of the world and for the seas separating them. He wondered if there was not a selfish element in the boy’s rejection of his offer to live out the rest of the war in the Big House, with his small farm tacked on to one or other of the larger units. He might even have become bored by the unremitting toil of the last two-and-a-half years, unrelieved as they had been by any of the pre-war recreations farmers traditionally enjoyed in and about the Valley. He felt he knew Rumble sufficiently well to ask a direct question.

  ‘You wouldn’t be looking forward to going? As a change, maybe?’

  ‘That’s part of it,’ Rumble admitted, ‘I enjoyed every moment of the time I spent at sea between ’30 and ’34, but there’s a lot more to it than that, Gov.’

  Paul found his resentment ebbing more readily than he cared to admit. ‘All right, tell me if you can find the words. Is it to do with your father being killed in the Hindenberg Line?’

  ‘Not in the least. My father was a professional and wars were his line of business. I’d say it was a lot more to do with my mother.’

  ‘You don’t remember a damned thing about your mother. She was run over out there on the river road when you were four.’

  ‘I’ve got a pretty accurate picture of her none the less,’ Rumble said, ‘and I know what made her tick. She was reckoned half-witted, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Only by fools. She wasn’t in the least half-witted. Sometimes I thought she was wiser than any of us. She liked living wild because freedom to go where she liked when she liked was the only life that made any sense to her!’

  ‘We’re getting warm.’ Rumble finished his drink at a gulp.

  ‘What the hell are you trying to say?’

  ‘Something I can’t unless you come down from the seat of judgment. You learned a lot from my mother. I’ve heard you admit it, and you learned as much again from Gypsy Meg, my grandmother. That’s what I mean when I say we can only make sense of this together.’

  ‘What’s the connection between you going and me learning my job from your mother and grandmother?’

  ‘There is one. There were only four of us who ever made a cult out of this place and two of those are dead. That leaves you and me.’

  ‘Isn’t that an argument for staying?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Rumble said, with an emphasis Paul had never heard him use in the past, ‘because the Valley will tick over so long as you’re alive and Claire and Mary are around to back you, but the idea of it—everything it has been, is, and will be—needs fighting for and by fighting I don’t mean loading guns for other people to fire. I don’t see this business as one war, I see it as three. One for stopping that bloody lunatic putting the clock back, one for preserving national independence, and the other—the one that’s vital to you and me—a war to stop the local patterns changing so drastically that it won’t be the same place anymore, not even after we’ve beaten Jerry. Sure I could stay on as your lodger, and move back into Periwinkle the moment it had a new roof on it, but afterwards it wouldn’t be the same, don’t you see? It would belong to people like Simon and Andy and Stevie, and all those Marines up on the hill, people who risked their lives defending it. Me? I should have pawned it for the duration and had it handed back to me as a gesture. It wouldn’t work, Gov’nor, not for me, and not really for you if you’re honest.’

  He was beaten and he knew it. It was, after all, no more than an echo of the two previous discussions they had had in this room on the same topic, the first when this sunburned, young man was a schoolboy, the other when he came rampaging into the house announcing that he intended marrying Mary and marrying her as a freeholder. The slight pang Paul experienced as he remembered this had nothing to do with Rumble’s present decision and not much to do with the dread of being on hand if news came for Mary that he was dead. Its source was older and more deeply buried in his being, and the boy’s logic, if you could call it that, was like the nag of a wound received half-a-lifetime ago, the bitterness of having sired four sons and seen three of them grow to manhood without giving a damn what happened to the stones and trees and red clay of this corner of the West where each of them had been born and raised. Alone among all the children who had lived in this house since Simon’s birth, in January 1904, Rumble Patrick, son of a Thameside urchin, and the postscript of Gypsy Meg Potter, both understood and cherished his mystical love of the Valley, and here he was putting it into words that Paul himself could never have spoken. In one way it was proof of ultimate defeat but in another it was a kind of victory. Somehow he had been able to forge a link with Rumble that had never fused with those of his own blood. He held out his empty glass and Rumble, glad of an excuse to turn his back on him, refilled it as Paul said, ‘How does Mary feel about it? Have you discussed it or just sprung it on her?’

  ‘I didn’t have to discuss it,’ Rumble said. ‘I daresay she guessed what would happen the minute she saw the farm reduced to rubble and, in any case, it’s the man who wears the pants in our family. That was another thing I learned from you, Gov’nor!’

  He looked at the boy carefully, wondering how many facts he had guessed about his origins and how much nonsense had been fed to him by Valley gossip.

  ‘I never told you much about how you arrived on the scene, Rumble,’ he said, ‘and maybe I should have. Claire and I always felt it might set you apart from the others.’

  ‘I asked around and filled in all the blank spaces. Rachel Eveleigh delivered me and she made no secret of it. Then there was Doctor Maureen, who seemed to know everything relevant to my mother. You never held back anything important about my father and finally there was my aunt, Joannie Potter.’

  ‘What did Joannie Potter tell you that we didn’t?’

  ‘She took me up to the badger slope in the woods and showed me the cave where I was born.’

  He grinned and somehow Paul was relieved by his gaiety. It all seemed so improbable and yet, here was the metal from which the link between had been forged all those years ago, the daughter of his most raggletailed tenant lying in a hillside and giving birth to a child sired by a raggamuffin he had rescued from a Bermondsey scrapyard. He said, ‘Did you ever hear that your father didn’t know of your existence until you were two? Or that I had the one big row of my life with Claire when she opposed your father’s marriage to Hazel Potter?’

  ‘No,’ said Rumble, ‘I never actually heard it, but you’d be surprised at the hints some of your chapel-going tenants dropped.’

  ‘You mean that I was your real father?’

  ‘Well—in a way you were’ Rumble said. ‘You not only hooked my father out of the slums and gave him everything you gave your own sons, you did precisely the same for me when my father and mother snuffed it.’

  ‘Snuffed it.’ It seemed an odd way to refer to the violent deaths of man and wife that had followed one another so swiftly in that pitiless period between 1917 and 1918, but then Rumble would have no clear recollection of his mother and none at all of his father, blown to pieces in a German dugout when the war was all but over.

  ‘When are you going and what kind of job will you do?’

  ‘I signed for a Canadian ship as gunner’s mate. She sails from Plymouth next Friday in convoy. I always fancied myself popping off at Jerry aircraft. I might even get the
silly sod who dropped an egg on Periwinkle!’

  ‘Do you know where you’ll be going?’

  ‘Good God no. They wouldn’t even give me a hint. But I’ve got my own ideas, based on the cargo they were taking aboard.’

  ‘Wherever it is it won’t be a picnic, but I daresay you thought of that.’ For a moment he was preoccupied with the business of screening an unpleasant vision of Rumble struggling in Arctic waters, or cowering under a rain of cannon shells on the Malta run, and Rumble, with his usual prescience, must have known as much for he said, ‘I’ll promise you something, Gov’nor. I’ll come back in one piece.’

  Paul was tempted to say that he had heard this kind of talk from men now mouldering out on the veldt, or lying in one of those tidy cemeteries behind Ypres but he held his peace, reflecting that Mary would need all the reassurance either of them could give in the months ahead. Instead he said, ‘Will you want me to run you to Plymouth?’

  ‘No, Gov’nor,’ Rumble replied, thoughtfully, ‘but there’s something I’d like you to do instead. You can run Mary and me to Paxtonbury and I can catch the train there. Then, on the way home, I should like you to cut through the woods and show Mary the place.’

  ‘What place?’

  ‘The cave. It sounds sentimental but I guarantee it would help. Gypsy medicine, maybe.’

  The odd request, and all that it implied, moved Paul so deeply that he turned away, looking out into the darkness that now enclosed the paddocks on each side of the drive.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he said shortly, and then, ‘She’s never been there?’

  ‘No, but somehow it ties in with a pact we made a long time ago, when we were kids.’

  He was able to smile, recalling with sudden clarity this boy and his daughter climbing the long green slope behind the house bent on one of their childish forays about the countryside. He said, ‘You and Mary; you made up your minds about one another from the beginning, didn’t you?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Rumble said, and suddenly he was gone and Paul heard him calling as he went up the stairs two at a time.

  Two or three stars showed through the branches of the avenue chestnuts, odd points of light exempted from the blackout. Something comforting was offered by their presence up there, something that had to do with the cycle of birth and death and rebirth that was the one unchanging feature of his forty years in this place. He pulled the curtain, switched on the light and went into the estate office. The map stirred in the draught from the library door Rumble had neglected to shut and somehow—he could not have explained why—the continuity of the Valley re-established itself as a pattern on the contours of the over-scored canvas.

  II

  They talked generalities all the way home from Paxtonbury and Mary seemed to him very composed, so much so that it struck him she had matured a great deal since marriage. The last time Rumble Patrick had sailed away she had moped for weeks and had lived for his letters, and Paul found himself wondering if she had found fulfilment in motherhood and was now less dependent on the presence of the man they had just seen on to the Plymouth train. It was possible, he told himself, for she had always been the most maternal of his family and the least dependent on the diversions of noise and company. He had invited Claire to accompany them on this solemn, leave-taking trip but Claire had declined.

  ‘The only props Mary ever needed were you and that scamp Rumble,’ she said. ‘I daresay she’ll weep a bit but you’ll have to put up with that. It’s a long time since I sprinkled your shoulder.’

  ‘I can’t remember an occasion since you discovered you were pregnant at fifty!’ she had laughed at this, recollecting the unreasoning panic of the time she was carrying John, their youngest, and what a strain she had put upon his patience. Then she went cheerfully about her chores and he was reminded again of her heedless attitude towards the sprawling family they had raised, and how effortlessly she took each new crisis in her stride, as though a war was no worse than an occasional wet harvest and just about as inevitable.

  When they reached the spot where Hermitage Lane joined the road down from the moor he stopped, saying, ‘Rumble asked me to show you something on the way home. Shall we leave it until after lunch and ride over there?’ but Mary said no, she would like to be taken there now, and that Rumble, who could never keep a secret, had hinted so broadly at the diversion that she guessed it had to do with Hazel’s cave in the woods.

  ‘Then you know about it?’ he asked, a little disconcerted. ‘I got the impression that it was something he had always kept to himself.’

  ‘We went looking for it several times,’ she admitted, ‘but he always pretended he couldn’t find it. He was obviously saving it for a special occasion, like this.’

  ‘He got Joannie Potter to show him where it was and I must say I don’t get the message. Do you think it’s just another of his practical jokes?’

  She looked shocked. ‘It’s not a joke, Daddy,’ and for a moment he thought she was going to elaborate but she said no more until they had climbed the steep lane to the point where it narrowed between the orchard of the Big House and the edge of the escarpment and the southern stretch of Shallowford Woods marched down to the Mere. They left the car at the last point where it was possible to reverse and made their way down through the ranks of oaks and beeches to the oval sheet of water at the bottom of the dip. When they came to a moss-covered log lying opposite the ruin of the pagoda on the tiny island, a folly built by one of the Lovells who had owned the estate in the last century, she stopped and pointed. ‘I’ll tell you something else you didn’t know. Rumble proposed to me right there, a few hours before he went off to Australia,’ and she laughed at his astonishment.

  ‘Good God. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. You mean, seriously?’

  ‘Well, as seriously as he ever does anything,’ Mary said, ‘and he must have known what he was doing because as soon as he came back four years later, he took up the option. As a matter of fact he was seventeen and from that moment I stopped feeling three years older. There was never anyone else, but I imagine you always knew that.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said thankfully, ‘I always knew it. It bothered your mother a little but it never bothered me.’

  He had his own memories of the spot and they were more poignant than hers. In the early days of his first marriage, several centuries ago it now seemed, he had crossed over to the islet in a punt with Grace one blazing summer noontime and they had mended a long and bitter quarrel by making love in the bracken like a couple of precocious adolescents. He said nothing to her, however, remembering that she had never set eyes on Grace, and that no-one, not even Grace’s son Simon, mentioned her in the Valley nowadays. She and her suffragettes were as outmoded as the Lollards and Anabaptists, belonging to an age of voluminous, dust-raising skirts, picture hats and croquet parties on the lawn. Twice since then the world had torn itself to pieces and in between there had been the long dismal haul from slump to agricultural convalescence.

  They turned north-west along the path that ran beside the Mere, passed Sam Potter’s cottage on the right, crossed a shallow stream and picked their way through tree stumps to a rabbit run that wound across the shoulder of the highest point of the woods to an open space crowned by a great slab of sandstone. It was not a good place to bring a horse and he seldom rode this way, but he had always known it was here that Hazel Potter had lived wild from April until late autumn.

  He had forgotten how lonely it was, and how attractive too in a desolate way, the long slope studded with dwarf jack-pines and a sea of rhododendrons screening the margin of the Mere. Spring, it seemed to him, was late this year. The primroses were out and lower down there had been marsh marigolds and a few wild daffodils but no bluebells showed in the open patches below and if he remembered rightly there was always an April haze of bluebells on this south-facing slope. It was a grey, sunless day, with tattered clouds drifting
slowly east and the breeze lacking its usual tang of the sea. He said, as though addressing himself, ‘Funny thing, wars always seem to shuffle the seasons. The rhythm changes when there’s a war on but I’ll promise you something more cheerful. The summer it finishes will be a scorcher. They had wet summers right through the Boer War and the Great War but in 1902, the year I came here and again in 1919, the heath caught fire and every stream went dry.’

  ‘How about the summer of Dunkirk?’ she asked, smiling at his tendency to hark back over the years whenever they were alone, but he said this too conformed to pattern because it demonstrated Jerry’s weather-luck. ‘They always have fine weather for their offensives,’ he said, ‘whereas whenever we launch one, everything is bogged down in the mud.’

  They had reached the bend in the path opposite the jutting slab of sandstone and he suddenly recollected that the cave was somewhere close by and poked around in the stiff screen of gorse that ran along under the rock. Then, congratulating himself on his memory, he found a tiny tunnel that ran north straight into a short slide of stones and flints and called over his shoulder, ‘Here, Mary! I thought I hadn’t forgotten. I haven’t been up here in ten years but there it is,’ and he made room for her to brush past and then followed her into a shallow excavation under the spur, reflecting that he was now standing on the exact spot where Rachel Eveleigh delivered Hazel Potter of the child who was to sire his first grandson. It brought the past very close and for a moment he fancied he could see Ikey Palfrey’s swift grin and the bloom on Hazel Potter’s cheek, could even hear Ikey’s laugh and soft, muffled burr of Hazel’s brogue. ‘Now what the hell induced Rumble to send us on this goose chase?’ he demanded, looking round the empty cave and sniffing the dank air of the place. Then he noticed that she was smiling and that her eyes, ‘spaniel’s eyes’ he always thought of them, were shining with excitement as she touched the dry earth walls where a root broke through the crust and curled into a question mark.