Days and nights passed without any real awareness of time. The Dornier pilot must have died for he was wheeled out and another man took his place, and then he died and a third man was lowered on to the bed, and he did not seem to be so badly injured for he sat up and ate food and grinned toothily at Andy, confirming that the orderly was right and that the war in North Africa was almost over. He was an Italian from near Naples and spoke comic-opera English. ‘Mussolini no bloody good!’ he said, gaily, and drew his hand across his throat.
It was from this man that Andy learned something of his injuries, for the Italian watched his daily dressings. ‘Damn lucky,’ he said. ‘No hand, no more flying.’
At first Andy did not absorb the fact that his left hand had been amputated above the wrist and when he did it was as though all his other injuries were scratches of the kind one was likely to get blackberrying in the Coombe. It took him about a fortnight to come to terms with the fact that, from now on, he would have to live out the rest of his life with one hand and probably one of those claw-like contrivances he had seen when visiting men of his squadron in hospital at home. The prospect did not frighten him so much as disgust him and he could only accept it by forcing himself to contemplate what it would have been like if he had lost a leg or legs instead of half an arm. At that time he did not know much about the burns down the left side of his face and when the British took Tunis, and he could talk freely with the American medics, secondary shock enfolded him in a lassitude that was like a long trance. He ate and slept and exchanged a few words with the Italian in the next bed, but there was no continuity in his existence, the focal points of which were the hospital smell and the pain of having his wounds dressed.
He came out of this trance when he began his saline baths and it was then, looking into a hand mirror, that he saw his reflection and found it unrecognisable. The left side of his face was the colour of a Victoria plum, and his left eye had a permanent droop. He was so shocked that he asked the orderly to bring the surgeon to his bedside and was only partially reassured when the man said, with a mid-Western drawl, that his face would not stay the colour of a plum but would respond to plastic surgery so that the only disfigurement—if you could call it that—would be a waxiness of the flesh under his eye and round as far as his jaw. It would be stiff, the man said, and unresponsive to jokes, but it would not frighten kids in the street.
One day a blonde nurse came and asked him if he would like to dictate a letter to his wife. When he asked how she knew he was married she gave a humour-the-invalid smile and said they had his papers in the office and that in a day or so someone from his own unit would be calling. The mention of his squadron was his first real handhold back to the everyday world and he said he would get one of his friends to write a letter home. The girl seemed disappointed.
‘She’ll want to know how you’re going on,’ she protested. ‘Mail goes out of here for London twice a week. Just a note, maybe?’
What did one say in these circumstances? ‘Dear Margaret: I was shovelled up by a bunch of Arabs and am okay except that I’m short of a hand and my face is a fistful of plum jam! Look out for the one with the lobster claw when you meet the boat!’ Suddenly he turned sulky and the fixed smile of the blonde nurse irritated him so much that he could have wiped it off with a smack. He growled, ‘Scrub it, sister. I’ll wait for the lads to look me up.’
They looked him up a day or two later, Johnny Boxall and ‘Twitch’ Bannister, both of his squadron, the one with flaming red hair, the other with a slight tic resulting from a training crash in a Lockheed Hudson a long time ago. They seemed far more surprised to see him than he was to see them and Twitch said, ‘We’d written you off, Crad. Christ, you’re dead lucky. You not only pranged behind the Mareth Line but fifty miles south of Jerry’s right flank. It’s a bloody miracle! You must have got here by camel.’
They made light of his injuries and said the same things he would have said himself in the circumstances. ‘Thank God it wasn’t your leg … anyone can get around with one paw … plastic surgery on your mug will be an improvement …’ It was like conducting a conversation in nursery language. He found it only slightly less irritating than talking to the blonde nurse. They promised to write home on his behalf and he could imagine the cheery reassurance they would put into the letter and tried to forestall it by instructing them to contact his brother Stephen in Bomber Command, and describe exactly what had happened, leaving him to relay details to his wife and parents. Then they left, promising to return with gifts, and for the first time he realised that he was done with them and their kind for all time and that soon a new phase would begin for him, probably at Roehampton or some such place, learning how to operate a claw. Suddenly he rejected present and future in favour of the past, searching out moments of his life that he could pin down and contemplate like dead butterflies. Such moments, he discovered, were elusive. For so long now, ever since the balloon went up in 1939, he had been living in a world of machines and schoolboy prattle and his injuries not only prohibited re-entry into that world but definitely disqualified him for the life he had lived before the war with Stevie, Stevie’s hard-faced wife, and roly-poly Margaret with whom he identified most of his pleasanter memories.
He remembered another hospital, a long time ago, where he had lain after a car crash and Margaret, liveliest of the probationers, had come rustling into his ward with her sing-song repartee and half-hearted protests, sharing a cigarette with him by taking alternate puffs and fanning the air in anticipation of night sister’s rounds. Good days they had been, with laughter always near the surface, and Stevie, the old clot, making certain that that bloody Archdeacon’s daughter he had married had her corners rubbed off in their joint company. But now that era was as dead as squadron life on the airstrips, for outside the hospital time rolled on and there was already talk of leapfrogging the Med. and chasing Jerry up the boot of Italy.
Even when they came to measure him for his artificial hand he remained listless and moody, living mainly in the past and seeing no way of filling the vacuum of his immediate future. There was no pivot for his thoughts and this was how he came to listen to the chatter of patients around him, mainly Shawcrosse’s chatter, for Shawcrosse was the ward braggart, a tubby, sandy-haired gunner, who boasted that he would find a way of making his artificial leg show a profit in Civvy Street and skim the cream from the post-war property boom as soon as he got back to his North London estate agency.
Shawcrosse, Andy discovered, had spent some time in Canada and had absorbed some of the North American speech-idioms that he used rather self-consciously, like someone acting the role of a toughie in a second feature film. If you could overlook this Shawcrosse was original, lacking self-pity, without a trace of bitterness, getting by on a line of bluff that would have served him well in the pre-war scrap market. Andy discovered that he could admire him without liking him. He found his pseudo-frankness as impudent and engaging as the patter of an auctioneer selling tea-sets and five-pound-notes from a seaside stand. But the trained merchant in Andy saw a good deal more than bluff in Shawcrosse, recognising in him a ruthlessness and ingenuity and singlemindedness that would make him a hard man to beat in a battle of wits.
It was Shawcrosse’s boast that he would make his artificial leg show a profit that gave him access to Shawcrosse as an individual rather than a clown. ‘I’m going to do more than learn to walk on the bloody thing,’ he announced, the day they fitted him. ‘You’re going to show little Kenny Shawcrosse a thumping profit, aren’t you, my beauty?’ and he patted it.
‘As a professional beggar?’ Andy asked, and Shawcrosse looked at him seriously.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ he said, in a Cockney accent that had survived a temporary commission. ‘It’s a free advert everywhere I go.’
‘Don’t bank on it. After the war tin legs will be ten a penny.’
‘Yes they will,’ Shawcrosse answered, thoughtfully, �
��but there’s a right and a wrong way of exploiting them.’
‘And your way?’
‘I’m a house agent,’ Shawcrosse said, ‘and there’s going to be a God-Almighty scramble in my business when this lot’s over. But I’m the handicapped one. Handicapped but game, you follow? Half-a-dozen after the same building-plot but only one with a tin leg. It pongs! “That chap with one leg—we ought to give him a chance didn’t we, Giles? You notice the way he ploughed through that mud, struggling to keep up with us on the survey?” That’s my line from here on! I had a Rover before the war, a Rover and a bed-sit in Muswell Hill, old boy. Once I’ve got my ticket it’s a Mercedes, a country house and a suite at the Savoy when I’m not in the Carlton, Cannes. First I get backing—somehow, somewhere, even if I have to marry it. And then—whoosh. Into battle!’
Perhaps because he had always been amused by professional braggarts of whom there had been so many in the scrap trade, Andy egged him on so that soon he had a very clear picture of Shawcrosse riding the crosstides of post-war property development, where speculators who knew how to operate like bootleggers in the ’twenties would come into their inheritance within weeks of the blackout bonfire. The smartest of them, Shawcrosse said, were already moving in on a seller’s market, gambling against there being no more blitzes in and around London, but this was to stick one’s neck out. Hitler might still have an ace up his sleeve. The thing to do, providing one could lay one’s hand on capital of course, was to concentrate on land where post-war expansion was a certainty and where existing bricks and mortar were already scheduled for demolition. The market, he declared, would be virtually inexhaustible. Shawcrosse could wax almost lyrical on the population explosion that would be touched off by a million wartime marriages, prophesying that every single one of them, plus the results of another million fond reunions between couples separated by the war, meant a new semi-detached, a flatlet, or a three-bedroomed bungalow with all mod cons. He described successive rashes of new building in city, town and village with a kind of poetic frenzy that made Andy think how much his father would have detested Shawcrosse and his vulgar visions. He said, in an unguarded moment, ‘Suppose you had capital, twenty to thirty thousand of it? How and where would you begin?’
Shawcrosse drew a deep, satisfying breath. ‘With that much in the kitty? In coastal belts along the south coast within easy driving distance of a city. Not too large a city—too many old-established firms with tame county councillors on the payroll, but the kind of place Dad used to take the missus and kids for the fortnight in August before the war. That’s where I’d invest because the fixes have yet to be made and no new building has gone up there since the slump of ’31. You can keep London and Brum and Manchester. They’ve all been blitzed, and beady eyes are already trained on the gaps. I’d go for virgin territory and with that much woo in my wallet any virgin I ran across would soon be in the family way!’ He brooded a moment and then added, ‘It’s too much anyway. Make a man lazy that would. Ten thousand would be about right. Plenty to operate with but not enough to waste.’
One day Andy said, ‘Shawcrosse, you’ve got yourself ten thousand,’ and as he said it the cloud of indecision that had clogged his brain since they had pumped him full of dope in the weeks following his crash cleared, so that he felt almost jocund, as though he was back in the days when he and Stevie were apprentices in the scrap empire of old Franz Zorndorff, the man who had made Paul Craddock two fortunes against his will.
For a long time Shawcrosse, suspicious of miracles, did not take his proposal seriously, but the longer they spent together the more he came to respect this half-fried R.A.F. type who was one of the few men he had met out here who could take his measure and look beyond the blowhard at a man with unlimited ambition based upon sound ideas. Taking nothing on trust, however, he pursued certain lines of private enquiry regarding Craddock and what he discovered not only increased his respect but his confidence in the future. There were two aspects of the man, however, that he never did understand, then or later. One was why a person who could have made a mint out of the war had volunteered for active service; the other was what impulse had guided Craddock, already comfortably off, to invest ten thousand pounds in a talkative stranger on the strength of a hunch. To understand the second of these things he would have had to have known Andy’s original mentor, Zorndorff. To understand the first he would have had to have grown up in the Valley and observed the various interpretations the Craddocks brought to the word patriotism.
The day before they parted, Shawcrosse to be shipped home for his discharge, Andy to another hospital in Algiers, they exchanged addresses and Shawcrosse, serious for the first time, said, ‘You’re not kidding, Craddock? You really would back me if I could come up with the right proposition?’ and Andy said, ‘Yes, if I liked the look of it. I think you’re on to something. Property will be a damned sight more lucrative than scrap after the war and what else is there left for crocks like you and me but to clean up?’
It was a chance encounter that was to set the course of Andrew Craddock’s post-war career but not exclusively along the trade routes.
Chapter Eight
Long Range Salvo
I
Paul was well aware why the letter from Simon, announcing that he was coming on nine days’ post-O.C.T.U. leave, pleased him so much. It was not only the prospect of seeing his eldest son after so long an interval but also Simon’s request to be met with a horse at Sorrel Halt, proving that he knew his father better than any of them.
He set out about seven a.m. on what promised to be a warm July day, riding his well-mannered grey, Snowdrop II, and leading the cob that Mary sometimes used and was now the only hack in the Valley apart from an old hunter or two out to grass. He was feeling more at peace with himself than for some considerable time. The news that Andy had re-emerged from the fog of war, albeit minus half an arm, had cheered him, although he was still puzzled by the blankness with which the news had been received by Claire. But then, he reflected, she had never clucked much over any of them except her youngest daughter, killed in that air crash long before the war, and had always been happy to let Simon, The Pair, and Whiz go their own ways, leaving Mary in his special charge.
Stevie, he had heard with relief, was grounded for a spell, and Simon as a highly-trained instructor, was unlikely to see active service again, for he was now in his thirty-ninth year and wars were a young man’s business. His daughter Whiz had never bothered him since the day she had married her dour Scotsman and Mary, despite the prolonged absence of Rumble Patrick, seemed contented enough, absorbed as she was in the care of her son Jerry and her new baby daughter whom she had christened Sorrel, after the river that ran past their door.
The valley, he told himself, was in good shape and producing more than it had ever yielded in the past, even during the final year of the 1914–18 war. Four Winds, on his left as he rode along under the park wall, was responding to the hand of Connie Eveleigh’s boy. Fields of wheat rippled eastward as far as the edge of the moor, then south to the dunes. The fields of Hermitage, farmed by old hands like Henry Pitts and his son David, promised an equally good harvest if the weather held. In the great bowl between the moor and the Bluff grew acres of wheat, barley, beans, peas, kale, potatoes, mangold and many other crops, and somewhere on the pastures of the seven farms lived five herds of Friesians and Red Devons, as well as hundreds of pigs and ten thousand chickens. They were all using manufactured fertilisers now and doing it as a matter of course, but he could remember a time when he had had to bully every one of them to adopt modern methods and bring all kinds of pressures to bear on people like Henry to exchange plough-horse for tractor. Now there were no plough-horses to be seen from the western boundary of Four Winds to the cliff fields of High Coombe. They all had tractors, and most of them had many other contrivances of one sort or another, although they could never learn to keep them in good repair and he was always having to get mechanics down
from Paxtonbury to replace broken parts or do a bit of welding.
He thought of them collectively and he thought of them individually and it seemed to him that they had adjusted, more or less, to the tremendous demands of the last three years. The black market, he suspected, was still active, despite that mysterious incident concerning packaged poultry along the tideline, a phenomenon that Constable Voysey had never referred to and Henry Pitts hugged to himself as a private joke, but it was limited to a hole-in-corner business and he had stopped prying. There was no point in knowing too much about tenants’ business these days. The time had gone when he could threaten them with the feudal stick if they looked like disgracing him and themselves. He was still a landlord of sorts but they expected and received far more independence than in the past and each of them could have been mistaken for a pre-war freeholder and probably thought of themselves as such. He didn’t really mind, for he was glad to be relieved of the responsibility. After the war, he supposed, most of them would want to buy their farms with profits put by during these boom years, and although he couldn’t pretend that he liked the idea of Shallowford shrinking to a single farm and the Big House, he would probably sell if they were insistent. They all thought of him as old-fashioned and a generation behind the times, but he knew that he wasn’t and that if the full truth were known it was he and old John Rudd, his agent for so long, who had dragged every man Jack of them into the twentieth century. He still missed the solace of John Rudd’s companionship but a man couldn’t live for ever and he supposed another ten years or so would see him laid in the crowded churchyard, alongside so many of the originals. The prospect did not depress him. Taken all round he had enjoyed his life and there was nowhere else he wanted to lie or would feel at home after all these years of striving, disappointment and guarded satisfaction.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 18