‘All right, get cracking on it right away,’ Paul said.
‘Wait a minute, Mr Craddock. There would have to be a certain amount of preliminary reorganisation first. The fact is, you’re heavily mortgaged and if you’ll take my advice you’ll clear off those mortgages and consolidate before bringing in other shareholders, even if those shareholders are your sons and daughters. That way the company will start life without a weight round its neck.’
It seemed a rational point to make and Paul said so. ‘How much do the mortgages amount to?’ he asked and Wonnacott said that they totalled just over nine thousand.
‘Great God! As much as that.’
‘You’ve been paying a lot of tax lately and your rents have remained at Slump level. Sooner or later you’ll have to raise them and start investing. Ever since I’ve known you you’ve spent as much as you earn, although I’ll admit you’ve never spent much on yourself. It’s all gone back into the estate. If restrictions and taxation hadn’t prevented you from continuing to do that throughout the war, you would have had an even bigger overdraft by now.’
Paul, sobered by the figure, asked, ‘What do you suggest I should do?’
‘Contract,’ Wonnacott said, ‘providing you can find buyers. Why don’t you sell off that eastern section, those three farms running down to Coombe Bay? With the money raised you could clear the mortgages altogether, hoist your rents all round—and don’t tell me the farmers can’t afford to pay more after the money they’ve been making lately and then form your company, with a small income guaranteed you for your lifetime. Have you got any private money I haven’t heard about?’
‘Two or three thousand in Government stock,’ Paul said, ‘and my wife got about as much from her father when he died. We could manage well enough. Periwinkle is due for a compensation grant but I don’t really own that farm. My son-in-law was buying it when it was blown to blazes.’ He got up and went to the window, rubbing his chin. ‘I don’t take kindly to the idea of slicing off the entire Coombe,’ he said finally. ‘Couldn’t I dispose of isolated properties in Coombe Bay itself?’
‘Certainly you could. It’s as broad as it’s long. My point was you aren’t getting any younger and apart from raising capital it would reduce the area of your responsibility.’
‘I like responsibility,’ Paul said, ‘it’s what’s kept me going all these years. Go ahead with that company and the transfer of ownership aimed at dodging death-duties. I’ll last another five years I promise you! In the meantime I’ll send you a detailed list of all the Coombe Bay odds-and-sods and we can clear the mortgage with what they yield.’
And so, in a matter of days, it was done, to Paul’s mind entirely satisfactorily. He was astonished by the total figure produced by the sale of his Coombe Bay properties. Anticipating about twelve thousand pounds he actually received a net total of nineteen and even then Wonnacott told him he let some of them go too cheaply. Neither Paul nor his agent ever met the purchasers. They were, it seemed, intermediaries who bought properties, did them up, and resold them immediately. Wonnacott, accustomed to the measured pace of provincial business, expressed disgust at what was going on now that the war was over and ex-servicemen were demanding living space.
‘Some of the places around here have changed hands five times in as many months,’ he growled. ‘They start out at about fifteen hundred pounds and the last in the queue hands over something in the region of four thousand.’ He looked at Paul cautiously for a moment, before saying ‘If you were a business man, Mr Craddock, I could put you in the way of making a packet.’
‘Out of youngsters who put paid to Hitler and his gang? No thank you!’
‘Oh, not necessarily that way,’ Wonnnacott said but choosing his words carefully. ‘You could raise money on that timber of yours in Shallowford Woods and make another fortune out of building-sites where the woods touch the main road on your northern boundary.’
Paul looked at him so bleakly that the lawyer shifted in his chair. ‘All right, let it pass but I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t put forward these ideas. You wouldn’t like anything of that kind to happen, I suppose?’
‘Only over my carcass,’ Paul said, ‘and not even then, for I’m damned if I’d rest easy. Some of those oaks have been growing there since the Wars of the Roses and even the beeches are half-way through their second century. Who the hell am I to chop them down for cash and replace them with rows of little pink boxes? The next thing you’ll suggest is we make a Lido out of the Mere, or hack a golf course out of Blackberry Moor.’
‘I daresay it will come to that,’ Wonnacott said seriously, ‘but not in our lifetime. You’d better sit down and listen to this covenant. I’ve called the company ‘Shallowford Estates Limited’. Does that suit you?’
‘Yes,’ Paul said, his humour restored by the man’s obvious sympathy with his outlook, ‘it has a dynastic ring and my wife will enjoy the joke. She’s always telling me I see myself as a biblical patriarch!’
He settled himself and listened to the lawyer’s sermon, marvelling at archaic words like ‘messuage’ and ‘appurtenance’, but the terms of the document were simple. Shallowford Estates Limited was now, nominally at least, to be administered by a board of directors, consisting of himself as Chairman, Simon, Andy, Rumble Patrick (representing Mary) and Whiz, who would serve more practical purpose on the board than her husband, for at least she had hunted the country. There were, in all, ten thousand shares, Paul holding three thousand, the remainder being distributed equally among the other four or their nominees. Claire was paid secretary and Young John, too young to hold shares, was named in the new will as heir to that part of the estate Paul retained for his own use or ‘enjoyment’ as Wonnacott put it. All in all Paul left the office feeling that he had achieved something lasting, especially when Wonnacott reminded him of the amount of tax liability he had shed.
As he went to collect his car in Whinmouth Square he saw Smut Potter and Henry Pitts emerging from the Maltster’s Arms, Henry wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and at the same moment they saw him. ‘Us was just havin’ a quick pint on V.J., Maister,’ Henry said. ‘Shall us go back and ’ave another?’
‘No,’ Paul told them, ‘I’ve got an afternoon’s letter-writing ahead of me. I’ve just come from Wonnacott, the lawyer. I’ve been forming a Company of the estate but don’t spread it around until I’ve had a chance to talk to Rumble Patrick. He’s one of the shareholders.’
He saw that Smut was the more interested of the two. The floating of a private company, he decided, was beyond Henry’s limited comprehension. Smut said, ‘Ah, us heard you’d sold off they Coombe Bay lots, Squire. Tell ’ee the truth, the Missus was on at me to tackle ’ee and buy our bakery. ‘Squire’ll let ’ee have it cheaper than he’d zell to a vorriner!’ she said, but I wasn’t ’avin’ any. As long as I’m a tenant youm zaddled with all the repairs, baint ’ee?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘but Marie was right. You could have had it cheaper if you had come to me. Who bought it? Do you know?’
‘Not zo far I don’t,’ Smut said, ‘but I baint bothered. They can’t stick the rent up more’n a shillin’ or two and they can’t shift me so long as I’m a zittin’ tenant.’
‘I ought to have given you the chance, Smut,’ he said, ‘but I left everything to Wonnacott,’ but Smut only grinned and said, ‘Aw, dornee worry, Squire. Us all knows you woulden diddle a Valley man but even you have to watch out for yourself these days.’
‘I never knowed Smut when he didn’t,’ said Henry and then went on to talk with relish of the enormous blasting power of the two bombs that had just finished the war in the East. After they had parted, and Paul was driving up the hill to the crest of the moor, he thought it odd that a genial soul like Henry, who had been outraged by the order against fraternisation with the Germans after the 1918 armistice, should find so much pleasure in the thought of thou
sands of Japanese civilians being, in Henry’s quaint phrase, ‘blowed to tatters’ and supposed it had to do with the unspeakable way the Japs had treated their prisoners. ‘It’s also the times,’ he told himself, ‘for everyone around here is getting tougher and tougher and Smut was right when he said a man has to look out for himself. After all, I’m doing just that, for this handing over of the estate to others is no more than a tax-fiddle and I’ve made damned sure of my own home and the woods behind it. I wouldn’t part with those while there’s breath in my body.’
Then, as he coasted down from the moor and saw the silver thread of the Sorrel gleaming in August sunshine, he felt surprise and relief that he had lived to see yet another war relegated to the history books. In the summer of 1940 it had seemed impossible that one among them would have a chance to begin over again, as they had in the long, hot summer of 1919, but at least this war hadn’t exacted such a fearful toll from the Valley as its predecessor. It had claimed one of his sons, and part of another; it had destroyed Simon’s wife Rachel and Connie Eveleigh’s husband; it had blasted Periwinkle to rubble and, here and there, in the Coombe Bay area, a familiar young face had been blotted out, but this was not an impossible price to pay for preventing some thick-necked German from establishing himself at Paxtonbury and sending his thugs to hammer on Valley doors in the middle of the night. What, he wondered, would happen now? Would there be the same optimism as there had been in 1919, when everyone had looked to the League of Nations to prevent the same thing happening again? He doubted it very much, for people—even simple countrymen like Smut Potter—had grown cynical and who could blame them? The best one could hope for was a long respite, long enough to last him out, and by then politicians and people generally might have learned a little sense. He stopped ruminating, put his foot down and hurried home to write his V.J. letters.
VI
The reactions, when they reached him, were interesting, for they emphasised the psychological differences of his children.
Whiz wrote in her usual formal prose, thanking him very politely on behalf of Ian and herself, and saying that when Ian retired he would ‘probably like to build a nice house somewhere on the estate and keep a couple of hunters’. That was all; nothing about the farms, the crops or the machinery, so that it was clear from her letter that neither she nor her husband regarded themselves as anything but sleeping partners in the enterprise.
Simon’s letter surprised him by its warmth and he was even more surprised by Evie’s news, when she brought him the letter that had arrived from Germany, enclosed in one of her own. Simon, she said, was to be demobilised in a month and go straight into a teachers’ training college, and when Paul asked what kind of job he would seek when qualified she said he would apply for a post at a local elementary school, in Paxtonbury perhaps, or Whinmouth.
‘That’s not very ambitious, is it?’ he said and she told him Simon had lost interest in party politics, notwithstanding the recent triumph of the Left. All he seemed to want now was to live in the country or by the sea and do some kind of worthwhile job, and perhaps write in the holidays. It looked as if he was going the right way about achieving these modest ends.
‘You think so too, don’t you?’ she said, clearly anxious to have his approval, and he said that he did, adding, ‘I think Simon will make a damned good schoolmaster. The income from the company should help you along, providing, of course, that you don’t go in for a family of my size.’
She looked down at her thickening figure with satisfaction and he thought again how lucky Simon had been to meet a girl like her when he was tired, disillusioned and getting on for forty.
‘I don’t suppose we’ll run to that,’ she said, ‘we started too late, but I daresay I’ll add one or two more to your score before I’m through. I mean to try, anyway. Simon is marvellous with kids. What are you hoping for this time?’
‘A girl,’ he said, emphatically, ‘and as like you as possible, my dear,’ and she kissed him and left him reading Simon’s comments on the formation of the Company. They were more generous than those of his daughter Whiz but here again it seemed unlikely that Simon would play more than a passive part in the Board room.
Andy wrote from London with enthusiasm, giving as his opinion that it was a first-class idea on somebody’s part (clearly he found it difficult to believe it had been Paul’s) and should ‘save him a packet in the long run’. He had, he said, a number of ideas for increasing the estate income but he would not enumerate them until he had sounded out the others.
Paul, smiling grimly, was not in much doubt as to what those ideas were. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t want to build a blasted hotel on the Dunes,’ he told Rumble, ‘but if he does he’ll have to wait a year or two before he starts browbeating me about that. I don’t mind parting with income, but any changes around here are going to be strictly agricultural, and not so many of those if I can help it.’
In the event the only immediate change resulting from the formation of the Company occured at Home Farm. Rumble Patrick and Mary moved into the vacant farmhouse that autumn, taking in the much smaller unit of Periwinkle and bulldozing the ruin that had begun to look like the monument of a dead generation, with mitre-shaped walls pointing to the sky and a riot of nettles, trefoil, dock, campion and tall yellow stichwort jostling for space in the kitchen where Rachel had died four years before.
Paul and Rumble went over there to see it done and Rumble winced as the great lumbering machine crashed through into the fireplace, like a mastodon stalking prey. Paul, hoping to reassure him, said, ‘You’ll soon have Home Farm as cheerful as this place when you and Mary married and moved in,’ but Rumble said, glumly, ‘Sure we will, and it’s a better farm in every way, but I didn’t build Home Farm, Gov’nor! It was there two hundred years ago.’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Paul said. ‘You don’t like parting with the tools you handled when you learned your trade. That’s the male equivalent of a woman’s feelings about her first lover, but there’s another way of looking at it.’
‘Such as?’
‘The way one ought to learn to look at everything inanimate. The soil is still here and every particle of it is alive. Bricks, mortar, tools, cob, thatch are all expendable. Even if they serve you a lifetime they’re only a loan, like the pictures and china and furniture I’ve accumulated up at the house. In the end what happens to it? A stranger walks in and carts it away but you can’t do that with this,’ and he bent down and picked up a handful of dry, red soil, letting it run through his ringers and ricochet from the toecaps of his gumboots.
Rumble grinned, his humour restored. ‘This Company you’ve launched,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how it’ll work. There’s built-in rivalry to begin with—you and me, a couple of nostalgic sentimentalists, Andy and Whiz, who think of places like the Valley as sites rather than farming land, and finally old Simon, conditioned over the years to juggle with abstracts. Won’t we fall out over fundamentals?’
‘I daresay,’ Paul said, equably, ‘most family concerns do but they survive when other enterprises don’t. Blood is still thicker than all that champagne they guzzle at business luncheons.’
‘Good old Gov,’ said Rumble, laughing, ‘long live the feudal system,’ and he went down the slope to have a closer look at the bulldozer’s progress, leaving Paul to sift the last dry grains of soil in the hollow of his hand. ‘Long live the feudal system,’ he muttered, ‘and not all that much of a joke either. It served its purpose a damned sight better than the one we have now, where policy decisions are handed down to us by civil servants. They’ll take us over lock, stock and barrel in the end, I suppose, but not yet, not quite yet’ … and he waved goodbye to Rumble and went down across the long tussocky slope to the foot of the Hermitage plateau.
Chapter Two
Routine Reconnaissance
I
On the first Saturday in August, 1947, Paul Craddock s
addled his aged grey, vintage horse of the Valley, and set out on his first circular sweep for nearly a year.
Most of the interval had been spent far from the Valley and this, in itself, had been a local talking-point through the long and excessively severe winter, for it had not gone unnoticed by Shallowford originals that this was the first time Squire Craddock had spent more than a fortnight out of sight of the Sorrel since 1918, when everyone but his wife had given him up for dead. Paul had, in fact, surprised everyone, including himself, by taking his doctor’s advice in February and setting off on a world cruise via Gibraltar, Suez, Tasmania, across the Pacific to San Francisco and Vancouver, then over the Rockies to Montreal and home by the Queen Elizabeth to Southampton.
Early in the New Year, when snow began to build into twenty-foot drifts on the eastern slopes of the moor, and the Sorrel froze harder than it had in the lifetime of Henry Pitts and Smut Potter (both of whom could remember more hard winters hereabouts than the Squire himself) he had gone down with bronchitis, his first real illness, discounting war injuries and accidents since boyhood. It had frightened Claire very much to hear him wheeze as he sat reading before the library fire and there had been some brisk exchanges in the kitchen when she had seen him lumber out into the stableyard and hoist his saddle on to Snowdrop’s unclipped back.
By mid-January, when the Valley was cut off from Whinmouth and Paxtonbury by almost Alpine walls of packed snow, he was in bed with a temperature of a hundred and four degrees, and even the aged Maureen Rudd, who still attended a few of her original patients, expressed anxiety to the family and called in a specialist. Within twenty-four hours of the specialist’s arrival, however, Paul unexpectedly rallied and asked Claire what all the fuss was about. She soothed him with invalid talk that at first made him very irritable but then, fortunately for everyone, reminded him of the days shortly before their marriage when she had come rushing back to the Valley to nurse him through injuries received in the sea-rescue off Tamer Potter’s Cove. His memory of the occasion, it seemed, was extraordinarily vivid and it pleased him to see her sitting over by the tall window again after all these years. He said:
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 35