The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Paul remembered then that a ‘varmint’ to Sam was anything on four legs that came down to the Mere and he remembered that, unlike most keepers, Sam had never erected a vermin pole and seldom carried a gun. Somehow he must have sensed that Paul, never much of a sportsman, subscribed to his live-and-let-live theory hereabouts. Apart from hunting foxes (and refusing to dig them out) Paul had rarely killed for sport or the pot. He always thought of the wild life on this side of the woods as tenantry.

  He said goodbye to Sam and took the winding path to the head of the Dell where the sun blazed out again and he saw that Dick Potter was due to start reaping in High Coombe’s west-sloping fields beyond the last of the trees.’

  He was relieved to see a real Shallowfordian back in the farm where Claire had been born and where, on an airless summer morning such as this, she had first appeared to him as a laughing girl offering him a plate of pikelets, and holding his hand longer than necessary when their fingers touched. ‘She had made up her mind to get me from the very start,’ he reflected, grinning, ‘and that madcap first marriage of mine must have set the whole Derwent family by the ears. Old Edward, her father, was a crusty old chap but one of the best farmers in the Valley, and I still can’t be sure Dick Potter will stick at it after all that traipsing about the world in the Forces. However, he can’t do worse than that bunch we had here during the war,’ and as he thought this Dick Potter, and his lifelong chum and cousin, Bon-Bon, Smut’s boy, left their tractor stuttering in the yard and came across to him, asking with a frankness that old Sam would have considered impertinent, ‘if he and Mrs Craddock had been gypped by the Wogs in Port Said’. Two generations ago, Paul thought, nobody working up here would have heard of Port Said, but two world wars had improved their geography and simultaneously widened and narrowed their outlook. They were more sophisticated than their grandfathers but their travels seemed to have left them even more contemptuous of foreigners.

  He told them a little of his travels and asked if either of them had heard or seen anything of the former tenant, who had gone off owing a quarter’s rent. ‘Not a butcher’s,’ Bon-Bon said, ‘the poor bastard was stuck with the kids. You heard his Missis—the one who was always painting when she wasn’t giving birth—ran off with a Yank? Imagine that! And her turned forty and as broad in the beam as that grey of yours.’

  ‘I’d heard she had left him,’ Paul said, feeling a little sorry for that idiot Archer-Forbes, ‘but I didn’t know it was for a Yank. It wasn’t the same one who caused that trouble over at the Home Farm, was it?’

  ‘Giddon no,’ said Dick Potter, chuckling, ‘this one was a darkie. He must have had something her old man didn’t have, in spite of all those kids. Come on Bon-Bon, time we got weaving. This summer has been a real scorcher, Squire, and it looks like staying that way.’

  He left them roaring away on their tractor, trailing blue exhaust and reflecting that he might have been wrong about the seriousness of the younger generation, for obviously here were a pair who were not weighed down by their responsibilities. ‘Funny thing,’ he said to himself, as he crossed the border to Deepdene, the middle Coombe farm, ‘you think you know it all and then you suddenly realise you know very little about anyone. Noah Williams and that mine, Andy’s attitude to those squatters, David Pitts getting it into his head to sail off to Australia, Sam Potter content to live out his days watching otters and badgers, and now a middle-aged woman with a large family running off with a buck Negro. Sometimes life is as good as a pantomime about here but the townsman still thinks of us as a bunch of rustics bogged down in mud and tradition.’

  He was in for a bigger shock when he clattered into the yard of Deepdene, expecting to be greeted by old Francis Willoughby. Who should be sunning herself in the porch but Prudence Honeyman—‘Prudence-Pitts-that-was’—and she seemed surprised that he was surprised, for apparently Rumble Patrick had promised to write informing him that Francis, defeated by his asthma, had retired in April and that Nelson Honeyman, homesick for the Valley after only three years ‘abroad’ in Dorset, had sold up, applied for the Deepdene lease and been granted it, Simon and Rumble having obtained Andy’s agreement over the telephone.

  ‘Well, I’m delighted to see you back,’ he admitted, thinking how handsome she looked and how much more sure of herself than when he had last seen her after that ludicrous incident in the Home Farm hayloft, ‘but surely Deepdene isn’t large enough for Nelson? I thought he was ambitious to make money.’

  ‘He was,’ Prudence said, ‘and he did. We sold that Dorset farm and stock for more than twice the price we paid for it. One of those expense-account farmers from London turned up, Nelson asked a silly price and he paid it, without batting an eyelid. It’s something to do with their tax but don’t ask me to explain it. We heard old Francis Willoughby was packing it in so Nelson decided he’d like to come back and see what he could make of this place. After all, Francis made money here, mostly with beef cattle of course, but Nelson’s sticking to sheep. He did very well out of them over there,’ and she pointed in the general direction of Dorset.

  He said, a little diffidently, ‘Er … how are things between Nelson and you, Prudence? You were very frank the last time we talked,’ and she said, with a laugh, ‘Yes I was, wasn’t I? Well, I’ll be frank again, Mr Craddock. That business with Eddy Morrisey showed a profit. Nelson has never been quite the same since and I don’t mean by that he throws it up at me. He never has, not once.’

  She paused a moment and Paul noticed that she wasn’t quite as brazen as her local reputation implied for she was blushing. She went on, however, ‘I more or less told you what our trouble was—that time you tried to sort us out? Well—how can I put it? There isn’t that kind of trouble anymore. I suppose the shock of that silly business helped. Not only Nelson but me, too. I’m not tarty-minded, you know, or not so long as I’m not taken for granted, the way I was up to that time. He spends more now, takes me out and about a bit, buys me things without me having to hint. What I really mean is—I’ll always settle for a quiet life, so long as it’s not too quiet if you follow me!’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ he said, smiling and reflecting that, in some ways, she was not unlike Claire. She had plenty to offer, and provided it was accepted with enthusiasm she could jog along contentedly enough, even with an unimaginative creature like Nelson. All she really looked for was security and to be admired and needed. For the rest, things could be left to take care of themselves.

  ‘Where is Nelson now?’

  ‘Gone to Paxtonbury to buy a smashing new car. Can I make you some coffee?’

  He was tempted but pleaded appointments in Coombe Bay and moved on, comforted by the thought that stability had returned to this side of the estate now that Dick Potter and Bon-Bon were at High Coombe, and a Honeyman was installed at Deepdene. This area had always been the weak spot in his defences and still was to a degree, for he was worried about Low Coombe, a perennial source of anxiety ever since old Tamer’s days. Brissot, the French Canadian who partnered Jumbo Bellchamber, had been a good farmer but the Cockney had never regarded the farm as much more than a bolt hole after the First War. Now that Brissot had retired and gone back to the home he left in 1914, Paul couldn’t see Jumbo managing on his own, especially with a woman like Violet Potter for a wife. He knew that they had all been coining money during the war and were still in cahoots with Smut Potter and his avaricious French wife, Marie. Both Jumbo and Smut ran big cars and spent whole days at National Hunt meetings. They also went up to London for a binge every now and again, and the farm was beginning to look down-at-heel.

  He descended the winding path through thinning trees, his thoughts returning to characters who had used it over the last half century—savage old Tamer, Gypsy Meg, the Timberlake boys who had come courting the Potter girls, and Jem, the Bideford Goliath, who had once held sway here with the two eldest Potter girls as his wives, and children of doubtful parentage swarming all over t
he Dell. Then, as he approached the clearing where the farmhouse squatted, he heard the roar of a powerful engine and was just in time to see a long, blue car shoot off down the track. Jumbo, standing at the porch, looked a little disconcerted, as though he might be asked questions concerning his visitor but Paul made no comment. Rationing was still in force, but if Jumbo was still active in the black market there was not much point in lecturing him years after the collapse of the Third Reich.

  Jumbo said, guardedly, ‘Heard you was back, Mr Craddock,’ and Paul wondered at the infallibility of the Valley jungle-drums and asked how Jumbo was faring now that his partner had left, and what kind of crops he intended raising in the cliff fields further east. The Cockney was more than usually evasive. His wary eyes—a rifleman’s eyes thought Paul, recalling how Jumbo had once shot four Uhlans out of the saddle like ducks at a fair—roved the Dell, and when Paul enquired after Violet he said, carelessly, ‘Lazy old slut’s gorne ter Whinmouth to ’ave a nairdo! She’s there twice a week.’

  Paul said, on impulse, ‘Do you ever regret settling here, Jumbo? Don’t you ever hanker after London?’ and the man replied, as though suspecting a trap, ‘No. Woulden want ter live there no more. Like a bit o’ country, alwus did,’ so that Paul had a glimpse of the original Jumbo playing cricket with a piece of wood and a rag ball in some smutty park near Southwark. Bellchamber, his instinct told him, was certainly uncomfortable about something. But he was not curious and rode down the track to the river road where he passed Mill Cottage, once the home of Hazel and her baby son Rumble, now much in need of renovation but capable, he would say, of housing a squatter if one of them could be persuaded to buckle down and earn a living from the soil. He made a note of this and pushed on across fields shimmering with heat to the head of Coombe Bay village where he had once owned property but, on looking about him, was glad it had passed to other hands.

  There were changes here every month now as the place continued to inflate itself into a community somewhere between Bognor Regis and one of those Westcountry coastal villages trying to qualify as a terminus for day-trippers. Old cottages had been ripped down and replaced with flat, greyish shops that looked like the blockhouses they had once built along the Transvaal railway, except that they had chromium-framed windows and were hung about with rubbishy merchandise and jazzy signs painted in hard, gilt lettering. There were several small cafés flanked by tinplate advertisements for soft drinks and brands of cigarettes, a window full of ‘handicrafts’ that included ashtrays contrived out of tortured knots of wood and pixies made from twigs and acorns. There were painted seashells and one or two wishy-washy water-colours trying to get themselves adopted as calendars, and lower down the hill was a shop called ‘The Olde Spinning Wheele’ that set Paul wondering why everyone who tried to give the impression he was practising an ancient craft should find it necessary to add a couple of ‘e’s’ to his signboard. The Raven, always a nondescript pub, now looked like a child’s attempt to build a Tudor barn out of black sticks and cardboard and the whole place smelled of fish, varnish and hot rubber.

  The season was in full swing and Paul marvelled at the number of people attracted by all this clutter. Families trudged up and down the hill, large pink mums in navy slacks and dads in shirtsleeves and cheap Panama hats. The children, some of them blistered but all of them well-fed and chubby, seemed never to have seen a man mounted on a horse before, for they shouted and pointed with every indication of excitement. Then Paul saw the new Rector, Mark Portal, chatting to an elderly hiker who looked as if he had stepped out of a pre-war Punch with his khaki shorts, deerstalker, and enormous rucksack. He reined in to pass the time of day with the parson whom he hardly knew, for Old Horsey had died a year ago and had not been replaced until the week before Paul’s winter illness. The professor-type hiker moved on and the young Rector called, ‘Top of the morning, Squire,’ with professional heartiness, but noting Paul’s bleak look, added, with a grin, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Craddock, but it gives me a lift to call somebody “Squire”. It puts me back in a world of free blankets, private pews and long, thundering sermons aimed at maintaining the status quo.’ Paul wondered if the fellow was getting at him but decided not, for he had an open face and humorous eyes. He said, ‘How are you liking it here? Is there anything I can do? My responsibility in the village has been whittled down to your rectory and the Boer War memorial tablet in the church. Wait a minute, I’ll get off, I can’t talk down to the cloth in this high-handed manner,’ and he dismounted, looping the grey’s bridle over his arm and edging into the kerb to make way for a motor-coach crammed with the day’s quota of sightseers from Paxtonbury’s hotels. The smell of seaweed, always so strong about here, was banished by the whiff of exhaust and he could not prevent himself saying, ‘If this is progress then number me among the primitives.’

  The Rector chuckled. ‘Yes, I heard they were your sentiments,’ he said, ‘and actually they’re mine too, but I dare not advertise it. My father had a latter-day Oliver Goldsmith living in Northamptonshire when I was a boy and the local Squire managed to keep even the railway at bay until 1899. He was a dedicated hunting man.’

  ‘So was your predecessor-before-last, Parson Bull,’ Paul said. ‘He drove himself into the ground foxhunting and between you and me he was one of the biggest old rascals around here.’

  ‘I heard that too,’ Portal said. ‘There’s a photograph of him in my study and he looks like a warrior bishop about the time of the Peasants’ Revolt. I wonder how he’d cope with my kind of parishioner?’ and Paul said that it would be interesting to watch him herding them to evensong with his long, leather whip that produced cracks capable of carrying across two fields and a covert. Portal said, thoughtfully, ‘It’s a matter of adjusting, I suppose, but frankly the speed of it all has left me breathless. I’m only thirty-nine and I’ve seen an incredible amount of change in that time. You must have seen a great deal more. Is all of it vulgar?’

  ‘Not by any means,’ Paul replied, taking a sudden liking to the man. ‘When I came here first there were some fearful injustices, a great deal of filthy housing, too much cruelty to children and animals, and old people living on about a shilling a day. There was an old woman called Coombes who lived in that cottage—or where a cottage once stood—she used to dry her tea-leaves on a piece of board to make them last a week. There was a family of nine who were all swept away by typhoid in a single summer due to polluted drinking water. We’ve got rid of that kind of thing, but somehow I can’t help wishing we’d managed it more gracefully. Will you and your wife come to dinner one day next week? That was obligatory in the old days but you won’t upset me a bit by declining.’

  Portal said he would be delighted and they fixed on Wednesday after which Paul swung himself into the saddle and went on down to the quay where he turned right, hoping to escape his involuntary role as one of the Coombe Bay holiday attractions. Half-way along the quay, however, he pulled up short outside Smut Potter’s bakery, astonished to discover that it was no longer a bakery but a half-gutted shop in the process of conversion into a Continental-type café. Iron tables were already stacked in one corner and the store had been demolished to make room for a drive-in car park. It was not his concern any longer, for he had sold the property when the Company was formed, but all the same it surprised him. He had always thought of Smut and Marie as permanent Shallowfordians and found it difficult to believe that they had made enough during the war to retire. Then Smut came out of the yard pushing a handcart loaded with part of his oven and gave Paul a cheery greeting. He too must have been listening to Valley drums for he said, ‘Us yerd you was backalong. Did ’ee see the boy on the way down?’

  ‘You mean your boy, Bon-Bon?’

  ‘Giddon no, your boy. The townee one, Andy.’

  ‘Andy has been here today?’

  ‘Just left,’ Smut said, ‘come to zee how us was gettin’ on with the new place.’

  A thought occurred to Paul.
He said, ‘Was he driving a big flashy car? A blue one?’

  ‘Yes he was,’ said Smut, ‘a real corker. Cost him nigh on dree thousand, or so he said. Do ’em pay that much for cars in London?’

  ‘You’d be surprised what they do up there,’ Paul said, vaguely, for his mind was occupied with the reason, if there was a reason, for Andy’s abrupt departure from Lower Coombe half an hour before. Thinking back it seemed to connect with Jumbo Bellchamber’s hangdog look and his reluctance to chat, as though he was anxious to prevent Paul from knowing Andy had been there. He said, briefly, ‘Look, Smut, what the hell is going on around here? This place is changing overnight and there’s a smell about it I don’t like. Do you own those premises of yours now?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Smut, readily, ‘I rent ’em, zame as I did from you. This café lark is Marie’s idea, but the new landlord is backing her. Not that I’m against it, mind. There’s a packet o’ money to be made in season the way things is going yerabouts.’

  ‘Then who is the new landlord?’

  ‘It’s a Company. Your boy could tell you more about it than me. Chum of his is the Chairman, one-legged chap called Shawcrosse. He was the one who bought it, and all them other lots you sold off a year or two back.’

  The name had an elusive familiarity but Paul, after chasing it a moment or two postponed pursuit until he could talk to Andy whom he supposed had gone to the house to await his return. ‘What the devil is this chap Shawcrosse trying to do? He’ll never make a Blackpool out of this place. It’s too far from the main road and any expansion east is blocked by the Bluff. Come to that, he can’t even expand inland, for there he runs smack up against our border. Have you ever actually met him?’