Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  She said, drawing him home-brewed cider from a cask, "Is it a message from mother?" He said no, he had a proposition to put to her and Denzil concerning the boys. "The two middle ones," he added, hastily. "Martin and John." They were no longer boys, he reflected, Martin being twenty-three by his reckoning, and John less than two years his junior, but everyone seemed like a boy in his sister's presence, even Denzil, her husband, who was about forty-six.

  "What about my boys?"

  "I've been wondering… this isn't a very large farm, and a good deal of your acreage is rough pasture. Robert, your eldest, will take over eventually, I imagine. It seemed to me that you might like to place them."

  Stella looked very surprised and then equally disapproving, squaring up to him, both freckled arms on heavy hips. "Place them? How do you mean, place them? They have a place, haven't they? Right here, working for us."

  George said, patiently, "I know that, Stella. I've seen them about in the fields, but four sons on a farm this size, doesn't seem very practical. I'm no farmer, of course, but everybody knows agriculture is in the doldrums. You can buy farms two a penny in some counties since they began bringing in all these refrigerated Australian and New Zealand products, and buying up millions of bushels of wheat from Canada. Ask Denzil if you don't believe me."

  She continued to eye him, with vague hostility. "I didn't say I didn't believe you. But you haven't seen me over at Tryst seeking charity, have you?"

  "Damn it," he said, half in mind to tell her and her sons to go to the devil, "I'm not here offering charity! You've got a claim on Grandfather Sam's money, the same as the rest of us, and it's no secret that the Gov'nor makes you an allowance. I'm not talking about money, but careers for the younger boys. If you don't care what becomes of them ten years from now, then say so."

  Denzil Fawcett clumped into the kitchen, nodding briefly in George's direction. George had a swift recollection of Denzil as a youth, walking with long strides and head held high, through a rainstorm to one of his father's pastures east of Tryst. He now looked like a man in his late fifties, with slumped shoulders and grey, balding head. Farming aged a man, George thought, and it encouraged him to press on. He said, "I'm here to offer apprenticeships to two of your boys, Denzil. They could learn the motor trade up north and get in on the ground floor. Stella doesn't seem taken with the idea. How about you?"

  Denzil glanced at his wife and in that glance, George thought, was the story of their marriage. Lifelong incredulity on Denzil's part, that he had brought home a prize like Stella from the grand house over the hill, and complete renunciation of her past on Stella's part, who must, he reasoned, have suffered dismally at the hands of the Moncton-Prices.

  "You'm hard agin it, m'dear?"

  "Aren't you? The boys' place is here, with their family and acres. Helping you as you get older and slower."

  "Arr," he said, thoughtfully, "that's so." But then, to George, he said, "The motor trade? Will that ever amount to anything, George?"

  "Good God, of course it will! It'll practically take over ten years from now. In your trade as well as in mine. Why else would I have invested a hundred thousand pounds in lorries? It's not a passing fad, man! Why the devil can't everybody see that by now? I had the same job convincing my managers, but it hasn't taken them long to decide I was right."

  ''A 'prenticeship," he said, thoughtfully. "You'd mean, I take it, to learn the trade. But how about after? I mean, who would be likely to employ 'em in that sort of work?"

  "I would, if they showed an aptitude. I'm training drivers and mechanics. We'd teach them all we know. After that it would be up to them. My guess is your boy Martin would take to it like a duck to water. I remember how he used to come over to Tryst when I was working on the old Maximus and watch the wheels go round. It was remembering that that made me think of them."

  There was a heavy silence in the room. The sap in the green log in the grate hissed an accompaniment to the ticking of the grandfather clock. Stella still had her upper lip clamped over the lower, but Denzil, judging by the furrows on his forehead, was thinking hard.

  "Would they get paid for larning?"

  "Not much. They'd get board and lodging, guaranteed by the firm. And ten shillings a week for pocket money."

  "And afterwards? When they knew what they was about?"

  "A driver mechanic in the network earns fifty shillings a week, plus overtime. He can soon double that, however, providing he's up to his work. We're expanding all the time. I hope to have two hundred vehicles on the road within two years."

  "It's still wrong! Wrong and unnatural!"

  This from Stella, red in the face now, and having some difficulty in restraining herself, but Denzil looked at her mildly. "Maybe so, maybe not. You say what you think any road."

  "I've told you what I think. Time enough, whether or not things pick up here, as they may and should, we won't be able to keep Ben Gaskell on as a hired hand. And old Trescoe is about finished, what with his rheumatism. What'll we do then, with none but you and Robert and young Richard to farm four hundred acres?"

  He said, without looking at her, "That's not the point, m'dear. I don't offen run counter to you, do I? But there's some sense in what George says, for things coulden be worse for farmers. How can we compete with all this foreign muck they're dumping on us every day o' the week? As long as there's free trade it'll get worse instead o' better. Maybe we owe it to the boys, and I reckon I'd like to sleep on it."

  "And talk it over with them if I were you," George said, although something in him responded to the despair in the man's voice and manner. It must be hard, he thought, to see a traditional way of life foundering month by month, with markets shrinking and roots, hard down in the land for a thousand years or more, wrenched up by technologies that, to a man of Fawcett's disposition, must seem as alien as Black Magic. Maybe an answer lay in the adaptation of farms and farmers to the mechanical age, with purpose-built vehicles taking the place of their clumsy ploughs and lumbering, boat-shaped waggons. But this was years ahead, and men who had worked the land with their hands all their lives would be slow to adjust to such a revolution, even slower than would a transport man like Bertieboy Bickford in the far west.

  He rose, draining and setting down his cider mug. "Think it over, both of you. The offer is there. All you have to do is to tell me yes or no," and he went out across the yard, scattering hens who were scavenging there.

  Denzil and Stella sat on, silent for above two minutes before Denzil rose and crossed the kitchen, laying his gnarled hand on his wife's shoulder.

  "We can't stand in their way," he said. "It woulden be right. Neither of 'em could ever wed on what I pay 'em, and I know how I would ha' felt about that wi' you in mind. They'm both courtin', baint they?"

  "Farm girls," Stella said. "Girls reared on good farms over in Lee Valley, but…"

  "There's no 'buts' about it then. We'll have to let 'em go if they've a mind to go."

  He went over to the open window and called Ben Gaskell, still wrestling with the windlass. "Leave that, Ben. Find Martin and John, and zend 'em to me and mother. And tell 'em to look sharp about it. I've something to zay to 'em!"

  He went back to where Stella sat by the smouldering fire and stood before her. They had ridden out a number of crises over the years, resolving each as partners in accord, but here, for the first time since they had rebuilt the farm together, was something he had to face alone, shouldering her prejudices to one side, and deep in her heart she understood his motives. They would never fail utterly, and sell up as some of their neighbours had done since the agricultural slump set in like a blight. She had savings of her own and access, as George had reminded her, to capital, but this was irrelevant. In their twenty-five years of marriage, he had never once sought help of this kind from her or her family, and she had never offered it, realising that his countryman's pride was as precious to him as the house they occupied and the acres he and his ancestors had farmed for more than four centuries.
She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek, holding it there until she heard the scrape of her sons' boots in the yard.

  Two

  Swann Whirligig, 1905–06

  Adam Swann, in a whimsical mood, had once likened his family's march down the decades as a tribal migration headed for the uplands. More objective observers— and there were many about the city and the big provincial centres, where money and goods changed hands in volume—saw it rather as a spring gushing from the old fox's enterprise in the 'fifties, and building rapidly to a broad, swift-flowing river in its progress towards a collective destiny. Or perhaps as a tide, beating on a coastline where, ultimately and given luck, it could change the map.

  For the Swanns, confound them, seemed destined to advance on a singularly broad front, and before the new century had got its second wind around the fall of the year 1905, they were recognised as a power in the land. Not only in the field of transport—almost from the beginning they had offered a formidable challenge here—but also in areas where rival trading clans sought no advancement, that of older, more staid professions, like the armed services and administrative spheres, and even out on the periphery of the national scene, where the vanguards of social reform, ranging far ahead of the national conscience, now emerged triumphant at the polls.

  As in the flow of all tides and rivers, there were stretches down the years when the thrust of the current lost impetus, spending itself in puny forays mounted by individuals, often at odds with one another. Such a period had been Adam Swann's recession in the early 'sixties, when he and his concerns came close to foundering. Or when, in 1865, he was out of action for a year after the Staplehurst rail disaster. But soon a sportive fate would take a hand in affairs, presenting some challenge that taxed the wits and the stamina of the tribe to the utmost. This had happened, after a long, smooth ride, in 1897, when George Swann wandered off course and the hub of the empire went up in smoke, leaving its spokes in disarray.

  But the Swanns, it seemed, were seasoned survivors and these occasional setbacks put them on their mettle so that very soon, in no time at all it appeared to observers, they were in the forefront of the battle again, having used the check to marshal their reserves, mount a series of new attacks in unexpected sectors, and push forward as a unit on several fronts.

  Then competitors in all their chosen fields acknowledged their merits, numbering among them resilience, original thinking, and above all the obstinacy of the British squares at Waterloo.

  The period immediately following George's display of what mechanicallypropelled vehicles could achieve when handled imaginatively was high noon for the family. Some of George's will to succeed had been siphoned off and distributed among other members of the clan and retainers. Thus 1905 was a time of triumph in a variety of sectors, beginning with the appearance on British roads of over a hundred power-operated vehicles, the very first of their kind, and ending, in December of that same year, with the arrival of Giles Swann at Westminster as the member for Pontnewydd. But between these two triumphs were a number of smaller victories that could have been grouped under the heading of Domestic Retrenchment.

  * * *

  The first of these modest victories occurred in the early spring of the year, and its Boadicea, so to speak, was Helen Coles, née Swann, widow of a decapitated missionary and unsung heroine of the Peking Siege.

  It assumed the form, in the eyes of Joanna, her sister and sponsor, of an enchantment, for nothing less, in her view, could have accomplished such an unlookedfor event. It was as though the malign agency that had reduced Helen to such dependence on her sister when haunted by nightmares of one kind or another had suddenly relented; or, more probably, it had been sent packing by a sentimental genie with a sense of humour. For Helen Coles, the pale, brooding widow of a year or so ago succeeded, against well-nigh impossible odds, in capturing Dublin's most eligible bachelor.

  Joanna was never quite sure how it came about or why Rory Clarke, most turbulent of the Dublin fillibusters in Westminster, should have been bewitched by a woman five years his senior, when he might have taken his pick of the Dublin belles, most of them pretty, and a few of them both pretty and handsomely dowered.

  Rory, younger son of Tim Clarke, the vintner Joanna had enlisted as a Swann regular, was a dashing, slightly Byronic man for whom a brilliant political future was forecast, and the two were introduced to one another at one of Clarke père's soirees. Their conversation on that occasion was confined to the exploitation in South Africa of Chinese coolies, imported as a source of cheap labour; not, one would have thought, a very promising springboard for a romance. It happened, however, that circumstances favoured the encounter. Rory was in search of a new stick to belabour the British Government, and Helen Coles was the only woman in Dublin with first-hand knowledge of Chinese affairs, so that no other woman present could compete for his attention.

  The very next day Rory sent his card round to Joanna's, together with an invitation for a carriage drive the following Sunday. Predictably, Joanna was included in the invitation. Equally predictably, somehow scenting a miracle, she persuaded Helen to go unaccompanied.

  From that point on progress was spectacular. Something in Helen's new-found stillness (and possibly her aura of tragedy) made a direct appeal to Rory Clarke's Celtic imagination. Bouquets and invitations began to arrive at the house almost daily, and soon Dublin was scouting the possibility that Rory Clarke (the new Parnell, some were already calling him) had succumbed to the charms of a thirtyfour-year-old Englishwoman, who had been romantically involved in a welter of bloodletting on the other side of the world.

  At first the neglected matrons and young eligibles of the Irish capital viewed the prospect of a romance with dismay, reflecting that an Irish champion had no business gallivanting with the English, but then certain unseen pressures began to be applied. First by Rory's soldier brother, who had no patience with the quarrel between the Irish and Dublin Castle, then by old Tim himself, who had taken the trouble to inform himself of Helen Coles two likely sources of income—her father and her father-in-law, the famous pill manufacturer. He also discovered, as a kind of bonus, that Helen, on remarriage, would have access to a trust fund from her maternal grandfather's fortune, derived from cotton and the Suez Canal shares.

  Yet these were not deciding factors in Dublin's ultimate approval of Helen as the bride-in-waiting of her most promising son. These had their roots in the Irish sporting instinct, for who could fail to respond to the run-up of such an unlikely outsider who had somehow contrived to lead the field in the Clarke matrimonial stakes?

  And then, for Joanna, came a miracle within a miracle. Under the sun of Rory Clarke's tempestuous courtship, Helen not only revived but reflowered, recapturing some of the sparkling good looks and high spirits of her youth at Tryst, to which was added a maturity and dignity that won approving nods from the senior section of society. Her appearance, in Joanna's view, changed almost overnight. When she had gone to her that night and assessed the damage caused by her marriage and dismal experiences abroad, she had been sallow, hollow-cheeked, and listless in movement and manner. She had never been as pretty as Joanna, but she had large and expressive grey eyes, a good complexion, and, in those days, a trim, athletic figure, moulded by her youthful passion for lawn tennis and cycling. But her best feature had always been her hair, dark brown and thick but very soft in texture.

  These starting-out advantages had been sacrificed by her years in the tropics. Hardly a trace of her original sparkle remained when Joanna talked her into a therapeutic frolic with the tipsy Jack-o'-Lantern, and when that sparkle returned in full measure Joanna reasoned that the change could never have been accomplished by a few sweaty moments in Clinton's embrace. Indeed, no appreciable change was apparent in the interval between that occasion and her first meeting with Rory. Yet, little by little, it became apparent that something had been achieved after all, for when they returned to Dublin Joanna noticed that Helen's apathy had changed to a kind of stillne
ss, while privately her sister admitted that her recurrent nightmare had ceased and she was now sleeping and eating normally.

  The knowledge made the goodhearted Joanna glad, despite a lingering doubt that Clinton had not been hoodwinked, for she sometimes caught him looking across the table at his sister-in-law with a vaguely puzzled expression, as though there was something about her that eluded him. It would, please God, continue to elude him. Men, Joanna was aware, often joked in their coarse way about all women being identical in the dark, but perhaps they deceived themselves in this respect. Perhaps something, smothered under those fumes of alcohol, some awareness of physical unfamiliarity in the woman he had held in his arms so briefly, remained in the morning, when he awakened to find his wife beside him and in an unusually thoughtful mood. If it was so, she did not let it bother her overmuch, or not after the forthcoming wedding of Rory Clarke, M.P., and Mrs. Helen Coles was announced in the Dublin and London papers. One way or another her sistercomrade had been restored to her, whole and healed, and Joanna was never one to quarrel with luck.