A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “Then we’ll plough them in, and turn them into humus, Matt. What you so aptly call the ‘marther’—the mother.”

  Matt the father was dark-eyed, a South-folk man. Luke the son was blue-eyed, of North-folk or invader stock. Matt went every night to play cards in the Hero inn. Luke never mixed with the village. He had no social life at all beyond an occasional game of bowls in the rectory garden. Week by week he saved his money in the Post Office Savings account. He was to be trusted to do only what he thought was necessary or right. But Luke did care for the land in his own way, and he was really patient like a tortoise; at times forbearing with the hare-like ideas and intuition of the boss. Phillip knew that he was not always right. Sometimes he did do silly, or unnecessary, things; but never when he had been working some days with his body, and was living away from his hare-like mind upon paper.

  *

  Billy brought back the younger children soon after one o’clock. Phillip did not appear for Sunday’s dinner. His appearance at meals was (at times of stress) erratic. A plate was kept hot in the oven. Billy bicycled to see a friend, the children played in the garden, and later in their cottage Phillip reappeared shortly after five o’clock: he had found several ewes with their rumps thrust into the hedge dividing a couple of acres of grazing below the Scalt field. Their soiled anal ends were crawling with maggots. Taking Matt’s bottle of disinfectant from its place by the gate-post he had ‘fly’d’ them, after chasing some about the two acres of Scalt common, often slipping on dung. On the way to the premises afterwards he had seen one of Lucy’s hens, which had died some days before, still lying there unburied. In the yard as he looked in was a rat killed by Spot, Matt’s terrier, likewise unburied. Like Lucy’s dead hen, it was yellow-stitched by the eggs of blowflies. Phillip had ceased to ask that rats and dead hens be buried deep in the yard dung, to add eventually to the land’s fertility.

  “Would you like your dinner now, Phillip?”

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

  Lucy went on with her black-out curtains.

  During the following week ration books and identity cards were given out, anti-arsenical-smoke chemical-containers fitted to gas-masks, to be carried to school by the children. Lucy registered with Brillman in the village grocery shop, and with Ramm the butcher of Crabbe, for the two village slaughter-houses had been closed. Phillip was thereby relieved by the thought that his trout-stream would receive a little less carbolic acid. Otherwise life went on almost as before, except that the village nights no longer were clamorous with pseudo-drunk territorial soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms; and fewer motor cars passed along the winding coastal road.

  *

  Phillip had bought a 36-inch circular saw during the past year, but it was not yet fitted up. It stood in the corrugated iron shed adjoining the chaff barn, and was a perch for hens. Moisture condensing on the iron sheeting above dripped on it; rust formed on its bright parts. He recalled how, before he had started farming in East Anglia, he had determined that his implements should always be maintained efficiently, kept in their right places, always under cover and never left out for sun and rain to fret and corrode. The shining curve of the plough-breast should never become drab with rust. As soon as one field was finished, the plough would be brought home, the bright breast wiped dry and then smeared with old engine oil ready for the next job.

  Rusty ploughs would not score. Soil clung to them. Horses had to strain at the pull-trees on the chain traces: the upturned furrow was irregular, a tumbled mess, until the breast was bright again and whispered through the earth.

  Likewise ladders would never be left out to rot. Cart-ropes must hang from one particular beam in the cart-shed. The rubber tyres of tumbrils, lorry, and the three trailers would be pumped up every Friday. The three iron rolls—heavy rib, two-horse, and light one-horse—always be oiled at the axles when in use; corn sacks folded and hung on the wire-suspended pole out of reach of rats in the barn. Through industry and example the derelict fields and premises of ‘the Bad Lands’ were to be transformed into part of the fine new Britain that the newspapers and politicians were beginning to declare was one of the reasons why Britain had gone to war: one of the war-aims, in fact.

  What was the truth? Was it that depressed markets had produced depressed industries, which had produced men who were depressed, men who did not care, who were without optimism, who had a resentment against the bosses—the farmers—even though this resentment was seldom uppermost in their minds? The horse-plough was left out to rust; the rolls were worked un-oiled; the corn-sacks were chucked down anywhere and anyhow; the tyres of tumbrils and tractors got softer and slacker; the cart-shed was a mess of chains and forks, shovels and old coats.

  Phillip had been patient, asking again and again, believing he was dealing with teachable minds. A dozen times he saw squalor returning, and spoke to the men as easily as he could; a score of times he saw neglect and disorder, until the face became set, and he became, in Matt’s phrase, ‘all wire’.

  He knew, but would not accept, the fact that his unusual ways and ideas were resented and deliberately countered by Luke. A young man called Hurst who had left his job in a London bank to work on the farm had told Phillip that when he had gone back to breakfast after giving Luke orders of a morning, Luke had frequently said, “Buggered if I’m going to do what he says.”

  So the fag was lit in the hay-barn, despite the red-printed card of the company which had insured the premises against fire. And gradually Phillip had begun to realise that he was a failure. There must be something lacking in his character that he could not inspire a new spirit in those about him. Through the months and the seasons hope had become low, and with it confidence in his power to continue; but one must endure. The war had not ended in 1918; the fighting had ceased, but not the war. Perhaps the war had never ended, perhaps it had always been going on, a conflict of idea and counter-idea, of would-be reformation and rebound in violence of counter-reformation.

  It seemed to him in business spheres that there was little sense of what was called honour. A man’s word meant nothing to him if by keeping it he would lose money. Later on, Phillip was to meet with men whose sense of fairness and accuracy was part of their business life as well as of their personal life; but at the beginning, among the smaller men, he had observed that money and egotism came first; not the job for the job’s sake. There were few craftsmen left in farming towards the end of the two decades following the Armistice of 1918. And now the war had come again.

  *

  But how could he blame others if he himself had the same fault? The rust-streaked circular saw standing in the ricketty tin lean-to shed by the Hay Barn was one of many things that reproached him: a new saw spoiling. He should have greased it. And weren’t the books in their three-ply tea chests in the workshop spoiling, after two years on the damp brick floor? The furniture in the loft above was covered with dust, and plaster fallen from the tiles tilted all ways upon broken battens. Since Hurst had gone, he had made fewer and fewer entries in the farm book: where then were his resolutions about efficiency and method? There was no end to the work, and almost no purpose in striving: up at half-past six in the morning and rarely in bed before midnight, and feeling tired all the time. However, he had undertaken the job as part of the idea of Hereward Birkin’s new resurgent Britain: and the job would be done. So—patience with slower minds!

  *

  Such was Phillip’s world at the outbreak of another war: a narrow world, a confining world he thought, as he sat in the kitchen of his cottage, a small room with creosoted beams crossing the ceiling, and a staircase with treads less than two feet wide leading up to a little room like the fo’c’sle of a wooden ship, lit by a latticed window scarcely wide enough for the head to be put through, let alone the shoulders: a cottage of rounded sea-shore pebbles, grey in colour.

  The cottage had been carefully—to Phillip, beautifully—built by some eighteenth-century craftsman, using hedgerow timber. It stood beside a na
rrow street enclosed by similar walls gapped where grey flints had either fallen, or been picked out by village boys. The village street had an air of drabness and neglect. Most of the cottages showed fronts of unpainted window frames set in walls of blackened split flint and crumbling brick. Phillip’s face sometimes reflected the exhausted appearance of the cottages—a face that sometimes caused the children’s voices to cease when he entered the parlour of the farmhouse.

  *

  They continued to chalk the arable of ‘the Bad Lands’. To blast away tons of the face of the quarry Phillip used a boring tool he had bought years before at his own auction of the unwanted effects of Fawley House in the West Country. It was made of a six-foot length of one-inch mild steel ending in an auger. Provided one bored horizontally, and above the stratum of flints which were packed along a definite line in the face of the quarry, a deep and narrow hole could be made into the sheer white wall.

  The next thing was to get blasting powder, so he went into Crabbe and bought a dozen pounds of black powder, with a coil of fuse; and returning, looked about for material for making cartridges.

  In the workshop, within one of the unpacked tea-chests of plywood, containing most of his books and papers, were some old Ordnance Survey maps—25 inches to the mile—of the land at Rookhurst which had been sold. They had served their turn. The stiff cartridge-paper, rolled around a broom-handle, and gummed, made strong uniform cases for the gunpowder. Giant Chinese Crackers, indeed. He made two, watched eagerly by the children, who took turns in carrying them to the quarry. There the cartridges were tapped into the neat and circular hole. The ramrod was the broom-handle—not the iron rod which Luke the steward had brought, because, Phillip explained, a spark from iron on flint might cause a premature explosion.

  “You’re boss,” Luke replied. “If ’twas mine, I wouldn’t——”

  “Even so,” Phillip cut him short, pretending to mistake the usual objection of economy, “Nelson’s cannon were rammed with wooden rods. So I’m doing things your local way.”

  Chapter 2

  HARE AND TORTOISE

  The war had been on ten weeks, but the skies were quieter than they had been for years, for the anti-aircraft training range on the marshes was closed. In the silence any sudden explosion might alarm the village, so he sent his children to say that the coming bang would not be due to invasion, but to the blasting of chalk sponsored by the Land Fertility Committee.

  “I promise not to blow the mine before all of you come back.”

  While the children were away they loaded the lorry with loose chalk lying at the foot of the quarry and drove up the gulley into the Nightcraft field. There, having set out two tons in sixteen heaps on one-fifth of an acre, they returned down the hill to the waiting children.

  “I only hope the blast doesn’t shake down the tiles of your Corn Barn,” said David anxiously.

  “And supposing someone has a broken head through the flying flint? Does the Workmen’s Compensation Act Insurance cover such an accident?” Phillip asked Luke, who didn’t know.

  “Probably a special risk, Luke. So will you take the men in front of the Corn Barn, out of the direct view, and therefore of blast. No, wait awhile.”

  The massive flint wall of the Corn Barn was leaning out from a wide crack extending from the brick door-jamb, at an angle of four degrees—a dangerous place, for fifty tons of flint and mortar would fall if the wall collapsed.

  “Better if you all went round to the Office.”

  The Office was a small, open, lean-to shed beyond the barn. It had been used by the auctioneer’s desk during a previous sale, and ever since had been known by that name. It was the home of Silas the young black boar, who was so fat that he could only just struggle on his feet at mealtimes. Wheat had been cheap just before the outbreak of war: eighteenpence a hundredweight, and Phillip used the grain, boiled, for feeding his pigs.

  The moment had come. Phillip climbed up the ladder against the quarry face and lit the fuse. Then he walked away with the ladder, and watched from a coign of the Barn. Hardly had he got there when Matt, who had been busy in the calf-box leading off the yard enclosed by the buildings, opened the turnip-house door and stepped over the bottom ledge. As always, in weather hot and dry or cold and wet, Matt wore gumboots over feet enwrapped in torn strips of old sack.

  “Go back, Matt. Go back!” cried Billy.

  Matt strolled towards Phillip. “What’s up, guv’nor?” he murmured. Then, “Marty’s just calved. A black bull-calf.”

  “I hope the bang won’t startle her.”

  “What bang, guv’nor?”

  “Blasting chalk. If my tamping is faulty, the blast might come this way.”

  “Oh, that’s it,” said Matt, in his soft, slow voice as he filled his pipe. “I thought it might be the Jarmans come.”

  “But it was only the bull-calf.”

  “Get back, Dad!” cried Billy, anxiously.

  The fuse was supposed to burn at the rate of three feet a minute. There were eight feet to sizzle through.

  “It’s all right, Billy, there’s some time to go.”

  Rosamund said, “Dad, what will happen if the wooden plug you rammed in flies back all the way over the river to the church and gets stuck in the tower?”

  “The rector will probably say: Now I know the meaning of the phrase, ‘the wooden walls of old England’.”

  “Hur, joke,” said Billy.

  When after another minute nothing happened Matt said, “Thet fuse is damp, arter so long in the chalk.”

  Certainly it seemed like it. Billy now became satirical.

  “I say, Peter, there might be such a thunderous and mighty roar that all the Spitfires round about will get into the air and start looking for Jerry bombers.”

  “Cor,” said Peter, “and all the beech trees on the hill above might come crashing down.”

  What could have happened? Seven minutes had ticked away, eight minutes, nine minutes. “War’ll be over per-aps before it goes off,” remarked Matt, puffing smoke into the still air. There was heard a slight noise like Phut, as though a lump of damp chalk had fallen six feet to the ground. But—was it imagination, or did the quarry-face bulge slightly? A few bits rattled down.

  “Ould rabbit about, guv’nor,” murmured Matt.

  “Cor, that’s a rum’n,” said John.

  “We ought to have used high explosive,” said Billy.

  A young, red-headed labourer, examining the quarry face, declared that ten cubic yards of chalk were nicely cracked. At the touch of his pick several tons dropped away with a rattling crash. By chance Phillip had found the right way of loosening it. High explosive would have made a satisfying bang and blown a narrow hole out of its cavern; but gunpowder, a low explosive, he explained to the children, had taken its time, and found its vent through hundreds of seams in the chalk. With the least picking, twelve tons, twelve cubic yards, each fragment blackened one side, glissaded down for their bright shovels.

  “The boring tool cost a shilling. The black powder eightpence. The fuse sixpence. A touch of a pick, and rattle down she comes,” said Phillip to Billy, for the steward to overhear.

  As they loaded, and later while driving the swaying lorry up the new surface of the gulley road, Phillip wondered when the Nightcraft field had last been chalked. Probably eighty or even a hundred years ago, before American pioneers discovered that the prairies of the New World would grow wheat, he said to Lucy, who had come to see how they were getting on.

  “Those trees up there, probably seventy years of age or older, growing out of the face of the quarry, were seeds windborne or bird-dropped when your great grandfather was in the Crimean war,” he said to Billy. “I’m afraid they’ll have to come down.”

  “Cor,” said Peter. “Next spring the jackdaws will miss their nests in those old rabbit holes.”

  “And the nests, all damp and mouldy, will be ploughed under with the chalk,” said Rosamund, “and make compost won’t they, Dad?” />
  “I’ve brought you some lunch,” said Lucy. “I thought you’d want to keep going.”

  “Yes, we’ve got to take up a hundred and fifty tons of chalk while the fine weather lasts, then nearly the same weight of muck. After that we’ve got to spread both chalk and muck, plough in and drill wheat, before the flocks of starlings come across the North Sea. Also a couple of hundred tons of sugar beet on Pewitts have to be topped and lifted before December.”

  “Well, I must not keep you, my dear.”

  After the first day’s work nearly a hundred and fifty heaps of chalk lay along one side of the Nightcraft. Towards knocking-off time Luke came to Phillip and said, with a serious face, “Do you think we ought to camouflage our chalk heaps? You’re boss, you say.”

  Phillip took this to be sly humour. He was not so sure when Luke went on, “You see, I reckon it this way. They’re easily seen from the air, and at night they’ll glimmer, and what if German bombers come over?”

  Phillip saw Billy’s face smiling round a post of the hovel.

  “Well, Luke, even with the German reputation for thoroughness, I doubt if they will have time, with their heads already full of Poles, so to speak, to disorganise this part of our farming scheme. If they do, bombs will scatter the chalk and save us the trouble of spreading it with shovels. So you needn’t stop behind after work and cover up the heaps.”

  Luke was not done with his joke—or rather Billy’s. “For this chalk to do any good it must be spread evenly and I don’t trust anyone else to do it, in a manner of speaking. And knowing how the boss likes things to be done properly, I thought I’d just mention about blacking them out. Well, goodnight.”

  *

  Ten days later the four men now working on the farm, using lorry and two horse-drawn rubber-tyred tumbrils, had tipped about one hundred and sixty tons of chalk in roughly a thousand heaps over the Nightcraft. Luke got a man from the Labour Exchange at Crabbe to come and help scatter it. The old sailor worked hard and sweated out by day the gallon of beer he put back at night. While he worked in the field, Phillip and the three regular men, helped by Billy and Peter, got the muck out of the yards into the lorry and took it up the gulley, setting out black and brown heaps beside the yellow patches in the grass where chalk heaps had stood. It was hard, continuous work, and by the end of another week the Nightcraft looked like a chessboard.