A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “Where’s Billy?”

  “He went to the pictures on his bike, the cute little beggar,” beamed Teddy. “Do you know Billy?” he asked Melissa, who had been talking as though happily to Mrs. Carfax during the meal.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You ought to see him suckling his bull-calf Nimrod. I-I-love that boy, you know!” Teddy’s eyes were shining.

  “The leader of the Horkey Band,” said Melissa. “Does he still wear that enormous cowboy’s hat?” she said to Phillip.

  “No, that’s a thing of the past,” exclaimed Teddy. “Only he still carries his little whip. Some of Phillip’s old war-time puttees round his legs, blue dungarees, and a ragged old cap on his head—you ought to paint him, Melissa.”

  “So you know Billy, do you?” asked ‘Yipps’.

  “Lucy is my cousin, Mrs. Carfax.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that. Why didn’t Phillip tell me?”

  “Has he any lights on his bike, ‘Yipps’?” asked Phillip, who had overheard. “It’s a dangerous, curving road in peacetime, let alone in the blackout.”

  “Now don’t start pimmimin’, ‘Little Ray’. Remember, I am looking after Billy!”

  Mrs. Carfax had eaten nothing, the polite hostess merely playing with fork and vegetables. At her words a silence fell on the others. Mrs. Carfax left the room. Teddy said in a low voice, “She’s starving herself. I’ve told her to eat more, but she won’t. I think I’ll go and speak to her.” He was all concern and sympathy as he went quietly into the next room—Lucy’s little ‘boudoir’—and they heard his footfalls going up the bare boards of the short staircase.

  “Where did you meet Pinnegar, Phillip?”

  “I soldiered with him in the war.”

  “Is he going to be your partner?”

  “I don’t know yet. I want someone who will take over the job of building up the farm, so that I’ll be able to write my novel series.”

  “I wonder if these people are the sort who will become working farmer, and farm wife.”

  “I think it’s unlikely.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I wish I knew.” He rubbed his forehead. “I can’t very well ask them to go. They’re trying their best in an impossible situation—I’m responsible for their being here—I accepted them—having practically turned out Lucy and the children.”

  Avoiding her gaze, he went on, “As I said, I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve always made a mess of things, throughout my life. I try to be detached—to tell myself to be tolerant about Teddy’s forgetfulness, and his inexperience of country matters—you know, we did agree that the shooting was to be reserved, and he apparently forgot—he’s a townsman, and doesn’t know that we have only about six shoots a season, and not a shot fired before or between the shoots, otherwise all these wild pheasants run away, sometimes across the boundary.”

  “Perhaps both would be relieved if you told them that the partnership won’t work.

  “Teddy’s got nowhere else to go. Also, he was a good friend to me in nineteen-seventeen, and got an adverse report after the battle of Bourlon Wood, entirely owing to my fault.”

  “How was it your fault?”

  “I was responsible for the brigade machine gun company Teddy commanded losing the way when the Company came out of the line. It was during the battle of Cambrai, when we had broken through the Hindenburg Line. The Germans counter-attacked the next morning, when our machine-guns were in my limbers, miles from the brigade, which copped it badly. The ‘Boy General’, who was twenty three years old, and had both the Victoria Cross and the Military Cross, was killed. Both Teddy and I had adverse reports. Teddy lost his command, we were both sent back to the infantry.”

  “Did you lose the way out on purpose?”

  “No, we were gas shelled, also crumped, and went miles from the brigade. During the German pincer-movement the machine-gun company was taken over by a senior officer, and formed part of a defensive flank. We held off a lot of the enemy. But in the wrong place. And afterwards, what was left of the company went to where we should have been. And Teddy, as I said, took the blame.”

  “And ever since you’ve blamed yourself for everything that went wrong.”

  “Well, I did know better——”

  “Just as you blame yourself because you didn’t fly to see Hitler just before the war broke out. And Birkin is still holding meetings, asking for the war to stop.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s a parallel case at all.”

  “But it springs from the same mistaken sense of duty.”

  “I thought you were with Birkin—against the war.”

  “I am against the war. But Hitler isn’t Birkin. If Birkin keeps on, he will ruin himself, Phillip.” She took his hand. “Don’t you see that all these ideas spring from the death of your generation in the Great War?”

  She felt stricken, alarmed at the tears which could not be held back, and turned away her face.

  “‘Yipps’ is coming back,” he said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “If she sees you crying, she may think——”

  She grabbed a pepper pot, shook some on her hand and sniffed. Then she sneezed; and went on sneezing.

  “I am awfully sorry, it must be riding in an open car,” he said, as though apologetically, as the others came into the parlour.

  “No, it is my hay-fever,” said Melissa, between sneezes.

  “Hay-fever? At this time of the year? I wonder that everyone doesn’t get pneumonia, riding about in Phillip’s old tumbril.”

  “We were well wrapped up, ‘Yipps’.”

  “You were, my dear man, in that heavy leather coat, but what about this child? I’m going to put her to bed with a hot-water bottle.”

  “I wore the leather coat part of the way, Mrs. Carfax.”

  Melissa had worn over her little suede jacket a camel’s hair coat, with several newspapers Phillip tenderly had placed under the coat behind her shoulders, where the backwash of the wind was insistent.

  “Well, it’s not my idea of travelling,” declared Mrs. Carfax. “You see?” as the girl sneezed again. “Melissa’s caught a chill. She ought to go to bed with a hot-water bottle, and a good stiff whisky and lemon.”

  “She can have my bottle,” said Teddy.

  “I really am quite all right, Mrs. Carfax, thank you so much.” Whereupon Melissa sneezed once more, and Phillip could not keep back his laughter.

  “What’s the joke, my dear man?” enquired ‘Yipps’.

  “Melissa upset the pepper pot, and didn’t like to say so, because your table is so beautifully polished.”

  “Did you?” beamed Teddy.

  “I am afraid I did. I’m most awfully sorry, Mrs. Carfax. Will you allow me to repolish it, after I’ve washed up.”

  “Maude and May are perfectly capable of washing up tomorrow morning.”

  “I’d like to polish your table, ‘Yipps’,” said Phillip.

  “My dear man, it is not your place to polish tables. The maids will do it—or go through the motions of polishing without elbow grease.”

  Teddy was looking at the Radio Times. “I say! There’s a London Philharmonic Concert to-night. Let’s all clear the table and listen!”

  “I’m off!” cried Billy, making for the door.

  “You’ll join us, won’t you, ‘Yipps’?”

  “My dear man, I’ve got work to do. Also I must write some letters.”

  Which Mrs. Carfax did, sitting in the little white boudoir of Lucy’s, where at least the open hearth burned without smoking, and it was warm if one sat away from the door past which sang an icy Aeolian plaint.

  In the parlour the lights were turned out: the deep red glow of the oil stoves, the yellow-red of the electric bars in the polished reflectors made it a Cave of Harmony. They were sitting there, after listening to the final item—Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony—when the door opened, and Billy came in, from his visit to Crabbe—a brief “Goodnight, all”—and he was gone
into the adjoining cottage.

  Teddy made some tea and took a cup to ‘Yipps’. They listened to the late B.B.C. news; then to ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ from Stuttgart.

  ‘Yipps’ came in, sat down, and said “Oh, that awful man! How anyone can listen to that horrible sneering German propaganda is beyond me.”

  “He’s interesting,” said Teddy.

  She brought in the electric kettle, and plugged it in. She sat there, a hot water bottle on her knees. When the kettle began to rattle, Melissa said, “I want to go for a walk. Anyone coming?”

  Phillip could feel what the others were thinking. “Not a bad idea to get one’s circulation going after sitting in the old tumbril, so let’s all go for a brisk walk along the road, shall we? Perhaps we’ll hear the otters in the river, and the duck flighting, Teddy. Why not bring your gun?”

  “They don’t flight at this time, Phillip.”

  “Anyway, come for a walk.”

  “I don’t think I will just now, thanks all the same.”

  “How about you, ‘Yipps’?”

  “No thank you, my dear man! Well, Melissa, you know your bedroom leads in through mine, don’t you? If you come up late, the switch at the bottom of the stairs is a two-way switch, so you needn’t break your neck falling down them in the dark. They are dangerous stairs if you don’t know them.” She poured boiling water into her bottle.

  “I hope I won’t disturb you, Mrs. Carfax.”

  “Oh, you won’t disturb me, I read until the small hours. I find it is my only relaxation.” And Mrs. Carfax, clutching the hot-water bottle, returned to her boudoir.

  “Well, I have my own private staircase this way,” said Teddy, opening the tapestry curtain leading to the stairs beside the open hearth. “Don’t get lost, will you, you two night birds?” and with a smile at Phillip, he went out to get more water for his bottle.

  “Now,” said Melissa, “the night birds can float on their plumage. Will you show me your cottage, Phillip?”

  They put on coats; and holding her hand lest she slip, he led her down the steps and around the bath-house to the street.

  “Walk in step with me, and don’t talk,” he whispered. “Then it will sound like one person passing.”

  “How reassuring to know that you are really full of cunning.”

  They walked in step down to the cross, past Horatio Bugg’s scrap yard, blacksmith’s shop, and row of condemned cottages, empty before the war but now occupied by evacuees—untidy-looking women with pale, small children, seemingly on the verge of destitution—from London.

  Opening the new white gate he led the way quietly up the little gravelly yard and so to the cottage door. The big hand-forged key went into the worn hole of the lock. They felt like conspirators. Enter and hush, not a word!

  Draw the curtains over the windows: hang something over the bulb.

  “I love your high room,” she whispered. “Did you creosote the beams? And O, the doll’s house staircase! Phillip, it’s exquisite.”

  “I can’t think how they managed to bring down coffins in the old days.”

  “Perhaps they laid them out down here. Why should anyone carry a coffin upstairs, and down again?”

  “I don’t believe this is true!”

  “What don’t you believe?”

  “That anyone could be so percipient, or have an original thought.”

  “I am really quite ordinary, you know, and I don’t always have the forbearance one should show to slower minds!”

  “My forbearance is entirely phoney, like this war.”

  “Do you think that good manners are phoney?”

  “My so-called tolerance is.”

  “Why is so much that you say turned against yourself?”

  He felt, a little tremulously, that she was like Barley.

  “I have what T. E. Lawrence had—‘A diffident inner core’ in the words of his brother. I can’t really cope with people.”

  “They cannot cope with you, I should say.”

  “The same thing.”

  She saw that he was tired. “You need sleep. Which is your bedroom?”

  He remembered the bed was unmade. “I’ll go upstairs first, and hang up the blackout blanket and make my bed.” She waited below, wanting to say, Let me make it, but remained silent until he called her up to a small room dimly lit by stars.

  “This cottage has sheltered generations of cocklers. That’s why the natives here are so independent. They can always get cockles—their main food—on the mud flats, and in the creeks.”

  “What a man it is,” she said, in sudden weariness.

  “Well, I mustn’t let a crack of light show,” he said nervously, returning to the small inner room at the top of the stairs. There he hung a blanket over the tiny dormer window, with its rotten leaded lattice which had flapped loose in the years of the cottage’s emptiness until most of the panes, each the size of a small prayer-book, had either fallen or been cracked. Having done this he led her by the hand to the other room, where he blew out the candle and removed the blackout blanket, to reveal a new large casement and quatrain of pale glass beyond which glittered the constellation of Orion, hanging low over the dark wooded hill-line of the farm.

  “Sirius, the dog-star, low down over the trees.” They watched for a while, in the silence of the starry night. “Now I’ll put this blanket on the nails, and then will you switch on the electric light? It’s just by your shoulder.”

  “Why, this room’s like the prow of a wooden ship,” she whispered, “and what a wizard carpet. ‘BOOGER OF GREAT SNORING.’ Oh, it’s a D—BODGER. Was anyone ever called BODGER? I don’t believe it, Phillip. Who was BODGER?”

  “Don’t make such a row, goose girl.”

  “I want to know who BODGER was.”

  “Mr. Bodger farmed the Bad Lands before I arrived. He came from Great Snoring. He farmed a lot during the depression with a a dog and a walking stick. The name of Bodger may have come from one who stopped up holes in pisé barns with Saxon bodies: a Norman knight having fun with his churl after the Conquest.

  “‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay

  Might stop a hole, to keep the wind away’

  I, Bodger, bodged that hole. What an imagination Shakespeare had!”

  “‘On such a night as this——’,” she quoted; and they moved into each other’s arms, she laying her head against his shoulder again. He stroked the soft hair, feeling its gleam; felt the outline of the skull, so dear, so vulnerable.

  They sat on the bed, she patted her lap, and took his head against her breast, giving his hair a series of little kisses.

  His heart lightened; but behind the happiness was fear: which led to the false excuse that it would be ruin, ruin, ruin for both of them if he yielded to her.

  “We ought to return, goose girl.”

  “I’d rather stay here.”

  It was too near the other cottages, he must protect her good name.

  “I’ll tell you what, we can take some blankets and pillows, and go into the unfinished cottage I took you into, before we had tea. We won’t have any light, as I haven’t got any blackout for that window all along the southern wall. There’s a grate in the bedroom, we can have a wood fire, and watch Orion through the window.”

  They crept down the stairs and out of the door, Phillip closing it softly. It was now after midnight. The village was absorbed in darkness, the surface of the street just discernible.

  It was colder inside the lower room of the empty cottage. The air there was condensed into damp; but Teddy’s new plaster on the upstairs walls and new cream paint gave an easier feeling.

  “I’ll go and get some sticks from the wood shed. A small fire won’t be visible except by reflection off the walls and ceiling, and there’s no one opposite us across the river.”

  He brought up a two-handled bushel skep filled with dried pine sticks. Soon a handful of fire was burning in the cockle-shell of a grate. Sparks leapt out of the cracking of fibres. A show
er of soot and mortar dust fell down the chimney. He put on more sticks. Soon the room was warm.

  “I hope they won’t spot us from the searchlight camp beyond the pine trees,” he said, making some sort of bed on the floor. “You lie over here, Melissa, under these blankets. There are pyjamas in the bag if you want them. And a pail of cold water, soap and towel, in the next room, and a pot. If you go downstairs, do be careful of the paint pots, chicken coops, binder twine, and various implements.”

  “Where are you going to sleep, among the paint pots?”

  “No, beside you.” He opened the bag, took out a pair of pale blue poplin trousers and threw them at her.

  She sat down to take off shoes and stockings.

  “I’ll be back in a moment, Melissa, I want to see if the glow is noticeable from outside. The searchlight camp is on the hill just the other side of the trees, and there’s no sense in taking a risk of being reported.” With you sleeping in the same room, he said to himself.

  From the garden the light above was but a wide rectangle of faint glowing; and after waiting for her to finish undressing, he returned. She was in the bed roughly made on the floor, lying on her back, arms behind head. He took off his clothes, put on pyjamas, and wondering at his absence of feeling other than that of entire self-possession, got in under the blanket she held open for him. He lay on his back beside her, feeling the warmth of her thigh against his own. He felt that they were part of one another, calmly and assuredly.

  “I’ve never been so happy in my life,” she said. “I feel I know you through and through. You are really very simple, Phillip. You are a wood spirit.”

  “‘An icicle, whose thawing is its dying.’”

  “No,” she said, “that applies to no one. It is a poetical conceit of Francis Thompson. Love is growth, not dissolution.”

  The fire died down. Stars brightened beyond the lighthouse window. Orion bestrode the wood called Pigeon Oaks, where stood the trees he had marked for the frame of the new farmhouse one day. How remote and nebulous seemed that ambition now.

  “Do you remember our phosphorescent selves, Phillip?”

  “Yes, the happiest night of my life. I was entirely without tension.”