A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “I can smell the south-west, Teddy. What shall we do if it rains all day?”

  “No need to meet trouble half way, Phillip. D’you know, I’m looking forward to this shoot tomorrow as keenly as anything in my life before. I—I’m sure, with a little patience all round, we shall be able to come to some arrangement about the future.”

  “I hope so, too, Teddy. Meanwhile, if you could give me some idea about the costs of the combined household—— Let’s see, it’s five weeks and more now, and no accounts have been rendered.”

  “I’ll ask ‘Yipps’ again. It’s not my affair, really.”

  When the two men arrived back at the farmhouse, a strange vehicle was to be seen standing beside Mrs. Carfax’s saloon in the yard: a seedy old relict with cracked windscreen, faded paint, and burst fabric body. Was it some little dealer in poultry come about the turkeys? Wondering where the owner could be, Phillip went into the parlour, immediately to conceal his feelings at seeing one of the faces there, which arose with a lazy smile to meet him; also to avoid shaking hands, for A. B. Cabton’s handshake in the past had been that of the manly man of pre-1914 magazine fiction; but as the hand was already thrust out, he took it, to have his own gripped unnecessarily hard, while thinking that once again Cabton and his wife had, as on many past occasions, invited themselves without notice. There were no spare bedrooms, anyway, now that ffondent-Jones, the improver, had come.

  *

  A. B. Cabton had been turning up unexpectedly for a number of years now, but usually he came in the summer. The odd thing was that Cabton and he had never been easy together, never been anything like friends, yet perennially Cabton presented himself with wide friendly grin and outstretched hand, prepared to stay a week or so. Neither Phillip nor Lucy had heard a word from him or his wife after their departure until they had arrived unexpectedly for the next visit.

  A. B. Cabton was not an easy person to be in company with; he was usually uninterested by, and sometimes near-contemptuous of, nearly all things in which Phillip tried to interest him. His manner was awkward; at the worst, embarrassing. Cabton kept himself apart, or inviolable, enclosing himself as in a skin of oil in water. Was he timid? What were Cabton’s true feelings? He looked to be a man of mixed blood, in part Levantine. He had tried to communicate with Cabton, but always that skin or cushion of oil was between them.

  Cabton was a writer with an arresting style and a compulsion of narrative which, in his early novels, had won praise from some of his seniors. Yet despite the originality of his imagery and the luring pliability of his prose there remained something baffling about his work. He had remained a precious writer, fanciful rather than factual. He was an inventor of country detail. His style had that tricky quality, found in some Armenian writers in their pristine inspiration, of evoking instant awareness in the reader, captivated by its very freshness and spontaneity. But afterwards came doubt; the pathos was unreal, the sense of pity used as a trick; the similes were too startling; the rural life too bizarre, the peasants too original, knobbly, cunning; their ‘Dummersetshire’ speech gnarled like a cuckoo clock. Cabton’s scenery that of the lithographer’s art rather than of the sober reality of the workaday world. After a brilliant beginning he had seemed content to imitate his earlier self; the pages overloaded with simile and metaphor.

  Phillip found Cabton hard to talk to, so Cabton must find it hard to speak with him. It had always been a relief when Cabton had departed, leaving the air clear; and he thought it was a relief for Cabton, too, to return into his own peculiar element.

  *

  “Well, how are you?” said Cabton. “Not too displeased to see us, as last time, I trust?”

  Phillip tried to feel that Cabton was a link with a happier past which seemed almost dead; but his weariness deepened; he felt also a return of the fly-paper feeling, of himself struggling to talk to Cabton against the tacky reluctance of that pseudo-assured and blasé manner. He tried to be natural with Cabton, while he wondered what room he and his wife could occupy. Could he put ffondent-Jones in with Billy? There wouldn’t be enough blankets, since Lucy had taken the children’s bedding to No. 2, The Glade.

  He left the Cabtons talking with Teddy, and sought ‘Yipps’ in the kitchen. There was the caravan in the Corn Barn, and they could have the blankets off his bed; his ulster overcoat and sheepskin rugs would keep him warm.

  “Well, Little Ray, they’re your friends, not mine.”

  The Cabtons shared a supper of soup, roast mallard with orange salad, plum pudding with cream and brandy sauce. Afterwards the old verbal routine, “What are your plans for the night?”

  “Oh, we have no plans.”

  “I doubt if you’ll be able, at this late hour, to get a room in Crabbe——”

  “Oh, we can sleep anywhere.”

  Phillip took the blankets off his bed and they drove down to the Corn Barn. Within the caravan were oil stove, lamp, cutlery and other things for a fairly comfortable temporary existence. He lit the oil stove to air the couch-bed, and they went back to the farmhouse, to sit with Phillip and Teddy before a slight fire in the open hearth, the top half of which was now covered by boards. Conversation soon came round to the war. Teddy, with his fixed idea that he had been swindled out of his business by Jews, became turgidly violent in his half-stuttered opinions, that the mistake Hitler had made was in not——

  “Oh come, Teddy—really——” said Phillip.

  “So you’re some of Birkin’s lot, are you?” said Cabton. “That explains everything.”

  Phillip repeated that Birkin had written and declared on many occasions that the Jews should have their own soil and country, within the British Empire, thus fulfilling their tribal prophecies, and giving them full scope for their constructive talents.

  Cabton made no reply, but taking out his knife began to clean his nails. Not wishing to observe his toilet, Phillip said goodnight. As the tall tarred doors of the Corn Barn were closing behind them, Cabton followed, and touching him lightly on the shoulder said, “You’ve been going wrong for some time now. Doesn’t loving-kindness count any more?” and closing the door before Phillip could reply, he said through an inch-wide crack, “Think it over.”

  “What a creature,” said ‘Yipps’, when Phillip returned. “Does he always take out that big clasp knife and use the point to clean his finger-nails before other people? What an amazing lot you literary genii are. I suppose you’ve invited him and his wife for the shoot tomorrow?”

  “I haven’t asked them.”

  “What time do you require breakfast? Will he and his wife require breakfast?”

  “They said they’d have it in the caravan, and be independent.”

  The next morning, at ten o’clock, as Phillip’s party was assembling, Cabton appeared out of the Corn Barn with a gun under his arm. It was beginning to rain. This meant a change of plans. Phillip was hurrying to speak to Luke waiting in the stables with beaters when Cabton stopped him.

  “How did you sleep, Cabton?”

  “Moderately, all things considered. You don’t mind if I come shooting, do you?”

  “Well, the guns for the stands are already made up, and to include an extra gun at the last moment will make it rather difficult. You see, the place for each of the eight guns was worked out some days ago.”

  “Oh, really?”

  The rain was now falling steadily. “Look here, Cabton, if only you’d let me know you were coming … I must see Luke about the beaters … if you can come down later, in about three weeks’ time, when we shoot next, I’ll arrange a place for you.”

  “Much too far to come just for that. But I see how you feel about it.”

  “Come and have lunch with us.”

  “Obviously we’re not wanted, so I don’t think we’ll come, thanks all the same.”

  “We’ll expect you.”

  But Cabton was walking away. Two more motors, with guests, were arriving. Phillip and Teddy went to greet them. “Stay with me, Teddy. You see, a
ll these shooters are experienced shots, and one can’t risk having an inexperienced gun among them, probably one shooting down the line, or not unloading his gun at every ditch and hedge.”

  “He looks the sort of chap who keeps his gun loaded in his car, and one day will have an accident.”

  “Oh blast this rain, Teddy. Will you meet my guests, and take them into the workshop? I’ve got to tell Luke to stop the beaters leaving for the wood by the river. Damn, they’ve already started off. If they enter other than by the north end of the River Wood the birds will run out and over the boundary.”

  “Okay, leave the guns to me. Don’t you worry. Everything’s going to be quite all right.”

  Phillip felt grateful to Teddy.

  *

  Of the guests, Lord Abeline had brought two of his friends from the far side of the county. They arrived for breakfast, a meal which ‘Yipps’ had taken some trouble to prepare—table set with silver and white napery, scrambled eggs, tomatoes, kidneys and bacon in chafing dishes; coffee, toast, marmalade.

  George Abeline thanked Mrs. Carfax for Melissa’s visit as they left for the farm premises, remarking that his daughter had given him ‘a glowing account of her visit’. Phillip, knowing that George, when he found himself in mixed company, could utter gauche remarks, was relieved that nothing more followed.

  The workshop was spacious and warm. The carpenter’s bench had been cleared of tools and parts of implements. The dark, as though underground, room with its low, wooden ceiling had white-washed flint walls and dull red brick floor. Three-ply tea-boxes, still filled with unpacked books and manuscripts, were set around the bench as seats, covered with corn-sacks of the late BODGER of GREAT SNORING.

  Two Fusilier officers from the Camp had been invited. They greeted Phillip with clicked heels and parade salutes. Teddy took them to the warm workshop. Rain blurred the cobwebbed window glass. They stood around the stove, talking to pass the time. It was now up to him to decide what to do. Luke had engaged six beaters, in addition to his own men. If he abandoned the shoot forthwith, the beaters and the stops by the River Wood would go home, with a day’s pay each. Would a few more lost pounds matter? Should he wait awhile? Were the guests getting bored? Why must it rain on this of all days? He had nothing but the shooting to offer them; no cards, no card-tables.

  “Don’t you worry, Phillip. Things will be all right.”

  The guests were talking among themselves quite happily, as Lucy would have said.

  “No one can help it raining. We’ll have to wait awhile, that’s all. Remember Cambrai, and Havrincourt Wood?”

  “Teddy, d’you think I can ask the beaters, sitting about in the cart-shed, to help tidy it?”

  How many times had he paid to have the long cart-shed tidied: setting implements straight, sweeping the rubbish on the beaten earth floor into heaps and taking it in wheelbarrows to the bullock yards to be trodden into muck to go on the land? And always the old untidiness and muddle had come about once more. The men didn’t care; they simply didn’t care. The lades of the tumbrils were put anywhere, for the tractor to bash into if it came home in the dusk; sacks thrown down on the damp floor; spades, picks, forks stood against wheels or implements instead of being set against the end wall in their appointed places. Creosote pails and brushes invariably left in whatever yard where they had been used, for bullocks to kick over and tread in: ladders were never put away after use in their immemorial places—on the cross-beams of the hovel roof, slidden through little wooden doors in the gable walls. The ladders were likely to be rotting in the rain by the straw stack, or leaning by the uncovered haystack. So it was throughout England: the art and mystery of farming become decadent: the farm workers slovenly and ignorant, their limited education had merely served to set them against their masters, any master. England had been rich, England had had great possessions, the rule and standard of success in the middle and lower classes was of money, and no longer of craft and workmanship.

  “These old East Anglian hovels are a relic of Old England, aren’t they?” said one of the guests, an old Lancer friend of ‘Boy’ Runnymeade, who had come over from Staithe to make the eighth gun.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  The doors in the walls for ladders were old and tattered. They had been made before the general use of coal and invention of the steam engine, before the industrial revolution and the change of power from the land to the town, before money had got into the wrong hands. In those days a ladder was a fine thing, made by craftsmen, cared for by fellow-craftsmen who looked after it. To try to bring back craftsman-standards in an age of money-standards was the hope of either a hero or a bloody fool as Horatio Bugg had more than once pronounced by his petrol pump.

  Phillip went through the rain to see Luke.

  “It don’t look like clearing yet awhile,” said Luke, in a low and confidential voice. The steward wore his best jacket, breeches and buskins. A gamekeeper’s side-bag was slung over his shoulder. He had a walking stick. “Father says it will clear later. In about an hour.”

  What to do during that hour? There was some beer and whisky, but if they drank it then, there would be none for lunch. Dogs squirmed by his legs.

  “Well, let’s hang on a bit, shall we, Luke?”

  “Right you are, sir.”

  At least he hadn’t mentioned wet-weather work to Luke. It had been coming to his tongue. A day’s shoot was a sporting event. To have revealed anxiety about money would have been in poor taste. His guests were expecting to show them sport, to entertain them: and how near had he come to revealing his hollow anxiety. Perhaps Cabton had, through nervousness and ignorance of the form, made a gaffe: and his rudeness was but a stammered cover-up? Go easy; relax; smile like the Commander of the 1st Corps on the Menin Road on 30 October, 1914, when the Alleyman had taken Gheluvelt and the survivors of the Coldstream were streaming down towards Ypres, ‘having lost cohesion’.

  “My chap thinks the weather will clear in about an hour. Would you care to hear something written during the last century on the state of English farming seventy years ago, and how the writer forecast certain world trends? I think it has some bearing on events in our present time.”

  Polite murmurs. Perhaps he would bore them worse than the rain: however, he was committed; keep his end up, go through with it now. Over the top. He was trembling as he opened one of the three-ply boxes, and took out the bound journals of his grandfather, turning pages until he came to one of his favourite passages concerning the industrial revolution; and began to read. At the end of the section he stopped; the rain was still falling outside.

  “Shall I go on for a bit? Or is it unbearable?”

  “Please go on.”

  At the end of the hour the diary entries were finished, and so was the rain. He had lived in the scenes, the feeling of their authenticity had been communicated to the listeners sitting on barrels and three-ply boxes. There were murmurs of approval.

  “Absolutely hits the nail on the head.”

  “Damned interesting, I must say,” said Teddy. “Your grandfather prophesied both bloody wars. In nineteen-fourteen a trade war for exports, and this one for the Golden Calf. I’ve got a wonderful idea while you were reading, Phillip! But I won’t tell you now.” Teddy’s face was beaming. Stout fellow, as always in trouble, Teddy Pinnegar.

  “Well, the rain god at last seems to be propitiated,” Phillip said, in the language of the military sportsmen of Blackwood’s Magazine, as he opened the door, to see blue sky between thinning vapours, and a shine of the sun among low clouds.

  Cheerfully he set out with the others for the distant wood by the river.

  *

  The boundary ‘stops’, carrying white rags on sticks, had been out since dawn. Many birds roosted in River Wood. Upon the field beyond the boundary, mustard had been sown in a strip thirty yards wide, out from the hedge ‘to draw the bards’, in Matt’s words. Charles Box, his neighbour, would begin his day’s shooting by lining the boundary with guns and
beaters; and at the sound of his copper horn the line would walk forward, thus driving any pheasants in the mustard away from the wood.

  The stops, two of Phillip’s men, had walked inside the boundary since dawn, waving rags on sticks and sometimes shouting to keep pheasants from flying across the meadows into the mustard.

  *

  The wood lay narrow and curving beside, and a little above, the river. Otters loved its wilderness of fallen fir trees, willows, thorns, and ash which grew on land that was almost an island. On its south side moved the river; on the north lay a dyke in which the tidal press of water moved sluggish or fast according to the height of the river and phases of the moon.

  When the moon was full or new the spring tides of the sea kept back fresh river-water behind sluice-gates in the sea-wall; and the fresh-water, moving back along the dykes, came after a mile or more to the River Wood and adjoining meadows. Phillip had watched the water rise as much as fifteen inches as it crept back up the lesser drains and along the serpentine grass-grown guts in the meadows, spreading out over areas of grazing until those areas were like lagoons. There the grass became what Matt called water-slain.

  He had a plan to replace the fallen-in and rotten wood-and-chalk ‘bridges’, which connected the meadows, with culverts made of concrete reinforced by old iron bedsteads and odd lengths of angle-iron bought at auctions for a few pence before the war. These new culverts would carry lorry and tumbrils and also be crossing-places for cattle. Two-foot-wide pre-cast concrete pipes to carry the water under the culverts. One way flaps on the lower ends of the pipes to stop back-flooding. Then plough the meadows: wheat and sugar-beet on that rich deep soil, once the sea-bed before sea-wall and sluice-gates were built a hundred years ago. Meanwhile, whenever he saw the flooded meadows, his thoughts were depresssed like the water-slain grasses there.

  *

  The beaters went in among the trees of River Wood. Birds flew out, fifty or sixty in succession. The semi-circle of guns on the meadow hit three out of every five pheasants that flew over. After the shooting Billy led Beatrice and the game cart to the meadow. He had been waiting on the Scalt field with ffondent-Jones, the improver. The tumbril had been washed and oiled, its red shafts and green body glistened as it moved on big rubber tyres scrubbed black. Under a green canvas cover lay clean wheaten straw; and on that straw after the first stand twenty-seven pheasants, two moorfowl, and one pigeon were laid.