A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  Snow was falling all over the island of Britain, from Cornwall in the south to the Black Country of the Midlands; falling upon the moors of Yorkshire and Westmorland; silently drifting in the Cairngorms, covering with its shroud the bens of far Caithness. Snow drifting from Scapa Flow to far out over the black waves of the North Sea; blanching the plains of Holland, lacing the frozen dykes, eddying upon the sandy heaths of Germany and farther east to the plains of the Ostmark, where another akin to Jefferies had thrust through his inner obstruction to take on the conception an of ideal world beyond human limits: the world that would roll back upon and crush him: Sisyphus.

  Part Three

  IMMORTAL CORN

  Chapter 17

  AT MRS. HAMMETT’S

  It was a strange life that they were now leading. He and Billy were existing in an unreal world: silence of forsaken farmhouse, pallor of snow-light behind latticed panes: a wider silence of village street deep in snow, he and Billy going together three times a day to their meals in Mrs. Hammett’s cottage.

  At night with Billy in bed, he saw himself as a spectre moving through the snow. No chink of light showed from dark cottages. All sound seemed frozen with the air.

  *

  By day there was little work to do on the farm. The men carted straw to the bullock yards, drew water in tubs from the river on a rough-made sled. Both tanks and pipes had long been frozen solid. They chaffed hay and barley straw in the High Barn while the tractor drove the main shaft with its pulleys turning grist and rolling mill, and three-knife cutter. Phillip attended to the tractor, grinding barley meal and crushing oats. Billy worked with Matt in the yards. The boy was proud of the growing Nimrod, the small red-poll which had travelled home in the car beside him one day from market, tied up in a sack for warmth and to prevent it jumping over the side.

  The stockman gave Phillip a list of the names and dates of services to the cows in his charge. The hand-writing was that of a seven-year-old child. Matt’s hands were like the lesser exposed roots of the sycamores growing out of the face of the disused chalk quarry; and as tenacious.

  Cows to BEAST

  Clara . . . . 27 Sept

  Marty . . . . 1 Oct

  Mabel . . . . 1 Oct

  Starlight . . . . 5 Oct

  Lightheart . . . 7 Oct

  Moonbeam . . . 11 Oct

  Moonlight . . . 14 Oct

  Patsy . . . . 24 Oct

  Mary . . . . 5 Nov

  BEAST being the black and hornless bull from Angus by way of Aberdeen and one of H.M. the King’s tenants on the Sandringham estate. BEAST had arrived out of a cattle float one day during the last spring. He had walked down the wooden ramp to feel under his cloven feet the first grass and weeds of his life on the Home Meadow. When he smelled the greenery he started to leap about. Then he had quietened down and begun to graze. In the afternoon with a sudden return of exuberance he had tried to push over the stack of marsh litter by the cow-yard gate and then rolled on his back for joy.

  This solitary celebration of new freedom had been interrupted by the little herd of curious and experienced cows, led by Clara, coming to see what it was on her pasture. There was some agitation and excitement, ending in BEAST being run by Clara into the brook, where he stood until his tormentors had gone away. Then he came out of the river and fed alone.

  Later, with surgent courage, he pushed Clara into the river, after which he made a more direct approach to amity, and so was accepted among them. Some of the cows were in calf, others were content with a pair of young calves each, so all was quiet for the time being.

  BEAST, after grazing, usually stood on the bank above the river, swishing his tail at flies and sometimes lifting horizontal the copper ring through his nose. Or he waited patiently with Clara, Mary, Marty, Lightheart, Mabel, Starlight, Moonbeam, Moonlight and Patsy by the gate to the concrete yard, while they lowed to their calves in the boxes.

  The copper ring was not, strictly speaking, through BEAST’S nostrils. It pierced the division of his nostrils. Whenever he flicked up this ring and held it there, with head outstretched and neck-skin tight, Phillip knew what he was thinking about. BEAST, despite the name bestowed by Matt, was somewhat shy in his thoughts, and never entirely self-confident. He was accepted by the cows as a sort of overgrown calf, and nothing more so far. He was in harmony with them. There was no selfishness or self-containedness in his attitude, because so far BEAST had accepted no responsibility. As with all natural creatures, the instinct they shared was simple and unpremeditated. Matt the stockman was part of this natural simplicity or harmony.

  A time came when BEAST must shoulder his responsibilities in the matter of the continuance of the herd. The first time he was taken to a cow, his nerve failed. Phillip thought it was because his legs were too short, or because his overgrown horny hooves, upturned like the shoes of medieval stage jesters, were liable to slip on the rounded flints of the yard floor. For when the young BEAST had attempted to raise his bulk to the vertical, when first led to make love to Clara, he had slipped back without reaching his objective. Three more attempts likewise failed, to BEAST’S obvious distress. In the end he stood there, quivering a little—cowed—a four-legged Sisyphus.

  One Sunday afternoon, the previous September, going through the yards, Phillip came upon a sight which seemed to him to be the true spirit of husbandry. There in the higher yard stood the stockman watching BEAST (who had had his hoofs trimmed) standing by Clara the Ayrshire-Guernsey cow. His black chin was laid on her point of hip: the while he uttered the short, softly gruff mer-r with which cows, Phillip had observed, first greeted their new-born calves. Clara desired a calf, and BEAST was the image of that desire. BEAST was agitated. He repeated the appealing mer-r of instinct, the mer-r of his lost dam as he stood still, unsure of himself, doubting his power to transmute dam to dame.

  “Goo on,” said Luke, softly, “Goo on, BEAST.”

  But BEAST needed more than spiritual encouragement. The bull was conscious of sympathetic male support, as his backward-glancing eye told. The fire of life in him was dying down, overcome by the force of gravity. Even when Clara was about-turned, to stand downhill, the slope of the yard—formidable enough for horses pulling out a tumbril-load of muck—did not compensate enough for the cow’s longer legs.

  After awhile BEAST became depressed and ceased to say mer-r. Then Luke got a shovel and thrusting vigorously into the layers of muck under the covered yard made a low standing pit for Clara. Gently, when this stance was prepared, Matt urged the slightly bemused cow downhill until she was standing in the pit. Then both men began anew their encouragement, in a soft chant.

  “Goo on, BEAST,” said Luke.

  “Goo on, lad,” said Matt.

  The copper ring in the flaring nose became horizontal. BEAST uttered a final appeal to the temple of his spiritual home—me-r-r!—and then, as though excited by the sound, he threw up his sleek and compact body by the forelegs, and the harmony of life was swiftly fulfilled.

  “One stab’s as good as a hundred,” murmured Matt, as Phillip was to hear him murmur many times in the future on similar occasions—probably the same phrase was being used when in the sixteenth century the premises were built.

  Thus the country verities were passed down from father to son, he reflected, wondering how such feeling could be preserved in the machine age: the age of efficiency through anxiety which he, in a sense, was trying to realise on the farm. For superficially, and yet psychologically, machine and man seemed to be antagonistic. Yet why should they be? For the spirit of machinery, if understood, was a good thing; but was it an intuitive, that is, a spiritual thing? It was an age of transition; laboratory science had not yet found its proper relation to the human world. The world awaited a synthesis. The alternative was the annihilation of man.

  *

  Phillip considered that he had been fortunate in getting Mrs. Hammett to look after Billy and himself. Mrs. Hammett was a pleasing person. She had a decided sense of what was righ
t and proper, and applied that sense in her own life and household, and in her attitude to her neighbours. If she were critical, which was seldom, Mrs. Hammett conveyed her meaning obliquely, and with the fewest words. In her sense of logic, truth was based on good work; and good work was a thing to be done with the fewest words. And anything that spoiled, or deviated from good work, was bad. Always when father and son entered the cottage, the table was laid for two. Charley, her husband, a ‘wore-up’ labourer, was deaf, slow of speech and action. He lived on the Old Age pension and had a bad heart.

  Conversation was difficult with Charley because it was carried on partly with the use of a slate. Phillip had to write his meaning; there followed a pause while Charley frowned and peered, muttering, “Blest if I can see wi’out me glasses.”

  He would adjust the steel frames slowly, peer again, and finally give an answer that was nearly always unintelligible, because he spoke thickly, as though he had a pebble in his mouth. Having delivered his answer he would spit neatly on the slate, and with a motion of the broad ball of his thumb obliterate the writing.

  He was a round-headed man, about seventy-five years old, and the gentlest man Phillip had ever met. Despite his deafness and poor heart, which made him so cold and slow, his eyes were always ready to smile, and to make some kind enquiry. He was that not uncommon creature, a gentle and good man.

  *

  Snow lay deep on fields and gardens, covering sloping tiled roofs and surface of narrow village street alike. Work must be found for the men. So Phillip led them in the cutting and clearing of one of the thick and overspreading hedges which enclosed all the fields. He began on the hedge between the Scalt field and the meadows. The Scalt was the fifteen-acre field of thin grass and moss below the Great Bustard wood, which had already been chalked and partly composted, and was due to be ploughed and so brought into the arable rotation.

  Elderberry shrubs, blackthorns, and hawthorns grew out of the choked ditch between field and meadow. These bird-sown wildlings had spread several yards over and on the rabbit-holed field. Phillip used a seven-pound axe, the men worked with saw and slasher. He threw the trunks, and lopped the lesser branches from the big limbs for burning in heaps. The denuded limbs were stacked for removal later on to the saw-bench. He wanted to get on with his writing, but worked with them. He tried to show Luke how an axe should be sharpened, and used correctly; for Luke did not know, never having used one. Nor did Luke want to know. His blows fell, not aslant, but at right angles to a trunk. Phillip had to remind himself that no hedging had been done on the farm for twenty years and more. All must be learned anew.

  *

  A young woman on skis, a visitor to the district, appeared on the deep snow drifts upon Steep Field. Twin tracks lay all over the snow, deepening down the steepest parts. His own hickory skis, gift of Piers Tofield his best friend of Fawley days ten years ago, stood in the granary. Meeting the girl one day in the village street, he told her of his skiing on the Wiltshire downs of long ago.

  “It’s more fun with two,” she suggested.

  The static visual world was all snow, a new quiet world. He thought of the wind-rush in the ears, slurring sounds as wings of snow arose beside rushing curved points of skis—but he was living in another world, the only world in which he could move unimpeded, the world of his book, and he knew how the activity of skiing would be antagonistic to the broodiness of creation. She was a pleasant-faced young woman, but might it not lead to another complication?

  The hickory skis remained in their press standing against the workshop wall. He sat day after day in his bedroom of River View by the lighthouse window with a view of grey skies above white hills set with blackest thorns, of snow-covered garden below with its stumpy iced cabbages. Fortunately there was a power-plug in the wainscot of the room; and as he sat at the small table, the old Army blankets hanging on nails beside the window, he was warmed by the glowing bars of an electric radiator.

  While he worked, dense flocks of pigeons from Norway wheeled and settled in the oakwood beyond the Home hills.

  He made a lean-to shelter among the trees there, of elderberry branches against the trunk of an oak. Flocks came in from the fields to the woods to roost, and when disturbed, departed to distant spinneys where other gunners waited to take a crack at them. Saturday afternoon was the organised time for the gunners to take up position under the trees. Phillip, wanting to be pleasant in his role of lord of the manor, was willing that all who cared to shoot pigeons should come, but so far as he could see the shooting was regarded as a right, without necessity for invitation or request: with the exception of one man, who took the trouble to ask for permission, and who gave thanks afterwards. He was an old cavalryman who had lost a leg at Le Cateau, and was known to all as ‘Scroggy’.

  On Saturday afternoon, seeing many birds flying over the oakwood as he was writing Phillip went downstairs to put on his thick double-breasted Macinaw coat, scarf, and mittens, and taking gun and game-bag, walked up the steep snowy slopes of the Home Hills. Birds clattered away out of the trees as he got over the rusty barbed wire fence. He crawled into the lean-to shelter on hands and knees, drawing the unloaded gun behind him. The opening was small in the wigwam of branches set up at the base of the oak tree. He closed it with a few boughs of elderberry before settling on an old bamboo shooting stick to await return of the pigeons.

  Owing to hunger, and the nearness of fields where rows of cabbages were standing, there were thousands, tens of thousands of pigeons now flying from wood to spinney, from spinney to copse. They were as wary as they were destructive. Turnip-tops, kale, cabbage—they ate them all. The native ring-doves had been joined by flocks of immigrant stock-doves. A ten-acre field of clover, were it not covered by the snow, would have been stripped in a few days.

  The regular pigeon-shooter sometimes had dummy birds, made of wood or lighter material, as decoys. They were set out in the open, head to wind, thirty yards away from a camouflaged shelter in a field of roots or clover. Live pigeons were shot as they glided down to join the feast. In the woods a weighted string was sometimes slung over a branch by means of a catapult, the dummy drawn up to perch in the tree.

  Pigeons were so numerous during this period that decoys were not needed. They flew from River wood to Brock Hanger, thence to Bustard or Meadow woods where, if disturbed, they went on to the Pine Wood or the Oaks where he had his shelter.

  He noticed that pigeons usually circled above a wood before pitching. One must not move while they were preparing to pitch. And certainly not look up. The brilliant eye of the pigeon saw the grey or pink movement which was an enemy face; there was a warning clap of wings over the bird’s back, followed by flight-arcs of wheeling birds breaking up in alarm.

  He daubed his face with burnt cork as the first reports of 12-bore guns came over the frozen fields and told that the flocks were coming in to roost. He imagined flights clapping through the sycamore twigs of the Hanger, rising high, circling several times, then spiralling down to select roosting places with glide and final flutter, to grip with red feet.

  Bang! Bang! in the nearer distance; snow-soft echoes. Who was in Meadow Wood? Whoever it was, he had not bothered to ask permission. It did not sound like Matt, who kept a fearsome single-barrel brown with rust in the broken wooden corn-bin in the cowshed.

  The scattered flock was wheeling out of gunshot and indecisively flying around, leaderless and alarmed. Would the oakwood beside the frozen Nightcraft wheat—those green-yellow gramophone needles under the snow—attract them? In a few moments they might be coming over, to circle, see no danger, glide down to alight in the branches of the ivy-clad pine at the western corner. He hoped so; for under that tree ‘Scroggy’ with his wooden leg was settled in a shelter of branches and beech boughs.

  Bang! Bang! startlingly near. The old cavalryman was in his hide.

  Pigeons flew over Phillip’s shelter. Bang! Bang! jolting his left shoulder and striking his cheek-bones; he was out of practice, his fingers
were cold. A pigeon hesitated, recovered, and flew on.

  He realised that his eye was out, his nervous reflexes hesitant after one hundred and sixty hours’ concentration at the desk in two weeks. But almost immediately other birds flew in, for the light was growing grey. He reloaded quietly after picking the cases out of the chambers of the old damascene barrels; closed the breech, pushed the safety catch backwards with a slight click, raised the gun gradually, and fired at two birds settling together on a beech-tree branch. Satisfaction as he went out to pick them up.

  While waiting for other birds he opened one of the crops and began to count the clover-leaves packed tightly like a green rubber ball inside. He soon gave up counting—there were thousands of fragments. During the previous autumn he had shot a pigeon and started to count the wheat-berries in its crop, and round about 1,500 had given up. At a rough estimate 10,000 pigeons in half a day had taken enough to make—at the eventual harvest—500 loaves of bread.

  It was twilight, it was lonely, it was cold. He went down the Home Hills to the farm road and the gate, and so to the village street and Mrs. Hammett’s cottage, carrying three rock pigeons.

  *

  “I don’t fancy them myself,” remarked Mrs. Hammett in her serene and equable voice. The room was warm and well-lit behind the black-out on the seeming-dead village. “But I’ll cook the pigeons for you if you would like them.”

  “I thought Charley might like them, Mrs. Hammett.”

  Charley was sitting at his usual place in the high-backed Windsor chair. His steel spectacles were on his nose. He held in his hands, thickened by more than sixty years of work, his usual newspaper, The Daily Clarion. With a considerable effort he managed to move round slightly in his chair, and look at Phillip over his glasses.