A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “Ho,” said Charley, “Poog’ns.”

  “For you, Charley,” said Mrs. Hammett, distinctly.

  “Come you and set in mah cheer,” replied Charley, struggling to get up.

  Mrs. Hammett leaned forward, and mouthing towards him said, “He says, For you’.”

  “Well, ah’m a-gett’n up,” replied Charley.

  Mrs. Hammett shook her head. “Pidg’ins!” she cried.

  “Who is?” asked Charley. “Aw, blest if I ken understand,” he muttered, changing position laboriously to get the slate. He spat expertly upon it, rubbed it with the ball of his thumb, and held out the slate to her. Mrs. Hammett laughed quietly to herself. “He can’t hear what we say,” she said, with a gentle gaiety. “His deafness worries him.”

  When he heard that he was to have stewed pigeons, a look of contentment came over the old man’s face. “Werry nice change o’ wittals, master,” he remarked to Phillip over his spectacles. “Thank ee, sir.”

  Charley pronounced words in the way of olden time; his ‘vs’ were ‘ws’. Phillip had heard men in his boyhood speak like that; and he felt, when he heard it, as though an encumbering obstacle were removed from his being and he had become once again a simple man.

  “Did you enjoy yourself in the wood?” asked Mrs. Hammett quietly, not pausing in the cutting of slices of bread and butter. “A nice change, I expect, after so much writing. But it was cold, wasn’t it?”

  “There’s an iceberg-air that moves over the farm, I’ve noticed, nearly every afternoon, whatever the temperature. I’ve heard it’s called the Arctic Circle air.”

  “It’s been very cold in here, despite the fire.”

  “I find it beautifully warm.”

  “You’ve been walking, you see,” said Mrs. Hammett, as to a child. “Now would you like some fried plaice? It’s a little dry, perhaps, but you said you would be here at six o’clock, and it’s twenty minutes after the hour. Billy has been waiting for you, he got here at six o’clock. He went out to find you.”

  “I do apologise, Mrs. Hammett.”

  “Well, you will both have to eat the dry plaice. Ah, here is Billy.”

  “Hullo, Dad!”

  They sat down. The fish was delicious with the thin-sliced bread and butter. “I could not get a lemon, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Hammett, warming the tea-pot. “Nor the China tea you like,” she murmured. “Both are unobtainable in either of the village shops now.”

  “It’s the best cup of tea I’ve had for weeks,” Phillip said, sipping gratefully.

  “I’m glad you’re pleased,” she said. “Is the fish nice, Billy?”

  “Ah, ’bor!” said the boy, with a wag of his head.

  Mrs. Hammett laughed. “That’s a real village expression. How’s Nimrod getting on—‘doin’’, as they say?”

  “He’s O.K.,” said Billy. Then he repeated his line that had always in the past got a laugh from Teddy Pinnegar. “He lays his lugs well back, lets out a terrific roar, gets into top gear, and rushes round the yards, scrapping in his tracks as he rounds the corners!” Changing his mood, Billy began to discuss ploughing. He asked Mrs. Hammett if she knew how to open a top and make up a furrow with a tractor-plough.

  “I’m afraid I don’t, but I would like to know.”

  The two talked about ploughing for several minutes. In an aside to Phillip Mrs. Hammett said softly, “He has no one to talk to, you see.”

  I must take him to Lucy, Phillip was thinking.

  *

  He read his newspaper, a relief from long hours at his writing table. Russia was attacking Finland. Baron Mannerheim was a hero in the columns of all the British newspapers. Russia was described as an aggressor nation, equal in guilt with Germany. There were demands for an expeditionary force to be sent to the help of Finland.

  The Rector, bicycling past that morning, had called out to Phillip, “We jolly well ought to declare war on Russia, and teach them the lesson they deserve!”

  “Propaganda, Rector, surely? An excuse to occupy the Scandinavian peninsular, and get to the iron ore from Narvik.”

  The Rector, about fifty years of age, had come to the village about a year before Phillip. He had come filled with determination to do all he could to improve its ragged and disunited life. He was finding it difficult. The years of unemployment had left their mark. When first Phillip had met him the rector had declared how glad he was that Phillip had come there. Perhaps between the two of them they might be able to get a cricket team going again? “I would like to help you, Rector, but may I ask you to be patient with me if I appear to be laggard, as there is so much reclamation work to be done on the farm?”

  The Rector gave lectures on the coastal dialect. He was a native of the county and an authority on local speech. He charged a modest fee which went to the fund for the restoration of the church fabric. Even this was subject to criticism. One woman who kept the Mudhook Inn in the hamlet of Durston which lay along the coastal road had once expressed her contempt of the Rector while Phillip was having a glass of beer in her pub.

  “Fancy telling us what we know already! Anyway, what right hev a foreigner to make money out of our way of speaking?” The foreigner had been born twenty miles inland from the hamlet. Yes, it was Old England, all right.

  Whatever he did, the Rector was liable to give offence to someone. It was not long before he found out that he had taken on a task which absorbed fruitlessly most of his vital force. Some of the cottage women objected to being visited and asked about their lives and doings. ‘He’s narthin’ but a Nosey Parker!’ Yet if he didn’t go to see them, that too was a cause for complaint. ‘He’s takin’ the big penny but not doin’ th’ wark!’

  In Charley’s paper, which Phillip borrowed for variety, there was a photograph of the volunteers to fight for Finland having drinks in a London night-club at one more final farewell party. In the stop-press it said that the Mannerheim Line was broken. The Finnish war was over before the parties.

  “Smash and grab, I call it,” said Mrs. Hammett. That was what the sub-editor had headed it.

  “Poog’ns,” exclaimed Charley, suddenly. He beamed at Phillip over his spectacles. “Nice change o’ wittals.”

  It was not easy to leave the warmth of Mrs. Hammett’s cottage, but sooner or later they must go home, father and son hand-in-hand groping their way in darkness past the pump and down the slippery yard to the new white gate and the road beyond.

  The wooden hut marked FISH AND CHIPS opposite was dark and silent these nights. It was closed for lack of custom. There were no troops in the camp. The anti-aircraft range was deserted. The pipes of the new bathrooms and wash-houses were split by frost. The troops which during the summer days and nights of a few months previously had roared out songs in the pubs and four-letter words in the streets were now somewhere behind the ‘impregnable’ Maginot Line.

  Father and son walked down the empty street of the village, Phillip thinking that it was as in the Napoleonic wars.

  *

  And so January wore on. The cold of winter set bleaker on garden, street, and field. Most of the mornings on the farm were spent in filling the inadequate tub standing on an inefficient sled made of an old thick ladder to which Matt and Luke had nailed new lengths of three-eighths tongued-and-grooved planks, skids to glide over ice and trodden snow. The planks were split, for no one on the farm knew how to hammer a nail into wood. The wrong nails—floor-board brads—had been taken from the workshop and banged into the oak sides of the stout granary ladder built to carry men bearing 250-lb. sacks of wheat on their backs as they climbed to the drying loft above. The nails banged into the oak were bent over and knocked sideways; the thin, straight-grained deal wood was split in many places.

  “Now what’s a plank or two, master? My beasts must drink, else yar’ll be mobbin’ me for lettin’m shrink. Blast, I don’t want to see my beasts do that, you know that, ’bor!”

  “But these planks were set aside for building only. Wood is likely
to be scarce, even unobtainable, in the years ahead.”

  “Yew don’t want to meet trouble halfway, guv’nor. The war’ll be over sooner than you think. The Jarmans haven’t got no money. Their big bosses hev sent it all to Ameriky. Yew can’t fight a war wi’out money, guv’nor.”

  “Did you read that in your newspaper, Matt?”

  “Ah now, I only take it for the football pools,” said Matt, on the defensive. “But ya’ll see,” he continued with a wise air. “I’ll tell you what,” he added, with a hint of nearly aggressiveness, though that was hardly in Matt’s nature, “mark you my words, yar’ll see if I’m not right. The Jarmans haven’t got any old jannerals, and the young ‘uns don’t know what to do.” Seeing Phillip’s look he changed direction. “My Gor, what a winter it’s bin! Can you get me four good calves when you go to Yarwich, master? The second-calve cows can take another apiece, now your drains don’t need no more sour milk.”

  “Mabel, Molly, Polly and Dolly?”

  “Thet’s it.”

  Phillip could see that Matt was pleased that the guv’nor had remembered the names of his bestowal, for of course they were Matt’s cows. Did the mere signing of a cheque make them his cows, when for all the days and not a few nights they had been in Matt’s constant care and thought? Had he criticized Matt for not knowing how to use nails and a hammer? For not having ‘larned’ the trade of joinery? Looking into the brown eyes of the honest and faithful old fellow, he wished for more patience in his own being.

  *

  The severe cold continued to grip the countryside. Day after day, morning, noon, and night, he sat writing by his wide glass window, warmed by the electric radiator drawing mysterious power from the wainscoting.

  One morning Billy seemed hot and feverish. Phillip told him to stay in bed. He took the boy’s temperature. It was 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Billy lay in his day clothes, owing to the risk of chill when he had to get out of bed periodically. Phillip fed him on soups, milk, and grape-fruit out of tins. He had bought eight dozen tins, to have them by him. There were still hundreds of cartons stacked in the grocer’s shop at Crabbe. Billy was most patient, and never complained. He had his dead mother’s nature, with her fair hair and china blue eyes. The father had a fantasy that Billy, too, might die, and leave him alone, alone, as Barley had done.

  *

  The frost struck deeper into earth and all things above the earth. The lavatory pan in the farmhouse froze solid and burst. Pigeons became less fearful of men. From his window Phillip saw bird after bird flutter to the iced heads of the cabbages. One bird was so weak that it could not rise again after pecking its fill. It fell asleep on a cabbage.

  The winter was said to be the coldest for forty years. All news of the weather, or mention of it over the B.B.C., was censored. One of the soldiers returning from leave in London to the anti-aircraft camp near Pine Wood told Phillip that the Thames was frozen over for eight miles between Teddington and Sunbury, and that twelve inches of ice covered the reservoir near Hounslow. Mrs. Hammett said that a wherry loaded with sugar-beet on one of the East Anglian rivers, after starting its journey to the factory in clear water, had been frozen in. When the water-level fell the wherry turned over and sank.

  Phillip saw a heron standing bleakly in his garden. The river was covered with ice. Two mornings later the heron was standing near the cottage door, ice on its feathers. It was weak with hunger and cold. A bittern actually entered an inn at Horning Ferry on the Broads, but although fed and cared for it died a day or two later. At the Swan Hotel seven wild swans came for food, trusting themselves to man. They became tame, and walked up the village street for scraps of food regularly every day, followed by gulls, ducks, coots, water hens, and dabchicks. The gulls were rapacious. They snatched food from the more demure coots. The kindliness of the villagers kept many of the birds alive.

  The wasting of food was not yet illegal: this was the period generally known as ‘the phoney war’.

  Walking about the garden he found several blackbirds, robins, and thrushes dead in odd corners. Each little bird’s track was visible in the snow. It had hopped, a few inches at a time, between long pauses, to a hiding place, and crouching there, had slept into death.

  The water system in the empty farmhouse had long been frozen up. Now it looked as though they would be without water even from the polluted river. For days he had been filling several pots and pails and tubs and standing them on the wash-house floor, cracking the ice when needing water.

  One night he brought a faggot into the deserted parlour. He trod it back with booted foot before setting light to it in the hope of blasting a way by the very rush of flames up the wide chimney. If the chimney caught fire and cleared itself with a roar and final eruption of flame and sparks so much the better. If the house caught fire, let it burn down. Flames and stifling smoke poured out over the brick lintel and into the room, dulling the electric light. The chimney appeared to be entirely choked; and yet the way was clear, for sky could be seen when he bent down to peer up. Owing to the ill shape of the chimney, big enough below to hold two yearling bullocks side by side, and suddenly diminishing near the ridge of the roof, the smoke eddied in rebound up there, causing a secondary rebound just above the lintel.

  Book or no book, that chimney would have to be tackled. The village bricklayer, without work owing to the frost, was called in. Phillip had some half-section drain pipes in his considerable store of building materials bought at bankrupt sales before the war. His idea, he explained to George, was to dig a rectangular sunken pit in front of and below the hearth wherein to lay half-pipes facing the hearth, and connect them to the outside wall by whole pipes laid in a trench under the floor. This might not cure the down-draught in the chimney, but it would help to stop the pull of hearth against hearth in the two rooms when both fires were alight. If both hearths had their lebensraum, their living-space, he told George, with access to raw materials of air, then they might not continue to be mutually destructive of one another.

  The floor was soon a trodden mess of mortar, broken pavers, and chalky loam. Phillip had some perforated bricks, which when inlaid at the foot of the outside walls, at the end of the pipes, would prevent rats and perhaps grass snakes coming to visit the parlour on some future occasion when the farmhouse really was a home. George said that he could lay the pipes inside with mortar, but the bricks outside would have to wait until the frost went. He was a nice fellow, an eager worker. Phillip left him to it, and returned optimistically to Mrs. Hammett’s for tea.

  The next morning, as he and the men were littering the yards with barley straw from the stack below the frozen hills, Matt said solemnly, “Yew ought to thank God, guv’nor, that the straw stacks are down here this weather. Just think you of the muddle we’d a’ bin in if we’d ha’ to go up the hills to get straw, the roads icy, the hosses slippin’ down and breaking the shafts and their own legs.”

  Dear Matt. He had forgotten his old objection to the plan of grouping the corn stacks down there, convenient for threshing, for carting corn, for straw. Everyone else made their stacks in the fields to get the corn ‘safe’ while the weather was good; but with the hillside road known as the New Cut and the Flying Column of lorry, tractor with large trailer, together with the two horse-drawn tumbrils, they had been able to build the stacks down there in the same time as in the fields—quicker, indeed, for there were no pauses while vehicles waited to be unloaded. It was sweat, sweat, sweat, but it was good, good, good.

  *

  Billy was still in bed, with a temperature of 100 degrees. His father began to feel the loneliness of the hard blank weather weigh upon him. The only bright occasions in his living were in Mrs. Hammett’s cottage, sitting at her table, reading, while old Charley sat in his chair and perused the newspaper through his steel spectacles and Mrs. Hammett tended to their wants. He had never eaten such nice food, Phillip told her, and she replied that the food was ordinary and somewhat dull, for she was limited by what was brought to her fro
m the shops.

  “I am glad you enjoy it,” she said, equably, “but I cannot understand why you haven’t had better. You should have had it, that’s all I can say.”

  Phillip thought that Mrs. Hammett was a rare woman, with perfect command of what she did. Her mind was clear because she used her brain. She used her head to think with, or rather to cogitate and plan, and that was, in his experience, an uncommon thing to find in a man or a woman; but when it was found, how happy life and work could be.

  “And how is Billy to-day?”

  “He seems all right, but his temperature remains high.”

  “Have you had a doctor to him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, it might be advisable to ask the doctor to come. How long has he been in bed now, two weeks is it?”

  “I’ll telephone the doctor.”

  It was warm in the upstairs room of River View. Phillip had become used to and therefore fond of his sanctuary, with its bed, chair, chest of drawers, and scrubbed wooden floor. In the next room Billy lay, never complaining, rising on an elbow thrice a day to sip soup, milk, and grape-fruit. Phillip took his temperature at morning and night. It was always the same.

  “Well, Billy, how do you feel?”

  “Okay.”

  “Food all right?”

  “Yes thanks.”

  “Warm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not feeling sick, or chilly?”

  “No.”

  “Bored with lying in bed?”

  “Not very much.”

  That was their usual conversation: followed by, “Well, I think I’ll do some writing now. Let me know if you want anything.”

  “Okay.”

  Sometimes Phillip would feel reproachfully that the poor boy was living a dreadful life.

  “Are you miserable without Mother, and the others? Tell me if you are.”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Only a little.”