A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  At Salisbury he had a little more than fifty miles to go before the black-out. He had delayed too long on the way. The road to Dorchester was empty. He was alone in a wide and undulating white landscape. No other car was to be seen. Plovers were flying in flocks across the north-west sky, seeking rest for the night.

  He had tea in Queensbridge, and was glad of it when he came to his field to see in the last of the light that the windows of the Gartenfeste had been broken, the door forced. Blankets and bedding within were strewn about. Pictures and books thrown on the floor. Upstairs in the loft the two beds had been fouled. On the walls swastikas were scrawled, and the word Traitor. He returned to Queensbridge, and put up at an hotel.

  There he tried to telephone Melissa at the flat. There was delay. He tried again after supper, meaning to ask her to bring her own blankets when she came by train. There was further delay of two hours. He passed the time in the bar talking to farmers, then tried once more; the line was clear but he heard only the burr-burr of no reply. He tried her mother’s club, it was now past eleven-o’clock.

  “Her Ladyship left the club this morning, sir.”

  In the morning he burned the old bedding, and having scrubbed the floors with carbolic soap set about distempering the walls. The damage was not so bad as he dreaded. Could he get a glazier from Queensbridge? The sun shone. Afar in the Channel waves had white caps. He saw the policeman in the village and told him what had happened. The policeman said there had been many complaints about soldiers at the camp four miles away. He saw the village carpenter, and was greatly relieved to hear that he would replace the broken panes.

  The next thing was to get milk, bread, and emergency rations with the coupons on his card. Then to collect driftwood above Malandine sands. Having packed it in the back of the car he returned to the Gartenfeste. His store had been burnt by the hooligans. Thank God they hadn’t found his iron rations under a flagstone in a corner of the living room, where tinned butter and other foods were kept.

  He had brought some lengths of black-out cloth with him, and these, draped over curtains, would serve to enclose all light after dark, Would he be watched? The Gartenfeste looked directly over the Channel.

  The sun shone, the wind was easterly, a little bleak. Before the winter he had been in the habit of having a cold tub every morning throughout the year. Dare he start again? It was coming on to evening when he finished the downstairs distempering, and the carpenter had gone home on his bicycle. Now was the time to go down to the sands! The tide was high, he crept in and bobbed under, met the shock of icy water, leapt about, went under again and hurried out, exhilarated and glowing, to feel clear and bodyless.

  Physical work had warmed the blood, but muscles were weary after work. A sense of well-being filled him as he sat by the fire, after eggs and bacon, drinking a mug of tea. Tomorrow, surely, there would be a letter from Melissa.

  *

  The oil-lamp glowed with an orange light. The bowl or container had been fashioned by a copper-smith just before he had married Lucy. It was the shape of a kettle with a handle like that of a tea-pot, and held half a gallon of paraffin. The burner had been taken from a lamp modern in the ’twenties and fitted to the copper container. A brass label stamped with his initials had been soldered on. It was an old friend, nearly as valuable as the dark lantern he had brought down with him.

  This object, with it’s bull’s-eye magnifying lens, stood on a window seat. The wick was turned low. The flame burning there in solitude was a symbol. Within its gentle wavering hovered the Virgilian ‘tears of things’. This lantern had been to his father a symbol of dream, which was hope. Father was the effect of the family ruin. The spirit of this must be transmuted into his film-story. From their ghosts, from ‘a full look at the worst’, would come a rebirth of the consciousness of duty to the land. The film would end in triumph.

  Even so, optimistic feelings began to decline as thoughts of the farm rose darkly in him, with the image of Melissa, a saving presence of all warmth and light.

  Hope hovered against darkness, then withdrew, leaving only the gleam of the dark lantern. Poor Father, he had always been alone. Should he visit him when he returned to London?

  Hope returned with compassion. He lay in the armchair, slipper’d feet to the fire, staring at soft yellow sodium flames green-fringed with copper, and the lilac flutterings of potassium. He saw suddenly how the story should run, and began to write.

  In the morning he walked down to the post office, telling himself on the way that there would be no letter from her. Nothing for him; nor on the following morning. He wrote away the rest of the daylight. And on the third day he determined to telephone; but at the box dare not risk rebuff, so put back the receiver, to walk away with hands clenched against yielding to her image.

  There was no more wood for the fire. Only the small yellow flame of the dark lantern was friendly. He walked up and down, ranting at himself. All his life had been of the same pattern: the diffident inner core of his nature had risen up, a puppet on wires, to deny his true self, his intuition. Without spiritual love, sex was selfish, a matter of shame, and consequent guilt followed by irritation.

  Enough of self-pity. He set himself to write his story for the film and kept on until 3 a.m. when he wrapped himself in anything he could find and went to sleep on the sofa. But sleep held off. Perhaps her letters were being detained for investigation, censorship?

  The next evening, a Saturday, he walked into the Ring o’Bells. Soldiers and a few fishermen were in the bar. There was silence when he entered, after the landlord, whom he knew well, had said, “’Evening, zur. You’m a proper stranger, Captain, zur. Good news tonight, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t heard.”

  “Churchill sent the Navy to rescue our sailors in a prison ship, the Altmark.”

  “I’m glad for our chaps, of course, but it means Churchill is trying to provoke Hitler to extend the war to Norway. In my opinion, as an old soldier, the war should be stopped.”

  One of the soldiers was looking at him intently. He spoke in a North Country accent, about runnin’ his bayonet into any bluddy Nazi he come across. Phillip left his beer and went to the telephone box below the church, forcing himself to ask for the Flaxman number, waiting with silver and copper coins in hand, ready for insertion.

  “You’re through now, caller. Go ahead, please.”

  A far-away voice said, “Hullo”.

  “Is that you, Melissa?”

  “Hullo.”

  “Press button A, caller——”

  “Hullo, are you still there? Phillip speaking—is that you, Melissa?”

  The far-away voice said, “Did you get my letter? Oh. Well, it explained why I shan’t be able to come.” Pause. “Are you still there?”

  “I’ve done the story synopsis.” Pause. “The sea’s wonderful for bathing, once you’ve crawled under the concertina barbed wire.’

  “I’ve had my orders for overseas, with forty-eight hours’ leave. I can’t tell you over the telephone, but I’ll write when I get there. Meanwhile, I am with you, always, always, always.”

  “Time is up, caller. If you wish to continue, please put one shilling and sixpence in the box.”

  “Good-bye,” he heard her voice beyond that of the switchboard operator.

  He did not return to the pub but walked back to the Gartenfeste. The underground room was all he had had left now for his shell; but the objects within had a more intense life, guarded by the flame within the dark lantern shining faithfully on the window seat, behind the blackout curtain.

  I am afraid that this letter may come as a disappointment to you, my dearest and always friend. I cannot come on Friday as I promised. We were asked to volunteer for service overseas—I may not tell you where—indeed, I can only guess the destination, but I hope to God it doesn’t mean for my generation what yours went through, darling Phillip. So I cannot be with you now, as I had hoped to be.

  You know my deepest heart, and your own
sensibility and fineness of character will I am sure inderstand.

  Everyone has to make a sacrifice, no one can be selfish at this time, there is no happiness if we live only for our own feelings—

  I am living only for my own feelings, I am putting them before my duty, I am thinking of Melissa and a new life with her. Lucy is not living only for her own feelings. Nor am I, perhaps, not altogether, my film will provide for the family. Melissa going overseas—urgently—then the attack is coming on the Western Front, Hitler provoked to rage at our violation of Norwegian neutrality—

  Forgive me if I say no more just now. Please let me be your loving friend always. I am that, wherever you go, whatever you do. I have not your gift of words, so will say no more. Except to send my dearest love to you, now and forever,

  Melissa.

  Churchill’s provocation of Hitler has succeeded. Now ‘earth’s wheels run clogged with blood’. I must keep calm. Pack calmly, quieten my shaking hands. Boil an egg‚ spread butter on bread when I have packed. Steady now. No need to tremble. Plenty of time. One thing at a time. Books on farming in this pile. Manuscript there, with carbon copy. Typewriter in case. Now slowly, slowly, go limp, stop the race of the brain deprived of blood because I have not eaten anything all day.

  *

  It was a slow journey on the regulation lights allowed: one masked headlight; glass of side or parking lights dimmed by tissue paper. In the clear, starry sky a half-moon was hanging, a pale ghost of lost life.

  *

  The moon had gone down to its grave when, with engine switched off, the black open car, out of gear, ran down the slope of the cul-de-sac, and stopped outside No. 2, The Glade. It was a few minutes before ten o’clock. Hardly had he gone inside and sat down in the kitchen to await hot soup being made by Lucy, who had come down in her dressing-gown, when there was a double knock on the door. Two young men wearing police-reserve uniforms stood there. They had watched his arrival from across the road, concealed among wayside trees.

  “There are no lights on your motor-car.”

  “But——”

  “I shall report you. Your licence, please.”

  They were workers in a factory making electric light bulbs. Their uniforms were new. His name and address were taken, driving licence and third-party insurance certificate inspected.

  “Absolute asses,” declared Tim, in the voice of Pa, as he came downstairs into the kitchen wearing Pa’s old dressing-gown. “They work in the factory with me. Well, Phil, it is a pleasure to see you. You’ve brought some eggs, by Jove!”

  “I took too many.”

  “Would you like one, darling?” Lucy asked her brother.

  “Would I not, Lulu!”

  Soon Tim was knocking a hole in the shell of his egg. Pa had always done that, ‘to let out the devil’. Tim was optimistic. That morning he had had an interview with an Air Ministry official. He had been selected for training as an inspector of aircraft at Bristol.

  “I cannot tell you, my dear Phil, how absolutely wonderful it is to feel that I shall spend most of my time away from that horrible conveyor-belt. Unfortunately it will mean giving up this house, as I may have to go absolutely anywhere in the country when I have passed my training. However, Lucy is welcome to stay on for as long as she likes. What’s more, I’ll be able to spend my leaves here!”

  “Hurray for Uncle Tim!” cried David, appearing at the open door in pyjamas.

  “Hurray for Uncle Tim!” echoed Jonathan, behind David.

  “It’s such a clean district, the school is so good for the children, after all the obscene words and phrases in the village school,” said Lucy, when the boys had gone back to bed.

  The next day Phillip went north with Billy, having telegraphed to Mrs. Hammett.

  *

  The Silver Eagle ran well, they arrived before their supper at seven o’clock. Afterwards to see Luke. Everything, said the steward, was all right. They had been copping on with the work.

  No work was possible on the land. The furrows were claggy said Luke. The meadows were swampy, cattle still in the yards. So all day they worked in the High Barn. Power to the High Barn shafting came from the tractor standing outside the north wall, under an open shed with corrugated iron roof. The tractor pulley turned a balata belt through a boxed hole in the wall to the main shafting, with its fixed pulleys, within the barn. These fixed pulleys turned lesser belts, one to the chaffing machine, another to the grinding and rolling mill. While the men worked at the chaffing machine, Phillip attended the mill.

  The cutter made chaff to be fed, with sliced mangold and swede roots, to the cattle in the yards. The curved knives of the cutter hissed into wads of oat-straw, and then long hay, making what Luke called ‘cut stuff’. It was an economical feed for cows and bullocks standing around the wooden bins. If the fodder was fed unchopped, or ‘long’, the bullocks invariably wasted almost as much as they ate, since they pulled mouthfuls away from the heaps under the walls while treading underfoot much of it. Before the war Phillip had bought wooden hay-racks to be fixed to the walls of the yards, but there had been no time to do this.

  The men did not like working in the High Barn. It meant dust in hair, eyes, and nostrils in an atmosphere of semi-darkness. Still they accepted the work. Boss had never ‘stood them off’ in wet weather, like other farmers in the district.

  Three men—Luke, Steve, and one-eyed ‘Billy the Nelson’—fed the cutting machine, which frequently broke down. It was driven by an old, much-riveted leather belt from the shafting, relict of the late Victorian age, when the motive power had been a steam engine.

  Oats to be rolled, or crushed, were fed to the left side of the mill. Barley to be ground for pig-meal on the right side. The two streams of grain fell from a wooden hopper above, which he had divided into two compartments, each with its separate wooden chute.

  The hopper, fixed on one of the main beams of the barn, was a feasting place for rats, which gnawed through the planking and spoiled any grain left there. Phillip had nailed a section of biscuit-box tin over the holes, and asked that no corn be left there, either in sack or hopper, after work in the High Barn; but since this order had been disregarded by Luke, he had seen to it himself.

  He knew that it was a clumsy, wasteful way of producing crushed oats and barley meal; but what else could they do, until the new farm was created? Every time anything was handled on a farm it cost money. First the grain lying in heaps in the Corn Barn had to be put into sacks; then the sacks loaded into a tumbril and taken round to the High Barn. The sacks were hoisted by chain and pulley to the platform below the hopper. From there they were lifted up and tipped into the hopper. When the metal stops were pulled out, the grain poured down pipes to the mill below, the barley passing through the grinding plates of one section of the mill, the oats falling between the rollers, before spouting into respective sacks.

  Phillip, the miller, looked after the sacking of crushed oats and pig-meal, replacing a sack when it was filled, tying its neck and hauling it away to stand with others in rows. The arrangement was poor because the chaff-cutter had to be stopped every hour for the knives to be sharpened. Each knife-edge was merely rubbed with a file and so given a smaller rounded edge each time. Thus the bluntness increased with every rubbing—the original acute angle of the blade became an arc—and caused frequent jams, some so abruptly that the belt was thrown off the shafting with a jerk. Then more ‘sharpening’, while the machine stood idle.

  Owing to the lay-out of the buildings all the sacked stuff had to be taken away again to the rat-proof bins in the stable. This meant that Matt, feeding the beasts, had to walk considerable distances twice a day to collect the cut-stuff in his two-bushel skeps, to heave it into the bins, and return again for more.

  Yes, it was all clumsy, crude, and wasteful. He must be patient with these slower minds: one was working for the future of Billy as a yeoman; one must endure.

  *

  Fortunately the seams of the water-pipes (devoid
of their protecting straw ropes) had not been split by the frost, so water was not an additional problem. Phillip replaced the broken kick-starter, so the little Villiers two-stroke engine, fixed to a concrete base in the hovel, spluttered and smoked every day, sucking water from the artesian well and pouring it into the tank resting on a beam of the cart-shed.

  He had an idea to lead water to the yards by way of the gutters from the overflow of the tank in the roof of the cart-shed. The engine filled the 125-gallon tank in half an hour. Brother Laurence had fitted the pipes in the cowhouse. There was no piping to the yards. The running of more water through the gutters would save the installing of pipes; the bullocks kept there to fatten in winter might not pay for the extra piping.

  When the heaps of cut-stuff on the herring-bone narrow bricks of the barn floor were sufficient for a week or more, the men set about creosoting the old beams and purlins of the roofs. They began at the stables, after sweeping away two decades of black cobwebs. Luke did not like this work. He preferred to go home and sit by the fire, losing a day’s money. Steve, the red-headed young labourer, did not like the work either, as it stained his hands and clothes, but he was always ready to do it. Phillip hoped that the creosote would poison the feeding grounds of the wood-beetles slowly eating the heart out of the timber. While the stable was being done by the men, he tackled the roofs of the bullock yards, and then the hovel—the long cart and implement shed, with its ten wide bays divided by oak posts which held up the tiled roof.

  It was still too wet to get on the land, so they tackled the Corn Barn, where were the greatest beams of all; one of them nearly two feet thick at one end, the mast of a schooner grown in some Finnish forest long ago.

  Why was there no letter from Arrowsmith?