A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  This last was for the benefit of the blacksmith and his brother, two earnest and sincere Christians, whose work in the Chapel was locally well-known and, in their own circle, esteemed. Phillip noticed in the eye of the younger brother a grim look. He was a gentle, Tim-like man.

  “Well,” said the soldier, uncertainly. “We’ve been told to report anything suspicious.”

  “You are quite right. I expect this does look a bit suspicious. I wonder if it will look so suspicious in, say, thirty years’ time?”

  Having said this, and before argument could develop, he went indoors, feeling rather quivering inside. Also he felt that his action, like the remark about Captain Runnymeade being a drunkard, had been somewhat silly; from any aspect, it was ineffectual. Probably none of the objectors to the lettering had ever met Birkin, or heard him speak. They had heard only the insinuations made against him during many years of his near-hopeless struggle to create in the country he loved a superlative civilisation, where in Britain sixteen million people were permanently undernourished and in the Empire sixty million and more were starving—in the midst of the Great Estate of one-fifth of the world—the Greatest Empire, potentially, ever known—

  In the past only its outstanding individuals had developed. Under Birkin the races of the Empire would be so treated and led that they would be proud and eager in their co-operation as they never could feel under the old obsolescent financial system, indirect spawner of world wars.

  As Phillip sat on the stairs, listening to the babble outside, he thought of the irony of it, but did not worry. He had not gone against tradition: only the effects of decadent tradition. All the same, perhaps he had been rather idiotic in creating a direct hostility; for had not Birkin told him that the curtain was down?

  Should he open the spare tin of distemper, and, after dark, block the letters out? He decided to do so; but when he went out later on, he found that someone had been before him. Every letter, together with the badge, had been coated with tar. Now it would remain, and not his doing! What was the idea of the tar? To obliterate a sign for hostile aircraft? The tar must have come from the blacksmith.

  *

  The next morning he took a final look round the farmhouse before setting off to fetch Lucy and the children. Lucy had offered to come back. Mrs. Valiant, who occupied the cottage next to Mrs. Hammett’s, had scrubbed and tidied the rooms. Each bedroom had its new carpet. On the parlour floor were two large rush mats from Java, the last two remaining at the Stores. New brushes and brooms, bathroom fittings—that enamelled corner cupboard, rack for toothbrushes and glasses, looking-glass, dozen large bath towels—dozen each of best quality drying-up cloths for dishes, glass and silver. Coconut mats of the best quality to filter and contain the dust, each one specially made to fit various sunken places inside doors. Also roll-up blinds, each one to the measure of its square of glass tiles which had been let into the coving ceilings of the roof over the bedrooms. There was a special security fastening to prevent them snapping up if accidentally touched at night.

  The next afternoon the Silver Eagle, drawing the small brown trailer with its new green canvas cover, loaded with suit cases, rolls of blankets, crate of hens, Rosamund’s dolls’ house, Jonathan’s trike, and other impedimenta drew into the yard of River View and stopped.

  “Welcome home again! I’m afraid the place isn’t as cosy as No. 2, The Glade, but the hearths should not smoke, and there’s a new floor of wood put in the next cottage for the children. As you can see, we had to throw the chalk from under the new floor’s foundation on the garden beds, but the chalk will be dug in sometime when I can spare men from the farm. No more mud—and with this broom and pail, the kids can keep the paved path clean.”

  Even so, when she went inside the parlour, Lucy sat down a moment. She looked pale, her eyes were dark. Obviously she felt bad on coming back to such a place, apart from the loss of happiness in leaving Tim and the little social unit of The Glade.

  “One thing I must say,” she said. “It has been on my mind for a long time. Do you remember repeating to me what Captain Pinnegar said to you as we were leaving? That ‘never had he seen such an awful mess in any house’?”

  “Yes, I remember he said it, and I repeated it.”

  “Did he say also, and did you tell him, that he and Mrs. Carfax arrived two days before they said they would arrive? And therefore I had no time to clean up as I had planned? And that I was packing until 2 a.m. the morning we did leave, in order that they might get in?”

  “John Galsworthy once wrote that there was no justice for men in this world. And I should think that you have suffered more injustice from me than I have suffered from all the people I have known put together.”

  He felt the place to be cold and gloomy. When he had left the day before the parlour had seemed to have a new life in it, waiting to welcome the family home. He lit a fire to prove how nice the parlour would be. But what could have happened? Smoke poured steadily into the room! When the flames broke through the smoke, they too came out below the lintel of the hearth.

  “It burned quite well the other night. I tested it. David always said there was a witch up the chimney. She has apparently returned with you lot.”

  “Well, it’s not your fault, don’t you worry. I was feeling a bit tired just now. I’ll make some tea.”

  At least the electric cooker in the kitchen worked. They had supper there of eggs and bacon, washed down with cups of milky tea. The boiler in the wash-house was already glowing, the water in the tank was hot.

  “It’s a poor place to come back to, I know, but the bedrooms look better with the new carpets. Now tell the truth, Davie. Are you glad you’re back again?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you, Jonny?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, thank you for the truth, gentlemen. Up the old school tie.”

  “We haven’t got one, sir.”

  “Still you can call yourself Old Boys.”

  “I’m still too young,” said Jonathan, seriously, “to be an Old Boy.”

  The food had put new life into Phillip, and he tried to raise their spirits.

  “The circular saw is fixed by an excellent young man who volunteered to come and help me, so we’ll have a lot of wood. The fire in your boudoir, Lucy, at least will burn properly. I swear I’ll cure the down-draught in this chimney. I’ll get on the roof and with a rope tied to a bar across the square brick of the chimney, let myself down, and examine it all the way to the hearth. Davie can come with me, and look for secret passages. There must be a reason why the smoke billows into the room. It’s very wide just above the beam over the hearth, seven feet at least, and the air in that big expansion chamber probably acts as a buffer, or rebounding surface. The hot air and smoke curl round and back like the horns of an Exmoor ram, and so out into the room.”

  David looked mystified. “Is there really a ram up the chimney, sir?”

  “A wind ram, Davie, butting the smoke back. Not your witch, but a great old smoky ram, with sparks for eyes and soot for wool. When you look up the chimney in daytime you see scores of glistening black fleeces hanging there, for the ram is a cannibal—a butcher!”

  “Yes!” cried David. “The butcher skins the wind-sheep in our chimney!”

  “You’re a writer, David. But to be serious; what our hearth needs is the cavern immediately up the chimney being filled in, and a regular flue being built there, slowly tapering to the top, slowly accelerating the upward flow of the smoke. I’ll get some pipes of a foot-diameter, and build them up inside the chimney.”

  Jonathan sat pale and still.

  “What’s the matter with you, Jonny?”

  “He wants to see the great old smoky ram up your chimney, sir.”

  “There isn’t anything up there, Jonny. It’s only pretend. It’s really because the chimney is too wide to let the smoke go up quickly. So don’t be afraid.”

  Jonny looked more unhappy.

  “He’s not real
ly afraid,” said David. “He really wants to come looking for secret passages with me. You didn’t ask him, sir.”

  The journey had taken six hours, during which Lucy had nursed her youngest child. Phillip had been late in starting, and had hastened to be home before the black-out, as the new regulation mask fitted on the off-side headlamp (the other headlamp must not be lit) gave no illumination at all. A driver at night saw a soldier walking in the road less than half a second before the late-shifting form was about to be struck by tip of near-side front mudguard: most pedestrians could not put themselves in the place of the wretched driver of a car proceeding even at the maximum speed permitted by law of 20 miles an hour, with a lamp scarcely giving the glimmer of one candle-power.

  “This house will be all right one day, Lucy. I hoped to get an extra window in your room, facing south, only the frost made it impossible. It would have disintegrated the mortar. Would you like a herb garden? I cut out the plan for one from The Times. And I want to buy some Cox’s apple and plum trees. The bees I expect are killed by the frost. I had the well cleaned a week ago, the moss scraped from the brickwork, and whitewash brushed on. It took two men two days. And soon, I hope, the children will be able to go to a decent school again.”

  Lucy’s eyes were unfixed from her surroundings. With a sudden start she said: “Oh, I’m sorry, were you talking to me?” She sighed. “Well, I suppose I must wash up.”

  The small boys went out into the village street to renew old acquaintance.

  Phillip helped her wash up. Then he went back to his cottage, to get into bed and read the local newspaper before The Times‚ as was his habit. There was a pile over three feet high of them against the wall, on the boards of the bedroom floor. But halfway through The East Anglian Daily Press he thought of the promised fees for schooling, and getting out of bed again switched on the electric fire, put on his dressing-gown, turned on the radio and the electric kettle for tea and continued with the last revision of his book until an hour after midnight.

  *

  The swallows came back to the porch, and as in other years, a nightingale sang in the lilacs around the draw-well outside Lucy’s kitchen door. The bird sang there, despite the chill east winds, for several days before leaving for softer inland groves and thickets. Rosamund went back to Mrs. Richard Cheffe’s school, taking David with her. “Zippee!” he cried, as soon as he got inside the house; and flinging himself on the carpet, began to roll swiftly across the floor.

  There was an airfield near the Manor house, but the dark-green Whitleys seldom rose into the air, and then only for the dropping of propaganda leaflets over Germany.

  After his book had been revised, Phillip flinched from physical work. In this vacuum he felt acutely that things were ill with Empire, England, farm, family, himself. Or was it in reverse order? Should it have been: Things were ill with him as with millions of other men, and therefore with family, farm, England, Empire?

  Behind the blackout curtain he read in The Times that the Advanced Striking Force of the R.A.F. in France was ready, and at any moment the industrial Rhineland would go up in spouts of flame and flying debris. The French were on German soil, the Ruhr under the fire of their guns.

  In another newspaper he read that at any moment Hitler’s cardboard house, and cardboard dummy tanks in the West Wall, would collapse. As for the West Wall, the dug-outs after the hard winter were damp and wet. The concrete, of inferior aggregate, was already crumbling. He read that British agents were buying up, for high prices, the future harvests of the Balkans; and so the Germans, who had no gold to buy anything in competition, would feel the effect of the economic war.

  From The Times he learned that Roumania had been lent another £10,000,000, and the wheat harvest of 1940, 1941, and 1942 had been secured as interest on the loan. By 1941, declared the Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, the power of Britain would be felt. Behind the impregnable Maginot Line the Third Reich would fall to bits, prophesied ‘Diogenes’ in some daily picture paper.

  Phillip was out and about on the farm now. The men had started hoeing the sugar beet by contract, while he enjoyed himself alone by stripping some of the cut thorn trees of the hedges, burning the lesser branches, and piling the trunks for the circular saw in coming winters.

  Arriving home from the farm to breakfast one morning he heard the B.B.C. announcement that the German fleet was out and the Norwegian ports were occupied. Anxiously he listened to more news that evening at six o’clock, while Billy and Jonny sat silent beside Lucy at the far end of the table. Mr. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, declared in the House of Commons that every German ship would be bottled up in the Skaggerak and destroyed. The Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, stated, amidst cheers, that Hitler had missed the ’bus. He had, said Mr. Chamberlain, made a fatal extension of his flank comparable to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Things could hardly be better for us, he concluded.

  At half past nine that evening Phillip tuned in to the German Radio. The nasal, sardonic voice of Haw-Haw commented on the news of the B.B.C., and concluded, “In the words of the late Lord Oxford and Asquith, my British listeners will have to wait and see.”

  *

  At the beginning of May the barley was green, but patchy, on the Scalt. It was poor and unhappy-looking on Pewitt’s, where the dour half-iced furrows had been turned up after the sheep’s feet had compressed the soil. Phillip had sensed what would happen when he had turned the ice under too far, making the soil cold for tender barley roots. Ploughing that piece had been like planing wood against the grain. A fair soul and a fair soil were related. He had ploughed against his true feeling, under the compulsion of fear—the hare of his mind dreading a late sowing in spring.

  The oats looked well on the Nightcraft, where Luke had drilled over the failed wheat. The seed had been sown after frost had gone out of the land, following the pitchpole harrow which had made the soil light and gracious: a happy tilth.

  The small seeds on Steep field, drilled among the wheat of the past season, were growing thick and dark green. The layer was mainly cowgrass, red clover, and ryegrass; his first proper hay crop was coming along. Never again, on the farm, said Phillip to Luke, shall we broadcast grass and clover seeds in this country of light rainfall, but always drill them as soon as possible after the barley is sown.

  Tortoise: “If you do do that, the clover and grass will grow high in a wet season, and will clog the barley sheaves, and cause them to be damp, and so heat in the stack.”

  Hare: “I’d rather run that risk than have no hay. Besides, the sheaves will dry out if laid butts to the wind. Or the straw can be cut higher up.”

  Tortoise: “If ’twas mine, I’d broadcast small seeds when the barley is up.”

  Hare took tractor and rib-roll to press down the frost-lifted plants of clover and ryegrass and exposed flints on Steep field. He had gone round the field once when there was a terrific explosion from the direction of the sea. A column of black smoke hung in the sky three miles away. Was it bomb or mine? A few minutes later Matt appeared, clumping over the sky-line from the direction of the meadows, to stop abruptly when he saw Phillip, to wipe a sweaty brow with his cap, and stare reproachfully.

  “My Gor!” he said when Phillip reached him. “I thought it was you, gone up on the tractor!”

  “Bless you, dear Tortoise. I expect the Sappers were exploding a mine.”

  A few mornings later Hare and Tortoise walked side by side across the lower slopes of the field. Each carried a stick with a thistle spud on it. Phillip wanted to have a thistle-free field after the bare fallow of two years before, when all weeds were killed. A few thistles had survived.

  “Your bare fallow did good, master. Ah, it did that. B’utiful bottom this hay hev. The partridges’ll soon be settun.”

  “Yes, it’s the tenth of May. They’re laying now, just about.”

  Phillip returned to the farmhouse by way of the meadows and the lower bridge over the river. As he was
passing the church the Rector came out of his drive on a bicycle and called out, “So it’s started at last! The Germans attacked Holland this morning with a million men. They are using great numbers of parachute troops dropped behind the lines!”

  Phillip was shocked. He had told Lucy—his only listener now—that the attack on Norway had come because the Royal Navy had mined the neutral waters of the northern ports; because Hore-Belisha, having left the Ministry of War, had been urging in a Sunday newspaper that they should attack Germany through Norway.

  “Hitler’s reply was to get there first. I don’t believe that Major Quisling, leader of the Norwegian National Samling, and the most brilliant soldier in Norway, yielded to the Germans. He knows Bolshevik Russia well, he believes in the new European consciousness, in the new economy, which will throw out the international financier with his concomitant Communist destroyer. Quisling is first of all a Norwegian patriot. He may be assassinated, or shot by a firing squad, but one day his name will be cleared. He’s been much in Russia, he knows Bolshevism as Norway’s, and Europe’s, real enemy.”

  So Phillip told a passively listening Lucy. Once she had believed all he said; but during the years she had become doubtful. He was often contradictory; he changed his mind suddenly, sometimes after listening to what someone else had been telling him. Thus one day Luke would be right; the next day he would be wrong again. Some of the things he said, too, about the children, she knew to be wrong: but he could not bear to be argued with, it seemed to upset him so, and anyway, what did it matter, whatever was said would not alter things. That was now Lucy’s general attitude.

  “They’ll be saying that next about Birkin—or even little me,” Phillip went on. “Birkin has made it plain to everyone in the party that, in the event of attack, we must all fight in defence of the country. But fancy Hitler attacking in the West. Oh, why wasn’t I in to hear the news over the wireless?”