A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  Or would Luke run the farm? The Steep wouldn’t grow hay, he had said: he had tried for two seasons under the old lazybones tenant and nothing had come up. No wonder, with furrows of a horse-plough driven only two or three inches in the sticky soil, the scratch-furrows drying out, to receive a scattering of seeds on a bed of rubble-lumps in the dry month of May.

  Last year the small seeds had been drilled half-an-inch deep in the lovely tilth of wheat-plants harrowed in early April. Soon thread-like green rows of grass, spotted with the minute heart-shaped plants of clover, were crossing delicately the sturdier plants of wheat, which was the nurse-crop. And the wheat rose thick and sappy to meet the caress of the upland summer breezes. Partridges ran down the Tows, pecking the little stalks of grass and clover-leaves below the wheat standing strong and uniform up to the skyline. In July the wheat took the gold of the King Harry sun. In August it yielded to scythe and reaper. Among the stubbles the layer assumed a darker green, clover plants and grass rising sturdily until the frost came and the clover plants wilted, but did not die, for later snow protected them from nibbling hare, cropping rabbit and the peck-pull-pluck of wild pigeon—the clover and rye-grass plants lay warm under the snow awaiting the nitrogenous surge of spring.

  And in late April and again in early May Matt and he had walked among the dark clovers and luxuriant grasses to spud the few thistles, only half a dozen to the acre remaining—the cleanest field in the county, and the best layer, Matt had declared.

  The car sped on. Looking over the driver’s shoulder, he saw the speedometer needle trembling at 75. Would Father read of it in his Daily Trident—Father who had not replied to his last half-dozen letters? What would the Maddison Aunts say? They too had given him up—or he them—years before. Viccy had taken the trouble to write, just before the war, and tell him that the family was ashamed of him. A queer, lonely lot: each one living in a house alone—Father—Uncle Hilary (his wife Irene had gone as a lay-sister in a French convent)—Aunts Theodora, Isabella, and Victoria. Every one living in an authentic world, based on temperament, warped by experience, limited by the arc of personal imagination: personal judgments all affected by personal frustration. And not one of them realised it. They were the last animate shadows of the set sun of Victorianism appalled by the dissolution of their worlds.

  Perhaps he would be taken to Falmouth: a grey ex-liner, cages of expanded metal between decks, and across the Atlantic to Canada—or into the depths of the Atlantic wherein, Chettwood had told him, many Italian waiters of London hotels, some resident in England for a dozen and more years, some with sons in the British fighting services, had already gone; torpedoed. He wondered how Lucy would react if one day, long after the war was over, someone found his last manuscript in the pillow.

  The curtain was down, even as the quiet voice long ago in Smith Street, Westminster, had hinted in that dim and remote-seeming past. If the manuscript was discovered by the police now, would it be a shroud? Or did they put a traitor’s body directly into lime?

  The car drew up in a road quiet with trees and empty pavements.

  “Will you please come with me.”

  He followed the constable on duty into a waiting room. Photographs on walls. Soon another constable came into the room and with a smile asked him to follow. A door opened. He was in a room with a solitary occupant sitting at a desk. About fifty years of age. Large cavalry moustache. Inviting Phillip to sit by him, saying that he was the Chief Constable and had asked him there to have a talk with him. His manner was forthright and courteous. Phillip felt himself returning to his body.

  “Well, we’ve searched your place, and have found nothing of what we were led to suppose we might find. This is a difficult time, and as you will imagine, we have a great many cases to investigate. At a time like this there are many rumours, and although most of the allegations which come into the office turn out to be unfounded, we cannot afford to disregard any, you understand.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “In your case we have received a great many communications of one kind and another,” the Chief Constable went on. “The result has been that we have detained you under the new Regulation 18b. We have looked over your papers and books, and have taken some for examination. Your diaries, for example, and some letters written to you. We are retaining these letters, and some of your own writings, and if we find it necessary to take proceedings they will be used as evidence against you. The letters and writings will be returned to you after the war.”

  The Chief Constable leant back in his chair. Somebody came through the door and gave him a dossier. He glanced at it and laid it down; picked it up again and considered it. Phillip looked at the polished brass objects on the shelf, all gleaming brightly—pickelhauben spikes, Christmas 1914 Princess Mary tobacco box, shrapnel-fuse, caps, clips of cartridges and other souvenirs of a dead-and-gone war. The Chief Constable looked at him and said in the same conversational tone, “Now tell me, what would you do if you saw parachute troops coming down on your farm?”

  “I should run as fast as I could and report them.”

  “You are an old soldier, aren’t you? However, I ought to tell you that there is a very strong feeling against you here in East Anglia. In fact,” he added, with a deprecatory wave of the hand, “your name is Mud.” He went on, “Rumours impede our work, clog it up. You were in the last war, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Chief Constable fingered his moustache, and appeared to fall into reverie. Then looking directly at Phillip he said, “What was your regiment?”

  “I served with the London Highlanders in nineteen-fourteen. Then with a Special Branch of the Royal Engineers, in nineteen-fifteen, at Loos. On the Somme with the infantry, where I was wounded. I went back in December nineteen-sixteen with the Machine Gun Corps, for twelve months, being invalided in December nineteen-seventeen. In February I rejoined my regiment, the Gaultshires, and after the March retreat we went north to Ypres, where I was knocked out in the second German push in April. That ended my war, sir.”

  “Yes, I have your record here.” He looked at other papers. “You appear to have blotted your copybook after the war. I see you served a month in prison in the Second Division.” He stroked his moustache reflectively. “Of course you understand that nothing of this is to be communicated to the press, so the less you say, the sooner it will be forgotten. We found a lot of cartridges in your house. You are a shooting man, I suppose?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well,” he said, looking Phillip in the eye, “I believe what you say. My men report that you and your wife gave them all the help you could. I have decided to send you home. Now be a good fellow, and don’t get into any trouble, will you? I don’t believe you’re a spy. Lots of people do, you know. I shall get it in the neck if you are, after releasing you.”

  “I am not a spy‚” said Phillip, repressing a flooding exuberance. He thought that if he found himself suddenly in Germany he would say or do nothing to injure England, even if he knew any vital facts, which he did not; just as if, during his visit before the war to Germany, he had learned anything vital about them, he would not have told anyone in England.

  “Have you any sympathy for Hitler?”

  Phillip said, in his rising relief, “Only the traditional British sympathy for the under-dog, sir.” When the Chief Constable laughed he went on, “I’ve always tried to understand the German point of view, ever since the Christmas truce of nineteen-fourteen.”

  “Oh, were you there? What brigade?”

  “The First Brigade. I was with the London Highlanders at Messines. We joined the First Brigade at First Ypres afterwards.”

  “Oh yes, your Colonel was killed, wasn’t he? Let me see, what was his name?”

  “The Earl of Findhorn, sir.”

  The Chief Constable nodded. “Well, this action we’ve taken will at least have cleared the air for you. I’m going to send you home now. You’ll be busy with the hay, I expect? Don�
�t give any trouble. Some of your fellows were rather silly, you know, shouting out Heil Hitler when they were detained. Good morning.”

  Phillip felt that his sinews had been replaced, tautened, and charged with vital force. The street had colour and the sky was shining. The car seemed smaller, less bulky, with normal doors which now he could open and help to shut.

  Joy bubbled up inside him. The motorcar sped away. Might he have a window open? Certainly. Would he care for a cigarette? Thanks very much. Would you care for a pint of beer? Not on duty, thanks all the same.

  The journey usually took him thirty-five minutes in peace time, the last ten of the twenty miles being a narrow lane with several blind curves and abrupt turns; but this car got there in thirty minutes and without sense of speed. It showed how old the Silver Eagle really was. It over-steered. The springs were laid. The kingpins were loose. So were the shackle bolts. Steering probably out of track.

  The narrow village street, strangely quiet in the dinner time sunshine.

  “Well, goodbye, and thanks for the lift.”

  He went through the gate past the draw-well and round by the brick-and-flint bathroom. Up the three steps and under the arch. One of the swallows which nested there dived just past his head.

  Lucy was alone, eating lunch of bread, cheese, and tea.

  “Hullo,” he said, casually.

  She stared at him.

  “The Road to En-dor did the trick.”

  She actually went pale.

  “I left them all in a spiritualistic trance. Took their revolvers away, what’s more.”

  She went red in the cheeks. “Really?” Then she lost colour again.

  “No, I’ve scared you. Sorry. I’m released. ‘Only the truth can set ye free.’ I told them the truth, and they let me go.”

  “I’m so glad,” she cried. Normal colour came again into her cheeks. “I was worrying about you. You looked such a poor one, coming out of that little dark cell when I came to see you.”

  “I was chiefly worried because of England.”

  “Yes, I know, my man. I’ll get you a glass of beer. Sit you down. I am afraid there is only bread and cheese and onions.”

  “I’ll be back shortly. I’ve just remembered something important.”

  He went down to the blacksmith’s shop, where he had left the grass-cutter. The elder blacksmith brother was working at his forge when he walked in.

  “Has the cutter been done? I want to get the weeds on the meadows cut.”

  The blacksmith began to say something, and stopped. He had been blowing the bellows, working the cow-horn on the wooden handle with one hand, while with the other hand he stirred slack-coal with a little iron shovel. He wiped his hands on his leather apron. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked pale. “You took me by surprise,” he went on.

  “The Chief Constable has examined my case, and set me free.”

  Down the street he saw Horatio Bugg walking briskly—Horatio usually walked briskly, although he never appeared to get any work done. Phillip watched him turning towards the smithy. Bugg saw him; stopped; stared; came forward a couple of paces; stared again, adjusted his beret, then walked back determinedly across the street and into his yard.

  “Can you have the cutter-bar done by three o’clock, please? I want to have a go at the rushes. I think the snipe and the meadow pipits have hatched off by now.”

  “I’ll get it done for you,” said the blacksmith. He was the gentlest man in the village, and completely honest. He once said to Phillip, “I never make any money.” But he had a good garden, he was happy with wife and small family, he was that not uncommon thing, a Christian who did not rant about the behaviour of others. Phillip had always felt entirely safe in his company.

  When he got back Lucy said, “I had a letter from Felicity this morning. I am afraid it contained rather sad news about her father.”

  “Tell me quickly.”

  “Brother Laurence was killed at Dunkirk, while helping the wounded.”

  Chapter 25

  MORNING STAR

  The hay of one field was safe in stack: odorous, pale green, dry, a delight to rest against. Phillip came home to breakfast happy. He stood with his youngest son by the jamb of the open farmhouse door.

  “My favourite bird is the swallow. Do you know, Jonny, I owe the two letters ‘1’ in my name to the bird when I was born—and to my mother’s inability to spell. Phil-lip—the cry of the swallow in alarm. They are the most tender of birds, I think. And how trusting. See how one passes within an inch or two of our faces—you can feel the little wind of its zoom up to the nest.”

  With a sigh-like sound a blue barbed body curved past their eyes.

  “Do you know,” said Lucy’s voice from within the parlour. “The young birds left the nest exactly a month after hatching. Aren’t they darlings?”

  Five young swallows, yellow gaped, were perching on the purlin beside their nest of grey mud, awaiting food from their parent.

  “There is the history of an entire human life on and beside the jamb of this door,” said Phillip.

  The jamb, the upright post against which the door shut—was of oak. It had been painted many times. By its roughness under the paint it looked to have been part of a ship’s timber. So did the threshold—the wooden bar across its base. The stouter length across the top, the lintel which bore the weight of the brick-and-flint wall above, looked to have been part of the same ship.

  “What scenes of human hope these timbers have borne, Jonny. What a story they could tell. See, beside the jamb, the brick is worn hollow, where the old man living in the cottage before we came sharpened his knife for Sunday’s dinner. Probably it was cow beef, and tough, judging by the concave in the brick.”

  The old man, white-whiskered, pale lined face engrained with woeful dirt, was still to be seen moving about the village, usually on his way to receive a weekly pension at the post-office. Had swallows nested under the porch all the time he had lived there? Phillip liked to think that the birds were of the same family. Lucy thought she recognised one of last year’s parent swallows by the white feather in one pinion.

  *

  When they had come there, the porch was an open arch through which winds blew and noises of cars passing up and down the village street were amplified. Phillip had had the western end bricked up to make a larder of the space, and so dull out some of the traffic noises. George the village bricklayer filled up one side of the arch with a flint wall, and the carpenter fitted some shelves and a little rack eighteen inches above the tiled floor to hang game-birds. When electric light was put in a bulb was hung a few inches below the site of the swallow’s nest. Would the light, switched on at night when the birds were roosting, disturb them, so that they forsook their ancestral nursery? If so, the light would be shifted.

  “After all,” he said to the children, “the swallows have the first claim to the rafters.”

  Apparently the pair did not mind the light. They had reared their first family above the old porch in the spring before the war. After the corn harvest the swallows left the fields and the village streets and evening flights above the river to begin their long flight across sea and plain and mountain to Africa, their winter home, he told Jonny. Would they return through all the icy cold that had bound Europe? To his relief—for the swallows were almost talismanic in his mind—they had reappeared while George the bricklayer was making a path of pavers where frozen foot-marks had clotted to a dangerous cobble during the hard winter. He had felt it to be an omen of good hope when a swallow had flown past his shoulder, twittering excitedly, and he recognised the white feather in one wing. Soon it was fluttering by a rafter, and diving away again, sometimes with its mate. Another pair of swallows followed them a few days later.

  “Then you and the family came back, Jonny. Do you remember the four parent birds roosting side by side at night? How tender their twittering talk was on the purlin, and they were happy together. Truly love is likeness of thought. That’s
what Richard Jefferies wrote, Jonny. You must read Bevis one day.”

  “Ah, ’bor,” said Jonathan.

  Something had happened to one of the hens when the nests were only half an ounce or so of drying mud, for a nest remained unfinished. The lone cockbird roosted always beside the remaining hen brooding her eggs at night, while her mate roosted on the other side. The solitary swallow sang sometimes: a startlingly loud trickle and plash of music falling from open beak and quivering throat.

  “He had become a poet,” said Phillip. “Loneliness had made him dream. He was singing from a broken heart. His mate must have been killed, for swallow does not forsake swallow. Perhaps a hawk killed her, or a chance bullet from the anti-aircraft range on the marshes struck her.”

  “Perhaps she hit the wire of a target being towed,” suggested Rosamund, who had quietly joined them. “Anyway, he helps to feed the young birds. Oh, look!”

  Five young birds had been perching on the purlin supporting the rafters. Now one after another fell with open wings, in little swoops which took them under the brick arch and so to the open sky.

  “They must feel strange in the brightness of a new world,” said Phillip. “Even I did, when I was set free the other day.”

  After making small circles and indecisive turns the young birds lit on the green-painted gutter of the kitchen, and there the three old birds flew to them, to poise fork-tailed for a moment as they thrust beakfuls of flies and midges into open mouths. The fledglings stayed on the gutter, and were fed in turn.

  At moments during the day one or another flew to their old home. At sunset Phillip again stood by the jamb of the door and watched them, standing beside his youngest son, and thinking that the child had almost the face of his cousin Willie. Jonathan had his large brown eyes which sometimes seemed to glow with a light of wonder, of the Imagination. He gazed at the little boy’s face as one bird fluttered less than a foot away from his eyes. Jonathan was greatly excited.