No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘It was an even more paradoxical summer in the Breckland,’ Elspeth said. ‘Even less immediately touched by the war—well, not untouched by it. There were men away, of course, an armoured division churning up forest tracks, but the rhythm of the heath still turned on rain and sunshine, harvests and drying winds. It was easy to feel the war was a long way away. For Sally Carver, Brian Hammond and Mervyn Prudhoe it was a very special kind of summer—restless, unfamiliar—full of all sorts of imagined symbolism, growing up, self-discovery.

  ‘Sally had just won a place at Bedford College; she was going to read English. Brian was going in the autumn—if there was an autumn, if the universities were going to open again—to Manchester to do chemistry. Mervyn had done a year at Cambridge, where he was taking the course in Estate Management. He was now daily awaiting his call-up papers.

  ‘Sally and Brian knew each other well. They were of an age and had grown up together, though Brian lived in the outlying cluster of cottages known as Pegg’s Corner. So they weren’t exactly in each other’s pockets every hour of the day.

  ‘They had both won scholarships to the Grammar School some ten miles away. In that respect, they were quite exceptional amongst the village children. In those days you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of annual awards in that part of the county. There were fee-paying places, but these cost twelve or fifteen pounds a year, not gladly spent by Yarrow Cross, even by families who could have raised it, for the dangers of artificiality and disorientation.

  ‘It was not an easy journey to the school. From the age of eleven onwards they had to cycle whatever the weather, eight miles to the Threeways Garage …’

  ‘Which keeps cropping up.’

  ‘They parked their bicycles there, and caught a bus that deposited them in town half-an-hour before the school doors were unlocked. Sally remembers sheltering from the snow in a shed at the end of the playground, her fingers numb with cold.

  ‘And the pair went through all the stages of adolescence. For the first couple of years, they hated their parents for insisting that they made the journey together both ways. In fact, they never sat together on the bus, and Brian would hang about looking unnecessarily in shop-windows, rather than be seen arriving through the gates with her. But they grew out of this in time. Sally remembers that it was in 1935 that they first became conscious of each other. It was the year of the Silver Jubilee, you remember, and there was a characteristic Prudhoe spectacular in one of his paddocks. Sally and Brian ran in the children’s sports, but it was very clear to them how they had grown away from those who had stayed on at the village school. Many of those, in fact, with whom they had sat in the lower classes, had already left and were broadening their shoulders in the fields.

  ‘Brian and Sally slipped away from the main celebrations and sat for an hour on a bank in a plantation of nursery pines, talking about their common world, with a new convergence of opinions and values. And after that they were simply accepted by the village as a pre-ordained and indissoluble pair. By the time they had been a year in the sixth form, they had branched out along very different tracks personally, but even these differences were a kind of agreement. They assumed that they complemented each other. During the holidays Sally loved to slip away amongst the scrublands with Lamartine or Christabel. Brian, as an embryonic scientist, developed a sort of mock-cynical materialism. They moved into a phase of almost perpetual dispute, but it was never a quarrel. I’m not wasting your time, Simon?’

  ‘Far from it.’

  ‘Could you hear that story and tell the couple that they never ought to have married?’

  ‘I don’t know. There are a lot of other things I’d want to consider too.’

  ‘All right, then. Sally and Brian had a perfectly ordinary boy and girl friendship. They were fairly enlightened, by Yarrow Cross standards, but pretty orthodox, when you boil it down. They were mainstays of the Church Young People’s Fellowship. They both taught at Sunday School. And their kissing and cuddling weren’t far off puritanical: nothing that would have offended in the fade-out of a 1930s film.

  ‘Then, in our Dunkirk summer, they got to know Mervyn Prudhoe. Mervyn had always been away at school, from the age of about nine. They had seen him from the village, but he had never mingled on the green, as it were. It was not, Sally insisted, through any natural snobbery on his part, it was the unquestioned order of life. His own pleasures, his absorbing occupations during school vacations, they took place naturally behind the fences of the estate not because he was imprisoned by them, but because within them he was fully occupied: with his tree-house in his younger days, his ponies, his twelve-bore and his breeding-pens, from which he was beginning to show beasts in his own name by the time he was sixteen.

  ‘Once, when he was twelve or thirteen, he had fought and driven off a gang of village boys, the Pascoes among them, whom he had come across fishing in a stretch of brook that was formally, though not very effectively, private. The mêlée had its aftermath, because Emma Pascoe made all she could of it, and the agent made some discreet visits to pay for torn clothing. But what attitude Mervyn’s father took in private about it, the village never heard.

  ‘It was common talk that the father held the reins pretty tight. In his later years at school, when Mervyn started going in low in the batting order for the village eleven, he never stayed for as much as a half pint with the others after stumps were drawn.’

  Sally’s first meeting with him had come when she and Brian had wandered, one July afternoon, into one of the wilder corners of the park. Brian, in a passing enthusiasm for field biology had brought equipment to collect pond specimens. Sally was reading Jane Austen. Mervyn came up wearing cavalry twill breeches and slapping his boots with a steel-cored crop. They thought at first that they were in for remonstrations. Notionally they were trespassing, but did not really expect this to be taken seriously. However, one never knew. Mervyn Prudhoe had his reputation.

  But he seemed to want to make friends with them. He questioned them about their school without much notion of what life in a country day-school was like. He showed a genuine and informed interest in Brian’s specimens. He had read Persuasion.

  The upshot was that he invited them to tennis. Brian did not want to go, and rationalised a hatred of all that Mervyn stood for. But Sally insisted, and they went. There were only the three of them, and the resulting mixed singles, ludicrously matched, petered out after a series of huge parabolic lobs into the hot, thick vegetation well outside the court. Mervyn could play a respectable game. Sally could not match him and Brian could not even begin to. Mervyn did not seem to mind. They sat in a summerhouse, sipped lemonade and talked.

  Brian knew more about science than Mervyn did; but Mervyn could run rings round him when it came to agricultural applications. Sally had read more than Mervyn, but Mervyn’s tastes were more confident. He knew more than she did about music and painting.

  ‘As Sally put it, he’d seen more originals. And there’s no doubt, Simon, he must have been a pretty shattering find for a girl. Well, even when she was telling me about it, sitting out in the rose-garden—I found Fantin Latour, by the way—she could half laugh at herself for her susceptibility. He was dark, athletic, classically handsome, witty, worldly, superbly poised and sure of himself.’

  ‘And we’ve a pretty good idea what she must have looked like, too, half seen, for a split second, on a misty morning.’

  ‘Sally didn’t mention Mervyn’s other attachments. There must surely have been some. God knows why he hasn’t eventually married. Anyway, it was love at first sight and they both knew it. But for the rest of that year it was a very conventional relationship. Without being narrow-minded or priggish, they had a solid sense of propriety. Sally had had a straightish upbringing, and there’s no doubt that Mervyn’s code was pretty strict. They weren’t ready to let themselves go—yet.

  ‘It was all very sad, of course, about Brian, and rather untidy. At first he hung about, and could easily have
become a laughing-stock. They made a deliberate decision to be kind to him, but of course it didn’t work. It wasn’t kindness Brian wanted. He stopped emerging from Pegg’s Corner.’

  But there was another source of hostility between the two young men. Mervyn, with various O.T. C. certificates under his belt at school and university was a keen recruit to the Home Guard. Brian refused to join. He would do his military service in due course. At the moment his time was too valuable to him. He was going to be at a disadvantage in college, competing with people from bigger schools. There were gaps in his preparation, and he was sweating to get them filled.

  Mervyn, on the other hand, was not entirely out of love with the war. He had some sense of his own destiny as a soldier, it was part of his own fulfilment. For him the war was not just a regrettable necessity. He believed in it, and Sally was drawn along to his point of view.

  In the falling leaf of the Breckland autumn, the three of them parted. Brian went to Manchester, Mervyn to his regimental depot and very shortly after that to OCTU. Sally went to London where she had a few startling knocks in store for her. In intellect, in breadth of knowledge, in experience of people and the things that people do, she found herself a good deal less distinguished than she had assumed herself to be. It was one thing to have shone in a little school with only two hundred pupils. It was quite another to be amongst people to whom concerts and galleries were a commonplace; who did not think it curious that they had never visited Norwich or Bury St Edmund’s.

  Christmas 1940: home with a lot to talk about. And the men came back, too, Brian full of nothing but chemistry, and treating her with a somewhat puerile coldness; Mervyn with the white tapes of an officer cadet already on his epaulettes. She did not see nearly as much of Mervyn as she had hoped. For almost the whole duration of his leave there was a house-party at the Hall, strangers to her and, like Cinderella, she yearned for an invitation. But none arrived.

  They met several times, however. One afternoon, characterised by damp, dead leaves and pale December sunshine, she was walking the lanes alone and he came round a corner on horseback. He dismounted at once, and led the animal by the bridle, and they wandered for a couple of hours, walking and talking. The next day they met without a horse, strolled round the unfrequented hedgerows of the Prudhoes’further fields, last spring’s nests exposed in the black mesh of the blackthorn. They walked with their arms about each other’s waists and kissed as they had last summer.

  But now it was no imitation of the close-up of the film-set. Now they were aware of reality. She could feel the urgent privacy of his body; and he must have known she could feel it; and she stood and let him press himself against her. The blood swelled and tingled in her breasts. She felt the heaviness of her womb. And he started to kiss her as if he wanted to consume her. She clasped his mouth in hers, gave him knowledge of what she wanted.

  But that was as far as they let it go—this time. She knew herself, and was honest about it. She knew they had reached a moment at which the only next thing was love-making unleashed and she wanted that. Oh God, how she wanted it. But there were other things one had to consider. There were things one could do: normal things, a spate of activity, at her dressing-table, at the sewing-machine, amongst her clothes and suit-cases, even about her mother’s house-work, that could help to ease off the worst of it.

  After that holiday, they corresponded, Sally more voluminously than Mervyn. In fact, in one given week, she was aghast to discover how much time she had given to writing letters as against essay-notes. Long letters, in which she spread herself at whimsy and at random: college gossip, college personalities, poetry, paragraphs quoted at length from books she was reading: Donne, Marvell and Patmore. She made Mervyn free of the sprawl and detail of her life; and his own letters, written on barrack tables and army bed-cots became longer and more personal. He began to look at daytime things through Sally’s eyes, saving them to be reported on canteen notepaper in the leisure of the evening. She lay in bed alone at night and wanted him, tried to imagine the abandon and the ecstasy.

  At Easter she came home again, but this time not the men. It was a terrible vacation, domestically a near-disaster. Her mother accused her of mooning, and asked her if there wasn’t work she should be getting on with. For the first time, the women began to get on each other’s nerves. For the first time, Sally realised that there was a gap between her and her mother that it was useless to try to cross.

  ‘What is it you have on your mind? A man?’

  ‘I’d be a strange creature if I didn’t want, and have, men-friends.’

  Her mother was working with her back to her, did not turn to face her. ‘It isn’t that young Prudhoe that you’re eating your heart out for? You can forget him.’

  Sally lost her temper. ‘Mother—it isn’t for you to tell me whom I should and whom I should not forget.’

  ‘His father would never allow it.’

  ‘Mother, what sort of world is it that you accept and admire? Do you think that Yarrow Cross’s feudal class distinctions are going to survive this war? Do you think that Mervyn Prudhoe cares two hoots which side of the village green I was born?’

  ‘I don’t know what else there is for him to care for.’

  ‘Mother, I don’t know how you can talk like that. You don’t know the man.’

  Her mother turned round, then, and she was crying. But her tears did not soften Sally; they disgusted her, and she went off to do something in another room.

  Another time it was, ‘We’ve each got to know our place, Sally.’

  ‘But Mother, the world is going to change. It must change.’

  ‘There are things that you can’t hope to change.’

  ‘Especially if you don’t even want to.’

  ‘It isn’t a question of what you want. Sally, I hate myself for saying this, but I must: Mervyn Prudhoe will leave you high and dry. He’ll have to.’

  Sally did not believe her. For days after that conversation she used one petty trick after another to prevent herself from being alone with her mother. She could not have tolerated a resumption of the topic.

  Then a featureless airman waved from over the trees, and for a wild few seconds she tried to wake the village to run on foot to a disaster twenty miles away. There was no way she could think of of learning whether the rear-gunner had survived the crash or not. The holiday drew mercifully to its close.

  One week in the following August the three central figures in the story were back in Yarrow Cross. Sally, to her dismay, had had a mediocre intermediate exam result: she had ploughed in the Chaucer paper. Brian had been called into the infantry within weeks of the end of his first college year. He positively hobbled in his army boots and his battle-dress sagged about his unmilitary shoulders. Mervyn had been gazetted, and was immaculate in the dark green beret of a fighting élite. Brian, alighting from the bus, and coming upon him unexpectedly outside the Post Office, had had to salute him.

  The village was by now under its notice to quit. The population was being disseminated over villages and towns seven and eight miles from each other. It seemed equivalent to spreading them across the oceans. As so often in the face of intolerable catastrophe, it was the little things that loomed large: there were end-of-garden crops that the villagers were never going to harvest. The Prudhoes, who were reputed to have done very well out of the deal, were already deeply involved in their new home. Negotiations for it must have been going on for months before the rest of the village got wind of events.

  Mervyn was going to spend half his leave in Wiltshire. His and Sally’s opportunities were brief and overwhelmed by the fore-knowledge of parting.

  They had one or two short and unsatisfactory meetings and then Mervyn took her not merely into the grounds, but in and about the Hall itself, where everything was in a state of chaos and movement: ancestral portraits being packed in crates, surplus furniture being marked for the salerooms. The house seemed to be milling with workmen, echoing with hammers, littered with pa
cking straw and damaged plaster.

  They came unexpectedly upon Mervyn’s father, picking his way distraughtly along a corridor cluttered with tea-chests. And he knew Sally as he knew all the children in the village. He had always made a point of knowing each of them by name, only occasionally making a mistake. And he always tried to remember one salient fact about each child, so that he could put up an appearance of conversation: Robert Whittle, for example, had had croup when he was about six, so the old man always asked him about the state of his chest. With Sally it was slightly different; since she had won her university place, he had always talked to her about Meredith: a monologue that she was never able to turn into a dialogue, because she had read no more than a few anthology pages of Richard Feverel.

  Now he did not appear to see her at all, walked past without looking into her face, but spoke to Mervyn.

  ‘I want you to drive me over in the station-wagon to the Lowdens.’

  Sally felt peremptorily dismissed. Mervyn leaped to do his father’s bidding and made her no more than a sketchy apology. She went and wandered away into the fields, in the direction they had taken last December, wholly disconsolate, knowing there were only a couple of days left to them at the most.

  It was a couple of hours before he came, startling her, vaulting over a gate with a boyish grin. ‘The old man thinks we’re seeing too much of each other.’

  His tone showed a complete absence of any shadow of filial devotion. Again they faced up to each other; this time the signs were not to be withstood. He lowered her into the grass. It was a hot afternoon. ‘We shouldn’t…’ Mervyn said.

  ‘Darling, I think we have to …’

  Elspeth took a deep breath.

  ‘Sally said that she could feel the self-command ebbing from her flesh as she said those words. Silly words; she knew that as she said them and yet she meant it.

  ‘I’ll say this for her, Simon: she makes no attempt to pretend that he seduced her. Nor would she have it that she seduced him. It was as it had to be.’