Outside the stables, there were horses all over the place. The farmer and his wife hunted with the Wylye Valley, and there were always a number of fine animals turned out up on the downs in the off-season. And in an orchard behind the farm buildings there lived a strange assortment of very old pensioners — one mare was reputed to be forty-five years of age. And with them three gaunt mules, survivors of an eight-mule team that had done the plowing of the farm in the early twenties. Despite their impotence they dreamed vain dreams of virility and leaped upon the ancients with loud, pretentious brays.
Most of the working horses were quirky beasts, each with its own pet phobia. Alice, for example, half-Shire, half-something, and a sprightly thirty-eight, was totally trustworthy in traffic but terrified of gateposts. Driving Alice through a gateway, which might occur many times a day, was something to be done with maximum concentration and a firm hold of the reins. She had to be steered exactly between the posts — fearful monsters, as you could see by her pricked ears, braced neck, and rolling eyes. They were waiting, she knew, to do her a terrible mischief, and if you should touch a careless wheel against one as you went through, Alice was off, no matter what the load, straight into a gallop that would have done justice to a two-year-old.
The great Flower had one bête noire or pet aversion (she was green, in fact) and that was a beast even larger than herself — the local bus. And her reaction was not to bolt but to buck. At sight of the approaching titan, she would throw herself against the breeching, tossing her head, whinnying, and paddling madly at the ground with her huge soup-plate hooves, the frenzy increasing as the bus drew nearer. Better to be in an empty Scotch cart than a loaded four-wheeled wagon when the giants met.
And then there was Foxianna. She was a liver-chestnut mare with rusty mane and tail who had served her time in the hunting field and was as biddable as you could wish. Until she saw a pig. Pigs to her were devils incarnate, and even the smell or the distant sound of them was enough to give her the vapors.
I drove her in a hay rake once, sitting contentedly in the iron seat as we swept up the rakings in a roadside field. The sun was shining, the mare plodded along sensibly, and I had learned to make her stop and start and turn and to work the machine, leaving neat rollers of hay at regular intervals. But though there were no pigs on Tytherington Farm, there was a herd of Saddlebacks on the land beyond the road, and as we made a turn at the headland nearest to it, there they were, dozens of them, big ones and small ones, staring through the fence at us with malevolent little eyes.
“Pi-i-i-i-i-igs!” screamed Foxianna, or that's what it sounded like. And in one violent crashing movement she lunged backwards, digging the long, curved tines into the ground and sending me shooting out over the back, and then she was gone like the wind with the hay rake bouncing and clanging behind her flying ginger tail.
So I was run away from, but it was Billy Ball who was run away with. We had been picking up a field of wheat. The combine, or harvester-thresher as it was at first called, was beginning to be used in English cornfields, but the old reaper-and-binder was still the principal machine at work. The cut corn stood in shocks, or stooks, each of ten sheaves, stacked four against four with one to close each end off, their butts to the ground, their heads upright to catch the air and dry the moisture in the grain. Then, in time, they were loaded onto wagons and carried to the corn mow, built on a layer of brushwood — a “stavel” by name — to keep the bottom layers from the ground. And there the wheat or barley or oats stayed, secure under a roof of thatch, until threshing time after the turn of the year.
This particular piece, of twenty or thirty acres I think, was of level downland and the spot chosen for the mow convenient; ideal therefore for the big four-wheeled horse-drawn wagons with their wooden “ladders” at either end, and in particular for the biggest of them all, that we called the Queen Mary, so enormous that no one but Flower was ever put to it, and even she could pull it only part-loaded. For a full load a trace horse was needed as well, and that day Albie was certainly building them full. With set weather, a dry flat ground, two of us pitching up on either side, and Billy up on the load to feed him, I wouldn't like to guess how many layings of long-strawed, heavy-headed wheat sheaves Albie built on the deck of the Queen Mary.
At last, from the top of the mountain, he said, “That'll do.” Tom stuck his prong into the side of the load for Albie to grasp in his descent, and down he slid.
“Bist coming down, Uncle Billy?”
“I'll ride in to the mow, my dear, I'll ride in to the mow,” piped Billy, perched almost out of sight on the summit. But there was a fly in the ointment, or rather in the hot August air, that changed the whole idyllic scene in a flash. One moment the horses were standing quietly, waiting for the order to move on — Flower in the shafts and in the traces a much smaller but very strong and muscular animal, a bay horse called Mac — and the next they were all of a fidget, for though we could not, they could hear the gadfly's thin metallic whine. And then it struck.
It must have stung Mac, for before anyone could get to his head, he shot forward in one great galvanic bound, dragging Flower into her collar. And in terror she began to trundle, and immediately, it seemed, they were at the gallop, the Queen Mary sailing behind them, and on top of her, little Billy, flat on his belly, hanging on with every finger and toe.
If the field had been even bigger, it might have all ended happily as the horses tired. As it was, Mac ran slap into a five-strand barbed-wire fence and burst it. The pain of it brought him up short, and Flower executed an elephantine sort of swerve to miss him, and the Queen tipped up onto two wheels. Over went Albie's enormous load and down came Billy.
It could have been worse. Flower was all right, and Mac, though he was terribly cut all across his legs and broad chest, had suffered no irreparable harm and mended in due course. But at the time it was Billy we were worried about as we dashed up, convinced that a fall onto hard ground at speed from that height must have broken something, a leg maybe, possibly his scrawny neck.
And then we heard, coming from within that great pile of fallen sheaves, the familiar tones, even shriller than usual, and the familiar language, infinitely worse than ever, and out he popped like a little polecat. And seeing that he was all in one piece, we laughed till we cried. And the harder we laughed, the worse he swore.
I wouldn't put it past Billy Ball to be alive today, even though he'd have to be about a hundred and ten. But all the horses are long gone, and no hoof rings upon the cobblestones of the stables.
It was cold steel that ended my apprenticeship on Tytherington Farm. We were threshing barley at the side of a field called the Pig Ground (don't listen, Foxianna, I always thought). Excused, for once, being on the dust, I had been up in the pitch hole of the straw rick, feeding the sheaves to Albie. And when he had finished topping, I jumped down onto the wagon bed so that he could fill in the hole. Somebody, carelessly, had left a two-grain prong leaning against the side of the wagon, points up, and as I swung off the bed to the ground, one tine went clean through my leg between the bone and the Achilles tendon and stuck out four inches clear on the other side.
I can't say it hurt that much going in, but it did coming out. Albie stood behind me and locked his arms round my chest, and Tom and Henry laid hold of the handle. And it was one, two, three, heave, and goodbye to the Wylye Valley.
I didn't see Tytherington again for five years. Caesar may just have come and seen and conquered. I went abroad and fought and came home full of holes. But that's a very different story.
Chapter 3
MYRLE AND THE WAR
Who know no doubts or fears!
Then sing tow, row, row, row, row, row,
The British Grenadiers.
Now let's go back a little bit in time. By the end of 1936, I had spent four years at my prep school, Beaudesert Park in the Cotswolds, and had just completed my first two terms at Marlborough.
I spent a lot of my school holidays with Jamie an
d his sister, Margaret, who lived just up the lane from me. We called ourselves the Red Hand Gang, a title whose blood-thirstiness was unwarranted, since all we did was to play endless card games or board games or, mostly, to wander around the countryside in a carefree way that no parents these days could possibly allow. The gang's name came from the initiation ceremony (each scratched a finger with a pin and mingled the blood with that of the others) and certain tests had to be passed, such as leaping across ditches or climbing trees. My brother, Tony, was admitted when he reached the age of four or so, but with easier requirements (narrower ditches, shorter trees, no bloodshed).
On Christmas Day 1936, something happened that was to affect the whole of the rest of my life and, in due course, a large number of other lives.
I had been given an air rifle as a Christmas present and was trying it out, firing out of an upstairs window at the trunk of the old crab apple tree on the other side of the lawn, when, to my annoyance, I was required to stop and be introduced to a strange girl.
Mother and Father always had a large number of people, family and friends, for drinks on Christmas morning, and on this particular morning a couple who had recently moved into the district came with their two daughters. I didn't take much notice of the elder dark-haired one — she was sixteen, for goodness' sake, and of no interest to someone of my age. But the younger one was fourteen, like me, and she didn't look too bad as girls went. She had fair hair and large brown eyes and wasn't giggly or silly like most girls.
More important, it turned out that she bred budgerigars, which interested me since I also did in an aviary where I kept different-colored birds all together, breeding quite indiscriminately — greens, yellows, various sort of blues, resulting in some very odd shades. Whereas this girl, so she gave me to understand, kept the various colors in separate flights, so that each bred true.
Her name, I found out, was Myrle England. Myrle's mother's family had lived in India at some time, and the unusual spelling of her name (to rhyme with “girl”) had been found on a gravestone at Naini Tal.
We seemed to have quite a lot of things in common, especially a liking for animals. I had rabbits and tortoises and guinea pigs and mice and rats, but at that time I didn't have a dog of my own. Myrle did, a bullterrier called Sally, whom she had trained to do some clever things. If a door was left open, Sally would shut it on command by jumping up and pushing at it with her forefeet. She would also use those feet to “play” the piano, sitting up on the stool and producing loud crashing discords.
Over the next year or so, Myrle and I met a number of times, in the kind of uncomplicated relationship that children of that age have, and once the two families went on holiday at the same time to the same place. We played golf too, where I could show off by driving the ball twice as far as she could (though seldom in the right direction). One thing annoyed me, though. We had a competition, throwing stones from the bank into the big pond that fed water to the paper mills, and I was very miffed to find that she could throw farther than I could.
I can't remember being heartbroken when Myrle's father changed his job and the England family moved away up into the Midlands. But I told myself that there was no girl I liked better.
We did not actually meet again until I had left Marlborough and was working on that Wiltshire farm. In the summer of 1940, when I was eighteen and she nearly so, I had a letter from her. I wrote back, hoping that perhaps we could meet again, and I suppose our respective mothers must have liaised about this. I had lodgings in Sutton Veny, and if Myrle were to come all the way from London to visit, then patently she would have to stay a night or two, and equally patently, the parents considered, she must be properly chaperoned. They were confident that my landlady, Mary Elliott, was just the person for such a job, and so very soon I found myself taking the bus into Warminster and then standing, waiting, outside the railway station.
Shall I recognize her? I thought. She will have changed, after all it's been two years or more. Then out through the station doors she came. Once we had been much the same in height, but now I was a head taller. Her fair hair had been worn short, but now it hung in a blond pageboy style. Her big brown eyes were the same, but her face — what had happened to it? Much, much later she told me that she was worried about blushing — on just such an occasion as that reunion, perhaps — and someone (well-meaning — who knows?) had recommended that she use a certain kind of face powder, formulated to conceal blushes. It was a greenish powder. So there was I, confronted by this glamorous green-faced girl wearing a rather striking white-belted mackintosh with large lapels and epaulets.
I imagine we shook hands. I suppose that in due course I offered to carry her suitcase to the bus. I know that we talked all the way back to Sutton Veny — so much had happened to each of us since our last meeting — and during her stay we went for long walks and talked a lot more and laughed at the same sort of jokes and generally got on very well together. A great deal of the talk was about animals: our dogs and other pets, the farm animals, wild animals. When the visit was over and I had left her at the railway station, I rang Mother and told her roundly that I was going to marry Myrle one day.
There was to be one more meeting before we were both in uniform. This was in Devon, where her mother and sister, Pam, had taken a holiday cottage. This meeting, like the other, ended at a railway station — Taunton, in fact — where I took a train north to Bristol and she went east to London. And for each of us it was this time a painful parting, neither wanting to leave the other.
In the summer of 1941, having decided that it was high time I joined up (I didn't want to wait to be conscripted, I wanted to volunteer), I said goodbye to family and friends and took the bus to Bath and thence the train to Devizes, where the Wiltshire Regimental Depot was. I reported myself at the gates to a sergeant who was everything that sergeants should be — full-chested, straight-backed, mustached, fierce-eyed, loud-mouthed. Then occurred the following conversation:
Self: “Please. I've come to join up.”
Sergeant: “Five and seven, or nine and eleven?”
Self (thinking, Heavens, does he mean years?): “I just want to join up for the duration of the war.”
Sergeant (scornfully): “We don't take duration soldiers in this regiment, sonny. You have to sign for a regular term.”
Self: “Oh, well, thanks. Goodbye.”
And off I marched back to Devizes Station and caught the next train for Bath and thence the next bus home. There was no one about as I walked up the drive. My younger brother, Tony, was away at school and Mother and Father were not as yet sitting with their evening drinks under the big horse chestnut outside the drawing-room window. I climbed to the top of the tree and waited. Not long afterwards, they came out of the house and sat down in their chairs, Mother with a gin and tonic, Father with a pink gin. He lit his pipe, and she took from a case the first of many cigarettes, and they began to wonder aloud about their elder son, gone that day to take the King's shilling. Then, at some noise in the chestnut's leafy top, they looked up to see him climbing down.
Later that summer, I found out that the Brigade of Guards would accept duration enlistment (provided the volunteer was not too short), and I enlisted, as a recruit, in the Grenadier Guards and was sent off to the Guards' Depot at Caterham.
Myrle enlisted in the WAAF some months before I joined the army and was, in due course, commissioned before I was. She ended up at Fighter Command at Stanmore as a filterer, and once I took a train from Windsor to meet her. I don't remember that the guards-man saluted the pilot officer as he should have done, but I do recall that because of my lowly rank, I was not allowed into the officers' mess at Stanmore, and we had to say goodbye outside the gates of Fighter Command.
Looking back, it seems that at that time, the autumn of 1942, each of us had privately decided that we should get married, though this was never voiced. In fact, I never proposed to Myrle in formal fashion. One day she had come down from Stanmore to visit me at Windsor (I
too was now commissioned), and we walked beside the Thames and then went to a riverside pub. There I said, “I suppose it would be a good idea to be married, wouldn't it?” And she said, “Yes.” So plans began.
Both of us were underage — twenty-one was the start of adulthood in those days — and so we needed, each of us, parental consent. Mother, Father, and Myrle's mother were all agreeable, despite our youth. After all, we'd known each other such a time that there was little point in a long engagement, and before long I was sure to be posted abroad, so the sooner the wedding could be arranged the better. Though each of them — Father especially — must have considered the chances of our marriage being a short one. Many young frontline infantry soldiers did not live — as Father had only just managed to do — to tell the tale.
Myrle's father was a slightly different proposition, for he was abroad, a group captain in the RAF, stationed in Egypt. Though he knew me, of course — as a boy at any rate — he was less enthusiastic about the need for haste and said that he thought we should have an engagement of at least six months. Thankfully, one way or another, he was overridden, and we were married from my parents' house on 6 February 1943.
Because we were so young, we had not yet made many friends, so the guests were mainly composed of relations — mostly mine — and old friends of my mother's and father's. Three of my brother officers in the Grenadiers were there, and Jamie, onetime second-in-command of the Red Hand Gang, stood best man to me.
Chewing the Cud Page 2