Father had somehow laid in ample supplies of wine — a difficult thing to do in those wartime days — and everyone drank to what some of them must have thought of as “those two children marrying.” So much so that two women, who had taken an instant dislike to one another, sat opposite at a table and let rip like fishwives.
Brother Tony, just turned fifteen, lay under the table (he'd had his share of wine) and listened as the names of various members of the animal kingdom were bandied above him: “Stupid cow!” “Making a pig of yourself!” “How catty can you be?” Next there was a thump, and Tony, lifting the edge of the tablecloth, was treated to the sight of the two women wrestling on the floor.
Then at last the local taxi took us away to Bath, where for the first time in our joint experience of railway stations, we rode off together on the puffer train. To Warminster, in fact, and then by taxi to Sutton Veny and Home Farm once more and our kind ex-chaperone Mary and her husband, Ted, though this time we were not put in separate bedrooms. It wasn't a very long honeymoon — forty-eight hours was all each of us could get — but a little later we managed nine days' leave, which was spent at the Anchor at Porlock Weir on the Somerset coast, and we walked on Exmoor.
But time was fleeting, and before long I was on embarkation leave, to be posted overseas with a number of Grenadier officers. Myrle was given compassionate leave to come down to Windsor and stay, at the Castle Hotel.
Then at last came yet another railway-station scene. I remember, with the most painful clarity, leaning out of the window of a compartment filled with friends all excited to some degree at the prospect before them — as young men are before they learn what war's all about — and kissing my new wife goodbye and seeing this small solitary figure walking away down the platform of Windsor Station and not looking back, resolutely not looking back. I must have thought, Will I ever see her again?
It was to be eighteen months before I did.
First there was a long troopship voyage round the Cape of Good Hope and up the Red Sea to Egypt. Then a long drive westwards along the Mediterranean shore of Africa, to Tripoli, a journey that was to end with saying goodbye to a large number of chameleons that I'd collected en route — I didn't think they'd be too keen to accompany me on the invasion of Italy, which is what we were about to do.
We landed at Salerno, south of Naples, in early September of 1943 and slowly fought our way northwards. There were a lot of casualties, of course. Many men in my platoon were killed or wounded, and among the young officers of the battalion, I lost many friends. But apart from being frightened stiff a lot of the time, I was unscathed, even managing to miss one particular battle at Monte Camino, or Murder Mountain as it became known, where the casualties were terribly high. I was tucked up in bed in a Naples hospital with jaundice.
We fought slowly on northwards, the Germans defending each position bravely, so that in the mountainous terrain there was never any chance of a breakthrough. Then, at last, after eleven months of active service, I met my Waterloo (just south of Florence).
We were dug in among the trees of a hilltop wood, my platoon and that of my friend Charlie. Charlie was sent off on a patrol, leaving me supposedly looking after both platoons. At around 5 A.M. the Germans suddenly put down a heavy barrage on us, so that there seemed to be shells bursting everywhere around us as we huddled in our slit trenches. Suddenly the stonk was over and in came the German attack, mounted, I learned much later, by men of the Storm Battalion of the Hermann Goering Division, very violent men armed with small rocket guns and a flamethrower.
The flamethrower was the first thing I saw, about ten yards in front of me. Luckily it misfired, spilling out a pitiable flame not six feet long, and before its operator could repair the thing, one of my Bren gunners shot him dead. I was by now standing behind a tree, shooting at the enemy with my German pistol, when suddenly I saw clearly that the hand grenade that had just been lobbed at me was a British one, a thirty-six grenade, what used to be called a Mills bomb. I had this split second of seeing the thing clearly, as at cricket a fielder might see a skied ball on its way to him. I've always supposed that when Charlie went off on his patrol that night, his men had left some grenades ready primed and the men of the Storm Battalion of course made use of them.
This one would certainly have killed me had it not been for my good old tree, which must have taken a lot of the blast, but anyway the grenade still did me a good deal of damage — leg, bottom, tummy. And though strangely I don't remember feeling much pain, no doubt because of shock, I do recall being very frightened that I would be left, lying helpless, to the tender mercies of those violent Germans. I cried out, as loudly as I could, “This position will be defended to the last man and the last round!” just like something out of a Boys' Own story.
Over fifty years later, in Australia, to which he had immigrated, I met once again my platoon sergeant, Bill Grandfield, and in a Sydney pub he told me, “When I saw you lying there bleeding, I went berserk!”
He had stood over my body blasting away with his tommy gun, and the rest of my platoon let rip too. Once the stretcher bearers had carted me off, Bill was in fact in command of both my platoon and Charlie's, and he held off the enemy for nearly a couple of hours till reinforcements arrived. He was, I'm glad to say, awarded the Military Medal. We had eight others wounded besides myself. The attackers, it was later found in the diary of one of them who had been taken prisoner, picked up twenty-six of their own dead.
I won't weary you with long descriptions of my recovery from the wounds inflicted on me by a German soldier throwing a British grenade at a British Grenadier in an Italian wood. Suffice it to say that at a field dressing station they operated on me to remove lots of shrapnel and stitched up all my flesh wounds, and then they sent me to a hospital at Caserta, where I seemed to be mending nicely. Suddenly, however, I became very ill with trouble in one lung. It seemed that a tiny bit of something, clothing perhaps, had been blown into that lung and caused an abscess, and now I was flown down to hospital in Naples (the same one where I'd had jaundice eight months before).
Here things worsened, as I now had something called a cerebral embolus, a nasty business that made me — before I lost consciousness — feel sure that I was going mad. When I came to, I had been put in a single-bed side room. Myrle's photograph was on the table beside me. I turned it back to front, saying, “I shan't see her again.” However, this dramatic forecast turned out to be wrong. For thanks to that new wonder drug, penicillin, I gradually got better, well enough to be sent home in a hospital ship and then to hospital in Liverpool.
Eighty-Eight Shell
The hair moves on the heads of dead men
In a little wind that is bitter with cordite
And sweet with the smell of death. All three
Lie starfished on the headland of the meadow.
When the shell came howling in through the hedge
One had his mouth full of chocolate, and
One had his mind full of girls, and one
Was watching a ladybird climbing his rifle.
The jaws are slack and the minds are blank
And eyeballs question the summer sky.
The rifle's crumpled. And what became
Of the ladybird, God alone knows.
1946
Chapter 4
A HOME OF OUR OWN
Friday 20 November
Mobbs's dispersal sale. Bought two cows
and various oddments. Missed by bull.
When, some days later, the ward doors opened to admit visitors — wives, sweethearts, parents — one of those visitors was my own wife. Myrle told me later that she was frightened she wouldn't recognize me in the long line of beds containing sick men, many amputees among them. I must have looked very different to her from that day on the platform at Windsor Station. My weight had dropped from 168 pounds to 112 pounds, and I had to lift one arm with the other in order to wave fondly at her. But seeing her again was, of course, the greatest of tonics
and I began to get better.
A final irony was that on her second long journey by rail up to Liverpool to see me, she walked into the ward and there was my bed, empty. They had suddenly sent me to a convalescent home near Weston-super-Mare, and neither had been able to contact the other. She was now faced with a return journey with no return ticket and, what was worse, not enough money to pay her fare. With admirable aplomb she managed to find a seat in a compartment in which there were a number of officers who had decided to play poker to while away the long trip and kindly asked her, Could she play? Would she like to? She could and she would and she won enough off them to do away with her worries about money.
From the convalescent home, I went to the only place I then thought of as home'the house where I'd been born. For the greatest part of two years Myrle and I lived with my parents, and my return to health is best judged by the fact that in October 1945 Myrle gave birth to a daughter, Juliet.
At around the same time I was invalided out of the army, my thoughts turned to farming again, the thing I'd always wanted to do. So back to the Wylye Valley went Myrle and I and the baby, accompanied by Anna, the first jointly owned dog we'd had.
Anna was a black-and-tan smooth-haired dachshund, and when we had first collected her as a puppy, we feared she might be deaf, for she paid no attention to what we said to her. We learned there are dogs and there are dachshunds, strong-minded individuals who prefer to have things their own way — always.
We lived in a tiny old house called Tudor Cottage, where the only bath was a tin one taken in front of the fire, and the only sort of lavatory was an earth closet, or outhouse, in the garden. The contents of this I would bury in the field behind, and because I used a rabbiting spade with a curved blade, that field, when finally we left, was a strange sight, its ordinary grassy green stippled with a great number of perfectly round very dark green dots.
Tytherington Farm seemed suddenly to have jumped forward into the twentieth century, you might say. The horses were almost all gone, machinery ruled, the downs were a sea of corn. Only Tom and Henry and Billy and the rest were just as I had remembered. Like the bombers we had then watched flying to Bristol, the war had passed over their heads and left them quite untouched.
I wasn't really much good on the farm, I wasn't yet strong enough, but I still wanted to become a farmer. That was my long-held ambition. So the next move was to leave Myrle and the baby with Mother and Father and go back to school, to an agricultural course, in fact, set up in a Wiltshire manor house for ex-servicemen.
I shared a bedroom with three other men. There was Tommy, who was not long out of hospital where they'd been treating him for what people in Father's war called “shell shock.” There was Pat, the eldest of us, urbane and kindly, who knelt by his bed each night to say his prayers. There was Sandy, who on most nights was not there to see this, for he had acquired a local light-of-love with whom he passed his evenings. “Shredded Wheat” he called her, and he always carried a mackintosh on these forays to lay her upon and save her from the damp. And there was me, only remarkable for the large cage that I kept in the bedroom, containing some hamsters. Unfortunately, these in due course escaped, and Lackham House (which is nowadays a very reputable agricultural college) suffered a hamster infestation, as the creatures colonized it and bred at speed. The German prisoners of war who were doing the cooking pursued them through the kitchens, brandishing soup ladles.
Our course turned out to be a great deal shorter than planned, because the winter of 1947 froze everything solid and we were all sent home for many weeks. But at the end everyone, dullards and laggards alike, was given a certificate, and we all set out to look for work in the agricultural industry, as cowmen or stockmen of some sort, perhaps as farm managers. Some, a very few — Pat for one — actually bought or rented a farm and began in business on their own account.
As for me, the family business came to my rescue. In the early years of the last century Grandfather, Charles King-Smith, had moved from a paper mill in Devon to take over one in a village called Bitton, in Gloucestershire, midway between Bristol and Bath. All paper mills need plentiful supplies of water, and the Golden Valley Paper Mills stood beside and fed off a tributary of the River Avon called the Boyd Brook, which ran slowly down the Golden Valley. The mill (oddly sometimes singular, sometimes plural) was a fairly small one, specializing in the making of high-quality paper, from rags rather than from wood pulp, and it was very much a family firm.
After the Great War, Grampy K-S was joined by my father and by his next brother down, my uncle Joe, who had been a prisoner of the Germans. He was really named Philip, but apparently as a boy he had had a favorite cat called Joe, who somehow lent him its name. Possibly they exchanged and the cat became Philip. I don't know.
Twenty or so years later, Grandfather, Father, and Uncle were joined at the mill by my brother, Tony, my cousin Beresford, and my uncle Terence. There would, I suppose, have been space for me, but by then I was set upon farming. (What chaos I would have caused in the business had I had anything to do with its accounts!)
Golden Valley Paper Mills had done well during the war, and Father, with the agreement of Grampy K-S and Uncle Joe, decided that the firm would buy a small farm and there install me as manager, ostensibly to supply the mill canteen with milk and eggs. So off I went with my little diploma tucked underneath my arm to look for a place of my own.
Hindsight makes Clever Dicks of us all, and it's easy for me now to see the long string of mistaken judgments that threaded through my farming life. Hastily and inadequately educated in the science and business of agriculture, after a spasmodic practical training on a huge downland chalk farm with no milking herd, I then, with no further experience, settled hastily upon a much too small dairy farm in poor order (heavy soil, no drainage, low fertility, good percentage of useless woodland). It was called Woodlands Farm (logical really, because seven or eight of its fifty acres were, indeed, covered in trees) on the edge of a village with the unromantic name of Coalpit Heath (again logical, for there had been opencast mining there).
But at last we had a home of our own, our first proper home, and now at last we were to be farmers.
I shall never forget the day of the dispersal sale at Woodlands Farm, when the previous farmer was moving out. The last lot on offer to the crowd of bidders was the bull. Six feet away, the Shorthorn bull stared fixedly at me with hot eyes. I don't remember thinking much about the length of his horns. But they did look sharp. He was blowing hard, and he shuffled his forefeet in the straw of the ring, like a boxer. Then he put his head down.
Up to this point it had been an unremarkable farm dispersal sale. They had dealt with the machinery and the implements and all the usual job lots — old tins of paint or grease, bottles of medicine for stock, coils of rusty barbed wire — for which there was always someone to bid half a crown or five shillings. There had been a few crates of ancient hens and a couple of fowl houses. They had sold the young stock and then the sixteen dairy cows, of which I had bought two, paying the top price and wearing a carefully contrived expression to show the assembled company that there wasn't much about a good milker that I didn't know. And then Lot Eighty-seven was called.
“Now then, gentlemen,” said the auctioneer in a voice rich with promise from his perch upon a four-wheeled wagon beside the rough circular sale ring out in the yard. “Now then! Last lot of the day, and worth waiting for as you will soon see.” He paused and looked up towards the open door of the cowshed. “Bring him out, please.”
Heads turned as a confused noise arose from inside, of snorting and shouting and a low roaring.
“Lot Eighty-seven,” went on the auctioneer. “Two-year-old light roan Dairy Shorthorn bull — come on, please, bring him along.” And at that moment there appeared in the doorway the son of the outgoing farmer and the bull. It was not quite clear who was bringing whom along. Young Mobbs had hold of the bull pole certainly, had the bull's head well up by the pressure of the pole on the
nose ring, but there was a certain air of desperation about him.
For a moment the bull stopped dead, bemused by the sudden sunlight and the crowd of people before him, and then three things happened. Young Mobbs lowered the tip of the pole, trying to drag the animal on into the ring. The bull, disregarding the pain in his nose, set his feet and pulled him back. And then a helpful bystander raised his stick and with a loud cry of “Get on, yer girt hummock!” brought it down upon the broad back of Lot Eighty-seven.
Five seconds later, the bull stood in the center of the sale ring, and as he swung his head from side to side, everyone could see the snap link of the bull pole dangling from his nose while at the cowshed door Young Mobbs gawped helplessly at the broken-off staff.
For the whole of that morning I had been in a dream, an understandably selfish dream. For me, this was no ordinary sale. Old Mobbs was going out and I was coming in. Things that I had bought — pig troughs, poultry fountains, pitchforks, fencing stakes, rolls of wire netting — would remain here, be used here. Lot Seventy (Buttercup) and Lot Seventy-one (Barbara) would stay and be milked in that cowshed, my cowshed. Dreamily I had stood among the press of local farmers around that makeshift ring of straw bales with a token fence of some old posts and a couple of strands of plain wire. Now suddenly there was an eruption of noise and movement.
Round the ring went the bull like a circus performer. Old Mobbs was standing with his hand resting on top of a fence post as he watched his cattle sold, and one of those short horns sliced the meat off his thumb as neatly as a butcher's knife. Warning shouts drowned Old Mobbs's cry of pain as the crowd melted away, into the cowshed, onto the wagon bed, behind walls, into sheds and loose boxes. Old men, fat men, even lame men leaped for safety with the speed and agility of gazelles. Only the dreamer remained.
Chewing the Cud Page 3