A House in Order (11 page)

When morning came, the beaters had all gone from round the camp, but I saw the hooded car with the dogs draw up again in the empty space and watched the handler go inside the prison by the big gate. Almost at the same moment, the agronomist appeared on the verandah, talking cheerfully to my old interpreter, who came down the steps, acknowledged my guards, and said to me: ‘If you have anything to take, you have ten minutes in which to do so’ – and without another word turned his back on me and went into the house. But the agronomist stayed at the head of the verandah steps, slapping his gloves lightly, waiting for our transport.

I found the two pots with the leaf-cuttings of the house-leek and stood them beside me, to wait. After five minutes, the handler came out of the gate below with something to show his dogs, who again began their happy running to and fro, eager in the morning sun. In only a few minutes more, one of them picked up the trail with great excitement and both began to race up the hill, until checked by the handler, who attached their leads and then began to run with them. But at the same moment a hooded car, like a Black Maria but with canvas sides, drew up on the gravel road and one of my guards opened my door and beckoned me out.

The agronomist preceded me, taking his seat beside the driver. I followed with a pot in each hand, escorted by my guards, and climbed into the back by little metal steps. Two armed soldiers were already awaiting me on the black benches inside, and the opening by which I had got in was at once drawn tight with cords. The last thing I saw as they drew-to the last chink was a man pushing a carrier on rubber wheels down the verandah to the steps: having nowhere else to put them, they were returning my plants to die in their empty house. Then, one of my two guards pulled up the iron steps with a clang and we moved off fast, checking only an instant to let the excited dogs and the panting handler cross the road towards my old greenhouse, and then moving on briskly in the military way.

I was not in darkness because there was a square of artificial glass in the canvas roof, but I could see nothing but the sky – a fine day (temp. 70 deg. approx.). Very soon, the nearest guard made me shift my seat towards the front, and he and the other sat at the very back, secretly smoking cigarettes and blowing the smoke through the corded slits. As is the Army way, they
obliged me to smoke too, so I could be the culprit if the smoking was noticed. And so we went the whole morning, climbing and coming down one mountain pass and having to check a couple of times for troop movements, but pushing on at a fast speed generally.

Some time after noon, we stopped and I was ordered out. A vast blue mountain stood against the sky, but fields stretched from its base and, in front of me, a quiet country inn with a brook running near it and stone tables and benches in the little garden. This made me burst into tears, but the agronomist was understanding and, sending my guards to another table, sat beside me on a stone bench and, when I had recovered, said to me as he took the two pots:

He then put them aside carefully and went on:

He stopped while a company marched down the road with a lot of din, and then went on:

He then gave me a pat on the shoulder and a cheerful smile and, after ordering my guards back into the Black Maria, took me to the back of the empty inn and showed me my way. When I managed to say that I would rather remain a prisoner in his department than try to go free, he only gave me another smile and said:

He then turned his back on me and, holding a pot in each hand, went off to the Black Maria, which drove away immediately.

To walk forever, exposed on all sides in such a huge, flat valley, seemed terrifying to me after so many months with only a ten-foot walk of concrete in a glass shell. But I walked as I had been told simply because the foothills a mile away were thick with trees, in which I could bury myself and not have the feeling that for miles round a thousand eyes were watching, riflemen aiming, etc., etc. I kept my eyes fixed on the path, never on the blue mountain, and was too afraid to run, but so near to being hysterical and horrified to be out of my shell that I tried to make illusions for my protection, pretending that the path under my feet was my old concrete strip and my glass prison still built round me and covering me at every
step – thinking once or twice, in the terrified way I had months before: ‘They would never shoot a man through glass’; ‘They would wait for him to come into the open’, and managing even to see round me every pane of my old prison, with its dead putty and hundred cracks. So, when I met the first tree, I screamed as if I had bumped into a person, and then ran for my life into the wood, in and out of the trees uphill, until I was too breathless and had to rest. I could see on my right the broad ride I was supposed to take, but it was no better than the huge, open valley, being a hundred yards wide, and turfed, and where one would be one figure, shot at by hundreds from the surrounding trees. So I went on the hard way, keeping in a line with the ride but giving myself a wretched time sliding on the pine-needles and bending under the lower branches – all in hysterical tears most of the time and frantic when great open squares came with thousands of white stubs from felled trees, which I had to go all round, so as not to expose myself to vacancy and shots. But I persisted so hard that I hardly saw at first the thinning out of the forest, and suddenly, to my right, the halting of the ride at a metalled road, which I realized was a curve in a mountain pass. Rather than face that exposure, I sat down at the foot of the trees on the verge, until I heard the beginnings on the curves below of roaring engines and saw the head of a motorized column crawling up to me as slow as tortoises. Sure that they would open fire on me as soon as they saw me, I lay close under my trees, watching with amazement the white-stencilled words on the crawling vehicles and knowing, as I read these words, that this was my own language, needing no interpreter. But I would have sat under my trees forever, as I had once sat on my chair, not daring to shout or wave to attract notice, if a soldier, stepping off the road to relieve himself, had not caught sight of me and, being in no position to level a rifle, stared at me dumbfounded and yelling as I raised my arms. After which, it was all easier, others running up and escorting me to the road, as astonished to hear me speaking our common language as I was myself. When I fell down, a sergeant who arrived inquired if I was wounded, and when I said no, I was a prisoner, asked me with surprise from where? When I answered: ‘the greenhouse’, which was all I could think of, he seemed to decide my case was grave and kept me where I sat until the appearance of a subaltern, after which I rose, rank by rank, as the days passed, and from field hospital to base, etc., etc.

I am lucky in my village policeman – not only an old acquaintance but a real policeman, interested mainly, like real train workers, only in how to grow things. Especially on the long summer evenings he arrives on his trim scooter and parks it on the road above my greenhouse where it crackles and squawks out local messages. As he talks to me, he always has one ear open filtering these
ORDERS
, yet never so that he can’t talk shop with real understanding – a most efficient man who, through the badness of his pay, must make do with a greenhouse that he can never heat and so always be limited in what he is best at.

I am always warned of his arriving by the noises of his radio, after which he crosses the paddock and takes my wooden chair just inside the greenhouse door – always very spruce with his white-metal numbers and signs and his red face full of sturdiness. It is always a comfort to have him sitting there while I go on working with my plants, not only because he understands every
movement but because he can talk, slowly and sensibly, about every sort and kind of plant – one would be a fool to think that because a thing is new or rare one could spring it on him as if he were an ignoramus. What’s more, his understanding talk makes me talk too – and sometimes I talk far too much, because as time passes and I look back I imagine ridiculous things that might, however, just be true – the space of garden, for example, that ran from the verandah to the gravel road and where I found the cranesbills – this now nags at me all the time and I think of a hundred and one rarities that were there for the finding, but never discovered by me and never likely to be by any other person. The policeman understands my distress at this, and my shame in not having discovered more: he also knows – only too well by now, I’m afraid – the fate of my three hundred plants, my leaving behind of the storksbills and house-leeks, etc., etc., and can appreciate the blow to pride and conscience. When I get angry, looking back, he knows why, and though he says always ‘I’d feel the same’, he encourages me to believe that it wasn’t just time lost, that opportunity will come again, that knowledge is never wasted – all things I know myself but come helpfully from him. He is also my greatest help in the public part of these days, because until the public can give itself a new war to amuse itself, it lives off stories of the last one and must always go on cooking them up again and re-telling them in fresh versions – for what reason, is unknown to me. So,
MACKENZIE
is a name to every man, woman and child, particularly because he never came home alive, and his famous escapes known to every fool – which is where they would like to bring me in, as if I had not answered questions enough. But my two visitors are famous too, and always singing my heroism for the
refuge I gave them – and this, too, my good policeman understands when I confide the truth. ‘Perhaps you did better than you think,’ he says, crossing his legs, and once, pointing with a smile to his own war-ribbons: ‘Easier to win, when you’re not alone.’ He also says: ‘It’s what you allow to happen that counts too’ and ‘It’s how it worked out that signifies, isn’t it?’ – a question to which I have no answer, so go on working, always feeling ‘at home’ because it is like old times to have a ‘guard’.

In the end, his sharp ear catches his
ORDERS
from the parked scooter and off he goes, always leaving me better than when he came. Soon, I put away my tools, run my eye for the last time over my pots, adjust the ventilators for the warm night and check humidity. It is always odd to close the greenhouse door at last behind me and see the last light of the day in the sky, and summer dusk coming down. I have to cross the open paddock to my bungalow, and usually things go well enough. But sometimes as I walk over the grass, a little breeze comes up from the north-east behind me and I feel suddenly a big, cold hand pressing my shirt against my back – and with fifty yards to go, I run and run.