A Solitary War (29 page)

Owing to hunger, and the nearness of fields where rows of cabbages were standing, there were thousands, tens of thousands of pigeons now flying from wood to spinney, from spinney to copse. They were as wary as they were destructive. Turnip-tops, kale, cabbage—they ate them all. The native ring-doves had been joined by flocks of immigrant stock-doves. A ten-acre field of clover, were it not covered by the snow, would have been stripped in a few days.

The regular pigeon-shooter sometimes had dummy birds, made of wood or lighter material, as decoys. They were set out in the open, head to wind, thirty yards away from a camouflaged shelter in a field of roots or clover. Live pigeons were shot as they glided down to join the feast. In the woods a weighted string was
sometimes
slung over a branch by means of a catapult, the dummy drawn up to perch in the tree.

Pigeons were so numerous during this period that decoys were not needed. They flew from River wood to Brock Hanger, thence to Bustard or Meadow woods where, if disturbed, they went on to the Pine Wood or the Oaks where he had his shelter.

He noticed that pigeons usually circled above a wood before pitching. One must not move while they were preparing to pitch. And certainly not look up. The brilliant eye of the pigeon saw the grey or pink movement which was an enemy face; there was a warning clap of wings over the bird's back, followed by flight-arcs of wheeling birds breaking up in alarm.

He daubed his face with burnt cork as the first reports of 12-bore guns came over the frozen fields and told that the flocks were coming in to roost. He imagined flights clapping through the sycamore twigs of the Hanger, rising high, circling several times, then spiralling down to select roosting places with glide and final flutter, to grip with red feet.

Bang!
Bang!
in the nearer distance; snow-soft echoes. Who was in Meadow Wood? Whoever it was, he had not bothered to ask permission. It did not sound like Matt, who kept a fearsome
single-barrel
brown with rust in the broken wooden corn-bin in the
cowshed.

The scattered flock was wheeling out of gunshot and indecisively flying around, leaderless and alarmed. Would the oakwood beside the frozen Nightcraft wheat—those green-yellow gramophone
needles under the snow—attract them? In a few moments they might be coming over, to circle, see no danger, glide down to alight in the branches of the ivy-clad pine at the western corner. He hoped so; for under that tree ‘Scroggy' with his wooden leg was settled in a shelter of branches and beech boughs.

Bang!
Bang!
startlingly near. The old cavalryman was in his hide.

Pigeons flew over Phillip's shelter.
Bang!
Bang!
jolting his left shoulder and striking his cheek-bones; he was out of practice, his fingers were cold. A pigeon hesitated, recovered, and flew on.

He realised that his eye was out, his nervous reflexes hesitant after one hundred and sixty hours' concentration at the desk in two weeks. But almost immediately other birds flew in, for the light was growing grey. He reloaded quietly after picking the cases out of the chambers of the old damascene barrels; closed the breech, pushed the safety catch backwards with a slight click, raised the gun gradually, and fired at two birds settling together on a
beech-tree
branch. Satisfaction as he went out to pick them up.

While waiting for other birds he opened one of the crops and began to count the clover-leaves packed tightly like a green rubber ball inside. He soon gave up counting—there were thousands of fragments. During the previous autumn he had shot a pigeon and started to count the wheat-berries in its crop, and round about 1,500 had given up. At a rough estimate 10,000 pigeons in half a day had taken enough to make—at the eventual harvest—500 loaves of bread.

It was twilight, it was lonely, it was cold. He went down the Home Hills to the farm road and the gate, and so to the village street and Mrs. Hammett's cottage, carrying three rock pigeons.

*

“I don't fancy them myself,” remarked Mrs. Hammett in her serene and equable voice. The room was warm and well-lit behind the black-out on the seeming-dead village. “But I'll cook the pigeons for you if you would like them.”

“I thought Charley might like them, Mrs. Hammett.”

Charley was sitting at his usual place in the high-backed Windsor chair. His steel spectacles were on his nose. He held in his hands, thickened by more than sixty years of work, his usual
newspaper
,
The
Daily
Clarion.
With a considerable effort he managed to move round slightly in his chair, and look at Phillip over his glasses.

“Ho,” said Charley, “Poog'ns.”

“For you, Charley,” said Mrs. Hammett, distinctly.

“Come you and set in mah cheer,” replied Charley, struggling to get up.

Mrs. Hammett leaned forward, and mouthing towards him said, “He says, For you'.”

“Well, ah'm a-gett'n up,” replied Charley.

Mrs. Hammett shook her head. “Pidg'ins!” she cried.

“Who is?” asked Charley. “Aw, blest if I ken understand,” he muttered, changing position laboriously to get the slate. He spat expertly upon it, rubbed it with the ball of his thumb, and held out the slate to her. Mrs. Hammett laughed quietly to herself. “He can't hear what we say,” she said, with a gentle gaiety. “His deafness worries him.”

When he heard that he was to have stewed pigeons, a look of contentment came over the old man's face. “Werry nice change o' wittals, master,” he remarked to Phillip over his spectacles. “Thank ee, sir.”

Charley pronounced words in the way of olden time; his ‘vs' were ‘ws'. Phillip had heard men in his boyhood speak like that; and he felt, when he heard it, as though an encumbering obstacle were removed from his being and he had become once again a simple man.

“Did you enjoy yourself in the wood?” asked Mrs. Hammett quietly, not pausing in the cutting of slices of bread and butter. “A nice change, I expect, after so much writing. But it was cold, wasn't it?”

“There's an iceberg-air that moves over the farm, I've noticed, nearly every afternoon, whatever the temperature. I've heard it's called the Arctic Circle air.”

“It's been very cold in here, despite the fire.”

“I find it beautifully warm.”

“You've been walking, you see,” said Mrs. Hammett, as to a child. “Now would you like some fried plaice? It's a little dry, perhaps, but you said you would be here at six o'clock, and it's twenty minutes after the hour. Billy has been waiting for you, he got here at six o'clock. He went out to find you.”

“I do apologise, Mrs. Hammett.”

“Well, you will both have to eat the dry plaice. Ah, here is Billy.”

“Hullo, Dad!”

They sat down. The fish was delicious with the thin-sliced bread and butter. “I could not get a lemon, I'm afraid,” said Mrs.
Hammett, warming the tea-pot. “Nor the China tea you like,” she murmured. “Both are unobtainable in either of the village shops now.”

“It's the best cup of tea I've had for weeks,” Phillip said, sipping gratefully.

“I'm glad you're pleased,” she said. “Is the fish nice, Billy?”

“Ah, 'bor!” said the boy, with a wag of his head.

Mrs. Hammett laughed. “That's a real village expression. How's Nimrod getting on—‘doin'', as they say?”

“He's O.K.,” said Billy. Then he repeated his line that had always in the past got a laugh from Teddy Pinnegar. “He lays his lugs well back, lets out a terrific roar, gets into top gear, and rushes round the yards, scrapping in his tracks as he rounds the corners!” Changing his mood, Billy began to discuss ploughing. He asked Mrs. Hammett if she knew how to open a top and make up a furrow with a tractor-plough.

“I'm afraid I don't, but I would like to know.”

The two talked about ploughing for several minutes. In an aside to Phillip Mrs. Hammett said softly, “He has no one to talk to, you see.”

I must take him to Lucy, Phillip was thinking.

*

He read his newspaper, a relief from long hours at his writing table. Russia was attacking Finland. Baron Mannerheim was a hero in the columns of all the British newspapers. Russia was
described
as an aggressor nation, equal in guilt with Germany. There were demands for an expeditionary force to be sent to the help of Finland.

The Rector, bicycling past that morning, had called out to Phillip, “We jolly well ought to declare war on Russia, and teach them the lesson they deserve!”

“Propaganda, Rector, surely? An excuse to occupy the Scandinavian peninsular, and get to the iron ore from Narvik.”

The Rector, about fifty years of age, had come to the village about a year before Phillip. He had come filled with determination to do all he could to improve its ragged and disunited life. He was finding it difficult. The years of unemployment had left their mark. When first Phillip had met him the rector had declared how glad he was that Phillip had come there. Perhaps between the two of them they might be able to get a cricket team going again? “I would like to help you, Rector, but may I ask you to be patient with me if I
appear to be laggard, as there is so much reclamation work to be done on the farm?”

The Rector gave lectures on the coastal dialect. He was a native of the county and an authority on local speech. He charged a modest fee which went to the fund for the restoration of the church fabric. Even this was subject to criticism. One woman who kept the Mudhook Inn in the hamlet of Durston which lay along the coastal road had once expressed her contempt of the Rector while Phillip was having a glass of beer in her pub.

“Fancy telling us what we know already! Anyway, what right hev a foreigner to make money out of our way of speaking?” The foreigner had been born twenty miles inland from the hamlet. Yes, it was Old England, all right.

Whatever he did, the Rector was liable to give offence to
someone.
It was not long before he found out that he had taken on a task which absorbed fruitlessly most of his vital force. Some of the cottage women objected to being visited and asked about their lives and doings. ‘He's narthin' but a Nosey Parker!' Yet if he didn't go to see them, that too was a cause for complaint. ‘He's takin' the big penny but not doin' th' wark!'

In Charley's paper, which Phillip borrowed for variety, there was a photograph of the volunteers to fight for Finland having drinks in a London night-club at one more final farewell party. In the stop-press it said that the Mannerheim Line was broken. The Finnish war was over before the parties.

“Smash and grab, I call it,” said Mrs. Hammett. That was what the sub-editor had headed it.

“Poog'ns,” exclaimed Charley, suddenly. He beamed at Phillip over his spectacles. “Nice change o' wittals.”

It was not easy to leave the warmth of Mrs. Hammett's cottage, but sooner or later they must go home, father and son hand-in-hand groping their way in darkness past the pump and down the slippery yard to the new white gate and the road beyond.

The wooden hut marked
FISH
AND
CHIPS
opposite was dark and silent these nights. It was closed for lack of custom. There were no troops in the camp. The anti-aircraft range was deserted. The pipes of the new bathrooms and wash-houses were split by frost. The troops which during the summer days and nights of a few months previously had roared out songs in the pubs and
four-letter
words in the streets were now somewhere behind the ‘
impregnable
' Maginot Line.

Father and son walked down the empty street of the village, Phillip thinking that it was as in the Napoleonic wars.

*

And so January wore on. The cold of winter set bleaker on garden, street, and field. Most of the mornings on the farm were spent in filling the inadequate tub standing on an inefficient sled made of an old thick ladder to which Matt and Luke had nailed new lengths of three-eighths tongued-and-grooved planks, skids to glide over ice and trodden snow. The planks were split, for no one on the farm knew how to hammer a nail into wood. The wrong nails—floor-board brads—had been taken from the workshop and banged into the oak sides of the stout granary ladder built to carry men bearing 250-lb. sacks of wheat on their backs as they climbed to the drying loft above. The nails banged into the oak were bent over and knocked sideways; the thin, straight-grained deal wood was split in many places.

“Now what's a plank or two, master? My beasts must drink, else yar'll be mobbin' me for lettin'm shrink. Blast, I don't want to see my beasts do that, you know that, 'bor!”

“But these planks were set aside for building only. Wood is likely to be scarce, even unobtainable, in the years ahead.”

“Yew don't want to meet trouble halfway, guv'nor. The war'll be over sooner than you think. The Jarmans haven't got no money. Their big bosses hev sent it all to Ameriky. Yew can't fight a war wi'out money, guv'nor.”

“Did you read that in your newspaper, Matt?”

“Ah now, I only take it for the football pools,” said Matt, on the defensive. “But ya'll see,” he continued with a wise air. “I'll tell you what,” he added, with a hint of nearly aggressiveness, though that was hardly in Matt's nature, “mark you my words, yar'll see if I'm not right. The Jarmans haven't got any old jannerals, and the young ‘uns don't know what to do.” Seeing Phillip's look he changed direction. “My Gor, what a winter it's bin! Can you get me four good calves when you go to Yarwich, master? The second-calve cows can take another apiece, now your drains don't need no more sour milk.”

“Mabel, Molly, Polly and Dolly?”

“Thet's it.”

Phillip could see that Matt was pleased that the guv'nor had remembered the names of his bestowal, for of course they were Matt's cows. Did the mere signing of a cheque make them his cows, when for all the days and not a few nights they had been in
Matt's constant care and thought? Had he criticized Matt for not knowing how to use nails and a hammer? For not having ‘larned' the trade of joinery? Looking into the brown eyes of the honest and faithful old fellow, he wished for more patience in his own being.