A Solitary War (30 page)

*

The severe cold continued to grip the countryside. Day after day, morning, noon, and night, he sat writing by his wide glass window, warmed by the electric radiator drawing mysterious power from the wainscoting.

One morning Billy seemed hot and feverish. Phillip told him to stay in bed. He took the boy's temperature. It was 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Billy lay in his day clothes, owing to the risk of chill when he had to get out of bed periodically. Phillip fed him on soups, milk, and grape-fruit out of tins. He had bought eight dozen tins, to have them by him. There were still hundreds of cartons stacked in the grocer's shop at Crabbe. Billy was most patient, and never complained. He had his dead mother's nature, with her fair hair and china blue eyes. The father had a fantasy that Billy, too, might die, and leave him alone, alone, as Barley had done.

*

The frost struck deeper into earth and all things above the earth. The lavatory pan in the farmhouse froze solid and burst. Pigeons became less fearful of men. From his window Phillip saw bird after bird flutter to the iced heads of the cabbages. One bird was so weak that it could not rise again after pecking its fill. It fell asleep on a cabbage.

The winter was said to be the coldest for forty years. All news of the weather, or mention of it over the B.B.C., was censored. One of the soldiers returning from leave in London to the anti-aircraft camp near Pine Wood told Phillip that the Thames was frozen over for eight miles between Teddington and Sunbury, and that twelve inches of ice covered the reservoir near Hounslow. Mrs. Hammett said that a wherry loaded with sugar-beet on one of the East Anglian rivers, after starting its journey to the factory in clear water, had been frozen in. When the water-level fell the wherry turned over and sank.

Phillip saw a heron standing bleakly in his garden. The river was covered with ice. Two mornings later the heron was standing near the cottage door, ice on its feathers. It was weak with hunger and cold. A bittern actually entered an inn at Horning Ferry on the
Broads, but although fed and cared for it died a day or two later. At the Swan Hotel seven wild swans came for food, trusting
themselves
to man. They became tame, and walked up the village street for scraps of food regularly every day, followed by gulls, ducks, coots, water hens, and dabchicks. The gulls were rapacious. They snatched food from the more demure coots. The kindliness of the villagers kept many of the birds alive.

The wasting of food was not yet illegal: this was the period generally known as ‘the phoney war'.

Walking about the garden he found several blackbirds, robins, and thrushes dead in odd corners. Each little bird's track was visible in the snow. It had hopped, a few inches at a time, between long pauses, to a hiding place, and crouching there, had slept into death.

The water system in the empty farmhouse had long been frozen up. Now it looked as though they would be without water even from the polluted river. For days he had been filling several pots and pails and tubs and standing them on the wash-house floor, cracking the ice when needing water.

One night he brought a faggot into the deserted parlour. He trod it back with booted foot before setting light to it in the hope of blasting a way by the very rush of flames up the wide chimney. If the chimney caught fire and cleared itself with a roar and final eruption of flame and sparks so much the better. If the house caught fire, let it burn down. Flames and stifling smoke poured out over the brick lintel and into the room, dulling the electric light. The chimney appeared to be entirely choked; and yet the way was clear, for sky could be seen when he bent down to peer up. Owing to the ill shape of the chimney, big enough below to hold two yearling bullocks side by side, and suddenly diminishing near the ridge of the roof, the smoke eddied in rebound up there, causing a secondary rebound just above the lintel.

Book or no book, that chimney would have to be tackled. The village bricklayer, without work owing to the frost, was called in. Phillip had some half-section drain pipes in his considerable store of building materials bought at bankrupt sales before the war. His idea, he explained to George, was to dig a rectangular sunken pit in front of and below the hearth wherein to lay half-pipes facing the hearth, and connect them to the outside wall by whole pipes laid in a trench under the floor. This might not cure the
down-draught
in the chimney, but it would help to stop the pull of hearth against hearth in the two rooms when both fires were
alight. If both hearths had their
lebensraum
,
their living-space, he told George, with access to raw materials of air, then they might not continue to be mutually destructive of one another.

The floor was soon a trodden mess of mortar, broken pavers, and chalky loam. Phillip had some perforated bricks, which when inlaid at the foot of the outside walls, at the end of the pipes, would prevent rats and perhaps grass snakes coming to visit the parlour on some future occasion when the farmhouse really was a home. George said that he could lay the pipes inside with mortar, but the bricks outside would have to wait until the frost went. He was a nice fellow, an eager worker. Phillip left him to it, and returned optimistically to Mrs. Hammett's for tea.

The next morning, as he and the men were littering the yards with barley straw from the stack below the frozen hills, Matt said solemnly, “Yew ought to thank God, guv'nor, that the straw stacks are down here this weather. Just think you of the muddle we'd a' bin in if we'd ha' to go up the hills to get straw, the roads icy, the hosses slippin' down and breaking the shafts and their own legs.”

Dear Matt. He had forgotten his old objection to the plan of grouping the corn stacks down there, convenient for threshing, for carting corn, for straw. Everyone else made their stacks in the fields to get the corn ‘safe' while the weather was good; but with the hillside road known as the New Cut and the Flying Column of lorry, tractor with large trailer, together with the two horse-drawn tumbrils, they had been able to build the stacks down there in the same time as in the fields—quicker, indeed, for there were no pauses while vehicles waited to be unloaded. It was sweat, sweat, sweat, but it was good, good, good.

*

Billy was still in bed, with a temperature of 100 degrees. His father began to feel the loneliness of the hard blank weather weigh upon him. The only bright occasions in his living were in Mrs. Hammett's cottage, sitting at her table, reading, while old Charley sat in his chair and perused the newspaper through his steel spectacles and Mrs. Hammett tended to their wants. He had never eaten such nice food, Phillip told her, and she replied that the food was ordinary and somewhat dull, for she was limited by what was brought to her from the shops.

“I am glad you enjoy it,” she said, equably, “but I cannot understand why you haven't had better. You should have had it, that's all I can say.”

Phillip thought that Mrs. Hammett was a rare woman, with
perfect command of what she did. Her mind was clear because she used her brain. She used her head to think with, or rather to cogitate and plan, and that was, in his experience, an uncommon thing to find in a man or a woman; but when it was found, how happy life and work could be.

“And how is Billy to-day?”

“He seems all right, but his temperature remains high.”

“Have you had a doctor to him?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, it might be advisable to ask the doctor to come. How long has he been in bed now, two weeks is it?”

“I'll telephone the doctor.”

It was warm in the upstairs room of River View. Phillip had become used to and therefore fond of his sanctuary, with its bed, chair, chest of drawers, and scrubbed wooden floor. In the next room Billy lay, never complaining, rising on an elbow thrice a day to sip soup, milk, and grape-fruit. Phillip took his
temperature
at morning and night. It was always the same.

“Well, Billy, how do you feel?”

“Okay.”

“Food all right?”

“Yes thanks.”

“Warm?”

“Yes.”

“Not feeling sick, or chilly?”

“No.”

“Bored with lying in bed?”

“Not very much.”

That was their usual conversation: followed by, “Well, I think I'll do some writing now. Let me know if you want anything.”

“Okay.”

Sometimes Phillip would feel reproachfully that the poor boy was living a dreadful life.

“Are you miserable without Mother, and the others? Tell me if you are.”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Only a little.”

Closing the door he pulled the blankets over the windows and settled to write. Day after day, night after night, in the same little room, with freedom for his thoughts: safe from the world within the confining distempered walls and white-washed ceiling: warmed
by the glowing bars of the electric radiator. When the blankets shut out the day he felt an added security. Pipe alight, pen and paper on table before him; the radio set at elbow, with its range of European countries and their music.

At midnight Billy was often awake.

“Goodnight, Billy. Feeling better?”

“I'm okay, thanks. Dad. I say!”

“Yes, Billy?”

“What was my real mother like? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you, truly I didn't.”

Phillip sat on the boy's bed. Billy's voice was becoming
suddenly
harsh at times. He was adolescent. Phillip felt shy of him, as Billy was beginning to be shy of his father.

“She was a heavenly person, Billy.”

“Dad.”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind very much if I joined the Royal Air Force Cadet Corps, if the shooting war really starts?”

This was a shock. He said equably, “I don't see why not, old chap.”

When the doctor came he said, “There's nothing wrong with your boy. The thermometer is broken.”

It was nearly the end of January. During the past weeks Phillip had had occasional brief glimpses of Teddy Pinnegar and Mrs. Carfax in Penelope’s saloon car, with Penelope at the wheel. Once he came upon them sitting motionless in that cream-coloured automobile on the sheep-walk beside the marshes. Had Penelope taken them there to initiate them into the delights of bird-watching, and found them alien to that wild place? There the three sat, still and unspeaking, in the motorcar beside the furze bushes where passerine migrants rested after the long journey across the North Sea. They stared ahead, as though unseeing, as he hurried past them.

There was nothing he could do on the farm. The arable was set hard in frost. He went on with his writing. The book was
three-quarters
done. The hedge-clearing around the Scalt was going on slowly but steadily. Axe and slashers would remain blunt whether he were there or not—unless he sharpened them himself during the dinner half-hour that took forty-five minutes. He was unable to approach them, they didn’t care whether the tools were blunt or sharp. They knew the treadle-grindstone in the hovel was there for their use. It was never used.

Long ragged lines of dark brushwood lay on the snow of the field, a pleasing sight. He avoided looking at the split branch-ends on the stubs. Let them get on with it. He must keep on writing. The book drew him to the climax as a cat to her new-born kittens.

Then one day he heard from Matt that Penelope had gone away.

“Them two, Mr. Vinegar an’ his friend, are left alone in the house. Yar’ll see,” said Matt, “things will come a’ right. Do you wait an’ see, master.”

Phillip asked no questions. He had no hope, save for his books. He lived in the scenes of ancient sunlight. It was a hopeful, happy book.

Much time in the yards every day was still being absorbed by
the getting of water from the river. The system of engine, pump, tank, pipes and artesian well, installed two years, was still
unusable
. Ice was solid in the pipes. Had it ever been otherwise? The war, the white fields—they had been so always. The old life under the sun was dead.

To lessen the power of winter frost he had asked Matt, during the autumn, to twist bonds of straw—ropes of about an inch in diameter—to be wound around the pipes. This Matt had done, making a neat and pleasing job of it. But at the beginning of the hard weather he had yet again failed to drain both tank and pipes after using them. Ice had solidified over a hundred feet of
galvanised
inch-piping.

Considerable time and trouble had been spent in a vain attempt to find where, along that hundred feet of piping, the stoppage was. Once when Phillip had stayed at No. 2, The Glade, the
straw-bonds
, made to last fifty years, had been ripped off by Luke, and the blow-lamp taken from the workshop to heat the pipe. But for an hour or two while it was being used, the blow-lamp was spluttering and no good. The tiny hole in the vaporiser-head, whence a fine spray of petrol was supposed to issue to be turned instantly into a roaring point of blue and lilac flame, was choked with carbon. Luke had disregarded Phillip’s warning that the petrol must never be turned on until all the methylated spirit had burned away, thus fully heating the vaporiser.

The flame of the spirit, which was wood alcohol, he had
explained
, was a pure flame. Unlike petrol, it would give off no unburned residue of carbon to float as smoke into the air. Petrol had a smoky flame: and if the least particle of carbon were to form in or near the tiny jet, it would obstruct the spray of petrol.

“So never turn on the tap until the very last of the spirit has burnt away, Luke.”

The blow-lamp being out of action, Luke had had the idea of making torches of the straw bonds, and holding them against the pipes. Flaring and sparking but giving little or no heat they had merely blackened the galvanised zinc-protection of the pipes. This had been a morning’s work for three men. The ice remained in the pipes, the straw-bonds were ruined. And since the sledge with the flimsy tongued-and-grooved runners was broken, something had to be done to bring drinking water to the cattle in the yards.

After some discussion with his father and the two other men employed on the farm—and not stood off by Phillip, who felt
this to be the last thing he must do—Luke had remembered an old iron-wheeled cart with a zinc tank mounted on it standing under the chalk quarry almost entirely overgrown by elderberry trees ever since the end of the Great War. This vehicle was dragged out of its hide and used in an attempt to ‘hull’ (haul) water from a hole broken in the ice of the river. The horses, unable to surmount the break in the river-bank, had pecked and slithered about before falling down and breaking the half-rotten shafts of the
antediluvian
water-tank whose pig-iron wheels had been cast about the time of the Crimean War.

What to do now? The boss wouldn’t miss another length of his store of tongued-and-grooved planking. The tank was pulled out of its frame on the cast-iron wheels, and mounted on flexible skis. Luke’s ‘patent’ worked! They weren’t in no muddle!

The water slopped from the ‘patent’, although several sacks were covering the tank lashed to the ladder nailed to the planks. It took the best part of each morning to haul water to the yards; but they weren’t in no muddle.

Phillip abandoned his writing to try to unfreeze the new galvanised water-pipe. He searched first for a piece of steel-wire fine enough to probe and so clear the jet of the blow-lamp. He tried all the ironmongers’ shops in Great Wordingham and Yarwich, but no steel-wire pricker had been small enough. It was one of the first of the war shortages. For the first time he heard the phrase ‘in short supply’. The Primus prickers, together with the lamps, had come from Norway.

“Why not take the bullocks and the horses and the cows to the river to drink, Luke?”

Luke stared at him. “Blast!” he said. “I nivver thought of that! I told you we’d be in no muddle, didn’t I? I like that idea of yours, we’ll do it if you like. You’re master.”

The problem was solved. Horses and neat stock were taken to the river, the ice was broken, they drank.

*

People were skating on the levels and drains of the Fen Country. The roads were dangerous. After the first fall of snow there was a slight thaw, turning snow to slush. Then a frost-wind fixed the slush into ridges and ragged tracts hard to walk on. Rubber tyres, worn smooth, slipped and spun. This did not stop Phillip once his mind was made up to take Billy to Lucy and the others. They would start early next morning and drive slowly with chains on the back wheels. Then he would get to No. 2, The Glade, by
daylight. The roads would be deserted. It would be an adventure, through a white forsaken Brecklands mile after mile until they came to the dark areas of towns.

The self-starter would not work, although by now six local garages had ‘put it right’. The draining of the radiator did not let out all the water. The drain-plug was not at the lowest point. Water remained in the phosphor-bronze pipe leading to the
water-pump
below the radiator base. It was solid with ice. There was a plug in this pipe, a hexagonal nut. It had been made round by some mechanic who had not bothered to find a box-spanner to fit it, using instead what Luke called a screw-hammer. The thread of the plug being stiff, to prevent it working loose during the motion of the engine, the ham-handed use of a
monkey-wrench
had rounded and ruined the nut. It was burred, immovable.

The only thing to do was to lie under the engine on one’s back and melt the ice in the bronze pipe with the blow-lamp. But he could not light the blow-lamp: for since the attempts to unfreeze the water-pipes of the cowhouse Luke had tried to clear the jet by the use of some sharp spike, which had gashed the jet so that it wouldn’t function.

Phillip was lying, muttering to himself, by the open workshop door when Teddy’s feet suddenly appeared underneath the opposite running board. He had come to borrow some petrol, he said. This seemed a moment to ask about the money for their telephone calls; Phillip had already written two notes to Teddy about this, and now he felt himself to be a real nagger as he said, “I’ll sell you a couple of gallons if you like, the amount will be credited to the farm account.”

Pinnegar paid for the petrol.

“I hope you didn’t mind my reminder about the telephone trunk calls, old boy.”

“It’s none of my affair what ‘Yipps’ does, Phillip.”

“Let me have the can back, will you? They aren’t obtainable now, and we need this at harvest time.”

“Okay.”

Feeling relieved by his own firmness, Phillip took his
thumbstick
and set out to walk the four miles to Crabbe, following the sheepwalk beside the marshes. There in a shop he bought a small wire brush, of an old fashioned pattern. The very thing. The stiff steel wires were fine enough to enter the jet of the blow-lamp. Hurrying back the way he had come, he cleared the jet and after heating the vaporiser with methylated spirit, pumped in the petrol.
It worked. His relief was great. Now for Lucy and the children at Gaultford!

When the water-pump was freed he brought jugs of hot water from Mrs. Hammett’s cottage and filled the radiator. This freed the pistons, but the engine wouldn’t fire. So he set about pushing the car down the slope before the Corn Barn, and when it was moving he jumped in but still the engine would not fire when he let-in the top gear.

The men were summoned to help. Luke had Beatrice standing by in readiness to ‘help yar ’Agle’. Back she went up the slope and past the Corn Barn to the hovel. Getting into the driver’s seat Phillip said that if the cylinders didn’t fire before reaching the end of the run-down he would set fire to the old ’bus and then jump into it.

Matt, Steve, Billy the Nelson and Luke all pushed behind and on the flanks. Phillip let in the clutch. They pushed the harder. Still the engine didn’t fire. The Silver Eagle became a leaden vulture, then a torpid whale. More hot water. Sparking plugs heated by blow-lamp. Once more down the slope. She fired. Jumping out, leaving the engine at 1,500 revs., Phillip shook hands with his deliverers, and promised them a duck each for Christmas. Then he drove the car to the top of the slope, left the engine covered with corn sacks, and hurried away with Billy to Mrs. Hammett’s.

*

Among the letters beside his plate was one which, upon
opening
, gave him a shock. The enclosed letter-heading was embossed
Arrowsmith
Publicity
with an address in Piccadilly. Would he
consider
writing a story for a film around the subject of British farming? Go to London at once and Mr. Arrowsmith would be greatly in his debt … pay all expenses …

At last! This would save the family, the farm! Then he thought, I can’t do it. What I know they won’t want. British farming films were weak, silly, unrealistic. Chawbacon and Gaffer Jarge stuff. What he
could
write was the true story of farming—the obvious struggle against nature, the hidden struggle against the money system, importing cheap foreign food sold in London for sterling to pay the interest on foreign loans. The City with fatted hearts, the country pauperised. Basic conflict between town-mind and soil-mind.

He showed the letter to Mrs. Hammett.

“It sounds good,” she said, serenely. “Have your luncheon
now, Mr. Maddison. If you are going to take Billy to his mother, why not go on to London from there, and see the gentleman?”

Of course he could do it! He telegraphed to Lucy that they would be arriving that evening with good news. He arrived at No. 2, The Glade, before dusk after an uneventful drive over forsaken roads. Chains were not needed. Driven at a steady thirty-five in the country and twenty-five through the towns, with brakes never used, the Silver Eagle did not skid once, though at times the driver had a feeling that he was steering a boat rather than a motor car.

It was a happy evening with Tim and the family, and the next morning he went hopefully to London by train. Tim had suggested fitting a brass drain tap in place of the spoiled octagonal nut on the water-pipe below the base of the radiator, thus to cure all stoppage by frost.

“You go by train to London, and I’ll have it ready for you when you come back.”

*

Chettwood, features editor of
The
Daily
Crusader
,
had been responsible for suggesting Phillip’s name for the farming film. He was a friend of the publicity agent, Arrowsmith who had an office in a building just off Piccadilly, where a film-producer Pierre Poluski also had an office.

One morning Mr. Poluski had stepped across the landing of his first floor office at the corner of Urbeville Street and Piccadilly to ask Mr. Arrowsmith, the publicity agent, to find him an author capable of writing for him a film on British farming. “I have been reading in the Briddish papers how farmers are now in the Front Line, and Digging for Victory. Farming is news, Mr. Arrowsmith. I have a really big idea for a great picture about Briddish farming.”

He went on to say that he had a further idea, which was to get a grant from the Ministry of Information for his picture. “I have also ‘an angel’, Mr. Arrowsmith. Now I shall want a good writer.”

“I think I can find you one. Can you give me, say, one hour?”

Arrowsmith spoke to Chettwood on the telephone, and thus the producer learned of the existence of a writer whose name, he said, meant nothing to him, but he would accept the assurance of Mr. Arrowsmith that the writer had made wonderful strides in Briddish farming. When in the course of more talk Poluski learned that the writer was a friend of Donald Cannock, a
film-star
whose box-office appeal was as great in the United States as it
was in Britain, Poluski said, “Get him! Get him quick, Mr. Arrowsmith. Get him before some of those vultures that hang around Wardour Street copy my idea and snap up this Mister—this Mister Maddison who is a great friend of Donald Cannock.”