A Solitary War (43 page)

“Do eat your mutton, it is so tender‚” said Lucy.

“Alarm and Despondency are now the twin bogies stalking throughout England behind the tortoise-head of the hare. Even an ordinary non-political fellow has to be very careful what he says, lest some patriotic busybody report his words. One farmer in Lincolnshire, according to the newspapers, has been fined one hundred pounds for saying in a pub ‘I reckon we’ve lost this ’ere war’.”

“The late Arnold Bennett,” he went on, looking at Lucy, “was said to have received as much as four shillings a word for some of his articles, but a phrase like the one I’ve just quoted nowadays has to be paid for by that Lincolnshire farmer at the rate of twelve pounds ten shillings a word. By jove, as Tim would say, this food is good, Lucy!”

*

As service in the L.D.V. was denied Phillip he joined the local Air Raid Precautions unit, with sign of A.R.P. outside its
headquarters
at the Rectory. After fitting anti-arsenical-dust cartons to gas-masks in a few cottages at night, he received a letter from Area Headquarters saying tersely that his services were no longer required.

Meanwhile he had got in the hay of his second stack. The
ryegrass
was a bit too mature, perhaps, but still grey-green, with sugar to be tasted at the knot. Bullocks would grow into beef from that in the coming winter.

The skies of late June, and all July, were empty of aircraft. The Rector said, “What does it all mean, this pause in the war? Can you tell me, Squire?”

“Hitler wants to stop the war, Rector. He wants to expand East, to get new commercial travellers’ territory for his exports. Let us call off the war, then he will leave France, and we can build a great new civilisation in our Empire.”

“Ah,” said the Rector, “Churchill has warned us of a peace
offensive coining from Hitler. We won’t fall into that trap! You will be careful what you say, won’t you?”

“I will do nothing to injure my country.”

*

Phillip told Lucy a week or two later, in the presence of the children—who now, with the exception of Billy, went to the village school—that they must all take the greatest care about lights at night, now that Hitler’s peace offer had been scorned. Churchill had sent the R.A.F. bombers into Germany to anger Hitler, and retaliation might begin very soon. If the least light were to be seen from any of their windows, they would all be in danger, not from the enemy, but from the windy ones in the village.

“So no lights at all must be used in the bedrooms at night.”

The little boys looked solemnly at him, and said obediently, “Yes, sir.”

It would be best, he said to Lucy, if all the electric bulbs were removed from the sockets in all the bedrooms. There was enough light from the summer sky to go to bed with. Was that clear?

Lucy said it should be done.

*

The first deep
brrr-brrr
of enemy bombers was heard in the height of the pale summer night sky. A few distant bombs caused the bedrooms to rattle. They felt them through the great frame of the refectory table when they could not be heard outside. After one alarm, as Phillip walked down from Matt’s cottage about 9 p.m., he saw a group of men outside his cottage. The
now-familiar
brrr-brrr,
the nodes and anti-nodes of twin engines not perfectly synchronised, was coming from among the stars. He heard, also, voices before him, near the dark walls of the cottage.

“He’s signalling!”

“A few shots through the window is what he deserves!”

“Give it to the bastard!”

“Fifth columnist! There’s the proof!”

Six or seven men stood there in the starlight. One of them was the camp canteen-manager who had made the ‘ceaselessly
blaspheming
’ accusation before the assembled volunteers in the village hut before Phillip’s arrest.

“What’s the matter?” he said, suddenly coming among them.

It appeared that Horatio Bugg had been fetched from the bridge near his yard by Jackie Bird, who had been one of Phillip’s fellow A.R.P. Wardens before Phillip was sacked. Jackie Bird
was what Billy called ‘a little old totty man’. Being only 4 ft. 8 inches tall, Jackie was too small to work as farm labourer. He picked up a living on the cockle beds, and did odd jobs in the village. He was not married, but lived cheerfully alone in a
2-roomed
cottage in Horatio’s Yard, paying a shilling a week rent to the landlord.

Apparently Jackie Bird was on duty that night, and seeing a dimness, over the window lintel, reflected from the ceiling and seeping through half an inch of space between wall and blackout curtain, had shouted
Put
that
light
out!,
and then, alarmed by his own voice, had taken to his heels down the street to the safety of the Yard. There others had been standing, including Horatio and some soldiers.

Phillip realized at once that up in the second room of his cottage Peter was reading in bed. Peter, the ex-choir-school boy, was eleven years old, and partly deaf. One ear-drum had been perforated ever since he had had bronchial-pneumonia as a baby, when pus had choked the ear and nearly spread into the brain. Lucy had sat up nine nights with Peter and saved the little skeleton’s life. The ear troubled Peter at times even now, but he was generally a healthy, if slender, boy.

He was an avid reader, and at the moment of Jackie Bird’s shout had been enthralled in a fantastic book about spies, death rays, heroes, fists smashed into faces and other stock-in-trade of the panders of print. Peter was not supposed to read in bed, having been asked not to do so, for two reasons, both of which had been explained to him several times: the one, for his health’s sake, the other for his father’s sake. However, with candle and book and
blanket-covered
head Peter was deep in the literature of the
Conglomerated
Press, E.C.2.

“What’s the matter?” Phillip repeated.

“You’re showing a light!” cried the portly, squeaky-voiced canteen-manager. “Want to get us all bombed,” said Bugg. “They’re after property.”

“I had no idea there was a light behind the blackout. Anyway, it’s very faint, and indirect, and doesn’t show upwards.”

“Report him,” cried the canteen-manager to Jackie Bird. “We all know what he is!” to a little group of soldiers. “It’s a signal, and it’s in direct line with our camp.”

Some of the men in the camp were Scotsmen from Glasgow. One, muttering about his pals at Dunkirk, had come to the
farmhouse
door a day or two before, saying he’d like to run his bayonet
through the bastard fifth-column traitor. On that occasion Phillip had guessed who had been priming him; and he knew that none of the Glasgow recruits had been out of England. Angered by the stupidity of it, he had pointed to the telephone and ordered the soldier to make a report immediately to the police. That had made the fellow hesitate. Then Phillip had asked for his identity card, saying he must report him to the police, for he was creating not only Alarm, and Despondency, but also Dyspepsia.

“
I
’
ll
telephone the police, and tell them that you are a veteran of Dunkirk!”

The youth had backed out and gone away at once.

Brrr-brrr,
brrr-brrr
high in the starry sky. The twin-engined Dorniers were passing from east to west in half sections.

“If they bomb the camp and kill our lads,” cried the
canteen-manager
, “it will be because of that light you’re showing.”

Phillip said distinctly, controlling his anger, “There’s a small boy up there, probably reading in bed. Come up with me and see him. Come on, Jackie Bird, do your duty, you are the A.R.P. Warden. Come on! Make your investigation, and then do your duty and report the light. Come with me now! If you don’t report me, I shall report you all for creating Alarm and
Despondency
.”

He shouted under the window for all to hear, “Peter, I told you, no reading in bed! Put that light out, you little idiot!” The pale line of light disappeared.

Footfalls came up the road. The newcomer, a fellow known by Phillip to poach regularly in his end wood by the river, joined the group, and proceeded to give him a lecture on the danger of showing even a cigarette glow.

“What about that red light on the nightcart?” asked Phillip. “That’s a signal, surely, of our decadent democracy?”

The lugubrious horse which drew, once a week, that vehicle of slop, clank, and smell up the village street was approaching, with melancholy clops of feet. Its fetlocks were swelled and greasy with permanent infestations of mites since the ’twenties. It was an aged, grey-muzzled gelding, dutiful and resigned.

“Come, you said I was signalling, while I was sitting with Matt in his cottage. Be fair. British justice, you know.”

“Do we get justice, with you in our midst? What are you doing here, that’s what we want to know? You ought to be locked up, and that’s too good for your sort!” cried the canteen manager.

“Yus, nah yer talkin’,” said one of the soldiers, who was
apparently
not from Glasgow. “If I see any fookin light again, I’ll fookin shoot fust and arst fookin questions arterwards.”

“And murder a small child reading in bed?”

“Anyway,” protested the canteen-manager. “What you said to me before the war was bad enough, about the Old Country. If it isn’t good enough for you, why don’t you go and live elsewhere? We don’t want your sort around here.”

“I’ve never spoken to you in my life,” retorted Phillip. “I heard what you said at the Local Defence Volunteers meeting, and I’m not sure it isn’t a slander and defamation of character. I think I’ll give you an opportunity of justifying your remarks in a court of law. I have plenty of witnesses.”

“You can’t be too careful,” the other protested, weakening, “we don’t want our lads in the camp bombed.”

“And I don’t want my lad up there shot by fookin rowdies with fookin wind-up, either!”

The incident dissolved before the imminence of the malodorously slopping nightcart.

*

Later that night, as he lay drowsing in his bed by the long window, he was awakened by shouts of the searchlight team behind the woods. There was the drone of aircraft. White rhomboids in the sky moved, collapsed, built up again. The valley was suffused with spectral lilac light. An aircraft passed over low down, and he rose on an elbow to hear a series of crackling reports and see white spots of light burning on the grass of the Home Hills and the higher land of his neighbour’s farm to the west.

He put on his clothes and went out, and helped the searchlight men pour sand on the incendiary bombs. One had fallen on a wasp’s nest that he had meant to burn out; but now, as one of the men cheerfully remarked, Hitler had done the job for him.

*

The night was warm and quiet. He climbed to the crest of the Home Hills and lay on his back, seeing the stain of the Milky Way high above him, and its dark patch of the Coalsack. He looked for the stars once known as faithful friends of many a summer night; but there was no feeling in those silver sentinels as of old: there was no feeling to spare within himself, he was no longer a vessel of his own personal feeling. The stars were void, their only message a high and remote
brrr-brrr
as aircraft flew from west to east, sought by the pale rays of searchlights.

No longer was the summer night-sky a tranquil space in which a man’s mind might find rest. Not only were German bombers and reconnaissance aircraft now passing over a blackened England, but the air was filled with voices, hundreds of voices in scores of languages, each urging its aspect of truth. The cool air of night, wandering over the Western Hemisphere, was vibrating with a myriad voices. They could be divided into two main categories, he said to himself: one, in the service of gold; the other, to the disservice of gold.

One of the voices, speaking English with a nasal voice, he had long recognised as belonging to the pink-faced man with the
razor-scar
whom he had met, just before the outbreak of war, with Hurst on the stairs leading down from the room in Fleet Street. Over the air from Germany this man’s voice was known through out the British Isles as Lord Haw-Haw. This nickname had originally been given to another voice, by a Fleet Street journalist called Jonah Barrington: that other voice had been high and soft, with an obstruction in delivery that might have been due to adenoids. The fluffy voice, the original Haw-Haw accent, had been a joke, and many English people had listened to it as a joke. When the fluffy voice ceased, and the nasal voice took its place on the air, the title Lord Haw-Haw remained.

*

The searchlights flicked out. The sky was silent again. It was a warm night. He was content to lie there. Around him his little ewe-flock was grazing. The ewes always grazed on the top of the Home Hills in the early mornings, and late nights, of summer. Here was coolth in the sea-airs eddying about the plateau of the hills; the grass was dewy; thyme grew there, and rest-harrow. The ewes fed in silence, their lambs quiet among them.

He thought of the old simile, that the majority of people were like sheep, and considered how true it was, especially at this time; of how British justice, once a thing to be proud of, was now being impelled by the same fear which possessed the majority in village, town and city. That poor little fellow in Leeds, for example: would people ever know the truth of how he was trapped by
agents
provocateurs
?

Going over the air of the British Broadcasting Corporation at that time, among the voices serving their aspects of truth with passion, scorn, vituperation, obscurity, and sincerity, was a doggerel song made audible by two good-humoured cousins from Birmingham calling themselves the Western Brothers. The title
of the popular song was Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen. Many listeners who possessed a short wave band on their radio receivers, after hearing it, must have, in curiosity, he reflected, sought the original voice lampooned by the two comedians. Zeesen was on the
25-metre
band, near to Daventry, Rome and Moscow. The nasal voice of Haw-Haw was to be heard several times by day and by night, and from stations other than Zeesen since the lost battle of France, among them Calais and Hilversum. A sixty-fourth turn of the dial by finger and thumb, anti-clockwise, and the lardidah voices of the Western Brothers on the Forces
wave-length
faded into the nasal tones of the prefatory and triple
Jairmany
calling!
Jairmany
calling!
Jairmany
calling!
of William Frolich.