Homeland (11 page)

‘Nothing to stop you
showing
’em what to do, is there? A hook’s a hook in any language.’

‘They’d do it all wrong.’

Maintaining his patience with difficulty, Billy said, ‘Yes, maybe they would at the start. But you could put ’em right quickly enough. And it’s not as if you’ve got a
whole lot of choice, is it?’ He shovelled the last load into the barrow and closed the hen-house door with a bang.

The old man was standing by the chicken run. His lower lip was signalling resistance. ‘I don’t understand why Frank won’t see reason,’ he said. ‘I told him, if he
wants to cut one bed, he’s got to cut ’em all. I told him, that’s my final word.’

Billy looked sharply away until the impulse to deliver a scathing retort had passed. ‘Yes, we know all about that. But Frank Carr’s not interested, is he? And nothing’s about
to change his mind. So forget about him. It’s past history. You’ve only one option now. Either you hire in these Polacks or you let the crop go to rot. Because that’s what it
boils down to, Old Man. As simple as that.’

‘Someone might still take on the cutting.’

‘Oh yes? And who would that be? One of the cutters who comes beating at your door each morning looking for work?’ He muttered under his breath, ‘God give me
strength.’

They watched the bantams pecking at the kitchen scraps, their beaks shooting out like darts, their feet moving delicately over the beaten earth. The old man proffered Billy a Woodbine. His hand
was trembling and the packet trembled with it. Fishing out some matches, he then fumbled with the box.

‘Give it here,’ Billy said gruffly, and struck a light for both of them.

The old man drew on his fag and coughed hard. ‘I didn’t mean to let things go, Billy. I didn’t mean for things to get so bad. But I hadn’t reckoned on folk being so
busy.’

‘Well, they’re out to make a living, aren’t they?’

‘It’s the war—’

‘Yes, it’s the war. And there’s not a blind thing you or anyone else can do about it.’

With a slow sigh the old man fell silent and shuffled over to the scrap bucket to scrape out the last of the peelings.

A thin cloud had crept over the sun, a faint breeze was stirring in the orchard, and somewhere close by a magpie gave a solitary screech. Billy looked out over the kitchen garden with its rows
of bolted cabbages standing tall and ragged amid a fountain of drooping leaves, and tried once again to make sense of his meeting with Annie Bentham. Her composure still niggled him. Was it
suppressed anger that had made her so calm, or plain indifference? Was her opinion of him so low that she’d long since shut him out of her mind, or had this husband been so bloody marvellous
that she’d no thought for anyone else? It bothered him that he couldn’t work this out, and it bothered him that he should keep trying. He’d never understood what made one woman
memorable and another drop from the mind without so much as a ripple. There was the lust factor of course, never to be underrated, but beyond that he’d little idea. He’d known sweet
impressionable girls, cheeky girls, good sports, and enthusiastic older women. Sometimes he’d gone for the ones who made him laugh, sometimes for the ones who promised him peace and quiet,
but there had never been a pattern as to which, if any, stuck in his imagination. During the war Annie’s image had drifted through his mind as often as any, maybe more than most, usually at
the oddest times, sometimes even infiltrating his dreams, to the point where, caught in a heavy rocket bombardment on the push towards Germany, witnessing the sight of tanks on either side getting
brewed up, he had sworn in the terror of the moment to go back and find her. Afterwards he had put the impulse down to the intensity of his fear, and the choice of Annie to fluke, even a crazy sort
of nostalgia, but now he had seen her again he realised that it was the power of the attraction he felt for her. It ached in him, like a hunger.

Stan was back at his side. He said, ‘You wouldn’t think of staying yourself, would you, Billy?’

‘What?’

‘You running the place and me helping out when I could.’

Billy had a brief vision of the place spick and span, making a tidy profit, but the picture disintegrated when he thought of the inevitable arguments. He said, ‘I’ve got
plans.’

‘But the whole place, Billy. Running it the way you like.’

‘I told you. I’m heading back to London.’

‘Why do you want to go there?’

‘Got a job waiting for me.’

‘What – better than you’d get here?’

‘That wouldn’t be difficult, would it?’

‘But all them people. All that racket.’

‘How would you know what it’s like? You’ve never been there.’

‘If it’s money you want, Billy, there’s good money to be made from withies.’

Billy felt a flash of anger, a sudden shiver of heat. He said roughly, ‘Not good enough for me, Old Man.’

‘I tell you, best buff and whites been fetching ten bob a bundle. In the war it was browns they wanted, but now it’s buff and whites. Ten bob – I swear! Frank Carr, he’s
just gone and bought himself a spanking new tractor on the proceeds.’

‘A bloody fool he looks on it too,’ Billy muttered.

Two of the bantams had begun to pick on a third. Stan banged his hand down on the chicken wire and cried, ‘Oy, oy!’ but the bullies took no notice and, driving their victim into a
corner, pecked viciously at its neck. The victim was small and scrawny, its neck was already raw, and it put up no fight.

Billy said, ‘Well, Old Man, if there’s so much money in withies you can go and hire as many of these Polacks as you want, can’t you? A whole bloody army.’ Pinching out
his fag and stowing the dog-end in his pocket, he went to the gate in the chicken run and let himself in. Wading through the squawking bantams, he quickly cornered the bloodied victim and caught it
at first lunge. He held it up to Stan. ‘Dinner or nursing care?’

For a moment he thought the old man had suffered a turn. His eyes had lost focus, his mouth had drooped, his skin had developed a greenish tinge and seemed to hang more pendulously from the
bones. Then Billy realised it was resentment that clouded his eyes, and old age that dragged at his skin, and the grey morning light that gave it the colour of death.

Billy made the decision: ‘Dinner,’ and wringing the bird’s neck took it back to the house. When he came out again, he spotted the old man’s bowed figure in the vegetable
garden, scraping at the weeds with a hoe.

He took another turn around the house, wondering what if anything was worth tackling in the time available. Annie had talked about two weeks to sort the place out, but that would barely see the
outbuildings straight, let alone the repairs started and the machinery up and running. Likely she’d picked two weeks because it was the most she thought she could prise out of him in the name
of duty. Well, he’d already stayed an extra day; at a push he might stay another, but it wasn’t from duty. Disgust, more like. Or pity. He quite liked the idea of pity. Whichever, the
most he’d give it was another day. Then last thing on Sunday he would slip away and catch the milk train from Athelney in the knowledge that he was starting his new job with a clean
slate.

Ernie Brandon, his best mate from the tank crew, had swung the job for him. Ernie had been the gunner, perched in the turret above Billy, ‘arse by mug’ as Ernie described it,
‘mine beautiful, yours ugly’. Ernie came from a large family, a confusion of uncles, grans and cousins spread across east London. One of these uncles had done all right for himself with
a range of business interests that Ernie described as ‘a bit of this and a bit of that’, though what these interests were exactly, apart from the Jaguar garage near Euston Station, he
couldn’t say. The promised job was similarly vague: mechanic or dogsbody, Ernie wasn’t too sure, and Billy hadn’t been able to find out. On the two occasions Billy had presented
himself at the garage at times arranged through Ernie, it was to find the boss out and nobody certain when he was expected back. Nothing, therefore, had been fixed for sure, but Billy trusted Ernie
to see him right. In their four-year friendship Ernie had only once failed to deliver on a promise, and that was on the joys of London. During the months they were stuck in Germany waiting for
demob Ernie had fed Billy endless tales of the pubs they would drink in, the girls they would sweeten up, the flashy dives they would waltz into. But the London they came back to was drab and
dirty, with queues everywhere and empty shops and a dearth of flashy dives open to ex-Tommies without money. For the first week Billy had taken up Ernie’s offer of floor space in the room he
shared with his brother, but Ernie’s family was large, the house cramped, and another brother was expected back from the war at any moment, so Billy had felt obliged to move into the first
digs he could find in a dark narrow house that smelt of soot and damp and the acrid fumes from a nearby tannery. When Billy wasn’t spending the evening with Ernie, he sometimes went to East
Ham to see Johnny, the machine gunner, who lived with his wife and two noisy kids in a back room of his in-laws’ house, or to Leyton to have a drink with Crasher, the gun loader, who was
working in the family butchery business and newly engaged to his childhood sweetheart. But neither of them could stay out for long, sometimes they couldn’t get away at all, and once, in a
thick fog, Billy’s bus home had taken two hours.

The more Billy thought back to the war, to the months the five of them had spent cooped up in the smelly sardine tin of a tank or dossing down in a succession of verminous billets, the more it
seemed to him a time of unparalleled contentment and ease of mind, not because there was anything to be said for war – a sad, dirty, unsatisfactory business – but because the five of
them had been the best of mates, part of a team, the best there was, the best there ever could be. Now it struck him with a sharpened sense of loss that those days were gone for ever, that none of
them would ever know such freedom again.

The previous day, after Annie had cycled away up the lane, he’d made a start on the yard and the woodshed, oiling, sharpening, sorting, clearing, hauling, burning,
stacking. Working on into the evening by paraffin lamp, he’d mucked out the pigsty and laid poison by the rat holes. When he came in for the night, he’d found a pot of chicken and
potatoes on the hotplate and Stan gone to bed. He’d slept deeply and without dreams.

This morning he’d gone out at dawn and shot a couple of rabbits close by Owers Meadow, and sawn and split a heap of apple logs, before overseeing the coal delivery and wheeling ten
barrowloads down to the bins by the woodshed. He’d spent an hour stacking and burning rotten withies from the drying racks, before deciding his time would be better spent chipping the muck
off the hen-house floor.

Now, having made his circuit of the house and finding no job that was more urgent than any other, he decided on a whim to walk over the ridge to look at the withy beds on Curry Moor. He went by
the back paths that looped around the side of the village, and crossed the Tone by Hook Bridge. Stan’s four acres lay under the banks of the river and were prone to flooding for most of the
winter and often much of the spring as well, yet he could see immediately why Frank Carr had wanted to buy the crop. The withies here were in far better fettle than those on West Sedgemoor, with
fine straight stems, no visible canker and far fewer weeds, as though cattle had been put on them, bang to order, the moment the land had dried out, and the second spurt of weeds cut back some time
since, with only the last growth left to run. He reckoned the yield at nine in ten.

He came back by way of the village. Now that he was staying on another day he didn’t want people to think he was hiding away. The village was little more than a straggle of cottages and
farmhouses dotted along a lattice of lanes, with no green, no cluster of shops, no obvious centre. Billy chose the road that took him past the post office and, some fifty yards on, the garage.
Seeing no one, he took a loop round to the east, past the chapel and the Rose and Crown, and finally met three people one after the other. The first called a greeting, the next waved, and the third
stopped to talk. From their manner he might have been away only a matter of months.

His route brought him up to the George and, just beyond it, on the corner opposite the church, to Spring Cottage. He’d meant to walk past but at the last moment turned in through the gate
and knocked. After a few moments he stood back from the porch and saw in one window a marmalade cat, and in the other some dried rushes in a blue vase. He knocked again and, staring at the
distinctive wrought-iron boot-scraper, remembered waiting here once before and seeing Annie emerge dressed for the May dance in a flowered dress and white shoes. It was the first time she’d
agreed to go out with him and, later that night, the first time she’d let him kiss her.

After another few seconds he gave up and walked rapidly back to Crick Farm. He worked on through the rest of the day, sweeping out the withy shed and pouring oil over the cogs and axles of the
stripping brake. Coming inside at dusk, he lit the lamps in the kitchen and skinned and paunched the rabbits, and put them to stew with some onions, carrots and potatoes. He threw the vegetable
peelings into the scraps bucket and scrubbed out the sink. Then he swept the floor and passed a mop over the flagstones. Flor had no need to worry about the state of the kitchen while he was
around. Cleanliness and order had become something of an obsession with him. It had started as a duty towards his mates, an essential contribution towards the safety and efficiency of the tank, but
over time he had come to crave order for its own sake, the security it brought him, the sense of fending off a more personal chaos.

Before supper, Billy popped up to report to Flor on the state of the kitchen floor and managed to make her laugh. After supper, while Stan was busy upstairs, he shaved and washed himself at the
sink, the whole business, top to toe. Then, wearing his demob suit and a donkey jacket, hair damped down and combed back, he went up to the village. He had intended to have an ale at the George
before knocking on Annie’s door, but seeing a light in her window and the curtains undrawn, he gathered his nerve and went straight there.