On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (17 page)

‘Enough, gentlemen!’ shouted Mr Arkwright. ‘Enough is
enough
. Thank you!’ Then a burst of hurrah-ing brought everyone to their feet.

The men whistled. Women craned their necks and offered tender-hearted comments: ‘Isn’t she lovely? … Lovely! … Oh! And do look at the little angels! … The little darlings! … Aren’t they sweet? … Oh, it’s Cis … Do look! It’s our Cissie … Oh! Oh! Isn’t she bee-yewtiful?’

‘Miss Cissie Pantall the Beeches,’ Mr Arkwright continued in a tone of rapture, ‘who has deigned to honour us with her presence – as “Peace”. Ladies and gentlemen! I give you … “Peace”!’

Fluid folds of white calico covered the floor and sides of the cart. Laurel swags hung down over the wheel-hubs and on all four corners there were pots of arum lilies.

A choir of angels formed a ring around the throne, and on it sat a big blonde girl in a snowy tunic. She held a wicker cage containing a white fantailed pigeon. Her hair fell like a fleece on to her shoulders, and her teeth were chattering with cold.

The ladies looked up at the chutes of rain already tumbling over the Black Hill, and cast around for the nearest umbrella.

‘Let’s be going,’ said Benjamin.

After a brief conference with Lady Vernon-Murray, Mr Arkwright hastily announced the foregone conclusion: Miss Pantall the Beeches was the winner. Her proud father then led his horse-team round in a circle, so that Cissie could step on to the podium and collect her trophy.

Frightened by the applause and approach of thunder, the Dove of Peace panicked and shredded its wings against the bars of the cage. Feathers flew, fluttered in the wind, and fell near Rosie Fifield’s feet. She stooped and picked up two of them. Flushed in the face and smiling, she stood provocatively in front of Lewis Jones.

‘Fancy you showing up!’ she said. ‘I’ve got a present for you.’ And she handed him one of the feathers.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said, with a puzzled smile. He took the feather before his brother could stop him: he had never even heard of ‘white-feathering’.

‘Shirkers!’ she jeered. And Reggie Bickerton laughed; and the group of soldiers round her also burst out laughing. The
N
.C.O. was with them. Lewis dropped the feather, and the rain began to fall.

‘The Sports will be postponed,’ the solicitor called through the megaphone as the crowd broke ranks and ran for the trees.

Lewis and Benjamin crouched under some rhododendrons, and the water ran in trickles down their necks. When the rain let up, they stole away towards the edge of the shrubbery and out onto the carriage drive. Four or five Army louts were blocking their paths. All of them were wet through, and tipsy.

‘’Ad it soft in ’Ereford, didn’t ya, mate?’ The N.C.O. swung a fist at Lewis, and he ducked.

‘Run!’ he yelled, and the twins ran back to the bushes. But the path was slippery; Lewis tripped on a root, and fell full-length in the mud. The N.C.O. fell on top of him and twisted his arm.

Another soldier shouted, ‘Wipe their bloody snouts in the muck!’ And Benjamin booted him behind the knees and toppled him. Then all his world was wheeling, and the next thing he heard was a sneering voice, ‘Aw! Leave ’em to stew!’

Then they were alone again, with swollen eyes and the taste of blood on their lips.

That night, climbing the crest of Cefn Hill, they saw a bonfire blazing on Croft Ambrey, another on the Clee and far off, faintly, a dull glow over the Malverns – blazing as they had blazed at the time of the Armada.

The Bombardier did not survive the celebrations. While clearing up the mess in the Park, an estate worker found him in the wheeled basket-chair. No one had remembered him in the rush for shelter. He had ceased to breathe. The man was amazed by the strength of his grip as he prised his fingers from the silver cigarette-case.

JIM THE ROCK
spent the Great Day at a military hospital on Southampton Water.

Serving as a muleteer with the South Wales Borderers, he had survived the First and Second Battles of Ypres, and then the Somme. He came through the war without a scratch until, in the final week, two lumps of shrapnel caught him behind the kneecaps. Septicaemia set in and, for a time, the doctors considered amputation.

When at last he came home after the long months of therapy, he was still very shaky on his pins; his face was pitted with black specks, and he was inclined to snap.

Jim had loved his mules, treated them for ophthalmia and mange, and dragged them from the mud when they fell in up to their fetlocks. He had never shot a wounded mule unless there was no hope of saving him.

The sight of dead mules had distressed him far more than the sight of dead men. ‘I see’d ’em,’ he’d say in the pub. ‘All along the road and stinkin’ summut ’orrible. Poor ol’ boys what never did no ’arm.’

He had hated it most when the mules got gassed. In one gas attack, he survived when the whole of his mule-train died – and that made him extremely angry. Marching up to his lieutenant, he saluted sullenly and blurted out, ‘If I can ’ave me gas mask, why can’t me mules?’

This piece of logic so impressed the lieutenant that he sent a report to the general, who, instead of ignoring it, sent back a note of commendation.

By 1918, most British units had equipped their horses and mules with gas-masks, whereas the Germans went on losing
supplies
; and though no military historian would credit Jim the Rock with the invention of the equine mask, he persisted in the illusion that it was he who had won the war.

So whenever it came to another round – at the Red Dragon in Rhulen, the Bannut Tree in Lurkenhope, or the Shepherd’s Rest at Upper Brechfa – he’d stare defiantly at his fellow-drinkers: ‘Aw, stand us another pint. I won the war, I did!’ And when they jeered back, ‘Get ye off, y’old scalliwamp,’ he’d fish in his pocket for the general’s letter, or the photo of himself and a pair of mules – all three of them in their gas-masks.

Jim’s sister Ethel was immeasurably proud of him and his shining medals, and said he needed a ‘good long rest’.

She had grown into a strong, big-boned woman who stamped around in an ex-Army greatcoat and stared at the world from under her mossy eyebrows. ‘Never you mind,’ she’d say, if Jim gave up on a job. ‘I’ll a-finish it myself.’ And when he rode off to the pub, a placid smile would spread across her face. ‘That Jim!’ she’d say. ‘He be wonderful fond of scenery.’

Aggie also doted on Jim and looked on him as one arisen from the grave. But Tom the Coffin – by now a craggy, matt-bearded old man with a luminous stare – had resented the lad for volunteering, and doubly resented his return. At the sight of the war-hero sunning himself, he’d yell in a hoarse and terrible voice: ‘I’ve warned you. I’ve warned you. This is your last chance. Get yourself to work or I’ll clout you. I’ll knobble you, you good-for-nothing lump! I’ll moil your fat face …’

One evening, he accused Jim of stealing a snaffle-bit and beat his cheeks like a tambourine – whereupon Aggie glowered and said, ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough.’

At suppertime, her husband found that the bolts had been drawn against him. He hanged and banged, but the door was solid oak, and he went away nursing his knuckles. Around midnight, they heard a terrifying whinny from the beast-house. In the morning he was gone, and Jim’s mare lay dead with a nail through her skull.

The next news of the old man, he was living in the Ithon Valley with a farmer’s widow, whom he’d gotten with child. People said he’d ‘fixed the devil’s stare’ on her when he went to deliver her husband’s coffin.

Without the money from the coffins, Aggie no longer had enough to keep a ‘nice house’ and, after scouring round for other sources of income, hit on the idea of boarding unwanted children.

The first of her ‘rescues’ was a baby girl called Sarah, whose mother, the miller’s wife at Brynarian, had been seduced by a seasonal shearer. The miller had refused to rear the child under his own roof, but offered £2 a week for her upkeep.

This arrangement brought in Aggie a clear profit of £1 and, on the strength of it, she took in two more illegitimates – Brenda and Lizzie – and, in this way, maintained her standards. The tea-caddy was full. They ate pickled lamb once a week. She bought a new white linen table-cloth, and a tin of pineapple chunks sat proudly on the Sunday tea-table.

As for Jim, he lorded it over his female brood, shirked work, and would sit on the hillside playing his penny-whistle to the whinchats and wheatears.

He hated to see any creature in pain; and if he found a rabbit in a snare, or a gull with a broken wing, he’d carry it home and bind the wound with a bandage, or the wing with a splint of twigs. Sometimes, there’d be several birds and animals festering in boxes by the fire; and when one of them died, he’d say, ‘Poor ol’ boy! An’ I dug a hole an’ put ’im in the ground.’

For years he went on harping about the war, and had the habit of slipping down to The Vision to hector the Jones twins.

They were scything one sunset in their shirtsleeves, when Jim limped up and launched into his usual harangue: ‘An’ them tanks I’m a-tellin’ yer! Baroom! … Baroom!’ The twins went on scything, stooping occasionally to whet their blades and, when a fly blew into Benjamin’s mouth, he spat it out: ‘Aagh! Them pithering flies!’

Of Jim they took no notice and he ended up losing his temper: ‘An’ you? You’d a-lasted a fraction of a second in that war. An’ you’d a farm to fight for! An’ I … I’d only me own skin to save!’

Since the day of the peace celebrations, the twins’ world had
contracted
to a few square miles, bounded on one side by Maesyfelin Chapel and on the other by the Black Hill: both Rhulen and Lurkenhope now lay on enemy soil.

Deliberately, as if reaching back to the innocence of early childhood, they turned away from the modern age; and though the neighbours invested in new farm machinery, they persuaded their father not to waste his money.

They shovelled muck on to the fields. They broadcast seed from a basketwork ‘lip’. They used the old binder, the old single-furrow plough, and even did their threshing with a flail. Yet, as Amos was forced to admit, the hedges had never been neater, the grass greener, the animals healthier. The farm even made money. He had only to set foot in the bank for the manager to slip round the counter, and shake his hand.

Lewis’s only extravagance was a subscription to the
News of the World
, and after lunch on Sundays, he would riffle through its pages in case there was an air-crash to paste in his scrapbook.

‘Really,’ Mary pretended to protest. ‘What a morbid imagination you have!’ Already, though they were only twenty-two, her sons were behaving like crabby old bachelors. But her daughter gave her greater concern.

For years, Rebecca had basked in her father’s infatuation: nowadays they seldom spoke. She would steal off to Rhulen and come back with cigarette smoke on her breath and rouge rubbed off around her lips. She raided Amos’s cash-box. He called her a ‘harlot’ and Mary despaired of reconciling them.

To get her out of the house, she found the girl a job as a sales assistant at the old Albion Drapery, which, in a flush of post-war francophilia, had changed its name to ‘Paris House’. Rebecca lodged in an attic above the shop and came home at weekends. One Saturday afternoon, as the twins were washing out the milk-churns, they heard the shouts and screams of a dreadful row in the kitchen.

Rebecca had confessed to being pregnant – and worse: the man was an Irish navvy, a Catholic, who worked on the railway. She left the house with a bleeding lip and fifteen gold sovereigns in her purse, astonishing everyone with her sly smile and the coolness of her behaviour.

‘And that’s all she’ll ever have from me,’ Amos thundered.

They never heard from her again. From an address in Cardiff she sent her old employer a postcard with news of a baby girl. Mary took a train-journey to see her grandchild, but the landlady said the couple had emigrated to America, and slammed the door in her face.

And Amos never recovered from her disappearance. He kept crying out ‘Rebecca!’ in his sleep. An attack of shingles maddened him to the point of frenzy. Then, to add to his troubles, the rent went up.

The Bickertons were in financial trouble.

Their Trustees had lost a fortune in Russian bonds. Their stud-farming experiments had failed to repay the investment. The sale of Old Masters was a disappointment and, when the Colonel’s lawyers broached the subject of avoiding death-duties, he flared up: ‘Don’t speak to me about death-duties! I’m not dead yet!’

A circular letter from his new agent warned all tenants to expect substantial rises in the coming year – an awkward time for Amos, who was hoping to buy some land.

Even at his angriest, Amos assumed that both the twins would marry, and continue to farm; and since The Vision could never support two families, they needed extra land.

For years he had had his eye on The Tump – a smallholding of thirty-three acres, set in a circle of beeches, on high ground half a mile from the Rhulen lane. The owner was an old recluse – a defrocked priest, so they said – who lived alone in scholarly squalor until one snowy morning Ethel the Rock saw no smoke from his chimney and found him spreadeagled in his garden, with a Christmas rose in his hand.

On making enquiries, Amos was told the place would be sold at auction. Then, one Thursday evening, he took Lewis aside and said sourly:

‘Your old friend, Rosie Fifield, moved herself into The Tump.’

WHILE WORKING AT
Lurkenhope, one of Rosie’s duties had been to carry the bathwater upstairs to Reggie Bickerton’s bedroom.

This place, to which few people were ever admitted, was situated in the West Tower, and was a perfect bachelor’s den. The walls were hung with deep-blue paper. The tapestry curtains and bed-hangings were worked in green with a design of heraldic beasts. There were chintz-covered chairs and ottomans; the carpet was Persian and in front of the fireplace lay a polar-bearskin rug. On the mantelpiece was an ormolu clock, flanked with figures of Castor and Pollux. Most of the paintings were of oriental subjects, bazaars, mosques, camel caravans and women in latticed rooms. His Eton photographs showed groups of young athletes with imperturbable smiles; and the evening sun filtering through roundels of stained glass, shed flecks of blood-red light over the frames.