Post of Honour (31 page)

It had all happened so quickly and so inexplicably that Claire, although leaning far out of the bedroom window, did not even see the big Crossley staff car until it came swinging round the bend at full throttle. There was no time for the driver to brake or even to honk and car and running figure met head-on thirty yards from the gate. Claire saw the car swing right and then left in a long, twisting skid as Hazel, mounting the bonnet, was flung upwards and outwards, to pitch like a bundle of rags in the iris clump at the stream’s edge.

Maureen and the driver were bending over her when she ran from the cottage and like the sound of a far-off bell submerged in the thunder of shock she heard herself crying, ‘Thank God the child wasn’t here—thank God, thank God!’, and after that images fused so that she had no more than a glimpse of men spilling out of the car and John Rudd, white and shaking, grasping her arm and saying, with a kind of pitiful emphasis, ‘You couldn’t help it! It had to happen—something like this! Maybe it’s better!’, and although Claire understood quite well that he was only trying to mitigate her grief and horror she remembered his words in the days ahead and derived comfort from them.

There was nothing Maureen or anyone else could do beyond lifting the broken body into the car to be driven to the potting-shed behind the Nissen huts, a place that had already done duty as a temporary mortuary that year. Hazel must have been dead when she struck the ground for her neck was broken, as well as her right arm and several ribs, but miraculously her face was almost unmarked and Maureen, sponging it clean and awaiting the arrival of the Camp Commandant and police, wondered at the curious serenity of expression reposing in the features of one who had died so suddenly and violently. She wept a little as she worked at straightening the clothes and tidying the hair, recalling her old affiliation with That Boy, who would have to be told by someone—not her, please God—that violent death was not the prerogative of young men in khaki. Perhaps Paul would come home and afterwards write, explaining as best he could that even this was preferable to shutting a wild creature like Hazel Potter behind walls and subjecting her, possibly for years, to the nameless indignities of the mentally deranged. There was the child to be thought of and mercifully he was young enough to be lied to until the memory of his mother grew dim. She supposed Claire would concern herself with Rumble Patrick and as she thought this she felt a terrible, choking pity for all of them—for Ikey, for Claire, for Paul, for the Valley wives and even for the miserable little Cockney driver of the car, who had whined in his thin nasal voice, ‘She come straight at me! Never giv’ me a chance, not a chance!’ Well, that was true enough and luckily for him there were witnesses to back him up, so that he, at any rate, was out of it. She would have trouble, she suspected, with John, who was sure to hold himself equally responsible with Claire but was any one of them to blame in the smallest degree? It was, at bedrock, simply a case of the world’s present madness catching up with one of the few who had managed to keep ahead of it for so long. Looking down at the calm, blank face of the girl Maureen found her crumb of comfort in the reflection that, when all was said and done, Hazel Potter’s life had been more fruitful, tranquil and rewarding than most.

III

I
t was ironic that, within days of Hazel Palfrey lighting her last beacon to bring the Valley wanderers home, two of the strays should make such dramatic reappearances, the one on Valley soil, the other two hundred miles to the east where the youth of Europe was entering upon its third successive summer in the trenches.

The camp despatch-rider carrying the findings of the court of inquiry and coroner’s report on the accident actually crossed beneath the route of the first of these returning warriors, who came sailing in at a height of about eight hundred feet, pushing his SE5 biplane up to its maximum of 120 m.p.h. as he swung into a following wind between the hills enclosing the two rivers. Then, to the delight and astonishment of every man, woman and child within running distance, the aircraft swooped down over the avenue chestnuts and went bump-bump-bump along the turf of the big paddock to stop barely a hundred yards from the house.

They came scrambling from every direction, spilling out of the barns of the Home Farm, crowding from the stable-yard and tearing new gaps in half the hedges along Hermitage and Four Winds boundaries, all converging on the dapper, leather-jacketed young man who half-rolled from the cockpit and pushed up his goggles to shake hands with the first arrival. This happened to be old Horace Handcock who nearly choked with excitement when the SE5 (a machine that he alone in the Valley could identify) dipped over the rose garden and, according to his account told later in The Raven, ‘Dam’ nearly knocked me bliddy ’at off!’

Few of those who crowded round the little machine, or reached to touch the smooth blades of its propeller, recognised the aviator. His snug helmet, heavy jacket and goggles gave him a Martian look and the nature of his arrival reinforced this notion. But Claire recognised him at once and told Thirza to take charge of the twins, who would have persuaded Simon to hoist them into the cockpit if they had not been held back. Claire remembered the young man’s half-apologetic grin, and also a familiar smear of oil on his forehead, for Tod Glover, the Valley’s first motor mechanic, had always worn a smear of grease on his face, carrying it like a trademark. When she pushed forward to greet him Claire recalled the occasion, years before, when Tod had rescued the family from the ignominy of being towed home in the Belsize. He was a fully-fledged pilot now, he told her, having completed his course at Montrose, in Scotland, and been transferred to a flying camp near Bristol. He had been there, he told his astonished audience, only an hour or so ago and would have to return at once but he decided to try a practice landing on home ground, having remembered that the paddock was the most level stretch this side of the river.

He stayed about half-an-hour, drinking tea (he refused alcohol) and munching a huge slice of Mrs Handcock’s plum cake and still they surrounded him like the figures in the engraving that hung in the bar of The Raven, entitled
News of Waterloo
.
He had retained his Devon burr but few among them could recognise his slang and concluded that, on taking to the air, these young men had been taught a new language. He apologised for his short stay but on taking off promised to loop-the-loop and the younger ones understood this well enough and hopped about with excitement, clutching one another and saying that Tod was going to perform the legendary feat right over big paddock and that if the war lasted long enough not one of them would enlist as a soldier but in the Royal Flying Corps, like Old Tod, where they could kill more Germans in two minutes than an infantryman killed in six months. As Tod shook them off, warning them to stand clear whilst he swung the propeller, Horace Handcock began a patriotic speech that might have lasted some time had it not been obliterated by the roar of the engine and a wind that carried his words away like dry beech leaves. Then, after a short, uncertain lurch across the turf, the SE5 was airborne and everybody stared at the sky as it gained speed and height, sweeping in a wide graceful circle round the fringe of Shallowford Woods and then shooting downwind as far as Codsall bridge. Tod kept his promise. Before heading off up the Valley he actually did loop-the-loop, not once but three times. The ecstatic sigh that arose from his audience was more prolonged than anything the Squire’s rockets and set-pieces had produced at either of his Coronation displays. Then Tod and his trim little steed were a disappearing speck over Blackberry Moor and all that was left to remind the earthbound of his miraculous visitation were two streaks and a brown skid-mark on the turf. The twins looked at the scars reverently every day until they were obliterated by the boots of hospital patients passing to and from the Nissen huts. The patients, as a whole, did not share the Valley’s enthusiasm for fliers. One private almost caused a riot in the bar of The Raven that same night by remarking, sourly, that ‘The bloody airmen had it cushy! They didn’t have to face barrages and they slept under a roof every night!’

The return of the second Valley wanderer did not create such a sensation as the appearance of Tod Glover, for he was unable to make a personal appearance but news of his miraculous reappearance this side of Jordan was a nine-day wonder. Smut Potter—poacher, gaol-bird, horticulturist, and slayer of innumerable Germans, missing and believed killed during the early days of the Somme offensive, returned from the dead, seemingly none the worse for dying.

Smut had been given up for lost by everybody in the Valley except, possibly, by Meg who consulted the cards on the subject any number of times but had not turned up the ace or jack of spades, signifying death or mutilation. She was not much surprised, therefore, when an official letter arrived informing her that Smut had rejoined his unit and would be home on furlough in due course. This was followed, within a day or so, by a single sheet written in Smut’s laborious scrawl, explaining that he had been taken prisoner in July last year but had escaped and holed up until he could rejoin the British field forces. Meg showed his letter to Horace and Horace showed it to John Rudd but neither of them could make very much of it for it sounded a very tame account for someone who had returned from the dead. It was, however, the simple truth and Smut himself was puzzled by the furore his reappearance caused in what remained of his battalion. He was interviewed by at least four intelligence officers, one of them a taciturn Red Cap whom Smut hated on sight. It was only when his own colonel interviewed him that the full story of Smut’s survival emerged, and was copied into the regimental record, forming the basis of several newspaper articles, one of which Smut read but understandably failed to recognise himself as the hero.

His Odyssey began ordinarily enough. On July 2nd, 1916, together with a wounded lieutenant and about a dozen other men, he was overrun in a shell-hole during a counter-attack. Smut, whose blood was up, was for fighting it out but luckily for the other men in the pocket the lieutenant decided to surrender when ammunition ran low. They were not murdered out of hand, as Smut rather thought they might be but were employed as stretcher-bearers until there was a lull and afterwards marched to a ruined farm behind Péronne. They were lightly guarded and Smut could have left the column without difficulty but he was tired, hungry and in no physical shape to attempt the feat of threading his way through the fluid German positions. An opportunity occurred, however, later in the day, when a large number of prisoners were packed into a large farmyard and dusk came down before they were recounted. On one side of the yard was a vast midden heap and near it Smut found a length of lead piping from a shattered pump. The pipe reminded him of an occasion, long ago, when he had given Gilroy’s gamekeepers the slip by taking to a pond and breathing through a long reed while his pursuers beat a patch of marsh without flushing him out. His chum, ‘Dinty’ Moore, to whom he confided his plan, was sceptical of burrowing into the midden and using the pipe in the way Smut had once used the reed.

‘I’d as lief spend the rest o’ me bloody life behind wire as lay up in that stinking mush!’ Dinty said but Smut, who had spent three and a half years behind bars, valued freedom more highly and was soon deep in the midden, his pipe projecting a few inches above the wall.

He lay there until he was half suffocated but the plan worked. As soon as the men were marched away he had no difficulty in emerging and walking unchallenged into the eastern outskirts of Péronne. By the time he got there, however, he was near the end of his tether. Forty-eight hours had passed since he had eaten his iron rations in the shell-hole and although by no means a fastidious man the stench he carried with him was enough to overpower a man travelling on an empty stomach. There was a shaded light at the back of the first house he reached, a tumble-down building with a large, stone-built barn abutting on to the street. Smut hesitated outside the half-open door wondering whether he could risk foraging for something to eat and perhaps lie up during daylight hours after making shift to remove traces of his sojourn in the manure heap. He was incredibly lucky. As he stood there, trying to make up his mind, he was assailed by a delicious smell of freshly-baked bread so that he pushed open the door and walked in, coming face to face with the baker, a handsome, statuesque woman of about forty, who might have weighed around eighteen stone. She came out of the inner bakery, stared at him in the dim light issuing from the open door, gave one or two long sniffs and then recoiled, as from a fiend of the pit but the smell of baking bread had now overcome the last of Smut’s reservations and he followed her up, closing the door and announcing himself as a British soldier on the run. Thus began an association that was to last a lifetime and form the starting point of his miraculous return from the dead.

The woman was a Fleming called Marie Viriot and had been widowed twice, once by a sack of flour that fell on her first husband and broke his neck, and later by the Germans, when Monsieur Viriot was killed in the Ardennes offensive. She was now struggling to run her business in territory that had been occupied by the enemy since the first weeks of the war and her unremitting hatred of the Boche stemmed more from the innumerable petty restrictions than from the fact that they had killed Sergeant Viriot in 1914. She was a vigorous, affable woman, with a loud, neighing laugh and her sense of humour, dormant for so long, was revived by the appearance of Smut standing in her bakery steaming in the heat of the oven and giving off the acrid stench of a neglected farmyard. In her youth she had been a waitress in an Ostend teashop that catered for tourists and her quick mind had picked up a working knowledge of English. Smut’s estaminet French was better than average so that they were able to converse freely almost from the start. They took to one another at once. Both Madame’s husbands had been short, stocky men of Smut’s build and after he had stripped and washed in her presence, and she had fed him on hot bread and thin vegetable soup she made her decision.