Post of Honour (7 page)

‘I haven’t put any petrol in since I brought her home,’ Paul admitted ruefully and the insertion of a twig showed that the tank was bone dry.

‘How about that can on the running board?’ asked Tod, trying not to look superior when Paul admitted that he thought the can contained water and after a sniff to make sure Tod made a funnel of paper and within minutes the Belsize was climbing the hill again, Paul maintaining a discreet silence all the way to Paxtonbury.

‘Well,’ said Claire, after an uneventful journey home, and insistence upon the entire family taking a bath to rid themselves of layers of white dust, ‘it was nice of you to buy a motor for us, but I can’t help thinking we should be much cleaner and far safer without one! It would be promising, I think, if you had a mechanical bent like young Tod but you haven’t and never will have, so why not admit it, and stick to horse and trap?’

‘That’s a ridiculous stand to take simply because I ran out of petrol,’ he said. ‘It’s high time we got used to motors and I’ll master this if it’s the last thing I do!’

It almost was; a day or so later, having refused to engage Tod as a chauffeur, he came bumbling down the steep drive, clashed his gears at the gate and shot across ten yards of soft ground straight into the Sorrel, carrying ten yards of paling with him. There had been some heavy rainfall and the water above the ford was five feet deep. The Belsize plunged in nose down, looking like a primeval monster maddened by thirst and only the fact that he had managed to unlatch the door whilst ploughing through the iris bed enabled Paul to free himself before the heavy vehicle sank into the soft mud of the river bed.

Help came from all directions. Matt, one of the shepherd twins, hauled him ashore and Honeyman and Henry Pitts, summoned from the lodge where they were conferring with John Rudd, managed to get a rope under the rear wheels just before they disappeared from view. When Claire was summoned she found the river bank seething with activity as Home Farm horses struggled with the hopeless task of hauling the Belsize clear. What astounded her was the fact that Paul did not seem cured of his obsession. Instead of going back to the house to change he remained on the bank to supervise salvage operations, snarling at everybody who advised him to get into dry clothes. He was there for an hour or more during which time no progress was made, apart from the motor being anchored by ropes to saplings and the following day, to nobody’s surprise, he had a heavy cold which did not improve his temper.

Claire said, as she dosed him with whisky and water, ‘What do you intend to do with The Juggernaut if you ever do get it out?’ and he said, grumpily, ‘clean it up, get young Tod to service it and have another go.’

She said, with unexpected firmness, ‘You’ll leave it right where it is!’ and when he exclaimed in protest, arguing that it was she who prompted him to buy, she went on, ‘That was before I realised you haven’t the temperament essential to anyone setting out to master one of those things! I admire you for trying and I shouldn’t have to remind you that I usually back you to the hilt when you set your mind on doing something, but this is different; the children are involved and I’m obliged to make a stand.’

‘Now how the devil are the children involved in my driving a motor?’ he demanded. ‘I’m not likely to let them play with it, am I?’

‘Sooner or later you’ll expect them to ride in it,’ she said. ‘It’s only by chance that Simon wasn’t beside you yesterday and if he had been he would have been drowned! Did you think of that while you were prancing about on the bank in wet clothes, catching this cold and working off your bad temper on people who were trying to help you?’

He had not thought of it but he knew it was true. Up to the last minute Simon had intended to accompany him but Paul, impatient to be off, had made a trial run down the drive whilst Simon slipped inside for coat and scarf. He said, reflecting how specially protective Claire always felt about Grace’s child, ‘You’re right. If anything had happened to him you would have found it hard to forgive me, wouldn’t you?’

‘I should have found it impossible, Paul,’ she said, calmly, ‘even though indirectly, it would have been my fault! As it is, we were lucky and I mean to profit by the lesson, even if you won’t! I can’t stop you amusing yourself with your new toy but I won’t have you take any of the children out ever again and that’s final!’

It was an edict and he accepted it as such but for all that her attitude still piqued him, perhaps because, for the first time since their marriage he had failed to impress her.

‘Suppose we retired old Chivers and signed on Tod as a chauffeur?’ he suggested. ‘He could give me lessons and I can’t be such a damned fool as to fail to get the hang of it in time.’

‘Paul,’ she said, more gently, ‘I know you better than anyone and a lot better than you know yourself! You’ll never make a motor-driver because you haven’t got that kind of patience. You’re a bull-at-a-gate person and machines need a light touch. You are entitled to risk your own neck but you’re not risking my children’s! I don’t often oppose you but in this I’m adamant and I’m not saying this because of what happened yesterday but because your prejudice against gadgets is so great that you ought never to be trusted with one as lethal as that motor!’ She smiled, for the first time since the subject had been raised. ‘Shall I tell you what my advice is? Leave The Juggernaut as a local landmark and ‘go back to horses!’

And this, after a good deal of grumbling about wasted money was what he did. All that winter, when the river was high, the Belsize was the plaything of otters and water voles but when the floods receded part of the wreck was revealed, a permanent testimony to the Squire’s short-lived attempt to adapt himself to the twentieth century. From then on the mechanisation of the valley proceeded without him. Soon the German professor appeared in Coombe Bay High Street in his new Humber, driven by his son, Gottfried, and then Eveleigh hired a traction engine to haul away the trunks of elms felled on his western boundary. Now and again, in that final glow of the Edwardian afternoon, an occasional motor was seen on the river road and occasionally, very occasionally, power-driven engines were used to harrow stubborn ground that had long lain fallow. But for the most part the horse continued to flourish and Claire consolidated her victory and in the main the people of the Valley were at one with her. It was Henry Pitts, watching the hired traction-engine pull roots as easily as a dentist extracts teeth, who voiced the opinion of witnesses when he said, with one of his slow, rubbery grins, ‘Tiz quicker an’ neater than us can do it wi’ chains an’ plough horses but somehow it baint real farmin’, be it?’

Chapter Three

I

L
ooking back on the last summer of the old world Paul was always struck by two features of that time; the weather and the focus of attention on Irish affairs to the exclusion of everything else, including Germany.

The weather he remembered as being the most pleasant of any comparable season he had spent in the Valley, wann and consistently sunny by day, with gentle rain at night so that crops ripened early and even the habitual pessimist Eveleigh, spoke guardedly of excellent harvest prospects. In some ways it resembled his first summer at Shallowford when there seemed to have been blazing sunshine for weeks on end but there was no accompanying drought, as there had been in 1902, and under a temperate sky the Valley burgeoned with promise and fruitfulness so that people went gaily about their work and only a few local wiseacres like Eph Morgan expressed doubts about what was likely to happen when the Irish were given their precious Home Rule and began civil war.

James Grenfell was down in early June and Paul invited him to dine with Professor Scholtzer with whom he was now on cordial terms. James liked the old German on sight and it was over their port that night that Paul took part in his first discussion on the dangers inherent in the rivalry Germany, France, Russia and Great Britain had been practising for more than a decade. He was mildly surprised when the Professor put forward a theory that, without justifying the Kaiser’s antics in the diplomatic field, at least shed a little light on them for he declared that, rightly or wrongly, fear of encirclement was very real to many Germans, even intelligent Germans. The Junkers, he told them in his expansive but guttural English, were anxious to come to some agreement with Great Britain and their fear of France and Russia was not merely a ruse to compel politicians into granting more and more money for military purposes. They saw Russia as a steam-roller driven by barbarians and France as an irresponsible nationalist mob determined to avenge the defeat of 1870. ‘I am not excusing them, my friends,’ he went on earnestly, when James Grenfell pointed out that sooner or later Germany would be obliged to restore the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, ‘I try to make you look at Europe through German eyes. Only if you British do that can we stop this Gadarene rush to destruction.’ James said, with a smile. ‘Oh, I don’t question your thesis, Professor, but surely it is generally accepted that war, even on the scale of 1870, is an impossibility? Threats and border incidents yes—we’ll always have those, but civilised nations, grinding one another to pieces? That’s a very different matter, if only on account of cost!’

‘Guns,’ said the Professor sadly, ‘have a vay of going off by themselves and vonce they bang there are always plenty of people to profit from refilling cartridge pouches! That has been my reading of history; it remains my greatest fear! Not a vor started by the Emperors or by the politicians or even the Junkers but those who profit by conflict!’

Neither Paul nor James took the Professor’s warnings very seriously, James because he was too deeply imbued by Westminster’s views that no power could afford to fight a modern war, Paul because he found it difficult to believe that anyone, even a crass idiot like the Kaiser, would, when it came to the touch, challenge the British Empire. He did not say this; it would have seemed to him a breach of good manners but he mentioned it to James after the Professor had gone home and they were smoking their last cigars in the library. James dismissed the Saxon’s fears as the result of studying the past at the expense of the present. ‘Even if the guns did go off by themselves, you can take it from me, Paul, that we should stay clear of it and I have that on the best authority—Asquith’s, Morley’s and even Grey’s! For your peace of mind we couldn’t get in even if we wanted to. The pacifist group in the Cabinet would resign in a body and we should lose the backing of the Labour Party. That would mean an election and by the time we had gone to the country it would be all over bar the shouting! So in case we don’t run our full term I advise you to concentrate on the Ulster question. That’s real enough and they mean to fight if they have to! A good many Tory MPs are egging them on and you can imagine how I feel when I see suffragettes sent to prison for long terms on charges of conspiracy when idiots like Carson are openly advocating armed rebellion!’

When at length he went to bed it was not of German aggression and Russian steamrollers that Paul thought but of women like Grace, Annie Kenney and the girl Davison, who had died under the hooves of a Derby horse the previous summer. James’ parting remarks robbed him of sleep for an hour or so, or it might have been the heavy meal and all the cigars they had smoked, for he lay awake beside Claire for a long time, wondering what had become of the woman who had entered and left his life so abruptly, so long ago it seemed that it might have happened in childhood. He thought, recalling the scenes they had witnessed outside the Houses of Parliament, ‘It’s their staying power that astonishes—that and their sense of dedication! But they don’t seem to be getting anywhere, poor devils, and now this Irish business has edged them out of the spotlight!’ When at last he fell asleep he had one of his meaningless dreams about her, a prolonged waiting in all manner of improbable places for Grace to keep a muddled rendezvous. If ever he did dream of Grace it was always along these lines.

In the decade after the Great War historians made play of the general anxiety caused by the shooting of Franz Ferdinand by a tubercular youth in Sarajevo that June but Paul, knowing the Valley and its people so well, never subscribed to this fiction. News of the Archduke’s death came and went but hardly anyone in the Sorrel district remembered the incident until it was thrust under their noses a month later and even then they looked on it as no more than a scuffle in a far-away country where the crack of the pistol and the roar of a home-made bomb were commonplace occurrences. Few in the Valley bought any newspaper but the
County Press
and although this publication carried a small section devoted to foreign news, its local readers did no more than glance at it before turning to the market section or columns dealing with county cricket.

There was one man, however, apart from the German professor, who was very much aware of the open door of the European powder magazine. Horace Handcock’s hatred of Germans dated from the day their Kaiser decided to compete with the British Navy and build himself a clutch of dreadnoughts. From then on Horace had waged a one-man campaign in the Valley, aimed at alerting his neighbours to the menace of Potsdam, and his warnings were so stark, and so original, that he was always able to enlist an audience in the Shallowford kitchen or the sawdust bar of The Raven. Horace appeared as a Solomon Eagle, preaching of wrath to come, and the regulars in the bar, seeking diversion, would sometimes encourage him to pronounce upon the latest forms of frightfulness Potsdam had in pickle for their British cousins. Nobody had ever discovered the source of Horace Handcock’s information, which was so extensive and so detailed, that the simple-minded among his listeners might have been forgiven for supposing him to have had access to the Wilhelmstrasse wastepaper baskets. He would talk of bombs disguised as marigolds dropped over agricultural districts by Zeppelins, of bags of poisoned sweets for unwary children delivered by the same agency and of giant howitzers planted as far away as the Baltic coast and capable of destroying half London. He was obsessed by the presence of cohorts of spies, landed nightly by submarine, to rendezvous a night or so later at deserted coves like Tamer Potter’s, east of the Bluff. To Horace every foreigner (Italian ice-cream vendors excepted) was in the pay of Von Moltke and quite aside from the personnel of German bands (spies to a man), he knew of at least two resident agents in the Valley, the mild-looking professor and his gentlemanly son, Gottfried. It was useless to point out to Horace that the professor himself was hostile to German militarists, or that he was on visiting terms with the Squire, Horace declared these instances typical examples of Teutonic guile and that they would not see the professor and his son in their true colours until the Kaiser’s fleet out-numbered the British by two ships to one. Then, one awful morning, they would find the German’s Coombe Bay house silent and shuttered, the occupants having been taken off by submarine the previous night in order to be spared the terrible naval bombardment that would follow and the sack of Paxtonbury and Whinmouth by field-grey hordes landed by fast torpedo boats, of which the Kaiser already had several thousand, with more building.

The only person agitated by these dire prophecies was Mrs Handcock, who was obliged to listen to them after everybody else had gone home to bed, and because she had always entertained a great respect for her husband’s erudition she had long since convinced herself that a German invasion of the coastal strip between Coombe Bay and Whinmouth was a virtual certainty. Fortunately for her, however, she was optimistic by nature and had made up her mind that the balance of naval power was unlikely to be tipped during her life-time, so there was really no point in worrying about it, especially as they were childless. And yet, in the end, Horace was caught on the hop just like everybody else for like a fool, he allowed the Mutiny at the Curragh to distract his attention during the critical months leading up to August, 1914. It was only when he learned of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, in late July, that he saw that events had overtaken him and by then it was too late to rouse the countryside.

The task would have been beyond him in any case for during the last few days of July, with hot weather continuing and the harvest upon them, the men of the Valley did not even pause to read the
County Press
.
While the telegraph systems of Europe quivered under a ceaseless exchange of threats, proposals, counter-proposals, accusations, denials and politely-phrased disclaimers, the respective masters of Four Winds and Hermitage were bargaining over a Jersey bull, and Smut Potter was working sixteen hours a day in his greenhouses. Nearby his two sisters, burned almost black by the sun, were digging an irrigation channel across the cliff field under the threat of the Bideford Goliath’s hazel switch and all over the estate men and women were discussing such things as the fruit crop, water shortage, field pests and the likely price of cow fodder in the autumn. On the very day that the Tsar of All the Russias was posting his ukase to the remotest villages in his vast domains, Sam Potter was blazing the next belt of firs to be felled in the plantation behind his cottage and Sydney Codsall was taking a posy to old Mrs Earnshaw, who was ninety-eight and making a new will at the expense of a niece in New South Wales. Sydney was one of the few who was half-aware of a crisis but it did not seem to him anything like so important as the transfer of Mrs Earnshaw’s ropewalk to a company known as Coombe Bay Enterprises Ltd., who were offering hard cash for an enterprise that had failed even before Mr Earnshaw was drowned at sea in the eighteen-eighties.

In only one kitchen in the Valley did the distant roll of kettle-drum cause dismay and this was at Periwinkle, on the edge of the moor, where hostilities had already begun in a sharp engagement between Will Codsall and his wife, Elinor. Like the bigger conflict over the sea the dispute had its origin in a scrap of paper, not a treaty exactly but a printed summons ordering Will to present himself at the Devon Yeomanry barracks within forty-eight hours, on pain of arrest.

The arrival of the summons stupefied Elinor. Until then she had looked upon Will’s territorial activities as a silly male game, for which, however (and she also considered this ridiculous), he had been paid a regular quarterly sum, ever since he had signed on the day of the Coronation Fête, in 1911. Will had been won over by the Yeomanry’s smart turnout on that occasion and in the refreshment tent after the tug-of-war he had got into conversation with a troop sergeant, who had pointed out the advantages of a Territorial engagement which required of a volunteer no more than one drill a week and a fortnight’s camp each summer. Will signed on the spot and had never regretted his impulsive act. He had enjoyed the drills and found the money useful for new stock, whereas the period in camp had been a welcome change from farm chores. It had never occurred to him that he might, at some time, be required under the terms of his engagement to fire a rifle in anger, and if anybody had told him there was the remotest possibility of his being transported across the seas he would have paid his solicitor brother to extricate him from such a menacing situation. Elinor, once the meaning of the summons was made known to her, flew into a temper that gave Will a foretaste of the drum-fire and box ban-ages he was soon to encounter near Armentieres. She stormed and raved for an hour, likening him to various vegetables of the coarser kind, and using phrases that would have stunned her lay-preaching father, mercifully at rest in the churchyard. Will reasoned and pleaded, pointing out that all Territorial units were earmarked for home service, for guarding viaducts and suchlike and that even if there was a war it was unlikely to last more than a month and that he would be paid for his time with the colours, just as he had for his periods in camp, but Elinor’s wrath continued to break over him in waves until at length he fled to the privy in the garden and locked the door against her. When it was dark he stole out and foraged around for his kit. It took him back a few years to be moving about a house with stealth as though, at any moment, he would hear the shrill voice of his mother, Arabella, but when Elinor found him packing in the kitchen he saw that her rage was spent, that her eyes were red and at once felt small, mean and wretched. He said, dismally, ‘You’ll get the separation allowance, Ellen, and I daresay tiz all a lot of ole nonsense and us’ll be ’ome be weekend,’ and he put his arms round her and kissed her as she wailed, ‘How be I goin’ to manage with harvest almost on us? What’s to become of everything we built up yerabouts if youm gone for months? Was ’ee mazed Will Codsall, to put us in this kind o’ fix for a few shillings?’ He admitted glumly that he must have been, as mazed as a March hare, adding that there was a possibility of him getting temporary exemption until the harvest was in, and after that he would see Squire and anyone else who could pull strings to prolong his deferment indefinitely. She cheered up a little at this and cooked his supper and afterwards, in the evening haze, they walked the boundaries of their eighty-acre holding and he issued his final instructions in case exemption took time to arrange. That night, while he slept, Elinor lay awake and her mind went back to the first night they had spent in this room after their wedding at the little chapel in Coombe Bay. They had, or so it seemed to her, achieved a great deal since then, enlarging what had been a ruined patch into a real farm, very small but prosperous. Then they had nothing but a few hens but now they had the biggest egg yield in the Valley, besides a cow, ducks, turkeys, pigs, and several acres of former heathland under the plough. Was this to be sacrificed because Will, almost an illiterate, had signed a paper he didn’t understand? It was a monstrous price to pay for a small mistake and what kind of soldier would he make anyway, despite a hulking frame and hardened muscles? He had never been able to bring himself to wring a fowl’s neck and all the killing was done by her. Perhaps they would find this out and send him back; perhaps, but somehow she thought it unlikely.