by Sam Angus
One Sunday in February, at the breakfast table at Lilycombe, Father Lamb stared at The Times headline, shocked and silent. Hettie,in an attempt to be cheerful for the children, said, ‘Look, Wolfie, see how Hero clings to the ponies now. He so tall and gleaming, they so stout and furry.’
Dodo managed a weak smile. Hettie had been so brave, saying only, ‘Scout died where she loved to be, with you both and with Hero.’ She’d been so relieved to see the children home and safe and then so worried by her father’s frailty, she’d not had time to grieve for Scout.
‘Twenty-five thousand dead in one night,’ repeated Father Lamb out loud. He picked up Captain and turned him and turned him, tenderly, gazing at him from all sides.
‘How the world has changed, Wolfie. Only yesterday it seems, we battled on horses, with lances . . . Now we can create six hundred acres of rubble, six hundred, in a single night . . . And our bombs may fall on statesmen, but they also fall on women and children, on horses and dogs. Why not daylight raids on military targets?’
There were tears on his cheeks. The children and Hettie were silent. The Allied air raids on Berlin, on Dresden and Hamburg, now once again on Berlin, had been thorough and devastating.
‘Come, Father,’ said Hettie. ‘We must get you to church.’
She helped him to his feet. Dodo went for his coat and hat and scarf.
Leaning on his daughter’s arm, he said, ‘I’m finding the church a lonely place to be, Hettie. Twenty-five thousand dead. Can there be any justification for such a thing?’
‘Shh, Father,’ said Hettie.
She looked at him anxiously. His congregation was dwindling. The village was uneasy with Father Lamb’s anxiety, that anxiety being so at odds with the country’s grim determination to get the whole thing over with, at any cost.
The sky was leaden. Inside St Simon’s it was dark, almost as night. Hettie took her place at the organ, the children at her side, Wolfie to pump, Dodo to turn the pages. A solitary figure in black sat at the front in the pew she thought of as her own.
‘There’s Mrs Sprig,’ hissed Wolfie.
‘Pray for her, Wolfie,’ Hettie whispered. ‘Henry was killed.’
Dodo and Wolfie bowed their heads.
Father Lamb lit a candle on the pulpit. He led the service, thin and frail and white, with a blanket draped over his cassock, the pale flame holding him as if in a pool of moonlight.
‘Let us pray . . .,’ he said, as the service drew to a close. When the shrunken congregation had bent to its knees, he continued, ‘. . . for the people of Dresden, for the people of Coventry, of Berlin, of London. For all whose lives have been taken by the bombings for all human life must be valued.’
There was a discomforted shuffling in the pews. Someone at the back rose and left, slamming the door. Father Lamb continued. The Causey family rose and left.
Father Lamb announced the final hymn, Wolfie’s favourite. Hettie played the opening bars. Father Lamb sang:
‘When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old . . .’ His voice was whispery and frail but no other voice rose with his.
‘He was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold, With a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand, For God and for valour, he rode through the land.’ Dodo and Wolfie turned to the audience and sang, as fully as they could. Father Lamb’s lovely baritone swelled with theirs and filled the church. ‘And let me set free with the sword of my youth, From the castle of darkness, the power of the truth.’ He gave the blessing. They bent their heads. Wolfie saw Hettie’s lips move and remembered to pray. Putting his hands together, he mouthed, ‘Dear God, Make Box well so Pa’s appeal can be soon. Make Father Lamb better. Make people come to his church. Help me look after Hero.’ Then he ran out of things to pray for and mouthed, ‘Amen.’
At the gate stood a dark clot of men. As Father Lamb stepped out into the porch, they booed and waved hastily improvised placards –
THE ENEMY STARTED IT.
WE WILL FINISH IT.
‘God bless you,’ he said as he passed.
Later Hettie unplugged the Bakelite wireless set and hid the lead. Once again, she cancelled the papers.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Water froze in the taps, milk crystallized and froze in the larder. An elemental cold gripped the country, a cold to freeze the blood.
They woke on the last Sunday in February to a staring, unearthly radiance, white rime on stone and cobble, each blade of grass stiff, seed heads turned to silvery globes, branches bowed with crystalline ice flowers, electricity cables glassy and garlanded with blossom.
Father Lamb had died in the night.
‘Dreadnought too,’ said Hettie, dark-eyed in the kitchen. ‘Dreadnought went with him.’
Wolfie looked out of the window, down past Hettie’s currant bushes to the graveyard. He smiled through his tears to think of Dreadnought and Father Lamb together at heaven’s gate, of the rowan that would be there and of what God and Dreadnought would make of each other.
Father Lamb was buried next morning, with Dreadnought. They did not have far to go.
A myriad diamond stars wreathed Father Lamb’s rowan, each branch of it hung with berries that flashed like blood against so much whiteness.
Chapter Thirty
After the burial, snow, soft as wool, fell from a pearly sky. For thirty hours it fell, transforming the hills to ghostly waves, unreal and timeless.
There was no school, the children confined to the house, Hero to his box. Restlessly he barged at the door of it till he broke the latch and Wolfie tied it with twine.
Samuel came, on foot, through snow to his thighs, a pair of corn sacks tied over his boots.
‘I’ll bring the ponies in – they can’t get to the grass,’ he called from the door. ‘Snow’s too deep on the lane to get ’em here, but I’ll get ’em into the shippon at Windwistle – that’s big enough to hold ’em.’ He gestured to the sky. ‘There’s more to come – sky’s thick with it – any more ’n’ it’ll bury ’em.’
‘Do we have enough hay?’ asked Hettie.
Samuel nodded. ‘Aye, and for the horse. For a week or two we’ve enough.’
‘I’ll put Hero next to the ponies,’ said Wolfie, watching Hero’s fretful head swing from side to side over the door. ‘He doesn’t like being on his own.’
Samuel nodded. ‘Gi’s a hand with the gates then,’ he said to Wolfie. ‘Ned’s up there, rounding ’em up, but we could do with help on the gates.’
Wolfie waited by the sheep pens at Windwistle, stamping and blowing on his fingers. Clods of snow thudded to the ground. The trees made strange creakings and groanings. Saplings snapped under their burden of snow with sudden, firework cracks. Wolfie was to keep one gate open, the gate on the other side closed. The ponies would be herded into the pen and the gate shut, from there they’d be ushered into the shippon.
He heard Ned’s cussing and shouting, then a muffled pounding. The half-dozen ponies, their furry winter coats iced like Christmas ornaments, stampeded in a wild torrent at the gate, manes and tails flying. Wolfie leaped to one side, leaned flat against the stone bank, holding the gate open as the ponies streamed through, sending snow flying.
Ned and Samuel ran staggering behind them, keeping to the bits where the snow had been flattened, making guttural, animal noises, herding them like a sheepdog. The ponies pounded on down beneath the white arching trees.
‘That’s all on ’em. Shut it. Quick. Or they’ll turn and stampede you.’
Finding the bottom gate shut, the ponies came to an abrupt halt and whirled round. Finding themselves trapped between the two gates they became wild and frightened.
‘Hurry, get that gate to the yard open,’ Ned called to Samuel. ‘Wolfie, get the shippon door open.’
When they were all in, Samuel forced the frozen iron bar across its door, then tied baler twine around the top of it. ‘Can’t rely on the latch,’ he said to Wolfie. ‘They can break their way out o’ most places . . . put
the horse in next door so he can see ’em. Give ’em all hay.’
Samuel tested the door again.
‘They’re strong,’ he said, ‘strong enough to break through that.’
‘Aye,’ said Ned. ‘Keep the yard gate shut too. That way, if they get out o’ the shippon, you’ll keep ’em in the yard.’
It was heavy work dragging hay over to the ponies and shovelling snow to keep the way clear but the beech tunnel kept off the worst of the snow and made it easier to reach the shippon.
School remained closed. On the third day a stinging wind got up, whipping up the snow and rearranging it, building it up to the eaves of Lilycombe. Branches bent and broke, snapping like gunshot. Snowdrifts, eight foot high, rose over the gates and filled every hollow. You could walk over the hedges not knowing they were there.
In bed, hearing the roof creak under its burden of snow, Wolfie thought of Hero in the shippon and was happy to think he was there with the ponies, warm and safe.
Chapter Thirty-One
The first drops of rain fell on the fourth night, an eerie drip, drip, drip, splattering and dimpling the snow. By morning it was swingeing and black.
There was a letter downstairs, from Pa, the first delivery since the snow had blocked the lanes. Something called a ‘Commission of Inquiry’ was being opened by the Warwicks. Things were going Pa’s way, the newspapers busy uncovering evidence bit by bit of what had happened at Wormhout.
Pa no longer added special notes for Wolfie. Dodo had written to him about Scout and probably because of that Pa no longer mentioned horses.
There was another letter, this one from Spud, on paper headed ‘26th (London) Anti-Aircraft Brigade’. Wolfie padded around the kitchen, jam on his cheeks, a slice of bread in his hands, as Dodo read.
A Doodlebug – a flying bomb – had hit Number 25 Addison Avenue. It must have been a while ago because Dora was growing beans where it used to stand. Everything had gone, even the joists of it had been taken for firewood. Spud hadn’t been able to save anything, but she’d found, in the front garden, a shortbread tin with Wolfie’s cavalry inside. She said that the Doodlebugs looked like comets with trailing fire, that the roar and the rush of them could lift even her off her feet, and that she’d always known that the Captain could never have done what they’d said he’d done.
Wolfie, after nearly five years in North Devon, could barely remember Number 25 Addison Avenue.
The rain continued all morning, driving and relentless, washing away the white curves.
The door opened and Hettie stood there, white faced, her tweed cape sodden.
‘Hurry, help me. They’re not there. Gone, all of them – Hero, the ponies . . .’
Wolfie held two fists to his mouth as though to stifle a scream. Dodo, deathly pale, walked like one already dead, towards the door.
The lane was running with water, the trees black and dripping. Pennywater howled down the little valley. The string to the shippon gate was gone, the bolt undone. The yard, a foot or so under water, was awash with mud, broken twigs and sodden leaves. The two gates on the drang, the sodden wood of them, already corrupt, was breached in the middle. Numb with grief and fear, they gazed at the splintered wood, gazed questioning into each other’s faces.
‘The rain – there’s no way of telling what happened . . .’ whispered Hettie.
They walked up beech tunnel and out on to the track that led up to the moor. The bushes there were trampled, impossible to tell now by what or by whom, but each sensed uneasily that there was or that there had been someone here. At the top, the gate to the moor was open, tied back in a secure and tidy knot.
‘That was no pony,’ said Hettie, weighing the knot in her hand.
‘Even Hero couldn’t do that,’ said Dodo.
Hour after hour, they searched on foot, the hills and the valleys, numb with grief and fear, hoarse with calling out across the black and sodden grass. To each other they said nothing, each haunted by the spectre of dark, crowded cattle trucks, the thought of what might have, must have, happened, too terrible to voice.
In the afternoon, Samuel joined them. Until it grew dark they searched. When they turned for home there was no Wolfie.
Samuel found him at dawn, shivering in the hollow of a gorse bush, and carried him back. He’d fallen from exhaustion, limp and broken hearted.
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘Never break faith with a horse, Wolfie.’
Day after day Wolfie sat at the window, a lanky, thirteen-year-old boy, holding the small lead figure he’d treasured since the day his Father had gone to France to fight for his country a second time. The flesh and blood horse that was the embodiment of his own deepest dream was gone.
Hettie never mentioned the ponies again.
On the ninth of the next month, the wireless announced the bombing of Tokyo, a hundred thousand people killed. Hettie collected her coat from the hall and left the house, not coming back till nightfall.
By May war in Europe was over, Hitler dead, but Pa remained in prison. Wolfie watched as Hettie dragged two huge old flags from the attic, last used for the Coronation, she thought. Dodo helped drape them from the first-floor windows.
The newspapers alleged, out of the blue, that an SS officer named Mohnke had committed a terrible massacre at Wormhout. Weeks later they said that a man named Otto Senf was responsible for ordering the massacre. Nothing could be proven because Senf could not be found. Once again Pa was in the papers, this time in connection with his statement. The papers whipped up a frenzy of anger and horror over the actions of the SS at Wormhout and a storm of indignation at the treatment meted out by the army to Pa.
In July, around a conference table in Potsdam, plans for the prompt and utter destruction of Japan were made. Hettie said she was glad her father could not hear such things.
That month they learned that Hettie was to lose her home, that in September a new rector would take the living. Numb at so much grief, all heaped together, Dodo thought only of Hettie when she asked, ‘Where will you go?’
Bravely Hettie told her that she’d go to her cousins in County Durham, that her uncle had always promised her a post at the village school there, that Dodo and Wolfie must come with her. She’d organized a post for Dodo as art tutor to her young cousins and Wolfie would attend her new school.
Wolfie, staring out at the empty box in the yard, did not look up.
Hettie and Dodo watched the haunted boy, their own eyes haunted by his grief. For Wolfie, as time went on, the loss had become harder to bear, the pain of it unassuageable. First, unbelieving, he’d searched all day, day after day, for the tall grey horse. As it grew certain that Hero, that the ponies, had gone, and gone forever, he was inconsolable. When once he’d begun to talk about Hero, about the ponies, about what might have happened to them all, he’d vomited with the horror of it. Now he never spoke of Hero, rarely spoke at all.
He’d broken faith with Hero. Hero had trusted Wolfie to look after him and Wolfie had failed.
‘He must know you’ll never let him down. Never, never break trust with a horse.’
Wolfie told Dodo later that he’d never leave Lilycombe, that he couldn’t go till he knew what had happened to Hero.
‘We’ve no choice, Wolfie,’ Dodo told him.
Lilycombe was never the same to them again. When Hero went, when the ponies went, they’d taken the spirit of the place with them, torn Lilycombe up by its roots. Wolfie’s heart had been ripped out of him, his dream stolen, washed downriver with the rain.
PART III
COUNTY DURHAM
Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows . . . Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle.
Robert F. Kennedy, 1966
Chapter Thirty-Three
Wolfie waited at a crossing, as one coal wagon passed, then another. Two men stood outside the pub, cloth caps low over their heads, mufflers on their hands, faces dusted with fine black dust. Wolfie crossed and ran alo
ng the far side of the street to Wynyard.
He waited by the stately iron gates. Beyond the gates lay the stern gravel walk, the vast house, the gentle hills and mountains. Behind him stood a single row of houses in an importunate line, then the mining village, beyond that the tall chimneys and dark smoke. Below the mine lay the cliffs and harbour. Behind Wolfie, two women stood, waiting, on their doorsteps, their faces drawn and tight, anxious for their men’s payday homecoming. Rationing had taken an iron hold of the country, stronger than it had ever been during the war.
As Wolfie waited for Dodo, he fingered the letter in his pocket, finally taking it out and rereading it.
15 May 1946
Dearest Wolfgang,
So many birthdays have passed since I last saw you, so many years I can never make up to you. The small boy I once knew is now a young man. Fourteen years old, Wolfie. You are now so used to jogging along without a father that you’ll have no need of me when I get out. I don’t mind my sentence on any account other than the waste of the years I could have spent with you. I have to guess what you have both become. At times I could tear the prison bars apart with my bare hands to be with you.
I count the days to the end of my sentence when I will see you both.
I try to imagine from your letters with what you fill your days. Dodo is a better letter writer now than you are. I miss your letters, Wolfgang, they were meat and bread to me. There’s nothing I can ever give you that will make up for Hero, and certainly nothing I can send you from this place. The only offering I have is to say that my case will be appealed. I hope to be released early and for the shadow over my name, over your name too, to go. Vickers is of course released now, and both he and Box have made statements on my behalf, we’ve enough evidence for the appeal. The Warwicks too, are collecting proof of the massacres. Unfortunately Mohnke is missing somewhere in the Balkans and Otto Senf is in hospital with tuberculosis, too ill to speak but since the SS make a vow of silence, a vow never to betray each other, I doubt he’d ever speak. Only when the bodies of my men are found will my statement finally be proved.
