by David Rees
‘Yes!’
‘And if you were Argentine we’d call you Evita,’ John said.
‘Get lost, Suffolk peasant!’
‘Per-ón! Per-ón! Per-ón!’ Aaron chanted. ‘Don’t cry for me, Ar-h-entina!’
‘Stop it,’ Tim said, quietly.
Aaron turned to him disdainfully, and said ‘Bummer.’
‘We might be in here for days!’ His voice rose, and he hoped his blush wasn’t visible. ‘Do you want it to be a battleground?’
Silence. John looked surprised. Ray, evidently, had not taken it in, for he said ‘My great-uncle was executed by the Fascists. My grandfather destroyed two tanks single-handed. There were twenty thousand people living on the pavements of Madrid, and when the city was on fire from the air-raids you could hear them: “¡No pas-ar-án! ¡No pas-ar-án!” When Bilbao was captured, the Germans inspected all the factories and, because they were undamaged, production was speeded up to make more guns for the rebels, and for Hitler. And you wonder why I don’t like being called Franco!’
‘Only a joke,’ John said. ‘A silly one, I daresay.’
‘How did they escape?’ Tim asked. ‘Your family?’
‘Grandad was with the Repúblican army all the war. Málaga, Guadalajara, Teruel. When Barcelona fell, he and Grandma . . . gave up, I suppose. They walked to France, over the freezing Pyrenees. My dad was three; his fourth birthday was the day they crossed the frontier.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘My grandparents? They live with us. Grandad worked in the docks until he retired last year. My dad’s on the car ferries, head chef. We all live in the one flat.’
‘Have you ever been to Spain?’
‘Been to Spain? My God, until last year we’d have all been shot as soon as we set foot in the country!’
‘He’s been to Spain every day of his life,’ Aaron said. ‘In his mind.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Ray admitted. ‘Yes, I’d like to go back there.’
‘Go back? You can’t go back to somewhere you’ve never been!’
Ray grinned. ‘We fight all the old battles in our kitchen. Brunete’s Grandad’s speciality. I’ve seen him do that, yes, many times; hardly a word changes each performance. He lines up the kitchen cups; they’re Franco’s mob, and the whisky tumblers are our battalions. To show the difference in class, he says. He’s good at imitating the politicians, Companys in particular. Oh, but you wouldn’t know who Companys was. ¡Visca la Llibertat! He was shot.’
‘I’ve heard it all,’ Aaron said. ‘Too often.’
‘Ron, they can’t help it! They were there!’
‘They could leave you out of it. You’re English, a Suffolk ploughboy! Do you know’—Aaron turned to Tim—‘if he went out with a Catholic girl they’d cut him off with a shilling!’
‘Why?’
‘Because the Church was on the rebels’ side,’ Ray explained. ‘That creeping Jesus, the Pope, supported Franco throughout, even though the Basques were Catholic to a man, no stauncher Catholics in the world, and Repúblican to a man. My family hates Catholics. Grandad was an Anarchist, you see.’
‘What’s the point of fighting about it now?’ Aaron said. ‘It’s all history. And very boring for everybody else.’
‘Ron, they can’t help it!’
‘You can. You can stand up for being you, can’t you?’
Ray looked perplexed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know.’ Aaron turned over, searching for the place he’d lost in his book. ‘I don’t have these problems. My dad runs a pub and he’s soft as a mashed turnip. lets me do almost anything I like. Mum’s an old nag. I don’t take any notice and neither do my brothers. Yes. I've got grandparents, too; they live a stone’s throw from us and Grandma’s a bit sharp. But I wouldn’t let anybody interfere with my life, not the way you do.’
‘Depends what you’re born to,’ Tim said.
‘What are yours like, then?’ John asked.
He was about to reply, but remembering what Ray had said about Catholics, he decided it was not really the moment. ‘They’re all right,’ he said, looking in his rucksack for Blake. And, after a moment. John reopened the subject of Ipswich Town with Ray.
All right! How did you tell a mother who was Irish and devoutly Catholic that you knew you were homosexual? There would be an instant drama: ‘Are you trying to kill me?’ and she would pack him off to Father Sullivan to be sorted out. There were no possible ways the two could be reconciled. Being homosexual, the priest would say, is not a sin in itself, though it was certainly not a condition to be desired. It was a severe handicap, perhaps a mental illness, and a homosexual act—in thought, word, or deed—was a mortal sin. Pope Paul had spoken on this matter not long ago, reaffirming what the Church had taught throughout the ages: sexual behaviour in human beings was only acceptable to God within marriage; its purpose was for the procreation of children. Pleasure, fulfillment, happiness: non-starters.
Tim found this hard. To be forbidden, for the rest of his life, to touch, stroke, kiss, let alone adventure further with any person of his own sex made a mockery of being given the blessing of existence in the first place. At the same time he could not reject the Church, the faith of his fathers, two thousand years of authority. Until recently it had been positively painful to hear Catholicism criticized: two terms back they had started Chaucer, and he’d been shocked by the ironic sneers at worldly nuns and lecherous friars. His English teacher had become quite impatient with his attitude. But somehow, in some way, in the distant future —or maybe not so far off perhaps—he would have to choose. ‘To be adult is to have the power to choose,’ he remembered the Headmaster saying in one of their sixth-form World Affairs periods.
Blake would have agreed. Expect poison from standing water. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. Inside myself, inside myself.
Extraordinary the hold parents had. It was the guilt they could induce; the all-we’ve-sacrificed-to-give-you syndrome. Even though he had been in conflict with both of them for some while now, slowly examining their standards, slowly rejecting them. His mother’s snobbery: table napkins instead of serviettes; ‘shut up!’ was a rude expression; wearing a school cap every morning as he left home (she insisted), to remove it of course as soon as he was round the corner. If he said—and naturally he never would—words like semen or vagina she would die on the spot. How had he arrived in this world? Shut your eyes and think of England? (Ireland.) Since he was born they had slept in separate beds; they were thirty-two at the time. The pressure on him to work, work, work! Education, the last and greatest of panaceas! Just to fulfill what she had always wanted for herself and never achieved!
Dad, whose mode of speech was the imperative mood: instructions, negatives. There’s a right way and a wrong way of doing everything. Fold your flannel in four when you wash. Tuck your shirt inside your pants. (Knickers! Tim would scream, inside his head.) You can’t learn to drive the car yet; you’re too young. I’m seventeen, Dad. I don’t care how old you are, you’re ... what’s the use? Give in, creep by, bent reed in the storm. Oh we don’t want to watch that sort of thing! Switch it off Bruce Forsyth, Are you being Served, Porridge, Top of the Pops, etcetera, etcetera. And why don’t you play games like any decent lad? When I was at school I was captain of the fourth eleven. And get a haircut. Clean yourself up (euphemism for shave). Be a nice neat replica of boring humourless unhappy old me with my twenty-seven years’ secure job in the civil service.
If only there had been a brother or a sister!
At least the idea of this trip had been allowed, welcomed even. ‘Do you good to get out in the open air, lads of your own age.’
How lucky to be Aaron! Fancying girls, Dad soft as a mashed turnip, brothers (there were three, David, Martin and Peter), able to do more or less exactly what he liked. The body so sleek, slim, desirable, and, Tim guessed, as soon as he’d discovered sex he’d been having it, not a trace of guilt or shame. How extraordinar
y that people were so different!
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.
He lay awake long after the others slept. The wind blew fiercely and the tent strained, its canvas banging and flapping. But it held firm. Maybe the low cloud would have disappeared by morning, and they could walk easily enough to Langdale.
Aaron, breathing evenly. Tim stretched out a hand and touched his face.
He was the first to open his eyes. No wind, just steady rain soaking into the saturated earth. He peered out. Dense grey cloud, worse than yesterday. He slipped back inside his warm sleeping-bag.
CHAPTER THREE
It soon appeared probable that the Parliament army was in no hurry to begin a frontal assault on Exeter. Observation from the walls, confirmed by reports from spies that filtered through to the citizens, showed that the New Model was more concerned with digging itself in, tending its sick and wounded, and finding suitable winter quarters, than with launching a grand attack. Rumours abounded. So many different stories, often flatly contradictory, circulated, that Anthony said the city was as leaky as a sieve. When Tim asked what he meant, he said that, despite the closure of the gates, the number of possible ways out was so numerous that, under the cover of darkness, people fled through the fields to the Puritan lines. Mostly they were cowards wishing to escape from the hardships of a long siege and the reprisals they feared would occur when Exeter finally capitulated, but some were employed to obtain first-hand information about the movements and plans of the enemy and report back to the authorities. This latter was undoubtedly a two-way traffic; a stranger noticed at dusk in the city streets could well be a Roundhead intelligence man. In a civil war it was not at all easy to tell friend from foe; speech, gesture, clothes could be identical on either side.
Rumour had it that the Governor, Sir John Berkeley, was already in communication with Fairfax concerning the terms of the surrender. Rumour had it that he had refused Fairfax’s proposals outright. Then, rumour, deciding that perhaps too much credence had been given to Berkeley’s defiance, let it be whispered that ten commissioners from both parties were in secret session at Poltimore, the home of Sir John Bampfylde, some three miles north-east of the city. Negotiations were extremely delicate, rumour said; Parliament’s biggest prize in Exeter would undoubtedly be the Princess Henrietta Maria, the King’s infant daughter, who had lived at Bedford House since her birth there four years previously. The Queen, of course, had long since fled to France, but on no account could Sir John Berkeley allow the little princess to fall into the hands of the Puritans. Time, however, was on Fairfax’s side; he could pitch his demands fairly high (not so high that history would deem him unreasonable or tyrannical) but high enough for Parliament to be satisfied, and know that he only had to wait patiently and Berkeley would capitulate. And, rumour added, there were other reasons for lack of haste; his army needed a pause after their long march into the West Country, for his men had been weakened by epidemics of fever.
Speculation was rife, too, concerning the fate of the thousand Royalist cavalry under the command of Lord George Goring, who had disappeared from Exeter the night before Fairfax had completed his encirclement. Some said they had regrouped at Okehampton, and, refreshed now, were advancing to relieve the city and chase the New Model out of Devon. No, they had been surprised by Cromwell’s men advancing from Bow and had been cut to pieces. Nonsense, Cromwell was still at Crediton, observing from a distance; Fairfax wanted the capital of the South-West to fall into his own hands. In that case the Royalist army had gone to the aid of the besiegers at Plymouth. Or, knowing that the cause was hopeless, perhaps they had dispersed quietly to safe places in the countryside.
Only one piece of information was certain. Powderham Castle, the last remaining outpost in Royalist hands, fell to the enemy. The castle, standing on the western side of the estuary, was stormed by a handful of Sir Hardress Waller's men, led by Colonel Hammond. They had crossed the river during the night. This piece of news was received in Exeter with profound gloom.
Daily the remnant of the Royalist horse left the city, more to boost morale and show the populace that the war was still being vigorously prosecuted than for any positive military reasons. They achieved a few mild successes, picking off a Parliament straggler here and there, raiding the odd farm for supplies. Their own losses, however, hardly made even this policy worthwhile, and rumour had it that Berkeley, whose control over his military commanders was imperfect, was incensed at the difficulties it was causing to his deliberations at Poltimore.
Tim watched these clashes from the gatehouse window, but otherwise he was bored by the inactivity that preparations for a siege induced. Anthony was increasingly occupied with various affairs about which he said little and which took up a great deal of his time (the illegal distribution of food, Tim guessed; the supplies upstairs had dropped considerably, and there were frequent sounds of footsteps and murmured conversations from the storeroom). Tim spent much of the days now away from the gatehouse, exploring the city, though he always made sure he served meals on time. Lack of punctuality about meals invariably made Anthony fly into a rage.
The city was like standing water, stagnant. There were very few people in the streets, for there was almost nothing to buy in the shops or at the markets. Those who were abroad often appeared to walk in an aimless fashion as if their only purpose was to exercise. Every third person, it was said, was a spy, either for the Royalist administration or else in the pay of Parliament. Neighbours who had lived contentedly now stared at their acquaintances with looks of dark suspicion. The favourite place for a stroll was the city walls, where people hoped to relieve the tedium with a glimpse of horsemen fighting; this sometimes caused annoyance to the soldiers on duty who thought such activities hampered their stint of observation, and more than one fist fight was the result.
There was no wheeled traffic of any sort, and grass began to grow in the cobbles, even in the High Street. Offensive smells increased; there was no means of removing excrement, not even to the river, which lay tantalisingly out of reach beyond the west gate. Drinking water was scarce; the authorities considered how it might be rationed, but no plan was put into operation. Disease was a threat, particularly in the poorer parishes of St Mary Major, St George, and St Mary Steps. Churches were full: the Sunday services—celebrated everywhere in a manner to which Archbishop Laud would have given total approval— became the chief events of the social calendar, were attended, indeed looked forward to, even by those who normally skimped or evaded. The Dissenting places of worship, on the other hand, were padlocked; some had been mysteriously destroyed by fire.
One afternoon, when Tim was wandering without much purpose near the Guildhall he saw a troop of horse clattering towards him on the cobbles. He paid little attention, but he was jolted abruptly from his thoughts by a strident voice shouting at him. ‘You! Who are you, and what are you doing?’
He looked up at the cavalry captain, a fierce red-faced giant with enormous grey whiskers. A dozen men had reined in their horses.
‘I’m Tim Keegan. The servant to the warder of the south gate.’
‘What are you about here, so far from your duties?’
‘There’s . . . little to do this afternoon.’
‘You’re a fit, able-bodied man?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Hmmm. I have a sick recruit.’ He turned, and bawled at the rearmost soldier: ‘Evans! Get off that damned horse and return to barracks. Give this man your cutlass and musket. And your pistol.’
‘But . . Tim quavered.
‘But what?’ The captain leaned down and glared ferociously. He did not seem to be the sort of person one argued with.
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘Good. Just as well for you. Now get up on that blasted horse and stop wasting my time.’
So Tim found himself riding out through the east gate into the parish of St Sidwell. The houses here lay all in ruins; they had been blown up by
Goring’s men in order to avoid giving shelter to the advancing columns of Fairfax’s army. The inhabitants had been forced to find refuge inside the city walls, and most of them, who had once been of the Royalist persuasion, had been turned by this piece of unnecessary destruction (as they saw it) into Parliament sympathizers. Only the church survived, though this had lost its roof and all its windows. The tower, nevertheless, offered the Roundheads an excellent position from which they could fire into the city itself, and the fact of its still standing unharmed seemed to underline the thoughtless nature of the Cavaliers’ action.
At the parish end the expedition turned south-east towards Heavitree. In the dip below the village they were shot at by some inaccurate Parliament marksmen hidden in a copse, so, digging in their spurs, they turned tail and dashed across the fields in the direction of Whipton. This village, the nearest to Exeter in Puritan hands, they skirted carefully. The Roundheads made no sign of having seen them, though the presence of the King’s men must have been quite obvious. The captain gave an order to halt in a secluded lane from which the low white outline of Poltimore House could be observed in the distance. Tim, at the rear, gazed about at the countryside. It was a peaceful autumn afternoon of hazy sunshine. Trees were a riot of gold, copper and red; beechnuts lay on the ground; thistledown and columns of gnats floated in the air. The fields were deserted, no cows nor sheep, no labourers at their seasonal tasks, and everywhere he looked there were signs that the rhythm of the year had been interrupted by war: a haystack, half-built and now rotting, a field of barley left half-reaped, unkempt overgrown hedges, ditches full to the brim with decaying leaves.
The captain gave the order to move, then driving his horse from a canter into a gallop, and brandishing his sword, yelled ‘Charge!’ The speed was hair-raising, and Tim, covered in dust and mud from the animals in front, felt certain he must fall off and break his neck. Gradually, try as he might to keep up, the rest of the cavalry drew away, and eventually, having lost them, he reined in his horse under a tree on some high ground. From here he watched them follow a road that discreetly avoided both Whipton and Heavitree, and soon all they were was a cloud of dust rushing towards the river, where, he guessed, they intended to water their steeds. The whole excursion had had no point whatsoever, except to give exercise to rider and horse, and perhaps to show to the Roundheads that there was still some life in the Cavaliers.
