Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  “William’s gone too.”

  She hadn’t even said hello.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “He’s not at the farm. Or in the fields. He’s gone. Like Tom.”

  Sarah laughed. “Tom hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  Maggie laid a hand on Sarah’s arm, just as she had again now with Menna. “Hasn’t he, bach?”

  Standing there in the bright, rain-polished yard, the two women had suddenly felt their ages upon them. Sarah felt like a girl again, that one word sending her back to her mother and her childhood. Back to when her brothers had left, when she never seemed to know the whole story and there was always something left to explain. Maggie, meanwhile, saw her own age reflected in Sarah’s younger face, in the deep furrow of confusion between her eyebrows, in all the unworry and unspent hope that was so evidently still welling within her. Why had Maggie felt none of that? Just the knowing, the dull, certain knowing of experience. She envied Sarah then, standing in that yard. But she pitied her too. She’d had hardly any distance to fall herself, but this young girl, she had the whole height of her hope. Maggie could still remember what that felt like. Just last year when her eldest was declared missing. When the telegram finally came confirming he was dead, she’d cursed herself for not coming down off that pillar of hope sooner. For not waking up earlier.

  “Why don’t we have a sit inside?”

  Sarah was still looking at her with an uncertain smile on her face. “Are you all right, Maggie?”

  “I’m fine, Sarah. It’s just I heard you calling. Just now. For Tom.”

  “Yes. I can’t find him. I don’t know where he’s got to.”

  “I know. That’s why I’ve come up. Let’s go inside, is it?”

  At first, when Maggie told Sarah what she thought might have happened to their husbands, Sarah refused to credit the idea at all. But then she thought of the bed, Tom’s outline, cold like it never was except maybe right in the depth of lambing when he’d been out all night. And she thought of his boots, both pairs missing. Of his silences this past week, deeper than usual. But there was still so much Maggie hadn’t explained. All she’d said was she thought this was to do with the invasion. That there would have been plans. Plans maybe they wouldn’t have known about. That Tom, William, and the others were some of the only men left. If something had to be set up, if something had to be organised, they’d be the ones to help with it. After all, who else knew this area as well as they did?

  “But why didn’t they tell us then?” Sarah had asked, feeling like that girl once more, tugging at the sleeve of her father, asking him to explain.

  Maggie didn’t know. In fact she didn’t know anything, she admitted. Nothing certain. She just knew. They’d all heard the wireless reports, hadn’t they? All of them had listened to the announcements from the BBC. Britain was being invaded. A massive counterattack is what the newsreader called it, speaking as calmly as if he were reporting that day’s business news. Britain was being invaded and the Germans were coming. Reinforcements flooding in from the victories on the collapsed Eastern Front. The Allies’ attempted invasion had been a disaster and now the Germans were staging their own. Chasing the ravaged Allied armies back across the Channel.

  They should have nothing to worry about here, though, that’s what Reverend Davies had told them. And the Home Guard officer who’d come round handing out the leaflets a week ago. “Disable all vehicles so only you can use them. Hide food stores and essential supplies. Offer no resistance but offer no help either.” He’d said these sentences in a flat tone, their intonations worn thin through repetition. But then he’d given Maggie a quick smile and briefly found his own voice again. “I wouldn’t worry too much, though, Mrs. Jones. Really. There’s no way Churchill’ll let them past the beaches. And even if he did, well, to be honest, I doubt you’d see a Jerry up a valley like this.”

  And now Tom and William were gone. And some of the others too, she’d bet. “So it has to be something to do with what’s happened, doesn’t it?” Maggie said, looking hard into Sarah’s eyes. She was looking for the start of that fall, the connection of possibility and reality, the gear change from doubt to concern. They’d known each other ever since Sarah came into the valley four years ago. Maggie was Sarah’s nearest neighbour. They’d soon become friends, although always along the axis of their ages. Always Maggie leading, playing the role of the mother, the aunt.

  Sarah looked down at the old wooden table, traced the swirls and eddies of the knots in the wood. “Like fingerprints,” her mother would have said. “Fingerprints in the wood from those gone before.”

  She shook her head slowly. “No, Maggie, Tom wouldn’t go anywhere without telling me first. He just wouldn’t.”

  Maggie sighed. She wouldn’t fall. God bless her, she wouldn’t fall.

  “Let’s go an’ call on Mary,” she said, ignoring Sarah’s refusal to address the idea. “And then we’ll see if Jack’s down at The Firs.”

  Sarah looked up at Maggie as if she were speaking another language and for a moment it made Maggie feel foolish. Was she jumping ahead? Was the girl right?

  “It’s best we check,” she said at last, “and then we’ll know, won’t we?”

  They’d found Mary Griffiths feeding her chickens at the back of the farmhouse. She’d sent her daughter, Bethan, out on the pony to look for her husband, Hywel. She wasn’t back yet. Mary had noticed Hywel’s winter coats weren’t hanging in the spare bedroom where they usually were. Both Bethan and her mother had overslept that morning and hadn’t been awake for long.

  Mary had two sons in the war, one of them in Intelligence, as she often told people. She was proud, but their absence these past four years had eroded her previously pretty face, leaving it worn with missing and marked with a perpetual frown. Sarah recognised Maggie’s deference to Mary’s fragility. She said nothing of the fears she’d expressed to Sarah. Just that William and Tom had gone off somewhere and they’d wondered if Hywel had seen them. No doubt he’d be back soon. If he had, could she send Bethan over and let them know?

  So they’d left Mary throwing handfuls of seed to her chickens, their urgent beaks drilling around her feet, the cockerel standing tall to stretch his wings and shake his blood red wattle and comb.

  They’d walked down the slope from Mary’s farm, through a lower field, and across the river, fording it where Jack Probert had thrown in a number of large rocks to create a pattern of makeshift stepping-stones. Then they’d climbed back up the slope, through the trees where a few early mushrooms were showing brilliant white and stubby in the grass, and up onto the track that cut into the side of the valley. As they walked along it towards The Firs, they spoke of other things than what had brought them out on this morning walk. The Home Service’s morning announcement, the withdrawal from Eastbourne, the wandering tomcat that had left Maggie with a litter of kittens to deal with. Anything other than where their husbands might be at that moment.

  At The Firs, Menna Probert was busy with her two young children, three-year-old Tudor, whom she held balanced on one hip as she answered the door, and one-year-old Emma, who lay crying somewhere in the darkened farmhouse behind her. Maggie and Sarah didn’t go in. They didn’t have to. Menna answered the door talking, her voice rising up the hallway towards them.

  “About time too. Where’ve you been? Your tea’s cold now and I’ve put the cake back in.…” She opened the door. “Oh. Sorry. I thought you were Jack,” she said, shifting Tudor another notch higher on her hip. “Has his hands full sometimes. Can’t get to the handle.”

  Back in the house Emma filled her lungs behind her mother and launched into another rising scale of cries. Menna winced and frowned over her shoulder into the hallway. Again Maggie said nothing more than ask if she’d seen William or Tom about. No? Well, not to worry, she said, stroking and pinching at Tudor the same way she might pet a dog or one of her horses. If she saw Jack she’d tell him his tea was cold. And she’d bring some of those old toys of
her boys round for Tudor. She’d been meaning to for ages. No, of course she would, no trouble. She didn’t really want them around the house anyway.

  They’d left The Firs, Emma’s cries dulling behind them as her mother closed the door of the farmhouse, and walked back down onto the track. If they turned right it would lead them all the way back to Upper Blaen. Turn left and it led out towards the mouth of the valley, gradually becoming a lane as it emerged from under the shadow of the slope and only evolving into a proper tarred road eight or nine miles further on, once it was free of the valley altogether.

  Maggie was quiet as they walked away from The Firs. She picked leaves from the hedge and kept her head down as if looking for something in the soft rutted mud beneath her feet. The blackberries were beginning to ripen, swelling from tight red clusters into claret dark bunches. Sarah wanted to stop and pull at the ripest ones, but Maggie’s pace had quickened and she was walking ahead. Sarah jogged a couple of strides to draw level with her.

  “So, what d’you think?”

  Maggie stopped in the lane. The light rain had passed and the sun through the leaves dappled across her face, making her squint when the breeze shifted the shadows from her eyes.

  “I think I was right, Sarah, that’s what I think. They’re up t’something. All of them. They’ve gone somewhere. The bloody fools,” she added with a shake of her head.

  “But where’d they go? The leaflets all say stay put. And the radio. And they can’t leave the farms for long, can they?”

  “I don’t know, bach. You’re right, they can’t leave the farms for long.” Maggie paused, looking back down at her feet. “But they’ve left us, haven’t they?”

  Sarah shook her head again, the notch between her eyebrows deepening. “They haven’t ‘left’ us. They’ve just gone somewhere. They’ll be back soon enough. I know Tom, he won’t be gone for long.”

  “An’ I know William,” Maggie said, looking back up at Sarah. “He’s never left the cows unmilked. Never. He’s been milking cows every morning since he was a lad. An’ he’s never done anything I didn’t know about first.”

  Maggie made this last assertion with some pride, and Sarah wondered if this wasn’t all just about her unease at being usurped by William, who, it was true, rarely moved from the house without Maggie’s blessing or knowledge.

  “We should get together,” Maggie said. “Mary will start worrying. As soon as Bethan’s back and she hasn’t got Hywel in tow.”

  “But she might. Have found him, I mean.”

  Maggie looked hard at Sarah. Don’t be so stupid, girl. Grow up. That’s what she wanted to say to her. Snap out of your dreams, your pretty life. What do you know? You’ve never lost anyone. This is war. Things happen. Don’t you realise, everything’s different now. Don’t you know what happened in France? In Holland? Belgium? Even Russia? Things happen. Even here, things happen. But she didn’t say this to Sarah. She just nodded her head instead, said, “Hmm, yes, she might,” and started walking on again, still talking, but more to herself than to Sarah, “but I still think we should get together an’ talk. Just in case, isn’t it?”

  Sarah didn’t object again. She knew better than to question Maggie more than once.

  “So,” Maggie continued, quickening her pace again and throwing her handful of leaves away, “why don’t you go back and tell Mary t’come up to ours. An’ tell Bethan to go over t’The Firs. She can take care of Tudor an’ Emma so Menna can come over too. Actually, you’d better go to Menna first, let her know. Gently, mind.”

  “And what are you going t’do?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m going down to t’The Court. See if Reg and the boys are there,” Maggie answered. “An’ then I’m going to milk those bloody cows,” she added, striding on, leaving Sarah standing in the middle of the track.

  A magpie, disturbed by Maggie, flew from a tree leaning over the track ahead of her. “One for sorrow,” Sarah thought, hearing her mother’s voice again. She looked around for the second bird that would make that curse a blessing. But it wasn’t there. And once Maggie had rounded the bend in the track, neither was anything else.

  That had been over an hour ago. And now here they were, the four of them, sitting around Maggie’s kitchen table listening to her as she explained to Menna once more that their husbands might be gone for a while. For more than just a day. They’d tried the wireless, but it hadn’t told them anything. The fighting in the south continued. The Allied forces were resisting the German counterattack. The population along the south coast had been evacuated north. America had pledged more reinforcements, but the U-boats in the Atlantic were sinking two ships out of every three. Japan was making advances in the Pacific. And then the signal had gone, fuzzed and whined out into static as it so often did, blunted by the hills that surrounded them.

  “So what d’we do?” Mary asked when Maggie had finished. Menna’s eyes had begun to fill and Mary’s voice had a different, harder tone to it. One Sarah hadn’t heard before.

  “Well, carry on, I suppose,” Maggie said. “Tha’s all we can do, isn’t it? Carry on, keep everything going.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Menna said, her voice thick with suppressed tears and muffled under the handkerchief she held over her mouth. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Maggie put a hand on her shoulder but carried on talking to Mary. “I don’t know about The Court, though.”

  When Maggie had gone to call on Reg and his boys at Olchon Court she’d found the morning’s pattern complete. Reg had no wife to leave behind, so Maggie had simply found the old house empty. The Court sat a mile or so further down the valley’s western wall than Maggie’s farm. It was a square, solid building, a fourteenth-century fortified farmhouse with walls several feet thick and initials carved into its pitted beams by boys over seven hundred years dead. Reg Powell had inherited it from a long line of fathers and sons. When his wife died he carried on living at The Court with his own two boys, Malcolm and John. Malcolm had been born with a club foot, so, given The Court’s large acreage, John had been allowed to stay to help his father run the farm. But this morning Maggie had found the place deserted, the sun flashing off the diamond-shaped panes in the higher windows and the chickens roaming the lawn, picking at the flowerbeds. It was The Court that made her sure. Every man in the valley had gone. Last night there were seven of them here. With their pipes and their cigarettes, with their caps, their boots, their rare laughter, their wind-weathered faces, and their earth-hardened hands. But this morning there were none. It was as if the valley had experienced its very own Passover and they, the women, had somehow been left untouched by whatever dark angel had visited in the night and taken their men.

  “We can’t cope with everything on our own. There’s no way.” Mary was hardening against Maggie’s assumed authority.

  “Yes we can,” Maggie said. “Of course we can. The dipping’s done, isn’t it?”

  “And it won’t be for long,” Sarah said.

  The two older women looked down the table at her but said nothing.

  “And what if the Germans get this far?”

  Mary’s question hung in the air. Maggie shot her a look as if to say, not now, not yet. Menna whispered, “Oh God,” into her handkerchief.

  “Well, I’ve got to think of Bethan,” Mary continued, and for the first time her eyes weakened and filled, like groundwater rising through waterlogged moss.

  Maggie rose from her chair and went over to the dresser where she picked out a leaflet from between two framed photos of her boys. It was dull green with “Stand Fast” printed across the cover. All of them had seen it before, propped on shelves and on sideboards in their own houses. It was the leaflet the Home Guard officer handed out the previous week. Returning to the table Maggie took her reading glasses out of her apron pocket and sitting down beside Menna again, read from the leaflet:

  German troops moving across the country would not stop to attack a single house.… The public must stay indoors
as long as there is fighting around them.… A slit trench in the garden may be dug for added protection. Diagrams to assist with the construction and buttressing of such trenches can be obtained from your local Women’s Institute.…

  (a snort of derision from Mary)

  The civilian must not attempt independent acts of armed resistance, but must also do nothing which would be of the slightest help to the enemy.… On the contrary, the enemy should be hindered and frustrated whenever possible.… If a civilian’s help is asked for by friendly military, as it may well be, it is his duty to answer wholeheartedly any call, however exacting, that may be made upon him.… Hide your maps. Hide your food. See that the enemy gets no petrol.

  The leaflet ended with a simple statement in capital letters:

  THINK BEFORE YOU ACT. BUT ALWAYS THINK OF YOUR COUNTRY BEFORE YOU THINK OF YOURSELF.

  The four women sat in silence when Maggie finished. The single bird ticking outside the window was replaced by the rise and fall of a song thrush, repeating its melody again and again. The twigs of an overgrown bush brushed against the glass. And it was then Sarah fell. She was looking at a framed piece of needlework hung beside Maggie’s dresser. It had been made by Maggie’s mother when she was a girl. A simple house and garden in bright primary colours; animals around the house, a woman feeding the animals, and Maggie’s mother’s name neatly picked out in red thread above the picture, “Catrin Roderick—1862.” Everything Maggie had just read to them seemed to threaten that needlework picture. It was like the bomber again. The war had finally come to them. Even here in the valley, where events just over the hill could go unknown, unnoticed for months. And Tom had left. They’d all left. Now, just when the German guns were firing on English soil, when the German army was marching towards them.

  Sarah had never known Tom to keep anything from her before, and as she sat there she began to work through all he must have done to keep this secret. That was why Mary was angry. She understood that now. The men had abandoned them, now of all times. And they’d planned it, behind their backs. Together and without them.