Resistance: A Novel

by Owen Sheers

  “Only child,” she called over her shoulder at them. “My father had me ploughing soon as I was big enough to reach both handles.” Sarah couldn’t see Mary’s face, but she could hear the smile in her voice.

  That had been last week. Now, at the end of the second since the men’s departure, Sarah and the others were exhausted. There were less bad good dreams, simply because they often fell into bed and slept too deeply for even their own unconsciousness to reach them. And it wasn’t even winter yet, although the season could be sensed every morning in the steelier taste of the air, in the first falling of the leaves, and in their clouded breaths as they walked out into the fields. The lambing ewes and yearlings would have to be brought down soon. The yearlings for protection and the ewes for flushing, for two weeks of good grazing on the richer meadow grass. So Sarah had her own challenges to consider ahead of her. The ones she hadn’t yet thought about, fearing to jinx Tom’s return. But now, increasingly, the work to be done tomorrow, next week, next month even, occupied her mind. At least it distracted her from where the men were, although that was a thought that never left her completely. It ran on beneath all the farmwork like a stream going underground, under all her other thoughts every day. For Sarah it took the form of a growing sense of disbelief. She simply couldn’t give herself to the scenario Maggie had painted. Who’s to say “The Countryman’s Diary” was connected to why the men had gone? Who’s to say it wasn’t just William who’d owned a copy, or if he hadn’t just picked it up from a friend in town?

  The night before the mangel picking, Sarah had spent the evening with Maggie. Over dinner she’d asked to see “The Countryman’s Diary” again. When she did Maggie had looked down into her steaming bowl of soup. “Afraid you can’t, Sarah,” she said simply.

  “Why not? We all saw it. I just want a proper read of it, that’s all.”

  “I know, bach,” Maggie said, looking up at her. “But I burnt it. After you all left. I put it on the fire.”

  Sarah looked back at her, her soupspoon held halfway to her mouth. She placed it in the bowl, feeling a flush of anger pulse through her chest. That pamphlet had been the only thing left; the only sign, the only marker. It was their only connection to their husbands and now Maggie had destroyed it. She felt her anger melt towards tears, tears of frustration, not sadness. The kind of tooth-grinding frustration she’d felt as a child when accused of doing something wrong. A frustration against the flow of events that seemed to always be running counter to her own direction.

  “I couldn’t have it around here,” Maggie continued. “What if someone else found it?”

  Sarah knew who Maggie was talking about. “I thought you said they wouldn’t come this far. That there was nothing for them here.”

  “Well, now there isn’t, is there?” Maggie replied, an edge to her voice. “And honestly, Sarah,” she continued more softly, “you wouldn’t have wanted to see it. There was some horrid stuff in there, really.” She returned to her soup, shaking her head. “Awful,” she muttered between spoonfuls, “awful.”

  Sarah walked home through the dark lanes that night still nursing her disbelief, her reluctance to accept the story that appeared to have unfolded before them all. She knew she would still ride out on the hill when she could, though, looking. Just in case. And it didn’t stop her from thinking all the time of where Tom and the other men would go, where, if Maggie’s story was true, they would build their underground shelter. In the meantime, however, the farm demanded her as a suckling baby demands its mother; without malice, without agenda, just simply because it was the way of things. Her farm and the farms of the other women. The whole valley was there, with its cycle of birth, sowing, harvesting, and slaughter, and they, the women, had to keep it turning or it would leave them behind altogether. And that’s why, despite her aching limbs and the gritty tiredness in her eyes, Sarah had woken the next morning and gone to pull mangels with Menna and the others.

  When she came back to Upper Blaen that evening, she saw to her own animals, then cooked herself some bacon and potatoes before tying up the dogs for the night. Then, with a slow rain tapping faster at the window, she sat by the fire to write her diary, picking up the thin pen through which she found it so hard to speak faithfully to Tom about how she’d spent her days without him.

  November 1st

  4.30 p.m. Wehrmacht Unit, Poss. 4th Infantry Div. (Wehrheis IV) temp. attached to 14th Panzergren. Div.? Travelling N.W. out of Pandy. Dest. Longtown/Michaelchurch?

  1 × Mercedes Benz staff car. One driver (1 × sergeant?) three passengers. 1 × officer. Light arms. 2 × MP38 submachine guns.

  1 × BMW R35 motorbike and sidecar. Two men. 1 × MG 42 heavy machine gun (7.92mm) on sidecar mount. Light arms.

  Shrapnel damage to left wheel arch of staff car.

  The tip of the pencil broke through the rice paper as George marked the full stop. He pulled it free, leaving a grey-edged puncture like a tiny bullet hole at the end of the sentence. His hand was shaking. He was too excited. Stay calm, he told himself. Too excited and too tired.

  George had been observing troop movements for the past week, but this was the first sign of the enemy probing deeper into the hills, away from the focus points of the railway and the main road. It had all begun as Atkins had predicted, just much slower. The fourteen days had passed and George was still here. Still going about his farmwork by day and running messages at night. But eventually it unfolded exactly as he’d told George it would, as if Atkins himself had planned the invasion.

  First there had been their own troops along with scatterings of Americans and Canadians. Mixed regiments, even some Home Guard units, retreating up the railway towards Hereford. There was talk of the smaller towns being handed over to the advancing Germans without putting up a fight, to save the civilians. The newspapers stopped coming and there was less news, more light music, on the radio. Through it all they kept broadcasting light music. George suspected the songs chosen and the order in which they were played were a code, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Then, two weeks ago as they’d sat down to breakfast, George’s family heard the guns for the first time. Over the course of the next day they got closer, until George could make out the exact metronomic rhythm of the thud, whine, crash of their firing. From what they could make out, several small units of Allied artillery had stayed behind to slow the German advance. It was among these units the German shells were now landing. George tried to imagine the damage inflicted each time he heard that final crash, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t even seen bombs dropped, let alone artillery fire, and he found it difficult to associate these soft crumples with what he knew must have been terrible explosions.

  More messages started appearing at the drop points. It looked as if one of the German invasion armies was moving north and west before curling east again towards London, like a giant wave on the point of breaking. Another was securing the southern approach to the capital and another again was pushing northeast towards the mouth of the Thames. They were closing a pincer around the city, cutting off all escape routes other than those to the north. Bristol fell. The German navy docked warships at Newport.

  After the day of the guns, George saw a flurry of civilians moving north, most of them on the main road. Cars crammed with people, luggage, boxes, mattresses tied to their roofs. Horses straining against their yokes, the carts behind them piled high with children, old women, and possessions. The army closed the railway line to civilians. There were protests and a man was shot trying to break through the cordons to the station. Leaflets appeared urging people to stay in their homes, not to try and travel anywhere. George heard of a German parachute agent caught landing outside Hereford. Apparently they were dropping all over the country just in front of the advancing armies, spreading rumours, panic. This one was killed by the crowd before the police could get to him. His accent had been perfect, but then it transpired this was because he wasn’t German at all but English. A Nazi sympathiser who’d moved to Germany be
fore the war.

  And then there was silence. No more guns, just the odd drone of bombers flying north. The occasional crackle of antiaircraft fire. All at a distance. Eventually a telephone call came through to the local police station. The news spread throughout the area within hours. A column of German troops was marching into Hereford. Another had already established a Western Headquarters in Abergavenny. After that there were always messages at all the drop points. The wireless operator, who George guessed was most probably Reverend Sheldon at the church, must have been active nonstop for forty-eight hours.

  For the first three days after that telephone call, George saw nothing. But then he found an excuse to go down to the railway station during the day. Constable Evans, looking pale and strained, had visited his father and confirmed the area was now under German occupation. He also said that, for now, essential movement of livestock was still being allowed. George’s father was expecting a batch of chicks on the Hereford train and it was there, at the two-track station in Pandy he’d known all his life, that George saw his first German soldiers.

  He’d waited in line behind the other farmers at the freight desk the Germans had set up and eyed the guards on the station forecourt. They looked younger than him, thin. He hated them, he was sure of that. Atkins had been clear about what these men did in the name of fighting for their country. And the other man too, the man who’d visited George after Atkins, the man who’d never told him his name, he’d been at his most articulate when telling George what the occupying soldiers would do to him and his loved ones. Men castrated like male lambs. The young women “spread” among the elite officers. Yes, he hated them. And yet here, in the flesh, these young guards looked so normal, so human. They looked like the young Allied soldiers he’d seen retreating through this same station just the week before. Only the colour and cut of their uniforms were different. The dirt, dust, and the shabbiness of the material were all the same. Under those odd mushroom-shaped helmets, George saw how these guards were boys like him. He even noticed two of them share a joke, the language angular on his ear. They’d laughed. And then he’d hated them again. These boys playing at soldiers, laughing outside the station he’d known since he was a child.

  At the head of the queue, a German officer stood beside the freight clerk, observing the showing of papers and the collection of goods. The white silk scarf about his neck was smudged with grime along its creases. When George handed his docket to the clerk, the officer took it and glanced over its details. “Ah, chickens,” he’d said in a delicately accented English as he passed the docket back to the clerk. “My wife keeps chickens.”

  A poster was pasted to the wall beside the desk. As the clerk worked through his files and papers, George read the first few sentences.

  Proclamation to the People of Britain

  1. British territory occupied by German troops will be placed under military government.

  2. Military commanders will issue decrees necessary for the protection of the troops and the maintenance of general law and order.

  3. Troops will respect property and persons if the population behaves according to instructions.

  4. British authorities may continue to function if they maintain a correct attitude.

  The clerk was completing his paperwork. George scanned over the next directive, hoping to reach the end of the poster before he had to leave. But then number 6 stopped him in his tracks. He felt the blood drain from his face.

  The officer gave George a curt smile and a short nod, indicating he could leave with his crate of chicks. As he carried the crate away from the station, the two young guards watched him pass. George looked straight ahead, fixing his eyes on the brow of the hill over which he’d walk home. One of them strolled a few paces behind him, then stopped. George heard the metallic snap of his steel-shod boots on the tarmac. When they stopped he thought maybe the soldier was raising his rifle, taking aim at the back of his head. A rush of fear rose through him. He felt vulnerable, exposed, as if an area the exact circumference of a bullet just above his neck had turned to liquid. He kept his eyes on the hill and carried on walking, the chicks bubbling away in the crate he held before him. Nothing happened, but still he didn’t look back until he was out of sight and only then did he put the crate down and rest beside a signpost at the edge of the road, his hands quivering on his thighs. The signpost was new, the soil at its base freshly turned. The Germans had put it there, replacing the one removed by the Home Office five years earlier. The Germans seemed to have thought of everything, even bringing their own signposts. What else had they come prepared for? George thought again of that poster at the station, its sixth directive, so definite, so abrupt in its translation:

  6. All civilians are warned that if they undertake active operations against the German forces, they will be condemned to death inexorably.

  Shrapnel damage to left wheel arch of staff car.

  George checked over the details of his latest observation, then folded it three times into a chunky square of paper. Reaching under his bed he picked out one of the split tennis balls he kept there. Pressing each side of the ball, he opened the slit as he would the mouth of a sheep he was dosing and slipped the folded rice paper inside. Then he put the ball in a canvas rucksack and put the sack under his bed, ready to take out that night, once his parents were asleep and he could move safely under the cover of darkness to the drop point at the barn.

  This had become his regular rhythm. A week after Atkins’s first visit four years ago, he’d met the Intelligence officer again. As he’d suggested, George had kept an eye on the drop points, and, sure enough, one evening there was a note from Atkins telling him to meet the next afternoon in the top ploughed field. It was another hot summer day and once again George saw Atkins’s fishing flies winking in the sun before he properly saw the man himself. As he stepped over the dry, crumbling ruts, he couldn’t help thinking that Atkins’s “cover” of a country fisherman didn’t hold up too well out here in the middle of a ploughed field. But he knew why he’d chosen to meet here. No one could possibly overhear them. The field was the farthest from the farmhouse and wasn’t overlooked by any other buildings.

  Standing there in the middle of the field, Atkins tested George on the sheet of German insignia he’d given him on their first meeting. Holding it before him he alternated between asking George for the name of a unit attached to a certain insignia and asking him for the description of the colours of a particular unit. He watched him carefully all the time, his blue eyes keen over the edge of the illustrated sheet.

  “Well done,” Atkins said when they’d finished. “Only one wrong. The 6th Engineers have a black, not a red cross at the centre. Not to worry, though, they’re all engineers, and that’s what matters.” Taking a matchbox from his waistcoat pocket, he struck a match then held it to the corner of the insignia sheet. George watched as the paper curled in the heat, as the flame caught and climbed towards Atkins’s hand like an animal reaching for the fingers of its feeder. The ashes fell to the ploughed earth and scattered over the young leaves of the potatoes growing at their feet.

  “Shan’t be needing that anymore, shall we?” Atkins said, eyeing George again.

  “No, Mr. Atkins, I suppose not,” George had replied, relieved he’d passed this first test. As it turned out they did need another sheet of insignia. Over the years since that meeting in the ploughed field, the war had moved on. Divisions had amalgamated, battalions were swallowed, and whole new armies formed from volunteers in the occupied countries. So a couple of months ago, George had found another note at the drop point from Atkins, this time accompanied with updated insignia details. That note was the last he’d heard from him. Ever since then there’d been silence. A hurried scribble, G, Afraid you’ll have to learn these on your own. Good luck! T. A., and attached to it, the illustrated list of insignia, at least twice as long as the one he’d given George four years ago.

  November 1st

  Heavy rain through the night and
into this morning. The river is very high, over the stepping-stones. The stream flowing fast too. Washing a lot of earth with it.

  Clear by this evening. A strong sunset. Maggie said it looked like the hills were on fire.

  Finished the ditching today. I think this rain might have drowned it though.

  Maggie said we’ll start bringing the lambing ewes down tomorrow as it looks about to set in cold. She had some more news off her radio. London is still ours but they have a lot of the south. Maggie says they’ve even changed the time down there. German Summer Time. And they’ll do the same if they come up here. I can’t really see how.

  They are close, Tom. The bells at Longtown were ringing without stopping for half an hour this evening. I could hear them clear. Maggie came straight over and then we went to stop in on Menna. Mary is up with Edith. Menna is very tired with her two.

  I think we all know what the bells mean but Maggie won’t have it. She still says they won’t come up here. But it is frightening, Tom. I am scared. Mary wants Bethan to go over to her cousin in Hay. I keep thinking of those stories we heard at the start. When the Germans went into Poland and Holland. I wish you were here.

  Maggie’s been into market twice now and says there’s no word there. She didn’t say anything, and neither would I, Tom. But I do wish I knew.

  Just heard some planes. Heavy ones by the sound of it. Don’t know if they are theirs or ours anymore.

  I hope you come back before it gets cold. I hate to think of you on the mountain in winter. If that is where you are.

  It was getting easier, this writing to Tom, but there was still so much she couldn’t tell him. For some reason, after the first two weeks she grew to expect him back more than ever. As if two weeks was enough. As if there was a season for his missing, just as there was a season for everything else and it should be waning now, just as autumn was waning to winter. She began waking in the mornings feeling as stripped as the branches outside her window.