‘Well,’ she said, philosophically, ‘I daresay that’ll put the fear o’ God into some o’ the gurt fools but it won’t bother Walt! He’s off first light an’ dam’ good riddance to ’un! Us ’aven’t ’ad a word o’ zense out of ’un zince it started!’
He wondered how she would manage on the meagre separation allowance and a house full of half-grown children but then he remembered that she was a Potter and that the Potters always managed somehow. He thanked her for telephoning and rode off up the empty street. Glancing over his shoulder he could still see the orange glow of the burning motor on the hillside; it looked, he thought, like a beacon warning the coast of invasion from the sea.
IV
There were changes that the sharp-eyed gulls did not see as they made their circuits waiting for the wind to change and enable them to return to their fishing grounds on the banks. By early November the Dell was beginning to assume its once familiar look of neglect and near-squalor, with tools and faggots scattered around, and rubbish accumulating behind the sheds and byres. Jem, the Bideford Goliath, who had reigned here ever since he quit his job at the fair and imposed his genial discipline upon the two Potter girls, had followed Will Codsall into the Army soon after the Miracle of the Marne, and although he was over thirty his giant frame had ensured acceptance by the fast-talking recruiting sergeant at the Paxtonbury Territorial centre. Jem had been followed, almost at once, by Smut, who had abandoned his greenhouses to the younger Eveleigh boy and gone gladly enough, as though, in soldiering, he saw an opportunity to recapture the excitement of a poacher’s life. John Rudd warned him that his prison record might result in rejection but John was wrong for when Smut admitted that he had served a term of imprisonment for belting a gamekeeper over the head with a gun butt the recruiting sergeant was delighted, saying this was precisely the type of recruit needed. Smut’s musketry instructor was equally impressed. At the initial five-round shoot-off Smut scored four bulls and an inner and that with a type of rifle he had never before fired. On the strength of this plus a pint or two of beer, the instructor withdrew him from the awkward squad and sent him on a sharpshooters’ course. It was astonishing how rapidly Smut reverted to type, how quickly and completely he forgot his patiently acquired horticultural skills and became, in effect, a poacher again. He found that he could still move across country quickly and noiselessly at night and interpret and locate the sounds made by blundering adversaries opposed to him in training exercises and with the rediscovery of his skills he sloughed off the new personality he had acquired after his release from gaol, progressing rapidly in his new profession. After Will Codsall he was the first of the Valley men to cross to France and move into the soggy ditches that already reached from Switzerland to the sea, and here he adapted himself far more easily than did most of the men of his battalion. Alone among them, save for a tramp or two lured into the recruiting office by the promise of beer and the leonine glare of Kitchener, Smut could spend successive nights lying out in the open in all weathers and he did not find a five-day spell of front-line duty very different from life as a boy in the Dell in Tamer’s time, or as a young man subsisting on what he could trap and kill between the Sorrel and the Whin. He had no personal quarrel with the Germans but he was more fatal to them than many of those who regarded all Germans as unspeakable swine. To Smut they were simply the equivalent of the hares, bucks and pheasants he had stalked in the past, and the techniques he employed against them were much the same. He would lie behind the parados for hours disguised as a roll of wet sacking on a pile of rubble, as still and patient as a famished cat at a mousehole. Whenever he caught a fleeting glimpse of a moving cap or a hunched shoulder in the trenches opposite, he would wheeze with satisfaction and gently squeeze the trigger of his specially-sighted rifle. Sometimes, if the weather was good, he would take a chance after making a kill and wait for a second victim but more often he would be inside his trench within seconds of his quarry hitting the ground. Then, after carefully notching his rifle, he would meander along to another sector, pick a fresh vantage point and begin another vigil. He would fire at almost anything that stirred but the mark that excited him most was a sun-reflecting Pickelhaube, for this meant the passage of an officer and therefore a slightly longer notch on his scoreboard. He was held in high esteem by his officers not because of his sniping but because he was now a fully-licensed poacher and an enormous asset to men short of almost everything that made life bearable under conditions of constant danger and appalling discomfort. He never hurried and never acted impulsively. Before making a swoop he would study the routes of ration parties, just as he had marked out the rabbit-runs in Heronslea coverts and sometimes, when his platoon was desperately short of firewood, duckboards, sandbags, wiring stakes, plum and apple jam, bully beef and even the almost unobtainable navy rum, Smut would be permitted to lay aside his rifle and drift back towards brigade headquarters on some spurious errand. Here he would make a careful reconnaissance, and after selecting three or four of the more robust of his mates, return after dark to the areas he had memorised. Sometimes one or two of his carriers would be caught and mercilessly punished but Smut was never among this minority, for he never carried anything himself and could always melt into the darkness and try again the following night. They soon made him a corporal and he could have risen higher but he was content with two stripes, explaining that a third would cramp his style. The night he appeared at the entrance of his officer’s dugout with a case of Scotch whisky his Company commander swore that he would recommend Potter for the D.C.M., declaring that men had been decorated for far less but Smut talked him out of it. One of the very earliest lessons he had learned as a poacher was to remain inconspicuous and after some discussion he settled for ten shillings which he sent home to Meg, telling her that more would be coming for he was now doing a brisk trade in the sale of souvenirs.
Smut was not the only member of the Potter clan to find release in war. All three of his elder sisters had their burdens appreciably lightened when their men marched out of the Valley whistling ‘Tipperary’. Pansy let her cottage at an advantageous rent to a major at the camp on Blackberry Moor and moved herself and family into the farmhouse at the Dell and here, restored at last to the congenial company of the recently liberated Cissie and Violet, she began her war work.
The Potter girls were the first women in the Valley to make war show a credit balance. Although past their prime (Cissie and Pansy were on the wrong side of thirty and Violet was twenty-eight), they were still strong, vigorous, handsome, healthy women and the Lancashire Fusiliers, occupying the tented camp on the moor, were a jolly set of boys, all far from home and unfastidious. Often, of a winter evening, the Dell farmhouse erupted with song and laughter and even a man as formidable as the Bideford Goliath would have found it impossible to defend the fort as he had defended it against the raids of the Timberlake boys. The girls still thought of Jem affectionately and sometimes sent him parcels and money to eke out his rations and pay in the dismal Welsh camp, where he was learning to disembowel Germans with bayonet and Mills bomb but they did not wish him back, telling one another that war had opened their eyes to the pitiful state of servitude into which they had lapsed. Such work as was done on the farm was now performed by volunteers and paid for in kind, and whereas Jem laid the mark of his despotism on the fat posteriors of his handmaidens if they so much as winked at another man they now had a battalion of men at their disposal, with no question of any one man, or even two, claiming proprietorial rights over them. Meg, as usual, kept to herself and Hazel rarely appeared in the Dell. One way and another the Potter girls were set fair to enjoy the war, for when the Lancashire Fusiliers moved out the Shropshires moved in and the pleasant rhythm of life in the Dell hardly faltered.
In the last week of November there was a flare-up in the kitchen of Four Winds, where domestic scenes had once been commonplace but had been unknown since the Eveleighs had replaced the Codsalls. The cause of the only serious dispute th
at had ever broken out between the black moustached Norman Eveleigh and his wife Marian was Gilbert, their eldest boy, who had been whipper-in to the Sorrel Vale Farmers’ Hunt ever since Squire Craddock had reorganised it, in 1911. Gilbert was now nearly eighteen, a slim, serious-minded boy, whose appearance favoured his mother but whose character was more like his father’s. He was withdrawn and sparing with words but known in the Valley as a conscientious boy and the best rider to hounds for miles around. Squire Craddock liked and trusted him and the hounds, each of whom he could identify at a glance, adored him. The demands of the Government Remount Department, however, cost Gilbert his job. By early October there was hardly a horse left in the Valley, apart from those reserved for the plough and all prospects of hunting ended. Without consulting anyone Gilbert walked into Paxtonbury, added a year to his age and joined up, and this folly on his part disrupted a very united family for Mrs Eveleigh, who prized her eldest boy above all the rest of the brood, said she would disclose Gilbert’s correct age and get him discharged at once. To her dismay Eveleigh told her to hold her silly tongue, saying that he, for his part, was proud of the boy. Periwinkle Farm had contributed a man to Kitchener’s Army and the contemptible Dell had sent two; if Gilbert wanted to rescue the honour of Four Winds who were they to deny him?
All the children were present during this dispute and what astonished them more than their father’s stand was their mother’s obstinacy. Never, so far as any of them could remember, had Marian Eveleigh contradicted her husband but here she was actually screaming abuse at him, with the white-faced Gilbert trying to reason with both and although the matter seemed to end when Eveleigh also lost his temper and threatened to strike her, it was Marian who carried the day, for she flung herself out of the house, walked into Coombe Bay and telephoned the military depot at Paxtonbury so that Gilbert’s enlistment was declared void.
After that, although tempers gradually cooled, things were never quite the same between man and wife. It was as though the ghost of Four Winds had not been banished after all but was still lurking in one of the attics awaiting an opportunity to sidle into the bedrooms and kitchen and foment trouble between man, wife and children. In the event all that Marian’s defiance achieved was four months’ deferment, for Gilbert re-enlisted on his eighteenth birthday and the controversy seemed likely to flare up again for there were two more boys, aged sixteen and twelve, and by the time Gilbert had gone nobody could say if the war would last three years, ten years, or the remainder of everybody’s life.
It was not long before the Eveleighs, man and wife, were at one another’s throats again and the dispute on this occasion centred round their second daughter Rachel. Rachel Eveleigh had been going steady with Keith Horsey ever since the Coronation summer but it was only after they had been instrumental in bringing help to the crazy gypsy-child, Hazel Potter, that the Valley showed any interest in the association. Now it was generally understood that Keith would marry the farmer’s daughter as soon as he passed his finals at Oxford and was assured a good teaching post and Eveleigh was thought to look upon the match with satisfaction, for a parson’s son with a university degree was a rare catch for the daughter of a man who had begun as Codsall’s hired hand.
Keith Horsey, luckier than most young men that catastrophic summer, sat for his finals in June and the result, a double first gave him a choice of several careers. The couple had planned to marry in early spring but the war was rushing along at a speed that bewildered all but the very young and in mid-October Rachel informed the family that the wedding was being put forward to the last week in November.
The Valley was still apt to look suspiciously upon hurried weddings and none more so than the dour Eveleigh, whose unexpected opposition to the changed date was reinforced, it seemed, by sudden and inexplicable second thoughts regarding the groom. Challenged by Rachel and her mother to explain them he said that he had been told that Keith Horsey was associated with a group of students dedicated to the ideal of international brotherhood. Rachel looked blank at this but Marian laughed in her husband’s face, something else she had never done in more than twenty years of married life.
‘You can’t be serious, Norman!’ she protested, ‘what can it matter to us what Keith thinks about politics? He’s a nice, well-mannered boy, capable of earning a good living independent of his father’s money and in any case he’s head over heels in love with our girl! I say the sooner they’re wed the better!’
‘Well I say different!’ snapped Eveleigh, ‘and seeing she isn’t twenty-one until next summer she’ll have to get my permission before she ties herself up to that snivelling little pro-German!’
At this Rachel burst into tears and rushed away but Marian stood her ground, for it occurred to her that this was her husband’s way of punishing her for intervening in the matter of Gilbert’s enlistment. Then another somewhat darker thought struck her and she came out with it at once. ‘Have you got it into your silly head that our girl has got to get married?’ she demanded and Eveleigh, to her amazement, replied, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me none, not with a boy of his type! Have ye not heard it said he’s agin the war?’
‘No, I haven’t heard it,’ said the wife stubbornly, ‘but if I had it wouldn’t cause me to think less of him! Anyone in their zenses is against the war I should think and the zooner more of them make it known the sooner this wicked slaughter among Christians’ll stop!’
Now when Eveleigh had begun this conversation he had had no serious intention of withholding his permission but had merely sought to express disapproval of his future son-in-law’s unpatriotic views. To a simple man like Norman Eveleigh lack of enthusiasm for the war amounted almost to treason. He had never given a thought to European politics before August 1914 but newspaper accounts of German atrocities in Belgium had stirred his anger so that he was among the most belligerent men in the Valley, growling that the world would never be safe until the Kaiser was put away, the German generals backed up against the wall and German towns given over to sack on the scale of Louvain. He was a man who had always driven himself remorselessly but he considered himself just and the German advance across France and Belgium surely called for retribution without mercy. The discovery that his own wife, the mother of his children, wanted the war stopped before justice had been done shocked him and hardened his resolve to make an issue of his daughter’s marriage to a pacifist. He said, flatly, ‘Lookit here, Marian! If she marries that milksop she’ll do it without my blessing! I’ll have no part in it, you understand? I’ll not show at the wedding, and if she won’t abide until she’s of age then she can run off for all I care!’ and having delivered this ultimatum he stamped off and took it out on a frisky bullock who had unwisely chosen this moment to break out of the pen behind the bam and career up the lane towards Codsall bridge.
Rachel, watching him belabouring the animal, said, ‘He’s mad! He must be! It’s this place! This farm! Everybody who lives here ends up going off their heads, like old Martin Codsall and Arabella!’ Then, drying her tears, ‘Well, I’m not going to let his silly notions ruin my life, Mam, and you can tell him so for I shan’t have another word to say to him! If he tries to stop us I’ll go before the magistrates and get permission! They’ll give it me and why shouldn’t they? I’ll be twenty-one in less than a year and Keith’s father will stand by us!’
In the event this proved unnecessary, for although Eveleigh persisted in his opposition he was persuaded by Paul to sign the papers on the grounds that, if he did not, the couple would marry in any case, war-time courts having little patience with parental opposition to weddings. Every day girls younger than Rachel were marrying soldiers, often after courtships of less than a month. All the same, the new quarrels deepened the unpleasant atmosphere at Four Winds and the ghost of Arabella had reason to be pleased. After Rachel had married and settled in Leeds, where Keith took a university post, the Eveleigh family sat through a succession of silent meals and when Gilbert re-enlisted Mari
an Eveleigh fastened on her old grievance, going so far as to tell her husband that he had driven the boy to his death! So many things were happening so quickly in the Valley, however, that it was some time before Paul was aware that strife had returned to Four Winds after a lapse of ten years. He was usually alive to most happenings in the Valley but at that season he had other and more personal matters on his mind, notably an unexpectedly violent dispute with his own wife. The disagreement centred on another war-time marriage.
V
Late in November, less than a week before Keith Horsey and Rachel Eveleigh were married in Coombe Bay parish church, Ikey Palfrey reappeared in the Valley, home with his unit from India after an absence of more than two years and destined, in a matter of days, for France.
There was no time to warn anyone of his approach for he was granted but seventy-two hours’ leave and travelled west on a night train that did not stop at Sorrel Halt. He arrived very early in the morning, driving a hired car of uncertain vintage and came into the kitchen just as Mrs Handcock was brewing her ritual cup of tea. She let out a squawk of joy as he came bounding up the yard steps, pouncing on her, kissing her on both cheeks and declaring that she had put on ten stone since he had seen her last. He had always been her favourite and she bustled about frying him eggs, bacon and potatoes, bubbling that she would ‘share un wi’ no one, not even Squire, ’till ’e ’ad summat hot in his belly and thawed-out-like!’ She told him that he was ’as chock full of ’is praper ole nonsense as ever, the gurt varmint!’ adding, with satisfaction, that he had ‘villed out summat’ and ‘looked more like a nigger than a Christian!’ He had indeed broadened so that his height was less noticeable and the Indian sun had burned his face and hands berry-brown, but already his tan was fading and looked, she told him ‘more like grime than zunburn!’ While he ate she gave him the news, or such of it as she could recall, for there had been so much in the last few months, although, prior to that, little enough save for the birth of the Squire’s second daughter Whiz, ‘the prettiest li’l maid you ever did zee!’ She told him Will Codsall had gone for a soldier as soon as war started and that his wife, Elinor, had been in a rare ole tizzy but had now got a good hand working for her, the son of Tom Williams (now minesweeping), who had a dread of the sea, having witnessed, as a child, the rescue of the German sailors in the cove. ‘And a praper zet o’ bliddy vools us maade of ourselves that day!’ she added, ‘for, like as not, they us dragged ashore are vighting for that varmint Little Willie!’ She told him that Smut Potter had enlisted and was said to have already killed hundreds of Germans and that Jem, Dandy Timberlake and Walt Pascoe had gone after him, leaving Walt’s slut of a wife to move in with her sisters at the Dell, there to earn more money on their backs, the hussies, than they were ever likely to earn standing upright! She also mentioned the rumour that Farmer Eveleigh was opposed to his daughter’s marriage to Keith, scheduled for next Saturday, and this seemed to interest him most for he questioned her as to the reasons for Eveleigh’s opposition but she could supply no satisfactory answer beyond saying, Tiz rumoured about yer that Passon’s son be one o’ they preaching agin the war and that’s enough to turn any man sour, baint it?’
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