‘That’s exactly it!’ said Paul, excited by the boy’s perception, ‘she told me I ought to have married a farmer’s daughter in the first place but what I’d really like to get home to you is that just because we got divorced she wasn’t a mother to be ashamed of but rather the opposite. She didn’t run off with anyone else, she just had to give herself to politics and she was prepared to go to prison for her beliefs which is a damned sight more than most politicians are!’
‘Some of those Labour chaps have,’ Simon said, unexpectedly, and Paul wondered how, in a conservative school like High Wood Simon could have known this and commented on it without labelling Socialist MPs ‘dirty conchies’.
‘Yes, that’s so,’ he replied. ‘Some people feel about the war that way and most of the fighting men respect them for it.’
‘They do?’ He saw that he had astounded the boy at last and went on, ‘Yes, they do, because people at home haven’t any real idea what it’s like, so they can’t help talking nonsense about it like the newspapers and politicians. Did Ikey tell you about his friend Keith Horsey, the parson’s son? He was a CO but he’s out there in the thick of it stretcher-bearing.’
‘Yes,’ said Simon thoughtfully, ‘I know about Horsey. Fellows here are ashamed he was a Highwodian you know, so I wrote to Ikey and told him and he wrote back saying they must be chumps because Horsey was braver than anyone if the truth was known!’
‘Did you pass that on?’ asked Paul, curiously.
‘No,’ Simon said, ‘because I’d get hell for sticking up for a CO. You don’t go around looking for trouble as a first-termer!’
Paul laughed and felt a rush of affection for the boy, thinking how badly he had misjudged him in the past.
‘I see your point,’ he said, ‘it must be damned difficult to hold an unpatriotic point of view in a place like this!’
‘What do you think about the war, Gov’nor?’
This was almost as difficult as explaining why Grace had exchanged home and husband for Holloway, for Paul feared to express himself too freely on the subject in case Simon quoted him in an unguarded moment.
‘I don’t think about it any more than I can help, son,’ he said, realising he was evading the question, ‘I just get on with it, like most of the chaps out there,’ but the boy was not to be fobbed off with this and again reminded Paul of Grace when one of her principles was challenged.
‘But you must know whether you think it right or wrong.’
‘Well then, it’s wrong,’ Paul said, reluctantly, ‘it’s the biggest crime against humanity that’s ever happened but I daresay some good will come out of it, at least, that’s what most of us out there like to think, the Germans as well as the English.’
‘If everybody fighting thinks that why isn’t it stopped?’ Simon persisted, with his mother’s maddening logic.
‘Because, for the moment, neither side is ready to give in. The men in the trenches would be very happy to call it a day but the war isn’t directed by them. They just do what they’re told and all the orders come from older men, most of them wanning their backsides beside a comfortable fire. That’s why it has to be fought to a finish.’
‘It seems a stupid way to carry on,’ the boy said and Paul agreed that it was indeed but that when the men came back they intended to make certain nothing like it would happen again so perhaps it would benefit their children and grandchildren.
After that they spent a rewarding day, talking easily of all kinds of things but when they parted in the quad as the bell rang for tea he realised Simon had absorbed every word he had been told about Grace for he said, shaking hands and pocketing Paul’s tip, ‘If they give my mother a medal could I have it? To keep?’
Paul had difficulty concealing the extent to which the request moved him but promised he certainly could keep the medal if there was one and the boy went off then, cheerfully enough Paul thought, envying the ability of the young to discard emotional problems in the struggle to adapt themselves to their immediate surroundings. The tedious journey home, however, was not wholly depressing, for at least he could congratulate himself on having got nearer to Simon than ever before and as he crossed the moor in the ramshackle motor-cab he had engaged at Paxtonbury he thought how small a part environment played in promoting character and how manifestly clear it was that Simon’s personality was the legacy of the sallow, exhausted woman he had last seen lying under a groundsheet on the road to Messines Ridge. ‘They can talk as much as they like about influences of social backgrounds,’ he told himself, ‘but what’s in the blood stays there! Look at Ikey and that crazy marriage of his? And look at the way Eveleigh is making a fool of himself over that damned shop-girl! Come to that look at Simon—his stream of political thought already veering left at thirteen!’ The rain slashed against the canvas hood of the cab and the darkness deprived him of his favourite view of the Valley.
Chapter Nine
I
January, 1918; snow blanketed the entire Valley, from the farthest fold of Blackberry Moor to the bleak, crusted dunes, from the blur of Shallowford Woods down through eight-foot drifts to the frozen Sorrel where the ice was said to be six inches thick. The frost had held fast since Boxing Day and even those with menfolk in the ice-bound ditches of Flanders were too cold, too tired and too discouraged to spare them much sympathy. For this was the fourth winter of the war that would never end and external pressures had shrivelled souls to the size and toughness of dried peas, sometimes putting an impossible price on neighbourliness.
Claire, depressed by this collective withdrawal, fought it wherever she could, for it seemed to her a loss more painful and damaging than the drain on Valley manpower. From time to time she went out of her way to marshal the survivors, reviving their flagging spirits with reminders of the approach of spring and the promise of a record yield from meadows now gripped fast by the frost and scoured by an east wind that searched through the heaviest garments a person could wear and still waddle up and down the lifeless lanes. The Valley, she would remind herself, was not only more populous but more productive than it had ever been. There were never less than two thousand men in the hutted camp at Nun’s Bay, and often a hundred convalescents at Shallowford House. All seven farms had a record number of acres under the plough and were supporting twice as much livestock as in pre-war years and although so many familiar faces had disappeared, some of them for ever, their places had been taken by others not all of whom came into the category of foreigners, like the soldiers in camp or the German prisoners in the depot north of the woods. Men and girls had drifted in from the neighbouring estate of Heronslea which had lost impetus since Lord Gilroy had been killed on the Italian Front leaving no heir and two Whinmouth conscientious objectors were now employed by her brother Hugh at High Coombe, Hugh having neither the patriotic scruples of Eveleigh nor his preference for buxom land-girls. Yet the shifts and changes in the tempo of life were so various and manifold that Claire had great difficulty in keeping track of them all when she sat in the library late at night writing to Paul, or keeping the estate diary up-to-date. She applied herself to these tasks religiously, for the one was her sole emotional outlet and the other seemed to her a bridge to post-war continuity. The list of Valley soldiers and Valley casualties had now entered upon a second page. Dick Marlowe, the sexton’s younger son, had gone down somewhere off the west coast of Africa bringing home a cargo of maize from Capetown, and news crossed the Teazel of the death in action of Dave Buller, Gilroy’s keeper, who had carried the scars of Smut Potter’s gunstock to his grave in a shell-hole on the slopes of Vimy Ridge. Then, as January passed, and the hard frost held on into February, news came of Parson Horsey’s loss. His son Keith had been blown to pieces when a Minnenwerfer scored a direct hit on a stretcher party passing down a communication trench in front of St Quentin, and this time Claire had to do more than record the casualty, feeling under an obligation to call on the little rector.
She always hated these duty visits to the bereaved for whatever could one say to a broken old widower, whose hopes for years had been centred on an only son who had taken a double-first at Oxford and whose brains were now at the bottom of a French ditch? Expressions of sympathy had been all very well in 1914 and even in 1915 but they were fatuous after years of slaughter and the actual presence in the Valley of so many maimed men. She made the effort, however, borrowing Maureen’s battered Ford, for she was now close on five months’ pregnant just as she had predicted, although it no longer seemed a subject to joke about. A baby on the way was just one more responsibility at a time when she needed the maximum freedom of movement.
She found the rector at work in his glacial, book-filled study and although he looked tired and ill he seemed to her to have derived some kind of fortitude from his faith which was more than could be said of most of his flock in identical circumstances. He seemed also to have acquired a kind of pride in his son’s share in the war, for he said, after showing her Keith’s last letter praising the courage of some of the wounded he had tended, ‘I was against him going to begin with, you know, but I realise now that he was right and I was wrong! I’ve since wondered if the early martyrs wouldn’t have made their point just as forcibly by electing to serve in the arena, perhaps attending to wounded gladiators and animals. I always knew Keith would justify me but I never imagined it would occur in this roundabout way!’ Claire, somewhat puzzled, asked him to explain and he went on, earnestly, ‘Oh come, Mrs Craddock, you and your husband have never had any illusions about me being a failure here, just as I was in my last parish and the one before that! I was never unaware of it but I could at least say to myself, “I fathered a first-class scholar, whose personal impact may be as feeble as mine but whose brains will win him a real place in the world!” And they would have done that, you know. Now, I suppose, I must find consolation in the thought that his presence out there must have been instrumental in bringing a hundred or so back from the dead and I could hardly think that if Keith had been just one more man with a gun.’ He smiled, politely and nervously, just as he did every Sunday on ascending the pulpit to begin sermons that were barely tolerated by his war-time congregations, and then he pointed at a large framed photograph of Parson Bull, his predecessor, still hanging over the fireplace. Bull had had himself photographed in hunting rig and contemplating the former rector’s Hogarthian build, and insolent, bulging eye, it occurred to Claire that one could spend a lifetime looking for two more dissimilar priests. Horsey said, ‘I keep it there to remind me there are various ways of preaching the gospel, Mrs Craddock. Bull’s way was a century or more out-of-date but it worked far more effectively than mine. You have to admit that!’
‘No,’ said Claire, beginning to assess the parson’s true stature for the first time. ‘I don’t admit it! Bull’s way wouldn’t work any longer and I think people about here are going to need your methods in the very near future. My husband never has thought of you as a failure, for at least you achieved something he always wanted by reconciling the Anglicans and the Nonconformists in the Valley. All Bull ever did was to hold them apart by brute strength!’ Horsey accepted the compliment with a slight inclination of the head and thanked her for calling. At the door she said, suddenly, ‘Look here, Rector, why don’t you come up to the house and hold a non-denominational service for the convalescents? I daresay most of them are beyond any parson’s reach but you might catch the odd lost sheep. Anyway, even the scoffers would like a change. The camp padre doesn’t impress them very much.’
‘Then I’m sure I should impress them less, Mrs Craddock. After all, can you wonder they’ve lost their faith? I don’t think we parsons have come very well out of this war. Keith wrote saying every German has the words “Gott Mit Uns” emblazoned on his belt. Besides, what would I talk to them about?’
She had a sudden inspiration. ‘Your son!’ and he looked at her sharply, saying, ‘Wouldn’t that be parading a personal grief, Mrs Craddock?’
‘No, I don’t think it would. Many of them wouldn’t be alive now if they hadn’t been brought in by stretcher-bearers.’
He seemed vaguely impressed by this and stood holding the door, his eyes on the yellow slush that had accumulated on the step.
‘Well, I’ll think it over,’ he said at length. ‘Anyway, it was kind of you to ask and kinder still to call.’ She went down the path to the car and heaved herself in, relieved to be done with the visit. ‘Poor little beggar,’ she thought as Marlowe, the sexton, who had lost two sons swung the engine, ‘he’s putting a brave face on it but I think this has about finished him.’ But the Reverend Horsey was far from finished. Within the week he not only surprised Claire but several hundred others, including himself.
When the sound of the car had died away Parson Horsey went back into his study and sat down at his desk, poking about among the mass of papers until he found a closely-written sheaf of manuscript left by Keith after his last leave, in December. Horsey studied each page carefully, sitting there until the light faded. Then, lighting the lamp, he put the manuscripts away and began to re-read his son’s letters, more than a score of them, written from France. When the housekeeper came in with his cocoa he was writing to Claire and his letter, delivered by hand the following morning, puzzled her. He said he would accept her offer to conduct a non-denominational service in the big ward next Sunday, subject to two conditions; attendance was to be optional and she must on no account circulate news of Keith’s death among the patients. She sent a message to Nun’s Bay camp informing the resident padre that the local rector would conduct a service on the following Sunday but was already half-regretting have invited Horsey to preach. The men, as she well knew, had shed what religious beliefs they held in France, and their approach to parsons was at best negative and sometimes hostile. ‘We on’y saw a few o’ the RCs up the line,’ one of the men told her. ‘Them others, they’d slip across during a quiet spell, dish out a few Woodbines an’ nip orf ruddy quick! It’s nice to ’ave one ’andy when you’re buried they say but me, I don’t, go much on ’em! Sooner put me money on Jumbo I would,’ and he showed her a small ivory elephant attached to his identity discs. Because Horsey was coming at her own invitation, however, she felt responsible for his reception and knowing that most of the more mobile patients would make themselves scarce before the service began she filled a couple of benches in the ward with household staff and a few of the VADs who had been allocated to her before Christmas. She was not really Commandant now, although she kept the title by courtesy. Her pregnancy had curtailed her nursing activities and a professional matron was due to arrive any day to cope with an influx of more seriously wounded men.
Horsey arrived about ten-thirty and the tepid service began, attended by no more than half-a-dozen of the active convalescents and, perforce, by those confined to bed. After the second hymn Horsey walked briskly behind the table they used as an altar and stood midway between the two nearest beds, blinking and fumbling with some notes he held in his hand. One of the men at the far end of the ward began to cough and deliberately prolonged the spasm but the rector waited quietly and when there was silence began, in an unexpectedly firm voice, ‘I daresay most of you chaps are familiar with stretcher-bearers! I’m not going to bore you with a sermon and I haven’t even thought of a text. All I want is to read you a piece of writing sent to me by a young man who spent a year in France and has since died. He calls this piece “Truce, 1917” and it tells of an incident that happened on the edge of a place called Pilckem Wood, near Ypres.’
There were several men present who had unpleasant memories of Pilckem Wood and one of them, who had lain under it a day and a night with a broken thigh, involuntarily advertised as much by exclaiming, ‘Christ!’, and left it at that. His exclamation had an unlooked-for effect on some of the others, who scowled and hissed, ‘Shh!’ whereas the man who had shown Claire his elephant charm, sat up and said, very sternly, ‘Stow it, mate!’ Claire, s
itting on the end of the form under the window, glanced at Horsey and noticed that he seemed unruffled by the stir. He cleared his throat and at once began to read.
It was a straightforward piece of prose telling a simple, factual story of a fifty-minute cessation of hostilities towards the end of the Passchendaele battle, when men of both sides came out into the open to collect the wounded. There was nothing remarkable about this, Claire decided. Paul had told her that it often happened but it occurred to her that the writing was remarkable for its restraint. It made no attempt whatever to imitate the purple passages of a magazine story and, what was even more unusual, it contained no irony so that it was neither a conventional ‘call-to-arms’ nor an indictment of war but simply an account of what actually occurred during the lull, as seen from the point of view of someone grubbing about in the shell-holes in search of men with a chance of recovery. The dying, it said, were given morphine and the dead were left lying where they had fallen in the morass. Time was an essential factor in the operation. Every man in the open knew that the firing would begin again at any moment and soon enough it did when the infantrymen on both sides fired shots over the stretcher-parties’ heads, warning them to return to their own lines.
When the rector had finished there was a silence such as Claire had never heard in the ward. At first she thought it was due to embarrassment but then, looking at the man she thought of as ‘Jumbo’, she realised that this was not so, for he was looking at Parson Horsey with a respect that she had never seen him bestow on any visitor, commissioned, civilian or clerical. It was as though, at any moment, he would embarrass them all by applauding but to Claire’s relief he continued to stare straight at the little man standing between the two beds. Horsey used the pause to grope under his surplice and his hand re-emerged holding a small packet of letters tied with tape. He shuffled them carefully, selecting one with the air of a man who considers himself unobserved and then, clearing his throat once more, he said, ‘The chap who wrote that was killed at the beginning of this month. The night before he was killed, however, he wrote two letters and one of them was passed on to me by his wife. I hope you will forgive me if I read this letter to end this little service. It isn’t very long but I think it helps to clarify the motives of many of the conscientious objectors. You see, this chap was classified as a CO who felt strongly enough about his beliefs to go to face gaol for them. At the last minute, however, a friend home from France persuaded him to enlist as a stretcher-bearer. Now I don’t know what you think of conscientious objectors; not much I imagine and therefore I would be less than honest if I failed to tell you this man once came to me and asked my advice and I told him he ought not to compromise in any way. I told him that partly because he was a brilliant scholar, the kind of man who might have something useful to contribute to the world after the war, but on reading this final letter of his I see very clearly that I was wrong. Perhaps you will agree, perhaps not, I don’t know. I’m not nearly as sure of anything as I was a year or so ago.’
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