The German did not seem as unsure of himself as Henry but advanced steadily and close behind him came half-a-dozen other Germans, still in file and led by a very thin officer, who seemed to walk very slowly, as though he found the clay too heavy for his boots. Then Henry noticed that the sergeant was smiling and pointing with his left hand to his right palm which held something that glittered and then raising his other hand to his mouth.
‘Well Christ A’mighty!’ Henry said to himself, ‘I reckon he wants to trade fags for them bliddy cap-badges he’s holding!’ and he hurried forward, fumbling in his tunic pocket for his Woodbines.
Then the Germans came forward at a run and suddenly he was surrounded by infantrymen of a Saxon regiment and his Woodbines disappeared in a flash as the Germans pressed upon him a variety of badges and emblems, including a matchbox holder emblazoned with a double-eagle and the legend ‘Gott Mit Uns’ that Henry recognised as having begun life as a belt buckle. The German officer now came up with them and Henry saw that he was a very sick young man and was breathing hard, as though he had run a mile. In contrast to the plump sergeant the officer’s helmet was too big for him, making his face look cavernous and pinched. He could hardly have been more than twenty and he looked, Henry thought, as if he was consumptive. The sergeant said something in German and the officer translated, flashing a pale smile at the Englishman. He spoke in rather lisping accents that reminded Henry of the occasional nob like Roddy Rudd and Bruce Lovell, who had strayed into the Valley from time to time.
‘The sergeant asks if you will shake the hand,’ he said and Henry, impressed but embarrassed, said that he would gladly shake hands and did so. He had always respected the German front-line troops and, like most of the infantry, dismissed most of the atrocity stories as newspaper twaddle. Then the sergeant said something else and the officer, after a spluttering cough, again translated, telling Henry that the sergeant said he looked as though he was a farmer. Henry was so delighted at this that he seized the Saxon’s hand again and shouted, ‘Youm right first time, Jerry! Now for Chrissake ’ow did ’ee work that one out?’ and after some difficulty, arising perhaps from the officer’s unfamiliarity with the Valley dialect, the officer said Henry’s hands had given him away whereupon Henry turned enthusiastically to L/Corporal Eley, who had come up at a run to harvest more cap-badges in exchange for the half-opened tin of bully, exclaiming, ‘Damme, Bert, theym smart as paint, baint ’em? Smart as paint they be, the whole bliddy lot o’ them!’, and Eley said he had never doubted it and searched his pockets for more Woodbines.
They stood there for perhaps ten minutes before officers came out from the British lines and ordered them back, announcing that an edict from Divisional HQ had strictly forbidden fraternisation. Henry was unfamiliar with the word ‘fraternisation’ and said so but when it was explained to him by a lieutenant of ‘B’ Company he was indignant. ‘Why damme,’ he said to Corporal Watts, in an uncharacteristically heated voice, ‘the bliddy thing’s over an’ done with, baint it? That Fritz was a farmer like me, an’ that poor toad of a lieutenant, the one who could speak our lingo, was half-dead a’ready! Whyfore shoudden us pass the time o’ day with ’em?’
He continued to brood on the fraternisation ban. It seemed to distress him far more than all the straffing and discomfort he had undergone in the past and his natural respect for officers, particularly front-line officers, began to fade, together with his enthusiasm for the war. He remained aloof from the unofficial celebrations (including a spectacular firework display of coloured flares from both sides of the line) and his mind continued to dwell on the bovine, broad-shouldered Saxon, who had instantly recognised him as a fellow farmer. Somehow it never occurred to him that the men he had been fighting all this time were identical, men who, in better times, plodded about tending pigs, herding cows, ploughing up land and banking swedes for winter cattle feed. He had thought of them, if at all, as a race of efficient robots whose trade—if they had one—was war, who had never lived anywhere but in holes in the ground and whose tools included mustard gas and shrapnel. The encounter in no-man’s-land undermined his entire philosophy of war and now, looking back, it seemed to him a very stupid, profitless business and he wanted nothing so much as to be done with it and go home. His dourness puzzled his platoon commander and also his intimates, men like Watts and Eley. Throughout all the bad times they had been able to look to him for reassurance, waiting for his slow, rubbery smile to indicate that the barrage had shifted further back, or north and south along the line but now his essential cheerfulness had deserted him and in its place was impatient pessimism.
They never really got to the bottom of it, although, from time to time, he tried to explain what had wrought such a change in his outlook and when, in late November, they followed the Germans across the winter landscape and entered Cologne he could be seen almost any day distributing pieces of chocolate and tins of plum and apple to clusters of pale, listless children at the street corners, thus openly defying the fraternisation order that he would describe as ‘a bliddy lot o’ red tape that dorn maake no zense no’ow!’
In late January he was weeded out on account of his age group and sent home for demobilisation and about a month later, when there was a light flurry of snow over the Valley, he detrained at Sorrel Halt and came tramping over the moor to the river road. It felt strange to be swinging along without the usual Christmas tree of equipment hanging about him and until he got used to the feeling he did not know what to do with his left hand that had always gripped the sling of the rifle hooked to his shoulder. Then the sky cleared a little and a fitful winter sun gleamed over the Teazel watershed, pin-pointing a million beads of moisture on the broad blades of the river rushes and he stopped to contemplate the scene, comparing it with the porridge aspect of the Salient. ‘By Jesus,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m bliddy glad to be back! I’d clean forgotten how diffrent it was!’ and he marched on, unconsciously adjusting his route march stride to the slow, splay-footed tread of a countryman crossing the ridges of a ploughed field.
IV
Paul had been home three months then, having been discharged from a convalescent centre in Wales a day or so after the armistice.
His comparatively rapid recovery surprised everybody, including Claire, who had rushed all the way to Rhyl to visit him the moment she had received a letter confirming the wonderful telegram telling her that he was alive and lying wounded at Soissons. Alone in the Valley she was not overwhelmed by this news for she had never, not for a moment thought of him as dead. She was relieved, however, when she found him unmaimed and more or less himself, although he complained of severe headaches that his doctors warned would persist for some months but would grow more and more infrequent as time passed. Although delighted to see her he was somewhat abstracted, as though he could not yet accept the fact that he was not only alive but whole. He remembered very little of the last few months and nothing at all between the moment of stooping to lift the wounded poilu and that of hearing the voice of an American nurse in the ward some ten weeks later. Between headaches he felt fairly fit but he tired very easily and sometimes slept dreamlessly, ten hours at a stretch.
Claire’s two brief visits did a good deal to encourage a steady self-adjustment. He relished the soft, warm plumpness of her hand in his and was touched by her timid hospital smile, saying, ‘Don’t fret, old girl, I’ll be all right when I get out of here,’ and although the doctor warned her that he ought to remain under direct medical care at least until spring she had an uneasy certainty that she was more aware of what was good for him than someone who had never ridden down into the Valley and through the autumn woods about the mere, and that what he needed far more urgently than drugs was the balm of familiar surroundings.
When she returned home for the second time she brought these thoughts into the open during a discussion with Maureen and it was Maureen’s letter to the MO that swung the balance in favour of an early discharge. Less
than a month after her second visit news came that he would be arriving on the afternoon train into Paxtonbury and so he did, descending slowly from the carriage and looking about anxiously until he saw the family clustered outside the refreshment room, a rather nervous Claire with seven-year-old Mary holding her hand, five-year-old Whiz holding Mary’s hand, and the twins dancing a jig among a stream of passengers. Mary reached him first and he was touched by the abandon with which she embraced him. He remarked also how pretty and cuddly she looked, with her dark clusters of sausage curls and soft brown eyes, ‘brown an’ mild as a heifer’s’ as Mrs Handcock had once described them. Then he was almost bowled over by the two-pronged assault of the twins, who came at him like a couple of bullet-headed fugitives from a barrage, squealing with excitement, and he thought, fleetingly, ‘I’ve always considered all four of them babies and here they are half-grown children, and each so individual that it hardly seems possible they are all mine and Claire’s!’ Claire stood back, letting the children enjoy their moment and looking, he thought, as though she was going to disgrace them all by bursting into tears. The, pulling herself together, she shepherded them into Maureen’s battered Ford and they bumped off across the moor and down between the banks of crisp, half-dead bracken to the river. All the time the twins chattered gaily while Mary nestled against his shoulder and he thought, as they swung left and along under the paddock wall, ‘It’s a miracle! An absolute bloody miracle to be here again, seeing it and smelling it, with Claire as calm and pretty as ever sitting at the wheel, the twins prattling on about horses and conkers and school, and Mary and Whiz preening themselves but saying little except to tell him that poor Rumble Patrick, Ikey’s boy, had been prevented from joining the welcome home party by ‘the ’flu that everybody caught!’ And then he remembered that he had yet another child, a girl Claire had named Jill, whom he had never seen and his mind leapt back more than a year to the hour of his child’s conception in old Crabpot Willie’s shanty during their second honeymoon, when the war had looked as if it was going on for ever. He felt an immense rush of tenderness and thankfulness for all of them and for everything about him; for the gleaming Sorrel and its sorry-looking autumn rushes, the sprays of late meadowsweet in the hedge, the twenty shades of brown in the avenue chestnuts and the breath-taking peace of a scene unencumbered by rusting wire, unpocked by gaping shell-holes and with every building roofed with thatch and pantiles that still held something of the summer’s warmth.
They made no great fuss of him at the house, having been warned against a demonstration in advance so that soon enough everyone had gone to bed or returned to their own pursuits and he and Claire were alone again in front of the study fire.
It seemed to him a smaller, cosier room than he remembered, with firelight reflecting on the coloured bindings of the books and the comforting smell of leather and odd, ineradicable dust that lay between the dark oak shelves. She sat with the hem of her skirt on her knees and her long, elegant legs stretched to the blaze. Seeing her like that, after so long a deprivation, he would have thought that she would have hurried him into beginning one of their study-fireside tumbles but for the moment he could only contemplate her, letting relief and gratitude warm him like the logs in the grate. She had lost a good deal of weight he would have said, was thinner about the face, and in her eyes was a maturity that was new to him. And yet, if anything, it heightened her allure and he said, involuntarily, ‘I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you were, Claire, how much of a woman!’ and when she smiled absently but made no reply, ‘I suppose it will take me time to get adjusted. So far it’s a little disturbing, no more than returning to a place one hasn’t visited since childhood but remembers as a source of joy and laughter.’
She said, ‘It won’t take you long, Paul! It won’t take you forty-eight hours if you can relax and let the Valley seep into your bones!’ She looked at him speculatively then, wondering whether she should take the initiative to search out the boisterous male in him that had so often responded to isolation here late at night but he was looking into the fire with a quizzical expression and she knew that she must be patient and walk carefully. His silence disconcerted her somewhat, for such silences were uncommon between them and one would have thought they had so much to discuss.
‘What did you think of the baby? You were up there a long time but when you came down you didn’t say?’
He recollected himself but she saw that he did so with an effort. ‘Jill? She’s quite beautiful!’ and then, with a welcome flicker of his old-time raillery, ‘She’ll have the edge on Claire Derwent at seventeen plus! She’s got perfect features.’
‘Do you like “Jill”? Do you want to change it for any other name?’
‘Since you ask me, yes. I’d like to call her Claire.’
She felt tremendously encouraged without knowing why. ‘For any special reason?’
‘She’s the most like you for one thing and for another . . . ’
‘Well?’
She knew precisely what he had in mind but she wanted very much to hear him say it. He looked across at her and grinned and her heart gave a leap. It was going to be all right. It was going to be the same, in spite of her intermittent misgivings ever since she had looked down on a stranger when they showed her into the ward at the hospital. He said, ‘You know damned well why. Do I really have to tell you?’
‘Yes, you do!’
‘All right. She’s far more of a love-child than any of them. She had to be when you look back on how you came by her. That’s a fact, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s a fact,’ she said. ‘They say a woman always knows precisely when she comes by a child but I’m hanged if I could give you chapter and verse regarding the other two girls. Who could with a man like you about the place?’
‘Right then,’ he said, settling back and feeling the room and her presence grow on him like a skin, ‘it’s “Claire” from now on! What made you think of “Jill” anyway?’
‘I daresay because she came tumbling after,’ she said and he laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh for longer than she cared to remember.
They were finding their way again and the certainty of this excited her so much that she had to make an effort to sit still and appear to share his mood.
‘She’s going to be a handful, I can tell you that already. I daresay it’s because I worried so much all the time I was carrying her but you can’t expect everything. She’ll probably grow up into a thoroughly spoiled little brat, with everyone billing and cooing round her and all the young men within miles making silly excuses to call on us.’
‘Well, damned good luck to her,’ said Paul, emphatically. ‘After what we’ve had to put up with I’m all for the next generation grabbing all they can get!’ And then, suddenly, he thought of poor old Ikey and Hazel and of their child now asleep upstairs in the room he shared with the twins. He said, bitterly, ‘It’s a bloody shame Ikey couldn’t have made it! To cop it like that, three months before the end!’ and he scrambled up and looked down on her anxiously. ‘Look here, Claire, if I have occasional fits of depression don’t run away with the idea that you or the children are involved. I shall be remembering chaps like Ikey and Tom Williams and Will Codsall and all the other poor devils who went west!’
She looked at him doubtfully for a moment, as though debating with herself whether or not to pursue the subject. Finally she said, ‘Was it worth it, Paul? Was it really worth it, do you think? I mean, couldn’t it have been avoided with a little commonsense and more tolerance all round?’
He did not have to reflect long on an answer. He had already give the question a great deal of thought. ‘It will have been well worth it if everybody has grown up sufficiently to throw bombast and national prejudice on the ash heap! Anyway, for what it’s worth, that’s the general opinion among the troops and they ought to know! As to whether it could have been avoided that’s a different question. I supp
ose not, really. It could have been put off for a few years but no more, I think, not when you had gilded idiots like the Kaiser and the Tsar, and so many of our own windbags directing things! Sooner or later somebody would have pooped off the first shot so I suppose one has to regard it as inevitable in terms of the pre-war way of running things. It’ll be different now, though, if only because it has to be! Nobody would ever stand for it again in any case and that goes for Fritz as well as us, and certainly the poor devils of French, who bore the brunt of it, for all our share in winning.’
The fire rustled and a half-burned log slipped, ejecting a spark with a sharp crack that made him wince. She saw the instinctive movement and suddenly she was beside him, holding him tightly and covering his face with kisses.
‘Let’s put a ban on mentioning it,’ she said, ‘let’s rake the fire out and go to bed. You must be tired out and I ought to have sent you to bed hours ago!’ and she seized his hands but perhaps, in doing so, defeated her intentions for the movement brought them face to face on the hearthrug and he kissed her on the mouth, not hungrily but with a flourish that was at least a positive reassertion. ‘I’m not as tired as all that,’ he said and then it was she who laughed.
Post of Honour Page 37
