Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  IV

  It was, one might have said, his Indian summer of smugness. With the Slump behind him and the family, apart from the baby, off his hands, even his feud with Sydney Codsall became almost extinct after the bricks of the bungalows on the eastern border had mellowed and the County Council (with whom Sydney seemed to have lost his grip) compelled him to shift the caravan park nearer the main road where it was screened, to some degree, by the tongue of the woods.

  The Silver Jubilee celebrations were tepid judged by earlier and more robust jamborees, as though the British were honouring the royal family from habit. Public luncheons were eaten, races run, mugs distributed, loyal addresses delivered but purely local festivities had lost their appeal in an age when radios were switched on all day and there was a two-hourly ’bus service between Coombe Bay and Paxtonbury, and all the youngsters roared about the countryside on motor-cycles. People went further afield these days and looked for more sophistication in their leisure. There were two cinemas in Paxtonbury and one in Whinmouth, and their bills were displayed regularly in the window of Smut Potter’s baker’s shop, giving him and his French wife free access to Hollywood entertainment every day of the week had they cared to avail themselves of this tremendous privilege.

  And yet the Valley remained a unit, buttressed in the east by dedicated, middle-aged men, like the cork-footed Brissot of Lower Coombe and Francis Willoughby of Deepdene, and in the west by the bastions of Four Winds, Hermitage and the resurrected Periwinkle. There was still no more than a wandering path along the dunes and over the goyles and liaison between the estate and the National Trust kept the great woods in being and the slopes of Blackberry Moor free of bricks and mortar.

  On Midsummer’s Day, 1935, when all the Jubilee litter had been gathered up and burned, a casual perusal of the estate diary sent Paul off on one of his great circular sweeps, his first in a long time. He had been entering up after breakfast when something prompted him to turn back the pages, a whole fistful of pages, to the same season of the year a quarter-century ago, when he had made the rounds to acquaint tenants of King Teddy’s death, in 1910. The recollection of this set him musing on the great patterns of change that had overlapped one another in the last two-and-a-half decades. It struck him that the very act of conveying such news across county on horseback was something linking him to Tudor and Stuart eras, for today, supposing the ailing George V died, everyone in the Valley would be aware of the fact within minutes. There was hardly a cottage that did not possess its radio and London papers arrived in Coombe Bay at breakfast-time on the morning ’bus. The bright sun threw golden darts across the little room so that the prospect of paperwork depressed him and he pushed his tray aside, letting his mind rove back to the day, clearly recalled, when he had ridden old Snowdrop over the Sorrel and back across the edge of the moor to the mere and the farms in the east. It seemed more than twenty-five years ago. Four of his seven children had been unborn and young Ikey Palfrey had only just left school. Old Tamer and Willoughby were already dead but Arthur Pitts, John Rudd, Norman Eveleigh and most of the old brigade were thriving and so were the second generation, Will Codsall, Big Jem, and a score of others commemorated in French Wood. The sight of a motor-car in those days had set everyone running and no one in the Valley had ever seen an aeroplane, or heard of Hollywood. There had been but one telephone in the district, a thing that looked like an ear-trumpet in Coombe Bay Post Office and the main road running behind the woods had been white with dust all summertime. He said aloud, as he re-read his 1910 entry, ‘God, it’s another world!’ and then, hearing Claire clearing the breakfast things, shouted, ‘I’m going out for a spell! I’ll be home to lunch!’ and went along the terrace to the yard calling Mark Codsall to saddle the skewbald.

  He took the same route, across Big Paddock to Home Farm, where he stopped for a brief chat with his goddaughter, formerly Prudence Pitts, now mistress of the place, and as he sat his horse talking to her he reflected how quickly these flighty girls let themselves go once they had settled for a man. Prudence had once been the belle of the Valley and the giddiest flirt for miles around; today she looked as though she had been married almost as long as her landlord. He gave her good-day and rode on, his mind occupied working out her age which he judged to be twenty-seven. She was not, he thought, wearing so well, despite her lavish use of cosmetics and fortnightly visits to the Paxtonbury hairdresser. Her figure had already begun to sag and rumour had reached him that she nagged her husband but the farm itself seemed in good order, with its outbuildings freshly whitewashed and its yard free of nettles. He emerged on to the river road and crossed the bridge, once a plank affair but now of metal plates bedded in concrete piers and rode on down the Four Winds’ approach lane to the biggest but no longer the most prosperous farm on the estate. Harold Eveleigh and his eldest boy were there, tinkering with a tractor parked alongside the barn where Martin Codsall had hanged himself more than thirty years ago. He called, ‘Lovely morning, Harold! Anything you can’t fix yourself?’ and Eveleigh straightened himself and grinned.

  ‘If I can’t, Bob can,’ he said and the boy beside him grunted, ‘Carburettor trouble! This fuel is second-rate and she clogs. Dad will start her on it, no matter how many times I tell him to switch over and start on pure gas!’ He tinkered awhile and then, with a stuttering roar, the engine suddenly burst into life and the boy leaped up and tuned it to a smooth bub-bub-bub.

  ‘Got to keep him handy all the time,’ Harold said. ‘I wish to God he didn’t have to go to school! I could do with Bob around me all the week. I was going in for a mug of tea. Will you join me, Mr Craddock?’

  ‘Thanks, no,’ Paul told him, ‘but give my regards to your wife. I’m just doing the rounds and I’ve promised to be home for lunch. Everything okay over here?’

  ‘Ticking over,’ Harold said. ‘Milk yield is up but we’re down on pigs. Poor old Ben is past it, I’m afraid. Time we pensioned him off!’ and he nodded in the direction of an incredibly old man doddering across the yard carrying two buckets of swill, completely absorbed in the task of keeping his balance on the sun-slippery flags.

  ‘He must be nearly ninety!’ Paul said, recognising the labourer to whom he had once delivered the drunken Martin Codsall after taking him home from the bay one winter’s afternoon, shortly before the Four Winds’ tragedy, and he called, ‘Hi there, Ben!’ but the old man disappeared round the corner of the barn without looking up.

  ‘Stone deaf!’ Harold said, ‘but a better worker than most of them for all that! I’ve tried to persuade him to pack it in but either he can’t hear or deliberately misunderstands. He was here in Codsall’s time, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘and I daresay he’s another who would prefer to die in his boots. If you retired him he’d fade out in a fortnight. It’s routine that keeps that kind going.’

  ‘My God, it won’t keep me going at his age!’ Harold said, ‘I shall be damned glad to put my feet up and let the boys carry on.’

  ‘Do they want to?’

  ‘Bob does, he’s got a mechanical flair. Must be from his mother’s side, it certainly isn’t from mine.’

  ‘Well, there’s hope for you yet,’ Paul said. ‘You heard Henry Pitts has acquired a tractor since he remarried?’

  ‘I never believed it until I saw him cruising across Undercliffe the other day but if he drives it the way he drives his Morris we shan’t have him around for long!’

  ‘Don’t bank on it,’ Paul said, moving on. ‘Henry came through Third Ypres. It’ll take a damned sight more than a tractor spill to kill him!’

  He rode down to the river, feeling, as he would have said, ‘comfortable’ about Four Winds. Harold Eveleigh would never be the kind of farmer his father was, or his brother Gilbert would have been, but he had more than enough staying power to see him through, and domestic peace anchored him to the place in a way that was rarer today than it had been a generation ago. He forded
the river where it was no more than a fetlock deep and punched up the swell of Undercliffe and under the lee of French Wood to Hermitage, passing on his way the cleared site of Davey Pitts’ new bungalow. Davey, it seemed, had been evasive when he had told him a month ago he had no plans to marry, or perhaps his father’s second marriage had jogged his elbow. He had appeared at Shallowford within three days of the confrontation and taken Paul up on his offer to provide alternative accommodation for himself and the old lady. Later it had leaked out that he had become engaged to one of the Timberlake girls living in Whinmouth, so that the danger of relationships going sour at Hermitage had been sidestepped.

  The old lady was sunning herself in the porch when Paul rode up and he was just in time to see Ellie emerge with her tea and biscuits. Old Martha, he noticed, received her ministrations as a right and he thought, ‘The sooner the old girl goes and leaves Henry and his new wife to themselves the better!’ and apparently Ellie thought so too, for she made a grimace of resignation with her mouth as if to say, ‘It isn’t for long, thank God! But I’m not giving her a stick to beat me with!’

  He passed the time of day with them both and learned that Henry had taken his new tractor down in the hollow near the moor road fork. On the rim of the western boundary he saw him, trailing blue exhaust along the bowl of a field they called Barley Mow and it was obvious, even from this distance, that he was using his tractor as a plaything and not as an implement, for the trailer he was towing was empty and Paul watched as Henry, hunched like a chariot driver, charged a narrow gateway and roared up the incline towards the north-westerly tip of the wood. It was, he felt, a cheering sight, and evidence that none were proof against the lure of gadgets. Not a hundred yards from where Henry joyously tackled the gradient was the road junction where, in the early years of the century, he had stood on the bank and gaped at his first horseless carriage, the fidgety little contrivance driven into the Valley by Roddy Rudd. From that moment, it seemed, his mind had hardened against machines and his prejudices had been increased rather than diminished by his experiences in the glutinous mud of Passchendaele, yet here he was, wedded to the machine age by a widow and eight-horse power car. In a way, Paul thought, it was a comic miracle.

  He left Henry to his play and rode across the shallow valley to the Periwinkle boundary where the skewbald, full of spring grass, and with the hunting season well behind her, threw up her heels and took the ascent at a gallop, Paul entering into the spirit of the frolic and hallooing Mary as she emerged from the wash-house with her mouth full of pegs—rubber pegs, he noticed. Rumble Patrick must have talked her into throwing her wooden pegs on to the ash-heap.

  Every time he had come this way in the last few months there had been changes and all of them good. The new shingled roof of the farmhouse, the creosoted split-rail fences and the general air of sleekness that the ugly duckling of the Valley had acquired under Rumble Patrick’s dynamic direction, made his heart swell with pride, not only because the marriage was so clearly a happy one but because he felt he could take credit himself for having produced a daughter with enough sense to sit waiting for the right husband when other girls would have compromised. And yet, although the wedding was only three months distant in time, he found it difficult to regard the new occupants of Periwinkle as newlyweds. To him they seemed always to have been man and wife elect and what had happened last April was no more than ratification of contract. As he reined in at the gate Rumble appeared from the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts and, improbably, an apron. The boy’s back and shoulders were burned a golden brown and Paul thought, ‘Now dammit, why can’t I tan like that? If I take my shirt off I go brick-red, endure two days’ agony, peel and then go fish-belly white again!’

  ‘What’s the idea of the badge of servitude?’ he asked. ‘No other man in the Valley would be seen dead in an apron!’ and Mary, spitting her pegs into a basket, called, ‘Don’t come between man and wife! Rumble does the cooking on washdays and he’s a better hand at it than most of the women around here! Are you going to stay and sample one of his hashes?’

  ‘Not likely,’ he said, dismounting and leading the skewbald into the lean-to stable, ‘but I’d like to see what kind of job you’ve made of it inside? You’re about finished now, aren’t you?’

  Yes they were, she told him, and he smiled at the queenly way she marched ahead of him into the house leaving Rumble to off-saddle the mare and resume his weekly chore. He had seen the renovations in various stages but was unprepared for the pleasant impact of Elinor’s old kitchen, always a tumbledown old place, with its crumbling beams and bulging cob. Today the place seemed not only solid and commodious but one of the most cheerful rooms he had ever entered, its great stone fireplace softened by large earthenware jars filled with lupins, delphiniums and gladioli, the slate floor laid with brightly patterned rugs and primrose curtains over the windows. There was a new stove in the enlarged scullery, a covered-way for boots, coals and logs, and what had once been a deeply recessed bacon cupboard had been converted into a backstair leading to the landing where the beams had been treated with a preservative that gave off a pleasing resinous smell. She obviously took immense pride in showing him all they had done and pouted when he said the place looked more like a pocket Manor House than a run-down farm.

  ‘I don’t see why all farmers should have to share a sty with their pigs,’ she said, ‘and most of them around here do! Rumble can solve any problem once he puts his mind to it but it was me who took charge up here,’ and she led the way into the low-ceiling bedroom, where the walls were painted the colour of old parchment, every piece of cottage furniture gleamed and the double bed was covered with a lavender-blue bedspread. There were night tables either side of the bed and on them were gleaming silver candlesticks, complete with original snuffers. It all looked so trim, fresh and elegant that he thought, ‘They aren’t really farmers at all, they’re more like a couple of kids playing house!’ He said:

  ‘I was only teasing. You’ve got a better home-making instinct than any of us, Mary, and this would have made old Elinor Codsall’s eyes start from her head. As for poor old Will, he would have rolled himself in a blanket and slept on the floor!’ Then, looking at her pink nightie and Rumble’s striped pyjamas folded on the pillows like props in a magazine advertisement, ‘You’re obviously well-matched and I don’t have to ask if you’re happy.’

  ‘No,’ she said, without a trace of the shyness that had characterised her up to the very moment of Rumble Patrick’s reappearance in the Valley, ‘No, you don’t, Daddy! He’s wonderful but sometimes I find it very hard to believe he’s only twenty-two. He seems so much more mature than any of the younger set round here and yet—well—it doesn’t make him in the least stodgy, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said, ‘for his father Ikey had the same quality. It was something I always envied him!’ and he gave her a swift hug to express his extreme satisfaction and they went downstairs to the scullery where Rumble was stirring a savoury-smelling stew in a large, black saucepan which he lifted aside and said, as he slipped his arm round her waist, ‘Did he think it was a bit fussy up there? Above stairs it was her doing, not mine, Gov’nor!’

  Paul said, seriously, ‘You’ve made a wonderful start here and it frightens me to think I thought of bulldozing the place after Elinor left, and letting it revert to rough pasture. What have you got in the way of stock?’

  ‘Nothing to boast about as yet,’ Rumble said, ‘but I’m buying some Friesians from Eveleigh. The new generator’s installed and the milking machine arrives on Friday. I shan’t bother with pigs while the price is so low but I’m going ahead with the cereal wheat as I planned. That way I can manage with one extra hand. After we’ve reclaimed fifteen acres of moor we’ll see about getting another on piecework basis. Would you and Claire like to come over to a meal on Saturday night? It’s rather special, the official switch-on!’ and he pointed to
the empty light-socket over the stove.

  ‘We should be delighted,’ he said and Rumble told Mary to watch the stew while he showed Paul the electric plant housed in what had been Will Codsall’s cowshed and then, as Rumble led the way out of the house, his face assumed a slightly wary expression as he said, ‘Did she drop the dutiful hint about a little stranger, Gov?’ and went on, before Paul could exclaim, ‘Oh, I talked the usual guff about waiting until there was money in the bank but . . . well . . . you know these things have a way of making up their own minds! Maybe there’s some sense in her view—that kids are the better for having young parents!’

  ‘Well, you certainly haven’t wasted much time, Rumble,’ he said, smiling, ‘but taken all around I think she’s right and you’re wrong!’ He glanced down the slope to where the river gleamed between the willow clump on the wide river bend above Codsall bridge. ‘It’s a nice spot to be born in and grow up, so damned good luck to the three of you!’

  He rode off along the crest towards the bulge of Hermitage Wood feeling more elated than ever. He already had three grandchildren, all girls, but Mary’s he felt sure, would be a boy and perhaps take his place here in the ’fifties and ’sixties. Somehow he had always known that his successor would derive from Mary and also that, somewhere along the line, Ikey would have a stake in it, and it was to Ikey that his thoughts returned as he cut across the northern boundary of Hermitage to enter the woods by a little-used bridle path running round the shoulder of the badgers’ slope. It was about here, so Maureen told him, that Hazel Potter had been delivered of Rumble Patrick in a cave, on a summer evening the year before hell broke loose and changes rushed down on them so rapidly that it seemed the pattern of life would be shattered for all time. It had not, thank God. Somehow they had been able to save the main fabric, sort out the pieces, and begin all over again and this, surely, was what Oliver Cromwell (himself a well-meaning vandal) would have called ‘a crowning mercy’.