III
Mary emerged from the cave and climbed the lip of heather to the flat surface of the rock, asking herself whether her serenity had been assumed for the benefit of her father, admittedly the Valley’s most persistent worrier, but deciding that it had not and that she did indeed feel confidence in the future. To that extent Rumble Patrick’s notion of sending her here had succeeded more than he could have hoped. It was curious, she thought, but not more so than their association, their long partnership as children, his solemn proposal at seventeen, his sudden reappearance four years later and a marriage that had resulted in the safe, unexacting life she had always promised herself. He would almost certainly return as he had promised, and within hours they would pick up the threads of their life, exploiting his sense of purpose, rebuilding Periwinkle to his design, and steadily adding to their family and stock; another Paul and another Claire, caught up in the rhythm of the Valley.
She sat there a long time looking down on the spread of farms between the southern rim of the woods and the blue-grey line of the heath and dunes where Four Winds and Home Farm borders met the sea. Down there, she reflected, were innumerable Pittses and Craddocks and Stokes and Eveleighs, and some of them had been there a very long time but none as long as the Potters whose blood ran in her children, born and unborn. It increased her sense of kinship with him to reflect that when he had emerged, bawling and brick-red from under this very slab of sandstone, she had been toddling about the Big House yonder, almost as though she expected and awaited him. Now she could contemplate him as boy and man, as husband and lover, and think herself more fortunate than most. She wondered if seven years as Rumble Patrick’s wife had not left her a little smug and decided, with the minimum of self-reproach, that it had but why not? Their marriage had been modelled on that of her parents and this was her doing, not his. Her relationship with her mother was more that of a younger sister than a daughter and when all the others had gone their several ways, and she had stayed on awaiting Rumble’s return, she had had a better opportunity to assess the Big House partnership than any of the others who dismissed man, wife and way of life as hopelessly old-fashioned. Perhaps they were and perhaps it was, but the point was it had worked, and so had her own marriage, a carbon copy of the original, so who cared a damn about sex equality as proclaimed by poor old Rachel, or pursued by the sophisticated wives of The Pair?
It might have raised a blush on Claire’s cheek to know how closely her eldest daughter had checked the simple arithmetic of her relationship with Paul, and how faithfully the answers had been applied at Periwinkle. For the first time in years Mary recalled her mother’s blunt advice on the subject of marriage, offered only a week or two before Rumble had whisked her off to the little farm on the far side of the Valley. ‘The way to make it work is to be cheerfully available morning, noon and night, and go along with his major decisions, no matter how damn silly they seem at the time. If you do quarrel don’t sulk but make it up in bed. In ten minutes you’ll both be back to normal.’ That was about it, for Claire with thirty-four years’ experience behind her, and for Mary with a mere seven. Looking back on those years she could remember no more than an occasional tiff, always resolved by mother’s prescription.
In her new-found serenity she could ponder the family as a whole, sparing a thought for the marriages of her brothers, and it seemed to her that all three of them would have benefited by closer observance of the old couple—a partnership, with the man a short head out in front, and any little differences resolved horizontally. Well, there it was and there was nothing very complicated about it. For mother and daughter it had meant fulfilment and that, she supposed, was an end in itself.
Down on the nearest grey stub of a sawn pine a dog fox looked up at her and showed his teeth. Peace and certainty warmed her breasts and belly and she called, in the brogue of old Sam Potter, ‘Hullo there, you ole varmint!’ The fox lifted a forepaw as though prepared to meet the challenge but suddenly changed his mind and padded unhurriedly down the long, sandy slope. In a moment, moving as jauntily as her father, she had slipped off the spur and followed him down to the Mere.
Chapter Four
Birth of a Legend
I
Because he was rooted, because, apart from a two-year stint in Flanders he had lived his life here as community leader, Paul Craddock was as sensitive to the shifts and trends in local loyalties as the commander of a beleaguered garrison. As the war entered its third year he noted a steady diminution of what he had always thought of as the tribal impetus of the people around him.
In times past, both in peace and war, a Valley crisis had never failed to awaken that tribal instinct, promoting collective action and a dedicated pooling of skills and resources under his leadership. It was as though, in moments of stress, the people of the Valley were able to reach out and pluck the threads of initiative from the hedgerows and pastures and follow them wherever they might lead. Always they had led to achievement and sometimes to glory.
Such an occasion had been the rescue operation mounted for the survivors of the German merchantman wrecked off Tamer Potter’s Cove in March, 1906. This (apart from the instance of a Craddock girl’s election as Dairy Queen and her death in an air disaster) was the only occasion the Sorrel Valley made national headlines.
Now, well into the year 1942, Paul had lost his hold upon this ultimate handrail. The present war did not promote this kind of collectivism. Its alarms, sacrifices and manifestations were too regimented to sustain local individualism and too widespread to earn Shallowford more than a couple of paragraphs in the County Weekly. The hit-and-run raid, involving two civilian casualties, had passed almost unnoticed in the world outside, for what were two deaths matched against the hecatombs of Coventry and Merseyside? The bodies of Harold Eveleigh and his sister Rachel were two dead leaves on a flood that had now spread from the Coral Sea to the Newfoundland Banks, from the jungles of Malaysia to the Forest of Dean. Anonymity masked the exertions of Sorrel men and women in uniform. In the First War as people now called it, the Valley had been rich in heroes, men like Smut Potter, who hid out behind the German lines for almost a year, and Jem Pollock, of Lower Coombe, who won a posthumous medal supporting the splintered timbers of a blown mineshaft. There were no local heroes in this war. No garlands were heaped upon men and women leaving the train at Sorrel Halt to begin their nine days’ leave. Mostly they were greeted by indifferent civilians with ‘Hello. Home again?’
What was badly needed, Paul reflected, was a sharp boost to Valley morale and this, in the absence of heroes, could only be achieved by a collective endeavour of some sort that was not only revitalising but was seen to be so by the world north and east of the main road. He could not see where it was coming from. The tribal spirit was dead.
In this, of course, he was mistaken. It was not dead but dormant, awaiting the right set of circumstances to galvanise it into organised endeavour and, in so doing, eject an even more unlikely hero than Smut Potter or Jem Pollock. Such a set of circumstances lit a fuse in July and the resultant explosion not only boosted morale, and made national headlines, but added chapter and verse to Valley folklore. The chapter was the usual Sorrel compound of high drama and low comedy; the verse emerged as a piece of lewd doggerel to be chanted by Valley schoolboys long after the circumstances that had produced it had been swept away with the debris of the Third Reich. The hero this incident produced was Henry Pitts of Hermitage. The heroine was Claire Craddock herself. The villain, as sinister as any in Victorian melodrama, was Otto von Shratt, an ex-U-boat lieutenant, who capered across the Sorrel stage for one summer afternoon and evening before disappearing into obscurity. What made this incident memorable however, was not its circumstance but its shape. It had, in retrospect, an almost classic form in that its cast included not only a hero-clown, a heroine, and a cleanshaven Victorian villain, but a maltreated child plus any number of walk-on parts, most of them armed to the teeth. It was this tha
t caught the Valley’s fancy, for Sorrel people liked their drama in black and white. They were confused by subtle shades and subtle interpretations; even in 1942 few of them had heard of Professor Freud.
Inspector Everett, of Paxtonbury, rang the Home Guard Command Post at ten a.m. that morning, warning the duty unit to look out for a desperate character who had jumped the train en route for Plymouth, his port of embarkation for a Canadian P.O.W. Camp. Paul, getting a garbled message during his morning round, at once rang back for more information and Everett was able to supply it. The prisoner, a dedicated Nazi who had given the authorities a great deal of trouble since his capture the previous year, was called Otto von Shratt. The ‘von’ was deemed to be spurious but Otto’s reputation was not. He was, according to the inspector’s information, a very truculent character, and a man of considerable strength, agility and ingenuity. He had already escaped twice and on one occasion had been free for nearly a week. This, in fact, was why he was being shipped overseas but his escort, bringing him south-west, had been foolish enough to sanction a visit to the lavatory whilst changing stations and he was now at large again and had last been seen heading for the coast. The military, he said, were not unduly alarmed for it was deemed impossible for Shratt to leave the country but they thought it not unlikely that he might attempt a little sabotage and were extremely anxious to lay hands on him without a moment’s delay.
‘He’ll almost certainly make for cover and lie up for a spell,’ Everett told Paul. ‘My instructions are for your people to beat the woods, working north and joining up with the Paxtonbury Home Guard moving south-east. How many men can you get together in the next hour or so?’
Paul said no more than a dozen or so but that number, he felt, would suffice. ‘Someone is sure to see him and ’phone in,’ he added, ‘and once they do we can pinpoint the area and concentrate. He won’t be likely to put up a fight, will he?’
‘Not if he has any sense, but how many of those hairy apes have? This one is a real beauty. He might tackle a single individual unless he found himself looking down the barrel of a rifle. I’ll send a detailed description and picture the minute I get one. It gives me blood pressure to think of those clots at the camp entrusting a man like that to a couple of recruits and a middle-aged corporal. They won’t ask for our co-operation. They prefer to fight the entire bloody war on their own, like all the Services!’
Paul was rather elated by the assignment and so, when he rode over to the Command Post at Coombe Bay to organise the hunt, was the rump of Valley originals and their teenage troops. The local Home Guard had made appreciable strides towards military perfection since the days of Dunkirk when it had consisted of a scratch group of volunteers manning a coastal strip six miles long and three miles deep. Today every man had a uniform, a rifle and plenty of ammunition. Training was still sketchy and discipline often depended on mood and variations in weather, but every volunteer possessed the merit of enthusiasm and a thorough knowledge of the local terrain. The prospect of flushing a real live Nazi from Shallowford coverts was one that promised not only adventure but kudos. Even Henry Pitts, a courtesy sergeant again at sixty-plus, begged to be numbered in the posse, and that despite the fact that he was not on duty and had left his rifle and ammunition at home.
‘Giddon, Maister,’ he protested when Paul relayed the Inspector’s warning, ‘us worn have no trouble flushing the bugger out o’ yer! I can borrow Smut’s rook-rifle and follow on zoon as I pick up the car. ’Er’s havin’ carburettor trouble and I’m waitin’ on ’er!’
Paul left it at that and assembled, by means of the telephone and boy-runner, some fifteen men, including Henry’s son David, Harold Eveleigh’s boy, three Coombe Bay servicemen home on leave, and the pot-bellied Francis Willoughby, of Deepdene. In three cars they drove to the point of departure, the head of the Coombe, and set off in a north-westerly direction, forming a long, ragged line and moving within hailing distance of one another. Latecomers had instructions to move forward on the same line of march about a mile behind the vanguard, if possible covering the gaps. The reserve was placed in nominal command of Henry and all were warned to work in pairs and rendezvous on the main road that formed the northern boundary of the woods.
Shallowford Woods were ideal cover for a fugitive at this time of year. Every beech, oak, ash and sycamore was in full leaf and the bracken between the trunks of the older trees was waist high. The going was comparatively easy up to the crest of the southern slope and down the far side to the margins of the Mere but from here on, inclining north, the way was very rough and Paul, passing Sam Potter’s cottage, reflected ruefully that he would need at least a hundred men to search the vast rhododendron thickets and fir coppices at the northern end of the Mere. He checked the beaters in order to consult with Sam, whose knowledge of this part of the Valley was unsurpassed, even by his brother Smut, the ex-poacher. Sam was not very sanguine about their hopes of forcing the Nazi to break cover.
‘Tiz a praper old wilderness about yer,’ he grumbled. ‘Us have done little or no cuttin’ back zince the start o’ the war. You could hide an elephant upalong. If you’ll taake my advice, Squire, you’ll shorten your line an’ go over the ground dree or fower times, leavin’ markers to show where us’ve been. I got a stack o’ flags in the shed us used for the sports, backalong. Lend me a couple o’ men to hump ’em and us’ll go about it methodical-like.’
They went about it methodical-like, narrowing their field and planting markers every hundred yards or so as they pushed their way through bracken, gorse and blackberry bushes to the higher ground known, from time immemorial, as the Badgers’ slope, for badgers had occupied setts here for centuries.
Paul, handling some of the flags, remembered the last time they had been used in a collective exercise, the occasion of the sports promoted to celebrate King George V’s Silver Jubilee in Big House paddocks, and he could recall the occasion before that, the local junketings that marked the signing of the Peace Treaty, in 1919. Many of the poles were old and rotten, with no more than a shred of rag adhering to the blunt ends but they served to narrow the field and enable the beaters to work with some kind of precision. Gradually, moving slowly and toilsomely in blazing sunshine, the Shallowford Home Guard worked its way up the sandy slope and over the crest into the last belt of woodland approaching the main road. An occasional rabbit scuttled ahead of them. A wide-eyed roebuck broke cover and dashed for the rhododendrons and at least a dozen pheasants flew squawking into the south, rising like heavy bombers and struggling madly to gain height. It was, for most of the beaters, a pleasant if tiring way of spending a summer afternoon and the general air of expectancy inclined them to keep in closer touch with one another than Paul had intended. Grunting along in their wake he said, ‘Tell them to spread out a bit, Sam. We’re not covering nearly enough ground,’ and Sam, whose stride had not been shortened by age, hurried on ahead waving his arms and shouting directions to the younger men. In obedience to his directions they fanned out so that the couples were separated by more than a hundred yards. It was this dispersal that gave the fugitive the opportunity he had been awaiting since he first spied their approach shortly after noon.
II
He had holed up in a bramble-sown crevice at the very top of the Badger Slope, within fifty yards of the ridge where Hazel Potter had once kept her little house. It was a unique vantage point for he could remain unseen by anyone passing within yards and yet observe in detail the sweep of the woods as far as the Mere and the movements of at least half the men searching for him. It seemed to him that his best course at the moment was to wait for the last of them to pass the crest of the escarpment and move down into the heavy timber beyond. Then, he reasoned, he could break cover with reasonable safety, gain the security of the rhododendron forest below and from here work his way round the western side of the lake and find a secure place to await darkness.
He was not by any means clear about what he would do after that e
xcept to hunt for transport of some kind that would enable him to get clear away from the area. This, he felt, was essential for two reasons. They would not be looking for him with such enthusiasm if he could put distance between himself and his point of escape, already ten miles to the north-east, and the chances of stowing aboard a vessel for Eire would improve very considerably if he could enter the area of a port like Plymouth or Falmouth.
He knew the country better than some of the men searching for him. His ability to read maps had been built into his initial training as a member of the Hitler Youth movement ten years ago and his seagoing experience had enabled him to memorise topographical features at a glance. The only map he possessed now was inside his head but it was none the worse for that. During his fifteen months of captivity and again, in the course of his two escapes, he had had many opportunities to study maps either smuggled into the camp in Cumberland, or displayed on railway stations he had passed through during his subsequent escapes. This ready availability of maps contributed to the unspeakable contempt he felt—and always had felt—for the British race. To his way of thinking their officials behaved with astonishing stupidity. They introduced an impenetrable blackout throughout the length and breadth of the country that made it very easy for escapers to move about at night, they removed the names of stations and carted away the sign-posts thereby causing themselves, and no-one else, endless confusion and frustration. They did not, however, take the elementary precaution of covering pre-war tourist posters at some of their transport depots, or making certain that school atlases did not find their way into prisoner-of-war camps. Clearly photographed in the brain of Shratt was the general layout of the entire western peninsula and this photograph had been there ever since he learned that he was destined to travel to Plymouth by train in the custody of a trio of yokels in uniform. He could have given them the slip before but had waited until he was within easy walking distance of the coast. Once he had smelled the sea and seen a catch of fresh fish at the junction a few miles back, he had gone into the station lavatory, climbed out of the window into a siding, displayed himself running east between two lines of open trucks, doubled back, and concealed himself in a canvas water tank until it was dusk. Now, in this kind of weather, he was already dry and was not even tired or hungry for he had enjoyed six hours’ sleep on reaching the Shallowford escarpment and had eaten his fill of fruit, vegetables and handfuls of corn gathered whilst crossing the open fields under the woods. For the first time since his last escape he felt confident of being the first German prisoner to escape from Britain. Von Werra had made it from Canada the previous year but Von Werra was dead, and Otto was confident that the Reich needed another hero to fête, cosset and promote, before sending him to make more inroads into Allied commerce. By now, he reasoned, he would have been among the most decorated of Admiral Doënitz’s stalwarts, the men to whom the Reich would owe its ultimate triumph after the hopeless rumblings of the Wehrmacht in Russia and the pitiable display of Goering’s Luftwaffe in the summer and autumn of 1940. For Shratt was not only a dedicated Nazi, fed and nurtured on the theory and practice of Teutonic supremacy. He was also a man who had come to believe the only certain way of beating Britain was to starve her to death and the latest shipping losses quoted in the camp confirmed him in this belief. No country, whatever its resources, could hope to replace an annual shipping loss of upwards of three million tons. By this time next year, by late autumn if the U-boat men attended to their duty, Winston Churchill would be in the mood to agree to a truce in the West in order that Germany could eliminate Russia. There would be plenty of time to finish the war against Britain and America once Germany had the entire resources of the Continent at her disposal. In the meantime the most important war aim in the mind of Otto von Shratt was to get home, have his picture in all the papers, and accept the command of one of Doënitz’s most up-to-date U-boats.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 10
