He stood for a moment watching the scene below, wondering if the usual truckloads of khaki-clad figures would emerge and make for the assault course where he could follow on and watch men descend the death-slide like encumbered Tarzans but none did. Far away, across the parade ground, an N.C.O. Discip. could be heard warbling commands half an octave beyond his pre-war range. A sergeant in shirtsleeves stood on the guard-house porch polishing a boot. The sentry continued to pace ten steps left, ten steps back and it was only for want of something more entertaining that John gave him his full attention, noticing that there was something a little odd about his turn-out. He continued to stare unblinkingly until he discovered what was amiss. The man’s cap badge had dropped off his beret and a moment later John spotted it, shining like a silver star directly in the man’s beat.
It was curious, he thought, that the sentry did not notice it for every twenty seconds his boots came crashing down within inches of it but then, John reasoned, it wasn’t curious after all, for like all good sentries he marched with his eyes on the middle distance. Watching, John saw trouble approaching. A staff car came slowly up the main avenue of the camp and the sergeant, throwing aside his boot, moved towards the gate to let it through and John saw his chance while the attention of the officer in the car was on the sergeant. He moved forward, unslinging his camera and, at the same time, side-kicking the badge towards the sentry who had faced about and was in the act of slamming his butt in salute.
The man saw the badge and the officer saw John’s camera in the same split second. The officer sprang out and doubled round the car, shouting, ‘Hi, there! You, there! You can’t take pictures here, sonny!’ and the sergeant, determined to get in on the act, roared, ‘You can’t take pictures here!’ but John understood that although both sounded fierce and emphatic they were also amused at his effrontery, and that this was a fortunate thing for it gave him an opportunity to occupy their attention long enough for the sentry to scoop up his cap badge, clip it on, and resume his rigid pose. This, in fact, was precisely what happened for the officer, a heavily-built middle-aged man suddenly became waggish and pointed to a security poster on the camp notice-board. ‘You’re old enough to read, aren’t you? What’s that say up there?’
‘“Careless talk costs lives”, sir,’ John said, equably, and then, as a polite qualification, ‘I wasn’t talking, sir.’
The officer looked baffled but then decided to laugh and at once the sergeant joined in, saying, ‘You live around here, don’t you?’ and John said, very politely, that he did, and that his father was Squire Craddock who owned the land as far as the River Whin, behind the camp.
At this the sergeant laughed first but straightened his face at once as the officer said, ‘Well, I’m sorry about that, but you still can’t carry a camera around the camp. Nobody can! It’s against regulations! Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The sergeant, wishing perhaps to atone for his premature laugh, said, ‘Er—those binoculars, sir.’
‘Yes by George! It’s a regular spy outfit, sergeant. Do you suppose we ought to clap him in the guardhouse?’
‘No, sir,’ replied the sergeant, who was reckoned a bit of a humourist. ‘If we did his dad would give us notice to quit,’ and at this the balance of joviality was restored and they both laughed very heartily indeed.
John let them enjoy their joke. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the sentry’s cap badge was back in place so that when the officer said, ‘Run along then, and don’t bring that kit round here again, there’s a war on,’ he replied, ‘Yes, sir’, and the officer climbed back into the car while the sergeant returned to his boot polishing.
When the car had disappeared John and the sentry exchanged grins but it was not until he was at the extreme end of his beat that the man said, ‘Thanks, chum. Nicely managed,’ in a stage whisper. It was a more than adequate acknowledgment John felt, enlarging both of them at nobody’s expense, and he turned and plodded away over the lower crest of the moor having crossed yet another profession off his list, for who, in his senses, would want to be at the mercy of a little tin badge and superiors who indulged in Second Form jokes? It was not even worth the glory of dying on a bloodstained cloak like General Wolfe and whispering ‘Thank God!’ when the aide-de-camp cried, ‘They run, sir! They run!’ This was a future he had conjured with after seeing a colour-plate reproduction of ‘The Heights of Abraham’ in his school history book.
III
Feeling that he had derived something worthwhile from the encounter he crossed the track at the point where it met Hermitage Lane and here, with a pant and a wriggle, Henry Pitts’ aged Labrador, Nosey, ran up to him. John and Nosey were old friends and John foraged in his knapsack for a sandwich that the dog swallowed at a gulp. Anticipating more he trotted at John’s heels when the boy tackled the steep slope up to French Wood and here, surprisingly, he encountered David Pitts, son of Henry and master of Hermitage contemplating a rusting tractor. John had a scale of intimates in the Valley and David was about half-way up the scale, several notches below Rumble Patrick, Mary and old Henry, a long way above the new people at High Coombe, who persisted in treating him as a five-year-old. David, a slow-thinking, serious man in his late thirties, said, ‘Wot be ’at then? Bird-watchin’?’, and without waiting for an answer went on, ‘Bide a minnit, I seed a yellowhammer yerabouts a minnit zince!’
They stood quite still by the bonnet of the tractor and John carefully unslung his binoculars and handed them to the broad-shouldered man at his side, who trained them on a section of hedge. Presently he said, ‘There ’er be. On thicky low branch, this zide o’ the gap,’ and passed the binoculars back to John, who ranged the hedge for a minute before getting the bird in focus.
He studied it lovingly, for the yellowhammer was one of his favourites and not often spotted. The nape, head and belly were like slivers of lemon peel but the duller wing feathers were the colour of the rubbed guinea that old Francis Willoughby wore on his watch fob. ‘It’s a male, David,’ he said, as the dog Nosey flopped and the bird, alerted, skimmed the hedge and dipped into the wood. ‘Is there a pair nesting up here?’
‘Not as I know of,’ said David, ‘but I’ll keep a look out. There was last year, with five eggs in but I didn’t tell ’ee, I was afraid you’d raid ’un. I likes them yaller-boys. They eats a rare lot o’ pests. Be ’ee goin’ backalong for a cup o’ tay wi’ Mother?’
‘Tomorrow,’ John said, ‘I got to make the rounds today.’
‘Ah!’ said David understandingly, ‘that’s as it should be. Time was when Squire made ’em regular, once a week. Twice sometimes, depending on what was stirring but he’ll be busy so I reckon he’s glad to have you backalong.’
It did not strike him as odd that an eight-year-old should take himself seriously. He was a serious man himself, rooted in tradition, with very little of his father’s sense of humour. He watched the boy climb through the gap and not until he had been swallowed up by the summer foliage of French Wood did he permit himself to exclaim.
‘Gordamme!’ he said aloud, ‘if he baint a chip off the old block! Tiz like old times just zeein’ ’im.’ He made a mental note to describe the encounter to his wife and ensure that she did not miss the symbolism of it, but the past had no meaning for John so that he forgot about David by the time he had crossed the protective paling of the wood put there to keep out the deer. Then, on the far side of the coppice he saw two Red Admirals playing at falling leaves on a shaft of sunlight and waited for them to settle so that he could get a closer look at the chain of islands decorating the scalloped margins of the wings. They looked, he thought, like a map of the Hebrides and he had never before noticed that the spots were precisely balanced, as though put there by a painter with a passion for symmetry. It was the same, he reflected, with the four ‘eyes’ on the wings of the Peacock butterfly, each pair being carefully matched, so that you could never mistake a hind
wing ‘eye’ for a fore wing ‘eye’. The arrangement impressed him. God, he reflected, must be an extremely busy person, with a wonderful eye for detail. There was absolutely nothing it seemed, he was likely to overlook once he had rolled up the sleeves of his nightshirt and got busy after his winter holiday. So far, try as he might, John had never been able to catch him out and find a piece of botched work, although he was disinclined to take things for granted and had hopes that one day he would chance upon a celestial error of one kind or another.
In the meantime, the butterflies having resumed their aimless saraband, he made his way down from the escarpment and into Shallowford Woods where he found a stump half-way down the wooded slope and ate his snack whilst contemplating a heron doing some leisurely fishing among the reeds at the eastern end of the Mere.
It was hot and still up here, with tree-talk reduced to the kind of whispers people exchanged in church. The only sounds that reached him, apart from the hushed tissing of the beeches, was the deliberate plop of a fish, or perhaps an otter, and the high undertone of bees searching the bells of foxgloves that grew in great straggling clumps beside the path. He did not worship trees, as his father obviously did, but he could understand his father’s reluctance to cut one down, for they surely took many lifetimes to grow to this height and to fell one was to make a change. He was like his father in that respect, wanting everything to stay as he remembered it, and thinking this he wondered if he wished it was always summer and that he could stop growing up. There were certain advantages, he thought, in remaining a boy and obvious disadvantages in growing as old and sad faced as his father, or as big around the rump as his mother, or, for that matter, as bristly as the officer at the camp, or as wheezy as old Francis Willoughby over at Deepdene. Ruthlessly, and with a certain relish, he considered the physical penalties of old age, among them the tiresome necessity of soaping one’s face and scraping it with a razor like his father and his eldest brother Simon whose whiskers sprouted like tares. For a man as old as his father, however, he judged Paul pretty active, particularly on horseback, but the older women grew the more they seemed to spread and a tendency to acquire a fat belly was not confined to the impossibly old, like Martha Pitts. Even his sister Mary, whom he considered only middle-aged, had recently put on a great deal of weight and was already walking clumsily and inclined to breathlessness.
He was considering this, and trying to equate Mary’s present girth with his earliest memories of her at Periwinkle, when his eye was alerted by a flutter of white seen through the snarl of branches between his stump and the Mere, and on looking more closely was surprised to see Mary sitting about a hundred yards below him on a mossy log, opposite the islet. He was not a person to contain curiosity and hitching his gear he drifted down the slope to ask her why she was there but he must have moved more silently than he intended, for when he emerged from the trees she gave a gasp and crammed the pages she was reading into her handbag. He was puzzled by the implied guilt of her action and wondered what it could be that she was reading, and then he remembered that a fat letter with an American stamp had been lying by her plate at breakfast and that she had made a poor pretence at ignoring it until everybody had finished eating and had then slipped away, taking the unopened letter with her. He noticed something else about her that puzzled him. Her eyes glittered as though she had been crying and it occurred to him that the letter must be from Rumble Patrick and contained bad news of one kind or another. He said, with the terrible candour of youth, ‘Who’s dead? It isn’t Rumble is it?’
She stared at him with her mouth slightly open as though he had said something bad like the word ‘bugger’ that had earned him a clout on the ear at Easter. Then, while he waited, she did her best to look ordinary again and he reminded himself that she was the quickest person he knew to turn pink and lose control of a situation. She said, with a laughable attempt at severity ‘Of course he isn’t dead! This letter’s from him. What on earth makes you say a terrible thing like that?’
‘You were blubbing,’ he said, calmly, ‘but I’m jolly glad Rumble is okay. It’s funny him not being here this hols. It’s not the same, somehow. I passed Periwinkle on the way down from the moor. It looks like a big bonfire. After it’s out I mean.’
He waited, hoping she would tell him about the letter but instead she did something that would have irritated him very much had she been anyone but Mary, who was born that way and couldn’t help herself he supposed. She shot out her arms and embraced him, pressing him hard against her fat stomach, so that he suddenly remembered what had made him interrupt his rounds and approach her. He said as she released him, ‘What’s up, then? Is it because you’re getting fat?’
He was accustomed to adults reacting to perfectly reasonable questions with gusts of laughter or superior smiles but in her present mood her laughter surprised him. She said, struggling to contain it, ‘No, no, John I wasn’t crying about getting fat. I’m glad I’m getting fat. The fatter, the better,’ and then she stopped, wondering if she had gone too far. Their relationship, eased by Rumble, had always been an undemanding one but she shared her mother’s uncertainty about him. Sometimes it seemed to her he had never been a baby at all but had come into the world as a precocious eight-year-old whom it was impossible to treat as a child. At first she was inclined to change the subject but suddenly, deciding that she badly needed a confidant, she said:
‘I was crying because I miss Rumble even more than you do and this is to say he won’t be home for longer than we thought. He’s going through the Panama Canal and then right across the Pacific.’
Digesting this news, and promising himself that he would look at a map as soon as he got home, John returned to the more pressing topic, ‘Why are you glad you’re getting fat?’
She said, ‘Because I’m going to have a baby. That’s what’s making me fat and I like babies. It’ll be someone for Jerry to play with and anyway, as soon as he arrives I’ll be thin again.’ He said nothing so she went on. ‘You knew babies came from their mothers, didn’t you? The same as cows and horses?’
One of the endearing things about John Craddock was his meticulous regard for the truth. He said, ‘No, not really. I knew of animals, of course. I saw one of Francis Willoughby’s Red Demons calve—that time they had to kill the cow with the humane killer.’ His tone told her that he was concerned for her survival so she said gaily, ‘Well, they’re not likely to use the humane killer on me so don’t give it another thought.’
‘Why didn’t you read the letter at breakfast?’
‘Because I didn’t want to cry in front of everybody.’
‘But how did you know you would if you hadn’t read it?
‘Because I always do, I can’t help it, it’s just that I was born beside a waterworks—no, that’s a joke—what I mean is, some people can control themselves and some can’t. Just seeing Rumble’s handwriting makes me start to snivel and I can’t do a thing about it but you don’t have to tell anyone up at the house you caught me at it.’
‘All right, I won’t,’ he said, ‘but will you tell me something else about babies?’
She looked at him apprehensively and then smiled. More than ever he looked like a gnome, one of those wise, amiable gnomes who entertained Snow White in their house in the woods. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Can people who aren’t married have them?’
She considered, reflecting that she might have anticipated this and said, at length, ‘Yes, they can, but it’s silly of them because a baby has to have a father as well as a mother. Usually it’s the father who earns the money that keeps all three and if a woman isn’t married she’s often in a fix.’ She wondered whether to leave it at that. He seemed satisfied but his honesty was infectious, so she went on, after a pause, ‘People fall in love and usually a baby arrives soon after that. Not always, of course, but as a rule. A baby isn’t just something the mother produces. It’s part of the father too and e
ven with people who aren’t married there has to be a father. It’s like …’
‘Like the bull?’
‘Yes,’ she said gratefully, ‘like the bull.’
‘And Rumble Patrick is your bull?’
He paused, as always resenting adult laughter, although Mary’s was moderate. ‘What’s funny about that?’
‘Nothing,’ she assured him, straightening her face, and for some reason feeling relieved at his innocence, ‘nothing at all. It was just an odd way of saying it. People are a bit different from animals and bulls don’t love the cows, or not a particular cow. But men and women, Rumble and me for instance, happen to love one another, so it isn’t in the least surprising that I’m having a baby and getting fat.’
He intended asking her how this had been achieved in Rumble’s absence but suddenly he understood that she had been making a considerable effort and decided that it would be unsporting to press her unduly, especially as she had been more patient with his line of questioning than his mother, the day he came home and sought further information concerning Francis Willoughby’s cow. He said, rising from the log, ‘Do you want me to go now?’
He was, she told herself, a very penetrating person and suddenly she felt closer to him than to anyone since Rumble had left the Valley.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s nearly lunchtime. Let’s go home together and you can show me where you found that spotted orchis you were talking about the other day.’
Wild flowers was an interest they shared and in the climb through the open part of the wood he seemed to dismiss the subject of babies and their relation to her swelling figure, but when they had found the patch of orchis, and reached the gate that led through the long orchard to the stableyard, he said suddenly, ‘Will it be another boy?’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 14
