The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Andy said, ‘Are you a Bolshie, Ken?’ and Shawcrosse had laughed. ‘I’m anything, old boy, anything that pays off in cash.’

  His attitude, in those early months of their association, was patronising but Andy gave him his head. He knew nothing of bricks and mortar, whereas Shawcrosse, reared in the world of small, readily-saleable property that was constantly changing hands, had familiarised himself with present conditions by a close study of local newspapers, sent to him during his long spell in hospital. His familiarity with requisitioning, building licences, green belts, town planning and local government procedures impressed Andy from the outset, and so did the man’s instinctive grasp of the essentials of any given situation requiring an indirect approach. He was like an ambitious ex-ranker sent by superiors to invest a small fortress, and would begin by considering the various merits of taking it by assault, resorting to the less costly method of sapping and mining, or solving the problem by bribing the garrison to open the gate at night. In every area they visited he seemed to know by instinct which method to adopt and the result was always the same, so that Romulus Development Incorporated soon found itself holding a mixed bag of assets, all the way down from a half-blitzed factory and accommodation land on the outskirts of market towns, to condemned workmen’s cottages in built-up areas that had been falling down years before the Luftwaffe hastened the process.

  There was an enormous amount of travelling and paper work to be done and all manner of calls upon people who, at first sight, seemed to have no place in a deal but whose goodwill was seen to be essential as time went on. Andy, driving to and fro along the South Coast (an area favoured by Shawcrosse as offering the best post-war promise), met jobbing builders, city aldermen, town councillors, local government officers, country squires who reminded him of his father, farmers, rack renters, people who could speak hardly any English but owned sizeable chunks of England, and any number of Smiths and Browns guessing at the amount of compensation they would collect for a blitzed or derequisitioned premises. It was a strange, higgledy-piggledy world, in its own way as bizarre as Zorndorff’s world of scrap, but Andy found it just as absorbing and sometimes exhilarating although, as he put it to Shawcrosse when they were prospecting a row of terrace houses half-demolished by a flying-bomb, they seemed to be staking a great deal of capital on an anticipated post-war rise in the price of site-values and the lifting of restrictive legislation regarding new building and renovation.

  Shawcrosse, as always, had the answer. ‘The point is, old boy, restrictions won’t be lifted for a long time but the man who holds the site holds the four-ace hand, even if he has to play a waiting game. I’m banking on most of these requisitioned premises staying requisitioned on wartime rents, so if you’re looking for a quick turnover on the lines of pre-war scrap deals, stop looking. This is long-term investment—maybe as long as ten years—but in the end it won’t be a matter of twelve to fifteen per cent profit. It’ll be nearer a thousand per cent. I only hope to God the Reds do win the next election and keep their bloody regulations clamped on for years. That’ll leave us sitting very pretty.’

  Andy, conditioned to a quick turnover, was not wholly convinced. ‘Suppose we end up holding a hundred thousand pounds-worth of sites and then run out of capital? I’ve already sunk all I’ve got into the Company.’

  Shawcrosse said, ‘Go easy, old boy. Do you suppose I hadn’t worked that one out? We now hold round about sixty sites, plus the same number of houses capable of being patched up for the defenders of Democracy when they roll up in their civvy suits. The Government has to release a proportion of buildings and those who are too skint to pay our price will have to rent furnished. We haven’t got any furnished? That’s our next priority—round the auction room for the necessary. A couple of dozen rented houses in the right places—and I’ve made bloody sure ours are in the right places—will keep the old pot on the boil while things sort themselves out. If we need more cash there are always ways and means of getting the odd house derequisitioned. Fifty quid invested in palm-oil will take care of that, old boy.’

  Andy’s movements were as rapid and uncertain as in the heyday of the scrap empire. This was why Paul’s V.J. letter took more than a week to catch up with him.

  Andy pondered it a long time before passing it over to Ken, who was elated by its content. ‘So the old Dad has finally come round to it? He’s handing over in advance, in the hope of doing the poor old Chancellor out of his death duties! Well, good for him and good for you. Cash is nice to have but give me coastal land every time. It can’t be pinched and it can’t shrink in value like the poor old British quid. Nice little reserve, tucked away in the West.’

  ‘Too far West for your vacuum-cleaner,’ Andy said, but Shawcrosse made the fashionable deprecating gesture, shaking his head slowly to and fro and spreading his palms, Shylockwise. He was almost too quick, Andy noticed, to adapt to the current slang and tricks of expression.

  ‘Don’t believe it, old boy! With every twopenny-ha’penny clerk and plumber’s mate owning a car it’s not as far West as all that. Hang on to it, and see if you can’t make it grow a bit if one of your brothers or sisters need a bit of the ready. We might even be able to use a slice like that Valley but not yet. Right now we stick to bricks and mortar within a bicycle ride of the nearest factory.’

  They plunged back into the mainstream of their activities. With the war in the East over, and everyone speculating on the long-term effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their instincts warned them that they were only one jump ahead of the nearest pursuers.

  IV

  Paul’s V.J. letter (that was how it was always referred to in after years), telling each of his children that he was ready to bet the Treasury he would attain the age of seventy-one, was the product of hard thinking set in train by his visit to French Wood just as dusk was falling on the Valley’s celebration of victory in Europe. It was a good deal more comprehensive than the straight deed-of-gift suggested to him long ago by that sharp-nosed old pedant, Edgar Wonnacott, who had taken over his legal chores after the death of Franz Zorndorff, his father’s partner in the original Thameside scrapyard.

  Paul had kept clear of lawyers most of his life, disliking their bloodless approach to all human affairs. Up to the day of his death old Franz had kept a fatherly eye on the Valley’s finances and on such capital as Paul did not plough back into the estate. Franz had sometimes given him good advice and had he followed it he could, at several turning points in his life, have reaped considerable financial advantage, but just as he edged away from lawyers he distrusted financiers and what he thought of as their whorehouse, the Stock Market. Indeed, in that respect his views approximated those of a Bolshevik.

  He owned very few shares and had never, in the whole of his life, played the market, or spent five minutes studying The Financial Times, but his overall attitude towards money and moneymaking could not have been described as Puritanical, for most Puritans feel very much at home in the countinghouse. It was, perhaps, a recoil from the original source of his acres, as though he could never quite remove the stain of the original fortune amassed by his father and that old rascal Zorndorff during the Boer War. He had always been conscious of having profited by the death of Boer children in the insanitary concentration camps on the Veldt, and the murder of his own generation in Flanders. This was why, on his return to the Valley in the autumn of 1918, one of his first acts had been to channel the whole of his wartime profits into the Valley and see most of it melt away in the agricultural slump of the ’twenties and early ’thirties.

  Zorndorff had told him then that he was behaving like an idiot, that his few thousands was the equivalent of feeding one oat to a donkey, but he had persisted and Claire had encouraged him to persist. It might not be businesslike, she told Zorndorff and her cynical sons, but it was Paul Craddock, and she would have no part in persuading him to act against his instincts.

  He was to suffer for his principle or,
as some would say, his obstinacy, for as soon as agriculture began to pick up again taxation kept pace with its progress. By the end of World War II it was galloping well ahead, so that Paul often found himself in the position of a man of affluence who could find no-one to change a five pound note. The Whinmouth bank manager, who knew him well, never pressed for a reduction of his periodical overdrafts and when what seemed to Paul staggering amounts were demanded by the Inland Revenue, cheerfully advanced him mortgages and other credits. When the war was virtually over, however, Paul realised that it was imperative to retrench and take some kind of action to stop the estate being bled white by the high rates of interest. It was with this in mind that he made an appointment with Edgar Wonnacott on what turned out to be the final day of the war.

  Some time before that, however, he had been thinking in wider terms of a reshuffle of his affairs. He did not feel his age, or anything like his age and put this down to Devon air, plenty of exercise on foot and on horseback, and a life-long limitation of objectives well within his ability to attain. He was, Claire said, very smug about his health and strength and the fact that he never caught cold or took so much as an aspirin. He slept well, did not suffer from rheumatism, ate sparingly and drank whisky when he could get it. He was also a heavy smoker of cigarettes but he had no cough and his wind was remarkable for a man of his age. He could still climb the Hermitage plateau or the Bluff in long, raking strides without much more than a grunt when he reached the summit. And yet, taken all round, he had lived a rough life and had been knocked about more than most men of his generation. He still limped slightly from the effects of a Mauser bullet in his kneecap, and twice since the Boer marksman had shot him down he had been seriously injured, once during the rescue of German sailors in Tamer Potter’s Cove, in 1906, and again twelve years later during the final German offensive. Now, when the wind was in the east, his old wounds ached a little but it was not battles of long ago that reminded him it was time to get his affairs in order. It had much more to do with an acknowledgment of what he felt he owed the generation that had grown up between the wars. They had, he would say, given a damned good account of themselves. But for the energy and adaptability of people like Stevie and Andy (whom he had once thought of as near-decadent), and misfits like Simon, or scamps like Bon-Bon Potter and his cousin Dick, the Nazis would have got ashore and fought their way across his Valley. It was time, Paul thought, as he sat on the ridge of French Wood on V.E. night, that somebody faced up to this and it might as well be the landlord.

  Below him, as the blue dusk stole in from the dunes, bonfires twinkled in a wide semi-circle, one big one at the R.M. Camp, smaller ones at Nun’s Head and Four Winds, another on Coombe beach and the one he had just left in the High Street. The night was mild but damp, and the scent, carried on the light breeze, was the smell of spring. From where he sat he could see the first drifts of bluebells in Hermitage larch coppice and the last of the primroses grew at his feet. On this plateau he could almost place the week of the year without reference to calendar or diary. Long ago he had memorised the sights, sounds and scents of successive seasons. In the spring the leaves were slippery underfoot, and in the autumn they whispered like children hushed by authority. The note of a snapping twig would tell him whether or not it held sap and he knew all the wild flowers and birds and small creatures who could be found here at different times of the year. He recognised too the sky signs over the Bluff where he could read the weather in cloud formation or degree of visibility. He thought, drawing on his cigarette, and welcoming the solitude of the wood, ‘I wonder who will take my place here in ten to fifteen years? The time will come when I can’t even ride up here, when I turn my back on it for the last time and go home to die.’ Claire might outlive me by a few years but she wouldn’t have to come this far to remember me. She could do that down by the Mere where she made her first clumsy attempt to catch me, or before the library fire, where we have spent so many pleasant, humdrum evenings. No, this place has always been more mine than anywhere else in the Valley and if I had any say in it I should like to die here as old Meg Potter died on the sandhills above Crabpot Willie’s shanty.’

  The thought of the shanty redirected his thoughts to his wife and he remembered her very vividly as she had appeared to him one autumn evening there during a 1917 leave, a few days they had salvaged from that grim time and presented to one another as one might exchange simple, inexpensive gifts. He remembered how breathtakingly beautiful she had seemed to him standing naked in front of the fire, with the soft light of burning apple-logs reflected on her firm white flesh and unpinned hair, and shadows chasing one another the length of her rounded thighs and long, dimpled back.

  The memory stirred nothing but silent laughter in him now, laughter and with it a flicker of complacency that their delight in one another had produced three sons and three daughters, to add to the one poor Grace had given him with so much pain as long ago as 1904. The date reminded him of Simon’s age and for a moment he thought of his children in two groups, five living and two dead. Then, detaching little Claire, Stevie, and the family postscript, John, he concentrated on the four who had weathered out this war and would now, he supposed, begin to think of settling down, as he had settled long before he was their age. Surely he owed it to them to offer some kind of inducement to do this, to put down roots and give those roots a chance to take hold of something, in the way every commemorative tree in this copse had rooted itself.

  There was old Simon, the brainiest of them but still undecided what to do with his life. There was Andy, with his permanently gloved hand and that dead strip of face. There was Mary and her Rumble Patrick, who would welcome any land coming his way. And there was the indifferent Whiz and her husband Ian, neither of whom he had seen for nearly six years. Whatever settlement was made would have to be an equal division among them. He had seen too many family quarrels begin in the Valley over a father’s preference for one child or another, even when one member of the family deserved a larger slice of the cake. He could form some kind of company, he supposed, with four equal shares and himself as permanent Chairman but how could this be achieved without breaking up the estate into small, uneconomical units? Nothing would induce Simon or Andy or Ian to farm, although one or other of them might like to own a house and a plot of land in the Valley. Young John’s patrimony could stay in pickle until he was twenty-one and that was still a decade away. Rumble Patrick might be persuaded through Mary to accept the vacant Home Farm as a gift, abandon the shattered Periwinkle, and join the two holdings in a single unit. As to Simon, his wife Evie, Andy, his wife Margaret, and Whiz and Ian, he couldn’t be sure. They had earned something and one way or another they were going to get it without waiting for him to die. It was a problem to be put to Wonnacott as soon as possible. With this resolve he got up, carefully extinguished the butt of his cigarette, and stumped off down the winding track to the river road.

  When he reached Codsall Bridge he noticed the stars, thrown across the arc of the sky like jewels scattered by a fugitive thief. He thought, as the damp of the river bottom probed his Boer wound, ‘I’d better ring Wonnacott and fix something up this week. That damned bullet nearly put paid to me before I set foot in this place, and Fritz’s lump of shrapnel came even closer in 1918. I’m a good deal fitter than most men over the hill but let’s face it—I’ve been luckier, and luck can run out, just as Stevie’s did.’ An owl who lived in the elms at the corner of the park wall hooted as though confirming this possibility and Paul smiled into the gathering darkness, cupping his hands, blowing into the cavity, and giving such an accurate imitation of the hoot that the owl was mute with astonishment. By the time he had found his voice again Paul had turned in at the lodge and was half-way up the drive.

  V

  For once Edgar Wonnacott paid him a grudging compliment, expressing surprise that Paul had at last turned his mind to a possibility that most business men begin to consider on reaching the age of forty. Paul, not
to be bullied by the old badger, said, ‘Damn it, Edgar, I’ve made my will, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes and it’s years out of date,’ said the lawyer, with one of his sour smiles. ‘I turned it out the day you phoned and your youngest child isn’t even mentioned in it. If you are set on this Deed of Gift—which I’m not against mind you, for it’s some kind of protection against penal death-duties—you’ll have to scrap that will and draw up another. Before we go any further, however, can you trust your family?’

  ‘Now what a damned stupid question,’ Paul said. ‘If I couldn’t I shouldn’t be here, should I?’

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ Wonnacott said, ‘it’s something I have to take for granted on occasions such as this, but I always make a point of raising it. You’d be surprised to hear how some sons and daughters react to a covenant of this kind. I’ve known of more than one case where an indulgent parent has voluntarily stripped himself of all he possesses and then been shown the door.’

  ‘I’m not that kind of a fool and I don’t have that kind of family,’ Paul told him. ‘I shall leave the house, grounds and Shallowford Woods in my own name. For the rest I had some idea of splitting it up as regards income yield, but stipulating that it wasn’t to be sold off in my lifetime.’

  ‘You can’t give something away and then lay down all kinds of conditions as to what the owner does with it,’ Wonnacott told him. ‘You could, however, make it over to a company, keep some of the shares yourself, and distribute the rest equally among your sons and daughters. It would have to have a secretary, of course, and would have to be registered in the proper way.’