Indian Summer Notebook

by Henry Williamson

  ‘We shall require all the grassland of the hills.’

  ‘What, all the twenty acres of the Home Hills? Will you enter the woods?’

  ‘No, we shall not go into the woods at all. You really need not worry. We have never had a complaint yet.’

  ‘My bull, cows and sheep are already on the twenty acres of grass, the only dry pasture we have. My meadows are flooded, and not only will the grass be trodden into the mud if my stock is put on the meadows, but the ewes’ feet will rot and many will die. Your men have left some of our gates open already. If anything happens to the bull or other stock, it will be a serious matter, for which I am legally responsible.’

  ‘Well, we’ve never had a complaint yet,’ repeated the major shortly. I avoided looking at his florid, fleshly face. He looked as though he ate a lot of meat. The lack of medal ribbons was puzzling: surely he could not be younger than myself? But wasn’t I looking at this man through the eyes of myself as a soldier a quarter of a century ago? Perhaps he was my junior in years. Heavens, did I look older than that corpulent, that decadent body? What a weary bore I must seem to these two, who probably thought of me as a wretched little farmer concerned with getting all the profit he could out of the war, and now was obstructing troops in their training.

  ‘Well, you see,’ I went on, half apologetically, ‘I regard my farm as a unit in the home front, to be maintained in full efficiency for the service of the nation, and I assure you that my stock must go on the grass of the hills. Can’t you possibly go to your proper camping site which was allocated to you? The adjutant of the Practice Camp told me you were supposed to go on the Sheep Walk.’

  The major looked at the captain again.

  ‘We will put sentries on the gates at night,’ said the captain. ‘I think you will find things will be all right.’

  ‘We’ve never had a complaint so far,’ repeated the major, patiently, smoothly.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, after a pause. ‘Can I offer you some beer?’ They thanked me, but no, they must get back, thanks all the same. I hoped it would not be too bad; and that I had not made myself appear too meticulous. Then, after a hasty meal of bread and cheese and pickled onions, I hurried back to help with the loading of the sugar-beet. It was wet weather, and the beet were thick with mud. Time was precious, time was alarming; soon the frosts might come, and if we did not hurry, the beet might rot in the field. Then there was the ploughing to be done, also before the frost. I hurried up by the Gulley, making myself not look at all the lorries standing on the grass.

  Our first sugar-beet returns had shown a 17.3 per cent sugar content; this was for the crop off the Hilly Piece hollow, a poor piece of land when I had come to the farm: since when it had been mucked, dispread with compost, trodden by sheep on roots, marled and ploughed twelve inches deep. We got thirty-six tons of beet off it, and thus paid for all the work in the hollow, as well as making it good for several years.

  The next day the rain stopped the sugar-beet lifting. It was heavy rain. We dressed barley in the big barn, putting it through an ancient winnowing dresser I had bought for fourteen shillings just before the war. I dressed the barley for two reasons: to give the men wet-weather work, and to assure myself that the barley was as good as, or better than, the samples by which I had already sold it. Jimmy had put the sheep-folds on the beet-tops, ready for the ewes to go on when the shiny green leaves of the struck-off crowns were wilted. If the ‘tops’ were fed fresh to sheep, they scoured badly: there was a near-poison in the fresh leaves. Jimmy begged me not to run the ewes on the Home Hills, where now thirty or forty brown-and-black tents and marquees were set up, with half a hundred great six-wheeled lorries drawing Bofors guns. These were parked under the trees. Our new roads were already churned up, and gateposts had been smashed. I had asked the commanding officer not to use the lower road – thus avoiding the Gulley – but to enter and go out by the top road, which was already spoiled by the lorries of the permanent searchlight camp on Twenty-One Acres. He said he would do all he could to help me, but all his help was nil, for the lorries used the lower road, coming down off the grass which they had deeply rutted and churned, bringing soil on the tyre-patterns to the road, and adding to the liquid mud already lying in the pot-holes they had torn. Rain fell every day; and soon the roads were worse than they had been the first winter I had viewed the derelict farm, before the war. I asked for an order limiting the speed of the monsters to 5 m.p.h., but they roared to and fro as before. The loamy gravel we had dug and spread so laboriously four years before – nearly a thousand tons of it in under two months – was scattered; the grass was churned to blackness; branches of trees everywhere torn down; doors lifted off iron hooks from stable and granary, to be used as washing perches beside the river; the tool kit of the Silver Eagle, which stood in a bay of the hovel, stolen, with a new alarm clock for which I had waited ten months, together with a pair of shoes left in the back under the tonneau cover. Sacks went from the barn, and other tools from the workshop were missing.

  Jimmy said the ewes would take fright easily, and slip their embryonic lambs, if something were not done. We were compelled to have them lie on the paddock, which was swampy. Many were limping; we had pared their feet, treated the rot with ointment, but the wet was fatal. Tom the Aberdeen-Angus bull and his cows had to remain on the Home Meadow, although it should have been closed to all stock now, since it was under water. What had been a green and level sward was now a mess of deep watery hoof-holes. And still no requisition order had been served upon me.

  On the last day of October I helped to sack up, in the corn barn, one hundred and six coombe of our Hilly Piece barley, and then we began to lift the two-hundred-weight sacks onto lorries taking the load to Whelk Station. The next day I stayed in bed, watching the rain flawing the window-panes; I felt giddy and cold, despite the electric fire; but work had to be done, so I got up in the afternoon and went to Whelk Station to collect sacks for the next day’s wet-weather sacking-up of the next lot of barley. Without sacks there could be no sacking-up, no wet-weather work for the men. When I came back I heard that the owner of the Old Castle – who had come to the village the same year as ourselves and had spent four thousand pounds on putting the Elizabethan house in order – had fallen at the top of his drive, as he was going for a walk. He was dead when they picked him up. He was a kind, gentle, aloof man, seeming always so tired and lonely. He had come to the little valley to find peace; and now, surely, he had found it, I thought, as I lay in bed that evening with a temperature of one hundred and three and a burning throat.

  The early days of November were cold and murky. After two days of fretting in bed, I got up and walked round the farm, feeling myself to be the ghost of my former living. I hurried past the wretched swedes and mangolds of the Lower Hanger – scarcely bigger than cricket balls – which the men were lifting, to the wheat on the Higher Hanger which looked well up. I was glad I had persisted in my own way and got it in early. Dick and Norman were thatching the meadow-hay stack on the causeway between the Home and the Camping Hill meadows. The bitumenised paper laid on the stack by the cartshed in June was already rotten. So much for the advertisements in the farming journals!

  When I came to the haystack by the Duck Decoy, I saw a wretched sight. Soldiers had clambered upon it, leaving broken depressions in the thatched roof. The heavy rains had drained into the holes made by foot and knee; the stack must either be re-thatched – and we were already far behind with our work – otherwise the rains would rot the heart of it. I found two men sitting there, enjoying the view; two friends, maybe, with boyhood memories of a world which had a horizon for them. I had not the heart to ask them to get down. My throat was still bad, and hurt me to speak and swallow; I hurried on, to look at the bow-backed and limping sheep.

  The roads were chains of lagoons. More gateposts were bashed into and cracked off, to lie splintered or pushed askew. In my low state – actively girding against the war and all that the war was, both effect and cau
se, in the human beings about me – the condition of the farm seemed to be symbolic of the condition of urbanised mankind. The ruined roads, costing so much in ceaseless work in the past, were a symbol of the vanity of hope and constructive endeavour. Was it for this – to be arrested and imprisoned without charge or trial, as a suspected traitor – that one had gone through the Somme and Passchendaele? For this, that one had striven to clarify the mind, to see, and then to tell in words, the truth? Life without honour was mere existence; it was more honourable to be dead. Cold and hollow, set in a wasting scorn and despair, I returned to bed, but could not rest: I must work: I must write of things I had known before they were lost in death’s dateless night. Reaching for my diary, I found I could only record the bare outline of facts. Nine ewes had died on the swampy paddock in one week. For several days they had been feeding on their knees, to avoid the pain in their fevered feet; they had ceased to feed, had lain down, and died, having lost heart.

  There were no oats for the horses, since the threshing contractor had deliberately broken his word about coming to thresh our only oat-stack, on which we depended for food for all our horned stock and also the ewes near lambing time. The oat-stack was built beside the Duck Decoy, and the way to it was now impassable, being low-lying and soggy. The horses were doing heavy work, carting the sugar-beet off Fourteen Acres. Even if the threshing tackle arrived, it would find the approach to the oat-stack impassable, with its fifteen-ton engine, until March or April. And oats were not to be bought during that winter of dearth and food shortage.

  One morning as I watched over thin beasts moodily eating chaffed barley straw and sugar-beet pulp, Robert, my small son, approached with a sidebag of breakfast for me, and with the mail. There was a letter from the District Claims Office, which I read as I swallowed a toast-and-bacon sandwich.

  ‘With reference to your telephone call of yesterday, I have been in touch with the Sub-Area Quartering Commandant and he was unaware that any part of your farm was in use by Military Personnel and steps are being taken immediately to enquire into the circumstances of this occupation, and to regularise the matter by formal requisition if he is satisfied the occupation warrants such action.’

  Perhaps, I thought, the enquiry might result in the farm being taken over as a permanent practice area. Some of the big lorries had got as far as the Hanger yard; over the layer of Hilly Piece; on Spong Breck: despite the aldermanic major’s assurance that only the hilly grassland would be occupied.

  I had to return to bed, as my temperature rose again; I had what was called a septic throat, and would not see a doctor. My son was most patient with me at this time, a boy of fifteen standing silent and unresponsive at the bottom of the bed. I told him I did not mind what he did, if he would always come to me straightly, and report any accident or error, without untruth: that it was a rare thing among men first to be able to see the truth, and then to learn how to utter or tell it. I know it was a sign of ineffectuality in myself as a parent to talk like that; but only words seemed left to my life.

  I read in the newspaper that Lt.-Col. Sir Arnold Wilson, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.P., who before the war had striven for clarity between Germany and Britain and Italy, and thereby had been much criticised by his inferiors, had, when the war had broken out, joined the R.A.F., qualified as a rear-gunner in a bomber and had fallen in flames in the summer of 1940, aged fifty-six. In the mood of frustration that bound my life at this period, it seemed more and more true that honour existed only among the dead and those about to die, and in those in prison without trial.

  A letter the next day from the merchants who bought the one hundred and six coombe of barley said it arrived at their maltster’s wet, and they asked me to say that it was in good condition before leaving the farm. I was happy to reply that it had left in first-class condition.

  I was out and about, hesitantly, on Thursday the 22nd November, and on Saturday I went to Norwich market. There I learned that barley, the one cereal that was not controlled, was now 84s. a coombe for fine; 75s. for medium; 70s. for common or tail. I had bought my next year’s seed at the end of October for 70s., once-grown pedigree Archer-Spratt, and wondered immediately afterwards if I had been silly; but I had an idea that the price would go up, and had acted on it, though somewhat trepidantly. When I had seen an acquaintance a few minutes later, at another stand, and had asked him if it were advisable to buy seed then, he had replied that he wouldn’t; that the price then ruling would not last, when more barley came into the market. He was a member of a famous local firm of barley merchants. Perhaps it was policy to say this, lest farmers held back their grain for the price to rise, as now it had risen.

  I went to London, for a change, and stayed a night at the Barbarian Club, or what was left of it after the blitz. The Club was very short of staff, also of food. An old fellow with a purple face in the bar and without the slightest provocation from me, shook his fist in my face, spluttered about his grandsons at Dunkirk, and said I ought to be in prison. I returned from London, feeling the usual negation which began at Liverpool Street, and increased all the way through the massed and bomb-broken houses of the East End to Whelk-next-the-Sea, where I alighted in darkness, and void of personality. Gradually the farmhouse parlour, with its whitewashed walls, chestnut beam across the ceiling where horse brasses and pewter mugs hung, its walnut cupboard and gate-leg table, armchairs and rush-mats on the red tiled floor and tea laid on the long polished refectory table, ruddy fire of bull-thorns in the open hearth, all the children to greet me, a tidy and nice room, and Loetitia always kind and ready to smile, annulled much of the negation of the world, wherein Britain seemed to be dying. I was told that the troops had left the farm, and the District Claims Office had rung up, with a view to coming out from Norwich to see me shortly, by appointment.

  II

  Before the visit of the Claims Officer, I went round with a notebook to write down the details of my claim. The lower road was still a chain of muddy lagoons. The granary door had floated down the river. The horse-trough was full of soapy water. Many more gateposts were smashed. The Gulley road was impassable, being a foot deep in mud. The sand pit, whence the best sand in the district for building was sometimes taken, was filled in; underneath lay broken bottles and tins and garbage. The undergrowth in the woods was trodden, branches of trees had been torn and chopped off for firewood. Apparently soldiers of the modern army disliked to use latrines as much as they did in my war; when on the Somme battlefield every shell-crater in summer had its little relic of private meditation. The woods were foul to walk in. The wire fences were trodden down. Hen houses had been smashed for firing. Altogether fourteen ewes had died in the swampy paddock. Nearly all the hens had disappeared. Scores of small iron screw-pickets, used for tents, remained in the grass at the wood’s edge. Obviously no officer had been detailed to look round before departure. Windles said he had seen soldiers in the workshop, handling my tools. Bits of paper and empty tins lay everywhere on the hills. Sacks had been taken, and straw. The commanding officer had left with his illusions unshattered – there had been no complaints.

  A subaltern of the Claims Department came out by car, to look around with me. He was an affable fellow. In the back of the camouflaged military car lay a .410 gun. He asked me who had the shooting. I said I had the shooting. With a laugh, he left the .410 gun in the back of the car.

  ‘This is too much for me to deal with,’ he said, when we had gone round. ‘I think I’ll tell the Big Chief.’

  The Big Chief came three days later, by appointment. My throat was bad again, and I got out of bed, with deep reluctance, ten minutes before he was due to arrive. The Big Chief certainly was a big man, as size went. As he walked in a stately manner up the pavor’d path, I saw, through the lattice window, that he was tall, and in a manner impressive, with red face, supercilious expression, distant eyes, and long nose. I opened the door for him, and said How do you do; he came in, bending under the arch, and without any reply put his hat and leather-cover
ed cane on the table. He wore the ribbons of two coronations and his highly-polished field-boots and cane and uniform all looked to be from the last war; or maybe from Moss Bros. Slowly he removed his dogskin gloves, tossing them negligently into his hat on the table. I almost expected him to start whistling, for his mode or manner was reminiscent of a Jewish-Australian comedian called Albert Whelan whom I had seen as a boy, a comedian who always appeared in evening clothes and top-hat, and whistling melodiously. But instead of a liquid whistle, the Big Chief turned abruptly to me and said curtly, ‘Now for your case! Have you a claim made out?’

  ‘No, I haven’t made one yet.’

  ‘Then you make no claim?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Of course I do.’

  ‘For what amount?’

  ‘I hardly know. I – ’

  ‘Now I’ve looked round the roads. The material, I cannot call it metalling, appears to be unsuitable for traffic, your own included.’ He looked at me accusingly.

  ‘It was the best we could get in 1937, when we made up all the roads which are now ruined.’

  ‘You talk of ruined roads, but let me tell you this, if Hitler came wouldn’t he do a great deal more damage, and what sort of claim would he consider from you? And after all, these fellows are defending your life for you, you know! And here’s another point: under Defence Regulation Fifty-two, the competent military authority, any troops, that is, can enter any land or building at any time, and you have no power to stop them. Therefore your point about the absence of a requisition order, made in your letter to my office, does not arise. Have you anything to say?’

  The feeling of being hopelessly in the wrong about everything came over me: I could say nothing.

  ‘Now we’ll look round together,’ he went on, in a changed tone of voice, with a trace of friendliness in it. ‘Of course it looks worse than it really is. When the dry weather comes, you’ll hardly notice the mud. It will turn to dust, and blow away! However, we will certainly allow you something for the pot-holes.’