A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “Well, I appreciate your help, Teddy, but it wasn’t exactly a sentimental arrangement, you know. It was a trial partnership, made at your request. Anyway, let’s go over the farm tomorrow. I must look at the Nightcraft wheat. Luke prophesied that, as the field was set out—or marked out for ploughing—on a Sunday, no good would come of it. The strange thing is, the wheat does look pretty poorly.”

  In the morning they walked up the gulley to see the wheat. The yellowish-green points looked bleak and sickly. There was a partial mid-day thaw; the going was heavy with a top crust of half-frozen sticky soil which lifted off with their footsteps, clogging their boots every few steps. Some of the wheat plants came away in the crust. They were half-rotten at the base. It seemed to Phillip that the plants were dead. Other fields, he had noticed when passing, had more developed plants; or, the seed sown deeper, the plants had not yet appeared above the ground. His plants, caught very young by the chilly rains, were delayed in growth, and later had been blasted by the frost-winds sweeping over the bare field.

  “Doesn’t look too good, Teddy. In fact, it may be a failure.”

  Teddy offered Phillip a cigarette. “About ‘Yipps’, you see, she had a bad time when her husband was killed in Kenya, on safari. She’s been more or less like that ever since. I’ve——”

  “That explains the look in her eyes.”

  “No, let me speak,” went on Teddy nervously. “I’ve given her friendship and companionship, and though I say it myself, consideration. In fact, I’ve devoted myself to her in every way, but it all seems to have ended in nothing. I say, just look at those two cock pheasants over there—we ought to have a shoot, you know.’

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking about a shoot. This wheat looks bad, doesn’t it? I think it’s done for.”

  “What will you do about it, if it is?”

  “Well, wait and see how it looks in March, and then drill spring oats over it. We’ll lose, then, only the cost of seed, drilling, and harrowing. This coastal air is raw, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve said it. I think I’ll go back. How about coming down to get a duck? I saw some flighting over the dykes the other evening. You don’t mind me going, do you?”

  “Gun-shots make the pheasants leave the coverts, you know. They run over the boundaries.”

  “I suppose,” said Teddy, smiling to conceal a suggestion of timidity, “I ought really to have asked your permission first, when I went out with my gun? But there seemed such a lot of birds about, and it was a pity to waste them.”

  “Yes, I know how you must have felt. But, as a matter of shooting technique in this locality, as I’ve said, I’m told it’s considered a wise thing to leave the woods quiet until the day of the proper shoot. One shot will upset the birds. They’re very wild and shy, and any disturbance will send them running away. They probably go over the boundaries anyway. Billy told me he saw one of my neighbours’ keepers, the other day, scattering tail-corn all along the boundary hedges. So perhaps it would be better if, for the time being, you went only after the duck on the marshes—they’re free shooting, by the way. Keep away from the meadows, d’you mind, at any rate until after we’ve had our shoot? I do hope you’ll not mind me asking you?”

  “Of course not, old man. I’ll only go on the meadows after dusk. I don’t think that will interfere with the pheasants roosting in the coverts. Well, I’ll be going. By the way, I’m out of cartridges. Can you lend me a box of twenty-five? There’re some in the gun cupboard in the granary, only someone’s taken away the key. I asked Matt where it was, but he said he didn’t know. It used to be on the inside ledge of the broken window. Like an old watchdog, Matt was.”

  “I’ll come down with you and give you a box. Now, I must look over the next field, Pewitts. Oh, while I remember it, you will try and get ‘Yipps’ to let us have the housekeeping accounts, won’t you? They’re overdue now, and I don’t like to owe her money.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask her again. Well, I’ll go home now and get on with the painting of your cottage.”

  “I’ll leave the cartridges on the bench downstairs. No. 4 shot? They’re best for duck.”

  “Thanks. Well, see you later.”

  When Phillip got to Pewitts to see how the sugar beet was going, Luke was about to return to the stables with the horses.

  “You’ve got a good crop up on that field,” he said. “Fourteen ton an acre, maybe fifteen, I reckon. We’ve got only about two acres left to clear. The ground is sumpy, but we won’t be in no muddle. Good thing I ploughed the beet out when I did, else the roots would be fast in the ground. The thick tops will protect it, though it’s the frost-winds I’m afeared of most. Blast, the horses feel the pull across the field. But ’twill rain tonight, there’s a change coming. Yew’ll see I’m right. If it dries later and we don’t get no frost, we ought to get the beet off by Christmas. Father says the tarkies aren’t doing. That new man, what’s he called, Mr. Vinegar or suthin’, sometimes forgets to feed them. It worries Father. They’re not doing—they’re shrinking, Father says.”

  “But Mr. Pinnegar’s in charge, Luke. That’s the arrangement. He used to be a business-man—he built up his own business.”

  “I don’t know about that,” replied Luke, “but when yew come to sell your tarkies yew’ll know about business or no business. They won’t be so fat as the bards—or the wild ducks,” he added significantly.

  Chapter 6

  BLACK VELVET

  The first scare of war, immediate and devastating bombing of London, was over. The features editor of The Daily Crusader wrote to Phillip, suggesting an article on the lines of Farmers being in the Front Line of Defence. So he went to London to call on Chettwood. Arriving in daylight, he saw barrage balloons floating at their cables over the mirk of the city. Having parked the Silver Eagle outside his club, under the plane tree where often it had stood before, he walked down The Mall to Charing Cross and so to Fleet Street.

  “Well,” said John Chettwood, in his glass-walled office, “how nice to see you, Varmer. How wise you were to get in on the ground floor. First things first. What are you doing tonight? Will you dine with me?”

  Phillip was glad to accept. He had heard little from his friends since the war, and had been prepared to spend the evening by himself, perhaps at the pictures, and so forget himself in visions of beauty and love.

  “A young man came here this morning wanting your address. We didn’t give it, of course. He’s followed what we printed of yours before the war, and wants a job on your farm.”

  “Oh.”

  “I must say he didn’t quite look the Dummerset type, but on the contrary seemed keen and intelligent. I liked what I saw of him—brown face, lean, lithe, recently finished two years at Wye Agricultural College.”

  “Eighty pounds a term fees——”

  “I know what you’re going to say, but I think he may be good. Said he had done a year dairy-farming, and wanted arable farming experience as an ‘improver’. An ‘improver’, I gather, is paid thirty bob a week, and finds his own board and lodging. Anyway, I got his name and address. I told him you were coming, and he said he would telephone you at your club.”

  Chettwood put a memo, before him, with Nugent ffondent-Jones and a Wiltshire address written on it. “If you like him, bring him to dinner tonight. The paper will stand it.”

  Chettwood asked for a number, and spoke briefly in his usual restrained tones before putting down the telephone.

  “Good, that’s fixed. I’d like you to meet the girl I’m going to marry. She shares a studio with another friend of yours, who visited your ‘Bad Lands’ just before the war.”

  Could it be Felicity? “Does this friend of mine’s name begin with an ‘F’?”

  “Most names begin with that,” Chettwood murmured. “No, it’s the one who helped you guard the hybrid roseate tern you wrote about in an article we printed. Melissa Watt-Wilby, your wife’s cousin, isn’t she? She’s staying with Dolly, my girl-friend. Well, there’s t
he editorial conference now. I must go. We’ll meet in the long bar of the Café Royal about half past seven? And bring the young farmer if you think he’ll be amusing.”

  At the Barbarian Club the young man was waiting: alert, bright-eyed, sharp of face, but the sharpness controlled by good humour. He was neatly dressed, and wore a long, serviceable macintosh.

  The hall porter said, “I offered him a drink, but he didn’t want it.”

  Coming forward, the visitor said in a clear and confident voice, “I feel I am imposing on your time, sir. I do hope you will forgive me not writing to you first, but my keenness got the better of me when I heard from Mr. Chettwood that you were in town.”

  Phillip, liking his bird-eyed manner, took him up into the bar, and over pots of beer he and Nugent ffondent-Jones got on better and better.

  According to the young man he was being frustrated on the dairy farm of his pupilage. The farmer there did not wish to improve his methods in accordance with the facts of the Wye Agricultural College.

  “The food for cows, if you will credit it, sir,” he declared, “is not given to each beast on a principle of the more milk she yields, the more food she receives, to the limit of a cow’s digestive tracts, of course. No, sir, the milk of each cow is never weighed. There is no recording. Poor, screwy passengers are fed as much concentrates as the good’ns. In addition, the concentrates are never rationed. My present employer has apparently never heard of the Avoirdupois Scale of Weights. He is a Saxon, sir, you see, and has never properly got used to the system introduced at the time of Domesday. ‘What the hell d’you mean, Avoir dew Poor?’ he enquires, and I try to explain that there are such comparatively recent inventions as weights and measures, and for the past few centuries William the Conqueror’s ‘To Have of the Weight’ has been the standard in this country. He replies that double-handfuls are good enough for his cows, so I can keep my ‘Have of the Weight’.”

  “Sounds like my farm.”

  “Oh, hardly sir. Well, I have continued to plead for recording, for the rationing of concentrates in accordance with milk yields, for Avoirdupois to replace the double-handfuls. In vain I have pointed to the upholstered hatstands that are mere passengers among his cows, giving so little milk that they do not pay for themselves, let alone give the farmer a profit for his work. So I decided to learn the Art and Mystery of Arable Farming with the potentially Keenest Agricultural Mind in England, if I may say so, sir.”

  “If on your present farm you hear Avoirdupois, that ‘theory’ brought over by William the Conqueror, discredited, on my farm you will discover a cowman who not only doesn’t use double-handfuls, but refuses to wash either the cow or himself before milking. As for the milk, most of it at present goes back, several gallons a day, after superficial cream-skimming in the kitchen, to two sows. So if you come you must be prepared to learn nothing except negatively. You will sit at a long oak table with others and eat mallard, teal, and occasionally pheasant. Locally my farm was known as the Bad Lands, now it is renamed the Convalescent Home.”

  “It sounds the very place for entirely new management, sir.”

  “By the way, the features editor you saw asked me to bring you to dinner, if you cared to come, and were free. Perhaps he sees in you a future contributor to his paper, now that Farming is News. We’re to meet at seven-thirty in the long bar of the Café Royal.”

  Shortly afterwards, having swallowed his quart, ffondent-Jones took his departure, and Phillip went into the reading room to try to sleep. His mind remained tense, so he took from the shelves some old and bound volumes of Punch, and looked at the humour and cartoons of the 1914–18 war, which soon wearied him, so he went to see a film, and for a couple of hours lived in semi-darkness and warmth on hope and desire.

  *

  Walking up from The Mall that evening, with an hour to spare, he thought of the poem of D. H. Lawrence, Gentians, as through the soft crepuscular night upon the town shadows strangely silent moved past, while yellow spots of light slowly approached in the blackness, becoming shadows of taxicabs gliding amidst the rippling marionette effect of tiny brighter light-splashes about the feet of those who walked through Pluto’s halls.

  And yet, there was a gentle kind of feeling everywhere, not of death, but of life. It was the slower rhythm that darkness gave to the people. Gone was the garish raucousness of metropolitan night life, together with all striving. People were easier; the strain had gone out of them—at least in the streets.

  The body politic has not yet taken any heavy blows: it does not need to drink or fornicate so heavily, an offset to death, as in my war—it seems to be mine as I wander down the streets, a ghost from ancient Flanders.

  The body politic has not yet been hit savagely about the head, as at Le Cateau and during the long retreat from Mons, when the ‘red little, dead little army’ began to bleed to death; when during First Ypres the hollow look came into the eyes of all infantry soldiers, and through the dead to some of those at home. And now, nearly three months after the country has declared war upon the same nation for the second time in a not very stable lifetime, there is hardly a scratch on the face of England.

  As I wandered down Piccadilly, I thought of the story of my family which I have delayed writing for so many years. I plan to begin with my grandfather Maddison, whose journals I was promised by my father when mother died. There is a direct connection between grandfather William and cousin Willie who was drowned not long after the Armistice. Grandfather prophesied the first war; Willie prophesied the second. Both were virtually offset from their relations; both were untimely; and now only I am left, the trustee of their unwritten lives. I shall reveal the European nerve-rot in the story of one family: in their mental attitudes towards the truth.

  I wandered, strangely secure. Piccadilly was a country lane dotted with curious little flashing will o’ th’ wisps by which we spectres of a vanished world, free of own workaday selves, had entered the blue-black halls of Dis. This was Byron’s London, Keats walked here, and Pepys, in a kindness of life and death.

  There was no jostling: the thrust and hurry of lighted peacetime was gone. The pace was slower, more amiable, easier—one feels it in the quiet voices of the figures passing in the tenebrous night. I was in touch with the secret hopes of their lives. If only I were free to write my novel series now! In the story of my family the two main ideas of growth and rest, of action and reaction, of creation and negation, will be set in conflict, and balanced: for only by restraint and impartiality can transcendental tragedy be written. But my story shall be the triumph of the creative will.

  Always so far in human history the higher vision of life has worn itself out against the mass-resistance and the time-lag of mediocrity; and whenever the visionary has taken to action, he has been left with only the ruins of his system. Had Judas tried to save Jesus by precipitating the revolution before the Roman-Sanhedrin authorities could, by taking Jesus, nip the revolution in the bud? This plan had failed and Judas had committed suicide. My story will reverse that idiom, by the triumph of clarity.

  All things seen about me in London this afternoon and evening were the materialisation of ideas. ‘As man has made good, so man can make better’—the words of Cousin Willie came to me through the seventeen years of his death. One remark I have never forgotten. It was said by Willie during that unforgettable night in the cottage by the Burrows in North Devon. ‘Change thought, and you change the world.’

  That had been the hope and effort of Jesus, who had scarcely used any physical force. Had Jesus lacked the extra strength, yet used the greater wisdom? As for Willie, he had gotten himself an early death; he knew it all before he was twenty-five, and so came to his end; he had not been born with that extra strength, so he had made up for it with extra pity. Strength of action or of pity, both must fail in the end. Who was it who said that so seldom was a great man also a grand man? Was it Goethe? How can one write such a book? When has genius ever converted mediocrity? Or time gone hand-in-hand with
lag? Consider my own story, my own mess. And thinking of the farm, I began to change, to feel that my face was that of a skull. An intense longing for rest in female beauty came over me.

  I turned up Sackville Street, and came to Regent Street and crossed over to the Café Royal. Being a quarter of an hour early, I entered the main room, with its red plush seats and marble-topped tables, and sat down to write in this Journal.

  Now I must finish these notes, it is time to go upstairs.

  Chettwood and ffondent-Jones were seated with Melissa and another girl. Before them on a table were glasses containing a dark, frothy liquid.

  “Hullo,” said Chettwood, rising with the bird-quick youth. “Come and sit down. May I introduce you to Dolly. We’re drinking black velvet, an appropriate tipple, don’t you think?”

  “What a welcome sight your four faces are, to one coming out of a night of Byron’s London. Chettwood is my patron,” he turned to the girl called Dolly. “Before the war he kept nearly half a square mile of land going for two years, by printing my articles.”

  “John and I plan to use your farm as a hide-out when the war really starts.”

  “Will the war really start, d’you think?” he asked Chettwood.

  “Some people think it’s already started.”

  “In Poland, yes. But isn’t that a mere local recovery of lost German territory?” He sat beside Melissa, and took her hand.

  The waiter turned a bottle of champagne in the ice-bucket, and then opened a Guinness. While they were drinking healths Dolly said, “How fortunate you are, to have all those beautiful children.”

  “Yes, they’re a good little covey, all due to their mother.”

  “Melissa told me how you sported together in the sad sea waves. Were you really among the seals and sea-trout, and were they all phosphorescent, like yourselves?” asked Dolly.