The Green Gauntlet

by Delderfield, R. F.

  III

  War, Claire was discovering, was an unreliable catalyst. She remembered the generalisations of 1914, when war had been proclaimed ‘ennobling’ by poets, politicians and journalists, and she remembered how, not long afterwards, these same people had piously denounced war as ‘the final debasement of human currency’. She was not, however, a diligent reader of leading articles, preferring to base her opinions on observation and instinct, and it seemed to her, now that the war was entering its sixth winter, its stresses were responsible for some dramatic changes in the characters of people around her.

  Paul had changed very little but then Paul was Paul, the captive of a single idea and basically more conservative than any of the Tories he had campaigned against in the Liberal heyday. It was otherwise with his sons. If Margaret was to be believed Stevie had developed a new personality when he had switched from fighter-pilot to bomber-pilot whereas his twin, Andy, had changed so dramatically that even casual acquaintances noticed it. He had gone to war a loud, cheerful extrovert and had returned, some three years later, a morose, truculent, glowering young man, quick to fly off the handle, silent and brooding when left alone. She didn’t know what to make of him these days and neither, it seemed, did poor Margaret, who was having a very difficult time with him.

  Andy, Margaret told her, had not been soured by her involvement with Stevie. This was something that he had shrugged off and seemed to regard as no more than tiresome, and only then because it involved them and governed their approach to him. He did not resent Vanessa either, in fact, in his lighter moments he appeared to be growing very fond of her. He had never, Margaret admitted under pressure, taxed her with disloyalty and when Claire, unable to believe this, had taken the risk of raising the subject with him, she found that Margaret was speaking the truth. ‘Stevie bought it, the old clot, so naturally I’ll stand by the kid,’ he said, briefly. ‘As for Margy—we all make bloody fools of ourselves now and again and I’m no angel. Never pretended to be one.’

  And that was about as far as she got and sometimes she wondered whether the reconciliation she had achieved had been worth her cab fare from York to Criccieth. But then, she told herself, Andy’s indifference was not all that surprising, for the younger generation had long since discarded the old values and invented for themselves an entirely different code of behaviour. What was more to the point was Andy’s moodiness and Claire assumed this stemmed from his disfigurement and the limitations imposed upon him by his injuries. Margaret thought otherwise, saying that he would never perk up until he could reabsorb himself in the strike-it-rich brigade. In that way he hasn’t changed at all,’ she told Claire, in one of her confiding moments—‘Stevie would never have gone back to scrap, or anything that meant keeping the kind of company we kept, or living in the places we lived in before the war. He would have gone for the open-air life, even farming maybe.’

  ‘Isn’t it at all possible to steer Andy in that direction?’ Claire asked. ‘Paul would probably set him up in one of the Coombe farms—my father’s old farm for instance, as soon as these arty-crafty people move out and they will the moment the war finishes.’

  Margaret was not encouraging. ‘That isn’t for Andy,’ she said, dolefully, ‘he’s still interested in money for its own sake. He’s already financed that one-legged speculator Shawcrosse he met in hospital and set him up next door for the duration. They hobnob most of the day when they aren’t on the phone and are forming a company I believe.’

  ‘What kind of company exactly?’

  ‘How would I know? He doesn’t confide in me. All I know is that it’s something to do with houses and land. Once upon a time he would have told me anything I asked but not anymore, and I can’t honestly blame him in that respect. He remembers. Before the war, when all four of us were living it up, I was never interested where the money came from, so long as it arrived in large, juicy dollops.’

  Claire sympathised with her. She lived in a vacuum between past and present. Her loyalty, perhaps her guilt, bound her to Andy, but she had seen through the sham of their pre-war marriage and its tawdriness, viewed in retrospect, dismayed her. Claire, who had always recognised its fairground glitter, understood this very well, but Andy was Margaret’s problem and she could only wait for matters to resolve themselves.

  They seemed to be doing this very satisfactorily as far as Simon was concerned. Claire had developed an easy undemanding relationship with Evie, who told her that Simon had also undergone a subtle change since his participation in the D-Day assault. To prove it she produced a letter she had received from him after the Allies had broken out from their beachhead and made their bid to win the war by Christmas.

  ‘It will tell you a lot more than I can second-hand,’ she said, ‘and I daresay you’ll read more into it than me because you knew his first wife and were around when he was involved in all those lame-dog campaigns. Anyway, read it, and tell me if I’m right about readjustment. I’ve only known him twelve months and I’m not all that bright, but it does seem to me that he’s—well, mellowed a lot.’

  Claire laughed and said it was probably the prospect of having a wife to come home to, but when she read the letter she saw that the girl’s instinct had served her well, and that Simon had indeed mellowed, so much so that there was hardly a trace of the smouldering young man Claire remembered in the period of political upheaval between the wars. She had always sympathised with his quarrel with the established order far more so than Paul, who regarded him as a bit of a fanatic, but she had never understood the masochistic pleasure he and that humourless girl Rachel seemed to derive from sharing the burdens (and sometimes the living quarters!) of what her father would have described as The Great Unwashed. All that, it seemed, was now in the past, and for the first time she detected tolerance and maturity in his outlook. ‘I don’t see this as a Left-versus­-Right contest anymore,’ he wrote, ‘but as a kind of Sanitary Squad exercise! I’ve always lived for politics, and they’ve always presented a straight choice for me, as they did for Rachel, but since I got back here I’ve had to shift my sights for a variety of reasons. The prisoners we took after the break-through to the Seine aren’t the Germans I remember, those arrogant, indoctrinated bullies, who bombed Guernica and threw us out of France, in 1940. Mostly they remind me of the kind of ferry one met in Remarque’s “All Quiet …” The French too are not all “gallant­ resisters “, who have been running around with secret codes and homemade explosives ever since Dunkirk. Many did, of course, but others just sat and waited, and there were some who made a packet of money out of the Occupation. It isn’t a matter of politics anymore, but expediency. There are plenty of cruel bastards on the Left, as well as on the Right. I had to threaten to shoot two of them yesterday, after they had shaved a seventeen-year-old girl because somebody pointed her out as someone who had once slept with a German. I’ve seen a lot of that since June and it isn‘t the kind of Democracy I’ve been fighting for ever since Spain.’ Then came what was, to Claire, a frank admission of self-doubt and reappraisal. ‘I’d more or less made up my mind to have a crack at getting into Parliament at the first post-war election but I’ve had second thoughts about that. I’m more interested in people than politics, so I shall look about for something where I can co-operate­ rather than legislate. Don’t ask me what, for I don’t know. We’ll talk about it when I get home, and as the Daddy of the Company I’m at least sure of one thing—I’m right at the head of the demob-queue.’

  Claire was so interested in his heresy that she took it upon herself to show part of the letter to Paul. She did not show him the final page that she ought not to have read but did, for she was always very curious to learn about other women’s relationships with their husbands. What she read here encouraged her to think that dear old Simon, bless his air-conditioned heart, had at last found someone with enough cosiness and commonsense to make a grab at the bonuses of marriage in the way she had done from the outset of life with Paul and sh
e was touched by the boyish endearments in the final paragraph. Evie must have realised she had read them but perhaps, in a way, she was glad for there had never been any secret between them that what Simon needed as much as a wife was an amiable mistress.

  Whiz wrote one of her formal, slightly prissy letters from India about the same time and it was clear that she too was developing into a person with whom a conventional mother-daughter relationship was unlikely to survive the war. Claire found that she could accept this with equanimity for Whiz, alone among the Craddocks, pursued her objectives untroubled by emotional doubts. Ian, her husband, was now firmly entrenched among what the American Rangers called the Top Brass, and Whiz wrote as though this was no more than the right of a professional kingpin in a pyramid of amateurs. She had two children and a third expected, an announcement that caused Claire to comment, when reading her daughter’s letter aloud to Paul, ‘She doesn’t so much tell us these things as to make them public, like royalty!’, to which Paul replied, with a chuckle (for his second daughter’s pomposity always amused him) that a diet of curry must have gingered them up a little and if this happy state of affairs continued the Craddocks would contribute substantially to the population explosion the newspapers were prophesying.

  Andy, Simon and Whiz Claire could adjust to without much difficulty, and even that curious, last-minute transformation of Stevie had been simplified by Margaret, but she knew little about Mary, or Mary’s relationship with that genial oddity, Rumble Patrick. Mary had always been Paul’s responsibility and Claire had never challenged his unrepentant favouritism of their eldest daughter.

  Thus it was that she remained in ignorance of the slight shift in the balance of the former Periwinkle team, and the anxieties that had beset her daughter before that shift became apparent. Paul was not unaware of them but said nothing until the day Mary confided in him and shocked him by admitting that her principal worry over the last two years was not that Rumble would be killed but that he would outgrow his tribal loyalties to the Valley.

  It should not have jolted him as much as it did. He remembered Rumble’s guarded admission at the time of the destruction of Periwinkle, a confession that he still cherished a curiosity about faraway places, but he did not appreciate the significance of this until the day he and Mary saddled the horses and rode over to Periwinkle to survey the prospects of rebuilding as soon as the authorities issued the building licence.

  They spent an hour or so on the site but Paul noticed that Mary seemed preoccupied and not much interested in his proposals. He said, offhandedly, ‘You and Rumble do intend to return here, don’t you? He isn’t hankering after one of the other farms?’ and she said, equably in the circumstances, ‘No, Daddy, I imagine it’ll be Periwinkle or nothing but until yesterday’s mail I was half convinced it was going to be nothing.’

  He stared at her in amazement. Of all his children he had regarded her as the most permanently rooted and had often consoled himself with the fact that one at least had married someone who shared his own dedication to the Valley.

  ‘Now what the devil do you mean by that?’ he demanded. ‘Rumble isn’t thinking of chucking the land is he?’ and she said, patiently, that she had suspected so for some time past but that suddenly they were almost back to normal and this would be Rumble’s last voyage if he could terminate his engagement as soon as his ship returned from the Far East.

  He said, unhappily, ‘You and Rumble—you always seemed to me to belong. There’s nothing wrong is there? I mean, nothing like the kind of thing that happened to The Pair?’

  She smiled, kicking her feet free from the stirrups so that he saw her as a rosy-cheeked girl again, jogging along beside him after a day’s hunting with the Sorrel Vale.

  ‘It’s not that kind of “wrongness”,’ she said. ‘Rumble has his own rules and lives by them, pretty strictly I should say. I’ve never had an hour’s worry about other women, even though I’ve only had him a month or so in more than two years. No, it’s the gypsy in him I daresay, and also the fact that he married young—too young. I suppose I was to blame for that but you remember how it was that time he came home unexpectedly, when we were all so miserable about little Claire being killed.’

  ‘I remember perfectly,’ he said grimly. ‘Tell me the rest, providing you want to.’

  She said, surprisingly, ‘Very well, but we’ll have to stop somewhere. The fact is he jumped at the chance of going to sea after the Germans bombed Periwinkle. In a way it was a last-minute reprieve and had the advantage of a built-in excuse to go with it. Farmhouse gone—prospect of seeing out the rest of the war as a lodger at the Big House—that didn’t suit our Rumble’s book at all! So he prattled a little about wanting to do his bit, like Stevie and Andy and Simon, and went off grinning all over his face.’

  ‘You mean you realised that at the time?’

  ‘In a way I did, but I didn’t admit it until after that one time he came home between voyages. I saw then that he wasn’t really cured, that he had to see what was left of the world before he was ready to settle for Shallowford. I suppose I resented it in a way but I tried to make allowances. Like I say, he was a husband at twenty-one and a father a year later. He was also a Potter, and although the Potter generation you knew were content to squat in the Dell there’s inherited wanderlust there, and always will be. Have you ever heard of a poet called James Elroy Flecker?’

  ‘Surprisingly I have,’ he said. ‘I’ve got one or two of his poems in an Anthology.’

  ‘One called “Brumana”?’

  ‘Yes, the one where he realises that the pine trees that talked him into leaving England were damned liars. I liked that.’

  ‘Ah, you would,’ she said, ‘it’s right up your street! Well, here’s the connection—Rumble came across it in a magazine in a barber’s shop in Auckland and it so fitted his mood that he sent the late Mr Flecker home to do his dirty work for him!’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She dismounted and he followed suit, sliding the reins over the cruppers and leaving the horses to crop the hedgerow grass in the lane that led over the shoulder of Hermitage Wood. She took out a letter that must have been a long time reaching her, for it was marked ‘June 7th, Sydney’.

  ‘You don’t mind me reading it?’

  ‘Good heavens no! Rumble couldn’t write a love-letter! I settled for that years ago. Go on, read it, and then the poem he tore out of the magazine. It must have impressed him no end, when I last saw him The Farmers’ Weekly was his literary high-water mark!’

  He sat down on the bank and read pages of scrawl. The letter, it seemed, had been prompted by the D-Day news-bulletins and Paul got the impression that wide horizons had blurred Rumble’s sense of geography, for he seemed to assume that Devon and the Normandy coastline were almost within hailing distance of one another and was in mortal fear of them being hit by stray shells. ‘I feel,’ he began, ‘the victim of a crazy practical joke! By my reckoning you are no more than a hundred miles north-west of the beaches, and here am I, polishing a gun I haven’t fired for eight months and nearly thirteen thousand miles from the nearest Jerry! Remember to tell the Gov he was spot-on when he accused me of dodging the column! I was, by twelve thousand nine hundred miles!’

  ‘Is that what you meant? He feels out of it all, despite the Japs?’

  ‘No, read from page four, the bit about Flecker. Read it aloud.’

  ‘“I met an old friend of yours the other day. Name of Flecker—James Elroy Flecker. At least, I think he’s a friend for the name rang a bell while I was browsing through a mag. in a barber’s shop, in Auckland. It made me remember you before the fire at Periwinkle on a winter’s night, with your ‘Just listen to this …’ routine, and me trying to tot up a column of figures! I had to travel this distance to make the connection. Read the lines I’ve marked. It’s how I feel right now and I couldn’t have put it better if you had been right beside me. My God, I
miss you and the Valley and can’t get home quickly enough! Catch me straying out of Devon after the war and you can shoot me and start fresh with someone who can recognise a good thing when he sees one”.’

  Paul looked up quickly and saw laughter in his daughter’s expression.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he may not write much of a love-letter but at least he doesn’t beat about the bush,’ and Mary chuckled saying, ‘Read the poem and notice the bits he’s underlined. I’ll hold that in reserve for the rest of my life. A spare shot in my locker if he gets itchy feet in his middle-age!’

  He read the poem and was moved by it, remembering very clearly some of the passages that had half-remained in his memory.

  ‘Oh shall I ever be home again?

  Meadows of England shining in the rain

  Spread wide your daisied lawns …’

  And

  ‘Old fragrant friends—preserve me the last lines

  Of that long saga which you sang me, pines,

  When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree,

  I listened, with my eyes upon the sea …

  Oh traitor pines, you sang what life has found

  The falsest of fair tales …’

  He was chuckling himself now so that Mary chimed in with the final underscored passage—

  ‘Hearing you sing O trees,

  Hearing you murmur “There are older seas

  That beat upon vaster shores …”’

  ‘Well, there you are. He’s cured! But if he comes home quoting that poem you never heard of James Elroy Flecker and his traitor pines, understand?’

  ‘I am not quite the bumbling old fool that you, your mother and your brothers sometimes take me for,’ he said, returning letter and poem and reaching for the bridle of the grey.

  Chapter Twelve

  Booby Trap