By the Green of the Spring

by John Masters

  ‘How do I know what the King will say?’ Guy said. ‘He didn’t say anything when he pinned on my VC and DSOs … except “Well done”. Too many others in line.’ Privately he thought, this time the King might say, You have a hangover, young man, your hand’s trembling, your eyes are bloodshot.

  ‘This’ll be summat to tell our bairns,’ Stanley said. ‘How we were that close to King George the Fifth. It’s a shame my mum and dad couldn’t be here.’

  ‘Even more, that all the chaps who went down in flames can’t be,’ Guy said shortly. Then they spoke very little until, having picked up Frank and Anne Stratton, they showed their command letters at the gates of the Palace, and were escorted to an inner courtyard, where they climbed down.

  An equerry came forward – ‘Lieutenant Colonel Sir Guy Rowland and party? His Majesty wishes to see you in private, before the main investiture. This way, please.’

  They followed the equerry into the building, up stairs, along passages, to a small drawing-room facing out over the Palace garden. They waited, standing, the two women muttering to each other in low voices. After five minutes the King came in, accompanied by the Queen, his youngest son Prince George, two equerries, and a Lord in Waiting, bearing a sword. The men bowed, the women curtsied.

  An equerry led Frank Stratton forward and he bent his head as the King hung the insignia of a Commander of the Order of the British Empire round his neck. Stanley followed, to receive his Distinguished Conduct Medal. Then, at a sign, Guy knelt, the King drew the sword from its scabbard, and touched him with the blade on each shoulder, saying, ‘Arise, Sir Guy.’ He handed the sword back to the Lord in Waiting, who returned it to its scabbard. Then the King said, ‘Sit down, everyone, please. Hatfield, do you think you could find us some sherry?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  ‘I want to hear all about your flight, Sir Guy. And where did you lose your arm, Mister – what was it?’

  ‘R-r-r-obinsson, Y-y-your Mamamamajesty, B-battery S-s-sergeant M-major, Royal Field Artillery … I lost it at L-l-loos.’

  ‘When you were winning your DCM?’

  ‘Y-yes, Your Majesty … sir!’

  ‘Fill the glasses, Hatfield. Here’s to all of you. There’ll always be an England as long as we have men like you … who are supported by ladies like you, Mrs Robinson, Mrs Stratton … and my own wife here.’

  The Queen, who had not taken any sherry, said, ‘I assume you are not married, Sir Guy?’

  ‘No, madam,’ Guy said.

  ‘You should get married, at once,’ the Queen said severely, admonishing him with a wagged forefinger. ‘Men need wives, otherwise they get into all sorts of stupid scrapes, and do all sorts of stupid things.’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ Guy said. Her Majesty had seen the shaky hand, the bloodshot eye. The sooner he got to a pub and downed a couple of Horse’s Necks, the better.

  Daily Telegraph, Saturday, September 13, 1919

  WIDNES BY-ELECTION

  MR HENDERSON RETURNED

  The result of the Widnes by-election was declared yesterday, as follows:

  Mr Arthur Henderson (Lab)

  11,404

  Hon. F. M. B. Fisher (C.U.)

  10,417

  Labour Majority …………………………. 987

  This was the seventh by-election since the new Parliament was formed, and in five cases the seats have been lost by the Coalition.

  A LABOUR GOVERNMENT

  After the declaration of the poll at Widnes, Mr Arthur Henderson, addressing the crowd, declared that the result was a magnificent victory after only eight days’ campaign, and a fight against a powerful organisation belonging to a party that had held the seat for some thirty years … It would not be his fault if he could not influence the public of the nation and the wage-earning classes from one end of the country to the other … Sufficient had been heard about Reconstruction, but Labour wanted more than words, it wanted deeds. They were not going to be content with patches and poultices. The present system was like putting poultices on wooden legs. Labour believed that the people, having won the war for the nation, should win the nation for the people …

  A Labour Government, Henderson was promising, Cate thought. It would have seemed like promising green cheese from the moon, a year or two ago, even a few months ago; but there was no doubt that Mr Lloyd George’s Coalition Government was fast losing the immense popularity with which it had gone into the Khaki Election. The working people no longer believed that either the Conservatives or the Liberals had their interests at heart … and perhaps it was true. Still, it was very difficult for him to imagine that such innocents as Ramsay MacDonald, Snowden, and this Arthur Henderson could ever be a match for the Clemenceaus and Bismarcks of the world in foreign affairs. Perhaps the Labour Government would more or less withdraw Britain from the world arena …

  Garrod came in and said, ‘Telephone, sir. It’s Sir Guy.’

  Cate pushed back his chair and hurried out, picked up the receiver and said anxiously, ‘Guy? Is everything all right?’

  The voice at the other end was laughing, ‘Calm down, Uncle. I have the ring. Everything’s fine. I am calling just to let you know that we’re taking off in half an hour from here – Hendon. We’re flying a passenger version of the Buffalo, so there’ll be plenty of room and we ought to be landing at Hedlington in an hour from now.’

  ‘Who’s coming?’

  ‘Everyone … David Toledano, Helen Rowland – with the baby, Boy – Lord and Lady Swanwick, Lady Barbara and her husband, Virgil and Jane Kramer, the Ambassador and his Mrs, Fletcher and Betty, Florinda … Oh, yes, and Isabel.’

  ‘Good heavens! Are you sure you’ll all fit in?’

  ‘With room to spare. It’s a big machine, Uncle … Who’s meeting us at the airfield?’

  ‘Your Aunt Louise, with a fleet of hired cars. Isabel’s being married from High Staining.’

  ‘All right. I’ll drive over to the Manor as soon as I can … and we will share a few French 75s to strengthen you for your ordeal. That’s the least your best man can do for you.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Cate said again. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Half cognac, half champagne, with a drop of bitters, all on ice.’

  ‘Well … do fly carefully, Guy. She’s awfully valuable to me.’

  ‘Some of the passengers are to me,’ Guy said briefly, hanging up.

  Behind Cate, Garrod said, ‘Why don’t you take an aspirin and lie down a bit, sir? It’s too early to dress, but everything’s ready … clothes pressed, carnation in a glass of cold water in the larder, shoes polished, church decorated – the Rector called half an hour ago … so do rest. Mrs Kramer wouldn’t like to see you looking nervous at the prospect of marrying her, now would she?’

  Chapter 27

  Vale of Scarrow, Kent: September, 1919

  Christopher Cate and his wife Isabel were walking back home from Walstone Park, where Lord Walstone’s team had narrowly beaten a Babes’ Team to mark the end of the cricket season in the village. The leaves were beginning to turn on the trees and the air had the peculiarly heavy feel of dying summer. With the couple walked Guy Rowland, on a month’s leave from the Air Ministry before taking up his next post, as commander of 84 Squadron, Royal Air Force, in Mesopotamia.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be promoted to full colonel, or brigadier general.’

  Guy laughed, ‘Not a bit of it. When I get out there I’ll drop to Major … well, the rank is now called Squadron Leader. We’re all losing rank as the RAF finally wastes down to its peacetime strength.’ He looked across the river at the slope of Lower Bohun Farm and said, ‘What’s going on there, Uncle Chris?’

  Cate said, without looking, ‘Building … The bank foreclosed. I tried to save the farm, but couldn’t manage it.’

  ‘Because he wouldn’t let me help,’ Isabel murmured.

  Cate said, ‘They’re going to build rows of little houses, each to contain a little stockbroker or a little bank clerk, with a l
ittle wife and a little family and a little car in a little garage. They’re going to electrify the railway to Hedlington and London soon. Then we won’t be a village any more. We’ll be a dormitory.’

  ‘I suppose the village people hate it all.’

  ‘Some do,’ Cate said grudgingly, ‘but most don’t. They expected to, but they’re all making money hand over fist. Especially Woodruff – the garage man, and his elder son, who was in the Wealds with your father … he came back a captain. They’re the most important people in the village now – not me, not Lord Walstone. I’ve been simply passed by as, well, irrelevant. Hoggin’s powerful, all right, but his influence is not particularly here, it’s all over the country.’

  A few moments later, by the half-completed war memorial, they heard singing and edged off to the side of the road as a mob of young people came up, mostly girls, but liberally scattered with a few old men and older women. They were singing ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road’ at the tops of their voices, carrying unwieldy sacks slung over their shoulders, with here and there a battered suitcase, and a few classic tramps’ bundles slung on sticks.

  ‘Wotcher, dad!’ they yelled at Cate as they passed; then ‘’Ere, look at ’im! Give us a kiss, ducks!’ A young woman with big dark eyes put up her face to Guy to be kissed and Guy obliged. He had to kiss a dozen more before they passed on, still singing.

  ‘Now what on earth was that?’ Isabel gasped.

  ‘Hop pickers,’ Cate said briefly. ‘Our annual invasion from the East End of London. They live in camps and work about ten days during the hop harvest. I’m surprised you haven’t seen them before.’

  ‘Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose,’ Guy said. ‘I could swear some of those were the same girls who were demanding kisses when I was sixteen.’

  Isabel laughed then, and they walked on, the older couple holding hands. They entered the footpath along Scarrow bank and soon came to a thatched cottage half-hidden by a dense wall of hazel and bramble. Guy said, ‘Are Fletcher and Betty still living in there – Probyn’s old cottage?’

  Cate said, ‘Yes, when they’re here. But most of the time they’re in London or she’s dragging him round the country, educating him. She’s very American.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Isabel said comfortably. ‘She’s not ramming book-learning down his throat. She’s just trying to widen his horizons so that he will have more background … more depth of experience to quarry his poetry out of.’

  A boy of about eleven popped out of an invisible gap in the brambles, crying, ‘Uncle! Uncle Christopher!’

  Cate turned, ‘Hullo, Tim. What is it? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Come and see my nets and traps, Uncle. You, too, Guy.’ He looked at Isabel and added grudgingly, ‘You can come too, if you want.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ she said mockingly. ‘Do we have to dive through the hedge?’

  Tim shook his head and led them to the real entrance. The ‘garden’ inside was full of weeds of all kinds, but the house was in good enough shape outside and, when they entered, inside too. Cate said, ‘Who’s keeping this clean, looking after it?’

  ‘Probyn,’ Tim said, ‘but he lets me look after all the guns and traps … and feed Fletcher’s ferrets.’

  Guy thought, his voice is hushed when he talks about Probyn; he thinks he’s the greatest man in the world. Well, he thought about the same at that age.

  Cate said, ‘What’s going to happen when you go back to school in a few days? And what school will it be this time?’

  ‘St Swithin’s, near Hindhead. I expect it’ll stink.’ Tim frowned and his lips curled in an angry pout. ‘Probyn’ll have to do it till I get back … I’ve made some gunpowder and I’m going to blow up the bogs at school. Or make stink bombs and leave them about in chapel, in the dining hall, in class – everywhere. They’ll think the whole school has farted …’

  ‘Tim!’

  ‘Sorry, Uncle … Anyway, they’ll sack me and I’ll be home again in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Tim,’ Cate said, ‘your mother and father are spending a great deal of money giving you an education which will enable you to do and be whatever you want to do or be when you grow up. Now you have been sacked from two prep schools already, and …’

  ‘I want to be a poacher,’ Tim said defiantly. ‘I want to be like Probyn … What’s the fun in getting up at seven o’clock, taking a train somewhere and coming back at five, every day?’

  Guy said, ‘You’d better get your schooling over, Tim, then you can decide … That’s a good decoy there. Did you make it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tim said eagerly.

  ‘Well, sign it,’ Guy said, and tousled the boy’s unruly hair, as he went out, following the Cates.

  In five minutes the party left the Scarrow bank woods and came out on a country road, to confront an unexpected scene – a police constable and three other men standing outside the gate to a little cottage; and facing them, inside the gate, a middle-aged man with a double-barrelled shotgun in his hands, while a woman and a small girl stood in the doorway of the cottage, hands defiantly on hips.

  Cate stopped and said, ‘What’s going on, Fulcher? What’s the matter with Hawthorne?’

  The constable turned, touching the peak of his helmet. ‘Mr Moore wants to sell the cottage, sir, but Hawthorne says he can’t, because it’s a tied cottage. Hawthorne says the only way Mr Moore can get him out of it is to sack him … but Mr Moore doesn’t want to do that, because Hawthorne’s a good, experienced man.’

  ‘And who are these men?’

  ‘Lawyers, sir … One for Mr Moore, one for Hawthorne – he was sent down by Mr Bentley, the MP, when Hawthorne wrote to him about all this … and the third lawyer’s for the people who are buying the rest of Mr Moore’s land, and want this cottage.’

  Cate said, ‘Well, let me know if you need any help. Though I have no idea what I can do … or should.’

  He walked on. Isabel said, ‘A tied house is one that belongs to a farm, specifically for a labourer who works on that farm, isn’t it?’

  Cate nodded – ‘It was a necessity once. Now …’ He shrugged – ‘I don’t know. All I know is that this sort of argument has been going on over tied houses ever since I was a boy … and long before. As Guy said, in the country here, plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.’

  It was a small house in a row, in the unfashionable northern part of Hedlington, but not quite so far north as to be in North Hedlington, the district of factories, wasteland, and actual slums. Guy sat in the front parlour with his Aunt Alice and Dave Cowell, drinking tea. The mousey little Mrs Cowell bustled in and out with plates of sandwiches and cake.

  ‘You made all these scones?’ Guy asked,

  ‘Oh yes, Sir Guy,’ she said.

  ‘Well, they’re very good.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She stopped. ‘If it isn’t impertinent, Sir Guy, what did the King and Queen say to you when you went to Buckingham Palace?’

  Guy said, ‘The King asked about the South Atlantic flight, and what I was going to do next. The Queen told me to get married, at once … How’s the partnership going?’

  Cowell said, ‘Very well. I’ll be passing my finals – for FICA – next year, and Alice a couple of years later – unless she decides to spend more time at home.’

  It was apparently a loaded remark, for Alice looked at Dave, then at Daisy Cowell, standing behind her husband’s chair, arms folded. Alice said, ‘I’m pregnant, Guy. By Dave. The baby’s due in March next. Everyone will know soon enough and we have been deciding how to face it … how to control our lives, in fact.’

  ‘I wanted Miss Alice to have the baby,’ Daisy said. ‘We can love each other without being jealous. Dave and Miss Alice will work to bring the money in. I’ll look after the house, and the baby when it comes.’

  Guy said, ‘You’ll get some nasty looks and words from your neighbours, I suppose. Unless you pretend you had a husband who was killed in the war … too late f
or that now … drowned at sea, perhaps?’

  Alice smiled – ‘We’re not going to pretend at all, Guy. We just say nothing. Dave and Daisy will officially adopt it. As to what others think …’

  ‘They can go to bloody hell,’ Daisy Cowell said suddenly, with great vehemence.

  ‘Good,’ Guy said. ‘At least you three know what you’re doing, and going to do, and why.’

  Guy stood at the top of the steps looking down the length of the huge room. This was where his grandfather and old Bob Stratton used to make Rowland Rubies and Sapphires … there were overhead cranes then, put in when he was a kid; and lots of men in cloth caps, and smells of hot steel, oil, noises of lathes turning, and whining metal … a masculine, engineering place. Then, during the war it had turned to filling shells, and nearly all the men disappeared – transmuted to mud in the trenches – and the place had become a flowerbed of women’s blue mob caps, and it smelled different; the toluene had its own, chemical smell … there was steam everywhere, and water on the concrete floor; and though they did not use much perfume, the smell of the women themselves, a femininity. Then there had been the explosion … and the rebuilding … the final closing down … and now …

  Beside him, his cousin Naomi Gregory said, ‘We’re following the same rule as Mr Ford does in his factories. Everything must go to the man – the woman mostly, here. No one needs to turn away, or move a step, for material or tools.’

  ‘Just like the army,’ Guy murmured. ‘How many are you employing now?’

  ‘Two hundred and twelve,’ Naomi answered at once. ‘But I hope to expand to four hundred as soon as we’ve built up a name for ourselves in the industry. We only completed the factory in all particulars four months ago … And our unit cost is too high still, solely because of our small output … comparatively small. We’ve got to get more orders.’