The Green Gauntlet (17 page)

‘I’m going to have a dekko,’ Smut said. ‘You wait here and if I whistle turn the van and we’ll double back to Henry’s.’

Jumbo would have argued but in a matter of seconds, Smut had disappeared, moving with the utmost precision through the heather clumps on the steep side of the road until he was within twenty yards of the junction. Then he saw what, for all his vague uncertainties, he had not expected to see, the gleam of a row of silver-gilt buttons pinpointing a bulky shape left of the bonnet and it told him all he wanted to know. Turning, he zigzagged back across the moor and when within range of the van gave a low, penetrating whistle so that Jumbo, badly startled, slid across the cushions, started up, slammed into reverse and pointed the van downhill just as Smut bobbed up on the nearside and jumped in.

‘It’s a bliddy copper!’ he gasped, ‘Waitin’ for us up there—jus’
waitin
’
fer us! Get to hell out of here!’

Jumbo lacked Smut’s nerve and fumbled with the gears so that Smut cried, ‘For Christ’s sake …’ as a powerful torch leaped out of the shadows above them and a distant voice called ‘Who’s there? Stay where you are.’

The challenge galvanised Jumbo into finding the right gear and the van shot off down the steep descent at forty miles an hour, driving straight into a baffling bank of mist so that Jumbo cried despairingly, ‘I can’t see a bloody thing. I can’t even see the bloody road.’

‘Just keep goin’,’ Smut said grimly, and reached out to steady the wheel as it juddered in a rut and the van bounced off the bank. ‘The minute Henry’s gatepost shows up swing left, stop, and move over.’

They saw the whitewashed gatepost when they were almost level with it and Jumbo wrenched the wheel hard over so that the van skidded and came into brief collision with the stones marking the entrance of Hermitage Lane. Then the engine stalled and Smut said, ‘Don’t switch on and don’t move neither,’ and was gone again, this time down the hill to a point where he could overlook the river road winding into the mist towards Codsall Bridge. One glance in that direction was enough. He saw, less than a quarter-mile to the east, two pinpricks of light moving uncertainly in his direction. Doubling back to the van he drove without lights down the narrow, squelching lane to Hermitage Yard.

‘Call Henry. Bring his missus too,’ and he ran round to the rear of the van, flung open the doors and began hauling parcels wrapped in clean sacking out on to the cobbles. By the time Henry Pitts and his wife Ellie had emerged from the kitchen the van was half empty and Henry said, ‘In the barn. There’s a feed bin just inside the door,’ and all four of them splashed across the slimy surface of the yard to dump their burdens in the half-empty bin. When the last was inside Henry slammed the lid and sealed it with a padlock.

‘If it’s the police, won’t they look there?’ Ellie said, breathlessly and Smut replied, ‘Not without a search warrant but they won’t need one to look in the van. You got something I could be takin’ in for repair, Henry? They might ask awkward questions.’

‘The wheelbarrow,’ Henry said and groped around until he laid hands on a half-dismembered wheelbarrow that had lain under the loft ladder since his father’s time because nobody had ever bothered to move it. ‘You was takin’ it over to Amos Smethwick’s for a new wheel,’ he said, and his wife added, with an excited giggle, ‘Make do an’ mend. Just the job. I’ll go and brew a dish o’ tea.’

They carried the ancient wheelbarrow into the yard, tossed it into the van and then trooped into the big kitchen where Jumbo, visibly shaken, spread his hands to the open hearth.

‘Christ, that was a close shave,’ Smut said, looking as exhilarated as he felt. ‘That bliddy Voysey is a lot smarter’n I reckoned. He must have watched us load up, phoned Paxtonbury, and follered on. They’m probably up there now looking in all the rabbit holes but it won’t take ’em long to figure out we doubled back yer. Us’d better plan the next move,’ and he sucked noisily at the mug of tea Ellie handed him.

Jumbo said bitterly, ‘Bastards. I got it all fixed where we was to drop off. Crawley, Symonds, and all the others will be waitin’ for us. Maybe we better phone ’em and say we’ll be late.’

Henry said thoughtfully, ‘That stuff don’t go out of here tonight, Jumbo.’

‘Why not? We could go round by the camp. It was on’y a spot check, wasn’t it?’

‘What do you say, Smut?’

In matters of strategy Henry was content to leave it to the professional, remembering a time when Smut Potter had successfully contended with Lord Gilroy’s keepers until he clubbed one with a gun butt and served a stretch in gaol.

‘We could try tomorrow night and go the long way round back o’ the woods,’ he said, but to Jumbo his voice lacked conviction. He said, irritably, ‘Tomorrer night’s too late! Crawley said they all want to deliver tomorrow for Christmas.’

‘I’m not going inside for a gang of bliddy butchers,’ said Henry and Ellie murmured agreement. ‘Come to that, I’d sooner dump it. Yes, dump the bliddy lot.’

Jumbo was outraged. ‘
Dump
it! Getting on for two hundred’s quid’s worth! No you don’t, Henry. It can stay here until Boxing Day and we’ll run it out one way or another. In a cart, maybe, under bags o’ manure if need be. After all, we ain’t gonner eat it, are we?’

He waited, sensing something inscrutable in the thoughtful expressions of the other men and presently Smut said slowly, ‘Be you thinking what I’m thinking, Henry?’

‘Ah,’ said Henry, ‘I be. The fact o’ the matter is we’re rumbled and zooner or later us’ll be nabbed. But it baint the fine nor the risk o’ zeeing the New Year in behind bars as matters all that much.’

‘Then what the hell …?’ Jumbo demanded, but Henry went on, pacifically, ‘I doan reckon you’d understand, Jumbo. After all, you’m still half a bliddy vorriner. You baint been yer from the beginning, like me an’ Smut.’

‘What’s the time I been farming up the Dell got to do with it?’ Jumbo demanded and Smut said, ‘Tiz the publicity. That’s what youm driving at, baint it, Henry?’

‘Arr,’ said Henry, ‘something on they lines. I don’t give a tinker’s curse wot folks say o’ me but Squire’s been on to us zame as he has you and Jumbo, and it doan zeem right somehow to mix him in with it. Takin’ one thing with another I reckon we’d best cut our losses an’ dump it. You doan have to bother, neither o’ you. I’ll do it meself, the minute the coast is clear.’

‘Now what the bloody hell ’as Squire Craddock got to do with it?’ asked Jumbo. ‘It’s not his pig and poultry, is it?’

‘No,’ Henry said, still mildly, ‘but they was reared on his varms and he’d take it hard if we was nabbed and it got around generally. After all, we’m tenants, all three of us, and he’s stood by us times enough. Ever zince he came here as a townee he’s stood by us. Smut’ll vouch for that, Jumbo, if you need tellin’ that is.’

Smut said nothing. His weatherbeaten features were puckered with the effort of concentration as he juggled loyalty and profit. He was no longer concerned with balancing risks but with weighing the cash value of those sacking-wrapped parcels in Henry’s bin against memories of long ago, when Young Craddock, new to the Valley, had visited him in Paxtonbury gaol and assured him he would see that Tamer Potter, Mother Meg, and all the rest of the Potter tribe did not suffer on his account and would be confirmed in their tenure of the Dell. He remembered something else, too, the friendship and practical help given him by Craddock when he had emerged from prison and started a horticultural business on the slopes of the Bluff, and it seemed to him that he owed the man as much or more than Henry, whose line of reasoning he had no difficulty in following. He said at length, ‘Well, tiz money down the drain but youm right, Henry. From now on we’ll play for smaller stakes and it’s every man for himself. I’ll drive on back presently and you dump the whole bliddy lot in the river. How much does your share stand you in at, Jumbo?’

‘Round about seventy quid,’ replied Jumbo, looking helplessly from one to the other, ‘but if we took our time and fed it to the butchers …’

‘We’ll give you cost price. Thirty-five quid each,’ Smut said, ‘for like Henry says, you’m a vorriner, and it’s no business o’ yours, not really.’

He looked carefully through a chink in the kitchen curtains and saw a torch-beam flickering at the rear of the van.

They’m there,’ he told the others, ‘Voysey, the Inspector and another copper!’

‘Will they knock?’ Ellie asked anxiously but Smut shook his head. ‘No, they’ll call it a day,’ he said. ‘They can’t write out a summons on the strength of a bliddy wheelbarrow, can ’em? Do ’ee really want me to get it repaired for ’ee, Henry?’

‘Giddon, no,’ said Henry glumly, ‘drive it home and use it for virewood.’

They sat on sipping their tea but no knock came and presently they heard footsteps striking on the cobbles as the policemen returned up the lane to their car.

‘Maybe they’ll come back with a warrant and pull your place apart, Henry,’ suggested Jumbo but Henry pooh poohed the idea and seemed unwilling to discuss the matter further. Between them he and Smut had been the losers by something like one hundred and seventy pounds but they were consoled by the reflection that there was no real alternative.

Voysey, still wondering why he had driven blindly up to the rendezvous instead of making a passing call at Hermitage drove slowly home with the Inspector’s flea still buzzing in his ear. It had been impossible to persuade his superior to bluff Henry Pitts into making a search of his outbuildings. The inspector returned to Paxtonbury, deciding that Voysey had bungled the entire operation by not challenging Smut Potter in the bakery yard.

At three a.m. on Christmas Eve Henry Pitts drove his wife’s two-seater to a spot about a mile above Codsall Bridge where, with a thoroughness that came close to masochism, he threw the better part of a pig and armfuls of trussed birds into eight feet of water. It was a kind of sacrifice on the altar of old times and it awoke in him a profound nostalgia for the splendours of his youth, ‘Before,’ as he might have put it, ‘the bliddy world went mazed.’

Two days later, on Boxing morning, soggy bundles lay strung along the tideline west of the Sorrel outfall and the gulls gathered in streaming cohorts so that word was passed around that there had been a U-boat sinking far out to sea. Paul Craddock, hearing the rumour, asked around but nobody could give him accurate information, not even his oldest friend, Henry Pitts. All Henry would say, with one of his slow rubbery smiles, was ‘Well, zeeing they’m geese an’ chicken, Squire, tiz clear enough they come off a ship outalong but us didden ’ear no gunvire did us?’ And Paul, knowing Henry’s wry sense of humour, had no alternative but to keep his doubts to himself.

Chapter Seven

Survival

I

S
tephen Craddock’s first tour of operations ended in spring and the morning he returned from a long haul from Cuxhaven he ’phoned Margaret suggesting they coincided a week’s leave. He was based in Lincolnshire now and the green, flat vistas depressed him.

She said, when he admitted as much, ‘Suppose I packed everything in, Stevie? Suppose I found a place somewhere you could come whenever you got a chance? You won’t be flying again for six months, will you?’

He was surprised and touched. Since his capitulation in the Westminster flat they had met no more than a dozen times, widely spaced and rather frantic occasions when he could dash up to town on a thirty-six-hour pass, and twice more when she had taken a room near one of his airfields, but despite the urgency and infrequency of their meetings they seemed to him to have had a profoundly calming effect upon her. After that first time, when she had crouched, trembling and weeping under his blanket, there had been no more hysteria, no more morbid talk of suicide. She seemed to accept the situation, bringing to him a warm, uncomplicated affection that was sometimes almost sisterly and even their climactic moments had a kind of deliberation, almost as though they were peaks to be scaled together before descending on to the plain of loneliness that followed separation. When they were together neither of them mentioned Andy or Monica, observing an unspoken pact to keep the madness of their association at bay a little longer, but sometimes, reliving these intervals during journeys back to camp, and the prospect of another eight-hour flight across the North Sea and enemy-occupied Europe, Stevie thought of the last few hours as a murderer’s last indulgence, the traditional hearty breakfast served in the condemned cell. He did not know how she thought of them. She never said but would lay quite still in his arms until it was time to go, so that sometimes he wondered if women could master the conscience in a way that a man found impossible.

He said, in response to her proposal, ‘How do you mean, Margy? Give up nursing and go back to the Valley?’ and she said quickly, ‘God no, not the Valley! Anywhere but there, but certainly out of London. I’m sick to death of it anyway. I’m like your father, I never want to smell the place again. Could you meet me tomorrow at Chester?’

‘Chester? Why Chester?’ He remembered then that she had said good-bye to Andy at Chester in the autumn of ’41 and somehow the coincidence was ominous.

‘I’ll explain later, but could you?’

‘Yes I could, I’ve got nine days due and an aircrew’s leave ration of petrol coupons.’

‘Fine. I’ll see you in the bar of The Blossoms round about lunch-time. Can’t say the exact hour, it depends on trains. They don’t give nurses indulgence petrol.’

Now she sounded gay and relieved and he had the impression she had been planning something like this all the time he was clawing his way towards the final stages of the tour. He went back to the billet puzzled but excited, packed the minimum kit, had a final drink with his wireless operator and made out his ‘295’ leave application.

By midday he was at the rendezvous and about an hour later she came in looking he thought, like a mischievous kitten, with her absurd peek-a-boo hair-do crowned by a little blue hat that reminded him of a Foreign Legionaire’s kepi. She said, gaily, ‘Foul journey. Five hours, packed like sardines. I’ll have a gin and French. A double. Have you eaten?’

He told her he had and suggested seeing what he could get for her but she said, shrugging, ‘Don’t bother, I’ve had sandwiches and we’ve some way to go. We don’t want to arrive after dusk.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘You’ll see. It’s a surprise. Don’t nag or I might change my mind. Talk about something else until we get there.’

He adjusted to her mood, partly because he was incurious now that she was here, but more because she obviously wanted him to play and as they drove across the Cheshire plain and into the low hills of Flint towards the mountains, he felt more relaxed than he had felt since the night Monica had come into the bathroom and flung down her ultimatum. He was even able to convey to her, objectively, some of the changes the tension of thirty bombing missions had wrought in him and describe the tightly-knit comradeship of the crew that was their sole bonus. He described the ‘Brock’s Benefit’ of flak-patterns over heavily-defended German cities, and the steady attrition of his squadron—his crew was among the fifty-two per cent survivors of the tour—although, as he was quick to point out, many of those shot down had been made prisoners and two or three, who had pancaked into France, had ultimately turned up ‘shooting a terrific line about their adventures’.

She asked a lot of direct questions. Was he frightened when he set out? Was he surprised to find himself alive and whole? Did he think he would ultimately qualify as one of those L.M.F. cases he had mentioned? He answered as best he could but they were not matters that could adequately be explained to a civilian who had never experienced the sweet-sour taste resulting from an ‘operation-scrubbed’ announcement, or the gush of relief that was like a spurting tap when the words ‘Bomb’s gone!’ came over the intercom and you were free to head for home. He said nothing of the blind panic of being caught in a searchlight beam, or the mad, half-exhilarating tumble about the sky that followed evasive action but he was astonished that he could talk as frankly as he did to anyone without reverting to the defensive banter the crews used among themselves to siphon off their dread.

Presently they came to the mountains, with the snow-capped shoulder of Snowdon on their right, and he said, ‘It’s terrific. The air, the colours, the untamed look of the place. Why didn’t we ever come here in the old days, Margy?’

‘We had a silly set of values,’ she said and suddenly asked him to pull in beside a still tarn, fringed with reeds. The surface was blue-black in the shadow of a peak that rose almost vertically from the far bank.

‘I’ve bought a cottage, Stevie,’ she announced. ‘No-one knows about it, not even my gran who once lived in it. I shall stay there until it’s over. That’s where we’re going right now.’

He was a little startled. ‘If it was your grandmother’s won’t they know you?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘for I’ve never been there since I was nine and when Gramp died Gran moved in with my parents, in South Wales. I got it through an agent and it’s furnished.’

He forced himself to ask, ‘Does Andy know?’

‘No he doesn’t. We don’t write much, just notes you might say. It’s funny, Andy’s dried up on me. Perhaps it’s the Desert. His letters don’t mean a damn thing anymore so now there’s just you, Stevie. I’m only any good to
you
now and maybe that’s why I’ve stopped worrying—about the future I mean. As long as you’re on tap there’s some point in life. What I mean is, I’ve got some kind of function.’ She paused a moment and gave him a shrewd glance. ‘You still worry, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘but there’s not a bloody thing I can do about it. I’m very much in love with you and the experience is still fresh to me, fresh and very sweet. Just to see you and hear your voice is all I need. I can tell myself it’s crazy and can only end one way but it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. You’re the only reason for sticking it out.’

‘I’m glad,’ she said, laying her hand on his knee, ‘that’s all I wanted to be sure about. I suppose I knew it after that first time but sometimes it seemed to me I was making all the running.’ Then, cheerfully, ‘To hell with the consequences. Let’s go!’

They wound through a pass cunningly lit by an orange sun sinking over Cardigan Bay and dropped down to coastal level beyond a slate town that was called, she said, Ffestiniog. Then, within sight of the sea, they turned into a stoney track that twisted between two great belts of gnarled, incredibly old-looking woods, and here, in a clearing open on the sea side, was the cottage, a squat, single-storeyed rectangle of white-washed stones, with a square of unkempt garden bounded by a sagging fence.

It had a name painted on a shingle, ‘
Ty-Bach
’,
and when he asked her what it meant she said ‘The Little House’, and somehow this delighted him and he paused before getting out and threw his arms round her, kissing her hair and soft, plump cheeks and finally her mouth. There were no other houses in the clearing but away near the crown of the woods he could see a tall chimney and she said that was ‘
Ty-Mawr
’,
or ‘The Big House’, and that her grandfather had been caretaker there for a wealthy family of Liverpool soap manufacturers who still owned it but never came there anymore for it was in bad repair.

They entered the low ceilinged living-room and he was surprised to find a fire burning and the floor and furniture polished. ‘The agent found me someone to give it a going-over,’ she told him, ‘the milkman’s wife from the village, I believe. We’ll see him in the morning and he’s promised to bring eggs. I got everything else from the American PX through Henrietta. She can lay her hands on anything if she wants. Would you like something now?’

It was almost as if they had been married for years and were using this funny little house as a holiday base. He watched her hang her coat in the cupboard, unpack her case and his grip, make up the fire and reach down blue and white crockery from the black oak dresser but when, innocently, he asked her how much the place had cost, she said sharply, ‘Does it matter? It was my money, not Andy’s.’

Then, relenting, she threw her arms round him and said, ‘I’m sorry, Stevie, but let’s live for the next nine days! Let’s blot out everything else, as if we were on an island and we are almost. This is a peninsula and at high tide it’s surrounded when the creeks fill. It’ll still be light after supper if we hurry and I’ll show you.’

They went down to the shore in fading light and crossed to one of the tongues of oak and ash that split the little estuary into sections. Seabirds Stevie did not recognise strutted in the shallows and the westering sun filled the bay with petal-pink light. The prospect moved him as a Valley sunset had never done so that he saw the marsh and the woods above ‘
Ty-Bach
’
as a setting much older than its Sorrel counterpart in Devon. Down there the landscape was Georgian but up here it was Arthurian. The bay might have floated a barge full of lamenting queens, and the dwarf oaks might have concealed a dragon. It occurred to him that a landscape had never prompted these kind of fancies before and also that he knew so many of the wrong things and so few of the right ones. He did not know the name of that mottled, long-billed wader down there on the shore, and although the solitary blue flower growing on a patch of turf at the edge of the woods looked like a bluebell he knew that it was not but some other flower that did not flourish in the West. When he asked Margaret she said it was a harebell and he replied, ‘All the bloody silly things I’ve memorised. The thrust of an airscrew, the T.N.T. content of a bomb, the price of scrap aluminium—they don’t seem worth remembering in a place like this, Margy,’ and she looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before saying, ‘No, they don’t and they aren’t. I realised that some time ago but it’s nice to think you’ve come round to it on your own. Your father had it right from the beginning. Land and what grows on it, that’s the only really important thing, that and people making do with what they’ve got and where they are.’

He understood then that she must have changed her outlook even more drastically than he and, again like him, was currently recasting her philosophy in an entirely fresh mould, and he wondered what had begun this process and if, as in his case, it was brought about by the pressures of fear. He said, ‘You must be thinking a lot about the old folks and the Valley, Margy. They crop up every time we meet. In the old days we always thought of them as good for a laugh, remember?’

‘I remember,’ she said, ‘but now the laugh is on us. They’ve had a wonderful marriage, better than most of our generation will ever have, and we can’t blame the times either! They had their war, and it was even worse than this for the people caught up in it, people like Paul and Claire, and all those men he planted trees for in that funny little plantation of his.’