The Green Gauntlet (20 page)

Shawcrosse drew a deep, satisfying breath. ‘With that much in the kitty? In coastal belts along the south coast within easy driving distance of a city. Not too large a city—too many old-established firms with tame county councillors on the payroll, but the kind of place Dad used to take the missus and kids for the fortnight in August before the war. That’s where I’d invest because the fixes have yet to be made and no new building has gone up there since the slump of ’31. You can keep London and Brum and Manchester. They’ve all been blitzed, and beady eyes are already trained on the gaps. I’d go for virgin territory and with that much woo in my wallet any virgin I ran across would soon be in the family way!’ He brooded a moment and then added, ‘It’s too much anyway. Make a man lazy that would. Ten thousand would be about right. Plenty to operate with but not enough to waste.’

One day Andy said, ‘Shawcrosse, you’ve got yourself ten thousand,’ and as he said it the cloud of indecision that had clogged his brain since they had pumped him full of dope in the weeks following his crash cleared, so that he felt almost jocund, as though he was back in the days when he and Stevie were apprentices in the scrap empire of old Franz Zorndorff, the man who had made Paul Craddock two fortunes against his will.

For a long time Shawcrosse, suspicious of miracles, did not take his proposal seriously, but the longer they spent together the more he came to respect this half-fried R.A.F. type who was one of the few men he had met out here who could take his measure and look beyond the blowhard at a man with unlimited ambition based upon sound ideas. Taking nothing on trust, however, he pursued certain lines of private enquiry regarding Craddock and what he discovered not only increased his respect but his confidence in the future. There were two aspects of the man, however, that he never did understand, then or later. One was why a person who could have made a mint out of the war had volunteered for active service; the other was what impulse had guided Craddock, already comfortably off, to invest ten thousand pounds in a talkative stranger on the strength of a hunch. To understand the second of these things he would have had to have known Andy’s original mentor, Zorndorff. To understand the first he would have had to have grown up in the Valley and observed the various interpretations the Craddocks brought to the word patriotism.

The day before they parted, Shawcrosse to be shipped home for his discharge, Andy to another hospital in Algiers, they exchanged addresses and Shawcrosse, serious for the first time, said, ‘You’re not kidding, Craddock? You really would back me if I could come up with the right proposition?’ and Andy said, ‘Yes, if I liked the look of it. I think you’re on to something. Property will be a damned sight more lucrative than scrap after the war and what else is there left for crocks like you and me but to clean up?’

It was a chance encounter that was to set the course of Andrew Craddock’s post-war career but not exclusively along the trade routes.

Chapter Eight

Long Range Salvo

I

P
aul was well aware why the letter from Simon, announcing that he was coming on nine days’ post-O.C.T.U. leave, pleased him so much. It was not only the prospect of seeing his eldest son after so long an interval but also Simon’s request to be met with a horse at Sorrel Halt, proving that he knew his father better than any of them.

He set out about seven a.m. on what promised to be a warm July day, riding his well-mannered grey, Snowdrop II, and leading the cob that Mary sometimes used and was now the only hack in the Valley apart from an old hunter or two out to grass. He was feeling more at peace with himself than for some considerable time. The news that Andy had re-emerged from the fog of war, albeit minus half an arm, had cheered him, although he was still puzzled by the blankness with which the news had been received by Claire. But then, he reflected, she had never clucked much over any of them except her youngest daughter, killed in that air crash long before the war, and had always been happy to let Simon, The Pair, and Whiz go their own ways, leaving Mary in his special charge.

Stevie, he had heard with relief, was grounded for a spell, and Simon as a highly-trained instructor, was unlikely to see active service again, for he was now in his thirty-ninth year and wars were a young man’s business. His daughter Whiz had never bothered him since the day she had married her dour Scotsman and Mary, despite the prolonged absence of Rumble Patrick, seemed contented enough, absorbed as she was in the care of her son Jerry and her new baby daughter whom she had christened Sorrel, after the river that ran past their door.

The valley, he told himself, was in good shape and producing more than it had ever yielded in the past, even during the final year of the 1914–18 war. Four Winds, on his left as he rode along under the park wall, was responding to the hand of Connie Eveleigh’s boy. Fields of wheat rippled eastward as far as the edge of the moor, then south to the dunes. The fields of Hermitage, farmed by old hands like Henry Pitts and his son David, promised an equally good harvest if the weather held. In the great bowl between the moor and the Bluff grew acres of wheat, barley, beans, peas, kale, potatoes, mangold and many other crops, and somewhere on the pastures of the seven farms lived five herds of Friesians and Red Devons, as well as hundreds of pigs and ten thousand chickens. They were all using manufactured fertilisers now and doing it as a matter of course, but he could remember a time when he had had to bully every one of them to adopt modern methods and bring all kinds of pressures to bear on people like Henry to exchange plough-horse for tractor. Now there were no plough-horses to be seen from the western boundary of Four Winds to the cliff fields of High Coombe. They all had tractors, and most of them had many other contrivances of one sort or another, although they could never learn to keep them in good repair and he was always having to get mechanics down from Paxtonbury to replace broken parts or do a bit of welding.

He thought of them collectively and he thought of them individually and it seemed to him that they had adjusted, more or less, to the tremendous demands of the last three years. The black market, he suspected, was still active, despite that mysterious incident concerning packaged poultry along the tideline, a phenomenon that Constable Voysey had never referred to and Henry Pitts hugged to himself as a private joke, but it was limited to a hole-in-corner business and he had stopped prying. There was no point in knowing too much about tenants’ business these days. The time had gone when he could threaten them with the feudal stick if they looked like disgracing him and themselves. He was still a landlord of sorts but they expected and received far more independence than in the past and each of them could have been mistaken for a pre-war freeholder and probably thought of themselves as such. He didn’t really mind, for he was glad to be relieved of the responsibility. After the war, he supposed, most of them would want to buy their farms with profits put by during these boom years, and although he couldn’t pretend that he liked the idea of Shallowford shrinking to a single farm and the Big House, he would probably sell if they were insistent. They all thought of him as old-fashioned and a generation behind the times, but he knew that he wasn’t and that if the full truth were known it was he and old John Rudd, his agent for so long, who had dragged every man Jack of them into the twentieth century. He still missed the solace of John Rudd’s companionship but a man couldn’t live for ever and he supposed another ten years or so would see him laid in the crowded churchyard, alongside so many of the originals. The prospect did not depress him. Taken all round he had enjoyed his life and there was nowhere else he wanted to lie or would feel at home after all these years of striving, disappointment and guarded satisfaction.

He turned off the river road beyond Codsall Bridge and tackled the long slope of the moor, glancing, as always when he rode this way, at the feathered crown of French Wood. Those trees were coming on. Every one of them was in its twenty-fourth year and the spur over Hermitage would have looked odd without them, as odd, no doubt, as the meadowland between the river and the sea on his left if he had planted it with soft timber as Eveleigh Senior had once proposed. There were no other significant changes in the landscape since the day he had first ridden along this road in the company of old John Rudd and the memory of that sunny afternoon, getting on for half-a-century ago, made him smile, for he remembered they had talked about the Zulu war, now as remote as Waterloo. And here he was doing John Rudd’s job for him, taking a led horse to the station to meet a passenger on the London train. It was, he reflected, untypical of Simon to propose such transport, and thinking of Simon’s decision to take a commission after all he wondered if the boy’s outlook had changed and whether he still thought of anyone who owned more than his own house in a suburb as a legitimate target for a cannonade of leaflets, fiery speeches and comparative statistics.

When he had crested the moor and could look over his shoulder at the great camp marching up the western slope to the Heronslea border, his thoughts turned to the war in general and here again he found cause for moderate satisfaction. It had been touch-and-go in the summer of 1940, and depressing enough in 1941 with new disasters coming one on top of the other but they had begun to see daylight in 1942, despite the local swoop of the Fokker-Wulfes, the surge of the Nazis into Southern Russia and the fall of Singapore. The tide had really begun to turn, he imagined, at El Alamein, and now the fighting was over in North Africa, for everyone as well as poor old Andy. Soon, he supposed, they would invade what that fire-eater Churchill was already calling ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’, and with more and more Americans arriving eventual victory was certain, particularly as the Russians were now moving over to the offensive. He wondered, vaguely, what madness could have got into the Germans after their terrible lesson of 1918. He had never been a German-hater until they started slamming poor devils into concentration camps and shooting God knows how many wretched civilians in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Germans of the trenches hadn’t seemed such bad chaps when you got to know them, and he had always prided himself on being one of the very few hereabouts who had never subscribed to the hysteria that resulted from all those 1914 stories of bayoneted babies. But it seemed that the Valley patriots had been nearer the truth after all, for how else could one explain unspeakable crimes like Lidice? Well, it would all sort itself out he imagined, like the other war and like the slump period when he had had to subsidise every farm in the Valley. Mostly it was a matter of holding on and minding one’s own business and he deliberately turned his back on global problems as he crossed the main road, trotted across the short stretch of moor to the railway cutting and rode into the station yard just as a distant puff of smoke over his right shoulder advertised the approach of the London train.

Simon looked fitter than Paul remembered him looking in years. With his combat experience, Paul thought, they ought to have given him a commission long ago, but his involvement with the militant left had probably held him back. Now that Russia was putting up such a fight everyone was inclining left and the irony of this had obviously not escaped Simon, for when Paul commented on the horses he said, with a grin, ‘Got to climb back in the saddle now, Gov’nor. I’m an officer and gentleman again!’

‘How was the O.C.T.U. course?’ Paul asked, ‘didn’t you find it tough going at your age?’

‘Piece of cake,’ Simon said, ‘probably because I’m in training after playing soldiers up in the Highlands so long! I had to watch the finer points, however. It still doesn’t do to be caught whistling “The Red Flag” or eating peas with your knife.’

Paul liked the boy’s sense of humour, seeing behind it a growth of tolerance, and he thought again of Simon’s mother, and how unerringly her championship of the underdog had reproduced itself in the boy. He noticed too that Simon looked about him eagerly and asked intelligent questions about the Valley’s contribution to the war. How cynical were the farmers in their approach to Government appeals to grow more and offset the U-boat campaign? What kind of prices were they getting for produce? How much of it was subsidy? How was High Coombe shaping under the new arty-crafty people Paul had written about. What had happened to Rumble Patrick’s acres after the young idiot had gone to sea? Paul answered his questions in detail, reflecting that this was the first time any of his sons had shown even a passing interest in his life’s work and presently Simon, reining in above the Sorrel, further enlarged himself by saying with a chuckle, ‘Well Gov’nor, we all used to snigger at you and your mediaeval villeins down here, but the laugh was on us after all. I’m taking you more seriously from now on.’

‘Ah yes,’ Paul said, unable to resist a sly backhander. ‘I daresay you are, but you’ll want all land nationalised after the war and chaps like me booted off to make room for civil servants!’

‘No I won’t,’ Simon said, unexpectedly, ‘I’m mellowing. We all wasted time and energy slanging one another through the ’twenties and ’thirties. In the end what happened? We had to form a Coalition and it worked a lot better than I hoped. The fact is, I suppose we ought to be grateful to that little bastard and his gang of psychopaths. At least he succeeded in uniting Left, Right and Centre.’

‘Down here it’s easy to lose one’s way among all the directives we get fired at us. What’ll happen afterwards?’

‘Well, we can’t do a damned thing until we’ve got that bunch behind bars. After that some kind of world federation, with more teeth than the poor old League of Nations. Everyone will have to surrender some sovereignty. The Empire will be the first casualty, I imagine.’

‘I won’t lose much sleep over that,’ Paul said grimly. ‘I daresay you and your brothers sometimes think of me as a flag-flapper but it’s never been much more than a local flag.’ He had always envied his eldest son’s comfortable grasp of the wider issues, however, so he went on, knitting his brows; ‘I was thinking of the Kaiser’s Germans on the way over here. They were idiots, of course, with their brass bands and worship of uniforms but they weren’t murderers, or not the ones I ran into. What do you suppose happened to them all of a sudden?’

‘They were in a mess and took a short cut that landed them in an abattoir. It’s happened before, and not only to them.’

‘Could it happen to us?’

‘No. It might begin to but then a jack-in-office would have an old lady’s pet poodle put down for imaginary rabies in Melton Mowbray and the entire bloody electorate would shout “shame!” and throw the Government in the Thames!’

Paul laughed, the first really hearty laugh he had enjoyed in a long time. ‘You used to be partial to short cuts yourself,’ he said and Simon replied, ‘That’s so, but a man likes familiar ground as he gets older. Don’t forget I’m nudging forty!’

‘It’s not just a matter of age,’ Paul said, ‘it’s a dampening down process, of the kind that I noticed in your mother when I met her in France after the Somme. The last time you were home, just before Rachel was killed, your hatred of what was going on was oozing out of your pores. I didn’t quarrel with that, mind you. You’d seen what Fascists were capable of in France and Spain, but now—well, you seem to me to be off the boil. More professional, perhaps? Is that it?’