The Green Gauntlet (37 page)

‘I’ve just seen Uncle to bed,’ she said, ‘we’ve been down at the Coombe Bay V.E. Celebrations. I’ve been telling everyone you were still in Brussels. What are you doing back here? You aren’t demobbed, are you?’

No, he told her, he was not, but to moderate her disappointment he assured her that there was no possibility of his being drafted out East. ‘It wasn’t that I ’phoned you about,’ he said. ‘Do you see yourself living in a redbrick schoolhouse, putting iodine on grazed knees?’

‘It depends. Redbrick you say? That rules out the Perrin-and-Trail hazards. Yes, if you were happy and settled I’d have no complaints. It’s better than living over a shop and a lot better than sitting on a political platform beaming down at an audience who would sooner be home listening to the radio. What’s headed you in that direction?’

‘Far too expensive to tell you on the ’phone, particularly as we’ll probably be cut off any moment. That’s all for now. I’ll write at length if I can’t wangle a forty-eight hour pass.’

‘No wait. You haven’t …’

He left it at that and rejoined a dozing Archie Bentinck in the lounge, nudging him awake.

‘Write that letter, Archie,’ he said. ‘There’ll probably be a stampede for teachers’ training college places as soon as the big demob starts and for once in my life I’d like to be first on a bandwagon!’

III

P
aul would have denied it and Andy would have derided it, but the truth was they were more alike in essentials than any of the Craddocks. Both had a steadiness of vision that was strong, purposeful, and could at times be brutally obstinate; both had uncertain tempers. Paul, fortunately for himself and others, had found his purpose early in life, and succeeded in holding on to it through periods of boom, slump, local disaster and two world wars. Andy was not so fortunate. At twenty-one he had broken away to find a purpose of his own, and although, to Paul, it had seemed a very seedy one, it had satisfied him up to the time he rushed into the RAF.

From then on, unlike Stevie, he had found another kind of fulfilment. The hard, bright little machines he flew and the challenge of wits presented by aerial combat, had absorbed his zest and curiosity, so that, up to the time he was invalided from the Service, he asked for nothing more, supposing that he would ultimately drift back to his peacetime occupation and get along as best he could with a relatively minor handicap. He had not been (as Claire had expected him to be) shattered by the news that his wife had been seduced by his brother in his absence. He was astonished and, at the outset, irritated by having to make another major adjustment, but his relationship with Margaret, although eroded to some extent, was not destroyed by the circumstances, as it might have been in the case of a less tolerant man. Its present weakness had nothing to do with Stevie. It was related to the changes in society as a whole, for there seemed to Andy to be very little left of the old world by the winter of 1943 and months of hospital boredom had brought about changes in himself, among them a readiness to admit that his affection for Margaret had never had more than a physical basis.

It was not simply the result of a long cooling-off process. Their world, the world they had shared with kindred spirits like Stevie and Monica, had been buried under the rubble of the blitz. Scrap was still in demand but its scavengers were very different men from those Andy had haggled with in dockside pubs and on provincial golf-courses. The Civil Service had moved in and taken over, as they had taken over almost everything else in the country. Behind every rolltop desk and trestle table was a faceless man who worked from the book, who used set rules of procedure and who went home at five o’clock to a wife in the suburbs. In almost every case he was what had become known as ‘a Ministry man’ and this meant that he was immune to flattery and armoured against bluff and bribes. You could not beat him or bully him and he would have been outraged if you had suggested joining him. He was there by Government edict, entrenched behind mountains of forms and files, all needing a hundred different signatures in ancillary departments that seemed to Andy, in his quick, scornful, post-discharge survey of once-familiar terrain, nothing whatever to do with scrap metals, their source or their ultimate destination. It was this, more than his wounds, or the break-up of the old alliance, that convinced Andy Craddock there was no place for him in the present scheme of things and that he would have to make one and make one soon unless he was to go mad with boredom. The demand for scrap, his commercial instinct told him, would not last much longer and he had never had much doubt regarding the final outcome of the war. The old territory had been fenced off. He would never fly again. It therefore followed that he would have to break new ground and take advantage of the fact that he had arrived at the frontier in the vanguard of the gold rush.

He had other unquestionable advantages, chief among them capital that had accumulated appreciably during the last few years. He also possessed a trained ally in the person of Ken Shawcrosse, the ex-gunner. Shawcrosse, he discovered, was really no more than a buccaneer of the kind Andy had encountered by the score in the pre-war scrap world, but there was a difference. The dealers of those days had never sought to acquire the trappings of conventional society whereas Ken, and more particularly his wife, were greedy for them. They were snobs and made no apology for their ambition to be someone, to exert influence, to call the tune wherever they perched, and this intention was the mainspring of their commercial aggressiveness. Shawcrosse admitted this soon after he and Andy had registered their first company, Romulus Development Incorporated. The name, suggested by Shawcrosse, was a sneer at his own obscure origins and the buffeting he had received in the ’thirties.

‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, they tell me,’ he said, ‘but the joker who built it knew his business. His first job was to clobber the opposition and brother, that’s me from here on! Before the war the Big Boys had it all their own way but now it’s anybody’s race. Did you ever read
Gone with the Wind
?’

Andy, who had never finished a novel in his life, said he had seen the film but Shawcrosse said, ‘It didn’t come over in the film. There was that Wide Boy, Rhett Something-or-other, whose theory was there was more dough to be made out of a crumbling civilisation than a healthy one and he was right. This society was a regular carve-up before the war, where two per cent owned ninety-nine per cent of the property but now it’s bust wide open. It’ll never be the same again.’

Andy said, ‘Are you a Bolshie, Ken?’ and Shawcrosse had laughed. ‘I’m anything, old boy, anything that pays off in cash.’

His attitude, in those early months of their association, was patronising but Andy gave him his head. He knew nothing of bricks and mortar, whereas Shawcrosse, reared in the world of small, readily-saleable property that was constantly changing hands, had familiarised himself with present conditions by a close study of local newspapers, sent to him during his long spell in hospital. His familiarity with requisitioning, building licences, green belts, town planning and local government procedures impressed Andy from the outset, and so did the man’s instinctive grasp of the essentials of any given situation requiring an indirect approach. He was like an ambitious ex-ranker sent by superiors to invest a small fortress, and would begin by considering the various merits of taking it by assault, resorting to the less costly method of sapping and mining, or solving the problem by bribing the garrison to open the gate at night. In every area they visited he seemed to know by instinct which method to adopt and the result was always the same, so that Romulus Development Incorporated soon found itself holding a mixed bag of assets, all the way down from a half-blitzed factory and accommodation land on the outskirts of market towns, to condemned workmen’s cottages in built-up areas that had been falling down years before the Luftwaffe hastened the process.

There was an enormous amount of travelling and paper work to be done and all manner of calls upon people who, at first sight, seemed to have no place in a deal but whose goodwill was seen to be essential as time went on. Andy, driving to and fro along the South Coast (an area favoured by Shawcrosse as offering the best post-war promise), met jobbing builders, city aldermen, town councillors, local government officers, country squires who reminded him of his father, farmers, rack renters, people who could speak hardly any English but owned sizeable chunks of England, and any number of Smiths and Browns guessing at the amount of compensation they would collect for a blitzed or derequisitioned premises. It was a strange, higgledy-piggledy world, in its own way as bizarre as Zorndorff’s world of scrap, but Andy found it just as absorbing and sometimes exhilarating although, as he put it to Shawcrosse when they were prospecting a row of terrace houses half-demolished by a flying-bomb, they seemed to be staking a great deal of capital on an anticipated post-war rise in the price of site-values and the lifting of restrictive legislation regarding new building and renovation.

Shawcrosse, as always, had the answer. ‘The point is, old boy, restrictions won’t be lifted for a long time but the man who holds the site holds the four-ace hand, even if he has to play a waiting game. I’m banking on most of these requisitioned premises staying requisitioned on wartime rents, so if you’re looking for a quick turnover on the lines of pre-war scrap deals, stop looking. This is long-term investment—maybe as long as ten years—but in the end it won’t be a matter of twelve to fifteen per cent profit. It’ll be nearer a thousand per cent. I only hope to God the Reds do win the next election and keep their bloody regulations clamped on for years. That’ll leave us sitting very pretty.’

Andy, conditioned to a quick turnover, was not wholly convinced. ‘Suppose we end up holding a hundred thousand pounds-worth of sites and then run out of capital? I’ve already sunk all I’ve got into the Company.’

Shawcrosse said, ‘Go easy, old boy. Do you suppose I hadn’t worked that one out? We now hold round about sixty sites, plus the same number of houses capable of being patched up for the defenders of Democracy when they roll up in their civvy suits. The Government has to release a proportion of buildings and those who are too skint to pay our price will have to rent furnished. We haven’t got any furnished? That’s our next priority—round the auction room for the necessary. A couple of dozen rented houses in the right places—and I’ve made bloody sure ours
are
in the right places—will keep the old pot on the boil while things sort themselves out. If we need more cash there are always ways and means of getting the odd house derequisitioned. Fifty quid invested in palm-oil will take care of that, old boy.’

Andy’s movements were as rapid and uncertain as in the heyday of the scrap empire. This was why Paul’s V.J. letter took more than a week to catch up with him.

Andy pondered it a long time before passing it over to Ken, who was elated by its content. ‘So the old Dad has finally come round to it? He’s handing over in advance, in the hope of doing the poor old Chancellor out of his death duties! Well, good for him and good for you. Cash is nice to have but give me coastal land every time. It can’t be pinched and it can’t shrink in value like the poor old British quid. Nice little reserve, tucked away in the West.’

‘Too far West for your vacuum-cleaner,’ Andy said, but Shawcrosse made the fashionable deprecating gesture, shaking his head slowly to and fro and spreading his palms, Shylockwise. He was almost too quick, Andy noticed, to adapt to the current slang and tricks of expression.

‘Don’t believe it, old boy! With every twopenny-ha’penny clerk and plumber’s mate owning a car it’s not as far West as all that. Hang on to it, and see if you can’t make it grow a bit if one of your brothers or sisters need a bit of the ready. We might even be able to use a slice like that Valley but not yet. Right now we stick to bricks and mortar within a bicycle ride of the nearest factory.’

They plunged back into the mainstream of their activities. With the war in the East over, and everyone speculating on the long-term effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their instincts warned them that they were only one jump ahead of the nearest pursuers.

IV

P
aul’s V.J. letter (that was how it was always referred to in after years), telling each of his children that he was ready to bet the Treasury he would attain the age of seventy-one, was the product of hard thinking set in train by his visit to French Wood just as dusk was falling on the Valley’s celebration of victory in Europe. It was a good deal more comprehensive than the straight deed-of-gift suggested to him long ago by that sharp-nosed old pedant, Edgar Wonnacott, who had taken over his legal chores after the death of Franz Zorndorff, his father’s partner in the original Thameside scrapyard.

Paul had kept clear of lawyers most of his life, disliking their bloodless approach to all human affairs. Up to the day of his death old Franz had kept a fatherly eye on the Valley’s finances and on such capital as Paul did not plough back into the estate. Franz had sometimes given him good advice and had he followed it he could, at several turning points in his life, have reaped considerable financial advantage, but just as he edged away from lawyers he distrusted financiers and what he thought of as their whorehouse, the Stock Market. Indeed, in that respect his views approximated those of a Bolshevik.

He owned very few shares and had never, in the whole of his life, played the market, or spent five minutes studying
The Financial Times
,
but his overall attitude towards money and moneymaking could not have been described as Puritanical, for most Puritans feel very much at home in the countinghouse. It was, perhaps, a recoil from the original source of his acres, as though he could never quite remove the stain of the original fortune amassed by his father and that old rascal Zorndorff during the Boer War. He had always been conscious of having profited by the death of Boer children in the insanitary concentration camps on the Veldt, and the murder of his own generation in Flanders. This was why, on his return to the Valley in the autumn of 1918, one of his first acts had been to channel the whole of his wartime profits into the Valley and see most of it melt away in the agricultural slump of the ’twenties and early ’thirties.