The Green Gauntlet (47 page)

The boy’s admission warmed his old bones and they stopped by common consent at a drystone wall that ran diagonally across the moor like a miniature ruin of Hadrian’s barrier in the north.

‘How far is part-way?’ he demanded. ‘Come now, admit that you’ve always regarded me as someone with the outlook of a small-time squire about 1760.’

John said, with a boy’s seriousness, ‘No, Gov! You’re much more than that. You won’t take a damned thing on trust until it’s worked itself into the national bloodstream, but people like you are progressive in your own way and that’s what I like about this country. You and Andy offset one another and provide an essential balance. Menzies—he’s our history master, that one with pebble-glasses—has an obsessive theory about it and although we often rag him on that account he’s managed to inject it into most of the Sixth by the simple method of tireless reiteration. He says that your kind of caution is so widespread among the English that it produces a steady percentage of inventive rebels in every generation and that’s how the Industrial Revolution began, sons improving on their fathers’ essentially sound methods and then, at about fifty, becoming conservative themselves and producing another reaction.’

‘Interesting,’ Paul said, and meant it, for he had often thought along these lines himself when reading beside a winter fire. ‘Does this chap Menzies say where we got it from, or why it’s peculiar to these offshore islands?’

‘Yes, he says it’s a racial accident, Celtic romanticism, Roman organisation, Saxon preoccupation with agriculture, Scandinavian obsession with the sea and finally Norman know-how. Successive invasions produced a kind of five-decker sandwich and you’re living proof of it. I suppose, knowing you, inclined me to take “The Menzies Theory” on trust. What I mean is, you resent change like hell but you always end up by adapting to it and rescuing some of the pieces. The Valley’s proof of it, proof of compromise I mean, and compromise—old Menzies again—is a basic English virtue. Two things could have happened to Shallowford under anyone else. It could have clung to feudalism and atrophied years ago, or it could have turned itself into a cash-register, like parts of the Lancashire and the Welsh coasts. But because you were there, directing the traffic so to speak, it didn’t. In the end it not only kept most of its charm but its essential usefulness.’

‘Well,’ said Paul feeling more gratified than at any time since Andy’s betrayal, ‘I must say it’s a relief to have one’s lifework understood by at least one member of the family,’ and he went home to tell Claire that her conception of John in middle-age was probably the most rewarding mistake she had made in her life.

Claire was encouraged by the friendship she saw developing between them. For her part she had always been wary of her youngest. He seemed to know too much, including what she was thinking most of the time, and his range of interests bewildered a person like herself who had never had more than one. As time went on Paul and John hobnobbed together whenever the boy was at home. Paul’s gain was twofold. He not only used John as a bridge between the extremes of the two generations but also as a source of up-to-date information that enabled him to score points off the opposition. It was John, in fact, who was behind the important victory that saved Shallowford Woods.

By 1954, when he was in his third year at University, the Paxtonbury Civil Airport had grown into one of the most important in the West and the power of the men behind it increased with its expansion. The local M.P was enlisted on their behalf and the threat to the northern half of the woods grew more and more menacing as questions were asked in the House, and a pressure group went to work on the Ministry. There came a time, in the early autumn, when he was almost ready to concede defeat but then, at the last moment, John organised a sally that not only relieved the pressure but ultimately raised the siege altogether. It was made possible by John’s affiliation with the new mass media, television.

On leaving university John surprised everyone except Paul by choosing a television career. Paul, now enjoying the advantages of an inside view, could see how the manifold threads of the boy’s obsessions over the years led naturally in this direction and recalled his wartime expeditions across the Valley with box camera, butterfly net, binoculars and other impedimenta. John’s degree and natural charm enabled him to infiltrate into this half-technical, half-creative world without difficulty, and one September morning he appeared in the drive with a camera team, announcing that he ‘had the answer to the airport zombies in one!’

‘My potential boss has a blank spot to fill in a national programme early in the New Year,’ he told Paul, without preamble, ‘and he’s looking for something he can resell overseas as tourist bait. The overall theme is the English landscape and English customs and if we get good enough coverage we can stir up the National Trust, the Coastal Preservation boys, The Men of the Trees, and God knows who else is prejudiced in your favour. Once it’s been seen all over the country and is passed on to the Castle-and-Cheesecake Department, we shall have a strong hand to play. Who knows? The airport boys might even get the chop!’

Paul, who had had to familiarise himself to the slang of successive decades, stumbled over the identification of ‘the Castle-and-Cheesecake Department’ and John explained that it was the Government department responsible for promoting British tourism. ‘They pack,’ he said, ‘a very hefty punch because tourists are dollars and as we’re always in the red this is important.’

A little more questioning elicited the information that the team intended to film the entire Valley, including many of the items that passed for amenities, and produce a half-hour feature emphasising the changes that had already taken place and the importance of retaining what was left of the natural beauty of the Valley. Paul thought it a splendid idea and rode around with the team, even starring as a mounted leftover from the Edwardian era and enjoying every moment of it.

John said the feature would be called ‘
The Green Gauntlet
’
and described how the title had suggested itself during an aerial survey.

‘This Valley, from a thousand feet, looks like a gauntlet,’ he said, ‘a great, finger-spread glove, made of green and rust-coloured leather. It’s all wrinkled and seamed, and the two predominant colours are unevenly spaced, blotches of both appearing here and there but without any plan. We shall use aerial shots, of course, and they show in our favour, for the only jarring notes are the new buildings around Coombe Bay. The tongues of the woods, for instance, are the original colour of the gauntlet, a faded green and they form the fingers. There’s the gimmick angle too, of course, throwing down the gauntlet to the developers.’

His enthusiasm and technical discipline was about evenly matched and when Paul saw the first run-through (that John called ‘rushes’), he was very impressed. Somehow they had distilled the magic of the place into a pictorial potion, so that most of the elements that had contributed to his lifelong love-affair with these few square miles were there to be sipped. The ranks of the old timber marching down the ridges to the Mere. The Mere itself, enclosed by evergreens and starred with the islet and the ruin of the Folly. The rooted farmsteads of High Coombe, Deepdene, Four Winds, and Hermitage. The mellow look of the Big House with its steep, curving drive flanked by chestnuts. The winding Sorrel and its ox-bows. The open dunes, now confined between two busy roads. And finally the gentle curve of the coast from the landslip to Tamer’s Cove, taking in the sandbars and the Bluff. It was all there. The only thing lacking was its colour.

They had good weather and finished shooting in less than a fortnight and John himself wrote the commentary. On New Year’s Eve Paul and Claire sat in front of their television screen feeling as nervous as a couple of amateurs on an opening night but as soon as the first few feet of film unfolded Paul lost his anxiety in admiration, not only for the subject matter but for its originator.

‘By God,’ he exclaimed, when the last notes of the ‘Greensleeves’ backing faded, ‘that boy’s a bloody genius. He ought to be Prime Minister!’ and Claire laughed as heartily as she had laughed in a long time and said that maybe he would be but as John was unlikely to take office until he was middle-aged neither of them were likely to be invited to Number Ten.

The end result was more satisfactory than any of them could have hoped. The feature received praise from a number of critics and the preservation of the Sorrel Valley became a Westcountry topic for a week or so. There was no more talk of felling the Shallowford oaks and soon it was being canvassed that new runways were to be built pointing east-west, instead of north-south. Paul, making a cautious reconnaissance on the far side of the main road, saw to his intense relief that several meadows running parallel with the highway were now being surveyed. He said, on his return, that the woods had had an even closer shave than in 1915, when Government agents had come to him screaming for timber, and that he intended to give John a sports car on his twenty-first birthday in a fortnight or so. Claire made a convincing show of sharing his sense of delivery and, being in such an ebullient mood, he did not notice her air of abstraction.

He remembered it later, much later, when he would have done better not to have remembered it at all.

Chapter Four

Cave-in

I

T
hat winter the rainfall had been well above average and the Sorrel was in spate earlier than was usual, its waters running tobacco-brown from early November, its ox-bows flooding to the edge of the new road and over it at places where the banks had been cut back to make a low embankment. What had once been the Codsall stubble fields, south of the road, were flooded to a depth of about a foot by Christmas and flotsam carried down by moorland streams and the fast-flowing rill of the Coombe, floated out to the foothills of the dunes.

Paul, walking or riding along this road and sometimes crossing the sloping field to the screen of trees that was now his border with the Shawcrosse Caravan Camp, or ‘Chinatown’ as he preferred to call it, noticed the weight of water coming down the Coombe and estimated that its volume had quadrupled since the felling of so many trees and the removal of so much brushwood from the eastern side of the Coombe, for about here the water had always been absorbed by thick undergrowth and for many years now the Coombe stream had been jumpable at any point between the Dell and Mill Cottage.

It was no satisfaction for him to see that the danger of big-scale erosion he had warned them about at the time was now apparent, even to a layman. They had not listened to him when he had tried, in their own interests as well as his, to set limits to the wholesale clearance that began before the first caravan was hauled up the one-in-four gradient of Coombe Lane. They had just gone right ahead with their clawing and rooting and digging until the only trees left was the screen written into the contract at the suggestion of Claire, who had been raised on a Coombe farm and knew the freaks and features of the long cleft better than anyone in the Valley, with the possible exception of Smut Potter and his brother Sam.

As the winter rains continued Coombe rill enlarged itself into a miniature Sorrel and its overspill raced through the culverts they had built under the road about fifty yards east of Mill Cottage. They were big culverts, capable of handling a large volume of water, but more than water was coming down now and twice the R.D.C. Surveyor’s department had to remove tree trunks and a build-up of stones, branches and jagged lumps of concrete washed down from the camp site.

Paul, watching their operations, warned the foreman to take a look higher up nearer the old Potter farmhouse, where the shoulder of the hill was a wilderness of small red craters, starred here and there with tree-stumps, so that the place reminded him of the quagmire west of Pilckem Wood in the Ypres sector. It had the same tortured look of an area stripped of vegetation and robbed of its natural drainage system, and if much more rain fell it would soon be impassable in gumboots or by tractor. He didn’t care much what happened up here anymore. They had made their mucky bed and they could lie on it, or drown in it for that matter. But any serious erosion in the Coombe would have a chain reaction upon Four Winds’ pastures across the river, and might even cause serious flooding at the ford outside his own lodge gates. Young Eveleigh thought so too, and insisted the Council foreman looked at his fields. Nothing was done about it, although later Paul learned that the Surveyor’s department had telephoned Shawcrosse and Bellchamber, urging them to sandbag and revet the widest section of the rill two hundred yards above the road.

Paul, far from satisfied, got Henry Pitts and Smut Potter up there and both sucked in their lips on surveying the widening area of slush on the eastern side of the Dell. Smut said, ‘Old Tamer knew a thing or two about the Dell. Woulden ’ave a bush trimmed yerabouts. ’Twas moren’ our skins was worth to cut wood this zide o’ the stream. Tamer always reckoned the on’y thing that stopped the bliddy hill shredding away was thicky tangle, reaching from the cliff fields to the river road.’

‘Tamer was dead right,’ said Paul, ‘but seeing that I don’t own a yard that side of the stream what can I do but warn them about it?’

Henry said, thoughtfully, ‘You still own Deepdene an’ High Coombe, dornee? A vine ole mess us’ll ’ave if the brook turns ’erself into a river bigger’n the Sorrel. Four Winds would be under dree foot o’ water but they’d be starved o’ water upalong come a drought. If I was you, Maister, I’d zee the bliddy County Surveyor meself an’ give it to ’un straight.’

‘I might even do that,’ Paul said and intended to, but in the whirl of preparing for John’s coming-of-age party he forgot about it, for it was a long time since they had had a big family occasion up at the House and both he and Claire were out of touch with the kind of entertainment young people seemed to expect nowadays.

The birthday fell late in January and all the preceding week Claire was busy helping Mary and Simon’s wife, Evie, decorate the house. She enjoyed these occasions usually but lately she was feeling her age and left the strenuous work to her daughter and daughter-in-law, who enlisted Margaret and some of the grandchildren in making the ground-floor rooms look festive and prepare for more overnight guests than Shallowford House had entertained since before the war.

Two days before the party, at about eleven in the morning she left the others planning the menu in the big kitchen and took her coffee into the double room west of the hall where, as was usual on these occasions, the partition dividing the drawing-room and dining-room had been removed and most of the heavy furniture cleared or pushed back for dancing.

The girls had, as they said, ‘gone to town’ in here, and the place was hung with evergreens from floor to ceiling. A rostrum had been erected for the dance band, the floor had been waxed and all Paul’s china had been taken upstairs for safety. His pictures had been left, however, for the walls would have looked patchy without them and as she sat sipping her coffee, listening to the sounds about the old house, she contemplated Paul’s favourite acquisition, a portrait of a lady in a blue headdress that was supposed to be a genuine Lely and was one of the few original items he had bought at the Lovell sale, in 1902.

She remembered so many occasions when this room had rocked with noise and laughter. There had been the original sale, the second occasion she had met Paul without realising he was already mooning after Grace Lovell, and there had been the Coronation supper-ball later in the year, when she had been convinced he was going to propose to her but had proposed to Grace instead. Later, in happier days, there had been a succession of Shallowford parties here, and after that a second Coronation dance for Edward’s successor, in 1911.

During the First War the room had been put to more sombre use and twenty beds had been wedged in here when Shallowford served as a convalescent home until 1918. Later still Simon, The Pair, Mary and Whiz, had all had their twenty-first birthday parties here and on two other occasions her daughters had received their wedding guests on this threshold.

It all seemed an incredibly long time ago, and as she sat there, thinking of the coming-of-age of her youngest, she reminded herself that she had already entered her seventy-third year. It was enough to prompt her to heave herself up and glance into the gilt-framed mirror hanging over the marble mantelshelf.

As usual she was able to persuade herself that she did not look her age. She had given up the struggle to keep the grey from her plentiful hair and had settled for a blue rinse. Her skin was mercifully free of wrinkles and her plump, slightly pendulous cheeks had resisted the sallow shadows of most of her contemporaries. Her eyes were still clear and her figure, although inclined towards stockiness, was far from shapeless so that she walked without the slump of the Potter girls and others who had grown old in the last decade or so. She thought, contemplating the coming celebrations, ‘I suppose it’s some kind of achievement to have survived to attend the coming-of-age of a son born after his mother was fifty, and still be game for a dance if anyone asks me! It’s a pity Paul and I can’t slip away after midnight and go down to Crabpot Willie’s shelter, as we did half-way through The Pair’s coming-of-age in 1929. He was just fifty then and I was forty-six, and we were both so full of champagne that we had our own kind of celebration down there and could have taught those youngsters a thing or two I wouldn’t wonder.’ Then she remembered that Crabpot Willie’s shanty had been cleared to make way for the new coastal road and this blunted the edge of her complacency so that she reached up and touched her hair to trap a stray wisp over the temples.

Then it came. For the second time that week. For the fifth time in the last three months. A paroxysm of pain starting in her back, shooting into her left shoulder and running the length of her upraised arm. It was so awful that it made her gasp and stagger, so that she clutched at the edge of the mantelshelf and hung there, head bowed, teeth clamped to her lip as the tide of agony gushed down to her finger-tips and then, recoiling like a spent wave, retreated as far as the shoulder, swirled around for a moment and left her trembling body as suddenly as it had appeared.

She stood quite still for more than a minute incapable of thought of any kind but marshalling every nerve in her body to prevent a scream that would bring others clattering into the room. Then, moving very slowly, she returned to the table and sat beside her empty cup, realising that she would have to confess to Maureen after all, and do it before the party so as to get something to guard against a spasm on the night when she might spoil everything for everybody. She waited another few minutes and then got up and went into the hall, asking the Coombe Bay operator for Maureen’s number and waiting, tapping impatiently, until Maureen’s gruff voice said, ‘Doctor Rudd. Who is it?’

For more than forty years now it had been a joke between them that Claire never consulted her unless she was pregnant. Maureen, who seldom congratulated anyone, had often remarked upon her health, matching it against Paul’s power to survive the injuries he had collected in the way of bullets, shrapnel and broken ribs throughout his life. But today Maureen was not joking and her face did not relax, as it usually did, when she finished her examination. Perhaps she was conscious of this for she turned her back on Claire on the excuse of washing her hands and stood there looking, Claire thought, very old and tired and helpless.

She said, ‘All right, Maureen, you don’t have to find the right words. It is angina, isn’t it? I’ve been telling myself it was chronic rheumatism ever since the first time, last year.’

‘Why didn’t you come then?’ Maureen said, without turning and Claire was touched by the break in her voice. In all the years she had known her she had never seen Maureen shed a tear for anyone, not even her own John Rudd when he had died in the room above a long time ago.

‘I honestly did think it was rheumatism at first. Then I thought maybe I’d put something out and was pinching a nerve. It was only the time before last I was sure and after that I put off thinking about it. The thing is, what’s to be done?’

Maureen turned round and faced her, having got herself under some kind of control. She said, ‘Very little’s to be done at your age, any more than it would be at mine. You could go on for years, depending upon the kind of life you lead. Angina isn’t nearly as predictable as most people imagine, at least I’ve never found it so. It’s a killer in the end but Old Aaron, the reed-cutter, had it for the last fifteen years of his life and he was eighty-eight when he died. He would have been dead at seventy-three if he hadn’t given up cutting reeds and taken to carving model schooners in his porch. The truth is, Claire, the party is over but you can still go on watching it. From now on you don’t do a damned thing impulsively, not even lift a basket, or walk upstairs. You think about it, plan it, and you’ll have to tell Paul at once.’

‘Not before John’s coming-of-age. That’s only forty-eight hours away now.’

‘Well, forty-eight hours won’t make much difference. I’ll give you tablets, of course, but for God’s sake take it easy the rest of this week. Don’t do a damned thing but beam at people and don’t join in any of their games on the night. For that matter don’t imagine you can play strenuous games of your own either.’