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Authors: Henry Williamson

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“Many thanks, ‘Mister’, but I must get back.”

“When are you and Lucy coming to stay? Oh, before I forget, the magneto of this beastly Onion has gone wrong again. Before you go, ask Ernest to come over and have a look at it, will you? Tell him to come to dinner tonight, will you? Now, be a good fellow and let me have a gallon of petrol. I would have done it myself, but the beastly pump’s locked for some reason. The key is in the office, I expect. They usually keep it on the top of the till.”

He found the office door locked and got in at the window facing the railway cutting. The till was open and empty, the key lying on top.

“Shall I book it, ‘Mister’?”

The old man hesitated; then said, “Oh yes, you might as well, I suppose, old chap. Now be a good fellow and shove me off, will you? This beastly asthma always comes back in the autumn, dash it.”

*

When Lucy heard about the Boys’ troubles she thought to ask Uncle John’s advice when she took Billy there to tea, as was the Sunday custom, while Phillip stayed at home and tried to write.
Perhaps she could sell her share of the marriage settlement. Uncle John had been a barrister, and would know about such things.

“The Boys have had their share, I think about a thousand pounds each. I’d like to sell, well, some of mine, anyway.”

“For an agricultural speculation, Lucy?”

“Well, partly,” she answered, blushing. It had not occurred to her that Phillip did not want Hilary to know about the Iron Horses.

“Let me share in it, Lucy.” He went on, “After all, it’s a job well done. The weathering will do good to the soil. In the spring a scattering of what they call ‘artificials’ before drilling lucerne, or sanfoin—lucerne perhaps on the drier fields, since it puts down deep roots—with ryegrass and clover should result in sound grazing. That is what Hilary is after: when he was here last his idea was that all the farms should turn over to stock, and so the deep ploughings, which could not have been done with horses, are just the thing. With balanced grazing I am sure the land will be brought back into heart. Now with your permission, I’ll take care of Johnson’s account. Be sure that I will not mention to Phillip that you have been here to talk about it. Before you spoke of it, I had intended to propose to Phillip that he allow me to regard it as an investment for the future. After all, what little I have, beyond my annuity, will eventually come to Phillip. I’ll telephone Johnson first thing tomorrow and ask him to bring back the Iron Horses, so that the Big Wheatfield can be drilled before the shoot.”

“Iron Horsey come back?” exclaimed Billy, happily. “Daddy come back too, Mummy?”

“Of course, darling.” Poor Billy, did he miss his real mother, without knowing it? She had heard that a breast-fed baby was usually more contented than one fed only on the bottle.

And everywhere in these desolate places I see the faces and figures of enslaved men, the marching columns pearl-hued with chalky dust on the sweat of their heavy drab clothes; files of carrying parties laden and staggering in the flickering gunfire; the waves of assaulting troops lying silent and pale in the jumping-off trenches.

Again I crouch with them while the steel glacier rushing by just overhead scrapes away every syllable, every fragment of a message bawled into my ear; while my mind begins to stare fixedly into the bitter dark of imminent death, and my limbs tremble and stiffen as in an icicle; while the sand-bag parapet above the rim of my helmet
spurts and lashes with machine-gun bullets. The sky of that morning of July the First is an uncaring blue which cannot help us; I meet it the instant I climb up the trench ladder, to see in the flame and the rolling smoke men arising on both sides of me and I go forward with them, and the moment is prolonged as an ordinary moment held within a calm glassy delirium wherein some seem to pause and with slowly bowed heads sink carefully to their knees and roll slowly over and lie still all in one extended motion. Others fall with rifles flung forward, or stop abruptly, to hesitate before turning in a sort of spin before dropping down in a heap to lie still. Others roll and roll, and scream and grip my legs in uttermost fear, and I have to struggle to break away, while the dust and earth on my tunic changes from grey to red.

And when I am hit and lying in a shell-hole others go on with aching feet, up and down across ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and the wave melts away, and the second wave comes up and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the ruins of the first and second, and after a while the fourth blunders into the remnants of the others, and they begin to run forward to catch up with the barrage, in bunches, anyhow, every bit of the months of drill and rehearsal
forgotten
, for who could have imagined that the Big Push was going to be this?

They come to wire that is uncut, and beyond they see grey
coal-scuttle
helmets bobbing about, and the vapour of over-heated machine-guns wafting away in the fountainous black smoke of howitzer shells; and the loud cracking of machine-guns changes to a screeching as of steam blown off by a hundred engines; and soon no one is left standing.

An hour later our guns are ‘back on the first objective’, and Kitchener’s ‘First Hundred Thousand’, with all their hopes and beliefs, have found their graves on those northern slopes of the Somme.

Phillip went over the next morning to see how he could help the Boys in their troubles. He found them lounging in the office. One waste-paper basket, stuffed with catalogues, lay on its side on the floor, half its contents spilled.

“I wonder if you will allow me to help you get all this in order.”

The other basket contained envelopes and letters as though dropped into it without having been read.

“I don’t care what you do,” replied Fiennes, who had heard Pa, on more than one occasion, say that Phillip ought to mind his own business, and not interfere with affairs that did not concern him.

There was a mess of cigarette stubs trodden out on the new wooden floor; a scatter of paper files on the shelves. The till was
open; dust on the typewriter. Several balls of white string lying about, with sheets of unused brown paper of the finest quality trodden and crumpled on the floor amidst the general disorder of the place. Ernest, the eldest, continued to touch a spider’s web in a corner of the window, gently twirling a piece of string between finger and thumb, while intently watching to see if the spider would dash out to seize it. It was an old web, littered with the shucks of bluebottles and the torn wings of moths.

“The fact is, we have no more damned money,” said Fiennes.

“And we don’t know how to tell the men,” said Tim, the youngest.

Phillip pointed at a folded blue form lying on top of the
waste-paper
basket.

“What’s that? The judgment summons?”

“Oh no,” said Tim. “That’s a new one.”

“May I see it?”

“Rather, anything you like,” exclaimed Tim, moving forward to pick it up.

“And there are more summonses in the basket?”

“We didn’t know what to do about it, so there seemed no reason to keep them,” said Fiennes.

“As a matter of fact, we’ve talked the matter over, and on going deeply into the matter, find we are in a bit of a mess,” said Tim.

“I see.”

“It’s extremely decent of you to come over,” Tim went on. “Lucy telephoned to say you were coming. Really, we don’t like bothering you with all this.”

“Well, of course I’ll help you all I can, but it will mean drastic alterations, I’m afraid.”

“We’re ready for anything, absolutely anything, but we don’t know what to do. Also, we don’t want Pa to be upset. It’s his seventy-fourth birthday soon.”

“Can he do anything?”

“I don’t think so.” Ernest spoke slowly and carefully. He had ceased to play with the bit of string. The spider was sulking down its tunnel.

“Then what does anyone suggest?”

“I don’t see that we can do a damn thing!” exclaimed Fiennes, lighting another cigarette. “As far as I’m concerned the sooner the beastly thing is over, the better. I’ll go back to sea again.”

“But isn’t the shipping depression still bad? Can you get a job as wireless operator, do you think?”

“I can work as a stoker. I don’t care a damn.”

The telephone bell rang on the shelf behind him. He took off the receiver and slid it away. “No point in answering the damned thing.”

“Well, you know, it may be from ‘Mister’,” said Tim.

It was from ‘Mister’. His idea was that the Onion should be decarbonised. The engine had done twelve hundred miles, he said, and he fancied the portes wanted decoking, and the rings clearing. It hadn’t the compression it had had. When Ernest came over to dinner, would he bring the requisite tools?

“Bother, I don’t want to go,” muttered Ernest.

“Ernest is a bit busy,” explained Tim. He listened. “Well, we’re all a bit busy just at the moment, ‘Mister’. Yes, I’ll give him your message. Hold on a moment.”

Phillip said, “Tell him that things here for a few days are going to be fairly busy. The Onion will keep, won’t it?” Tim repeated this, and put down the receiver.

“Leave the damned thing off,” said Fiennes. “‘Mister’ and his Onion are bores.”

“I think the first thing to do is to get out a column of what bills, including judgment summonses, are owing.”

“A good idea,” breathed Tim. “We’ll try to get it done by tomorrow, Phil.” He avoided looking at Fiennes, who was in charge of the office.

“Why not now?”

“Well yes, I suppose it could be done now, since you come to mention it.”

Fiennes made no move. At length Phillip said, with emphasised politeness, “Do you mind if we examine the office records in your waste-paper baskets, Fiennes?”

“You can do what you like as far as I’m concerned,” replied Fiennes, getting up to leave. Soon afterwards Ernest, humming tunelessly, moved away to the open door.

“We don’t need these entered into the books, Tim,” said Phillip, picking out apple cores and cigarette packets. “Got a pencil?”

“Pencil? Pencil. Now where did I see a pencil? Ah, Pa borrowed it for his cross-word puzzle. I won’t be long.” Tim hurried away to do his bit to help his hero Phillip.

The hero put the telephone receiver on the rest. Shortly after
Tim returned the bell rang. The Clerk to the Magistrates’ Court inquired in the matter of the fee for stay-of-execution. He had rung up twice before, he said, but the line was engaged. He said the entry by the bailiffs could be delayed forty-eight hours by the promised payment of a fee of
£
2
which must be paid by six o’clock. Phillip said he would go to his office at once.

“By Jove, I forgot,” exclaimed Tim, seeing him off. “I told the bank I’d take a cheque in. It was for that beastly Dynawurker vacuum cleaner I sold Colonel De’Ath, but Mrs. De’Ath refused to take delivery of it, when I called this morning.”

“Did you or didn’t you sell it?”

“I thought we had.”

“Who is we?”

“A commercial traveller who called. He offered to take me in his car, to give a demonstration, and asked me if I had any friends who might be interested. So we went to the De’Ath’s. The traveller offered to leave it with them, saying there was absolutely no obligation to buy.”

“And did you leave it?”

“No, I was coming to that. Outside he said we’d really made a sale, and advised me to buy a machine from him at trade price, and have it sent direct to the De’Ath’s.”

“So he really sold the thing to you?”

Tim laughed dryly. “Well, now I come to think of it, I suppose he did, in a way.”

“I’d better come and help you, I think, Tim.”

“How frightfully decent of you, my dear Phil. We’ll do
anything
you say. It’s a simply terrific load off my mind.”

“Will you ask Ernest and Fiennes if they agree? If so, I’ll want to know how much you owe; how much you are owed; what contracts you have in hand; how many workmen you employ.”

“I can tell you the answer to the last query now, Phil. There’s the carpenter, the smith, his son the apprentice, and ourselves.”

They returned to the office.

“What are the wages? What do the men do?”

“Very little nowadays, I’m afraid, there simply isn’t any work for them.”

“No contracts?”

“None.”

“Then they must be given a week’s notice.”

“I don’t see how we can do that,” objected Fiennes. “We can’t just turn them off like that.”

“Then you’ll pay them out of your own pocket?”

When there was no reply he said, “Do you or don’t you want me as your temporary honorary manager?”

Fiennes shrugged his shoulders. Ernest seemed deep in thought. “We want you to be,” said Tim.

“All right. Now I must return to my farm. I had a bit of a financial crisis, too, but it’s cleared up, thank God. I’ll settle the fee for the stay of execution. There must not be a knock-down sale of this machinery, which will happen if the bailiffs come in. I may be able to come over later on in the day. Au revoir, and don’t forget the figures, Tim. And telephone the bank when they open, find out the amount of the overdraft, and don’t issue any more cheques. Cheerho—see you soon!”

On his way through Shakesbury he called at the Clerk’s office to pay a penalty of
£
2,
learning with dismay that it would only cover that day. “There’s another matter just arisen, sir, a writ has been issued against the Copleston Brothers by Bristol Foundries, Ltd., for sixty pounds.”

“May I use your telephone?”

He got on to the Works. “I’ll be over in a couple of hours or so, Fiennes.”

“Right. You might collect the papers at Roper’s bookshop, and enquire if the
Encyclopædia
Britannica
has come.”

“Who wants it, Fiennes? It’ll cost a bit, won’t it?”

“I don’t know. Pa wants it.”

“What about paying for it?”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter, it goes on the bill. Hold on. Tim wants a word with you.”

“I’m most frightfully sorry, but Miss Calmady was asking about the groceries,” explained Tim diffidently. “She says they weren’t sent out, as usual, last Monday.”

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