Post of Honour (93 page)

When fighter aircraft became more sophisticated his appetite for concerted and preconceived action grew with every sortie. He operated less and less as a well-mounted buck in the hunting field and more and more like a seasoned boxer, fighting his way towards a world title. He was in line for promotion now and, as he himself would have put it, intended to keep his nose clean. As a squadron-leader he would have some sort of say in tactics and could progress from the dogsbody stage to ranks where he might be given a chance to put some of his theories to work.

Out here, in the Western Desert, the tempo of the aerial war was very different from the comparative slapdash days of British-based operations in 1940 and early ’41. Squadron scores and squadron casualties were more moderate and combats were by no means as frequent as over the Kentish Weald and the Channel. To an extent, despite the ceaseless sway of armies between the Qattara Depression and Benghazi, the contest had settled down. Andy, based in the region of the Ruweisat Ridge, east of Alexandria, was now flying every day, escorting coastal convoys or, once Rommel had launched his May offensive, the Blenheim bombers raiding enemy supply dumps and occasionally he tangled with a Stuka. In June of that year he got his first confirmed kill, a JU 88 lumbering into Tobruk after its surrender. Two days after that he shot out of the sun and killed a Stuka. He watched, impersonally, as the maimed aircraft hurtled down in wide circles to explode on the brown emptied landscape below and then made for base, unable to try his luck at strafing lorries crawling along the coastal road because his ammunition supply was exhausted.

All through the final eastward heave of the Afrika Korps towards Egypt he was happily engaged in this kind of ploy, peeling off and following his leader down to shoot up transport, tanks and self-propelled 80 mm guns. The overall progress of the war, or even the campaign, did not concern him. He concentrated on the immediate task and gave hardly a thought to his wife, to his brother Stevie, or to the future once this fascinating period of his life should end. He did not contemplate death either, despite the occasional failure of a messmate to return from a sweep across the great blue and white bowl of the sky enclosing this featureless desert. Sometimes, when he was alone up there he would give expression to the sheer exhilaration of flying by mouthing some dance tune of the past, when he, Stevie and their wives had zoomed about Britain and the Continent in one or other of their many fast cars and although he could not hear himself sing, the rhythm of a ’thirties tune would conjure up a fleeting picture of Margaret’s chubby face puckered with laughter. The thing that sometimes puzzled him was that he no longer felt a physical need for women and he had once raised this subject with the unit M.O., who set about reassuring him with the paternal earnestness of the family G.P. In Andy’s view the man talked nonsense. The fact was the highly complex business of handling aircraft, and evolving new techniques satisfied his creative urge if there was such a thing outside of a book. When Margaret was available he had enjoyed her undemanding company and taken a great deal of pleasure in possessing her but the current demands made upon his energy far transcended the demands of these pleasant trivialities and he had never been much of a letter writer. It would, in fact, have surprised him a good deal to be reminded that there had once been a time when the sight of her, dressed for a night out, had enlivened him sufficiently to spoil her make-up and send her back to the dressing-table uttering counterfeit protests in her lilting Welsh accent. Because of this he did not think it strange that little or no word of her reached him when the squadron post-corporal shouted, ‘Mail up!’ Home now belonged in the past, before this demanding and wholly satisfying occupation translated him into a sensitive machine. Home had to do with contracts and bargaining, with bluff and a kind of second-rate espionage waged from behind desks and over the telephone. Somehow he could not see himself returning to it, any more than he could picture himself a farmer like his father. He flew into the sun, automatically noting the few landmarks and searching the vast brown wasteland for targets. To Andy Craddock, who all his life had been seeking outlets for his explosive energy and technical know-how, the war in the Western Desert was a legacy that had come his way when he was still young enough to profit by it.

One morning he did get a letter from Margaret but it told him very little, for something she had written about Stevie’s whereabouts had been blocked out by the censor. She was thinking of giving up nursing, she said (he had forgotten she had returned to it), and hoped he was well. She had seen something of Stevie but nothing of Monica. She sent her love and missed him. That was about all and a less preoccupied man might have read an effort of composition into the note—for it was little more. He stuffed the letter in his pocket and ambled across the hard sand to watch his ground crew warm up his Hurricane. Today they were all taking a closer look at Rommel’s build-up in the Mersa Matruh area.

V

F
ar away to the east, where the brassy Indian sun beat down on the trim white buildings of a Sports Club some two hundred miles west of the Burma battlefront, another member of the Craddock family basked in the warmth of her own content.

Karen McClean who, as ‘Whiz’ Craddock, had once carried off all the gymkhana prizes within a twenty-mile radius of the Valley, sunbathed her honey-coloured body beside the staff pool, contemplating the present with a smugness that discouraged close attention to the letter from her mother that had come in with the last mail. Claire Craddock was a gossipy letter writer once launched upon Valley topics, but it had never occurred to her, poor dear, that her daughter Whiz did not place the same importance on good harvests, or the enlistment in the Armoured Corps of a Valley craftsman’s son. Whiz had been interested but unmoved by news that the Luftwaffe had demolished Periwinkle, killing Rachel, her sister-in-law, and Rachel’s brother Harold, but she was not deeply concerned about the prospect of her sister Mary’s eccentric husband’s intention to forsake the land for the sea. Rumble Patrick, like most of the other Valley characters, had always struck her as a hobbledehoy and she had never regretted rejecting offers of marriage pressed upon her by farmers’ sons and marrying Ian who had now secured a staff appointment and seemed destined to move into the upper echelons of the Service. Some people, Mary for instance, would consider Ian very dull, with his Scots caution and infinite attention to detail but he suited Whiz because, alone among the Craddock tribe, her personality was undiluted by sentiment. All her life, and she was approaching thirty now, she had observed the conventions and, within those conventions, excelled. Singlemindedness, plus an uncompromising rejection of anything loosely described as romantic, had brought her precisely the kind of success she sought at any one time. She had been acknowledged the most expert equestrienne in the Valley and, later, its most expert dancer if one discounted fancy steps. At twenty she had married and had spent her life on foreign stations, getting to know people likely to contribute to Ian’s advance and shamelessly flattering the leathery wives of station commanders. She could manage house-servants with the easy competence of someone who had never had to grapple with the perverse independence of the Anglo-Saxon working-class and, as far as anyone could remember, she had never been seen to laugh, not even at an air commodore’s joke. Ian McClean had a very great respect for her and secretly acknowledged the part she had played in his promotion to the undreamed of status of group captain but, being a Scot, he would have found it too embarrassing to have told her as much, any more than he could have found words to express satisfaction or otherwise with her recent announcement (made under cover of darkness) that she was pregnant. He must, on the whole, have been pleased however, for his approach to her became even more ambassadorial as time passed. When she reached her fourth month of pregnancy they were treating one another like a couple of professional diplomats moving towards a common goal. The only moment of the day either of them unbent was when they discussed the forthcoming addition to the McClean family over the six o’clock drink that was now a ritual, for Ian saw comparatively little of his wife and child these days. He said, in a Perthshire accent magically released by a dram of Scots whisky, ‘It’s a pity the bairn canna be born in Scotland but I see no prospect o’ that.’ To which she replied, dutifully, that it was indeed a pity, for it would inflict upon his Aunt Jean, known to be very rich, a second disappointment, particularly if it was another girl. Ian said, after a thoughtful pause, ‘It’ll no’ be a girl,’ and she accepted this, supposing him to be on fairly intimate terms with God.

Their rectitude was like a wall of smooth Scots granite, isolating them from a war that had by now involved so many amateurs that professionals wondered whether it was worth winning at such a cost to tradition. Seen like this man and wife were extraordinarily alike. Simon, noticing this as long ago as their wedding day, had said, ‘They’re not only made for one another, they were designed for mutual inflation!’ a remark that still encouraged Claire, in her lighter moments, to make bawdy guesses at their bedroom conversation. Always inclined to tease her children Claire continued to begin her letters with ‘Dear Old Whiz …’ and when Whiz’s replies began ‘My Dearest Mother and Father …’ she knew she had made her point.

Sitting beside the Club pool in the glaring sunlight Whiz turned the pages of her mother’s latest letter, noting that Periwinkle Farm would remain a ruin until the war was over, that the local black market was enriching certain Valley patriots, and that Stevie and his wife Monica had quarrelled over his refusal to accept a discharge to industry, but it was like listening to the prattle of Elspeth at present teaching a celluloid duck to swim in the shallow end. The only impact the letter made was to cause Whiz to wonder why her mother should bother to commit such trivia to paper and post it half-way across the world and soon she folded the sheets, returned them to her crocodile handbag and called for Club stationery to write a reply. She made no reference to her mother’s gossip but demolished it for what it was worth in her opening paragraph that ran, ‘
Dearest Mother and Father, I received your letter by today’s post and am happy to inform you that I expect our second child in the first week of December, almost certainly after the 4th but before the 7th …
’ a perfectly logical prophecy that reduced Claire Craddock, reading it at the breakfast table six weeks later, to helpless laughter. Paul dried the tea-splattered sheet of paper with a napkin and then joined in, so that the study rang with merriment. He said, when they had recovered somewhat, ‘Where on earth did she get it from? Do you suppose it was from me? Was I ever that pompous?’

‘Oh yes, and sometimes still are, but God, in His infinite mercy, threw in a handful of self-doubt so that you deflate every now and again. Read the rest of it for I can’t, it’ll set me off again,’ and he relayed the news that Ian’s staff appointment had been confirmed, that they had lunched with the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp, that all three of them were in excellent health, and that Ian’s batman had made little Elspeth a large rocking horse fitted with a howdah.

At this point he broke off to remark that he had always supposed howdahs were reserved for elephants, but Claire clearly could not have been listening for all she replied was: ‘I must be right, you know. I mean about Whiz and Ian. Those dates prove they’ve reduced sex to a ceremonial.’ And then, with one of her impulsively affectionate glances, ‘Oh God, Paul, I’m glad we were young a long time ago and not now. What’s got into these youngsters since the ’thirties? They’re so dreadfully earnest.’

‘They’ve plenty to be earnest about!’ Paul said piously and returned to the
Western Morning News.

Chapter Three

Garrison Duty

I

I
t was midsummer when Whiz’s letter enlivened the breakfast table of the Big House. By then Paul had had plenty of time to absorb the shock and disappointment of Rumble Patrick’s desertion from the Valley garrison.

About three months before, on an evening in early April, he had watched the battered family Austin grind over the loose gravel at the bend of the drive just as dusk stole across the paddock, a scurry of dry chestnut leaves preceding it like fussy outriders. He stood at the library window, his long face wearing what his family called ‘his Elizabethan expression’, which meant that he was engaged in pondering a Valley problem that was complex but not necessarily insoluble.

The family joke—Paul’s Elizabethan look—went a long way back in Valley history, dating from the day he had brought home an oval miniature, allegedly by Nicholas Hillyarde but almost certainly a mid-Victorian copy, and Claire, comparing the sombre features with those of her husband, exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s
you,
Paul! When you’re looking for a way around something,’ and since Paul rarely concerned himself with anything not linked to the thirteen hundred acres enclosed by the River Whin and Coombe Bay Bluff, the air of dignified gloom on the face of Hillyarde’s model became ‘Paul Craddock’s Elizabethan expression’.

That particular day in 1942 the old joke had relevance. Paul had been bedevilled by a Valley problem ever since Rumble Patrick, son-in-law freeholder now without a farm, had talked of enlisting, and thus touched off a long, rumbling quarrel in the Big House. That morning Paul had seen him load an extra can of hoarded petrol into the boot of the Austin and it occurred to him that Rumble could very well have got to and from his declared destination on the petrol in the tank. His uneasiness as to what Rumble was up to increased when the boy was gone all day and he had noticed his daughter Mary’s air of abstraction at lunch. He told Claire, grumpily, ‘If he’s gone off to join something I’ll stop his gallop somehow, even if it means calling in the War Ag. Committee! It’s plain bloody stupid and he knows it. Good God, we’ve already got three sons and a son-in-law in uniform, and most of the people round here are hugging their reserved occupations like lifebelts!’

This was not strictly true. There were only two young farmers, David Pitts of Hermitage and Bob Eveleigh of Four Winds left in the Valley, but Paul said it in an effort to justify himself. He really did think that Rumble Patrick’s services were of far more value to the country here than in any fighting unit but that was not the real reason why he so strenuously opposed his son-in-law’s enlistment. His opposition was at once more personal and more instinctive, for it was based on a belief that Rumble’s involvement in the shooting war set the entire future at risk, not only the future of his daughter but that of the Valley itself. To a man who saw the Second World War as a winner-take-all contest between a mob of sadistic bullies and his particular corner of provincial England, it seemed to him absurd to stake so much for so little—the continuity of a way of life, in exchange for a single trained soldier in the field. It maddened him that nobody else, not even his own daughter who stood to lose her personal happiness, shared his viewpoint.

He turned away from the darkening window and lounged into his estate office that adjoined this favourite room of his. Here, above the elbow-height drawing-board desk hung the estate map, a huge, flapping affair, scored by the musical chairs of forty years. He studied it gloomily, doing the kind of sums he had done so often since he came here as a greenhorn of twenty-three and the answers, he decided, were suspiciously like those resulting from similar calculations in 1915 and 1916, when the Valley was hanging on to its community life by a shred of barbed wire.

To the west defences were still impressive. Bob Eveleigh was not only a sensible lad but a good son, unlikely to abandon his widowed mother to her own devices. That was one crumb of comfort to be gathered from that idiotic hit-and-run raid, for Harold Eveleigh had never been the farmer that his son promised to become. North-east of Four Winds the three hundred acres of Hermitage were also secure under the unimaginative hand of David Pitts, son of Paul’s oldest friend in the Valley, and Henry himself was still capable of doing a good day’s work when he was not compounding a felony by selling the odd pig and chuckling over the profits. Periwinkle, the farm without a farmhouse, was now joined to the Home Farm and the deep belt of woodland that ran behind Hermitage was safe for the time being. In 1916 he had had the devil’s own job to save the timber from the grasping hands of Government pimps. So far this war had produced no demands in that direction for, to everyone’s surprise, there had been no trench systems and therefore no need for millions of pit-props.

Further east, however, there was plenty to worry about. Here lay his father-in-law’s old farm, High Coombe, Francis Willoughby’s domain, Deepdene, and finally the old Potter holding, now farmed by the French Canadian Brissot and his partner Jumbo Bellchamber, and there was an inherent weakness in each bastion. High Coombe, healthy enough until Dick Potter had taken it into his silly head to enlist, was being fumbled by a fanciful amateur whom Paul had never trusted, notwithstanding his university degree and pseudo-scientific methods. He suspected that the new tenant, a townsman called Archer-Forbes, had turned farmer in 1940 partly to dodge military service and partly to fill the bellies of himself, his allegedly artistic wife, and their innumerable children, who were all called by pretentious names—Sebastian, Peregrine, Orela, Sonia and Rhoda. A man who could give his children names like that was surely unstable and Paul suspected that the Archer-Forbes tribe not only returned his distrust but considered him and his whole philosophy as anachronistic as feudalism.

Lower down the slope, at Deepdene, Francis Willoughby, son of a former tenant, farmed on, but the Willoughbys had never been a robust family and the asthmatic Francis, a confirmed bachelor, had no prospects of continuity. South again, at Low Coombe, sometimes known as The Dell, the two hundred acres once held by the Potter family were going through another of their periodical crises and the farmhouse, Paul believed, was a clearing house for the local black market, supervised by that old poacher, and First World War sniper, Smut Potter, and his avaricious French wife, Marie. He had no proof of this and Brissot, the French Canadian, was a sober enough fellow, but Brissot’s partner Jumbo behaved as if he would have been more at home behind a barrow in Aldgate than cultivating land and raising stock in a remote corner of the Westcountry. Paul had seen Smut and Jumbo hobnobbing together in the private bar of The Raven and their presence there was proof that they were up to something for, until recently, both had used the public bar where private conversation was out of the question. Smut, he felt, could be trusted to keep the Valley out of the police courts, if only for his landlord’s sake. The two men had a warm personal relationship that went right back to the Edwardian era but Jumbo Bellchamber was a relative newcomer to the Valley and his place there had been won by marrying one of the Potter girls, herself a reformed harlot.

It was in the attitude of these two men that Paul noticed the first signs of dry rot in the system of benevolent despotism that had prevailed in the Sorrel Valley for so long. Neither had ever been subservient but he had always looked upon them as friends, owing him the kind of allegiance still paid by people like Henry Pitts and other tenants who consulted him on major changes of policy. Since the summer of Dunkirk, however, and the passing of the imminent danger of invasion, Smut and Jumbo had gone their own way with the air of freeholders and this was too clean a break with tradition to pass unnoticed by a diehard like Paul Craddock. He had said nothing, not even to Claire, but he had brooded on the possible effects this new attitude might have upon post-war trends. So much was changing and so quickly, far more rapidly than it had changed under the terrible stresses of the last war. For a time, back in 1940, the unity of the Valley families had seemed as indestructible as in the days when he had first settled there, but once the fear of national extinction had receded there had been a curious reaction evidenced in so many ways. He saw it in the cynical approach of men like Smut to the rationing regulations, and in the prices charged by Smut’s wife to Royal Marines who patronised her shop. It was noticeable in the shallow, ultra-left chatter of Archer-Forbes’ wife at High Coombe, and in a general atmosphere of let’s-see-what-we-can-make-out-of-the-damned-war spirit that was like an epidemic that never ran its full course but was always breaking out in odd corners of the estate, like the pig-sties of the genial Henry Pitts, and could even be found in his own wife, Claire. It was nothing very much, he told himself, frankly admitting that his love for the Valley often made him a prig, but it was there, lurking in the superior smirk of that damned Archer-Forbes woman, or the casual ‘Giddon, Maister, us have to live, doan us?’ of Smut Potter, when Paul warned him that he could be prosecuted for hoarding eggs that should have gone elsewhere. And now, as though the sickness had suddenly appeared on his own doorstep, here was Rumble Patrick talking of abandoning his acres for the duration and opting for what was, despite all the claptrap they talked, the far less demanding life of the Forces.

He turned away from the estate map and, hands deep in breeches pockets, returned to the library, running his eye along a shelf of brown leather spines as though searching for a subject to take his mind off his immediate problem. He did not reach for a book however, for he was listening to sounds from the hall and presently they told him what he wanted to know, that Rumble Patrick had been upstairs to see Mary and was now standing in the passage leading to the library talking to Claire, apparently ascertaining whether or not this would be a propitious moment to explain where he had been all day and why he had needed that extra ration of petrol. He heard Claire say, ‘Yes, he’s in there, Rumble …’ and then, with a hint of uncertainty ‘Well, that’s up to you. I’m not taking sides, so don’t count on me.’

That was it, then. Another gap torn in Valley defences through which God alone knew what problems might advance. At best more work and more muddle; at worst a daughter left without a husband and condemned to a life of shadows, like so many Valley wives in the decade that followed the 1918 Armistice.

Rumble came in without knocking, cheerful, tousled and, Paul decided, a little too hearty in his approach. Glancing at him Paul’s mind went back to an interview with the boy years and years ago, when Rumble, expelled from school for a series of extravagant practical jokes, had stood there by the window refusing Paul’s offer to send him to the Agricultural College and announcing his intention to try his luck in Australia. Paul had loved him for that because he knew why the choice had been made. As an adopted son Rumble Patrick considered that the line of succession should remain with Simon, Andy or Stevie, and nothing Paul or Claire could say had persuaded him to do otherwise. He had gone off, at sixteen, to make his own way in the world, and had not returned until the mid-thirties to claim Mary and Periwinkle Farm, but even then, with that independence that had been both his father’s and mother’s legacy, he had insisted on buying it and Paul could even remember what he had said: ‘If I farm I farm my own land, Gov’nor.’

Well, here was the same obstinacy and for a moment Paul was able to study it objectively. He said, without looking at him, ‘You don’t have to grope for the soft approach. I know where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to. All I’m interested in learning is
why
.’

‘I don’t think I could say off my own bat, Gov’nor, but we might solve it together. Providing you were willing to try that is.’

This time Paul did look at him, expecting to see the fleeting, half-quizzical smile that was something else the boy’s urchin father had bestowed on him but Rumble was not smiling. He looked troubled so that Paul said, with a shrug, ‘I thought you had more sense than any of them but it seems you haven’t. One bomb and you go overboard, looking for sharks with a knife between your teeth.’