Chewing the Cud (5 page)

Over fifty years later, in Australia, to which he had immigrated, I met once again my platoon sergeant, Bill Grandfield, and in a Sydney pub he told me, “When I saw you lying there bleeding, I went berserk!”

He had stood over my body blasting away with his tommy gun, and the rest of my platoon let rip too. Once the stretcher bearers had carted me off, Bill was in fact in command of both my platoon and Charlie's, and he held off the enemy for nearly a couple of hours till reinforcements arrived. He was, I'm glad to say, awarded the Military Medal. We had eight others wounded besides myself. The attackers, it was later found in the diary of one of them who had been taken prisoner, picked up twenty-six of their own dead.

I won't weary you with long descriptions of my recovery from the wounds inflicted on me by a German soldier throwing a British grenade at a British Grenadier in an Italian wood. Suffice it to say that at a field dressing
station they operated on me to remove lots of shrapnel and stitched up all my flesh wounds, and then they sent me to a hospital at Caserta, where I seemed to be mending nicely. Suddenly, however, I became very ill with trouble in one lung. It seemed that a tiny bit of something, clothing perhaps, had been blown into that lung and caused an abscess, and now I was flown down to hospital in Naples (the same one where I'd had jaundice eight months before).

Here things worsened, as I now had something called a cerebral embolus, a nasty business that made me — before I lost consciousness — feel sure that I was going mad. When I came to, I had been put in a single-bed side room. Myrle's photograph was on the table beside me. I turned it back to front, saying, “I shan't see her again.” However, this dramatic forecast turned out to be wrong. For thanks to that new wonder drug, penicillin, I gradually got better, well enough to be sent home in a hospital ship and then to hospital in Liverpool.

W
hen, some days later, the ward doors opened to admit visitors — wives, sweethearts, parents — one of those visitors was my own wife. Myrle told me later that she was frightened she wouldn't recognize me in the long line of beds containing sick men, many amputees among them. I must have looked very different to her from that day on the platform at Windsor Station. My weight had dropped from 168 pounds to 112 pounds, and I had to lift one arm with the other in order to wave fondly at
her. But seeing her again was, of course, the greatest of tonics and I began to get better.

A final irony was that on her second long journey by rail up to Liverpool to see me, she walked into the ward and there was my bed, empty. They had suddenly sent me to a convalescent home near Weston-super-Mare, and neither had been able to contact the other. She was now faced with a return journey with no return ticket and, what was worse, not enough money to pay her fare. With admirable aplomb she managed to find a seat in a compartment in which there were a number of officers who had decided to play poker to while away the long trip and kindly asked her, Could she play? Would she like to? She could and she would and she won enough off them to do away with her worries about money.

From the convalescent home, I went to the only place I then thought of as home'the house where I'd been born. For the greatest part of two years Myrle and I lived with my parents, and my return to health is best judged by the fact that in October 1945 Myrle gave birth to a daughter, Juliet.

At around the same time I was invalided out of the army, my thoughts turned to farming again, the thing I'd always wanted to do. So back to the Wylye Valley went Myrle and I and the baby, accompanied by Anna, the first jointly owned dog we'd had.

Anna was a black-and-tan smooth-haired dachshund, and when we had first collected her as a puppy, we feared she might be deaf, for she paid no attention to what we said to her. We learned there are dogs and there are dachshunds, strong-minded individuals who prefer to have things their own way — always.

We lived in a tiny old house called Tudor Cottage, where the only bath was a tin one taken in front of the fire, and the only sort of lavatory was an earth closet, or outhouse, in the garden. The contents of this I would bury in the field behind, and because I used a rabbiting spade with a curved blade, that field, when finally we left, was a strange sight, its ordinary grassy green stippled with a great number of perfectly round very dark green dots.

Tytherington Farm seemed suddenly to have jumped forward into the twentieth century, you might say. The horses were almost all gone, machinery ruled, the downs were a sea of corn. Only Tom and Henry and Billy and the
rest were just as I had remembered. Like the bombers we had then watched flying to Bristol, the war had passed over their heads and left them quite untouched.

I wasn't really much good on the farm, I wasn't yet strong enough, but I still wanted to become a farmer. That was my long-held ambition. So the next move was to leave Myrle and the baby with Mother and Father and go back to school, to an agricultural course, in fact, set up in a Wiltshire manor house for ex-servicemen.

I shared a bedroom with three other men. There was Tommy, who was not long out of hospital where they'd been treating him for what people in Father's war called “shell shock.” There was Pat, the eldest of us, urbane and kindly, who knelt by his bed each night to say his prayers. There was Sandy, who on most nights was not there to see this, for he had acquired a local light-of-love with whom he passed his evenings. “Shredded Wheat” he called her, and he always carried a mackintosh on these forays to lay her upon and save her from the damp. And there was me, only remarkable for the large cage that I kept in the bedroom, containing some hamsters. Unfortunately, these in due course escaped, and Lackham House (which is nowadays a very reputable agricultural college) suffered a hamster infestation, as the creatures colonized it and bred at speed. The German prisoners of war who were doing the
cooking pursued them through the kitchens, brandishing soup ladles.

Our course turned out to be a great deal shorter than planned, because the winter of 1947 froze everything solid and we were all sent home for many weeks. But at the end everyone, dullards and laggards alike, was given a certificate, and we all set out to look for work in the agricultural industry, as cowmen or stockmen of some sort, perhaps as farm managers. Some, a very few — Pat for one — actually bought or rented a farm and began in business on their own account.

As for me, the family business came to my rescue. In the early years of the last century Grandfather, Charles King-Smith, had moved from a paper mill in Devon to take over one in a village called Bitton, in Gloucestershire, midway between Bristol and Bath. All paper mills need plentiful supplies of water, and the Golden Valley Paper Mills stood beside and fed off a tributary of the River Avon called the Boyd Brook, which ran slowly down the Golden Valley. The mill (oddly sometimes singular, sometimes plural) was a fairly small one, specializing in the making of high-quality paper, from rags rather than from wood pulp, and it was very much a family firm.

After the Great War, Grampy K-S was joined by my father and by his next brother down, my uncle Joe, who
had been a prisoner of the Germans. He was really named Philip, but apparently as a boy he had had a favorite cat called Joe, who somehow lent him its name. Possibly they exchanged and the cat became Philip. I don't know.

Twenty or so years later, Grandfather, Father, and Uncle were joined at the mill by my brother, Tony, my cousin Beresford, and my uncle Terence. There would, I suppose, have been space for me, but by then I was set upon farming. (What chaos I would have caused in the business had I had anything to do with its accounts!)

Golden Valley Paper Mills had done well during the war, and Father, with the agreement of Grampy K-S and Uncle Joe, decided that the firm would buy a small farm and there install me as manager, ostensibly to supply the mill canteen with milk and eggs. So off I went with my little diploma tucked underneath my arm to look for a place of my own.

Hindsight makes Clever Dicks of us all, and it's easy for me now to see the long string of mistaken judgments that threaded through my farming life. Hastily and inadequately educated in the science and business of agriculture, after a spasmodic practical training on a huge downland chalk farm with no milking herd, I then, with no further experience, settled hastily upon a much too small dairy farm in poor order (heavy soil, no drainage, low fertility, good
percentage of useless woodland). It was called Woodlands Farm (logical really, because seven or eight of its fifty acres were, indeed, covered in trees) on the edge of a village with the unromantic name of Coalpit Heath (again logical, for there had been opencast mining there).

But at last we had a home of our own, our first proper home, and now at last we were to be farmers.

I shall never forget the day of the dispersal sale at Woodlands Farm, when the previous farmer was moving out. The last lot on offer to the crowd of bidders was the bull. Six feet away, the Shorthorn bull stared fixedly at me with hot eyes. I don't remember thinking much about the length of his horns. But they did look sharp. He was blowing hard, and he shuffled his forefeet in the straw of the ring, like a boxer. Then he put his head down.