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
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
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