The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I have had much time for reflection in these last years of deepening loneliness. Often, in the sleepless hours of night I have reviewed my own conduct during the days when we hovered upon the brink of disaster. I have wondered whether I could have done anything, by word or deed, to have saved my country – or, at least, my home.

Perhaps it sounds conceited for an obscure, retiring man even to consider the possibility of guiding his country away from that abyss; but history tells us of many such men who rose up in the darkest hours to guide the destiny of their fellows. If I had raised my voice in the sacred cause of sanity, could I have done anything? If I had clothed myself as a prophet, taken a staff and gone from village to village preaching the gospel of self-preservation, could I have gained sufficient followers to defeat the submerging madness? Always I come to the same conclusion. If I could not save my own home, I could not have saved the world.

After a night’s rest I was sufficiently recovered from Major Jagger’s speech to think coherently once more. It was useless to deceive myself any longer. Jagger was not bluffing. It was no good pretending that it would ‘all blow over’. Jagger meant business: he had proclaimed his fateful decisions to the world and I knew the man well enough to realise that nothing would divert him from his ruthless purpose.

My own course of action was quickly settled. I had a clear-cut, inflexible conviction of the right and patriotic thing to do. It happened to be a Saturday, and every Saturday morning it was the custom of our small community to meet together in the granary of The Manor House to decide upon the produce that we should take to Market that day.

This was an excellent opportunity to declare my policy, for it saved the disturbing necessity of making an ‘occasion’ of it by calling a special meeting.

‘You have seen this morning’s papers,’ I began. ‘Some of us listened last night to Major Jagger’s speech. I’m afraid we have some very black days ahead of us, and I think we should be unanimous upon the proper understanding of our duty.’

Old Humphrey, who was nearly eighty and very deaf, had probably not seen the papers, nor heard a word of Jagger’s speech, and Jim, although a willing boy, was only sixteen, and slow in the uptake. I scarcely expected either of them to grasp what I was talking about, but by speaking, apparently, for the benefit of our farm hands I was able to let Pat and Robin know my views without restraint.

For Pat and Robin were of an age to understand: reliant enough to form their own opinions. They might have resented any attempt of mine to influence them had I spoken to them privately, and I desperately hoped that they would understand me, and stand by me in all that I had planned.

‘In the next few months,’ I said (with my eyes upon the goggling Jim, and the corners of them upon Robin), ‘we may hear many radio appeals: we may read in our newspapers of what we ought to do to serve our country. Let us do what we know to be right and patriotic! In times of great stress it sometimes happens that those in authority overlook the less spectacular, but no less vital needs of mankind. They may seek to throw all of us into the front line and forget that, without good food, a front line must soon collapse! Our duty in Beadle Valley is clear. We must work with all our strength: redouble our energies and supply the food that leads to victory. If the farmers desert their farms because it seems more heroic to carry a gun, then not only their fellow soldiers, but thousands of women and children will face famine in the winter. Are we all agreed to turn a deaf ear to panicky appeals and do our duty in Beadle Valley?’

‘It ain’t too late to put another acre under turnips,’ said old Humphrey.

I was surprised that the old man understood. ‘Splendid!’ I exclaimed. ‘For my own part I’ll put in another ten rows of late potatoes. I’ll keep those new pullets out of the market to increase our winter egg supplies.’

I glanced towards Robin, hoping for a response, but the boy was impatiently looking at his watch.

‘It’s nearly ten,’ he said. ‘We’d better load the car.’

When we arrived at Mulcaster Market we found the town bewildered and dismayed. I had hoped that a short respite at least would lie between Jagger’s speech and the day when Jagger began his ‘drive’ – but I was quickly disillusioned.

On the previous night, the town had been jubilant at the long awaited arrival of a trainload of steel girders for the new Town Hall. At dawn next morning, when a gang of workmen had gone to unload, they discovered to their astonishment that the train had disappeared. Under cover of darkness, in accordance with urgent orders from the Government, the train had been shunted out and its load of steel girders taken away to an ‘unknown destination for special military use’.

It was a crushing blow to Mulcaster. They had waited weeks to get those girders and the whole progress of their ‘Ten-Year Reconstruction Plan’ depended on them. To me it was damning proof of Jagger’s headlong stupidity. However much he needed the girders for tanks or guns he should never have called them back when once the people of Mulcaster had set eyes upon them. It was pitiful to see that brave little town, by one stupid Government order, cast from the heights of optimism to the depths of disappointment and despair. I left the town as early as possible that day. I could not bear to see those loitering, aimless people whose employment had gone with such tragic, unexpected swiftness.

We got home early enough to hear the evening radio news: to hear that Jagger had that day despatched an army of 10,000 men to garrison the British corridor across the moon to ‘protect our vital interests’. We also heard an impassioned speech by a man I had never heard of: a Mr Justin Wheelwright, new Minister of War. He appealed for 200,000 men to volunteer at once. They were to proceed to the Military Training Centre at Aldershot.

Two days later we heard that fighting had broken out in Normandy, upon the north-eastern fringes of the moon. The war was on.

Military historians, in days to come, may take the task in hand, but it will need men of superhuman genius to give sense and logic to that tangled, fruitless war.

The news we received was heavily censored. We were told of ‘magnificent victories’ and ‘astonishing progress’. One evening, with a blast of official jubilation, came the news that our Army of the Corridor had reached the Mediterranean and established touch with the survivors of the Gibraltar garrison. ‘Britain reaches the sea!’ – ‘The British Empire saved!’ – ‘A glorious peace in sight!’ cried the radio. ‘Our mighty purpose is all but achieved!’ boomed Jagger. ‘The corridor is ours! We shall build a bulwark of Blood and Iron: a mighty bulwark of British courage will starve greed and suspicion into surrender! As guardians and trustees of the moon’s great wealth we shall dispense fair play and give equal shares to every nation in the world!’

I must admit that even I was thrilled by the news and stuck out my chest. I was proud to belong to a great people whose crusade for peace and justice was carrying all before it. For a space dejection lifted from the town of Mulcaster: they hung an old Union Jack from the unfinished skeleton of the new Town Hall.

But that was in the summer time. Autumn came and winter loomed through a haze of menace and gathering suspense.

It was clear that Jagger had taken Europe by surprise and carried all before him in the opening campaign, but news crept through by way of foreign radio, and we learnt of the ‘Confederated Army of Europe’.

It seems that Jagger’s dramatic rise to power had impressed the Leaders of Europe so deeply that they made friends with one another. They came to the unanimous conclusion that the destruction of Jagger was essential before they could proceed with their long-looked-forward-to destruction of each other.

One morning an aeroplane scattered pamphlets over Britain, and a copy came down in the garden of Mr Wilkins’ house in Mulcaster. It was addressed to ‘The People of Britain’ by ‘The Confederated States of Europe’. It told us not to lose hope, because the Confederated States had solemnly agreed to destroy Jagger and release the British people from the toils of a mad usurper who was leading us to destruction. The people of Mulcaster did not consider this quite fair upon Jagger, but it certainly made them think.

A few weeks later a broadcast in English was given from Amsterdam. It announced that the Confederated Army had forced its way across the British corridor and cut our forces into two. ‘The Southern Army is isolated and starving into surrender. The Northern Army is in retreat to Britain’.

The news stunned us. It was vigorously denied by Jagger, but the denial lacked conviction. With the news came winter and the grinning spectre of famine.

Desperately I sought to drown my misery in work upon my farm, and those who toiled beside me were staunch and loyal. The Poultry Show that I had striven so hard to organise, was cancelled. The heart and soul had gone from Mulcaster. For a while they had hoped for victory and peace by autumn: they had desperately hoped to start once more upon the reconstruction of their town. But now their fine roads, begun with such brave endeavour, lay derelict and weed-grown – the wind sighed through the rusting framework of the new Town Hall and men walked the streets with bowed heads and hollow eyes.

Voluntarily I gave one half of all our produce to ‘The National Pool’. Once a week we drove to Mulcaster with all that we could spare, and the pale, dejected people watched our fine brown eggs and succulent vegetables loaded by soldiers upon Army lorries and driven off to the training camp at Aldershot.

Throughout that winter our fragile civilisation clung together by a miracle. There was hunger and misery: insistent calls for men: urgent and still more urgent calls for courage and renewed resolve.

‘The Confederated States’ swept our army from the corridor, and sometimes, in the long, dark evenings, creeping up that silent valley, came the sound of guns.

By Christmas we learnt that the Confederation had collapsed. The leaders of it had come at last within grasping distance of the wealth upon the moon, but as they stretched forth to clasp it, they began to knock each other’s hands away; they began to argue about their rights once more: they began to fight. By June the fighting had spread through the limbs of Europe like disease through a weak, resistless body.

Autumn came once more, and with it the day I dreaded: the day that I had known for a long time must come.

It was in the twilight of an October evening when Robin came to me. I was closing the hatches of my chicken houses as he came up the slope of the downs. He stood there for a little while, talking of casual things: of the way the seedling trees had grown that summer – of how the sunset caught the windows of our house and made it seem as if every light were on within it. And then he turned his head away, brushed his hair back from his forehead with a characteristic little movement that always betrayed him in embarrassment.

‘I don’t know what you’ll think, Uncle – but I’ve got to go.’

‘Go?’ I echoed. My heart fell with the weight of lead. For many months I had known that this must happen; yet now that it had come it seemed unreal and dreamlike… ‘Go where?’

‘I wrote last month… for a commission in the Infantry Army. The reply came this afternoon.’

I held the thin, shabby strip of paper in my hand. I read the words through a quivering mist of unreality. ‘Robin Parker: appointed Lieutenant – the 14th Expeditionary Battalion.’

‘Robin!…’ I began, but he stopped me with a weary, impatient gesture of his hand.

‘I know. I know exactly what you’re going to say. We agreed that our job was to stay here. But that was over a year ago… in the days when everybody believed we’d win easily in a month or two. It isn’t like that anymore. It may sound silly and… and sentimental, but I still believe terribly that we are the people who must get this beastly thing put right. My people were always soldiers. D’you suppose my uncle would have stayed at The Manor House and grown potatoes with the country in this awful danger?’

Many a time I have regretted my passionate outburst. I was not angry with Robin: I was furious at the senseless folly of it all: furious at the impotent devilishness of it…

‘You’re a fool!’ I shouted. ‘A senseless young fool! D’you imagine you’re serving your country by walking out like this! You’re not! You’re just playing into the hands of a beastly crowd of money grabbers who don’t care a damn for England or anybody else! One day when these upstarts have cut each other’s throats, the world will turn to people like us and bless us for keeping a few corners of a madhouse free from lunatics! D’you realise that the only way to save a few shreds of humanity upon earth is for people like us to stand firm and carry on! D’you think you’ll save women and children from starvation by going off and playing soldiers with a lot of other fools!’

I stopped. I was exhausted. I sobbed for breath, and I was alone. Robin was walking slowly down the hillside.

It was quite dark when I returned to the house. For nearly an hour I wandered to and fro, ashamed to go inside.

Through the library window I could see Robin. He was writing at the desk, but I could not go in to him. Quietly I went up to my room. The door of Robin’s bedroom stood open and the light was on. Pat was moving between the bed and the cupboard by the wall. I went in to her, puzzled to know what she was doing.

On the bed lay the cadet uniform that Robin had worn at Eton: Pat was brushing it and cleaning a stain from the sleeve. She looked up at me almost guiltily, with a shy, embarrassed smile.

‘When is he going?’ I asked.

‘He’s told you?’

‘Yes.’

A shadow of relief passed across the girl’s face. ‘He hated telling you,’ she said. ‘We talked it over and over a hundred times. It was all so terribly difficult.’

There was a little silence. The old clock in the hall was striking seven. ‘He’s going tomorrow,’ said Pat. ‘He’s got to get to Canterbury somehow – his regiment is waiting there.’ She saw me looking at the old worn uniform upon the bed. ‘I’m afraid he’s grown a lot since he wore this at Eton, but they say there aren’t any uniforms at Headquarters any more. They’ve got to take anything they can. I’ve let the sleeves out as far as they’ll go.’

‘How long have you known about this, Pat?’ My voice sounded hard and dull – I could not bring a spark of life to it. The loss of Robin was in itself well-nigh unbearable: my shame at the way I had behaved towards him had numbed me.

‘For over a year,’ replied the girl. ‘Ever since they first called for men he was tortured by a… a sort of urge. He knew that his work here was important: he knew how much you depended on him… but when things began to go so terribly badly… he just had to go.’

‘Did you never think of consulting me, Pat?… did you never feel that I could help?’

‘We thought of that – always,’ replied Pat. ‘You’ve been so good to us – but you had so many things to worry you. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to throw the decision upon you.’

For a moment her fine, clear eyes were upon me, and then she glanced unhappily away towards the windows. The wind was rising: it came in little moaning gusts across the downs. Upon the dressing table lay Robin’s underclothes, neatly, in little piles – pitifully threadbare now – pitifully inadequate, I thought, to face the grim menace of this winter. Beside them lay a few of Robin’s little treasures that Pat and he had selected to take with him – an old pair of binoculars that Colonel Parker had carried through the Great War of thirty years ago – a pipe that I had given him last Christmas – a clean towel – two slim volumes of Kipling… I thought of this dear, devoted girl – quietly, secretly planning with her brother the things that he would most need in that groping, twilit journey to his duty.

‘He just felt it… it was the right thing to do,’ said Pat in a low, trembling voice. ‘However silly it seems – whatever we think of the men who have brought us to it – it’s still our country, isn’t it?… it’s still worth giving everything we have to save it.’ Once again her eyes were upon mine. ‘Are you very angry with him?’ she asked.

I looked down at the empty haversack upon the floor, opened in preparation for tomorrow’s journey. I took Pat’s hand and turned my eyes away.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m very proud.’

A solitary train crawled through Beadle Station at six o’clock each evening. Two years ago there used to be as many as half a dozen, all stacked with building materials for the new towns, but now there was no need for them, and this one old train meandered through on its aimless way to Winchester and London. Robin was to go by this train to London and thence to Canterbury as best he could.

He cycled into Mulcaster that morning to say goodbye to Joan Cranley, whose brother had left some weeks before to serve with the Medical Corps of the Expeditionary Force. He returned to lunch, and in the afternoon we went for a last walk around the farm. I had asked his forgiveness on the previous night, and on that last walk he became the charming, carefree boy whom I knew and loved so well.

‘I’ve taught Jim all I know about the fish and the rabbits: old Humphrey will keep an eye on him: they’ll carry on all right till I come back.’ We stood for a few moments, watching the dark little shadows whisk to and fro in the clear, slowly-moving water.

‘You’ve made a wonderful job of this, Robin,’ I said.

We walked up to the ruined Manor House – to Colonel Parker’s grave beneath the old cedar whose splintered trunk was already a haze of green again. We went on, over the downs to the eastern crest where the great plain lay beneath us in the pale autumn sun.

‘Remember this place?’ said Robin.

There was a lump in my throat, and I could scarcely speak. ‘The place where I first met you and Pat…’

‘I came climbing up the slope with Pat’s flabby little hat… and you were there. What years ago it seems!’

He turned away: he took my arm and we walked back to our house.

Tea was ready: a big substantial tea of eggs and fried potatoes. There was no telling when the boy would see hot food again.

‘Come on, Robin!’ called Pat. ‘You’ll miss either the tea or the train if you don’t hurry up!’

Robin came down from his bedroom and stood before us with an awkward, boyish grin.

‘Do I look very funny?’ he asked.

He was in his uniform. In a smart cadet parade at Eton he might have looked funny in a uniform three sizes too small, but to me, at that moment, he looked splendid. I had not realised how tall he had grown in the past two years: the tightly-fitting tunic enhanced his height and suddenly he seemed to tower above me.

‘You’ve done marvels with these sleeves, Pat: nobody’ll notice how short the trousers are so long as I keep the puttees on.’

‘It fits perfectly,’ I said. ‘You’ve grown upwards – not outwards.’

‘And they’ll give you Lieutenant’s badges when you join the Battalion,’ put in Pat. ‘You’ll look an awful swell!’

Pat and I tried valiantly to eat in company with Robin. To me it seemed utterly unreal – utterly impossible. The little room was darkening with the setting sun: pale beams of sunlight lingered upon the table and slowly fell away: the memories of all our happy evenings came whispering through the twilight: the strange, exalting evening when the three of us first gathered here on the night that followed the cataclysm – when Robin had knelt before the fire, coaxing it once more to life. Evenings when we had read aloud around that glowing fire – evenings when we had woven our dreams of all the splendid things that lay ahead.

Twilight still lingered around the lips of the valley as we went down to the station. The wind had fallen and it was very still and peaceful. There was just the faintest rustle in the brown leaves of the stripling trees that lined the lane.

We must have looked a strange little party upon that weed-grown, derelict station – Pat in her old Burberry coat and ‘flabby little hat’ – I in my old patched plus-fours and walking jacket – Robin, the young soldier going out to war. To an onlooker, deceived by our pitiful attempt at gaiety, we might have been a father with his daughter, seeing his tall son away to school. We rattled an empty old automatic machine with a rusty label marked ‘Milk Chocolate’: Robin banged against the window of the empty Booking Office and called out: ‘Three Excursion tickets to Blackpool, please!’ We scared a family of starlings from their nests in the ruined signal box with our gay laughter, and all the while my eyes kept turning towards the cleft in the valley where the sunset lingered – the cleft from which the train would come.

A dull haze of smoke tarnished the sky: a faint, weak whistle drifted through the twilight. ‘Here it is,’ I said.

Suddenly, with one accord, our laughter died. I saw Robin stoop to pick up his haversack. He slung it over his shoulder and turned to Pat. In that last moment I knew that I should never have come to the station that night. I should have remained at home, for I felt like an eavesdropper upon a moment sacred to that boy and girl. I knew their devotion to one another: I should have given them this last moment alone. The boy’s hand lay upon her shoulder: with lowered head she groped and held her brother’s leather belt.

‘Steady, old girl,’ I heard him whisper, ‘it won’t be for long… I’ll be back in no time, really.’

‘Take care of yourself, Robin… I’m… I’m so proud of you…’

I walked down the platform and drew out my torch to signal to the train, for they never stopped at this ruined little station unless you signalled to them.

The engine was just panting into the cutting – a precious minute still.

From the distance I saw the boy lower his head to kiss the girl beside him. Through the gathering night I saw her arms around him, and my memory raced through the years to far-off days when boys of my own generation had gone to another, far different war.

They had gone in the morning sunlight – gone in fresh uniforms and glittering badges – gone to a fluttering blaze of flags and the brave music of bands – to cheering crowds and waving handkerchiefs. They had gone to finely ordered regiments, well-clothed, well-fed: gone, above all, with a clear and definite purpose: with burning faith in the triumph of a cause.

And now Robin was going: going from the darkness of a derelict, wayside station into a deeper darkness from which reason and purpose had long since died, knowing nothing except that the land of his birth was in the toils – feeling nothing save an aching desire to do what he believed was right.

The engine driver had seen my waving torch. He signalled a grimy hand to me and the shabby train came slowly to a halt.

‘So long, Robin!’ I cried. ‘Write to us!’

‘Your sandwiches!’ cried Pat, thrusting the little packet through the window.

‘My heavens! – I nearly forgot them.’

For a long way we could see Robin’s waving handkerchief. A tiny, solitary white speck, blotted now and then by the smoke of the train.

We scarcely spoke as we walked home through the night. My mind was numbed to the thoughts of the boy who had left us. I was thinking all the way of a silly, irrelevant thing.

There had been scarcely anyone in the train, but as it had drawn away I had glimpsed through a window an elderly, red-faced man in a dinner jacket! A man with the heavy, wine-red face of a country gentleman, in a trilby hat and dinner jacket! Where on earth was he going, in a meandering train through a land quite barren of dinners demanding jackets?

It puzzled me and puzzled me. When Pat had gone to her room I sat for hours alone by my library fire, wondering about it. I have wondered since whether that old man in his dinner jacket was shown to me by a divine providence: a merciful drug to numb a pain beyond my bearing. The pain of the first evening without Robin sitting there by the library fire.

It was in the week after Christmas – on New Year’s Eve – when Pat said ‘goodbye’ to me.

An urgent call had been made for girls prepared to serve as nurses with the Expeditionary Force in Europe. Heavy fighting all that winter had made the need a desperate one, and Pat was going with her friend Joan Cranley.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve I helped to strap her luggage upon the back of Robin’s old bicycle, for the chain of her own had broken with age.

I walked with her to the crest of the downs. I waved to her until she was out of sight upon the road to Mulcaster, and returned to my home alone.