Remembrance Day

Jean’s parents had refused to attend the wedding.

Jean had been philosophical. ‘Renegade father, weak mother – what do you expect?’ and the remark had been quoted with pride. Mike’s parents shared not dissimilar qualities.

The Linwood farm at Middle Rollright was comfortable enough. Jean enjoyed playing the role of farmer’s wife. Mike had watched approvingly as his new wife took to baking her own bread and carrying cider to the men who worked on the land with Mike. She tolerated mud. She bottle-fed piglets. She shopped locally. She dressed the part in scarf and wellies by day, and was popular in chintzy frocks at Young Farmers’ parties in the evenings.

‘A dream world for us both,’ Mike had commented, with bitterness.

In the golden haze, he had bought more land. He made deals with a leading fertilizer company which took much of the burden of actual crop-growing off his shoulders. He bought the adjoining run-down Base Bottom Farm for cattle, for what he regarded as a bargain price, although the pasturage was poor and sour. During the seventies, generous subsidies were available for beef farmers.

Disaster came knocking with the eighties. As unemployment mounted, inflation rose, the price of mortgages climbed. EEC agricultural policies ran counter to Mike’s expectations. When he realized how serious were his financial problems, the fertilizer company proved unhelpful. They were closing down one of their factories outside Sheffield. They were off-loading commitments. They wrote threatening letters.

‘Seemed God had it in for me,’ Linwood commented, carelessly enough, as he and Tebbutt slapped emulsion on the cottage walls.

The bank gave him a loan at stiff interest rates which he soon found himself unable to pay off. Smart accountants took to visiting him in smart cars. Someone was making money.

That winter was a bad one. He lost some stock. The bank fore-closed. He sold off Base Bottom Farm at a loss to a London insurance company. Came the following summer and drought, and he threw in his hand. Jean urged him to hang on, but at the last he was even relieved to see the old place go.

At the time the Linwoods were packing up and leaving their ancestors to moulder in the local churchyard, trouble also visited the Lazenbys.

Jean’s father, ‘Artful’ Archie Lazenby, died of a stroke over dinner in his London club. His will presented the family with some unpleasant surprises. Not only had Artful Archie lost most of the last of the sugar money gambling in the Peccadillo, a Mayfair club, but what sums remained were in generous part bestowed on a hitherto unsuspected Miss Dolly Spicer, of Camberwell Villas, London, SE5.

Jean’s mother went into sheltered housing and died of influenza within eight months.

‘How did Jean take all that?’ Tebbutt had asked.

‘Like a trooper. Not a word of mourning. Bit unfeeling, really.’

With no option but to farm again, Michael Linwood moved with trooper-like wife and sons to somewhere where land was cheaper. He settled on Norfolk.

The acres he bought proved difficult to work and were liable to flooding. His heart had gone out of the business. Again he got his sums wrong. Within a twelve-month, he was forced to sell to a scoundrel who swindled him and turned the land into a caravan park.

The shipwrecked family had moved into St Giles House and Linwood had taken up odd-jobbery. Jean had worked in a local dairy until that was taken over by a larger company.

You can’t blame the poor sod for being a bit difficult, Tebbutt thought, mentally reviewing his friend’s history, as they headed for Stanton’s garage.

They had driven in silence for some miles before he dared to ask about the progress of the Linwood boys. Their sons seemed always more a source of anxiety than pleasure to Mike and Jean.

Instead of answering his friend’s question, Mike said, ‘In all our misfortunes, I have surely seen the guiding hand of Our Lord, directing me into His paths. After constant prayer, I can at last see a way to clarify our lives. This is confidential as yet, Ray, but I am thinking of joining the Church of Rome as a lay preacher.’

On reflection, Tebbutt realized he might have thought of something more tactful to say than the question he now blurted out. ‘What did Jean say when you broke the news to her? Crikey, Mike, you can’t earn a living as a lay preacher. You’ve got three kids to support.’

‘Jean said more or less the same thing.’ The blue eyes gazed serenely at the road ahead.

‘I bet she did,’ Tebbutt said. ‘And your father?’

Mike clasped his hands together and trapped them tightly between his knees. ‘We’re not on speaking terms just now, Noel and I. My father is a heathen. When Jean ran upstairs and told him the news, he rushed out of the house roaring profanities. Jean wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘Where did your father go?’

‘Oh, over to my dotty Auntie April in Blakeney, of course. If only he’d stay there …’

‘I don’t want to interfere, Mike, but how are you all going to eat if you … well, I mean, if you decide to go into the Church?’

‘The Lord will decide, the Lord will provide.’

Tebbutt felt driven to say something in Jean’s defence. He spoke cautiously. ‘The Lord provides best for those who help themselves. Jean must be very anxious as to where the money’s going to come from. I know Ruby would be.’

‘Jean will eventually see the light. We shall manage,’ Linwood said, with infuriating calm. An awful inflexibility in his voice silenced Tebbutt.

It was ten to nine. They were nearing Melton Constable. Tebbutt drove more and more slowly, feeling anger and despair welling up inside him. He stopped the car. Linwood looked at him curiously, raising one of the neat furry eyebrows, saying nothing as Tebbutt turned to him.

‘Mike, the country’s gone down the tubes. You are I are both hard put to earn a crust. But times are bound to get better. Maybe if we clubbed together we could buy out Yarker and make a go of the garden centre. What do you say?’

The reply was slow in coming. Gazing out at the placid countryside, Linwood said, ‘You might like to know I nearly did away with myself when I lost my land here. God intervened through Jean. I knew then I was in sin. In sin, you understand? I no longer wish to operate within an economic system I consider wicked. It’s as simple as that.’

Tebbutt closed his eyes. ‘But you can’t possibly dream of going into the Church with a wife and three kids to support. You must be fucking mad to think of it.’

Linwood’s face grew red. Making a solemn moue which would not have looked out of place above a dog collar, he slowly shook his head and said, ‘You sound just like the rest of them, my friend. I know you mean well. But there is such a thing as conscience, and I am bound to obey mine. We live in a sinful world, but our obligations to God must never be forgotten.’

‘There’s also such a thing as an obligation to your fucking family.’

‘Swearing will do no one any good. I’m not angry with you, Mike, but please will you drive on to the garage. I can’t sit here all day.’

Bottling up his fury, Tebbutt threw the Hillman into first gear and they jerked violently forward. Five minutes later, they rolled into the forecourt of Joe Stanton’s garage. A CLOSED sign swung idly by the pumps and the large double doors of the service station were padlocked. An old blue car stood forlornly on the forecourt with a FOR SALE notice stuck under its windscreen wiper.

‘That’s funny,’ Linwood remarked. ‘I had anticipated seeing the Chrysler standing ready for me out the front. Wait here a minute, will you, Ray?’

He got out of the car and stood about indecisively on the forecourt, arms hanging by his side. Tebbutt was tempted to drive away. Later, he regretted he had not done so. But a feeling of loyalty to his friend kept him where he was, tapping the fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel. After a moment, he tried the radio, hopefully, but it had not functioned for some months.

Joe Stanton’s garage did not inspire confidence in a discerning motorist. First impressions suggested that many cars rolling in here never left. Most had been cannibalized and their wheels removed. Rust, weather, and hooliganism had reduced them to a kind of auto Stalingrad. Long-defunct Stantons had worked a forge on the site. The ramshackle old building had been converted by Stanton’s wife, Marigold, into a shop for the sale of newspapers, bread, milk, Mars bars, and other necessities. But the shop was either too near to or too far out of Melton for it to flourish. It had died by slow degrees, until the ‘Out to Lunch’ sign in the door window became an informal funeral notice. The concrete of the more modern filling station was crumbling in sympathy. The whole place, Tebbutt considered, would qualify for a picture on a ‘Quaint Norfolk’ calendar. November, probably.

Marigold Stanton had retreated to the bungalow behind the garage, where she kept geese in considerable squalor. A handwritten notice on the Four Star pump advertised ‘Gooce Eggs’.

After walking about the forecourt for some while, Linwood made his way through the automobile skeletons to the bungalow. The geese roused a hullabaloo as he disappeared from Tebbutt’s sight.

Tebbutt sat at the wheel of his car, staring at a tin advert for Pratt’s High Test, remembering how life used to be. He watched bees tumbling among the trumpets of a bindweed growing up a telegraph pole. Ruby would be at work by now. She caught the bus into Fakenham every weekday to do a summer job in Mrs Bligh’s cake shop. Agnes would be safe at home with the cat for company.

Ray got out of his car and pottered about the forecourt. He took a look at the car offered for sale. It was a model unknown to him, a Zastava Caribbean, with an Oxfordshire number plate. A faded sticker on the rear window said, ‘I Love Cheri’. On the FOR SALE notice, under the price, Stanton had written WON ONER.

Melancholy increased, Ray went back to sit in his car.

When Linwood reappeared round the side of the old forge, he was accompanied by Stanton. The two men were arguing. Stanton was an untidy, straggling kind of man who walked with a limp and a decided list to starboard. He wore boots, a pair of dungarees and an incongruous checked cap. His chest was bare. He shook his head in time with his rapid slanting walk. Beside Linwood’s rather boneless figure, Stanton appeared an embodiment of energy.

Crossing to the double doors of his shed, he unlocked the padlock, wrenched the doors a few inches open, and elbowed his way inside, to leave Linwood on the forecourt. Linwood appeared to be studying the cracked concrete at his feet.

After looking at his watch, Tebbutt leaned out of the car window and called, ‘Any problems, Mike? Is it repaired?’

His friend looked round slowly, as if previously unaware of Tebbutt’s presence, and said, nodding his head, ‘Hang on a minute, Ray.’ It was not a satisfying response.