âWhich market are you taking them to?â
âNo market. Iâve always dealt man and boy with Haigâs of Wharfedale. They give me top price âcos they know my stock, and I sell them my stock âcos I know theyâll see them right. So watch out for their wagon on your way into town. Take up most of the road them things.â
âIâll be careful,â said Wield. âNo hurry on a morning like this. Iâd as lief be staying here to give you a hand if youâd have me.â
âIâm always willing to set on a likely lad,â laughed Creed. âBut I think youâd be wanting your cards afore the end of the day.â
He glanced upwards as he spoke and Wield followed his gaze into the unflawed bowl of blue sky.
âYouâre never saying itâs on the turn, are you?â he asked sceptically. âLooks set for another month to me.â
âNay, itâll spoil itself by tea time, and make a right job of it too.â
âYou reckon? Well, even if it does, youâre better off here than where Iâm going. Wet, dry, hail or shine, thereâs no place like Enscombe. See you, George.â
He engaged the clutch and continued his leisurely progress down the valley road which aped the twists and turns of the River Een as though it were of the same ancient natural birth. A couple of miles further on he saw the juggernaut of the livestock transporter coming towards him and pulled off the road into a small piece of woodland to let it past. The driver blew his horn in appreciation and Wield waved as the huge truck with its legend D. HAIG & CO Livestock Wholesalers rumbled by.
When it was past and out of sight, he continued to sit for a while, enjoying the cool breeze through the open window and the way the amber sunlight scintillaâd through the trembling branches. He had the feeling that if he got out of his car and strolled off into the wood, he could keep going forever with nothing changing, no ageing, no hunger, no cold, no crime, no war â¦
And certainly no rain!
Yes, that was one thing he was certain of. He was a great respecter of the rustic eye, but towns had weather too and Detective Sergeant Wield of Mid-Yorkshire CID wasnât often caught without his umbrella. No, this time George had got it wrong. This Indian summer had a lot of wear in it yet. He couldnât see any end to it himself. And what you couldnât see the end of, surely that must be forever?
part oneSANCTUARY (#uca644583-6410-5fab-b00f-e2d9704fd38c)
The wanton Troopers riding by
Have shot my Faun and it will dye.
i (#ulink_abf13b77-9ddf-54d2-a5c8-30b79a44f89b)
Dear Mrs Pascoe
I do not know if Peter ever mentioned to you that I was his superior officer for some time. Indeed one of my last acts before I was invalided out was to confirm his promotion to sergeant. You may therefore understand with what dismay I received the tragic news of his death, and I wanted to write to you at once to say that in my opinion he was one of the finest men I had the privilege to command, and in no way does the manner of his death divert me from that judgment.
I realize that at a time like this you will scarcely feel able to look ahead, but with a young daughter to bring up, the future and its problems will all too soon demand attention. Recognizing that you may have needs which are pressing and immediate, I beg you to accept the accompanying small initial contribution and my assurance that as soon as the opportunity arises I shall take steps to ensure you and your child are cared for as Peter would have wished.
Meanwhile I remain yours in deepest sympathy,
Herbert Antony Grindal
ii (#ulink_e73da10e-3b91-5974-9e6c-9c4d5b535a71)
Is this thing working? Right. Here we go. Here we go, here we go ⦠sorry. Just testing. OK, from the start. Getting into the wood were easy. Out of the ditch, over the top, and there we were. Mind you, it were like jumping into a raging sea. Wind howling, everything shaking and creaking and groaning like the whole bloody issue was alive, and so much stuff flying around you were in danger of getting your head took off. But we pressed on regardless, taking our direction from the glow up ahead. Even when you canât see your hand before your face, thereâs always that glow.
Then at the edge of the trees we hit wire, and we paused here to get our breath and count heads.
We were all present and correct, the whole eight of us, and Cap started in on the wire. Youâll have met the Captain? Useless with the cutters but wonât let anyone else have them. Sort of badge of office. Eventually there was a hole of sorts and we started through. Jacksie â thatâs Jacklin, the well-made one â got snagged and swore. Cap said, âKeep it down,â like someone might hear in all that din, and Jacksie said, âIf I could keep it down, I wouldnât have got it stuck,â and a couple of us got the giggles. Itâs easy done when youâre shit scared. Not that it mattered or Jacksie swearing either. Like I said, it were pissing with rain and blowing a gale, and you would have needed a lot more than a giggle to get noticed.
Then we were all through and the laughing stopped.
Thereâs nowt to laugh at out there. Itâs a wasteland. Used to be trees but after the big raid last summer, they blew them all to hell, roots and all, and when it rains for a week, like itâs been doing, the holes all fill with water and the ground gets so clarty, you can feel it sucking you down. Smells too. Donât know why it should. It were once good mixed woodland like whatâs still there. But now it stinks like a ploughed-up boneyard.
Someone â donât know who â said, âThis is bloody stupid. We should head back.â Seconded, I thought. But I kept my trap shut âcos if thereâs one thing guaranteed to make Cap head east, itâs hearing me speak up for west. I shouldâve known better than to try diplomacy. It never works. Might as well start scrapping right off and get it over with. Cap just glowered at me as if it had been me mouthing off, and said, âFollow me. Keep close.â And we were off, no pretence of a discussion. Whatever happened to universal suffrage?
God, it were hard going. Two steps forward, one back, and as for keeping close, with that rain coming down and the mist coming up, it was all you could do to see where your next step were going to land, let alone keep an eye on anybody else. So it came as no surprise when somewhere over to the left I heard a splash and yell and a voice crying âOh shit!â all spluttery. Someone had gone into a crater. My money was on Jacksie, but I didnât waste time speculating. Even someone a lot better coordinated could drown in one of them holes as easy as the middle of the Atlantic. So I headed for the noise like everybody else. Only I mustâve been a bit more headstrong than the rest âcos when I got there, I didnât stop but slid right over the edge, and next thing, I were down the bleeding hole too!
For a while I thought I were going to drown, but once I got the right way up and persuaded Jacksie â Iâd been right about that â to stop grabbing my hair, I realized there were only two or three feet of water down there, which was fine so long as you didnât lose your footing. The real problem was how to get out, âcos the walls started sloshing and crumbling every time you tried to get a hold on them.
Cap and the others had arrived by now and were reaching down to grab us. They got Jacksie first and I pushed like mad and got nowt but a faceful of boot for my pains. But eventually the useless bugger got hauled out and it were my turn. I reached up and felt someone get a hold of my right hand, I couldnât see who, my eyes were so full of mud and water, and I thrashed around with my left till finally I found another hand to get hold of. Then, kicking my toes into the side, I started to haul myself out.
I soon caught on I were getting a lot of help with my right hand â turned out to be Cap who were doing the pulling â but nowt at all with my left. But before I could start wondering why, my feet slipped out of the hole Iâd kicked in the side of the crater and my hand slipped out of Capâs, and I started to slide back in, putting all my weight on whoever had got a hold of my left hand.
And it just came away, the hand I was holding on to I mean. And I slid right back down into that filthy water with my fingers still grasped tight around that thing, or like it seemed then, with that thingâs fingers still grasped tight round mine, and I started to scream, and some on the others started to scream too, and eventually even them buggers in the green uniforms started taking notice, and next thing there was a whole platoon of them all around us shouting and shoving and thatâs how we ended up getting captured. Me ciggies are all sodden. Youâve not got a dry one, have you?
iii (#ulink_63643e25-0bb3-5907-9898-a130a553388f)
Families are a fuck-up, thought Peter Pascoe.
Otherwise, how come he was standing here in a crematorium chapel with all the inspirational ambience of a McDonaldâs though without, thank God, the attendant grilled burger odours, being glared at by his sister, Myra, and squinted at by a bunch of geriatric myopes, as he attempted an extempore exordium of a grandmother he hadnât seen for nearly two years?
âHello. Iâm Peter Pascoe and Ada was my grandmother and Iâm doing this because â¦â
Because when heâd arrived and discovered Myra had ordered a full-fig C of E service right down to âAbide With Meâ, his guilt had vaulted him onto a high horse and heâd gone through the arrangements like Jesus through the money changers, till at his moment of triumph Myra had brought him crashing to earth with the question, âOK, smartarse, just what are you going to do?â
â⦠because as you probably know, Ada didnât reckon much to organized religion. She always said that when she died the last thing she wanted was a funeral-chasing parson droning on about her unlikely virtues. So Iâm doing it instead ⦠not droning on, I hope ⦠and not unlikely ⦠anyway, Iâm doing it.â
And a right cockup youâre making of it too. He could see Myraâs fury moderating into malicious pleasure. If only thereâd been time to make a few notes. Only a fool relied on divine inspiration when heâd just dumped God!
âWell Iâm not going to make a lot of notes ⦠I mean, fuss, because Ada hated fuss. But equally Iâm not going to let the passing of this remarkable old lady pass un ⦠er ⦠remarked.â
This got worse! Pull yourself together. If you can brief a bunch of CID cynics and pissed-off plods, no need to be fazed by a pewful of wrinklies. What was Myra rolling her eyeballs at? Doesnât she know a dramatic pause when she hears one?
âAda was born in Yorkshire though she didnât stay there long. The event which changed her life, changed all our lives, come to think of it, was the Great War. So many died ⦠millions ⦠numbers too large to register. One of them was Adaâs father, my great-grandfather. After she got the news, my great-grandmother took her three-year-old daughter and headed down here to Warwickshire. Iâve no details of how they lived. I only discovered the Yorkshire connection because I was a nosy kid. Ada wasnât one to go on about the past, maybe because there was too much pain in it for her. But I can guess that one-parent families had it even tougher in those days than they do now. Anyway here they came and here they stayed. This was where Ada grew up and in her turn got married. And in her turn she had a child. And in her turn she saw her husband, my grandfather Colin Pascoe, go off to the wars.
âDid she know as she said goodbye that in her turn she too was never going to see him again? Who knows? But I think she knew. Oh yes. Iâm sure she knew.â
That had them. Even Myra was looking rapt.
âThe child they had was, of course, Peter, my father. Naturally he wishes he could be here today. But as you probably know when he took early retirement a few years back, he decided to follow my eldest sister, Susan, and her family out to Australia, and unfortunately urgent commitments have prevented any of them from making the long journey. But Iâm sure we will be very much in their thoughts at this sad time.â
He caught Myraâs eye and looked away, but not before theyâd shared their awareness that any thoughts turning their way in that antipodean night would probably need the attention of an oneiromantist.
âSo in 1942 Ada got the same news from North Africa that in 1917 her mother had got from Flanders. Another young widow. Another fatherless child. No wonder she hated uniforms and wars and anything which seemed to be celebrating them. She could never look at an Armistice Day poppy without feeling physically sick, and one of her last cogent acts was to rebuke a British Legion volunteer who came round the ward selling them.â
Rebuke? What sheâd actually said according to Myra was, âSod off, ghoul.â Which message it might appear he was passing on to this well-poppied congregation. Ah well. You canât please all of the people all of the time.
âBut Ada did not let the past destroy her present. She joined one of the accelerated teacher training courses after the war and despite her late start, she climbed high, finishing as Head of Redstones Junior which I myself had the privilege of attending. As you can imagine, having your gran as head teacher was a mixed blessing. Certainly in school I got no favours, just a first-class education. But outside, I got all the love and indulgence a growing boy is entitled to expect from his gran.â