A Solitary War by Henry Williamson Page A

enjoyment, Jonathan as usual following and imitating David. “Gee whizz, I like Uncle Tim’s house,” cried David. “I’m so glad we’ve left the farm. Hurray.”
    “Hurray,” echoed Jonathan.
    *
    Lying relaxed in bed that night, Phillip wondered how Teddy Pinnegar and Mrs. Carfax were getting on. Mrs. Carfax had spoken of the possibility of her two hunters coming to the farm. What would that mean, ten pounds of crushed oats daily for each hunter? ‘The Bad Lands’ could hardly support its own livestock. Teddy had assured him in a letter that he had very simple tastes: four hundred a year in the country would be sufficient to satisfy those tastes, he had declared; while asking, Would there be that return from two thousand pounds invested in the farming business ? Four hundred was a normal return for a working partner from two thousand invested in an ordinary business, he said.
    Phillip had replied that it might be possible with new and improved methods: a pedigree milking herd instead of nine cows rearing three or four nondescript market calves each, in a year; the meadows drained, ploughed, and re-seeded to feed the herd; the arable enriched to grow better hay, beans, for silage; an increased flock of turkeys and perhaps hundreds of hens in fold units to improve the pastures. In a phrase, high farming.
    But was high farming possible in a siege war when submarines began to attack British shipping seriously? The import of feeding stuffs and fertilisers, particularly potash, would be cut down, rationed, and finally unobtainable. There were the several big compost heaps as potash-makers on the farm; but it was a long-term system. As cultivations improved, so would the crops; more straw and better meadows meant more dung because there would be more bullocks to tread the straw in the yards in winter. But £ 800 a year profit from £ 4,000 invested in the arable of ‘the Bad Lands’ and 90 acres of indifferent grassland was asking a lot to begin with. He had said all this to Teddy; adding that it depended entirely on the ability, drive, and vision of the partnership.
    *
    During his stay at No. 2, The Glade, he walked in some of the places he had known as a boy, pretending he was farming the fields which he passed, while knowing that those heavy lands had broken many a farmer. His farthest walk was to a spinney where with his cousin Percy Pickering he had found his first chaffinch’s nest, in a low hawthorn hedge of the country lane within bicycling distance of Beau Brickhill. Rooks had cawed against the windy April sky, but neither he nor Percy had dared to climb up. Theyhad stood under the trees, regarding the long upper boughs on the slender tops of which the mysterious nests swayed against white clouds riding high above the blue halls of the wind.
    The boy who had gazed upwards with him had been dead a long time, killed on the Somme; but Phillip could see his rosy face, Eton collar resting on shoulders of Norfolk jacket, hear his voice in the shadows of April leaves speckling the white dusty lane to the gay song of the chaffinch. It was hard to imagine Percy further: for the essence of him, so real once, had gone out of his life. Percy was dead, too far away for any feeling of him to remain under the trees; and the spinney, once so remote and enchanting, was changed also, for just down the tarmac road were great pits of excavated blue-clay with miles of elevated lines and steel trucks slowly moving along them, travelling laden to the furnaces whose tall pale yellow chimneys were visible some miles away. The former meadows and fields, covering several thousands of acres, were now part of an immense brick-works; perhaps half of Greater London was once lying under the song of the chaffinch when Percy and he had bicycled to Brogborough Spinney.
    A queer sight, the trucks trundling above that deeply excavated grey landscape, where not a human being was to be seen: only the steel trucks trundling on their miles of raised