Chewing the Cud Read Online Free PDF

and the minds are blank
And eyeballs question the summer sky.
The rifle's crumpled. And what became
Of the ladybird, God alone knows.
    1946

Chapter 4
A H OME OF O UR O WN
Friday 20 November
Mobbs's dispersal sale. Bought two cows
and various oddments. Missed by bull.
    W hen, some days later, the ward doors opened to admit visitors — wives, sweethearts, parents — one of those visitors was my own wife. Myrle told me later that she was frightened she wouldn't recognize me in the long line of beds containing sick men, many amputees among them. I must have looked very different to her from that day on the platform at Windsor Station. My weight had dropped from 168 pounds to 112 pounds, and I had to lift one arm with the other in order to wave fondly ather. But seeing her again was, of course, the greatest of tonics and I began to get better.
    A final irony was that on her second long journey by rail up to Liverpool to see me, she walked into the ward and there was my bed, empty. They had suddenly sent me to a convalescent home near Weston-super-Mare, and neither had been able to contact the other. She was now faced with a return journey with no return ticket and, what was worse, not enough money to pay her fare. With admirable aplomb she managed to find a seat in a compartment in which there were a number of officers who had decided to play poker to while away the long trip and kindly asked her, Could she play? Would she like to? She could and she would and she won enough off them to do away with her worries about money.
    From the convalescent home, I went to the only place I then thought of as home'the house where I'd been born. For the greatest part of two years Myrle and I lived with my parents, and my return to health is best judged by the fact that in October 1945 Myrle gave birth to a daughter, Juliet.
    At around the same time I was invalided out of the army, my thoughts turned to farming again, the thing I'd always wanted to do. So back to the Wylye Valley went Myrle and I and the baby, accompanied by Anna, the first jointly owned dog we'd had.
    Anna was a black-and-tan smooth-haired dachshund, and when we had first collected her as a puppy, we feared she might be deaf, for she paid no attention to what we said to her. We learned there are dogs and there are dachshunds, strong-minded individuals who prefer to have things their own way — always.

    We lived in a tiny old house called Tudor Cottage, where the only bath was a tin one taken in front of the fire, and the only sort of lavatory was an earth closet, or outhouse, in the garden. The contents of this I would bury in the field behind, and because I used a rabbiting spade with a curved blade, that field, when finally we left, was a strange sight, its ordinary grassy green stippled with a great number of perfectly round very dark green dots.
    Tytherington Farm seemed suddenly to have jumped forward into the twentieth century, you might say. The horses were almost all gone, machinery ruled, the downs were a sea of corn. Only Tom and Henry and Billy and therest were just as I had remembered. Like the bombers we had then watched flying to Bristol, the war had passed over their heads and left them quite untouched.
    I wasn't really much good on the farm, I wasn't yet strong enough, but I still wanted to become a farmer. That was my long-held ambition. So the next move was to leave Myrle and the baby with Mother and Father and go back to school, to an agricultural course, in fact, set up in a Wiltshire manor house for ex-servicemen.
    I shared a bedroom with three other men. There was Tommy, who was not long out of hospital where they'd been treating him for what people in Father's war called “shell shock.” There was Pat, the eldest of us, urbane and kindly, who knelt by his bed each night to say his prayers. There was Sandy, who on most nights was not there to see this, for he had acquired a local light-of-love with whom he passed his evenings. “Shredded Wheat”