The Green Gauntlet Read Online Free PDF Page B

faces.
    Paul Craddock’s sons and his absent daughter Whiz were not of this latter group. To each of them the Valley had never been more than a jumping-off place where, years ago, they had eaten, slept, and exchanged sly jokes about their father’s dedication to the land, or their mother’s Victorian approach to their father.
    Simon, the eldest, had disappeared into the murk of the Northcountry after a number of false starts in life. The Pair Stevie and Andy, had followed him although, unlike Simon they had made a success of their exodus. Whiz turned her back on the Valley the day she married and had rarely visited it since. Her home now was the Service and if she thought of the Valley at all it was as a rustic backwater where there had once been some good hunting. Now it was as dead to her as Atlantis. Like Stevie and Andrew she had always lived for the present.
    With Simon it was different again. He did not see his father’s patriarchal pretensions as ridiculous, or his stepmother’s devotion as naïve, but he could see neither one of them as having, in this day and age, a meaningful place in the structure of Western civilisation. They were pleasant anachronisms, clinging to a way of life that had crumbled as long ago as the summer of 1914. They had been unable to adapt to the demands of his own generation, currently facing the most dire threat since the westward surge of Attila. Possibly this was why he was able to read the wire informing him of his wife’s death without much sense of shock. It did not surprise him overmuch that, here and there in the process of total war, a civilian living in a remote agricultural area could be blotted out. He had fought in Spain and he had fought in France and in each campaign he had seen dwellings reduced to rubble and women and children reduced to pulp. Such things no longer horrified him, they only fed his hatred of a system that had accepted a policy of drift through the ’thirties and braced itself when it was all but too late. He had been a professional hater of privilege since his youth and now he was a dedicated hater of Fascism who found himself temporarily allied to bankers, merchants, and other former enemies. He had compassion, too much of it perhaps, but he could no longer waste it on an individual, not even when that individual was the tight-lipped woman who had been his wife and comrade in the long prelude to this cacophony. Thus he was able to ride out the shock of the news they brought him when he came in dripping from the grenade range on that winter’s afternoon. Anyone watching him might have assumed him to be reading a posting signal. His reactions were limited to a blink or two and a swallow of saliva. Then, very abruptly, he left the mess and went out into the thin, pattering rain to the cookhouse where his chief crony, Sergeant Rawlinson, was serving tea to recruits.
    He called through the hatch, ‘Rawley! You got a minute?’ and Rawlinson’s red face appeared at the opening.
    Their friendship was stronger than most wartime friendships for both, having served in the International Brigade, had special entries against their names in the green, confidential files of the unit. They were not exactly suspect but were what a regular officer might describe as ‘ Men with strong Leftist sympathies ’ . The rankers had a much simpler way of putting it: they called them ‘Bolshies’ but now that Russia had joined the Allies the term had lost some of its opprobrium.
    It was strange that a man like Simon Craddock, whose mother had been killed driving an ambulance in 1917, whose father, veteran of two wars, owned thirteen hundred English acres, and who himself was a 1939 volunteer, should be regarded so warily but there it was. This was Britain and this was the British way of assessing loyalty to the crown.
    Both Simon and Sergeant Rawlinson knew about the entry on their documents but neither resented it. In the six years that had passed between now and the day