Laughing House - Warwick Deeping (good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT) 📗

turned to look at the house. A little battered and decayed it might be, but it was a House; a solid and courageous house, and its eyes looked out upon beauty. My House! But how much was it my house? There was a little less of the I in my contemplation. Could a house with twenty bedrooms be rationally mine? Were the house and I out of date unless we adapted somehow? But how? I felt worried and uneasy, but I could find no answer to these questions.

The new lot are in. Not a bad crowd I think. I strolled across and made contact with their C.O. and asked him to dine with me at the cottage.

Rather a sallow, solemn fellow, but with guts and character.

I said to him: “The last unit here were a good crowd. We got on very well together. They put a lot of things straight.”

He looked me in the face and said that he hoped the new relationship would be the same. He would see to it that no wanton damage was done.

I liked the man. We spent a friendly evening to gether, and I managed to draw him out. In civil life he was a lawyer, and his relaxations were gardening and music. He was a pianist, and I persuaded him to play some Delius and Debussy to me on Sibilla’s piano.

My feeling was that we should get on very well.

We did.

He took a personal interest in the poor old garden.

I am becoming quite a farmer, and learning a devil of a lot. Nothing like doing things yourself. You can neither criticize nor praise adequately unless you have personal experience. Our poultry are laying well, and it is one of my jobs to deliver eggs to the collecting centre. Basic petrol has gone long ago, but I have a small supplementary ration for egg delivery, and shop ping in Melford. Very rarely do I go up to London, for London depresses me. It is a shabby, restless city, or so it strikes me, and the London I loved was passing even before the war. I visited some of the bombed areas, St. Paul’s and the City, and what I saw in the city gave me furiously and gloomily to think. Here it seemed to me was a force that was finished, and all those sinister ruins were like the dried bones of a civilization that had received its death blow. Poor old London might take it, but the power that had been London might pass in the future to New York, Moscow, or even to Berlin.

My Club had been bombed, and was out of action, and every month it became more difficult to eat or to get one’s hair cut. My tailor I never saw. My simple shopping was completely domestic, and largely under instructions from Ellen. I searched for such articles as saucepan cleaners, aluminum kettles, sieves, mops, fibre washing-bowls, and what-not, and often not with much success. London tired and depressed me, and it had macabre moments that made me glad to get back into the country. You were too haunted by forebodings amid those battered buildings. In the country there could still be peace.

We had much the same quota as to crops, and my Committee treated me somewhat benignly and as an enthusiastic amateur. Provided I grew my quota of potatoes I was left alone, and no one worried me about my oats, buckwheat and maize. I had managed to obtain a sample of the new maize seed, and I found it to mature early and crop well in the damper portion of Valley Mead. As to buckwheat I discovered that in my innocence I had struck a winner. A local seed-merchant put me wise. Did I know what parrot food was fetching? At ‘that moment I did not, and he told me, and when to sell. Our buckwheat patch proved a little gold mine. Nor do I know what we should have done without our portable thresher, and the little old “Diesel” I managed to buy secondhand. I had been wiser than I knew in thinking things out. Moreover, Gibson and I bought a half share each in a mysterious cow, and milk was ours. Old men need wine and milk.

I had heard silly people complain of the luxurious living in the country. They appeared to think that we had masses of secret butter, milk, poultry, fruit. Bosh! As a matter of fact the farm labourer was far worse off than a factory hand. All he had was his cheese, and a few extra greens and spuds. He had no canteen, no British Restaurant, no shop round the corner, and he worked harder and for about half the pay of a munitioner.

Service not profit! What utter bunkum! Who are the profiteers in this war? Whose pockets have bene fit tted? And who will go on shouting and striking after the war for more hard cash? The workers. Service in deed! I have to confess that when I hear the word “War-Worker” I am moved if not to laughing scorn, to a spasm of benign cynicism.

I have had three letters from Peter, the last of them I gather from Sicily. He speaks guardedly of the hotel that took a tumble down the cliff. That must be Taormina. Poor, macabre, fantastic old Taormina. Sibilla and I spent part of a winter there at the delightul little Hotel Timeo, Peter writes happily. Thanks to “Monty” all our tails are up.

And Sybil has spent a weekend with me. She came with her pretty, solid little face rather severe and set, but after a day’s loafing and fruit picking her sun came out. She is tired, tired of dealing with a batch of awkward young women who had been added to the unit, and were inclined to giggle and play pert. Sybil is an officer, and for the first time I saw her in uniform, her hat prettily cocked and legs neat in black stockings.

Her first words were: “I’ll get out of all this, Uncle.”

She reappeared looking flowery, to relax in a deck chair and smoke a cigarette. She told me about the saucy and sometimes sulky recruits.

“I could slap the lot. But we’ll teach ‘em. It’s the first casual crowd we’ve had.”

I could see Sybil smacking them, and with gusto.

Over a cocktail that evening she let go about her feelings. She said that after the war she would want to go all flowery and flouncy, yes—pretty pretty and sentimental. Discipline was all very well for yourself, but rubbing it into others was not much fun. I put it to her that the one thing the country might need after the war would be discipline. Envy, hatred and malice could not be allowed to go native.

Did I believe that? She frowned at me.

“Well, human nature, and years of repression. Your reaction, my dear, may be somewhat admirable but—”

“No leg-pulling, Uncle.”

I glanced at her pretty legs.

“No, not for old gentlemen, though they are pretty ones. I rather think Peter will approve.”

“Of what?”

“Your going all flowery and romantic.”

She was more troubled about the ultimate future than about the war, and even the magic word “Planning” which was so much in the air, did not reassure her. Ex-officers did not belong to some union which could exert mass pressure, nor were they domestically essential like plumbers and painters, cooks, carpenters and what-not. They could not hold the community up at the point of a pistol. And Peter was sensitive and dreamy, and the world would not be for the dreamers.

I was not so sure, either about Peter or dreams. Translate dreaming into inspiration of some sort, and the dreamer is leagues ahead of the common man. They are not in the same class. Moreover, I had a pretty good opinion of Peter’s practicability. He was a success as an officer, and could manage men.

I asked her a question:

“Is your idea Peter’s?”

“Just how?”

“I mean the job. Would your serene young highness stoop to gain in running an hotel?”

“Don’t be nasty, Uncle. Peter and I will be in it together.”

“Good girl.”

“But not some slovenly country pub where booze and the bar are all that matters, and the cooking and the manners are sub-human. I’ve ideas too.”

“A super guest-house?”

“What about it being flowery like my frock?”

Peter has been wounded.

I think it must have happened somewhere near Cassino. The taking up of stores and ammunition cannot be a pansy job. I had a scrawl from hospital. A smashed right leg. I hope to God the lad won’t lose it.

Sybil has written. A tender-hearted, motherly child this, behind all her sturdy composure. Sybil will wear well.

How damnable! Another letter from Sybil. They have had to amputate Peter’s leg. He is in hospital somewhere in Italy. It will be a long job.

Sybil writes: “Oh, Uncle, it makes me mad that I can’t go to him. I hate the thought of some strange nurse messing around him.”

What a touch of the feminine! And Sybil jealous, bless her! I can’t stand cold blooded people.

Poor lad, minus one leg, but it means that he will be out of the war so far as acute danger is concerned. And yet, I suppose, that a man with one live leg will be badly handicapped when the scramble for jobs begins.

These two young things seem to be getting more and more into my thoughts.

I have written to Peter. I have told him not to worry too much, and that constructive heads are more valuable than lost legs.

This business of living is becoming more and more difficult. But for our extra milk and our eggs and an occasional fowl and rabbit, and our fresh vegetables I don’t know how we could manage. The cost of every thing is going up, and one’s income shrinking. Ellen, poor dear, “is always telling me to go in search of fish. That means queueing, and I’m not fond of fish or of wasting my time in queues. I wonder how half the world lives, poor old people with small, fixed incomes. Buns and meat pies full of mysterious horrors! I look at my ration of cheese and sometimes I laugh. Well, we are alive, and but for “The Few” we should have been corpses.

I have been round the garden. I remember a picture called The Briar Rose I think by one of the pre-Raphaelites, and it might symbolize all that has hap pened here. Peter’s crowd had cleaned up the productive ground, and the present lot had also done some work, but elsewhere my world ‘had gone wild. It is extraordinary how quickly artifice surrenders to nature. The paths and borders are full of weeds, chickweed, dock, nettles, fat-hen thistles, sorrel, and I am sorry to say couch. Brambles might have sprung up in the night and put out predatory suckers and rooted again in loops to catch your feet. I find them and bracken amid the rhododendrons and azaleas. The place is a wild tangle, and lovely in its way, but not lovely to the eyes of a gardener, though many of the herbaceous plants are making a fight for it, and the phloxes are in flower. I see that pretty pest “Golden Rod” putting up its plumes everywhere, even in some of the paths. Hedges have gone native, and the clipped yews and box trees have sprouted like hedgehogs. You can hardly tell where grass and borders meet. My God, what a business it will be cleaning up and recovering the place! Weeds seeding for years, brambles, bracken and nettles to be dug out. Both brambles and bracken are the very devil when they have got established. And the couch! The prospect frightens me