Rule Britannia

  “Mr. Trembath ought to be in Parliament instead of Mrs. Moorhouse,” he said. “You’ve never seen anything like it, it was terrific. How everyone got into the house I don’t know. Half of them were standing up against the wall, and some of us sitting on the floor, and some on the stairs. Most of them came for a laugh, I think, in the first place, but they soon learned differently, when Mr. Trembath started speaking to them. “Are we Cornishmen or bloody suckers?” he asked, and there was a great yell, ‘Cornishmen!’ even from poor Mr. Swiggs, who’s as deaf as a post. Anyway, after Mr. Trembath had harangued them for twenty minutes they were all agreed to stand by what he laid down. No more milk to the depot, nothing to the supermarket, nothing to the camp, those who have their own transport will deliver to households within their own radius and be paid at the door. Oh yes, they’ll lose a hell of a lot by it, they just don’t care. Only those households who agree to protest against the restrictions will be able to buy milk.”

  He looked about him, smiling. Emma had never known him so sure of himself, Joe of all people, diffident, silent in company, even among those of his own age.

  “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,” murmured Mad. “I wonder. I doubt if they can achieve much except hurt themselves.”

  “Oh, don’t be so damping!” exclaimed Terry. “By God, I wish I’d been there. Don’t you see, if only people who agree to protest can buy milk, we’ll sort out those who resist from those who suck up. And everyone will start talking about it.”

  “What about water?” Mad asked. “How will the farmers manage for water?”

  “Most of them, like us, have their own wells,” replied Joe. “And if one of them goes short, his nearest neighbor will oblige. The animals won’t suffer, that’s agreed. Any surplus water, the animals get it.”

  Mad stretched herself full-length in her chair, Folly humped beside her. “The marines will have powdered milk, thousands of tins of it. It’s not going to hurt them at all.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Joe. “They drink gallons down at the camp, the farmers were saying so. They go around like kids, with straws in the bottles, sipping it in gulps.”

  Terry got up and began swinging to and fro on his crutches like something caged. “If only we could hatch up a plan that would really hurt them. Send their bloody ship sky-high.”

  “Terry dearest,” Mad put out her hand to stop his crutch, which was hitting her on the ankle, “the Japanese tried that at Pearl Harbor before you were born, and look what they got in return some three years later. Bigger and better explosions won’t get us anywhere. We must make it a war of attrition and see who cracks first. Have all the farmers gone home yet?” She turned to Joe.

  “Some left when I did, but most were getting merry and having a singsong. I think they were going to have a rush at the last and beat the midnight ban by a few minutes.”

  “H’m,” said Mad thoughtfully, and then, rising from her chair, “I’ll have a word with Jack Trembath before he bids them Godspeed. When it comes to protest his Breton associates of old could give him a tip or two.”

  She left the library for the telephone. Terry flopped down in the vacant chair beside the slumbering Folly.

  “What can she do, or a bunch of farmers?” he muttered. “What we need is gelignite, and stacks of it. Andy had a point when he suggested blowing up the port.”

  “What about the people who live nearby?” asked Joe. “Remember, if the port went, they’d go too.”

  “Was it Dottie,” Terry suggested, “who coined the phrase ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs’?”

  “No,” said Emma, “it was a general in world war one, and people seem to have followed his advice ever since. What you two don’t seem to realize, and neither does Mad, is that the majority of people down here, and probably in the country as a whole, appear to want this USUK business, and whether we do or not we’re lumbered with it.”

  The two boys stared at her. “You aren’t for it, surely?” asked Terry.

  “Of course I’m not.” It was Emma’s turn to get up from the sofa and pace about the room. “I hate the whole thing as much as you do. It’s just that a handful of people are so helpless, they can’t achieve anything on their own. You must have a powerful organization behind you to get anywhere, that’s been proved time and time again.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Joe pondered. “I believe if people formed little groups and just helped each other, became self-supporting among their neighbors, they could get by without having anything to do with the world outside at all. We’d grow our own food, burn our own fuel, use wool from our own sheep for clothes…”

  “Oh, shucks,” scoffed Terry. “Catch our own Black Death from the dirt and stink of it. Hell, this is the last quarter of the twentieth century, after all.”

  They were still hot in argument when Mad returned from the telephone.

  “I’m glad I spoke to him,” she said. “Apparently from midnight on we shall get our telephones tapped and our conversations recorded. This is official—Jack Trembath had it straight from one of his farmer friends, whose daughter works in the telephone exchange. So… the screws are on, or whatever the expression is. Just Poldrea, mark you. We are the scapegoats. I think they, and by “they” I mean the marines, imagine that by doing this to the neighborhood somebody is going to turn informer and come clean about the dead corporal. The guilty person will be caught and punished, the informer recompensed, and the scapegoat community revert to normal, or as normal as USUK allows us to be.”

  All this, thought Emma, because of an arrow. All this because a boy’s fantasy world turned him, for one single moment in time, into a killer.

  “If that’s what they’re doing it for,” said Joe, “they’ll have to wait a hell of a time.”

  Mad smiled. “That’s what I feel,” she said. “In the meantime, I think we might have a little fun at the expense of the Commandant and the marines. I made a suggestion to Jack Trembath, and he was going to put it to the vote among his farmer friends who were still in the house. If what I suggested goes with a swing, which I hope it does, then he’s going to ring me back in a few minutes.”

  Now what, Emma wondered? Pa at this moment in New York—or was it Rio?—having a bath after his flight and a soothing drink before dining at some flash restaurant with his fellow tycoons, and saying to them with a laugh, perhaps, “My old mother, you know, bats, completely bats, my daughter has to lock her up in her room.” It might come to that yet. Mad couldn’t be trusted, ever.

  “What was your suggestion?” Terry asked.

  “Never you mind,” said Mad.

  The telephone rang, and in the race to get to the cloakroom Joe beat Emma by a short head. Jack Trembath only kept him a moment. Emma, watching, saw Joe nod his head, answer, “Yes,” a couple of times and then replace the receiver, after which he turned to her, shrugging his shoulders, a puzzled expression on his face.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Mr. Trembath didn’t say anything to me that made sense. It was just a message to Madam to say Operation Dung Cart full steam ahead, and any of us who wanted a joyride would be welcome. Zero hour as agreed.”

  Emma left her grandmother to unravel the code concealed in Jack Trembath’s cryptic communication. Time enough to find out what it meant when zero hour struck. All she wanted to do at the moment was to go to her own room, get into bed, and with luck fall into a dreamless sleep. Pa had been wrong not to stay with them. Pa should have let monetary problems take care of themselves, or at least allowed someone else to fly across the Atlantic and handle financial crises for the country and the English-speaking peoples, instead of deserting his own family in their hour of need. The responsibility was too great for his daughter to cope with single-handed, and even Joe, steady-going, faithful Joe, seemed ready to be carried away by a newfound rebellious urge. If I can’t control her, she decided, before dropping exhausted into bed, and by her she meant her grandmother, then there will be
nothing for it but to get hold of Bevil Summers and ask him to put her out with an injection. It was a shocking thought, but the image it conjured up of Mad sleeping peacefully for several hours with a faithful Dottie by her side guaranteed Emma’s own exit into the unconscious, and proved far more efficacious than the proverbial counting of sheep.

  The hard weather, feared by Joe for his unheated greenhouse, did not materialize, and Wednesday dawned, like so many of its November predecessors, with a rise in temperature, a shift in wind, a mizzle of rain and fog on high ground. Fog on high ground always meant that Trevanal would be bathed in a white mist as permanent throughout the day as low cloud above an airport.

  “Splendid,” said Terry after breakfast, with the younger boys dispatched once more to school. “Couldn’t be better for our exercise if it continues like this until this time tomorrow.” And he winked at Joe.

  “Why?” asked Emma.

  “Doesn’t concern you,” replied Terry. “Madam and Joe and I decided last night, after you’d gone up to bed, that we weren’t going to tell you anything.”

  Emma felt anger rise. “That’s damned unfair! Mad’s my grandmother, not yours, and Pa put me in charge of her. Any crazy plan she may get into her head is my business far more than it is yours.”

  “Listen, Em,” said Joe, “I wouldn’t let Madam do anything dangerous. You know that. Nor would Mr. Trembath. So stop being class-conscious.”

  Emma stared at him, astounded. “Class-conscious?” she demanded. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “What I say,” answered Joe. “You are her granddaughter, yes, and she is, or was, a famous person. We are no relation to you or to her, yet she’s all we’ve ever known, and if it comes to love I dare say we’d give our lives for her before you did. You think your special relationship makes you superior to Terry and me, and to the kids as well. It doesn’t.”

  “Hurrah!” shouted Terry. “Long live the underdogs. I never knew you could be so eloquent, my old buddy. High time Emma knew her place.”

  Emma, near to tears, went out of the room. Terry she could take, but not Joe. Class-conscious… God! what an insult. She had never thought of the boys in that light, never for one moment believed herself superior. Of course being Mad’s granddaughter gave her a special relationship, it was to be expected, it was natural, but that Joe should accuse her of having some sort of snobbish attitude towards him and Terry and the others—it was outrageous. It was Joe who was the snob, Joe who had an inferiority complex, all mixed up with not being able to read and write, and then a kind of hangover of jealousy because of that fool Wally Sherman, who, poor brute, was only trying to be friendly when he had come to the house to soften the uneasy truth of being an invader…

  “What on earth’s the matter, darling?”

  Emma had run full tilt into her grandmother after leaving the kitchen.

  “It’s the boys,” she stormed. “They drive me wild at times. Just because I’m your relation and they are not, they accuse me of thinking myself superior, of being a snob, and it’s not true.”

  Mad was trying on a variety of hats before going out to gather more fir cones with Ben. Discarding three in succession she finally ended up with a sou’wester worn back to front that turned her into a coolie.

  “We’re all snobs,” she said calmly, “and we all like to think ourselves superior. If we didn’t we’d never have risen from the apes.” She called to her small companion, who was helping himself to mint humbugs from the dining room sideboard. “Ben and I are going to fill one sack, then I propose taking him down through the wood to call on Taffy. Like to come with us?”

  The thought of Mr. Willis, alone in his lair, with the gelignite hidden somewhere under the floorboards and the sacks that had been wrapped round the body of Corporal Wagg still lying black and sodden on the ashes of the compost heap, was the final straw.

  “No,” said Emma, “I wouldn’t. And to be perfectly frank I don’t think you ought to go. He knows too much. He could be dangerous.”

  “That’s why I’m going to see him,” replied Mad. “The more he knows the more flattered he’ll be to be one of us. I know how to deal with Taffy.”

  She set forth into the rain with Ben at her heels, and Emma waited until the pair of them had disappeared under the trees. Then she sneaked upstairs to her grandmother’s bedroom to ensure she wasn’t overheard by Dottie or the two elder boys, and put through a call to Dr. Summers’s surgery. It was only after she had dialed the number that she remembered the telephones were tapped. Never mind. She must choose her words, that was all.

  “Yes?” The secretary in the surgery had connected her at once, but she recognized the tone of his voice. “There’s a patient waiting to be examined, I can give you two minutes, but no more.”

  “It’s Emma,” she said. “I think we may be in trouble.”

  “Terry’s leg or your grandmother’s heart?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, you’d better drive them along to the surgery and I’ll have a look at them.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Perhaps you hadn’t heard, but all private cars are banned from today in and around Poldrea. Nor have we got any water. And this conversation is being overheard, the telephones are tapped.”

  As she heard herself speak she could hardly believe it. She was amazed at her own audacity. I’m behaving exactly like Mad, she thought, this wasn’t what I meant to say at all.

  “Hold on a moment,” said Dr. Summers, and the tone of his voice had changed. She heard him put down the receiver, and he must have gone to speak to the secretary in the office, for he was absent quite a few minutes before she heard him on the line once more.

  “I was just checking, Emma,” he said, “and Terry has had his leg in plaster now a week tomorrow. He’s due to come out of it, and have a wedge in the heel of his shoe instead. I’ll arrange about getting him to hospital, it will only take about half an hour. If your grandmother’s heart will hold out I can prescribe for her at the same time.”

  “That’s the trouble,” said Emma. “I’m afraid she may overdo it before tomorrow.”

  “I see.”

  He didn’t, of course, but he knew what she inferred. Mad was getting out of control.

  “Has your father gone back to London?”

  “Worse than that. He’s either in New York or in Brazil.”

  “That’s very helpful. Right, Emma. I’ll be along sometime today, but I can’t tell you when.”

  Then he rang off. In the meantime, she thought, he will surely find out what is happening to all of us in this area, and if he has any influence he will try and do something about it. Perhaps nothing very much could be done immediately, with the following day a public holiday; nevertheless, word could be passed from one district to another, and the fact that a small community was being punished for the death of one man, a death which had not been proved to be other than accidental, must eventually rouse somebody to action. And yet, and yet… If Dr. Summers turned up later in the day, must she tell him the truth? Would he take the line that punishment was deserved? She turned away from the telephone, suddenly despondent. Perhaps she had done the wrong thing after all in getting through to the surgery.

  She glanced out of Mad’s bedroom window, and saw that Mr. Trembath’s Land Rover was parked in the plowed field beyond the garden wall, with the farmer himself at the wheel, and then, from the shrubbery, Joe emerged, and Terry on his crutches, making for the steps in the wall. She flung open the window.

  “Where are you going?” she called.

  “To the farm,” shouted Joe, turning his head. “Madam knows, it was all fixed last night. We’re going to give Mr. Trembath a hand, we’ll be away for the day.”

  They grinned up at her, Terry waved his crutch, and they began scrambling down the bank to the Land Rover below. I’m no longer one of them, she thought, I’ve been cut out of it, told to mind my own business, I’m class-conscious, I don’t belong. She was isolated in a sort of no-man’s-la
nd between her contemporaries and the aged; between Joe and Terry, and Dottie and Mad.

  Her isolation became more complete when, sometime later, she saw the fir-cone party return from the wood, not two but three. Mr. Willis, a large sack bulging over his back, was walking by her grandmother’s side and talking volubly. No question of relieving him of the sack and bidding him farewell at the gate with thanks; Mad escorted her helpmate to the porch, told him to dump the sack inside, and called to Emma.

  “Tell Dottie Taffy will stay to lunch,” she said. “He doesn’t mind what he eats as long as it isn’t flesh.”

  Mr. Willis made his customary bow to Emma. “It sounds as if I expected the rest of you to be cannibals, doesn’t it?” he said, smiling. “And truly, to see people chewing meat can sometimes be offensive to a vegetarian like myself.”

  “I don’t think you need worry today,” replied Emma. “It will probably be beetroot soup and boiled cabbage.”

  “Full of vitamins,” said Mad. “Come along in and have a drink. You’re not going to refuse that, surely?”

  “No, indeed.” Mr. Willis removed his boots, to expose yellow socks. “Take a little wine for the stomach’s sake—it was recommended by St. Paul to all of us. Though I wouldn’t say no to whiskey or even brandy.”

  “If you like you can have all three,” Mad told him.

  Emma disappeared to the kitchen to warn Dottie. “I’m afraid we are in for a lengthy session,” she sighed. “Sound the gong soon, or it will mean filling up glasses before and during lunch.”

  “I don’t know why Madam had to invite him at all,” replied Dottie. “You never know what someone of that sort will bring in with him, living as he does in that old hut in the woods.”

  When Emma returned to the dining room Mr. Willis was already standing by the sideboard, and at her grandmother’s instructions was drawing the cork from a bottle of Chambertin. He proceeded to fill a tumbler to the full.

  “The same for you, ladies?” he asked.

  “Just enough to drink your health,” said Mad. “Emma and I never touch wine midday.”