1934

D.G. Holliday

Description

1934 follows the lives and families of men who served in the Great War and have kept up the friendships forged by the shared experiences of that time. John Hurst, village schoolmaster, is a staunch supporter of the League of Nations Union in London and a sometime delegate to Geneva; John is an optimist. Charles Stembridge, retired and living in Croatia, observes from his Balkan redoubt the crumbling of order across Europe with apprehension; Charles is a pessimist. Between these poles are the plain citizens going about their daily business: John's brothers run the textile mill at Stroud, his wife's grandfather is a farmer in Devizes; Richard Donaldson is a builder at Salisbury; former chaplain Philip Glover translates St Luke living with his solicitor brother at Malmesbury; Robert Silshaw has his French family in Dieppe. Letters pass, families meet up. As the spring of this fateful year turns to summer, summer to autumn, the news darkens... What caused the war? What did the politicians do and say: Churchill and Eden, Lansbury and Attlee? This fictionalised commentary looks at the realities. A tense and compelling read, 1934 will appeal to those with an interest in the interwar period in Britain.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788032032
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

1934


A Novel of Peace or War






D.G. Holliday
Copyright © 2017 D.G. Holliday

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781788032032

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To my wife Lyn
At his office window above the High Street Cyril had full view of the townsmen going about their daily business, under the aegis of law, custom, decency. Elsewhere, agreements are set aside, accords broken. Signed treaties are abrogated – Versailles, Rapallo, Locarno, Young Plan –
Contents
1934
1934



The shepherds on the Marlborough Downs had passed a winter season middling fair, no worse than most and better than some, was the solemn alehouse judgement. Sheep have their wool and shepherds have their huts. From the older hillsmen, as one listens with a schoolmaster’s ear, the words come deliberate and stoical, between sips on tankard and pulls on briar, while the men of fewer years make their nods. Only a newcomer to the crook, if the bold sort, will voice a doubt. For young Peter Scawby the uplands had been a place of summer jaunts, whenever no fête or fun booth was calling out, no cricket playing. The cold and wet of November through to March, the dreary hostile gloom, had little share in boyhood images of the ancient and worthy vocation. Now, sat against thick-plastered wall under sound roof, a lad not long out of school should maybe pause and take stock. Down here in the village an apprentice has the dry of the chandler’s store, the warmth of the smithy.
‘Peter never expected the winds, Mr. Hurst!’
‘But westerly for the most part, I believe, Matthew. “It’s a warm wind, the west wind,” the poet said.’
‘The poet was never up there, not in January!’
Matthew was right. John had himself on occasion topped a bleak ridge, an airy prominence, and must sympathise with his erstwhile pupil. Better a June ramble in the lower hills with company and a basket. On a halcyon morning they had walked out early – John and Trix and the two boys – and reached the tumuli above Fyfield, and come across men hammering at the strewn sarcens, heaving lumps into carts to be split and shaped in their workshop along the valley. ‘Hard sandstone, sir, not our soft downs chalk. For road-sets.’ The finished squares – thick, solid under an iron cart-wheel the ganger said – would be taken to the wharf at Honeystreet, and thence transported by canal to Reading and Windsor. But how did the Celtic Britons haul the greater sarcens over to Stonehenge, and how did they erect them? ‘Were they giants?’ It was no wild surmise for a boy of eleven: did not the classical Greeks conjecture as much, of the builders of the walls and Lion Gate of Homeric Mycenae? ‘Unlikely, Edward. They had our large brains, our intelligence. And their own special knowledge, we may be sure.’ In a timeless moment one had sensed that knowledge, persisting still, beyond the study window and the garden, beyond fence and fields and woods, high and silent among the mounds and lynchets. There was the feel of wisdom, too. Wisdom as old as the pyramids. It was a beginning, the start of the human journey…
‘Ample time for thinking, Matthew, deep in the hills, I should say. Old man or young.’ If the observation was sententious, it was nothing more than the assembled drinkers might expect of their village schoolmaster.
‘Thinking, Mr. Hurst? Why no, we do that down in the street here. Always something or somebody to see – and to speak sharp of, if we choose – here in Ogbourne!’
There was plain truth in Matthew’s humour. Stride along the pavement on a Saturday and cordial greetings will abound. Then, a horse gives a bad-tempered whinny, a sack of grain spills into the gutter, heads turn, the carter mouths a euphemism, and the fine weave of the morning unravels. Out upon the serene hills, skies blue or skies grey, there are no such mishaps to agitate the mind.
‘Better a sharp word than a sharp wind–’
‘A sharp word–’
Whether Herbert Drake or Alan Bealey counted the senior was a question for a dull afternoon here in the King’s Head, and likely also in the Black Boar across the way. Which of the two first broke silence of an evening? Who spoke weightier? Each had his fireside place to sit and stare from, raise a grizzled brow and croak a word. Yet the one had followed the other, Alan had echoed Herbert. And was Alan’s chair an inch or two further from the hearth?
‘They are for helping, sharp words, often as not. Like in schooldays, sir? What a sharp wind is for, I never fathomed.’
‘Nor I, Matthew.’
‘I was up there December before last. A bit of hard news for James Hedley and fetch him down. Not a situation for the thinking sort. Fog. Gorse bushes. Twist of a thorn tree. A man sees things. Never did Matthew Swaize enjoy a landlord’s ale and fireside as he did that night!’
And Peter had been a thinking sort of boy, seven or eight years under John’s hand, steady at his books. Practical too, in the crafts room, and sociable, a sportsman. He will be missing his friends. The laughs and banter of the working day, were he planer of ash and oak, beater of brass and tin, would be there at his door.
‘What says your father, Peter? Shepherd himself, and his father before him.’
‘I’m to follow my own path, sir.’
‘None of the old law-making, Mr. Hurst, in the Scawby household. Their lads and girls are to choose for themselves.’ Matthew’s grin was for Herbert and Alan. ‘Bit of guidance never did a lad any harm.’
The inn’s pair of elders stayed silent. Good ale was not to be spoiled by vinegar talk. Not when somebody had a birthday – Daniel Chivers it was, over at the dominoes bench in the alcove, doing justice to the landlord’s strong right arm. If the rap of ivory on wood began to be loud in a schoolmaster’s ear, and voices louder, the more reason to bolster one’s own circle with telling of an incident.
‘I was out walking, above Ogbourne St Andrew. Two spurs came together, a flock of sheep in the coombe between. There was a lad up there, clear against the sky. Suddenly he moved, into a run. He reached the track, ahead of me. Stopped. As I came up, he said nothing. Just looked. I nodded a greeting. He just looked, watched me go by. I believe my mind was on him the rest of the day. Lonely, one imagined.’
‘He was shy of you, sir. Your high soldier boots. A gentleman.’
‘Boots repaired near to extinction, Matthew! Ready for honourable discharge from service.’
‘Ready for the next tramp who knocks at Mrs. Hurst’s door! He’ll bless the lady’s pennies, and the boots more so. Now, you’ll believe me– ’
But the inn’s tireless clock had done its work and filled benches and settles to overflowing, front rooms and back. Dick Elcot would have coppers tomorrow for his boisterous children, and silver for his brewhouse wife, monies well got. Maybe a portion would be set dutifully aside, a schoolmasterly thought for the walk home. Half a dozen youngsters to be found employment not many years hence. A large prospect, not easy for folk of the lower middling sort. Those of the educated class – ‘as the educated class like to call ourselves,’ Richard Donaldson down at Salisbury had said with his amiable smile – pass their offspring at the customary age into the hands of grammarians and classicists, historians and geographers, biologists and physicists. By due process and in the fullness of time they become attorney, doctor, surgeon; professor, bishop; perhaps statesman, consul, governor. Or, if fortunate, a teacher – the face and embodiment of the noble three R’s in a Wiltshire village threaded by a chalk trout stream at the foot of sheltering downland. As the poet says, “The breasted hills curved as if under the influence of a great melody.”

* * *

Newsagent and shopkeeper Sidney Brockwell at his counter returned John’s greeting and acknowledged that he had read not a line from his racks of papers, not even by half past seven on a bright Monday morning. ‘If trouble decides to happen over a week-end that’s its own affair,’ he quipped, though he had a good word for the railmen who rushed the bundles out here from London in the early hours. ‘Merchandise!’ he had declared as John announced himself, the new schoolmaster, just after the war, and placed a regular order. ‘The papers and magazines are goods, Mr. Hurst. I sell tobacco, but I don’t smoke!’ Sidney’s bluff certitudes were no bad accompaniment to the start of the day, the week. His opinions on assorted matters he subsumed under the title of common sense. “Without it, a man is either foolish or mad,” was his working rule of thumb. A pedagogue might allow himself the reflection