Knapworth at War

Timothy Finn

Description

The Leicestershire village of Knapworth numbering just sixty souls faced World War II with the same phlegmatic gaze that had seen off most other national crises in its thousand years of history. These affectionate memoirs evoke a timeless world seen through the eyes of a small boy.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: eBookPartnership.com
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908886125
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

KNAPWORTH AT WAR
Stories from an English village 1939-45


TIMOTHY FINN
With drawings by Shoo Rayner

Duckworth
Contents
Map
1: Riddam
2: Brine
3: Christmas Dinner
4: The Wall
5: Robbie’s Night Out
6: Grand Manoeuvres
7: The Bomb
8: Prisoners of War
9: Gathered In
10: Undesirable Alien
11: The Race
12: Triumph
By the Same Author
About The Author
Copyright
For Emma, Jonathan and Ben

1
Riddam
There were two retainers attached to my father’s household.
The first of these was called Riddle, and he lived in the attics. Exactly how he came to be there was a mystery to us three boys - Michael, Marcus and me - but we received the fact with the unquestioning acquiescence of children. My mother always claimed that she had just found Riddle there in 1938 when we moved in. She said it was rather like inheriting an old hen-house and finding on inspection that there was a decrepit and wheezy cockerel clinging to a perch in the rafters. Nobody exactly wanted it there, but it clearly had no intention of moving on.
No Christian name accompanied Riddle’s extraordinary surname - a name which fitted him like a glove since his job was supposed to be in the garden and he had to be shaken vigorously to get anything out of him. He was lazy and sly, and he spent any time when he was not being watched dipping fig-biscuits into a can of hot cocoa beside the kitchen range. When, as occasionally happened in the evenings, my mother got angered by his lumpish presence, he would be shooed off to his room to continue his slurping and munching up there, with his mug and his biscuits laid out on a small wicker-work table covered with newspaper. I don’t ever remember seeing him do any work.
The other retainer was Adam. He didn’t do any work either, but then in Adam’s case there were extenuating circumstances. Adam was a gypsy, and his contacts with Knapworth House were strictly speaking informal, although they were very frequent. The fact was that the low wall outside our back door was the favourite Wednesday resting place for Adam and his dog Bulger in their weekly cycle of expeditions around the villages; so that, if there was any house in the parish that could boast the dubious claim of Adam’s patronage, it was ours.
Riddle and Adam were to outward appearances much of a muchness. Both were old and brown and dressed in cast-offs. Both were gentlemen of leisure, freely accepting whatever comforts or sustenance they were given. But in reality the chasm between the two was infinite. Adam - outlandish, alone, and cheerfully dignified - was doing no more than following the strange way of life his parents had reared him to in a world whose indifference and hostility were already beginning to threaten its existence. Riddle by contrast was a renegade from his own civilization - a scrounger, dodgy-eyed and mean-spirited. Not for him the camp in the woods, the making of clothes-pegs and toys for the children, the gathering of fuel when the frost was a white crust on the ground. Riddle was a cap-in-hand man, a non-contributor, only too ready to sit by the fire which somebody else had kindled.
All this was well demonstrated by The Day The Water Came Down The Stairs. Exactly what happened to our antique plumbing on that occasion has long been forgotten in the drama that followed. All I remember was that it was Wednesday, and Adam was sunning himself on the wall with us three children around him. Riddle had smelled the tea and cheese which my mother had brought out on a tray - under the terms of Adam’s imaginary retainership, tea and cheese was served as payment for the benefit of his weekly conversations - so that the full complement of hangers on had gathered by the back door at the moment when water suddenly began to run down the stairs inside the house. For a few seconds it was just a trickle; then it became a regular river.
Of the three adults caught up in this excitement, Adam and my mother would not have had the least idea of the cause or the cure. Riddle, with a lifetime of half-baked odd-jobbing behind him, must surely have had some inkling. Yet the action taken - utterly futile though it was - was entirely in inverse proportion to the knowledge. Adam, alarmed by my mother’s shouts, tore into the house, and after doing a dance of agitation around the ever-spreading puddle, suddenly pulled off his shirt and began using to mop up the water, skeltering outside and squeezing it over the cobbles as he saturated it again and again. Of course nothing was done to get to the continuing source of the trouble, merely to stem the tide downstairs. My mother shrieked for Riddle to do something, and at length he stirred himself to get up from his seat against the wall and hold a basin beside the flood-water for the two squeezers to fill it. ‘You know, Mrs Finn,’ Riddle said in the height of the crisis, giving full weight to every sage word, ‘you know what you want for these ‘ere pipes? What you want’s a man.’ The phrase became famous in the family.
This pair, whose names were often and unceremoniously compressed by Mother into the single word of ‘Riddam’, were the chief actors in one of Knapworth’s great incidents of the war.
One fine cold day in March the two met in a field called Glebe Close. Adam had been going about his business in the hedgerows - gathering plovers’ eggs, rootling out old bits of iron that the farmer had chucked there, who knows? Riddle had been to the pub in the next village, an important journey for him, but one he resented since Knapworth had no pub of its own. Scarecrow waved to scarecrow across the furrows and the two met by the roadside to exchange gossip. The afternoon was early, and logically nothing short of hunger or nightfall might be expected to bring this particular encounter to an end. About three o’clock the two paused to look at a distant aeroplane, by no means a common sight even then. The plane was approaching and it was bidding fair to pass overhead, when the engine coughed, then hiccupped, then stopped altogether. At the same moment the pilot put the nose down, and within a minute the two men’s casual interest had changed to wild wonderment as the aircraft turned in a great arc and began to approach the field to land, each detail of the wheels and wings and the pilot’s head clearly visible in miniature to the watchers at the roadside.
Then there was a set-to indeed. With a whoosh of wind which Adam later described as ‘like Nigeria Falls’ the plane hummed over the tree-tops of Long Middlescombe, brushed the hedges of Quoyles’ first-field where the sheep were now careering about in panic, and touched down with a bumpety-bump and a bumpety-bump in the very middle of Glebe Close not fifty yards from the roadside. If ever Riddle’s ability to stir himself had been called in question, that question was answered now: in a frenzy of excitement he was jumping up and down on the spot he had been rooted to a minute earlier. Then he started running towards the plane, stopped, and started running back again. Adam raced towards the village, then turned and raced back again. Finally, charging round in circles from sheer inability to stand still, the two began to look at the wing markings to see whether the new arrival was friend or foe. What they saw threw them into a greater dither than before, for the markings were certainly not British, nor were they the awesome swastika, and it was not till the pilot was half way across the field towards them that the realisation that he was alone began to steady their nerves.
Another shock soon followed. The airman could speak no English, and as soon as he began to talk Adam and Riddle instantly clutched each other for protection. Then slowly from the skein of foreign speech they heard the word ‘telephone’ being repeated over and over again.
‘He’s wanting a telephone,’ said Riddle.
‘Telephone?’ quavered Adam. ‘Mrs Finn has got a telephone.’
‘Mrs Finn!’ he bawled nodding towards the village as though she were as well known as President Roosevelt. ‘She’s got a telephone in the Great Hall.’ This was all nonsense. We had no telephone. The only telephone in the village was at the Brinkton’s in the Old Rectory. Nor did we have a Great Hall or anything larger than the drawing room. But Adam was fired by the drama of the occasion and his own imagination was beginning to take flight like an aeroplane. Certainly he was not going to let his patroness down by underplaying her importance at this moment of crisis.
By the time they got to our house in the heart of the village the three men were the greatest of friends, Adam and Riddle shouting at their new-found comrade as though the mere volume of noise would make up for his lack of comprehension. Half the village had run to join in the excitement, so that the yard was filled with people by the time my mother came to the back door.
My mother responded to the moment with a verve which fully matched the dramatic possibilities, boasting to her friends afterwards that the aviator had kissed her on both cheeks and had even attempted to rub noses. One thing at least was established at this point: the man was French. His strange machine was based at a large country house ten miles away where training for the French Resistance Movement went on in the greatest secrecy. He had run out of fuel and had been forced to land.
Next the Brinktons came running across, and the pilot, escorted by fifty enthusiastic villagers, was led over the road to speak to his headquarters. To a population brought up in the ‘Esker-vous avay’ school, the idea that French people could actually speak their own language fluently and fast, and understand each other at the same time, came as a revelation.
Knapworth’s single telephone line hummed that day. There was, of course, the military aspect of the affair. Already some of the youths and grandfathers had slipped away and were making their reappearance in crumpled battledress and ill-fi