annaround, Kins meditated on this: a small dog with its ear cocked tumbling over a horn. . the only Victor I’ll ever be. — Each interminable and hurting summer day was somehow succeeded by another, and, as the sun’s swords were beaten into ploughshares, so Kins’s faith — forged during the long walks up on to the downs, matins plainsinging back into evensong — melted away. In its place a white-hot lust boiled through his veins. He tried thinking of the altar boys wafting their censers — he tried to hear the choristers, their reedy calls and the school chaplain’s honked responses. To Kins, surrounded by Brockleby and his Fenland ilk, the College’s devotions appeared higher and higher . . and he tried to fix upon that higher purpose — but the smells assailing him emanated from Annette’s berry-brown skin, and the bells he heard were his ears ringing as he strained for the slightest note of approval in her monotone. — This, though she was a spirited enough girl, dismissed within weeks of the declaration for speaking openly of her objections to her class in Bromsgrove. Given Annette had been an ILP member since ’36 and was also an organiser for the Teachers’ Anti-War Movement, Kins assumed she’d take a shine to Jack — he certainly did to her. After all, he was closer to being a proper proletarian, and spoke without a smidgen of the ironical about the inevitable production of warfare by the capitalistic system. But they jawed so over doctrinal matters — Kins thought of shop stewards. . speechifying on the head of a Woolworth’s pin. Besides, while Jack was handsome enough — with his long, lean form and head of jet-black hair — Kins had his suspicions: for all her mucking in and talk of equality, Annette remained an alderman’s daughter. She’d told Kins — with a pride he’d have found. . laughable in anyone else — that her father was a stalwart Rotarian who owned the largest sanitary-ware manufactory in the Midlands. No doubt he also had. . all the wholesale prejudices this implied. — When the farmhouse door opens and she comes out, Kins assumes her aim is to finish off what the old fraud Feydeau has started . . and castigate him for being a public school and Oxford man, circumstances that. . are patently beyond my control. She pauses on the doorstep, straightening her shoulders, tugging down first the one then the other sleeve of her dress, taking time, Kins thinks, to gain her night sight — then she comes towards him calling softly, Kins? Kins? Before she arrives he smells her perfume — a real one she must’ve put on after her bath. He knows she’s bathed today, because this is a twice-weekly ritual the three young women at Collow Abbey Farm undertake together, in the smaller of the two milking parlours, with a great deal of public fetching and carrying of just-boiled water, the aim being to give the men ample warning, so they’ll retreat to the home field for footer, or to the millpond for a dip. Annette, Valerie and Ida do their laundry together as well, then carry their moist things to the very end of the orchard to be pegged out to dry. One day Kins came on Ida unexpectedly there, and they stared at each other with the shocked recognition. . of minds encountering bodies. She’s a small girl who wears thick spectacles and has a voluptuous figure. Between them were dresses, blouses and smalls hanging from a washing line — as she grabbed brassieres and bloomers, hugging them defensively to her chest, he was sure they both saw the same mirage: the bare breasts, exposed haunches and naked buttocks these scraps should clothe. . wobbling in mid-air. Anointed she is, my Sheba . . her perfume mingles headily with the sweet reek of dung. The great heat of the day is subsiding, the earth giving it off in shuddery gasps . . Annette wears a sensible-enough frock, over the knee, with a collar and some sort of embroidery down the front . . it’s her breasts he’s overpoweringly aware of as he gestures at the moon, saying, They should put a big bit of blackout over that if they really want to stop the Luftwaff e finding their targets. His legs go all dithery as he awaits her response. Honestly, she says, that man Feydeau is a complete ass. . Her shoulders are high and mighty, her thick auburn hair, unset, lies loose and tousled on her neck. She has an ironstone stuck in her throat, and every time she speaks it resonates with an adenoidal whine that for Kins lends everything she has to say an irresistible authority . . told us a faintly indecent anecdote. Said he’d met some chap on a London bus, chap says to Feydeau: No civilisation can be secure that wastes its sewage as ours does. Feydeau says to chap: Pray give me an example. Chap continues: The Chinese were a civilisation thousands of years before we were, and they’ll remain one when we’ve blown ourselves to pieces because they return all their. . excrement to the land! — As Annette’s great heat . . subsides, she gives off. . shuddery gasps. Kins starts muttering how Brockleby says there are increased yields to be gained from concerted manuring. . then takes two steps forward, grasps the back of her head and spreads his mouth over hers. — The meals at the farm are simple, although ample and served with plenty of ale and cider. The girls have no interest in camouflaging dishes with suet or pastry, instead bowls piled with steaming swede, potatoes and mangel-wurzels are set before them, gilded with their pooled butter ration. When he looks from mouth to mouth around the long refectory table, Kins thinks, Yes, this is a re-creation of a village community such as there was in the middle ages. . He misses the heavy chocolate cake of his parents’ cook, Doris, and her beetling beef, roasted into a carapace of its own juice — but his bowels move easily. . and with terrific regularity. Her belly seethes against his and in the alarming tumult of lips, teeth and tongue, for a second or so it seems to Kins. . she yields! — South, towards Bardney and Woodall Spa, the soil is richer and the land. . rolls — not on the surface. . deep below. The fields open out and out. In some places they’re half a mile wide and interspersed by dense copses of lime, beech and elm. . stately Queen Marys, each a world entire. Walking here, distractedly fleeing the earnestness of the farm, Kins stumbled upon the bones of a Cistercian abbey, the vertebrae of its pillars scattered across a pasture snarled by vetch and cow parsley, spattered with dung. Flies and midges revolved giddily above the dolloped cowpats, the waywardness of one only emphasising the tight conformity of the rest. He happened there upon a bull in the act of mounting a cow, its earnestness was. . comical and tragic. Kins looked once upon the preposterous extent of its penis — then turned away from its bemused and foam-flecked muzzle. — There was no wireless at the farm, no electricity or water from the main either. The buildings were dilapidated, which was why Brockleby and Feydeau had been able to buy the property for a few thou’. When a refugee from the wider world arrived, fresh from the ordeal of his tribunal, he might talk nervily for a day or two about the capitulation of the Netherlands, or the encirclement of the BEF, but soon enough he’d be caught up in workaday farm life, succumb to its Lilliputian captivity, and so fall silent. Kins was responsible for the wall newspaper, which he put up conscientiously every other day. Modelled on the De’Ath Watch, Collow Laffs featured reports of eggceptional layers, with whimsical pen-portraits of individual hens. There were testy editorials on the wilfulness of Lincolnshire shorthorns — more emollient ones celebrated the epochal progress of the first farm-bred heifers into Brockleby’s precious Friesian herd. Kins tried to give his paper plenty of pep — also intellectual depth: he glossed Mandeville when reporting the bee hives’ harvesting, and quoted Ovid in his analysis of silage-making. He commissioned Valerie to illustrate this article, and she produced a vigorous gouache on a bit of old Lincrusta depicting Work Group No. 1 loading up the great galleon of a haywain, with Kins himself — somewhat implausibly — directing their labour from the high poop of its thatching. Collow Laff s was popular with the Community Land Association trainees, whose numbers had swelled to near twenty by midsummer. Brockleby offered them all the same terms: bed, board and thirteen shillings a week. There will be sweat and tears, he told them, but no blood unless you’re daft enough to fall into the threshing machine. — There weren’t meant to be any bosses as such, yet he still divided them into two working groups: one under Ted Cornwallis, a pugnacious communist and former docker from South Shields, the other answerable to Tiny Procter, a giant and seraphic Quaker. Procter had lost all the toes on his left foot when he was wounded at Passchendaele while serving with the ambulance service. This gave him a precipitate gait: always lurching forwards, saved from falling flat on his rubicund face, Kins hypothesised, only by his irrepressible good humour. The socialistic gravitated to Cornwallis, who stirred them up. War, he sing-songed, is the in-ev-i-table condition of capitalistic pro-duction, laddies. We moost de-velop new modes of mech-a-nis-ation. The Brockhouse trac-tor is only the beginning — the old Imperial master’s belly woon’t continue t’be swollen by cheap food imports after this war has ended, and it’s co-mu-no-ties such as these that’ll take up and radicalise the great armies of the unemployed! — A rivalry quickly developed between the two groups — at first good-humoured, then predictably earnest, and eventually verging on hostile. — Each day the trainees toiled in their work groups, and each evening, after their vegetable supper, they separated again to form their own colloquies, each one gathered in the halo of an oil lamp. Kins hung back, looking from face to face, from lips pursed at the ends of hand-rolled cigarettes to teeth clenched on pipe stems. He sidled away from the refectory table into the dark passage, where he stood, muscles stretching and twanging, fingers twining in the soft hush of spider webs, nostrils prickling as he inhaled the old must-makings of beetles and mice. In the back parlour, under a photogravure of Sanssouci. .