They both grinned. “She’s a good girl,” David said, “but Davey—well, he’s Davey.”
“You should have married and got a few of your own.”
“I never had the time to go courting.”
John said: “I thought you countrymen took that in your stride, along with the cabbage planting.”
“I don’t plant cabbages, though. There’s no sense in doing anything but wheat and potatoes these days. That’s what the Government wants, so that’s what I give ’em.”
John looked at him with amusement. “I like you in your part of the honest, awkward farmer. What about your beef cattle, though? And the dairy herd?”
“I was talking about crops. I think the dairy cattle will have to go, anyway. They take up more land, than they’re worth.”
John shook his head. “I can’t imagine the valley without cows.”
“The townie’s{12} old illusion,” David said, “of the unchanging countryside. The country changes more than the city does. With the city it’s only a matter of different buildings—bigger maybe, and uglier, but no more than that. When the country changes, it changes in a more fundamental way altogether.”
“We could argue about that,” John said. “After all…”
David looked over his shoulder. “Here’s Ann coming.” When she was in earshot, he added: “And you ask me why I never got married!”
Ann put an arm on each of their shoulders. “What I like about the valley,” she said, “is the high standard of courtly compliments. Do you really want to know why you never married, David?”
“He tells me he’s never had the time,” John said.
“You’re a hybrid{13},” Ann told him. “You’re enough of a farmer to know that a wife should be a chattel, but being one of the new-fangled university-trained kind, you have the grace to feel guilty about it.”
“And how do you reckon I would treat my wife,” David asked, “assuming I brought myself to the point of getting one? Yoke her up to the plough when the tractor broke down?”
“It would depend on the wife, I should think—on whether she was able to master you or not.”
“She might yoke you to the plough!” John commented.
“You will have to find me a nice masterful one, Ann. Surely you’ve got some women friends who could cope with a Westmorland clod{14}?”
“I’ve been discouraged,” Ann said. “Look how hard I used to try, and it never got anywhere.”
“Now, then! They were all either flat-chested and bespectacled, with dirty fingers and a New Statesman{15} tucked behind their left ear; or else dressed in funny-coloured tweeds, nylons, and high-heeled shoes.”
“What about Norma?”
“Norma,” David said, “wanted to see the stallion servicing one of the mares. She thought it would be a highly interesting experience.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that in a farmer’s wife?”
David said drily: “I’ve no idea. But it shocked old Jess when he heard her. We have our rough-and-ready notions of decorum{16}, funny though they may be.”
“It’s just as I said,” Ann told him. “You’re still partly civilized. You’ll be a bachelor all your days.”
David grinned. “What I want to know is—am I going to get Davey to reduce to my own condition of barbarism?”
John said: “Davey is going to be an architect. I want to have some sensible plans to work to in my old age. You should see the monstrosity I’m helping to put up now.”
“Davey will do as he wishes,” Ann said. “I think his present notion is that he’s going to be a mountaineer. What about Mary? Aren’t you going to fight over her?”
“I don’t see Mary as an architect,” her father said.
“Mary will marry,” her uncle added, “like any woman who’s worth anything.”
Ann contemplated them. “You’re both savages really,” she observed. “I suppose all men are. It’s just that David’s had more of his veneer of civilization chipped off.”
“Now,” David said, “what’s wrong with taking it for granted that a good woman will marry?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Davey marries, too,” Ann said.
There was a girl in my year at the university,” David said. “She had every one of us beat for theory, and from what I heard she’d been more or less running her father’s farm in Lancashire since she was about fourteen. She didn’t even take her degree. She married an American airman and went back with him to live in Detroit.”
“And therefore,” Ann observed, “take no thought for your daughters, who will inevitably marry American airmen and go and live in Detroit.”
David smiled slowly. “Well, something like that!”
Ann threw him a look half-tolerant, half-exasperated, but made no further comment. They walked together in silence by the river bank. The air had the lift of May; the sky was blue and white, with clouds browsing slowly across their azure pasture. In the valley, one was always more conscious of the sky, framed as it was by the encircling hills. A shadow sailed across the ground towards them, enveloped them, and yielded again to sunshine.
“This peaceful land,” Ann said. “You are lucky, David.”
“Don’t go back on Sunday,” he suggested. “Stay here. We could do with some extra hands for the potatoes with Luke away sick.”
“My monstrosity calls me,” John said. “And the kids will never do their holiday tasks while they stay here. I’m afraid it’s back to London on schedule.”
“There’s such a richness everywhere. Look at all this, and then think of the poor wretched Chinese.”
“What’s the latest? Did you hear the news before you came out?”
“The Americans are sending more grain ships.”
“Anything from Peking?”
“Nothing official. It’s supposed to be in flames. And at Hong Kong they’ve had to repel attacks across the frontier.”
“A genteel way of putting it,” John said grimly. “Did you ever see those old pictures{17} of the rabbit plagues in Australia? Wire-netting fences ten feet high, and rabbits—hundreds, thousands of rabbits—piled up against them, leap-frogging over each other until in the end either they scaled the fences or the fences went down under their weight. That’s Hong Kong right now, except that it’s not rabbits piled against the fence but human beings.”
“Do you think it’s as bad as that?” David asked.
“Worse, if anything. The rabbits only advanced under the blind instinct of hunger. Men are intelligent, and because they’re intelligent you have to take sterner measures to stop them. I suppose they’ve got plenty of ammunition for their guns, but it’s certain they won’t have enough.”
“You think Hong Kong will fall?”
“I’m sure it will. The pressure will build up until it has to. They may machine-gun them from the air first, and dive-bomb them and drop napalm on them, but for every one they kill there will be a hundred trekking in from the interior to replace him.”
“Napalm!” Ann said. “Oh, no.”
“What else? It’s that or evacuate, and there aren’t the ships to evacuate the whole of Hong Kong in time.”
David said: “But if they took Hong Kong—there can’t be enough food there to give them three square meals, and then they’re back where they started.”
“Three square meals? Not even one, I shouldn’t think. But what difference does that make? Those people are starving. When you’re in that condition, it’s the next mouthful that you’re willing to commit murder for.”
“And India?” David asked. “And Burma, and all the rest of Asia?”