Peace Breaks Out Read online

  VIRAGO

  MODERN CLASSICS

  694

  Angela Thirkell (1890–1961) was the eldest daughter of John William Mackail, a Scottish classical scholar and civil servant, and Margaret Burne-Jones. Her relatives included the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, and her godfather was J. M. Barrie. She was educated in London and Paris, and began publishing articles and stories in the 1920s. In 1931 she brought out her first book, a memoir entitled Three Houses, and in 1933 her comic novel High Rising – set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, borrowed from Trollope – met with great success. She went on to write nearly thirty Barsetshire novels, as well as several further works of fiction and non-fiction. She was twice married, and had four children.

  By Angela Thirkell

  Barsetshire novels

  High Rising

  Wild Strawberries

  The Demon in the House

  August Folly

  Summer Half

  Pomfret Towers

  The Brandons

  Before Lunch

  Cheerfulness Breaks In

  Northbridge Rectory

  Marling Hall

  Growing Up

  The Headmistress

  Miss Bunting

  Peace Breaks Out

  Private Enterprise

  Love Among the Ruins

  The Old Bank House

  County Chronicle

  The Duke’s Daughter

  Happy Returns

  Jutland Cottage

  What Did it Mean?

  Enter Sir Robert

  Never Too Late

  A Double Affair

  Close Quarters

  Love at All Ages

  Three Score and Ten

  Non-fiction

  Three Houses

  Collected Stories

  Christmas at High Rising

  PEACE BREAKS OUT

  A Novel by

  Angela Thirkell

  Published by Virago Press

  ISBN: 9780349007519

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Angela Thirkell 1946

  Copyright © The Beneficiaries of Angela Thirkell 1961

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Virago Press

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  CHAPTER 1

  ABOUT half way between Little Misfit and High Rising the pleasant village of Hatch End, close under the steep downland, straggles along one side of the river Rising, separated from it by the road and the water-meadows. The houses are of grey Barsetshire stone fretted with golden lichen, the cottages of anything from decaying stone, through mellow crumbling brick, to a kind of primitive wattle and daub washed in harmonious faded creams and dirty pinks, with mossy, leaking thatched roofs. Over the whole street there reigns a general air of exquisite harmonious crumblingness whose charm is but poorly expressed in the shiny post-cards which used before the war to be sold at Mrs. Hubback’s, known as The Shop; though poorly as we think of these chromo-lithographic efforts, we have always disliked the pen and ink sketches by the local artist, Mr. Scatcherd, even more. For not only are his works all exactly alike (which is perhaps why they are so well-known), but each carries a few suitable words taken without any particular application from the anthological poems (if we make ourselves clear) of approved bards. His “Rising Rambler” series are particular favourites with the public that used to hike through rural England in motor coaches, with half-an-hour’s stop at the Mellings Arms for tea; and among them the picture of the old bridge all on the skew, with Dolly Varden being chucked under the chin by Beau Nash (we give an impression rather than anything so low as a categorical description of the scene) with the caption, “Many a youth and many a maid, Dancing in the chequered shade,” was perhaps the most popular. Mr. Scatcherd, who with unusual commonsense lives in a well-built hideous little house called “Rokeby,” just outside the village, has further shown his sense by bringing his art up to date. The post-card of the Mellings Arms (to give but one example) with a few rude forefathers of the hamlet adumbrated (for the human figure is not one of Mr. Scatcherd’s strong points) on a bench outside the Tap with the caption “Troll the bowl,” was vastly improved by their metamorphosis as members, or shall we say lay-figures, of the Home Guard, with the simple words, “Britannia needs no Bulwarks.” This card was sent by everyone to everyone else for Christmas until paper restriction came into force; and as soon as this ban (invented by a Capittleist and effete government for the enslavement of the people) is removed, Mr. Scatcherd has in mind a yet nobler version in which a one-armed soldier and a one-legged airman, rather vague about the uniform, will be seen clinking mugs upon the bench with those moving words “Home is the sailor, home from the sea.” We can confidently predict that this card will bring joy to many a hearth which ought to know better. But few hearths in this half-baked New World have the factual outlook (as their newspapers teach them to say) of Miss Scatcherd, the artist’s niece and housekeeper, who turns out and dusts the ground floor back, known as The Studio, once a week, and has often said to her friends what a blessing it is Uncle likes sketching as it keeps him quiet for hours on the stretch as they say.

  Hatch End has no great House, for the shadow of Pomfret Towers lies over this part of the Rising Valley. The nearest approach to a squire-house is not even in the village, but lies on the bank of the Rising where the ground slopes gently upwards and has all the afternoon and evening light, whereas Hatch End, nestling closely under the great downs; is in shadow for the greater part of the day and of the year; which accounts for the general mossiness of everything and the amount of rheumatics in the cottages, though since the late Lord Pomfret had the water meadow properly drained and all the sluices and hatches put in order, the cottage floors are distinctly drier. But Hatch House stands well above the river valley, high and dry at all seasons, a square red-brick house with sash windows, a gravel sweep, and a front lawn which is embanked by a brick wall above the old road to Barchester. The road is probably as old as history, always well out of reach of the higher floods, and follows the contours of the hilly land in a series of twisting ups and downs, so that no motor buses use it. This is a source of some quite unreasonable pleasure and pride to its owners, the Hallidays, who have for several generations scoured the country on horse, bicycle and foot, regarding in later years the car of the moment as a useful piece of machinery on occasion and no more, and chiefly used for taking them to the nearest main line station at Nutfield, some six or seven miles away; for the single track line that serves Little Misfit and Pomfret Madrigal ignores people foolish enough to want to go to London, looking upon even Barchester as foreign parts. It is in fact the purest democracy, being a paternal service of the locals, by the locals, for the locals, and no one has ever been allo
wed to miss a train so long as the guard or the engine driver could see the car, trap, or pedestrian half a mile away. There is of course the inevitable exception to prove the rule, namely the case of Sir Ogilvy Hibberd when he was trying to buy up land before the war; and old gentlemen at the Mellings Arms still discuss, with the long silences broken by a few Wessex words which are their form of Witenagemot, the day when the station-master at Pomfret Madrigal exercised a long dormant right and locked the booking office door in Sir Ogilvy’s face at the hour scheduled for the departure of the 9.43, who was still gossiping quietly with the 9.52 down. But of Sir Ogilvy we will say no more. He met more than his match in old Lord Pomfret in the matter of Pooker’s Piece and has now gone aloft, in which place his baronial title, which begins with Aber, or Inver, has reduced him to the indistinguishable level of most of his brother peers of later and unimaginative creations, and no one knows who he (or they) were.

  So Mr. Halliday rode about a good deal on a hardworking conscientious horse who had no objection to giving the farm-horse a hand with carting dung or wood occasionally; and Mrs. Halliday bicycled or drove an old cob in an old pony trap; and Captain George Halliday of the Barsetshire Yeomanry when on leave rode his father’s horse, or the farm-horse or even, in vacant or in pensive mood, the cob who, he complained, made his legs stick out sideways like doing the splits.

  “People’s legs don’t really stick out sideways,” said his sister Sylvia, who had been hoping for five-and-a-half years that the war would be over in time for her to go on with her dancing, but did her best for the Waafs in the meantime. “They really stick out behind and in front, like running, only much flatter and straighter. And then you turn yourself round like a corkscrew so that it takes everyone in.”

  To prove which assertion she got up from the breakfast table and gave a fairly good demonstration.

  “Cheating an innocent and gullible public, that’s what I call it,” said Captain Halliday. “English-Speaking Ballet, my girl. Now, look at this.”

  Rising from the breakfast table he crossed his arms, crossed his feet, sank elegantly and without apparent effort to the floor, rose with the precision of a well-oiled machine, repeated the combined operation three times and sat down again.

  “Blast,” he said. “That seam in my breeches has gone again.”

  “I knew it would,” said Mrs. Halliday, who minded almost more about damaged clothes than broken arms or legs. “Every time you get leave, George, that seam goes again and I shall have to reinforce it this time. I think,” she pursued, contemplating with extensive view all the pieces and scraps of material that were available for patching after so many years of war, “that I might be able to get a bit out of the back seam of your father’s old hunting breeches. The tailor left a good wide turn-in at the back when he made them in 1938 because your father was getting so much stouter at that time, and now he has got so nice and thin again that the turn-in is really wasted. And if I unrip the seam of your breeches and machine a good piece of father’s onto the back of the seams where the stuff is so worn with being mended so much, and get Hubback to press it well, on the wrong side of course, it would machine up again quite nicely and I could even let it out a bit; the old seam-mark wouldn’t show much when it had been pressed with a damp cloth.”

  By this time her son and daughter, who were used to their mother’s household soliloquies, had begun to talk quietly about other matters till the sound of his own name pulled George’s attention back.

  “So,” his mother was continuing, “if you will take those breeches off, George, and let me have them, I am sure I can make a good job of them. But I must have them now, because of all sorts of things.”

  “But I’ll tell you what you can’t do,” said Sylvia, suddenly emerging from a profound and thoughtful silence. “You can’t sit down with your legs beside you.”

  “I always rather wanted to have a wooden leg when I was small,” said George reflectively, “I mean a proper wooden leg like a leg of mutton, so that I could take it off and throw it at people.”

  “So if you will take off those breeches, George darling,” said Mrs. Halliday, getting up, “I’ll see about them now.”

  “Or one could give it to a poor old cottage woman who was too weak to get firewood from the Squire’s woods and anyway he’d have had her transported if she had,” said Sylvia, warming to the subject, “and be a Ministering Angel.”

  “I simply can’t take off these breeches now, mother,” said George. “I don’t mean not in the dining-room, for heaven knows nothing is sacred since you and Hubback would try on Sylvia’s camiknicks or whatever it was in here because it was the only fire in the house last winter, but I’m going down to the village now and I must have my breeches on.”

  “But the place will get worse,” said his mother.

  “It won’t go any further,” said George. “They split about forty times in Normandy and my batman got the little jigger from the adjutant’s office that sticks papers together with bits of hairpin and stamped some of them on so that it couldn’t come undone any further. I do miss Jones. I hope he’ll be there all right when I get back to wherever my lot have gone to.”

  “I think it is quite dreadful that none of you know how to sew properly,” said Mrs. Halliday severely. “It is like that dreadful batman of yours who put nails through your breeches, right through the material, to hold your braces up when the buttons came off.”

  “I put the nails in, mother,” said George. “They worked awfully well. In fact one of them is still there, because a button you sewed on came off again.”

  “Then I must have your breeches at once,” said Mrs. Halliday. “That settles it. A nail might get shot right into you at any minute.”

  “So might a button” said George. “All right, mother, I’ll give them you to-night.”

  “You mean ‘I’ll give you them,’” said Sylvia. “If you say, ‘I’ll give them you,’ it means ‘I’ll give you to them,’ like giving Christians to the lions.”

  George said it didn’t. It meant, he said, ‘I will give them to you’ and if he said ‘I’ll give you them’ it would mean ‘I will give—I will give—’ “Oh gosh,” he added, “I don’t know, but anyway you’re wrong. And what’s this about sitting down beside your legs anyway?”

  Sylvia stood up, and quietly sat down on the floor, the lower part of each leg doubled up neatly on the carpet alongside its upper part.

  “Good God,” said George.

  “Elementary, my dear Watson,” said Sylvia, rising as smoothly as she had sunk. “Only I bet you can’t do it.”

  “OW!” said George as he nearly twisted his knees out of their sockets and had to save himself from falling in a heap by clutching at his sister’s skirt. “It isn’t fair. You’ve got double joints.”

  “Doubles muscles,” said Mrs. Halliday, one of whose unexpected gifts was excellent French.

  Her offspring stared uncomprehendingly. Mrs. Halliday, who had long ago accepted the fact that her children were by her standards illiterate, and knew that if she said Tartarin they would be no wiser than before, seized the moment of George’s discumfiture to tell him that she was quite sure the seam had opened a bit more with all those gymnastics, and he had better let her have his breeches before he went down to the village.

  “I say, father,” said George to Mr. Halliday, who came in at that moment. “Do save me from your wife. She wants to mend my breeches and I can’t spare them.”

  “Look, my dear,” said Mr. Halliday, holding up a pair of riding breeches for his wife’s inspection. “It’s that button again. Hubback put it on for me last week, but her buttons never last. One might as well use a nail as we used to in the old war. I wish you would sew it on for me, Ellie, if you’ve time. No—not the back button—that front one.”

  “I was only looking,” said Mrs. Halliday in a fateful voice, which would not have been unworthy of Norna of the Fitful Head in one of her pythonic moments, “to see how much stuff there was on the back
seam. All right, Leonard, I’ll do it now. And if you will let me have those riding breeches of yours, George,” she continued, “I will start the patch at once.”

  “Oh, all right mother,” said George, with a fairly good grace. “I’ll put them in your room.”

  “What’s your mother up to?” asked Mr. Halliday. “Is she cutting up your breeches to patch mine?”

  “Cutting up yours, father, to patch mine,” said George, and went out of the room in better spirits.

  “Good God, Ellie! You’re not going to touch my breeches,” said Mr. Halliday much alarmed.

  “It is quite all right, Leonard,” said his wife. “George was exaggerating. And don’t forget we are having tea at the Deanery to-day. Will you be in for lunch?”

  A little more exchange of plans took place and then Mr. Halliday went away. Sylvia had meanwhile removed the breakfast things and washed them up under the disapproving yet complacent eye of Hubback, daughter of old Mrs. Hubback at The Shop, servant in the Halliday family by right of long village ties as under-housemaid, head-housemaid and now as much a maid of all work as her mistress. Old Mrs. Fothergill was, it is true, nominally cook, but her age and her legs told upon her more and more, and when she was not having a nice cup of tea, or a quiet lay down, or a nice quiet time with the wireless, she was doing something else of a nice and quiet nature. However she was faithful and honest, and as she never went out Mrs. Halliday could always leave the house with a quiet mind.

  So George took off his breeches and put on his old grey flannel trousers, very frayed round the turn-ups, and his sister tied her head up in a scarlet handkerchief and took her brother George’s Burberry, and they prepared to go for a walk by the sunken lane which represents what is left of Gundric’s Fossway in those parts, under the steep escarpment of Fresh-down, once Frey’s Down, and so to the bold eminence of Bolder’s Knob where no tree has ever grown since St. Ewold, in an access of slum-clearance, caused the sacred oak grove to be cut down. But all those pleasant plans were swept away, as remorselessly as St. Ewold had swept away the Druid’s oaks, by the irruption into the hall of Hubback, holding a large basket in what appeared to the young Hallidays to be an ominous, nay minatory manner.