ATMOSPHERES

If the weather hadn’t been so wet that autumn – but it had been. If I hadn’t been wearing an army greatcoat – but I was. Because it was cold. Because it was damp. Because it was that time of year, and it somehow seemed right, it went with the atmosphere. (Besides, I couldn’t find the anorak I intended to wear, and I’d stumbled across the greatcoat in my wardrobe, left over from a play, and thought it appropriate to give it an outing, to celebrate the fact it had escaped the moth.)

If, if, if – but, but, but. If Archduke Ferdinand hadn’t – but then, somebody else would have. It was waiting to happen. So was this. I knew it.

For years now, I’ve been waiting to write a story about Edward Thomas – you know, the Edwardian-cum-Georgian nature poet with the edge, wrote a biography of Richard Jeffreys, the consumptive Wiltshire essayist and novelist, Bevis, the Story of a Boy, After London, a pro-rural apocalyptic vision. Thomas lived at Steep, near Petersfield, I think of going there to see his house whenever I drive past to somewhere else (Petworth, or friends in Burgess Hill), but I’m concentrating too hard on the hairpins in Little Switzerland to find the turn: present danger distracts from future pleasure. The story, if I ever write it, writing this one makes it less likely, present action limits future possibility, is quite simple: 1913, Thomas, slogging along a country lane in thick English mud, between two barbed wire fences, has a vision of a dead soldier, caught on the wire, drowned in the mud. (Believe me, there are bits of the Southern English chalk uplands that could give Flanders fields a run for their money in the glutinosity stakes!) That’s all. But it’s the atmosphere that’s important. The poetic vision. That’s what I’d concentrate on. How a total absorption in nature, like Thomas’s or Jeffreys’, is not only a method of transcending personal extinction but also, unfortunately, a method of hastening and promoting it.

Hmm. You know, of course, that Henry Williamson wrote Tarka the Otter in the 1920s after some particularly horrendous experiences in the trenches? The stuff he wrote later, dealing with the war directly, was vastly inferior.

So, as I’m sure I’ve told you in the past, I like going for walks in the country. Takes me out of myself. Leads me back into myself. By a circuitous route. Sometimes I take the dogs. But not always. They can go further than I want, stray into places I’m reluctant to go, run into roads.

Where was I? The Ox-Drove? Old Shaftesbury Road? Somewhere up above Fovant, perhaps, where the soldiers carved their badges into the hillside? Somewhere isolated, anyway. I’d seen the barn from a distance, lost it, found it, as the track wound with the contours, and little copses danced to and fro across my line of sight. No map, just thermos and sandwiches in the khaki haversack (thank goodness for the Surplus Army!) I used to treat the OS as my Bible, but I found the same problem I do with religion: the difficulty of reconciling what I see on the page with what I see around me. Walking back from Avebury to Marlborough, I tried changing the landscape to fit, and ended up three miles away from where I thought I should have been – three miles nearer to the bus-stop, as it happened, but all the same…

Of course, I look at the map before I set off, to have a general sense of where I’m going and whether I’m likely to turn left or right, go up or down, but on the spot I’m guided by events (walls, hedges, stiles, barking dogs, recently ploughed fields and so on). Bilingual imagination at the village level (Zeal Monachorum, Toller Porcorum, Wendens Ambo) is counterweighted by haiku-like simplicity in the nomenclature of other features. If all the “Lone Barns” got together, they’d easily outnumber everything else and perhaps they wouldn’t feel so lonely any more. Lone Barn Farm – there’s a tongue-twister. And you wonder why the barn was lone, if they built a farm next to it – or why they built a farm next to it, if it was so lone? Surely not just to keep it company?

As the lone barn turned and showed me its different faces, I could see low walls behind it, flint, of course, as you’d expect on chalk, some parts substantial, others barely footings. Stables? A house? Timber-framed, and the timber taken away for other purposes? Down in the valley, perhaps, out of the wind – every village in a valley lays claim by name to the downs above it, sometimes for miles and miles away.

Not that there was much wind up here at the moment. Hazy. There’d been sunshine when I’d set off – isn’t there always? But now the grey of the sky was spreading down to the earth and the charcoal-sketch sharpness of the winter trees was blurring into water-colour wash.

That was why my eyes were down as I came past the barn – nothing to see in the distance – which was why I noticed the strange splashes in the liquid mud at the side of the track. The mud leapt up in the oddest of ways – like those high-speed photographs of a sugar-cube hitting the surface of a cup of tea, or the computer models of meteors making craters on the moon. At the same time, I thought I heard the crack of distant shots, and thought of partridge and pheasant and pigeon, down in the woods at the foot of the hills. It never crossed my mind that anyone might be shooting at ME!

But suddenly a khaki-clad figure emerged from the barn, grabbed my arm, and dragged me inside.

Let’s be clear: I don’t usually follow strange men into barns. It’s not my style. I wait to be introduced. And then I make my excuses and leave. But there was something so forceful and intense about this young man that I didn’t resist. It seemed serious. Besides, he called me sir, which otherwise I only hear from schoolkids and a certain type of barman. It was a powerful persuasion. Moreover, I’d thought about the shots I’d heard, and the leaping mud, put two and two together and made five.

What might be going on here, in darkest Wiltshire? Was Madonna’s husband doing another gangster film on local location, and the extras had gone wild? Was it paintballing with live emulsion? Taking cover seemed the safest option. At least I’d be alive to be embarrassed after the event.

The young man took my arm and drew me across to peep out through a convenient gap between the barn’s cladding planks. What I expected to see was what I had seen throughout my walk: the light grey swirls of chalk arable, some shallow-ploughed with furrows like the forked top of a shepherd’s pie, some already harrowed like the crust of a rhubarb crumble, a smidgeon still untouched, with stubble like hog’s bristles, or the microscopic view of a man’s chin.

What I saw was No-man’s land (and I don’t mean the New Forest village). Crater interleaved with crater. A lava-flow of mud randomly halted. Barbed wire in coils and strands with things tangled in it that might once have been weapons or people – was that a gun and limber, with wheels and barrel and shaft at crazy angles to one another? And hanging on the wire, hands up in eternal surrender, a body with a fleshless grin?

I turned and stared wordlessly at the young man, whose articulacy made up for my speechlessness.

“They’re closer than you’d think, sir,” he said, working the bolt on what was clearly a Lee Enfield .303 to put another bullet into the breech. “If I may?” and he took my place at the gap in the planking, aimed, traversed and fired in one smooth movement, then carried on speaking, “But I’ve been able to hold them off so far. They haven’t any cover, you see.”

He stood back from the barn wall for a moment, moving along, seeking out another loophole for his next shot, as if he could see through the overlaid wood and knew his enemy’s every move. He was clad in khaki, like me, but it was clear he didn’t belong to the Surplus Army. He was the Real Thing.

Have I stumbled on Secret Manoeuvres? I thought. Does he take me for one of the Marshals in the War Games, just because I’m wearing the right costume? If I hadn’t trimmed my beard, turning myself from Robinson Crusoe on a bad-hair-day into a passable imitation of George V, he’d have realised what was going on, but…

I always tend to play the part I’m given – the Show must go on, I thought – but then I remembered the other sense of “show”, and the Wilfred Owen poem with that title – and I began to worry. I peeped again through the gap in the planking – my rescuer was peering through another slit to the right and above – and the landscape was still that of the Western Front. My dream or his? A powerful mind, to say the least, to transform things so completely. I looked away from the view to talk to him – but his body was taut, and I watched unbreathing as his finger squeezed the trigger and his shoulder absorbed the recoil with the slightest shudder. I couldn’t help myself. I turned and looked out through my observation slit to see the result. There was a grey hump on the field in the middle distance which had been smooth before, and the hint of a glint of light off a thin piece of metal skewed to the right and the sky.

“Nice shot,” I said, before I could help myself.

“Thanks,” he said, “though I don’t like doing it and I’m not proud of it. Some people keep a score, you know. But then some people keep a tally of the number of times they make love in the brothel. It’s just got to be done. If I don’t do it to them, then they’ll do it to me, and after they’ve done it to me, they’ll go on and do it to everyone else beside me and behind me, and then they’ll go over to England and do it to everybody I care about, and I can’t have that happening, can I?”

“No, indeed not,” I said, wondering who he was and where he was from, and how many of his pals had had it done to them, and how long he’d been out here (out here? I was in the middle of Wiltshire, for goodness’s sake!) and all the other questions I wanted to ask but knew I shouldn’t, because one didn’t.

To tell the truth, I had no idea what to say to him. I’m not usually tongue-tied, even with strangers, and I pride myself on possessing enough unusual information to provide at least one relevant remark on anybody’s specialism – enough to give them a decent cue for the monologue they secretly want to deliver. But in this case – I didn’t even know what year it was for him. Should I talk about the 1913 Derby? (Poor woman! Poor horse! In what order?) Or the 1914 Christmas football match? First, second or third Ypres? First second or third Loos? Passchendaele? The Somme? Would I be an unwelcome prophet, or a bringer of stale and belated tidings? I’ve never had trench foot or eaten bully beef or killed a man or had a friend hit beside me and had to wash bits of his brains out of my hair. Art is art and life is life and even reading diaries doesn’t help.

So I resorted to song, because it’s neutral. It’s between you and me, not mine, not yours, you can join in if you choose or simply listen.

I began by whistling, and since he didn’t object, but actually smiled, I added the lyrics:

Bombed last night, and bombed the night before,

Gonna get bombed tonight, if we never get bombed any more!

When we’re bombed, we’re scared as we can be!

God rot the bombing men from Higher Germany!

He began to join in the chorus, and I felt good as we sang together:

They’re warning us, they’re warning us,

One shell-hole for just the four of us,

Thank your lucky stars there are no more of us,

For one of us could fill it all alone!

I should probably have been content with that, and offered to keep a look-out while he snatched some sleep. I should have given him some of my sandwiches (concealing the plastic bag they were in, to avoid the culture shock), tea from my thermos (if he’d had a tin mug of his own, for the same reason). But hubris has been part of human nature since we first stood upright and fell over – well before the Greeks invented the word for it – and my obsession with Great War nostalgia pushed me into the second verse, which we sang in alternate lines:

Gassed last night, and gassed the night before,

Gonna get gassed tonight if we never get gassed any more.

When we’re gassed, we’re sick as we can be,

Cos phosgene and mustard gas is much too much for me!

They’re after us, they’re after us,

One respirator for the four of us,

Thank your lucky stars that three of us can run,

So one of us can use it all alone.

The chorus, of course, brought us together. And then it parted us. We smelt it at the same time and saw the knowledge in one another’s eyes. He had the gas-mask. I had the thermos and the sandwiches. I nodded to him, half-waved, and turned and ran out of the barn, holding my breath (though why, I do not know).

I made it to the end of the ruined buildings before I turned and looked back. The Lone Barn was just the way it had been before – but so were the fields: some ploughed, some harrowed, some with the agricultural equivalent of five o’clock shadow. I stopped holding my breath and drew in several lungfuls of replacement air to make up for the fright and the flight.

There was a seat a few yards further on, in the place with the best view, and I staggered over to it and sat down. I knew I wasn’t going back into the barn. I didn’t want to find it empty, and I didn’t want to find it occupied. I looked at the landscape instead. Where I had seen the wreckage of some dreadful engine of war, a chain harrow was rusting quietly among nettles. What I had seen as a grinning death’s head supported on skeletal arms was a crumpled black and white plastic fertiliser sack half-caught round a skewed and broken fence-post that still held up its three strands of barbed wire.

Suddenly, the wind swung round a little, and a noise reached me, and straight afterwards a stench, sickly and acrid at the same time. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! whispered Wilfred Owen in my ear. But I ignored him. The noise was a tractor, one of those modern ones with a totally enclosed cab and air-conditioning, designed to protect the driver from the fumes of whatever was being sprayed, which in this case I recognised at once as pig-slurry, with its unique, gut-wrenching stink. Give me horse-manure any time, failing that, cow-dung.

Postponing tea and sandwiches for obvious reasons, I continued on my way, noticing as I stood up a brass plaque on the bench:

Alfred (Fred) Hutchings 1894-1917 Corpore ignota in terra sepulto maneat anima in loco ei gratissimo. Renewed 1997.

Should they have renewed it? I wondered. When do you let people go? Was it the Latin that held him, as it said, “his body buried in unknown earth, may his soul remain in his favourite place”? Be careful what you wish for; you may get it.

I reflected that I was surprised they were putting pig-slurry on the fields in autumn; I’d associated it more with the spring growing-season. But when have humans ever needed a reason for spreading shit around?