Caught, Back, Concluding Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Henry Green

  Title Page

  Caught

  Back

  Concluding

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Dazzling, daring and full of original insight and wit, Henry Green offers a unique view of a class-ridden Britain enduring both war and its aftermath. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz, so brilliantly evoked in Caught, gossip spreads like wildfire and the lives of two men are torn apart. In Back, Charley, an amputee, returns from a prison camp to his village and the grave of the woman he loved. Concluding was Green’s own favourite of his novels and tells the story of a summer’s day and a schoolgirl’s disappearance.

  The text of Caught used in this edition is based on Green’s original manuscript, which was censored by the publisher on first publication, but can be read now for the first time in unexpurgated form.

  About the Author

  Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born in 1905 near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become managing director of an engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926) was written whilst he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the London Fire Brigade. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, and a memoir, Pack My Bag. Henry Green died in 1973.

  OTHER WORKS BY HENRY GREEN

  Blindness

  Living

  Party Going

  Loving

  Nothing

  Doting

  Pack My Bag

  HENRY GREEN

  Caught, Back, Concluding

  CAUGHT

  This book is about the Auxiliary Fire Service which saved London in her night blitzes, and bears no relation, or resemblance, to the National Fire Service, which took over when raids on London had ended.

  The characters, while founded on the reality of that time, are not drawn from life. They are all imaginary men and women. In this book only 1940 in London is real. It is the effect of that time that I have written into the fiction of Caught.

  H.G.

  When war broke out in September we were told to expect air raids. Christopher, who was five, had been visiting his grandparents in the country. His father and mother decided that he must stay down there with his aunt, and not come back to London until the war was over. His mother, Dy, went away to join him.

  The father, Richard Roe, had joined the Fire Service as an Auxiliary. He was allowed one day’s leave in three. That is, throughout forty-eight hours he stood by in case there should be a fire, and then had twenty-four in which he could do as he pleased. There were no week-ends off. Public holidays were not recognised. The trains at once became so slow that there was no way he could get down to see Christopher in a day.

  Christopher was like any other child of his age, not very interested or interesting, strident with health. He enjoyed teasing and was careful no one should know what he felt.

  He was naturally a responsibility but, with things as they were in the first few months, he was not too great a one, nevertheless rather irritating at a distance. War puts men in this position, however, that they can do little about their own affairs, they have no prospects, their incomes fluctuate wildly, heavier taxation is always threatened. As soon as Roe felt he could do no more for the boy than he had already done and by what he was still doing, dropping in to the office on leave days, Christopher grew very much closer to him.

  After a time, when the turmoil of the first weeks of war subsided, conditions settled in the Service, and it became possible to do ninety-six on duty to get forty-eight hours off. In this way, after three months of war and no raids, that is of anticlimax, Roe worked four days to be two days on leave.

  He took a train. It was raining. The carriages were full of young men uniformed. Soon they were in darkness. When, some time later, in considerable suspense, he stepped out at night into more cold rain, back into his old life, on to a platform shining as ink, like a dark picture done on glass framed to screen electric light, he told himself he had been wrong to expect so much of this meeting.

  Dy had brought Christopher to meet the train with his cousin Rosemary. This child was three years older than Christopher who, at that time, would not be parted from her. But she was old enough to say some of the conventional things when they shook hands. Roe felt sorry she had not been left behind. It was too dark, the engine made much noise, and they had to see that Christopher was not bowled over, or did not get down on the line in his excitement, which, in part, was showing off. This tired the parents, and the boy had become over-excited. There was dark and hissing. In the car at last, Christopher talked incomprehensibly to Rosemary of some game or pretence of their own. With all this still between the three of them their child was put to bed by his nurse.

  The next morning Roe went to fetch Christopher from day school. They were shy of each other. He wanted to buy him sweets but could not hear which shop the boy said was best, Christopher was so low off the ground, and he was rather deaf. It may have been politeness, but his son let him go by three which would have done, until, in the end, they came to almost the last shop in this small street, a stationer’s. He took him in to look. There were no sweets, but he bought a children’s paper Christopher wanted, then led him back to the shop he knew Dy liked, where she got her chocolate. It may now have been that the child’s shyness of other school children, or the shyness of being alone with his father, was beginning to wear off, but when they got back to this particular shop Christopher said distinctly this was the best in town. It was the first thing Roe had really heard him say all morning, which was unusual because as a rule the child would shout the few things he wanted.

  They bought a great deal, so much that Roe was afraid his son would only remember the leave by how ill he had been. The old man who served them was tiresome. Christopher said yes to whatever was offered. Roe began to feel the boy might not be having his own choice. He could pick nothing for himself. It is possible that he was confused by the amount he was getting. But he seemed satisfied, although he had not lost his reserve. He stayed silent until they had walked the few yards home, when he ran on ahead to shew some of the sweets to his cousin. Roe carried the rest to the nursery. Christopher asked if he could have lunch downstairs. Roe had not expected this. The house was full of people. He was relieved when the nanny had a good reason against.

  After lunch father and son were to take a walk alone. When Christopher was punctually brought down ready to go out, Roe found that he himself was shy. The child seemed so unapproachably young. We can do little more, in this world than be ordinary and natural to each other and it was just this which, so he thought, it was so difficult to be.

  There had, as yet, been no raids on London. Because this was his first leave, Roe felt that it might be his last, that the moment he got back to the substation he might be in the thick of it, after the fruitless waiting.

  Also this was to be their first walk alone together. Whereas in the old days he could have arranged it any afternoon. He felt now, and he could not tell Christopher, that they might never go for a walk again.

  By the time they started out the rain had stopped. Dy put the boy’s hat in his pocket, and, with a pang Roe heard him angrily cry out that he did not want it. There was too much fuss before they were off.

  He took his father up the garden by a back way. Roe had never used this, and, to break the ice, tried to make something of its being so dark, for there was a high wall one side
, thick shrubs on the other. But Christopher was definite. In a loud voice he told his father it was to hide all sight of the gardeners from the lawn, as these men went from kitchen to kitchen garden, and back again. From that moment he spoke up.

  Separated by privet from the aspect of those lawns and borders familiar to him, Roe was brought to a red brick wall he knew, along which were trained pear trees, and to a door he had never seen, not the flamboyant wrought-iron gate which opened on to that cinder path between cabbages, which led to the peaches, but, when Christopher had turned a brass knob, one that let them into the glasshouse given over to palms, hot, with long dark flowing leaves perennially dark green. Christopher broke away. He ran on to be first so that he could open the door out, on a brass latch. Recognising, when they had gone through, what had last year been a bed of carrots, Roe asked whether he remembered how in the summer they had all gone to get something for his rabbit, that he had pulled one up, and eaten it raw. Christopher said he did not know, then added coldly that his rabbit was sent away.

  It came on to rain as they went along, but gently, in a mist. Roe never thought to make him put on his hat.

  By the time they had come to three gardeners in a fig house spraying the heart-shaped leaves from a portable tank, Christopher was quite wet. He insisted on working the handle, and Roe helped. Then he wanted to do it on his own. Then he went inside. He took the nozzle, sending the chemical solution where he pleased. Roe thought the boy might get some in his eyes, but did not like to forbid him.

  Then Christopher took his father off. They went to the summer house beyond. They found a dead mouse.

  They took a path up out of the gardens into the park. It was steep in places. Roe slipped and fell, full length. Christopher was much amused. They both laughed. He kept on saying his father had looked so funny, too often. Roe noticed the wet had brought out a curl in the child’s hair, which he had never seen anything but straight.

  They climbed a gate into the park. Ordinarily there was a view, from the cart track they followed, out over country which stretched to the first Welsh hills. But this day a permanence of rain softened what was near, and half hid by catching the soft light all that was far, in the way a veil will obscure, yet enhance the beauty of a well-remembered face or, in a naked body so covered, sharpen the sight. In such a way this stretch of country he knew so well was made the nearer to him by rain.

  They threw wet sticks to see who could send these amongst the deer that moved off faster than they came up, merging ahead until these heraldic cattle were a part of the mist, unidentifiable in rain. Christopher was light-hearted. His father had regrets. He wished it had all been less, as a man can search to find he knows not what behind a netted brilliant skin, the eyes of a veiled face, as he can also go with his young son parted from him by the years that are between, from her by the web of love, or from remembered country by the weather, in the sadness of not finding.

  They were now on top of a hill which was not long. They came to where there was a hollow. Sunk in the middle of this, level with the turf, they found a big domed triangle of concrete. There was an iron door, padlocked fast. It might have been one of those houses in which ice used to be kept against the summer, when we had hard winters. In these days it was more probably a cistern to supply the manor house with water, but, speaking down to what he took to be his level of romance, Roe, in a roundabout way, said it was a secret, that he had never shewn anyone before, this was where the hob-goblins lived, no one had ever known this place but him. Christopher said, ‘but nanny knows, Rosemary knows, oh everybody knows.’ Roe said he’d had no idea of that. Christopher made out he was sorry but it was so, and he did not think fairies lived there. When he was asked how he could tell, all he would say was that he knew he did not think they did.

  Christopher took hold of his father’s hand. They went on with their walk, beneath bare oaks from which water dripped, watched by the deer, turned heads and pointed ears. Then, after a silence, Roe was surprised to be asked if he really thought fairies were people. He said he was not sure. He was told that his son knew they were. He asked why. He was answered that the nanny had met an old man from Wales who had seen one. Roe said if he should see one for himself then he would let Christopher know. The question next put to him was whether he would tell Christopher or Christopher’s mother first. He told the boy he would let him know before anyone. He was then asked why. He said he supposed it would be because he was not sure that Dy would be interested, anyway that he had been talking about fairies to Christopher only, so it would be natural to tell Christopher first.

  Christopher said, ‘Yes.’

  They came to the trap for rooks which stood in one corner of the park, a square space with walls of rabbit wire, now rotted. Christopher remembered, he said with satisfaction, how they used to caw in it, beating from side to side against the wire until the keeper came with his gun.

  Then, as they turned to come back, going out of their way to climb along a fallen tree, another herd of deer moved off into the veil, heads up, one of them coughing. He wanted to know if it was going to die. Asking this he struck so close to the note this sad day played over and over, with the wet, the silence once broken, flying low over tops of trees, by a warplane which he did not even look up to watch, neither did the deer, and to the note repeated which was this separation that war had forced into their lives, all these sounded the closing phrase of a call to depart, and Roe said the deer would die, that it was sure to.

  Roe had to go back that night. He said goodbye in the hall, the front door open on to the darkness and the journey. Standing there, awkwardly shaking hands, he wished, and he wished too late, that he had never made a point of not kissing Christopher. He was upset, at that moment no contact with his son could have been too close. But he did not dare, for he was afraid, if he took Christopher in his arms, that he would break into tears, and then the boy might be frightened.

  As he drove away he felt he had lost everything, and in particular the boy. Yet he had to admit that he could, at the time, feel nothing stronger than irritation when, some months earlier, as will appear, Christopher had really been lost in London.

  On the journey back he was alone in the carriage. He put his feet up and lay relaxed, his back to the whirling dark outside. He remembered how, from curiosity, he had been to look at the store out of which Christopher had been abducted. It was disastrous that the woman who took the boy away should be his Fireman Instructor’s sister. Hardly less fatal that the store had been lit by stained glass windows in front of arc lamps which cast the violent colours of that glass over the goods laid out on counters.

  He remembered, in the autumn, it was dusk as they used to arrive at the fire station to report, in dark blue overalls, rubber boots, and what looked like a chauffeur’s cap with a white metal badge. The tower each station has in its yard, the five open platforms one above the other, each the height from ground level of the floor of a building, was partially visible by street lights, monstrous, overwhelming because there were no railings round its platforms.

  When he was sixteen a friend of the family, a man who studied church windows, had taken them round just under those in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey, on a ledge about forty feet from the ground. This step which ran along in the thickness of the walls was no more than a yard in width and had nothing to the side, no balustrade, no rail. Every so often they had to get by cords, cutting across from each window down to the floor that seemed so far beneath. These were the means by which panels in the glass could be opened to ventilate the choir. As they went round, each one in turn had to take hold of a cord with his right hand to step over left leg first, and then, in his own case, as he faced right to bring his right leg over, he had that terror of the urge to leap, his back to deep violet and yellow Bible stories on the glass, his eyes reluctant over the whole grey stretch of the Abbey until they were drawn, abruptly as to a chasm, inevitably, and so far beneath, down to that floor hemmed with pews, that height calling on the puls
es and he did not know why to his ears, down to dropped stone flags over which sunlight had cast the colour in each window, the colour it seemed his blood had turned.

  At the station they used to pitch the escape and climb up that sharply narrowing, rattling ladder, red, but it would by now be too dark to see, up to the head painted white for work at night with, in this dusk, a voice from the sea bellowing advice below, all of them getting out of breath, fumbling, some telling themselves, and even each other, not to look down. After the first few times they were handy at it, but in the beginning, and most of all before they had been sent up, he would get wet in the seat of his trousers as he walked past the half seen tower at six o’clock, unlike by more than the time of day that other under which, on sun-laden evenings, the windows for seven hundred years had stained the flags, as it might be with coward’s blood.

  As he lay in the carriage, he had to arch his back and twist to stub out his cigarette, in a tray fixed by the door.

  When, from curiosity, he went to see for himself the store out of which Christopher had been abducted, he stopped, unknowing, by that very counter with the toy display which had so struck his son as to make him lost. Fire engines attracted the father, but deer, then sailboats, had bewitched the son. For both it was the deep colour spilled over these objects that, by evoking memories they would not name, and which they could not place, held them, and then led both to a loch-deep unconsciousness of all else.

  The walls of this store being covered with stained glass windows which depicted trading scenes, that is of merchandise being loaded on to galleons, the leaving port, of incidents on the voyage, and then the unloading, all brilliantly lit from without, it follows that the body of the shop was inundated with colour, brimming, and this colour, as the sea was a predominant part of each window, was a permanence of sapphire in shopping hours. Pink neon lights on the high ceiling wore down this blue to some extent, made customers’ faces less aggressively steeped in the body of the store, but enhanced, or deepened that fire brigade scarlet to carmine, and, in so doing, drugged Richard’s consciousness.