Arms and the Women. Reginald Hill

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       x

       spelt from Sibyl’s leaves

      Feenie Macallum…

      A blast from the past. Dear old Feenie, whose first entry was probably made with a quill pen on parchment. Box file, card index, microfiche, this Serafina has flown through the lot and here she is, wings neatly folded, sleeping in my casket waiting for the kiss of Sir Gawain to awaken her.

      fighting the world with a protest that no one will heed…

      except those in need…

      What does Daddy think as he looks down upon, or perhaps up at, his beloved daughter? Mungo Macallum, whose Celtic beginnings not even my little electronic moles have been able to dig up. The working classes of the nineteenth century still offered that option which all classes of the twenty-first century would give their eye teeth for – impenetrable obscurity.

      But there he was, an exile in Yorkshire at the turn of the century, already a man of brass, busy turning himself into a man of steel.

      But not knives and forks and spoons for Mungo. Oh no. He didn’t let himself be dazzled by the bright dawn of this new Edwardian age, he looked beyond that last long garden party of privilege and class, he saw the approaching darkness and knew that this was to be the century of the gun.

      Mungo Macallum, the armaments king.

      There are some who say that you were the model for Undershaft in Major Barbara, Mungo. Great wealth from a morally dubious source, yet not without your own moral concerns. Poverty you saw as a cause of evil, not an effect. You paid, by the standards of the time, fair wages, and you underwrote the establishment of a savings bank to encourage providence among your workers, and a building society to give those who desired it the chance of buying their own homes.

      And you led by example, showing the world how money wisely invested was the basis of prosperity.

      In 1914 you were already rich. By 1918 you had wealth beyond computation.

      In Flanders fields the poppies blow

      Between the crosses, row on row,

      While westward eighty miles or so,

      In England’s fields the profits grow.

      And in a Yorkshire field, in that remote and peaceful wedge of coastal land called Axness, you found Granary House, a bat-infested, rat-infested ruin of a mansion looking out across the sea, far far away from the glow of the furnaces and the dust of the spoilheaps. Not that you were ever ashamed of the source of your wealth. And when you heard as you rebuilt and refurbished Granary House that your mocking friends were referring to it as Gunnery House, that’s what you officially renamed it.

      Here at Gunnery you hoped to found a dynasty in a world which your own weaponry had made safe for your descendants. Lord Macallum of Axness. Oh, your title was all chosen, your coat of arms prepared. Cleverly you forbore to stoop for the windfalls the dying storm of war shook from the many branches of the new and Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The golden fruit you wanted was not to be scabbed with war-profiteering sneers. Through the twenties you paved the way with charitable deeds. But you could not forbear to make assurance doubly sure by crossing the palms of those who claimed to be able to tell your noble future with gold and silver, and all your hopes died in the Honours for Sale scandal of 1933.

      One plan had failed. Another looked like to fail. Three wives (by death, not divorce) had left you with a single child. But not the son you needed to lead off your dynasty.

      Yet a man may do something, may do much, with a biddable daughter.

      Alas, poor Mungo, what you had was not a biddable daughter.

      What you had was Serafina, born as one war ended to come of age as another began.

      Serafina, the passionate one.

      And, for a while, Serafina, one of us.

      For they were all ours for a while, those brave boys and girls who played their merry games in the enemy’s own yard. So many going, so few returning. But for that few, such a bright future, such a world of profit and delight lay ahead in those years after the shooting stopped and the real war, our kind of war, began.

      But by that time you, Serafina, had been too long away, had caught a foreign infection, had gone native.

      What you saw was not a world in the glorious turmoil of necessary recreation, with populations shifting, new battle lines being drawn up, new alliances formed, a glorious opportunity to play a part in the last and greatest crusade. No, what you saw was individuals suffering pain and deprivation and loss and injustice. Instead of population patterns, you saw refugees. Instead of demographic trends, you saw orphaned children. Instead of the forest, you saw the trees.

      Oh, here it all is, Serafina, in your little casket. The charities, the agencies, the foundations, the movements, the causes, and hardly a one of them, to start with, whose strings were not being pulled by us. Or someone somewhere very like us.