Sergeant Nelson of the Guards Read Free Page B

circumstances demanded it, he got a job labouring, and happy to get it. The whole point is, the children ate, had shoes, and never had a day’s illness. That’s little enough to brag about, but at the same time it’s something, he reckons. Well, gentlemen, he got together a pound here and a pound there, by going without everything except potatoes and sleep. He likes his grub but can go without it. He took a little shop, starting with a few packets of stuff on tick. Now he owes no man a farthing. It is a good business. It took him five years to make it what it is. He had a vast scheme for a mail-order business, a fair and square one on new lines, which, in another five years, might make Shorrocks as big as Sainsbury. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that Agatha, though the finest lass in the world, will ruin everything. Well … happen she will, happen she won’t. He’ll still have his own two hands—
    —that is to say, given reasonable luck. He reckons that very few men lose both hands….
    He sits, pink and stubborn, like a skinned bulldog. His expression does not change. He has got his left-hand dog-teeth into the hole they have bitten through the stem of his pipe; pincers could not wrest it from his mouth before he chose to lay it down. Somebody asks him why he volunteered so soon. A year or two might pass before the thirty-sixes are called; and in that time a lot might happen….
    “If we’ve to fight,” says Shorrocks, “let’s get it over and done wi’. Let’s get on wi’ it. I look at it lak this: it takes months to train a man.Ah. A year, eh? Ah. I reckon that year between now and t’ call-up o’ t’ thirty-sixes as eighteen months. Ah. Any’ow I don’t like foreigners gettin’ cheeky. So let’s get on wi’ it, and quick, too.”
    His little blue eyes glitter as he talks, and he spits rather than puffs the smoke of his pipe. You agree with Shorrocks or you quarrel with him. He is a man of unyielding spirit. He loves England for one smoky dent in her wind-blasted northern moors—the unlovely valley of Rockbottom which reeks to the rainy sky.
    The wars of all the world never moved a hair of his scanty eyebrows. He never gave a damn for all the Japs in China. He wanted only to be left alone.
    In this he gets his way, in the end.
    There were other Shorrockses, just like this one. They were the dawn-men of Britain. There is little doubt that they looked much the same; had the same stubborn, rosy, primeval English face; the same stalwart carriage; and talked something like the same language. If Shorrocks on the bed wants to “talk broad,” or lapse into Lancashire dialect, up pops the old Angle. He never yielded a thing—not even a phrase—to foreign influence!
    The ancient Shorrocks went about his business in the same way and the same place when there was a bit of a Roman villa standing where the Jubilee Memorial Tower stands today. The Romans had come and gone. Shorrocks ploughed his land, and rose at dawn, and lay down at dark, and owed no man a farthing; kept a cautious eye on what came in and what went out, and cared not a rap for the heaving world. Yorkshire was a foreign land. Leicester was a traveller’s story. London was a legend. Soldiers were a pain; they ate and drank but grew no barley for bread and beer. Shorrocks was unimpressible. He wanted nothing. He had Rockbottom. He had a world.
    And when they said that the wild men were coming from the north—giants with winged helmets, swordsmen in long boats—Shorrocks snorted and sniffed and called the panting newsmonger a Silly Fewel, and told him to be damned.
    But when he smelt the smoke of something burning, and heard that the long boats were up the Ribble, Shorrocks put down his scythe and put on a steel cap—not unlike his best black bowler—and got down a buckler and honed up an axe, and told Gurth to look after the swine, and kissed his wife, and went out to do battle with the raiders. He fought like the pig-headed yeoman that