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By Root 8483 0

‘details’ – usually a couple of hundred men – at Retreat, sleeping at night by the telephone. We were Gwatkin’s only subalterns now, for this was the period of experiment, later abandoned as unsatisfactory, when one platoon in each company was led by a warrant-officer. If an Anti-Gas course were in progress, we slept alternate nights in the Company Office, in case there was a call from Battalion. I often undertook Kedward’s tour of duty, as he liked to ‘improve his eye’, when training was over for the day, by exploring the neighbouring country with a view to marking down suitable sites for machine-gun nests and anti-tank emplacements. Lying in the window-seat, I would think how it felt to be a father, of the times during the latter part of the Aldershot course when I had been able to see Isobel and the child. She and the baby, a boy, were ‘doing well’, but there had been difficulty in visiting them, Stevens’s car by then no longer available. Stevens, as Brent prophesied, had been ‘Returned to Unit’.

‘I shan’t be seeing you lads after tomorrow,’ he said one afternoon.

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve been RTU-ed.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘I cut one of those bloody lectures and got caught.’

‘Sorry about this.’

‘I don’t give a damn,’ he said. ‘All I want is to get abroad. This may start me on the move. I’ll bring it off sooner or later. Look here, give me your sister-in-law’s address, so I can keep in touch with her about that brooch.’

There was a certain bravado about all this. To get in the army’s black books is something always to be avoided; as a rule, no help to advancement in any direction. I gave Stevens the address of Frederica’s house, so that he could send Priscilla back her brooch. We said goodbye.

‘We’ll meet again.’

‘We will, indeed.’

The course ended without further incident of any note. On its last day, I had a word with Brent, before our ways, too, parted.

‘Pleased we ran into each other,’ he said. ‘To tell the truth, I was glad to spill all that stuff about the Duports for some reason. Don’t quite know why. You won’t breathe a word, will you?’

‘Of course not. Where are you off to now?’

‘The ITC – for a posting.’

I sailed back across the water. Return, like the war news, was cheerless. The Battalion had been re-deployed further south, in a new area nearer the border, where companies were on detachment. Gwatkin’s, as it turned out, was quartered at the Corps School of Chemical Warfare, the keeps, turrets and castellations of which also enclosed certain Ordnance stores of some importance, which came under Command. For these stores, Gwatkin’s company provided security guards, also furnishing men, if required, for Anti-Gas demonstrations. When the Battalion operated as a unit, we operated with the rest, otherwise lived a life apart, occupied with our own training or the occasional demands of the School.

Isobel wrote that her aunt, Molly Jeavons – as a rule far from an authority on such matters – had lent her a book about Castlemallock, its original owner, a Lord Chief Justice (whose earldom had been raised to a marquisate for supporting the Union) having been a distant connexion of the Ardglass family. His heir – better known as Hercules Mallock, friend of d’Orsay and Lady Blessington – had sold the place to a rich linen manufacturer, who had pulled down the palladian mansion and built this neo-gothic castle. The second Lord Castlemallock died unmarried, at a great age, in Lisbon, leaving little or nothing to the great-nephew who inherited the title, father or grandfather of the Castlemallock who had run away with Dicky Umfraville’s second wife. Like other houses of similar size throughout this region, Castlemallock, too large and inconvenient, had lain untenanted for twenty or thirty years before its requisitioning. The book also quoted Byron’s letter (a fragment only, said to be of doubtful authenticity) written to Caroline Lamb who had visited the house when exiled from England by her family on his account. Isobel had copied this out for me:

‘... even though the diversions of Castlemallock may exceed those of Lismore, I perceive you are ignorant of one matter