I'll make you one out of a bit of that tree.'
He nodded to a hazel bush.
They stared at him, incredulous.
He got up from his chair and cut a twig the thickness of his little finger from the bush.
'Like this.'
He sat down again, and began to fashion a whistle with the pen-knife that he kept for scraping out his pipe.
It was a trick that he had practised throughout his life, for John first and then for Enid when they had been children, more recently for little Martin Costello.
The Cavanagh children stood by him watching his slow, wrinkled fingers as they worked; in their faces incredulity melted into interest.
He stripped the bark from the twig, cut deftly with the little knife, and bound the bark back into place.
He put it to his lips, and it gave out a shrill note.
They were delighted, and he gave it to the little girl,
'You can whistle with your mouth,' he said to Ronald, 'but she can't.'
'Will you make me one tomorrow?'
'All right, I'll make you one tomorrow.'
They went off together, and whistled all over the hotel and through the village, till the bark crushed beneath the grip of a hot hand.
But the whistle was still good for taking to bed, together with a Teddy and a doll called Melanic.
'It was so very kind of you to make that whistle for the children,' Mrs Cavanagh said that night, over coffee.
'They were simply thrilled with it.'
'Children always like a whistle, especially if they see it made,' the old man said.
It was one of the basic truths that he had learned in a long life, and he stated it simply.
'They told me how quickly you made it,' she said.
'You must have made a great many.'
'Yes,' he said, 'I've made a good many whistles in my time.'
He fell into a reverie, thinking of all the whistles he had made for John and Enid, so many years ago, in the quiet garden of the house at Exeter.
Enid who had grown up and married and gone to live in the United States.
John, who had grown up and gone into the Air Force.
John.
He forced his mind back to the present.
'I'm glad they liked it,' he said.
'I promised Ronald that I'd make him one tomorrow.'
Tomorrow was the tenth of May.
As the old man sat in his deck-chair beneath the trees carving a whistle for Ronald, German troops were pouring into Holland, beating down the Dutch Army.
The Dutch Air Force was flinging its full strength of forty fighting planes against the Luftwaffe.
A thousand traitors leapt into activity; all through the day the parachutists dropped from the sky.
In Cidoton the only radio happened to be switched off, and so Howard whittled at his hazel twig in peace.
It did not break his peace much when they switched it on.
In Cidoton the war seemed very far away; with Switzerland to insulate them from the Germans the village was able to view the war dispassionately.
Belgium was being invaded again, as in the last war; the sale Boche!
This time Holland, too, was in it; so many more to fight on the side of France.
Perhaps they would not penetrate into France at all this time, with Holland to be conquered and assimilated first.
In all this, Howard acquiesced.
He could remember very clearly how the war had gone before.
He had been in it for a short time, in the Yeomanry, but had been quickly invalided out with rheumatic fever.
The cockpit of Europe would take the shock of the fighting as it usually did; there was nothing new in that.
In Cidoton, it made no change.
He listened to the news from time to time in a detached manner, without great interest.
Presently fishing would begin; the snow was gone from the low levels and the mountain streams were running less violently each day.
The retreat from Brussels did not interest him much; it had all happened before.
He felt a trace of disquiet when Abbeville was reached, but he was no great strategist, and did not realise all that was involved.
He got his first great shock when Leopold, King of the Belgians, laid down his arms on the 29th May.