by Bryher;
Las! tu n’as qu’un livre,
Tu n’as qu’une vie
A vivre...
and of course my Elizabethans.
It was easy to talk about people wasting opportunities because they rushed about, as my aunt said, “like maniacs,” but suppose you were never given an opportunity to waste? I was scolded again for being inattentive and sent off to dress for dinner, I really regretted the Queenwood uniform, “What a pity the dear child takes no interest in her clothes,” feeling that another day had dropped completely out of life.
In April, 1913, we went back to the South. This time, on account of my brother, we joined a cruise to Italy and Greece. The places had not altered but I had changed. I recognized the scents and colors but I had lost the ability to become part of the landscape that I had had as a child. It was a curious and empty feeling. Besides, there was too much dressing up on the steamer, I missed Doris who could not come with us because she had been ill and I thought longingly of the Scillies. All the same there were some exciting moments.
We happened to arrive in Naples at the moment when they were about to launch a new Italian battleship. The steamers were in line across the bay so we took our places in one of the lifeboats for the occasion. It was impossible to see the water. The surface of the sea was crowded with Neapolitans. Sometimes there were twenty people aboard a craft meant for four, boys paddled about on improvised rafts, one passenger declared he could see somebody floating round in a converted tub. It was ten in the morning and the sun was already hot. The spectators sucked oranges, munched salami, drank wine, sang songs and flung their greasy paper against their neighbors’ oars. “This is how they welcomed Nelson,” one of our party remarked, “you would never see an English crowd enjoying themselves so much.”
“It’s the sun, remember our fogs!”
“They’ll stand up when the guns go off, capsize and sink,” our officer grunted, doing good work with a boat hook. We had dressed ship that morning quicker than any other vessel in sight.
“You don’t know Italians. They’re so buoyant, they’ll float.”
A destroyer dashed up and down, trying to keep the lines. The boatmen yelled, backed and as soon as the wash had subsided, swarmed forward again. It was obviously every man for himself. A particularly dirty bit of sausage wrapping drifted against the side and one of our sailors pushed it away with a grimace of disgust. I looked across at Vesuvius, it was peaceful and quiet. Capri lay behind us, the rest of the bay was full of every type of craft. “It will be midday before they start and we shall all get sunstroke,” another of our passengers grumbled.
It happened when we least expected it. Guns boomed, flags waved, we could just see the battleship sliding into the water. The Neapolitans not only stood up, they jumped. They broke all the rules of being in a boat. Yet oddly enough nothing seemed to capsize around us although we all got splashed and a raft just missed our stern. Then everybody made for the shore at once. We were about to wait with true British calm for the rush to subside but we were caught up in the push. We wriggled our way with infinite skill until we reached the haven of the steamer.
It was in the early days of travel and as we had been promised a visit to Paestum, it had been arranged that some of the local fishermen should take us ashore from the ship in their boats. I doubt if any of us will forget the experience. We were rowed for half an hour across a deep blue sea that was very different from the choppy English Channel, the mountains behind the temples seemed almost transparent in the heat, everything was calm when suddenly, and without a word of warning, we appeared to turn sideways on top of a wall of surf. Men prayed, some stopped rowing, others yelled, we expected the craft to fall back on top of us but somehow we were flung forward and were lifted out onto a circle of damp shingle, half a mile from the ruins.
There were no paths. It was still a time when people walked and none of us minded a scramble but we soon found that the sand was full of small, angry vipers that looked so much like scraps of dried weed that we narrowly escaped stepping on them. In ancient times when there were few remedies, they must have caused many deaths. I cannot imagine anyone enjoying the walk, it was unpleasant struggling through warm, slithery sand with hisses coming from adjacent boulders and knowing that we had to return that same way to the shore but it was an authentic approach to the temples that was very different from the motor road of today.
The myths of childhood had faded and nothing had prepared me for the impact of Greece when we landed at Corfu. Strangely enough, I felt that the island was alive, antiquity was there and I was not looking at it through a veil because it was also intensely modern. We went to Delphi, Athens, Delos and Crete where I watched Sir Arthur Evans excavating but did not dare to speak to him but this early visit was simply a preparation and my real Greek experiences belong to a later section of this record. In 1913, once we had left Greece, all that I could think about was Scilly and I was happy to get away from the formal atmosphere of the cruise and back in July to the islands.
ELEVEN
1914. Life swept on towards war.
Was it the golden summer that some say? It was hard to understand the people who spoke of it later as a time of unparalleled beauty because to me as to many other girls of my generation it was a moment like any other with no particular promise to single it out from the ever-narrowing world in which we lived. We helped our mothers in the morning, we went for walks in the afternoon; when possible, whatever wishes flowered in us they destroyed. It was the pattern that England expected of her daughters or even of her sons. We were thousands of mass-produced little Victorias and Alberts already sitting on our memorials, certain conventions common to every class in the land, that had replaced understanding and compassion. I have always felt that it was a lesser tragedy that thousands died in the trenches than that these youths had never had the chance of any human experience before they were killed. How far in fact was this repression of nature, not in Britain alone but all over Europe, the underlying reason of the war?
All July we waited. We moved as if paralyzed among our neighbors who were sure that everything would “blow over” and that it was all “hot air.” Our friends teased my father when he refused to go abroad for our usual summer holiday but, as some repairs were needed to the Eastbourne house, we rented a place at Totland Bay for August. “I cannot understand why the Germans want to fight,” my father said while we were watering the garden together, “they will have world trade securely in their hands in another few years without firing a shot.”
I hated the Isle of Wight. It was as conventional as Sussex without the consolation of my cupboard full of books. The grass was pale as if there was never any sun and the water bitterly cold. We tried a canoe but there was a strong current flowing through the bay and we were almost swept out to sea. Sometimes there was artillery practice at night. Then the windows rattled and there were sinister flashes across a cloudy, threatening sky as we began our apprenticeship to the dominant mood of this century, waiting for a catastrophe that we imperfectly understood, to crush or spare us, apparently by chance.
An odd word, “neutrality,” appeared in conversation, like a ball in a new game. I knew that the universe about me was slipping away but what could I, or even my father, do? Yesterday, how was it possible to remember yesterday when ray own hope of freedom was ending with these last days of peace? “You must realize, Miggy,” my father said as we went on tying up the tomato plants, “nothing will ever be the same.” Oh, how much easier it was in 1939!
The news grew worse. People poured back to the ports or crossed the Channel by the next to the last boat. Dr. Boyce got home but had had to leave his luggage on the way. I discovered to my shame that though the round turrets had always been a familiar feature of the landscape, I did not know the origin of the Martello towers. After I had looked it up, I wondered if there had to be a great war every century and, if so, would the pattern ever change?
We were still firmly rooted in a former age. Nobody had
a radio and if we wanted to go for a picnic we rented a pony trap and drove to a different beach. It was sinful to be late for meals, people still wondered if the water supply was safe. One afternoon we started out for a drive, the roads were empty, the hedges white with dust. A motorcycle roared past us suddenly and stopped at a cottage at the end of a lane. These machines were rare at that time and very, very noisy. The pony pricked up its ears and had to be soothed. The cyclist was holding out a paper to a woman when I looked up. She began to cry. “Oh,” my brother’s governess said, “they are calling up the Reserve.” The flowers were half withered in the garden, the rider swung onto his cycle again and was off, the woman stood still in the doorway of the house. Somehow it is this scene that I always see in memory when I hear the word “Mons.”
That night I joined my first queue. It formed outside the stationer’s shop when the evening papers arrived.
The sky was red, the weather thundery, there was nothing to do but watch each minute crawl slowly after another on the clock. Still a further new word, the “ultimatum,” spread softly among the groups waiting together in the dusk.
I stood for a while among the crowd on the evening of August 4th, feeling that as long as I did not see the words “War is declared” there was still a fragment of hope. There were no lights, the rumor spread that we should hear nothing before the morning and so we gradually dispersed. I was quite unable to imagine a modern battle in spite of my history; faced with catastrophe all any of us could do was to murmur, “But it isn’t possible.”
“It’s war.” Somebody rapped on the door early the next morning, “Get up, we’re having breakfast at once.” I had a momentary feeling of relief that the strain of waiting was over although I knew that at every instant something of the familiar world was shattering into dust. The front door knob was smeared with blood when I went downstairs. It was an appropriate symbol. The government had summoned my father to London and the telegraph boy had fallen off his bicycle in the darkness and cut his hand.
People on holiday with no urgent business were ordered to remain where they were and not to crowd the trains. I remember no cheering in the Isle of Wight, only many tears. The place was full of sailors who belonged to the Reserve. The first hours were so utterly strange that I think we all hoped that Time could swallow itself for once, obliterate a day and let us return to peace. It was only after the first cruiser was sunk in the North Sea that there was a general realization there could be no turning back. A handwritten notice about the loss was posted up among tins of biscuits and packets of tea in the little general shop. Then the mood changed instantaneously; rumors began to circulate, German spies had been landed in a cove, all civilians were to be evacuated, silver coinage disappeared. We began to struggle with the blackout. In an age that has seen the triumph of electricity, it is odd to realize that we have had to live in artificial darkness for eleven of the century’s first fifty years.
An English cargo boat came peacefully up the narrow channel between the cliffs and the mainland. It had left port several weeks previously and carried no radio. Why should it stop because a shot was fired across its bow? It was just the navy playing about on maneuvers, the captain was saying, no doubt, but in more picturesque language, to the mate. We stood on the cliffs, knowing that the area was mined, while the firing continued. At last as the vessel hove to, we seemed to feel its surprise. It was a perfect symbol for the advancing month.
London was a city of the dead. The news got worse and my father was not confident of victory. He wanted to send us to America but we all refused indignantly to leave him. “This is the result of our education,” I grumbled, “what is the use of knowing every skirmish in the War of the Roses by heart and nothing about what is happening in Europe?” I knew that I was caught in a trap (if only I had not seen it coming) and that I was only a cipher in what future historians would call the general population, sharing a chronicle instead of writing about it but without the solace of believing England to be invincible.
A wartime pattern of life began to evolve. The shops were empty, the parks were full of soldiers learning their drill. The air was suspended in excitement, in the vibrating stillness of after an explosion. Ugly rumors began to spread about faulty ammunition and waterlogged trenches. People still greeted each other with “It will all be over by Christmas” and when my father said no, it would last several years, they remembered his German grandfather and refused to speak to us. I comforted myself with Freeman’s history of ancient Sicily. It was just as modern as the newspapers. Artillery or Iberian slingers, the effect was the same whether Paris or Syracuse were in danger. It became so saturated with the spirit of that unhappy, bewildering time that I was never able to read the book again.
Business as usual. No, my masters, how quickly we misread the language of the past. Those words did not have the sinister meaning that is now ascribed to them. It was not a summons to profiteer. We were in the first major war since Waterloo and it was an order to us not to panic but to get on with our jobs. Let the present misunderstanding be a warning to historians how much the moral meaning of a phrase can be distorted in a generation. I believe that the English took the First World War far more deeply and seriously than they did the Second. They learned in sorrow, the casualty lists were nearly three times greater than they were in the nineteen forties, the beliefs for which they had sacrificed so much and that they had been taught would sustain them in adversity were shattered in a night. They were then blamed for having had faith in them. There was more fluidity in 1939. People knew what to expect and took it as a necessary evil, like going to school. The real British revolution took place on August 4, 1914, and none of the survivors have got over it.
The winter was grim and hard. It is never pleasant belonging to an unpopular minority and we were disliked the more heartily when Christmas passed and my father’s prophecy that it would not be a short war proved correct. At Easter, 1915, I had a brief respite. I was allowed to go alone with Dorothy Pilley to a cottage belonging to one of her relatives at Beddgelert in North Wales.
These holidays were another proof of the inconsistency of the laws that bound our daily lives. We were not allowed to go to a teashop in London even as a group but Dorothy and I enjoyed two glorious weeks of complete freedom in the mountains simply because we had been sent there to walk. Both of us loved rambling and this was no hardship. I tramped a great deal when I was young, mostly with a heavy rucksack. I think my record was fifty miles in three days.
How little we know about our native land! To our surprise we found ourselves among foreigners. The children learnt English at school but their parents spoke Welsh and we had to learn a few words ourselves so as to ask the way should we get lost. The minister called on us the day after our arrival and told us that he would excuse us from attending the services as those were in Welsh but that we must pull down our blinds, read our Bibles and not go out until after four o’clock on Sundays. Yet in spite of much apparent godliness, many of the neighbors would not speak to one another and the village was seething with scandals and feuds.
We wandered about the hills from dawn to dusk. The land felt old, a mist rose sometimes without warning and we wondered if we should be able to find our way back to the valley. Other mornings the sunlight brought out the smell of grass, fresh and cool in the growing time of the year. A pale blue clump of harebells marked the way along a narrow river where the water tumbled over ancient, moss-covered stones. Every generation has a special symbol that it cherishes and ours was Nature; we did not have to be “seen and not heard” on those long tramps, we could talk to each other, we were free.
Dorothy wanted to climb as much as I wanted to write. I thought that mountaineering was reserved for the Alps because at that time only a few enthusiasts climbed in England and it was little discussed outside their own circle. We happened to walk fifteen miles across open country one day and met three men from the Beddgelert hotel over tea as we were waiting for the bus to take us back to the village
. They invited us to try a mountain with them on the following morning.
So we climbed Tryfan, and incredible as this must sound today, we climbed it in skirts. It is true that they were short. One man unrolled the rope, the leader explained the belay and we were off, clinging to the rock face with fingers and toes. I am afraid that I was hauled on several occasions but Dorothy went up as if she had been used to precipices all her life.
I imagine that we climbed one of the easier ways. It was exciting to sit on the summit and look across at other peaks instead of up at them. The descent was worse, particularly one pitch where we had to swing out in space without being able to see the next foothold, but we got to the valley eventually and had a short rest. It was about four in the afternoon but our leader suggested that instead of taking the path to the valley we should go up and over a place called the Bristly Ridge and back that way to Beddgelert. The name was enough for me. One of the party was elderly and he and I went ignominiously down by the easy track while the others roped up and started again for the heights. They did not return until eleven o’clock that night. Dorothy had found her destiny and was in a state of ecstatic happiness.
I was praying that our parents would not hear about our escapade.
It is said that the English are a nation of amateurs but to share in some sport or art, no matter in how humble a manner, makes life richer and keeps us young. It is only after we have tried to climb, ourselves, that we can really understand it. I have never been a mountaineer because I do not have the requisite balance or a head for heights but the gain from my few attempts has been pure gold. My shelves have always been full of climbing books, I have walked for days with a rucksack among the rough hill paths of the Alps and at least I know enough to appreciate the difference between rocks that crackle in the sun like a dragon’s mouth and the cold crevices just empty of ice. I have seen saxifrage growing out of a rift that was a deeper, purer color than its cousin in the valley and have felt the contrast between the nearness of the prickly surface to which I was clinging and the wideness of the surrounding space. Dorothy Pilley (now Mrs. I. A. Richards) got the feeling best of a sudden unity with a far from inanimate earth in her book, Climbing Days. Her ascents in the Alps and the Far East are well-known to her fellow mountaineers. I was there the day that it all began and have always been grateful; she widened my world.
