The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  All wartime blurs together in retrospect but I would far rather go through the second war again than the first. There was a gulf between soldiers and civilians in 1914; in the blitz we were as one. After the initial, shattering start (not at Dunkirk but at Mons) there were four years of shortages, food queues, alarms and appalling losses, while we waited in stunned silence, never knowing what to say or do. Petrol pumps were left running at the camps, men played football with joints of meat but we, as civilians, dared not criticize the waste. I lost all confidence in governments then and afterwards. Less bureaucracy and more common sense might have saved so many lives.

  As far as I and the girls I knew were concerned our already stern discipline was immediately tightened. It was wrong to be happy in such times and whatever tiny rebellions broke out were crushed before they were born. No deliverance was possible as long as England was at war. Little attempt was made to recruit female labor until 1917 although it was fashionable to volunteer for nursing and maids went into factories instead of domestic service. I answered the telephone and did odd jobs, my chief task seemed to be carrying heavy baskets of potatoes up a rather steep hill. It seemed to me that I was neither dead nor alive but struggling like Atlas to hold up some grain of individual identity against a monstrous cloud. It was useless saying that I could not endure; in the classic phrase of the Second World War, “What else was there to do?” If I could grow again, I scribbled in another notebook, if I could only grow...

  It was one of the few times in my life when my landscape shifted from the country to the town. The noise of the passing traffic made the streets seem less lonely than the silent fields. I could not resist the illusion that someday in London I might meet a fellow writer although no stranger crossed the threshold of our house. In 1916 I read a review of Dorothy Richardson’s Backwater. It was said to be critical of education so I immediately bought a copy. I defied all rules and read on until I had finished it. For the first time as I said excitedly to my schoolfellows, “Somebody is writing about us.”

  I have always told my friends abroad that if they want to know what England was like between 1890 and 1914, they must read Pilgrimage, and Dorothy Richardson has often been more appreciated on the Continent than in her native land. People do not want to know what really happened in that epoch that they persist in calling “the golden years.” Miriam’s England was the England that I saw. I never identified myself with her because she was twenty years older than I was and I was full of the revolutionary spirit of my own generation. We had faced the same reproaches, however, and shared the same fury that social conventions were considered more important than intelligence. Perhaps great art is always the flower of some deeply felt rebellion. Then there was the excitement of her style, it was the first time that I realized that modern prose could be as exciting as poetry and as for continuous association, it was stereoscopic, a precursor of the cinema, moving from the window to a face, from a thought back to the room, all in one moment just as it happened in life. Dorothy Pilley was as enthusiastic as I was; we had our favorite scenes, mine was the discussion as to how far the school’s reputation might have been harmed because a child had taken off her hat while she played and both of us knew the sudden exhilaration in spite of the pressure upon us, as we rode down a London street, like Miriam, on top of a bus. Most of all I felt that a weight had been lifted for a moment so that underneath the daily frustrations I could feel my roots prickle and know that they were still alive.

  I did not meet Dorothy Richardson until 1923 but she was the Baedeker of all our early experiences and I have read and reread Pilgrimage throughout my life.

  It is difficult to pick out dates in the conglomerate of years.

  My school friends were scattered, Ethel was nursing in Salonika, Petrie was at Oxford, Dorothy at work and Doris was also helping her father in his office. She was allowed occasionally to come up from Penzance and stay with us. One evening after a particularly dreary day of small but necessary tasks, we were sitting after dinner beside the blue and silver curtains in the drawing room that, in their turn, concealed the blackout when the door opened slowly and the butler entered. He bowed and announced with an old-fashioned formality, “My lady, the Zeppelins.”

  My mother was on her feet in an instant, “Get your coats, girls, come at once.”

  “Is it wise to go out?” my father inquired, lowering the newspaper that he was reading.

  We did not stop to reply, we ran. By the time that we got into the street dozens of people were staring at the sky as if they expected an eclipse. Officers on leave stood beside girls in evening dresses, a scullery maid with her hair already in curlers had tried to tuck these unsuccessfully beneath a faded, woolen cap, a cook had come from washing up with flecks of soap still on her arms and the nurse from next door ran out, buttoning up her coat. We had no idea whether we were being attacked by one Zeppelin or seven, it was our very first raid and we did not think about damage. As usual in a time of crisis class distinctions were forgotten, we gaped and chattered, thought we had seen “something,” were answered with jokes. The only person unconcerned was the postman; we had an evening delivery right through the first war and he continued his round with perfect dignity as if he were in an empty road.

  Doris and I slipped out the next day and took a bus to the City to look at our first bombed house. It may seem callous in the light of later experience but when masses of the population had not even seen an aeroplane and the wildest rumors were circulating, we felt that accurate information was important and it seemed the proper thing to do. We could not find the place at first but few people could resist Doris when she smiled at them and a friendly policeman directed us to the street with a “mind you stop when you get to the rope.” The back of the house was untouched, the front was rubble, a familiar enough sight in the forties but then it seemed vast, unnatural and completely new. I could not relate it to anything that had ever happened and as we boarded an ancient bus to return home with our tale I said, “Remember, Doris, we are a footnote to history,” in the most pompous voice.

  It was only a beginning. The raids continued and we began to take them seriously. “I shall not live to see the country recover,” my father said, “you may.” The external rules held, we dressed for dinner but we had strips of flannel stitched inside our clothes. The only fire was in the dining room, there was no other heating and I was never warm in winter except in bed.

  “Wake up!” A hand shook my blankets. “Wake up!”

  I did not want to emerge into another monotonous day. I wanted to be conscious instead that I was warm and asleep.

  “Hurry!” I heard a tremendous explosion but as I opened my unwilling eyes I realized that it was only a maroon. Our maid, Emma, was standing over me, a Bible under her arm and a dustpan in the guise of a steel helmet upon her head. My blankets had never felt so luxurious but somebody else would only come to fetch me if I lingered. My dressing gown and a coat, the usual routine, were spread over a chair.

  I grabbed a book of American poetry, if I were going to be killed it should be while I was reading about the New World. “Hurry!” There were shouts from the staircase and we shuffled down to the dining room as we had been advised to shelter at the bottom of the house. How innocent we were! There was a glass chandelier in the middle of the room. I do not think we imagined what it would be like if the house were hit (it was in 1940, and partially destroyed but by then it was empty), we went downstairs purely to please the government, quiet in demeanor as per headline advice and, as I added, with yawns.

  I went along the corridor to my father’s office. The lights were out so I drew back the curtains and stared at the sky. It was as blue as a deep wave and the rooftops looked like towers. People were always blaming me for talking about the past but here we were in the middle of things and a bomb splinter could kill one in exactly the same way as an Agincourt arrow.

  Something zigzagged across the window and I leapt backwards like a modern kangaroo. The park guns sta
rted, I felt the foundations of the house rock under me, I wondered if we should even hear a bomb in all the noise. It was a little lonely and I returned to the dining room to report.

  “Have they hit anything?”

  “If they have, we shall not hear for months!”

  “We’ll know. The rumors will be everywhere.”

  “It’s a thunderstorm, darling,” my mother said reassuringly to my brother who had been rolled up in a blanket, he was about seven, and put into the big armchair.

  “It’s not, it’s a raid.”

  Ah, I thought, you cannot trick a child as I wrapped myself up in a rug. The noise moved away. The firing continued in the distance but there was a strange, unearthly silence along our street. “Go and tell Emma it is over,” my mother suggested, “she always gets so frightened.”

  I crawled along to the kitchen in the dark as I was not sure if they had remembered to draw the blinds and found Emma, still in her dustpan helmet, moaning to herself. “It’s all right, they’ve gone,” I shouted but she did not hear me until I shook her by the shoulder and she lifted the pan an inch.

  “Gone, miss, don’t you know what they are going to do?”

  “Come along,” I knew if I gave her the slightest encouragement that we should never get back to bed.

  “But, miss, you don’t understand! My brother-in-law wrote us from France. The first lot come with bombs. The second are going to sprinkle a powder, or maybe it’s a gas, over all of us. Whoever breathes a particle of it and you can’t see it, mind you, or smell it, will die of diphtheria, after ‘orrible sufferings.” (Normally Emma was most precise in her speech but there were occasional lapses.) “I wished I had stayed in America when I went to see my brother there but I couldn’t get a decent cup of tea.”

  “It’s cold, come along, we may as well die in our beds,” I suggested cheerfully.

  “You go, miss,” Emma tilted the pan back on her carefully rolled bun of hair and opened her Bible, “I couldn’t sleep a wink if I did get upstairs but mind” (she was more authoritarian with me than my mother) “don’t you go turning on your light till you’re sure the curtains are drawn.”

  “All clear!” The boy scouts were riding round on their cycles. “All clear!” A dog barked, it sounded so old-fashioned after the guns. I peeped round a blind on my way upstairs to see the gray of a civilian dawn breaking over the houses. Somewhere people were digging through wreckage and marking the places where bombs had fallen on a map. How stupid it was! We were not in the Dark Ages, this was the twentieth century. I gripped the banisters but even the hardness of the wood did not convince me of reality or that I was actually myself. I had forgotten my doubts by the next morning only to have them return as if a switch had been reconnected as I stood under the same conditions on a similar staircase on my first experience in 1940 of the blitz.

  TWELVE

  I knew the Scillies in war as well as peace. Fishing was forbidden, notices were posted up advising us to take shelter in suitable caves in case of an invasion (how we longed for the alarm to go off) and the commander of a German submarine was said to have told some torpedoed sailors that he had been round and under the little Lyonnesse a score of times. We landed in July, 1917, to find St. Mary’s in a turmoil of excitement. The Kathlamba, a cargo boat bound from Australia to England, had been hit just outside the islands but had managed to gain the safety of the Sound and had been beached off Tresco. Doris and I looked at each other, we were careful to be silent about our plans but as soon as lunch was over we rushed to the shore, launched the punt and started to row towards the vessel. Every craft that could float was already in front of us. “She’s carrying white flour,” one fisherman yelled, “And peach jam,” another shouted in reply. Neither of these items had been in the shops for months, besides your true Scillonian is always a wrecker at heart.

  It was a fantastic sight. The torpedo had made a hole in the side as big as a large room. The tide was washing in and out, bringing litter from the hold. About thirty islanders with hooks and shrimping nets grabbed these sacks as they floated away or gave an occasional, helpful push to those stuck near the opening. A strong, unpleasant smell of flour rotting in salt water, it was rather worse than sulphur, almost made us sneeze. “What is the use of saving the stuff?” Doris asked a fisherman who had recognized her, “Oh, the outside cakes into a sort of cement but if you scrape it off, the inside is perfectly edible and sweet.”

  We edged our way cautiously along the steamer and looked up hopefully. An officer saw us and invited us aboard. I followed Doris up the companionway with intense admiration because I should not have had the temerity to suggest the visit myself. It was our first experience of the effects of blast. The paint had been stripped from the woodwork and many doors smashed through the force of the explosion. Fortunately nobody had been much hurt. All the sailors had their stories, one man was sure that he had seen the torpedo, “It was like a porpoise, only flat,” others had been flung to the deck in complete surprise. Now and again the officer interrupted his tale to go and roar at the Scillonians. “If those pirates go on hooking away the stuff like that, there’ll be nothing left to salvage if we do get into port.”

  “They’re not pirates,” we said together in an indignant voice. The islanders were simply exercising their age-old wrecking rights but of course the officer was a foreigner, an Englishman, and he did not know. It would not be correct to lure vessels onto the rocks but with the side stove in and casks floating about, we were fully entitled to whatever gifts the sea brought to our nets. He laughed at our explanations but sent two men forward to prevent the hole from being enlarged.

  We rowed cheerfully home and, instead of being scolded as we had expected, we were actually thanked for having brought back some accurate news. Alas, the sequel was not so pleasant. Mr. Banfield was Lloyd’s Agent for the islands so while the populace feasted openly upon white bread and peach jam, we stuck sternly to a wartime diet. Rulers seldom get the best of the game. Still at the end of the holidays after they had patched the Kathlamba up sufficiently to continue her journey to “foreign parts” or otherwise England, we were all invited to tea on board and Mrs. Banfield was presented with a large and welcome cake.

  Few ships were as fortunate. We were often wakened in the middle of the night by sailors shouting in a foreign tongue under our windows. Next morning an unfamiliar lifeboat would be tied to the quay with a group of men in ill-assorted clothing standing near it, waiting for the Lyonnesse to take them to the mainland. The little hospital was full of wounded and occasionally a fisherman came into the harbor, towing a spar, all that we should ever know about another loss. The war was often nearer to us there than it was in London.

  Those were our barefoot summers. There were six of them, three before and three during the war. Sometimes as I walk round St. Mary’s today, I think of that time as some earlier incarnation. We have moved so fast that even a trained historian finds it hard to recollect the peacefulness and unbroken tradition of those turn-of-the-century years. The islanders, cut off from the mainland, spoke the pure English of an isolated folk. There was a sharp division between men who spoke of the harbors of Australia and Africa as if they were merely an extension of our single road and people who had never visited Penzance. There were even “off-islanders” who had never crossed to St. Mary’s. We also knew of a handful of women who took to their beds in their fifties and, in obedience to some strange custom whose origin we could not find, never left their houses again until they died. What a rich field it would have offered to the sociologist! It must have gone back to an incredibly early England but naturally nothing of this crossed my mind at the time; all I thought about was how many pints of shrimps each of us would catch and what we should have for dinner.

  The “goodness” of the country can be much exaggerated; most of the humane and progressive movements have originated in cities. Only too often, villagers are harsh and intolerant in their views but all the same we have half a million years of d
ependence upon nature in our blood and only a thin crust of what we please to call civilization over it. To be cut off from the breakers and the rain or the dawn rising on a windy morning is an impoverishment for most of us and if I had not been able to go back to the wilderness for an all too brief month each year, I am sure that I should have died. Even now, although I have traveled from the Khyber to the Arctic, it is Scilly of all places and countries that holds my heart.

  We could not leave St. Mary’s in wartime except by the Endeavour, the launch that took the mails round to the other islands. Its engineer was the first socialist I knew, his round head would pop up through the hatch like an inquiring walrus while he asked us questions as if he were delivering a speech. Today he would be considered a reactionary Tory. We shrimped, using the heavy, wide nets of the professionals, picked blackberries if they ripened in time and bathed on Pellistry beach. I am afraid that I spent a lot of time sitting on the rocks, trying to invent new words. I thought that “ronded” might be a stronger word than “rounded,” I dug up “huttering” for “leaves” because they were sometimes like straw rustling in a hutch. We are more perceptive of color today than our ancestors were but we are poor in words to describe either it or movement. (You simply cannot refer to the sky as being shade number 196 in a Color Chart even if such classification does make trade and gardening easier.) There was a pattern in the waves that broke over the sand in the flutes but not the hue of a shell, the ocean swept above the land of Lyonnesse in a tone that was neither gray nor green but a combination of both yet I wanted direct words and not comparisons. (I still do.) Remembering my early love, I noted that the clouds moved like giant pterodactyls and, thinking of the present, scribbled with gritty hands that emotions were the palette of a writer. I even wrote some verses while the others hunted for cowries.