It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  On the round table, still covered by the table cloth, Phillip set pork pies and tomatoes, while Lucy pulled lettuces from the garden and washed them under the rotary pump. Phillip found some Waterford wine-glasses and polished them, afterwards setting them on the table. Lucy brought in a silver tray engraved with coat-armour, holding cream jug and sugar bowl; and after lighting the spirit flame under the kettle on the stand she went outside to beat a gong which hung near fox masks mounted on oaken shields along the passage wall, while Phillip examined sporting prints dating from the eighteenth century. Among them were engravings of a garrison hunt in Ireland; and the portrait of a young man with side-whiskers and sensitive face, who was, Lucy had said, her mother’s father. Cobwebs linked them. The stair-carpet was more earth than carpet, with several rents in it, and no wonder, for the Boys thumped up and down in nailed boots and shoes.

  The gong sounded gently. They waited for a few moments, while he stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. “Perhaps Pa didn’t hear,” she said, taking his hand. “He’s a bit deaf.”

  Phillip went to where Mr. Copleston was digging. “Lucy says lunch, sir!”

  “Eh, lunch? Good idea!” He stretched his back. “One gets too beastly stiff, nowadays,” he muttered. Phillip followed him into the room. “Ha!” The old gentleman eyed the food. “Pork pies!” He sniffed appreciatively. “H’m,” he looked at the sherry, then at Phillip, with a genial look in his grey eyes. “Your doing, I suppose? Well, no objections from me! I’ll go and wash my hands.”

  Phillip went to the door of the workshop, seeing the Boys at treadle lathes, apparently turning some brass parts. “Lucy says ‘Lunch’!”

  The treadling ceased.

  “Ah, lunch!” Ernest, the eldest, spoke as though to himself. He surveyed a slide-rule critically, and went on making notes on a piece of paper beside a blueprint.

  “That’s absolutely splendid news!” exclaimed Tim. “Lunch, by Jove, Fiennes!”

  Fiennes, fair of hair—his two brothers were dark, like Lucy—said nothing as he threw a file on the bench and left the workshop.

  Phillip returned to Lucy. They waited happily while Pa came slowly down the stairs and seated himself in the chair at the head of the table. Phillip held Lucy’s chair for her, and then sat down beside her. Meanwhile Pa had been scrutinising the label on the bottle of sherry.

  “Won’t do much work afterwards if I have too much of that,” he said, with a knowing look at Phillip.

  Ernest came very quietly into the room. He was tall and bespectacled, with a sallow face, and still wore his dungaree jacket. He took his place without a word, then after staring at the pies, exclaimed “Ha!” with quiet satisfaction.

  Fiennes came in next. He too said “Ha!” then added, “Pork pies, I see! Well, I’m hungry.” Finally came Tim, who exclaimed “By Jove!” enthusiastically. “Pork pies! Well, well, well! Jolly decent of you,” he smiled at Phillip, and sitting down, exclaimed “Ha!” to the sherry bottle.

  “Long time since a bottle was opened in this house,” said Mr. Copleston. “May I offer you some of your own wine?”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t a corkscrew.”

  “Corkscrew, corkscrew,” muttered Ernest, with a preoccupied air. “Now where have I seen a corkscrew. H’m, there was one in the workshop somewhere. But someone took it.”

  “That corkscrew, by Jove, yes,” said Tim, who looked to be about twenty years old. “I had it to try to get the bell-pull wire out of the wall. Now where did I leave the dashed thing?”

  They sat still, as though ruminating, while Bukbuk, the small grey cat, came into the room with arching tail, followed by four kittens with similarly arching tails. While those around the table remained still, the cat with a chirrup leapt upon the edge of Lucy’s chair and stared at a hole in the cloth about six inches away from its nose. Was this some ritual? For the faces around the table-cloth were watching the cat with anticipation.

  “Bukbuk,” said Ernest.

  At this labial sound the cat put its head on one side, delicately lifted a front leg over the cloth, and with curl of paw tried to draw the hole towards it. It made several hesitant attempts to do this, before withdrawing the paw, and, looking at Lucy, opened its mouth to mew inaudibly. At that everyone laughed.

  “You see,” explained Tim to Phillip, “Bukbuk is very fond of currants, and when we have any we put one on the table-cloth for her to take. A year ago, when she was a kitten, she mistook that hole for a currant, and whenever she sees that hole now she thinks of a currant.” They all laughed again.

  “Pork pie, anyone?” asked Mr. Copleston, knife and fork poised. He looked at Phillip.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Sherry,” said Ernest, with sudden quiet forcefulness, staring before him. “I—want—sherry!”

  “By Jove, yes,” cried Tim. “Now where did I leave that dashed corkscrew?”

  “Yes, where?” demanded Ernest. Phillip had observed a faded photograph of Ernest on the fireplace shelf: Ernest at three years wearing large straw hat, black button boots, white socks, sailor suit with skirt: Ernest with bashful reluctance facing photographer. Lucy had told Phillip that Ernest had so hated his public school near Shoreham in Sussex that he had run away several times, each time arriving home without a word of explanation, or of questioning from Pa, who thought that Ernest had come home for the holidays.

  “Corkscrew wanted,” said Fiennes firmly, sitting still.

  “Ha, yes,” replied Tim. “Now where the blinking blazes did I see that cursed corkscrew?”

  Nobody left the table. At last Mr. Copleston, having apportioned the pies, opened a drawer in the gun-cupboard behind his chair and took out a nickel-silver whistle. He unscrewed it across the middle, and flicked one end. Screwing the sections together again, there was a corkscrew.

  After putting a little wine in his own glass, he went round the table, filling the other glasses before his own.

  “I say!” exclaimed Tim, “we ought to drink to the New Gas Engine!”

  “Ah!” said Fiennes. Ernest was already sipping his sherry.

  “We’re going to get an oil engine to work the lathes,” explained Tim to Phillip. “With a little dynamo, for electric light in the workshop. It will make a great difference when we are working an all-night session.”

  “To the New Gas Engine,” said Phillip, raising his glass. Only Tim responded to this toast.

  Phillip noticed that the top half of the window, which was open, was covered by a wire-netting frame. Seeing him looking at it Mr. Copleston said, “A confounded robin used to come in and take the food on our plates, but when his relations arrived as well and the little beggar spent the entire meal in chivvying them out again we thought it time to keep out the lot!”

  After lunch Phillip washed up with Lucy in the scullery, then she took him to see the workshop, where Moggy had taken up her quarters inside a straw skep. Within the wooden building were many rows and shelves of tools—many kinds of saw, chisel, drill, hammer, gauge, plane and set-square. There was a mahogany cabinet containing a hundred and more steel bits for woodwork fixed on the wall behind what Tim had explained was a very fine Holtzappfel lathe for turning ivory, woodwork, and metal.

  “This is Pa’s lathe,” explained Tim. “It is a marvellous example of engineering. Among other things, it can turn three hollow ivory balls, one inside the other!”

  “It looks a wonderful piece of machinery. I haven’t seen one like that before.”

  “There were only about ten in England. Pa bought it when a young man. It cost six hundred pounds.”

  Lucy told Phillip that the Boys were making parts of sac-machines for an East Anglian firm, which sold them to “little men” who, having seen advertisements in various magazines, bought the sac-machines together with all the materials for making batteries in their spare time, and then sold back the batteries to the East Anglian firm.

  “Sometimes the Boys get rush orders and then they work all
night. I don’t know what Tim would have done if he hadn’t thought of answering an advertisement in The Model Engineer.”

  She went on to say that Ernest and Fiennes had been in the Merchant Service, as wireless operators, but when the shipping slump came they returned home.

  “Did Tim run away from school, like Ernest?”

  “Well, not exactly that, but he did spend the last year at Shakesbury grammar school playing truant, setting off in the morning on his bicycle and coming back at night. The head-master thought he had left, I suppose. He spent his time reading engineering books out of the public library, I believe. Anyway, he didn’t like school very much. Then Ernest and Fiennes apprenticed him to an ironmonger, but all Tim had to do for months and months was to weigh up small packets of nails, so after six months of that he didn’t go back any more.”

  “Well, I hope they are doing well making sac-machines.”

  “Oh yes, not too badly, you know. The new oil engine will save treadling, which is a bit tiring, especially when they work all day and night and then the next day as well, to try and get the orders done to time.”

  “How much would it cost them to install an oil engine?”

  “About sixty pounds. They’re trying to save up for one now.”

  After watching the Boys hard at it, Phillip thought that he must certainly do some work himself. He had already scoured the scullery floor, now for the walls and ceiling. He would prepare them for distempering, then buy brush and materials. It would be a surprise for Lucy, who was away decorating the church with her father. He brushed and scraped the ceiling, then the walls, including the iron pipes and handle of the pump, washed and polished the windows; and looking in the larder, decided to tackle that while he was about it. The job would take two days in all.

  The kittens of Bukbuk were playing in there; he lifted them out with his foot after noticing the messes in the corner and on the shelves. Some of these deposits were old and covered with mildew. The perforated zinc window was overgrown with ivy which made the place dark and airless. The ivy must go, at least round the window frame.

  Lucy came back and said, “How lovely!” While she was upstairs changing her clothes before going for a walk by the river he went into the dining-room to look at the books, as he had been invited to do. There was Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills; a Railway Edition, in green paper covers, of Wee Willie Winkie; P. H. Gosse’s books on the sea-shore, with hand-coloured plates, also Goldsmith’s Birds of Britain, and others on British Fishes. Ah, a first edition of Pickwick Papers! He remembered reading in The Times Literary Supplement that this was valuable only in the original fortnightly parts—a pity. It was bound in tooled leather, with the bookplate of Pa’s father. Most of the books had this bookplate stuck inside the covers, with the family coat-armour and the engraved names of Adrian Ernest Fiennes Copleston, with what appeared to be his original address, Hernbrook House, Oxon. There was a set of Sowerby’s Wild Flowers, with tinted wood-cuts, each volume uniform, bound in calf, tooled with gold leaf; a first edition of Treasure Island, one of a set of Stevenson; some first editions of Thomas Hardy; many novels by William Black; all Surtees’ first editions. The books on birds, which he looked at eagerly, were massive, with plates of eggs, many coloured by hand; three volumes on British conchology, with engravings also hand-coloured.

  On one wall was a portrait of Lucy’s grandfather, a tall, dark young man with large brown eyes, in the uniform of the Royal Navy.

  “Pa was one of a large family,” said Lucy, coming beside him. “I don’t know all of them. Pa and Mamma were so happy they kept to themselves, and didn’t bother about relations.” Like we shall be, she thought happily to herself, as they wandered down to the river.

  “I wish I had known your mother, Lucy.”

  He learned that she had spent her last years in the chalet on the lawn, ill with consumption. Lucy had been at school near Oxford, when Sister Agnes had told her the news of her mother’s death. She had returned home at once, deciding not to go back to school, but to stay at home to look after them. She and Tim used to go for walks together, while playing a game of imagining fine meals they were eating. That was in 1917, when German submarines were sinking many British ships. Most of Pa’s money was in Russian bonds, said Lucy, and when the revolution came they lost it. Ernest and Fiennes were away then. Ernest had been round the world twice, and had been torpedoed three times; but he never spoke about it.

  “What was the favourite meal you and Tim used to eat in imagination, you poor starved creature?” he said, putting his arm round her and laying his cheek against hers.

  “Usually sausages and mashed potatoes,” she replied, laughing. He determined to go into the town immediately after tea and get several pounds of sausages for supper.

  They came to the oak tree where usually they sat on the afternoon walks. It grew out of a steep slope above the river. They agreed to bring a kettle there, and hide it, to make tea every afternoon. There was an old nest of a heron in the top of the oak above them. He made plans to climb there in the following spring; he had never found a heron’s nest, he said.

  “Perhaps we can tame a young heron, and train it to catch eels!”

  The oak tree became a friend to be visited every afternoon by the river. Phillip borrowed from the workshop an iron bar, and spent many hours digging a cave under the roots of the tree, playing a game of make-believe, two castaways hiding from the world.

  The cave was never finished; and after a fortnight he went back to North Devon, to find that only one letter had arrived during his absence, and that Billy was as well as ever.

  *

  He forestalled any complaints or questions from Mrs. Mules and Zillah about his absence by saying at once that he would pay for the two weeks he had been away. But layers of thought about this absence, day upon day, had raised a monument in Mrs. Mules’ mind.

  “My dear zoul, us nivver knowed when you’d be in mind to return or not, do ’ee zee? Us’v kep’ the room for ’ee when us might ’v let’n to someone else, you knaw! So us ban’t overchargin’ ’ee, mind!”

  “Of course you aren’t. That’s why I offered to pay for the time I’ve been away.”

  Mrs. Mules began to explain again that she was not overcharging.

  “I think five shillings a week is most moderate, Mrs. Mules. Anything happened in the village while I’ve been away? What about my paying for food as well? After all, you must have kept the fire in the bodley ready to cook a duck, or a cockerel, or a hedgehog.”

  “’Tes all very well vor make a joke of you not comin’ back as you zaid you would, but don’t ’ee zee——”

  Remembering the character of Mr. Padge in The Diary of A Nobody who stuck to the only armchair in the Pooter household, preferring comfort to the Pooter supper, Phillip said, “That’s right!” to all Mrs. Mules said. Martin Beausire had declared that talk with Mrs. Mules was like trying to talk to a perpetual gramophone record, while Mules’ style of talk was like the same gramophone record sticking in the same place for three revolutions until it passed on to further inanities.

  While Mules kept repeating, over his wife’s shoulder, during her pauses for breath, “That’s right! My wife be quite honest!” Phillip opened his letter. It was from his sister Doris, asking him if he had made up his mind yet about her adopting Billy; her baby had been born, a son; she was still in the nursing home, but had heard of a good nurse; would he agree to share the wages if she engaged the nurse before anyone else engaged her. Would he please let her know immediately?

  He sent her a telegram with congratulations, ending letter follows; then dropping his work, wheeled out the Norton and made for Down Close.

  “Shall we get married fairly soon, Lucy?”

  “Yes! Then I can look after Billy!”

  “I’m down to my last ten pounds in the bank!”

  “Oh well,” she replied, “I don’t expect we’ve got even that much!”

  They agreed to keep the secret for the t
ime being. Lucy said that two of her mother’s old friends would like to meet him, and would he care to spend the week-end at Ruddle Stones, their home. “You’ve already met ‘Mister’, haven’t you? Mrs. Smith asked me to take you to see her.”

  “‘Mister’? Oh yes, quite a nice old chap.”

  ‘Mister’ had arrived to see the Boys, during Phillip’s first visit, on an ancient two-stroke motor-bicycle which he called The Onion. The Onion was always breaking down, he complained.

  The wheezy engine, puffing out oily smoke, somehow seemed to fit the tall, thin, huddled figure that perched upon it. ‘Mister’ himself was wheezy, being asthmatical; he was plaintive, appealingly human.

  Lucy told Phillip that he had never done any work, and since the war his income was so reduced that his home could only be maintained by the taking-in of what he and his wife called Pee Gees.

  Mrs. à Court Smith was a squat, dark woman with remotely inquisitive eyes. Hardly had they arrived for the week-end when ‘Mister’, asking Phillip to look round the garden with him, began to ask questions in a roundabout way.

  At last he said, “My wife and I are very fond of Lucy, you know. Between ourselves, we have wondered if there is anything between you two.”

  At first Phillip remained unresponsive, but ‘Mister’ appeared to be so friendly that at last he told him, in confidence, that he and Lucy were engaged, mentioning that they were keeping it strictly to themselves for the time being.

  “We hope to be married before very long, ‘Mister’!”

  “Oh. What about Pa?”

  “Pa?”

  “Haven’t you asked for his permission?”

  “Well, you see, I want to write a book on an otter that I have long planned; and when that’s a success—as I feel it will be—then I shall go to Pa and tell him.”

  Very soon after hearing this, ‘Mister’ left him. To Phillip’s surprise he saw, as he wandered in the garden, the old fellow talking to his wife through the open french windows. They glanced in his direction as he sat alone on the lawn. He knew what that meant, and was prepared when ‘Mister’ rejoined him, and said, “Now you know, old fellow, I think it only right to tell you that my wife and I feel a great responsibility towards Lucy who comes of a very good family! We both consider that you ought to ask her father’s permission before things go any further!”