A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  “Calf love, perhaps, ‘Pinwheel’?”

  “Well hardly, sir. I’ve slept with both of them on and off, so I know them basically, so to speak. But I’d never choose a wife unless she rang my upper bell, so to speak, sir, as well. You know, all feelings at all levels at once, and the finest feeling is not just sex, sir, but freedom of the spirit. I’d never choose a wife who didn’t ring my upper bell, sir.”

  “So you’re a bellringer, are you? Do you believe in seducing virgins, ‘Pinwheel’?”

  “Good lord no, sir! That’s sex-in-the-head. Besides, nowadays a boy and a girl seduce one another. I take a poor view of sexual deceit in any form, sir. So do all my friends, both girls and boys. We never sleep with anyone we don’t love, sir. Mere sex is an over-rated pastime, from the sense of frustration it is liable to engender. And that impedes efficiency, or the sense of well-being.”

  “Did you learn all this at the Wye Agricultural College?”

  “Partly, sir. After hours, if you know what I mean. We used to discuss it in one another’s rooms. Only very occasionally, of course. It can be very boring as a theoretical subject, not to say aseptic. It’s the practice that counts, sir.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t made my meaning clear, sir. What I mean is, surely it can’t be wrong to want to stroke a beautiful girl, sir. It gives me extraordinary pleasure to stroke hair—the curve of the neck sir, and the ear disclosed by lifting the curls. Most beautiful. Then the limbs—the wrist particularly, and the elbow. The arch of the instep—and just above the knee. The ribs, sir—I’ve spent hours stroking a girl’s ribs.”

  “How much whisky have you been drinking, ‘Pinwheel?’”

  “Three half-quarterns, sir. That’s my limit.”

  “I’d no idea the new generation was so abstemious.”

  “We owe quite a lot to you, sir, you know. Your Donkin tetralogy, especially.”

  “A few, here and there, ‘Pinwheel’. God, I sound like a phoney fogey.”

  “Not at all, sir. And your readers, sir, are here, there, and everywhere.”

  “Three half-quarterns, you said. Could you perhaps hold just a wee dram?”

  “Certainly, sir!”

  Phillip got a bottle out of a drawer and poured two drinks.

  “Cheerho.”

  “Cheerho, sir.”

  “So you want to get married, ‘Pinwheel’. You know, I think you’d make a good dairy manager. But the War Agricultural Committee wants us to plough up grassland for corn. I doubt if they’d allow us to develop as a dairy farm. However, it’s a fine idea. Have you told anyone else?”

  “Only one person, sir. As a matter of fact, she is not one of the girls I mentioned just now. There has been no love-making between us. I feel so confident about her, that I’d marry her tomorrow if she’d have me. And after only one meeting, sir.”

  “Love at first sight, ‘Pinwheel’?”

  “Instinct, sir. The trouble is, she’s in London, and must know a lot of chaps. She’s a wizard girl. I’m afraid most beautiful girls attract me, but after meeting this one, I know, sir, that she is the only one for me.”

  “You’re fortunate, ‘Pinwheel’.”

  “May I tell you who she is, in confidence, sir?”

  “If you wish. I usually forget names, so you’ll be quite safe.”

  “But you know her, sir. And she has a very high opinion of you, sir, if I may say so.”

  “One of my ‘fans’?”

  “Yes, sir. She is Melissa Watt-Wilby.”

  *

  The next evening when Teddy Pinnegar took down his twelve-bore and cartridge belt Phillip said at once, “Would you like to go on the meadows, Teddy?”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “You add to the gaiety of nations, Teddy. Besides, aren’t you spending every morning and early afternoon in decorating the upstairs rooms of the ‘new’ cottage for me?”

  Thoughts of that ‘new’ cottage made Phillip feel weak. All private building had ceased, and the one room downstairs, the kitchen, was hopeless. It was as cold and damp as the circular bricked draw-well. There were hundredweights of moisture in those old brick walls, put up long ago without damp-course; particularly in the north wall, against which the coastal road outside rose nearly three feet above floor level. The plaster was covered with a sort of mildew where damp had brought out the lime in the mortar.

  As for the heavy worn pavers of the kitchen floor itself, many of them had been cracked by someone in the past bumping logs in which a blunt axe had probably been stuck. These pavers were black with a sort of slime. The cold struck up from them. And the bigger the wood-fire burning in the cavernous open hearth, from which the cracked and rusty cooking range had been levered out, the greater the draught across the kitchen floor.

  The room was a dungeon. Teddy did not attempt to paint the matchboard panelling against the road-wall. The wood bulged with the cracked patterns of dry rot. Behind the layers of paint, which held the panelling from falling, the deal boarding was brittle. One slight kick, and an area fell away. It was a dead room. The last occupant’s wife had died in it.

  The name of River View, bestowed in past hopefulness, was still discernible in faded white letters on the broken-down gate leading to the road. But the labourer had lost his job in the depression; his wife, fed on tinned skim milk, marked Not for Infants, had died of tuberculosis; the labourer, so long out-of-work, had lost hope. At last he had ceased to till his garden. It was the last despair before going into the workhouse.

  The cottage had been standing empty, until Phillip bought it. “They’ve found a mugg,” declared Horatio Bugg, the rabbit-skin and meal-sack merchant of the petrol pump. “He paid eighty pounds for it. It’s only worth sixty. Ah, why did Phillip Maddison buy it? He told me he was going to fill it up with concrete and make a pill-box of it ready for when Hitler comes.”

  Phillip had indeed pulled Horatio Bugg’s leg with those words. But what he wanted to do was to dig up the old pavers and put down a three-inch batch of water-repellent cement, and a wooden floor on top, after hacking off all old plaster from the walls and replacing it with the same water-proofing cement. Then to skim plaster on the walls.

  The upstairs of River View was divided into two small bedroom by a flimsy partition of match-boarding reinforced by layers o wall-paper. During the summer before the war Phillip had bought a wide metal window framed with thirty-six panes of glass, each a foot high and nine inches wide. The village bricklayer had removed the old wooden window from the southern wall and replaced it with this ‘lighthouse’ window which now filled almost the entire Southern length of the bedroom.

  The sunshine poured in. Another metal window had been let into the eastern wall, bringing light to the inner bedroom. So there were possibilities in River View, for during that summer the wood partition between the two bedrooms had been torn down; a new frame of two-inch by two-inch studs fixed; and to this heavy insulation boards, made of pressed shavings impregnated with cement, were nailed, and plastered smooth. It made a firm wall.

  There were possibilities of a decent cottage, if only the job could be finished. Phillip had not asked ‘Pinwheel’ if Melissa had accepted his offer of marriage; she had not written to him, beyond a short note of thanks for her week-end; perhaps she had not been able to tell him.

  *

  Morning after morning Teddy had been going upstairs to the bedrooms of River View to paint slowly and quietly sills, wainscotings and doors, all in cream paint.

  The larger of the two rooms, with its lighthouse window, had an immediate view below of the garden. Beyond the heaps of tins and bottles tipped on to the vacant garden site in the past by Horatio Bugg was the river, then a small paddock adjoining a butcher’s slaughter-house, which must have been the River View of olden time. Now it was a dumping place of sheep-skulls, bullocks’ jaws and horns hidden in summer by nettles, docks, and other rank weeds.

  Ancient cankered apple trees sp
rawled in the garden, above attenuated and wild cabbage plants which grew, as though sick, among Horatio Bugg’s trash dumps and rusty remains of various abandoned bicycles.

  *

  Winter was now set hard outside upon the valley scene; but clothed anew in cream paint and distemper, the lighthouse room glowed when the sun shone.

  Yes, ‘Pinwheel’ should have his old cottage up the street. Phillip brought up a horse and tumbril, and helped by Teddy and ‘Pinwheel’, began the move one Saturday afternoon in late December of that year of 1939. He was sorry to leave the downstairs room of the old cottage where he had sat at night for over two years since selling the Old Manor. It was a well-balanced room, taller than most cottage parlours. The eighteenth-century date, with the builder’s initials, was carved on a stone set in the flint gable-end facing south—a pleasing gable, stucco’d with white pebbles from the sea-shore, and edged with brick. The roof had a pitch more acute than most of the local cottage roofs.

  It was the lowest of three cottages in a row, which he had rebuilt soon after coming to Deepwater Farm. They had been condemned as human dwellings; now they were dry where before they had been damp; light where they had been dark. The bedrooms were taller, with new roofs. The walls were sound where they had been cracked. Yet the casement windows, new three years before, were already showing signs of falling to pieces from faulty joinery. Some of the tiles of one of the roofs had blown off in a gale. Snow and rain came through the bituminous felt overlaying the rafters, where the pointed shoes of the young man laying the tiles had broken the felt.

  To Phillip, the reconditioning of the condemned cottages had been costly, using most of his capital for no return, since the rents, eighteen pence a week, landlord paying rates, were in line with other service cottages in the district. To Horatio Bugg, the reconditioning had been a mystery. New cottages, with septic tanks and water, could have been built cheaper on a new site somewhere on the estate. Ah ha, he got the idea! These cottages were on the road which led from the only deep-anchorage harbour on the East Coast between Thames Estuary and Humber!

  To Phillip, the cottages were now Maddison’s Folly. But to some others before the war the rebuilding did not appear as a failure. In the top cottage lived Mrs. Valiant with her husband, a man who had laboured on a neighbouring farm for almost half a century. With them were her son and daughter-in-law. There were four bedrooms in Top Cottage, and two downstairs rooms. Mrs. Valiant had come to Phillip, begging to be allowed to occupy the cottage, saying that where she lived it was so dark and damp.

  “The Council condemned it years ago, with the others beside it, but nothing wor’ done. They make promises, then they say there is no money to carry out the promises. Oh, please, do give me a chance, sir!”

  Phillip had intended the two upper cottages to be kept as service-cottages: for a farmer without service-cottages was impotent to hire new men, who expected to live in his cottages. But Top Cottage had stood empty; and Mrs. Valiant looked to be a neat and tidy woman, with a sensitive face that he liked at once, so he had yielded to her plea. He told her that he could not allow any hen-houses or rabbit-hutches to be erected in the garden; and, as the paths had been relaid with new gravel, and much time spent on clearing the gardens of broken bottles, tins, and other rubbish, he did not want them to degenerate into what they were before he came, and would they please not throw coal-ashes and cinders there?

  The terms hen-houses and rabbit-hutches were euphemistic: what he wanted to avoid was the usual village assembly of old boards and banged-out iron sheets of empty bitumen barrels of road-repair knocked together anyhow to form some sort of shelter, covered with decaying sacks or flapping bits of rotten canvas.

  Mrs. Valiant had promised to keep all neat and tidy, and having got the cottage, her sad face had become almost a shining morning face, beside that of her seventy-year-old husband.

  Below the top cottage, in the middle of the three, lived an old pensioned labourer with his wife. She had been a cook in service. They had moved from the two-roomed cottage which had become known as the Children’s, next to the farmhouse.

  *

  “We won’t get this bloody stuff up the stairs of River View,” prophesied Teddy Pinnegar.

  “We shan’t need to. I put brass screws into the eastern metal window-frame, for its easy removal. The furniture can be hauled through when I’ve taken out the entire window-frame.”

  When the job was done ‘Pinwheel’ said, “Welcome to your new home, sir.”

  ‘Pinwheel’ did not look altogether happy. That morning he had said to Phillip, “Tactical error, sir. I should have got leave from you to offer myself to Melissa in person, instead of by letter.”

  “You’ll find the right girl one day, ‘Pinwheel’.”

  That night Phillip slept in River View. It was cold. The three portable electric fires he had bought before the war were keeping the farmhouse bedrooms warm. It was freezing harder outside. There were no blackout curtains, so he hung his thin 1914–18 army blankets on nails over the windows. There was the old sack from his other cottage, BODGER GREAT SNORING, on the floor for carpet.

  The floor was dusty and sand-grit and plaster in the grain after George the bricklayer had finished the partition. Phillip liked George; he was a quick, cheerful worker, his flint walls were a delight to see. He was the son and grandson of bricklayers, of the quality known as tradesmen.

  Robert Bodger of Snoring, late of ‘the Bad Lands’, farmer long-since dead and passed away, judging by the excellent hand-stitching of the four-bushel sack, felt Phillip’s bare toes on his memorial in ice-cold mornings. Remembering the frozen battlefields of his youth, Phillip told himself that he was a fortunate man, but as the days went on he found it harder to face going into the adjacent farmhouse.

  Chapter 11

  DESMOND NEVILLE ARRIVES

  The Daily Crusader had published Phillip’s article about seals, and a second about the shoot: a factual description of ewes on yellow mustard in a hollow sheltered by coverts of beech, oak, sycamore and chestnut, from which barley-plump pheasants ran and flew. There were glimpses of distant sea pale-blue between copper-flaked trunks of pines; white lines of waves breaking on sand-bars in autumn sunlight; the jocund yeoman sportsmen. Very good, farmer, wish I had been there, wrote Chettwood in a letter of that single sentence.

  Other letters followed, re-directed from the office. One was startling when Phillip read the signature, Desmond Neville. He had neither seen nor heard from him during the past sixteen years.

  Desmond wrote that he had come home from Natal to rejoin the gunners. ‘It’s Death or Glory for me this time.’ Before he reported at his depot, might he come and see Phillip on a very important matter?

  Phillip read this letter with various feelings. He remembered the last meeting with this great friend of his boyhood and youth. However, he could not very well refuse the request of one who had once been a friend, so he asked him to come down for a few days, saying that he had very little to offer in the way of hospitality, being in the throes of trying to reclaim a poor farm, but anyway he looked forward to seeing him.

  Desmond Neville replied that he was only killing time in a London hostel, having worked his passage from Cape Town in the stokehold of a liner. That sounded good and workmanlike. But no more hanging round my neck, as in the old days, thought Phillip, disturbed by this visitation from out of the past.

  One of the other letters, in a clear but rather childlike hand, was even more disturbing. It was from a young woman called Laura Wissilcraft whom he had met, for a night, while he was looking over ‘the Bad Lands’ before deciding to buy. It had been a blighted, almost destructive occasion. Yet when she had written later her script was clear and flowing, beautiful in thought, original in detail.

  My Prospero. Your voice. Your eyes. You have the power to bring me out of my state of confusion. Tears! During the days and nights since you left me I have thought of you, I have written a dozen letters in my mind, had strange dreams i
n which I was in London watching a satirical musical revue of the war, the whole audience howled with laughter at the image of Hider as a ventriloquist’s dummy on the lap of a great fat man who wore a pickelhaube drunkenly on his head. I was suffering for you during this skit because looking round I saw you waving your arms, pale with despair your face, and when you tried to walk out the audience rose up and chased you. I tried to help you but my feet would not move although I tried to pull myself along by my arms, my hands clutching the back of a seat. The rest of the night seemed spent in climbing up and down stairs and going on long train journeys searching for YOU.

  In the morning I walked along a footpath in the sun, and lay down on the headland of a field with wheat beginning to tiller with the larks above as my attendants. I felt as though double-barred gates inside me had been at last pushed open.

  What do you feel, think of me? I do so want us to be good friends. And the rest? I dare not think, plan or hope now. I wish life could be as simple as this short piece of D. H. Lawrence’s:

  ‘The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on and the horse looks at him in silence. They are so silent they are in another world.’

  If relationships could be as pure, as lucid as that! A peaceful participation to the greater glory! I cannot talk when I am in your presence, I feel at times suffocated. Are you one of the dead of 1914–18? Help me O God, to see you as Shelley plain. You are so understanding about my predicament, that alone makes me weep. You alone seem instinctively to know the workings of my mind and spirit. I feel optimistic for you on your farm. You will achieve all things if you do not allow anyone, anything, in this ghastly war to break your wand, to sink your book deep in the sea of your dilemma.

  Your articles I’m sure will be good if they incorporate what you wrote me about this strange stillness in the war. ‘1914–18 was a purging period of loss, it will lead to be a resurgent period of new creation, and a fairer vision.’ God, you are right to be an optimist. I wish I could be. I have over the years become a fully-fledged patron of the philosophy of expressionism. I wonder if there is basically just this difference between us? But why go on searching for an explanation? Why am I so heart-divided? Why do I long to rush into your arms, yet when you are here equally I want to rush away again? Is it the quest for aloneness, which was so necessary for Richard Jefferies and D. H. Lawrence, indeed for all great artists? I do not know. At times I want to hide myself away in shame, fearing that I have exploited you, and others, for my ‘little ego’, as Hitler calls it.