Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  “Try, dear one, try, try——” and Minnie made a growling noise, which was to stimulate trying.

  Nothing had happened. She put him back in the cot, telling him to be a good boy while she was gone, and to try not to call Mummie, as Mummie was not well. Minnie would not be long. Minnie would come back to her little gosling.

  Try meant being good boy on pot, try was what he did in pot. Minnie come back. Ganschen—gosling—little mouse—Sonny—Donkey Boy must do big try in pot for Minnie, lie still for Minnie Mummie, oh-be-quiet-ganschen.

  Then the pains again, loneliness, pot pot pot, Minnie p’e Mummie, Minnie Mummie, Minnie p’e, Minnie come p’e; all voicelessly in his mind.

  At last, in fear the child sent out his calls for help. First Golly, then Hanky, then “Minnie Mummie!” Overwhelming shame, grizzling and sobbing, until Auntie made it all better again. Clean, clean! He trusted himself to Aunty Bigge, sitting serenely in her arms.

  And when Minnie came back, jump jump jump for joy; and a horse came with a big man in a cart of black and a man with a black bag came in and said “Hullo, little fellow, how are you today, it seems only yesterday I was launching you into the world, now be good boy and don’t annoy”, and Mrs. Feeney came and Mrs. Bottle Black Drink came (Phillip watching the midwife pouring out porter from a flagon and refreshing herself) and Mummie was in bed and he must play in the garden. He went to look at Mrs. Bottle Black Drink in the kitchen. She was not there, but her bottle was. He took what he thought of as its hat off the bottle’s head, and after poking his finger in the neck, licked it, not liking the taste; but fascinated by the black pouring, he tilted the bottle on the floor. It was nice black splash. Having splattered it about, he remembered Daddy-things, and hurried out into the garden.

  He found the scraper, and did some digging and splashing and then what Daddy did and was a Goodboyanddontannoy when he stood the scraper against the wall beside Daddy’s spade, Daddy’s fork, Daddy’s rake, Daddy’s trowel, Daddy’s hoe. And it was nice and safe with many people-faces in the house and no one telling him he must not, and new Auntie’s cream bun. And Daddy kissed him and silver sweetie went crack crack with Daddy’s white penknife and told him he had a little sister and Phillip thought that was the new name of the sweet and liked little sister and Grannie gave him new shiny shilling for his money box which rattled and he went by-byes with it and Golly. And Hanky goodasgold.

  That evening Richard did not see the wooden scraper standing in line, so neatly with the other garden implements; for Minnie, seeing it first, had fastened it back in its place on the handle of the spade. Hetty had told her of the previous scraper, and of the trouble it had very nearly brought.

  *

  The Hill, once a place where a fellow might walk with some degree of privacy, was fast becoming spoiled, in Richard’s eyes. The forty acres had been fenced in with iron railings. There were gravel paths, iron gates at the various entrances, notice boards with the rules and regulations of the London County Council printed upon them, and varnished over against the weather. There were seats at intervals. Upon the crest a bandstand now stood.

  Hither on summer evenings swarmed the masses, as Richard thought of them: the great unwashed from the slums on the low ground south of the river. Hundreds, thousands of men and women arrived with pale-faced unwashed brats in mailcarts and soap-boxes on wheels every Thursday evening during the summer, to hear the Band playing. Sometimes a breeze brought the strains of brassy music as he toiled during the long evenings in the garden.

  The little garden, in size between five and six square poles, was Richard’s delight. He had a pet hedgehog which lived in the rough grasses and old leaves at the bottom of the fence. It ate the big black slugs, and could be seen, and heard, rustling and grunting in the twilight. It came forth to a saucer of milk. There was a brown owl, too, that flew in the half light to a branch of one of the elms in the waste land over the fence, where was a black soil he dug up and tipped over in pailfuls, for the making of a meat-soil. Otherwise it was a deadly kind of land he was trying to convert for vegetables and flowers.

  The first thing he had done was to dig up the top spit, for a bare fallow. Now the yellow clay was baked hard, the ends of bindweed roots brown and withered in the clots turned up by the spade. Ugh, ugly London clay! Soil of fogs and bricks, rows of brick houses being run up everywhere by the jerry builders. The view from the Hill, which he crossed every day to and from the station, was becoming ugly. There he was, part of it all. Gone were the hopes of Hetty on a bicycle beside him, pedalling into the countryside. He must go alone; or not at all.

  On Thursday evenings the crest of the Hill swarmed with shouting children, unwashed faces, pale and grimy, little girls wearing hats and coats and boots cast-off from their elders. In the late twilights of the summer evenings the southern slopes held their scores of dark and faceless couples lying unmoving in the grass: an objectionable, almost an offensive sight. For Richard liked to be alone with hi& thoughts on the Hill; he never thought that perhaps the couples on the grass had similar ideas.

  On Thursday evenings the great attraction was the Crystal Palace firework display. From the ridge a couple of miles or so distant rockets arose and broke into sprays of colours, inducing from the dim slopes long-drawn oo-hs! and ah-ahs! of wonder and admiration. The swarming of the masses out of their sunless streets was a sign of the times, the end of an age, the beginning of the masses becoming vocal. Already agitators were busy. On Sunday afternoons, by the oak on the eastern part of the Hill, speakers ranted and held forth on the woes of the workers, and more than one red flag was unfurled. Richard had gone up one Sunday to listen, and had told Hetty, on his return, that all he had heard was prejudice, ignorance, and soap-box hot-air. Still, it was letting off steam, and free speech was the Englishman’s right. But the utter rubbish that was spouted there! The usual socialistic nonsense, that Jack was as good as his master! Liberalism under Gladstone had paved the way for Labour agitation, which led to Socialism, and so to the terrors of class-warfare and Communism.

  “Yes, dear, of course, naturally,” agreed Hetty, half-listening, while thinking that at times he was rather like one of the speakers round the Socialist Oak himself.

  One June evening of that year the Hill was transformed. For weeks a great bonfire near the bandstand had been building. Faggots and branches of trees, tar-barrels in the middle, a mass as high and compact as a house, for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. In the twilight Richard carried his son up the wide gravel way beyond Hillside Road, planted on either side with may-thorns, to see the sights. He left pocket-book, all money, and watch and chain behind; and carried his oak walking stick on his arm. Minnie was to have come with them; but at the last moment was left behind. Burglars might take advantage of the celebrations to break into the house. Hetty must not be left alone with the baby. So Richard went with Phillip in his arms, the boy wrapped up and wondering what was to happen: something exciting, he could feel. And it was all strange and frightening, all red like his sleep-pictures, called nightmare by Mummy, when the ninganing man and the ninganing and all had been red.

  The flames ran up the forty-foot bonfire and soon all the people were moving back from the big red. The wood was crackling and the tar-barrels roaring, and all the faces red in the fire light. Shouts, cries, all the sky on fire—he hid his face by Daddy’s tickling beard and cried for Minnie. Before he took the child home, Richard went apart from the crowd of many thousands of people with gilded faces around the perimeter of heat, turning his back upon the great roaring fire, the sparks coiling and whisking hundreds of feet into the air. He walked to the southern crest of the Hill and looking across the lights of houses and streets below, saw many beacons burning far away. There were nearer fiery tongues leaping upon Honor Oak Hill and Sydenham and Shooter’s Hill, with smaller speckles all the way to the North Downs. Chains of beacons ringed the base of the London night to Hampstead and Highgate and distant Hainault and Epping. His imagination took fire; he thoug
ht of the tongues of flame from Poldhu in Cornwall to Dunkery Beacon on Exmoor, a living girdle of flame from the hills of Cranborne Chase and the Great Plain above the grey spire of Salisbury Cathedral to Portsdown Hill and eastwards to Ditchling, in Sussex; onwards to Wrotham Hill and Caesar’s Camp above Folkestone in Kent: the midsummer night filled with fire along the coasts of England, far north to the pikes of Northumberland and the remote grey capes of Scotland. Great Britain was aflame! Sixty years a Queen! Nearly into the Twentieth Century! He was the father of a son and daughter in the greatest nation on earth! Could it all be possible?

  “Look, Phillip, bonfires everywhere, for the Old Queen!”

  “Mummy p’e Daddy, mummy p’e Daddy”.

  Richard sighed. Fancy forsook him. With memories of his boyhood gone for ever and ever, he walked in the ruddy twilight down the broad gravel to his home again, the child quiet against his shoulder.

  He was taken up to bed at once, and Richard said he thought he would return upon the Hill, for it was an historic occasion; but feeling suddenly weary, he settled in his armchair, and read the Golden Extra of The Daily Trident, printed in gilt letter-press for the Diamond Jubilee. He had an evening paper, too, which he intended to put away, for his son to read when he was a man. That day the old Queen had driven to St. Paul’s Cathedral for the service, which had taken place on the steps, because she was too weak to get out of the State Carriage.

  Well, it was the end of an age all right; and another near-terrifying thought came to him, that almost before life had begun, he was approaching middle-age. Next birthday he would be thirty-two. How far away seemed the holiday in North Devon with brother John and Jenny, Theodora and Hetty, and the baby in its specially made wicker basket. Could it have been only two years ago? And had Jenny been dead only five short months? Jenny, so beautiful and wise and calm, the one he had, from the moment he had seen her, loved with his soul, was dead; and John left with a baby son, one year and eight months younger than Phillip. She had died in childbirth during the gale that had swept all England last December, the same night that the Chain Pier at Brighton had collapsed in the storm. He had cried as he walked to the station after he had read John’s telegram.

  *

  Richard sighed and closed his eyes; then started up, as a cry came from the kitchen. At once he thought of burglars; his hair twitched coldly on his neck; he thought of his special constable’s truncheon which he kept inside his desk. He went to the door.

  It was nothing, Hetty assured him, nothing at all. “I was only startled for the moment, by the sight of a mouse.”

  “You are becoming a nervous little thing, aren’t you?”

  Richard was never irritable now that Minnie was with him. Minnie and Richard often talked and laughed together about the old days. He showed her his cases of butterflies, and she peered at them, murmuring at their beauty and precision in line. She was devoted to Richard; she was able to endure an alien living mainly through him, the only one left to her. She was almost selfless, almost entirely subordinated to his feelings. His true, or inner living, was held in affection for Minnie; and the rows of pinned and mummified insects were as real to her as to him.

  Hetty had cried out because suddenly as she was suckling the baby beside Minnie a mouse had appeared on Minnie’s lap; and before she could say anything, Minnie had sprung up and with a shake of her skirts had jerked it into the open grate. It had screamed in the flames and tried to run over the hot coals. Hetty had hidden her eyes. How could Minnie do such a thing?

  Minnie was now living for the day when she would see her Fatherland again. She thought London was the dirtiest and cruellest city in the world. The filthy streets, the untidiness, the careless ways of people, their acceptance of low standards, and above all, the look in the faces of the children seen in the streets, all blank and worried, had given her heimweh, homesickness for the clean and orderly countryside of her childhood. Truly the Englanders called their country the Motherland, for they treated it as so many treated their wives, with no mitleid, and often with unkindness. How she had suffered for her poor hochgeboren baronin, her father and brothers killed in the war, and then a cruel Englander for husband! But God in His Mercy had taken her, and surely her spirit on its way to Heaven had gone back to Lindenheim, to the beautiful schloss on the side of the hill, where she belonged.

  So Minnie departed. Richard obtained leave to see her off from Liverpool Street Station, on the train for Harwich and the Hook of Holland. The outside porter from Randiswell came up with his trolley to take her corded wooden box early one morning. When the moment came, of parting from the place that Minnie could not bear, a place neither of the town nor of the countryside, suddenly Minnie looked stricken. Fortunately at that moment Mrs. Bigge popped out of her front door, beaming with affection, and trotting up the porch, put her arms round the older German woman and hugged her.

  “Pleasant journey, dear, and don’t forget us, will you? We won’t forget you, and your beautiful yellow skirt, will we, Mrs. Maddison? Nor will dear little Phil, in a hurry, with his ‘Minnie Mummie’, bless his little heart. Well I must not keep you, I’ve left my iron on the gas-ring, so tootleoo, and give my love to Germany. I’ve never been there, but I know it is very beautiful.”

  With a wipe of an eye and wave of hand Mrs. Bigge hurried away down the front path lined with candy-tuft and London Pride growing in the rockery, with some fleshy cactus-like plants, and so into her own house again. And there her face was, between the Nottingham lace curtains of her front room, beside an aspidistra, ready to smile at last farewell to Minnie.

  Mrs. Bigge was much affected at the departure. For Hetty, too, the occasion held a sense of desolation; and for a terrifying instant it seemed that every time you said goodbye it was bringing death a little nearer. Every parting was a kind of oblivion; every tick of the clock said goodbye. How very sad was change! You met people, and places, and then—goodbye! Very shortly the dear, dear house in Cross Aulton would be in other hands, for Mamma had said that Pappa was thinking of giving it up, it was far too large, now that only one child was left at home,—Joey already grown up, and in the Firm!

  Her face smiled, her lips quivered, her eyes were bright with unbroken tears. Oh sonny, come to Mother, hug Mother, hold me close dear little son, she thought to him. You, little son, who have such large serious eyes, Little Mouse, you understand, don’t you, Sonny? We’ll be together when Minnie and Daddy have gone, won’t we, Sonny?

  Phillip was sitting on the stairs, looking at the scene through the bars of the banisters, his mouth down at the corners, very quiet in the immensity of so much movement.

  “Ach, how can I go, how can I leave you all, whom I love so dearly?” cried Minnie, laughing and smiling, when the last moment was come, and the door wide open. Ach, mein lieb’ ganschen, will you not miss your Minnie? How may I go now? And the lieb’ dark-eyed Mavis, so called because the Dinkelweizen heard a drossel, a thrush, singing on the top of the little elm-tree at the bottom of the garden! That was just as it should be, naturlich! For all true things come only from Nature. It was his German blood. Ach, the Englanders were at heart like the Deutsche! Had not the good Queen married a German hochgeboren Prince, noble Albert? Then why was it that she was leaving all her dear freunde und verwandte—her kith and kin—for what after thirty-three years must now be entirely new and strange? Duty, duty called. Auf wiedersehen! Auf wiedersehen! Auf wiedersehen! Grüsse Gott! Hetty, Mrs. Bigge, and Phillip watched the two turn the corner—a last wave of the hand——

  Hetty walked up the porch crying. Phillip was crying too. They sat down in the kitchen and cried together, mother clasping son. The house would never be the same again. Ah well, she must try and be worthy of all that Minnie had taught her, keeping the larder and scullery neat and fresh and clean as Dickie liked all things to be. And then as she was wiping away tears from two faces, both smiling again, there came a ring at the bell in the corner of the kitchen ceiling, and Phillip was excitedly pointing out the
red signal behind the glass of the box and saying, “Front door, Murnmie, front door!”

  “Open it, will you please, Sonny? I think it must be Aunty Bigge.”

  He ran to open the door, and there stood Mrs. Bigge, with a steaming pot of tea in one hand.

  “New Auntie come, Mummie, New Auntie come!”

  “Yes dear, it’s your new Auntie who loves you! I thought a little company just now would be the very thing for us both,” cried Mrs. Bigge, cheerfully. And at once life seemed to be flowing again.

  “Ah well, we must make the best of it, mustn’t we, Mrs. Bigge?”

  “Yes dear, and what you need now is a nice sensible young girl from ‘Old Loos’am’ down in the High Street. That’s what they call Miss Thoroughgood, of the Agency. I would not wish to interfere in your affairs, of course, were it not that your own mother lives so far away.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Bigge. Mamma did think of moving nearer, now that all her children are flown, except the youngest, she says.”

  “Yes dear, she was telling me the very selfsame thing on the day little Mavis was born. And I said to her, ‘Mrs. Turney, why not move into Hillside Road, there is a house vacant right next door, where you can keep an eye on your grandchildren.’”

  “Oh Mrs. Bigge, I expect she will have forgotten all about it by now!”

  Mrs. Bigge misinterpreted the anxiety on Hetty’s face. “No, don’t you believe it, dear! Why, she said she would talk it over with your Papa. Cross Aulton is a nice place, I’ve heard, but too far away from you for your Mum’s liking, I gathered. It is nice for a girl to have her mother near, especially when she has such an understanding one as you have, dear.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Bigge.” Hetty was in a flurry. Mamma next to her would be too good for words, but—what would Dickie say? The baby was crying in the crib upstairs. “I must feed the baby now, if you will excuse me.”