Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  She sat alone in a carriage; and without reserve, she found herself speaking with the tongues of the poets—Francis Thompson, Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. After a time her exuberance settled to a more concrete contemplation, and with that mood many memories reappeared with startling clearness before the eye of her mind.

  She thought of Sidney Cakebread with whom her youthful self had fallen so helplessly, so agonisingly in love, a condition which had impelled her to leave England. She had heard not one word of him during the years of wandering abroad: never once had Hetty mentioned him. His children must be growing up now, three boys and a little daughter. How had his marriage with DorrieTurney fared? They had beenill-matched. Dorrie, sweet and gentle as she was by nature, knew little of the empire of the mind.

  Would Dorrie have been different if she had had, say, an education at the sort of school she and Rechenda were going to build? Surely she would! The future of the world lay in the full and proper education of women. Western civilisation had fallen out of balance since the time when women had been subjugated, stultified, and treated as chattels by men who had ceased to use their bodies in natural actions, but become soft and cunning in trade, in the acquisition of property through stock markets and the counting house. And having perceived the problems of the nineteenth century in the spirit of truth, Theodora felt an immense optimism for the future.

  *

  Her visit to Rookhurst was not what she had imagined it to be. She was, indeed, shocked by the appearance of her brother John. Already his face was lined, his beard was streaked with grey, and the hair above his temples was grey, too. He appeared to have let himself go, and was by that so much a stranger to her. He lived in his library, while the house was run by an odd little housekeeper-cook, with the help of daily women coming in from the village. As for her nephew William, he was a dear little fellow, but obviously had been allowed to run far too wild, in the sense of growing up apart from his father. Obviously John had never recovered from the death of Jenny.

  Theodora, after some hesitation, made suggestions to her brother, who appeared to have decided that his life was over. The house was neglected; some of the rooms had been closed, the furniture covered with sheets, the shutters barred upon the windows. They had been shut up for some years now. The outer woodwork of the house needed painting. So did the gutters, which were choked with leaves. Some of them had grass sprouting out of them a foot high. Down one wall the water from a choked lead spout, cracked by frost, had spread in a green delta, the damp blackening the plaster of the rooms within. As for the gardens, they were a wilderness. They had been bad enough during Mother’s last years, since Father had gone away, but now they were choked with thorns, unbelliferous plants, and nettles.

  A feeling of helplessness gradually overcame Theodora; the spirit of the place was affecting her as it had affected her brother. Poor man, what could she say, what could she do to help him to find himself again?

  Theodora thought of telegraphing to her friend Rechenda to come and stay, as her guest, in Colham. There she would discuss the matter with her; for it seemed to Theodora that her duty lay in looking after her brother, and in particular of that nephew of hers. Obviously something was wrong in his upbringing. John said he was deceitful, and already showing some of the traits of their Father which had ruined the family. How could John misinterpret his own condition so? Had he lost all sense of cause and effect, of objectivity?

  Theodora did not like to tell her brother that he was making the memory of Father into a scapegoat for his own defects; at the same time it was remarkable how, now that he had let his beard grow, he resembled Father. Father had tried to find the ideal, and had never succeeded; while John, having found it, was denying all further growth by living solely in the past. So Theodora concluded, before she wired for her friend, who was a woman of exceptional beauty of both mind and body, and not unlike Jenny. Perhaps John would find in Rechenda a complement to what he had lost. For so young a man ought to marry again, if only for the sake of his little boy!

  As she waited for a reply, Theodora began to plan the school in Ravenscombe Park by herself, for, she thought, she would never dare to take a partner to replace Rechenda; but the reply when it arrived by a boy on a pony cantering up the weedy drive stopped further ideas. Rechenda had gone to look after an ailing sister, and a letter was following. This letter contained the grave news that the sister had had an unexpected haemorrhage, and upon examination, was found to be suffering from phthisis. Poor girl, consumption of the lungs!

  So at the end of her week’s stay Theodora left her old home somewhat sadly, feeling the inadequacy of herself. Brother John got up from his cracked leather armchair, Isaak Walton’s Compleat Angler before him on the reading stand, and in carpet slippers, came to the door to bid her goodbye. So did Biddy, the cook-housekeeper, a chubby little woman in elastic-sided boots which Theodora recognised as once belonging to her own mother. As for her nephew Willie, he had disappeared after breakfast that morning, to go fishing in the Longpond with another little boy, the son of Frank Temperley, the farmer who had been the close boyhood friend of Richard.

  Theodora left for Colham station in a seedy brougham driven by the local grocer, a new man, taking with her a couple of pounds of fresh salted butter, a small crate of farm eggs, and John’s kindest regards to Dickie and Hetty.

  “I haven’t seen either of them since Lynmouth, Dora, it must be all of six years ago. Well, that is our fate, I suppose. Come again sometime if you do not mind taking us as you find us. My very best wishes for the success of your school. Now remember, don’t lay out all your capital at the start, or you may find yourself with that toppling thing, an inverted pyramid. Goodbye, goodbye!”

  Theodora’s last view of him was as he waved from under the gothic arch, while the swallows dived past the familiar figure and rose without fear to their nest on the beam above the porch enclosing the massive oak door. She thought of Homer, the most homeless of poets; and then of Virgil, and could scarce repress her feelings for “the tears of things”.

  A somewhat disturbing journey followed; and the arrival at Waterloo was like a personal reproach, with views of squalor and poverty increasing as the city was reached. Why, why had she left the Isles of Greece? What could one woman do, however dedicated, to alter the static?

  However, she must not allow her feelings to take charge of her. She recalled how bleak had been her emotions when first she had arrived in Athens, after the long and enchanting approach through the islands. Sursam corda!

  At Randiswell station Theodora left instructions with the outside porter to take up her box to the address she gave him, at six o’clock, it now being just before three in the afternoon. She wanted to walk and collect her thoughts before arriving at Richard’s new house, the site of which she remembered from the day of the picnic when Mr. Turney, Dickie, and herself had driven on to Vicar’s Hill, after the birth of Phillip. There was a direct way to the eastern side of the Hill from the station, and thither she went, glad that the day was fine and sunny.

  It was a steep approach, past a row of houses, at the end of which began a line of spiked green railings, and then an iron gate opening upon a wide gravel path. She saw a notice board on a freshly-painted green post, on which was pasted a notice of several thousand words in close type, divided into sections and numbered paragraphs, of rules, regulations and by-laws of the Open Spaces Committee of the London County Council. So the Hill had been civilised, the Kentish district had been absorbed by London! She recalled that Dickie had hoped that would never happen.

  She walked on up the very steep path, and when she was upon the summit her spirits rose with the view. Here at least were light and air, and a feeling of spaciousness. It being a Saturday afternoon, the green fields were in movement with many children, whose shrill cries made her happy, as she saw them as coils and twists of repressive homes and schoolrooms being thrown off under the sky. They were returning to nature, they were happy.

  Upon th
e summit of the hill, where gravel paths led off in several directions, what a transformation! Here were tennis courts marked off, trees planted, and seats erected at intervals. She sat down near a small hut with pointed roof, surrounded by railings. Soon a keeper in brown uniform, leggings, and bowler hat came out, with a canvas bag in one hand and a thin steel rod, long as a walking stick, in the other. Theodora watched him lock the door of the hut, walking over the grass and stabbing pieces of paper with the steel rod, then transferring them to his bag.

  To Theodora this was a pleasing sight; but on reflection, she decided that tidiness must begin at the other end, in the enlightenment of children. Children were flying kites, bowling hoops of wood and iron—boys preferred the iron hoops, she noticed—and others were playing leapfrog. She looked eagerly, wondering if one of them was her nephew. A haze hung over the horizon to the south and east. There seemed to be ever so many more rows of houses than when she was last upon the crest. And walking onwards, she passed by the square brick bulk of the grammar school, and moving out of its northern shadow, saw upon the distant ridge the familiar grey tower-flanked length of the Crystal Palace.

  The sight renewed particular memories; for over the ridge, seen vividly in her mind, lay the red-bricked villages amidst the herb farms of Surrey, and Cross Aulton in particular. Ah, those radiant days of flowers and cool flowing water, of music in the Turneys’ house, before the tragedy of male possessiveness, and domination over the lives of wife and daughter, had occurred. Were the Turneys still at Maybury Lodge? And how was Hugh, who had fancied himself to be in love with her? Perhaps he was happily married by now. And Joseph, the youngest boy, as dull as Hugh was vivid, he must be grown up. He was a schoolboy then. It was almost frightening, to think of how people and places changed: how they were changing every moment of the night and the day.

  How remote already seemed her arrival at Bristol in the schooner Myonides! And even her visit to Fawley. She saw John waving from the porch: the moment of departure from her brother that morning was for ever gone. Never again would it be the same arrival at the little wooden station of Randiswell under the humped-back brick bridge, or the whistle sound the same note of departure. Theodora sat down on a seat, momentarily overcome by the fearful feeling of having been suspended, for an instant, on the perimeter of Time’s wheel.

  She wandered northwards to the remembered slope leading down to what Hetty had called the Warm Kitchen. Here Dickie and Sidney Cakebread had tobogganned during the hard winter, soon after Dickie and Hetty had set up their little household in Comfort Road. How much smaller the warm kitchen looked now!

  Below on the level sward a cricket match was in progress; while beside her was a new circular bandstand. In the cage-like centre of its white-boarded ceiling, under the iron roof, was a sparrow’s nest, with long grasses hanging between the spaces of the bars. A London sparrow had set up home there. The mother bird flew out as she watched; while on the roof, in his sombre uniform of chestnut, black, and fawn, chirped father sparrow, entirely content with the home found for him by the London County Council. The sight released Theodora’s spirits; suddenly she felt free and gay, light-hearted. Happy little fellow, with wife and bairns under the Band Stand! She said to herself, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so!” and glancing at her watch, saw the time was only a few minutes short of four o’clock, and now she must descend to find the house in Hillside Road.

  Theodora found it without any difficulty, although the Hill had been thoroughly civilised. A wide gravelled gulley led down the southern slope of the hill, and beyond open park gates stood the houses of Hillside Road. The first house had a little turret at its end. A pleasant looking man in Norfolk jacket and cloth cap was standing on the pavement, clipping a privet hedge. As Theodora went through the green iron gates a young woman of extraordinary beauty came out of the house, a small girl beside her. Theodora was struck by the happiness on all three faces. She found herself smiling, the woman smiling at her. The man, who was tall and upright, with a large fair moustache, raised his cap.

  “What a beautiful day,” said Theodora. “What a pretty little girl you have. I hope you will forgive my speaking to you, but I find it so strange to revisit this place after six years abroad. My brother and his wife live here somewhere—I wonder if you would be so good as to direct me—their name is Maddison.”

  “They live three doors down,” said the woman. “If you had arrived five minutes earlier, you would have seen Mr. Maddison leaving for a ride on his bicycle.”

  “Oh, thank you,” replied Theodora. “I will find Hetty in, perhaps. It is so kind of you to help me,” and she walked down the asphalt pavement, noticing that it was already cracked in places, and the flowers of pink convolvulus were looking out. Nature, she thought, will not be denied.

  She stopped at the gate on which was painted the word Lindenheim. It gave her a start, for it was the name of her mother’s old home in Germany. So this was Dickie’s little house. She stopped by the gate, to get herself together, for so much had happened during the six years, and she was suddenly overcome. And while she stood there, preparing herself to lift the latch of the gate, she heard the sound of a child sobbing.

  The top of the square-cut privet hedge was about six feet above the level of the asphalt pavement, and two feet thick behind an oak fence, so from where she stood by the step Theodora could not see that the middle window of the front room of the house was open wide. She thought the sounds came from the little lawn behind the hedge; and lifting the latch gently, she opened the gate and went inside, peering round the hedge. A rag doll lay on the grass, beside a book, a shawl, and a cane-bottom rocking chair. She saw the open window, and stepping over the bordering rockery of the path, went to it, to peer over the cream-painted sill.

  She saw a small boy with dark hair sitting on a chair before a table in the centre of the room. There was a blotting pad, an inkwell, and a sheet of paper on the table before him. The pen was stuck in the inkwell. The boy’s back was towards her. His arms were laid on the tablecloth, his face was buried in them. As Theodora stared at his back the boy lifted up his head, got off the chair, and cried in piteous tones, “O! O! O!” and taking the pen, stabbed the paper with it, then uttered a low wail of despair.

  He saw the face looking in the open window, and stopped still, staring at her.

  “Hullo, Boy,” said Theodora. “Are you Phillip?”

  “Yes,” he said, almost inaudibly.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked, ignoring his tear-stained face.

  “Yes, Aunt Theodora, on a sailing ship.”

  “How very clever of you to know that so quickly. How do you do?”

  “Very well thank you, Aunt Theodora.”

  “That’s right. Now tell me what’s the trouble, Phillip.”

  Theodora had to ask again, to draw out of him the surprising confession, “I have been mischiev-i-ous.”

  “Oh,” she said, and asked what he was writing. He brought a foolscap sheet. He brought it to her. On the top, in her brother’s meticulous handwriting, was the phrase, I must not tell lies.

  Underneath, the boy had made some sort of attempt to copy the letters and words, accompanied by several inky blots and smears. In the margin she noticed a picture. Judging by the outline it was a sparrow sitting on the roof of the bandstand on the Hill. There were the straws, hanging from its nest. The drawing had been scratched out. Theodora could scarcely refrain from smiling, as she divined what had been Phillip’s thoughts as his task grew the more wearisome to him. He had copied only four rows before the lettering became grotesque and ragged, ending in a splutter and two wider inkless lines where the nib had broken off.

  “Oh dear, the nib wasn’t very strong, was it, Phillip?”

  “No, Aunt.” Sniff-sniff. “And when I have done all my lines I must go to bed, and not go to the party next door, and”—the voice became as though strangled—“have—have—have bread and water for my tea.”

  Theo
dora stared at her nephew. Never had she seen a child looking so unhappy.

  “But there will be other parties, won’t there?”

  “Un-Un-Uncle H-H-Hugh is g-g-go-going away to the war, and m-m-may never come back any-any-any more.”

  “Uncle Hugh? Uncle Hugh Turney?” asked Theodora, after a pause.

  Phillip nodded his head. “Yes, Aunt.”

  “Will you tell your Mother that I am here? Is she about?”

  “She’s gone to see G-G-Gran’ma.”

  “Are you all alone in the house, then?”

  “Yes, I am. But Mummy won’t be a minute.”

  Theodora was puzzled. “Where does your Grannie live, Phillip?”

  “Next door.”

  “Next door? Then has she moved from Cross Aulton?”

  “Yes, Aunt. Long ago, before Mummie had scarlet fever.”

  Theodora was so surprised that she did not know what to think. Could there be some connexion between the boy’s unhappy condition, and the Turneys living so close to her brother and his wife?

  “I hear Mummy!” cried Phillip. “She’s come by the back gate which Grandpa had made in the fence by the back door! Shall I open the front door for you, Aunt Theodora?”

  “Thank you, Boy, that would be so kind,” said Theodora.

  When she saw Hetty she felt that six years had made no difference. Smiling, and clasping hands, both women declared that the other had not changed in the very least; but when they were having tea in the garden, sitting on the lawn under the elm tree now eight or nine feet high, with Mavis quietly eating her bread and butter and drinking milk from her Jubilee mug between them, Theodora could see that Hetty was not really happy.

  “Isn’t Phillip having any tea, Hetty? What has happened, or should I not ask?”