The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  It was an idea. That was the place. A writer should have a secret pied-à-terre—

  As he was leaving she dared to ask about his secretary. “Has Miss Ancroft finished her secretarial duties, Phillip?”

  “Yes, Mother. Felicity left because she wants to be on her own—to write. And meanwhile, keep herself by typing. She’s going to advertise for work in The Writer.”

  Dearest Phillip,

  I’m awfully sorry, darling, but however hard I try, I cannot feel myself to be a ruined girl—no, I am not the ruinable sort—though perhaps ruinous. And as no-one else feels that—three rousing cheers. All the same, I seem to sense that you are not altogether happy. I wish I could determine once and for all if you would be better away from your home—and act upon it. Why should you, as you write from your field in Malandine, be ‘almost afraid’ to go back to your lovely valley? Darling, you must not let your heart wither away. It must not be wasted by a sort of slow petrifaction, but allowed to flow out easily and without strain.

  I have rented a room here from mother, and am typing a novel—as I told you—I have advertised in The Writer. And am also doing my own work. When I see you again I shall be a new girl for you, without any more silly mistakes.

  Always yours,

  Felicity.

  If only he could settle to a clear prospect of what to write. If only life were simple, as in those years after the war, in the cottage at Malandine. Now to think. The first rough draft of water-scenes was done; now to determine the dramatic theme. It was fishing weather in the West Country with hatches of fly every noon, and trout on the move. He stood beside the river, watching the rises of trout, and the insect traffic upon the water; making notes of the times of flies hatching, and identifying them with a book with coloured plates by Halford. He made notes on the buoyancy and grace of cloud formations high in the dome of the sky which brought lightness of heart to man, bird, and fish—the nymphs swimming to the surface of the stream, to arise tremulously to the shelter of willow and alder, there to cast their pellicles, those diaphanous coverings of wing and body, to await the nuptial flight into the sky of late afternoon. He came to know the regular stances of the trout, day after day, when they were feeding just under the surface.

  One morning he noticed a fish, over three pounds in weight, darker than the others, a lean fish the colour of which was almost black. As the days went on he saw that it was always in the same place, in relation to the rise, but never seemed to take any flies. He used a telescope to watch it; and seeing smaller trout, again and again, rising to flies just under the surface, observed that this fish never appeared to feed. It stayed in one place, using small slow movements of fin and tail and evenly opening its mouth to breath—but nothing more. Could it be blind?

  How could a blind fish feed? Had it a sense of smell, like an eel? Was it hovering in its stance by day, at the times of hatching, only out of habit, having nothing else to do with its life? Did it feed on minnows in the shallows, by sensing the nearness of the little fish by the nerves along the lateral nerve-lines of its body?

  Now for a theme, to relate observation to a story with its own life. Take several fish and relate their lives as individual fish, with the blind, black, and aged trout symbol of the obsolescence, leading to its death. A symbol, hidden and never revealed directly, of dying Europe? No politics. Keep to the blind trout. Relate its condition to the pollution of so many rivers due to the industrialisation and the squalor of the machine age. Be neither romantic nor sentimental: a fish is a fish is a fish, as Gertrude Stein said of a rose. It existed; no more than that. The problem to solve was, How did this blind trout exist? And was it black because the sense of protective colouration was put in action by the optic nerve? A blind trout living through eternal night? Pollution? The Flumen was one of the purest rivers in the West Country …

  He hurried home, packed up his note-books, addressed and posted them to Felicity. Would she type them at once and give any ideas, or reactions from the notes, about how the story might go? He would pay her for this work at the rate of fifteen shillings a day.

  Darling,

  Of course I will give you priority for the trout and river notes and impressions which arrived just now, and tell you exactly how they strike me. I am sorry you have to chip every word from your breast-bone. What you tell me about the blind trout is exciting. You are wonderful in your scenes of darkness, cold starlight, and the first electric pallor of dawn arising before the ‘rosy fingers’ of the Greeks.

  Now I don’t want one speck of Ancroft pollen—mère ou fille—for I can hardly describe myself a jeune fille—to touch the opening flower, but the fact is, I am in a quandary. I must leave home at once, but it is difficult, almost impossible, for me to begin looking for a cottage because I have no money of my own. There is ‘alternative accommodation’, as they say, but it involves a tentative acceptance of an offer of marriage which I do not want to consider, even, feeling as I do. Also it would be rather a shock to my mother. I am sorry not to be more explicit, perhaps I should not have mentioned it, anyway it is ‘out’.

  Do you think you could let me have an advance of, say, £5 for the typing, so that I could look at some cottages offered in The Lady? They are usually very cheap ones advertised in that magazine. I would not ask this were I not desperate, for I know you must not stop writing when ‘the honey flow is on’. Also you have so many mouths to feed.

  Could you come up for a couple of days, and take me in your lovely Silver Eagle to look at various cottages? As I said, I am most loath to interrupt your work, but a cottage of my own would enable me to feel free and unencumbered in mind, so that I can give all of it to help you in your work. I myself am in my usual health and feel buoyant and optimistic.

  Later. Perhaps it would save you a journey to London if, in the course of your wandering, you come across any cottage that is to be let, the humbler the better. Will you let me know?

  He would go to London on the morrow. He must take her a basket of trout. He was tired: the idea of putting on waders, oversocks, and nailed canvas boots was too much. The sun was going down behind the hill. How lonely, bereft, was the earth without sunlight. Even under morning and afternoon light there was a vacancy in the valley: sameness of walks by the river: the same trout to be caught on barbless hooks and put back, to disappear for a day or two and then they were back at their stances, before and below the old blind trout slowly waving its life away.

  It was no good fishing now that a mist was beginning to lie upon the meadows. He couldn’t see to tie the fly properly. Was his eyesight failing? Could it be due to that temporary blindness by mustard gas in his youth? The knot was wrong anyway, he could not see to bend the gut round the eye of the shank. It became a grannie knot. He cast badly. The fly struck the water, he snatched it back—he was all jangle, disintegrated, no harmony between eye, arm, and heart. He tried again. The fly was caught in an alder branch. He snatched it back and the cast snapped. He was always meaning to cut back the branches, and here it was June, he hadn’t really fished properly that season, no time to do anything. He waded across but could not see where the fly was caught. His legs felt chilled and heavy. He got out of the water and walked to the bridge, to look down into the pool from his usual place in the centre of the parapet.

  The sinking sun was lengthening oak and alder shadows. Red spinners of the midday hatch of olive dun were now rising and falling regularly over the gliding copper-plated surface of the river.

  He stood below the bend, with no desire to fish, his mind empty save for an impersonal feeling of sadness which he knew came from nervous exhaustion. For some time now the river had been him. He had known, sensed, and lived in every gravelly stone, bubble, grain of sand: yet that part of his life, because it had remained unwritten, was as ephemeral as the air-life of one of the spinners, those creatures, frail and delicate, their mouths sealed against the need of food or water, living only on air during their brief winged life between the rise and setting of their one
day’s sun.

  Love is a full growing and constant light:

  But his first minute after noon is night.

  The water was low and clear. Cattle in the morning and afternoon heats had been cooling themselves under the shade of the alders, but the slight cloudiness of loam in the gravel had settled, so that, peering down into the water at noon, he had seen every stone and speck of gravel, every tiny spotted samlet of the late winter’s hatching.

  During the early part of the year the water had been high, the spring-heads in full gush, salmon coming in from the Channel had been able to run up higher than was usual at the beginning of the season.

  As the level dropped in April, the salmon sought the deepest water they could find, in the pools and by the hovers of the banks.

  And as the springs lessened their upwelling in May, the salmon were forced to spend most of the daylight under the muddy roots of the waterside alders, waiting for twilight and cooler water from the great reservoirs of the chalk downs and safety from the glare of day.

  There was a solitary salmon lodged under a clump of roots a few yards below where Phillip was standing at the bend. The water there was about two feet deep, and the salmon was trapped.

  He had been watching that fish for more than two months. Its life was one of solitary confinement. When it had first appeared, in April, it had been a bluish-silver, and very lively. Now its scales were a pinkish brown and the fish was dejected.

  Its tail could usually be seen sticking out of the roots about eleven in the morning, before the shadow of a branch hid it.

  Sometimes when he had gone to the bridge about noon he had seen the fish sidle out of the roots, turn slowly into the wimpling current, to idle there like a great trout for a few moments, its back-fin out of water, and then to gather way while it prepared for a leap—a great splash, and it had fallen back, while the narrow river rocked and rippled with the impact. After remaining in midstream for a minute or so the fish would drift backwards to its hiding place, slowly, almost wearily, and push itself under the roots again.

  Now, on this evening in late June, Phillip was standing beside the run, a small seven-foot rod of split cane weighing two ounces in his right hand. He was about to drop lightly an imitation of a red spinner—the olive dun which had shed the pale green pellicle or sheath of morning for its one dance of love-and-death—upon the wimpled surface when something made him pause and remain quite still.

  The water in which he was standing was about ten inches deep. It blurred as it began to deepen towards the edge of the run. The sky-reflecting water had shown a gleam as he had raised his rod. The salmon was swimming slowly up the run, to pass within a few inches of his wet trouser-ends.

  Very slowly he turned his head to watch the fish. After some moments of quietude it turned on its side and sinuated along the gravel as though trying to scrape away the itch in its gill-rakers, for freshwater maggots were clustering there. It actually pushed itself against Phillip’s left foot. And there it idled before beginning a series of gentle rolling movements, porpoise-like … until it accelerated up the run, pushing waves from bank to bank, to make a slashing turn in water shallower than its own depth and to hurtle down the run again, making a thruddling noise as it passed.

  Entering deeper water above the bridge it leapt, and smacked down on its side. It came up the run once more and idled there, maintaining place with the slightest of slow sinuating movements, scarcely perceptible now that the sun had gone down in the west.

  He stood there, still as a heron, watching the lonely salmon playing by itself—a fish, three feet long, imprisoned in a few square yards of space, threatened by asphyxiation in warm water, by gaff of poacher, by beak of heron; by eels which would eat it alive when the fungus grew in yellow rosettes on its wilting scales; by otters; by many other hazards. He stood there while the sunset faded to dusk, and full darkness came to the earth. Moths whirred past, sometimes alighting on his hair, their wings brushing his brow. It was nearly midnight when he went back to the house. There were no lights in the bedrooms. Lucy, and the children were asleep. He wrote until the first light of day, and when he set out for the London road the downs were dark against the sky, and ‘the rosy fingers of dawn’ (a physical love-image, surely) were arising in the east.

  11 Hillside Road,

  London, S.E.

  One moment I am in despair, dearest Lucy, with my guardian urging me to go to live in his Oxfordshire cottage, and my Mother wanting to let this house and take me to the Lake District with my grandmother, when a certain sports-car draws up round the corner and within ten minutes all my things are under the tonneau cover and we are crossing the Thames and safe upon the Surrey side! A wonderful day for a joy-ride through Richmond and on to Kingston and over the chalk downs to Cheam and Cross Aulton and the lovely country which Phillip told me was once all herb fields and dog-carts when he was a baby and his mother left her home to have him in her very own little house in Wakenham.

  We drove past the Crystal Palace, where we stopped awhile to gaze up at the tall glass towers and the roof glittering like the wings of an immense dragonfly. And at last up Hillside Road, with the beautiful park-like Hill opposite. I can hardly believe it—that I am in Phillip’s bedroom where he lived before going down to Malandine after the war.

  I have already met one of Phillip’s sisters, the younger one, whom I saw in Devon during that lovely holiday by the estuary. Of course, she is very unhappy, her husband having left her. Doris is very kind, and I like her very much, but poor woman, her irritability and pessimism and don’t caredness are all against my nature. However, I look forward to helping her with the two small boys. It will be grand to have her company for the time being, but I don’t think this house will be suitable when my babe gets lively later on and wants to start crawling and possessing. The front, or drawing room, is the most unlived-in room I have ever seen, I don’t suppose Phillip’s mother often, if ever, had any time to rest, let alone relax here.

  So I’m still keeping my fingers crossed and hoping to find a 5s. a week place somewhere in Phillip’s old haunts near Reynards’ Common; and where I can grow my own vegetables. I know such cottages are to be had in plenty.

  By the way, I am known here in Wakenham as Mrs. Rivers, wife of an absentee American husband. (I choose Rivers as a good luck symbol for Phillip’s new book.)

  During my first evening here we went for a walk in the High Street, and Phillip showed me ‘Freddy’s’ which he used to haunt during the war with Desmond Neville his friend, whom he hasn’t heard of for years, he said. We also went to Nightingale Grove, and saw where the Zeppelin torpedo fell, destroying eight cottages and killing Lily Cornford, who is to be a heroine of his Somme novel, which he feels he will never be able to write; but we shall see! The cottages there are all rebuilt and only here and there a gash in a brick wall remains. Phillip seems more than ever wanting to avoid the present; I suppose his mind is, like Shelley’s, always dwelling in the past. He did not speak of Barley (whom I resemble but fail to live up to) but I felt that she was very much behind those sad and speculative eyes. Also he seems to feel that in some way he has let me down, but as I told him, he needn’t worry on my account, because I am perfectly content here for the time being and there is the green Hill to go to, with its views and sunshine and many shady trees. At the same time, I am finding, as Phillip told me I might, that D. is obstinate as a mule. She is obviously worn out physically and mentally, but all my efforts to get her to talk, not by being inquisitive of course, are without effect.

  She lives too much in the past. I already knew, of course, about her boy being killed on the Somme, and that she had married, after the war, his friend in the army. She did tell me, however, that he tried to strangle her before he left home. Apparently he argued with her all that night, before he lost control. She is extraordinarily obstinate. Phillip told me that she was set as a child against her father, because he used to make her mother cry. He explained it all to me. “Doris was the on
ly brave one of us three children; she set herself against Father, and was thus petrified in part of her. When Percy Pickering was killed, she reverted to the rock.” It all seems very tragic.

  Doris told me that her mother had offered to pay the fees for her to see a doctor and get a tonic, which she needs, and which probably would make no end of difference to her health and spirits. But she says she can’t be bothered to go. Well that seems to me to be utterly inexcusable. There must be something wrong: she goes to bed never later than 10 and sleeps very well, gets up at 7.30 feeling heavy and cross and half-awake. I feel desperately sorry for her and wish I could be allowed to nurse her. However, there you are. But I shall continue my gentle pressure and as I always feel very cheerful and full of energy in the morning it may react on her some day.

  She is rather naïve. The other day she asked me if Phillip was going to the U.S.A. to find my absentee husband, Rivers!

  Later. I’m afraid I’ve held this up for a couple of days. In the meantime I have met Phillip’s mother. She stayed here last night and seemed very cheerful. She, also, asked after my American husband. Doris persists in calling me Mrs. Rivers, by the way: I wonder if this is transference, (if that is the Freudian term) because her father still refers to her as Mrs. Willoughby?

  I have met Phillip’s other sister, Elizabeth, who arrived here last evening with her mother in Phillip’s car. She brought three large suitcases. According to Doris, she spends all her money on clothes and must always have the latest fashion. Elizabeth would be very pretty were it not for her sharp, almost imperious manner of judging others and abruptly dismissing them. Thus much of what Phillip said to her she scoffed at—I could feel her underlying tenseness. Also she is unkind to her mother, indeed when she asked her for money she was so persistent in a neurotic way that I could not bear it, and left the room, following Phillip, who had a drawn look on his face. Later Doris told me that Elizabeth has fits at times and her mother always gives in to her because otherwise she gets very upset. What a desperately unhappy home it must have been for Phillip when he was a small boy. No wonder he says that the war was the happiest time of his life.