The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  “Why should there be anything the matter?”

  “You seem changed.”

  “I am changed, Phillip.”

  He sat still, looking at the fire. After a while he said, “In what way?”

  “I suppose I’ve grown up.”

  “And grown out of me. Yes, I ought to have known it would happen. You had an illusion about me, which I couldn’t live up to.”

  “Perhaps it was that,” she said. “But I am still very fond of you, Phillip. And shall always be grateful for the way you have helped me.”

  “Or hindered you, and used you.”

  “I think I used you.”

  He finished the meal somehow. “Then you are going back to Fitz?”

  “Are you making any progress with Melissa—your Isolde?”

  “You’re more real to me than Isolde. In Wagner’s opera everything happens in the mind.”

  “Ah! You say that because you haven’t slept with Melissa.”

  He wanted to leave. Had she gone back to Fitz? She was transferring her own feelings to him.

  “I was going to write to you, Phillip——”

  “All right, give it me straight. There’s someone else?”

  “Not in the way you mean,” she replied, sitting beside him and taking his hand. “Do you remember sending me those fan letters to reply to?”

  “Yes. I suppose one of them came to see you?” he said, not believing what he said. Even so, he was shocked when she replied, “Yes, someone did, Phillip.”

  “And you’ve fallen in love with him?”

  “Not fallen in love, no. I love him. Do you remember Brother Laurence?” She took a deep breath. “He is my father.”

  “Do you know, I had an idea—vaguely—of something like that when I had that letter from him? He must have come to Monachorum to find you. And on that day I screamed at you—over those sandshoes.”

  “I was a very foolish girl in those days. Poor you, it was an awful shock——”

  “Where is Brother Laurence now?”

  “Sleeping in the spare bedroom. Oh, Phillip, he is so sweet! I can never forgive my mother for telling me he was killed in the war.”

  “Your mother must have been dreadfully unhappy.”

  “So was I. I used to cry myself to sleep.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want you to feel different from the other girls at school.”

  “She was thinking only of herself!”

  He said reflectively, “Horatius holding the bridge alone until it became a habit—unable to be relieved—and an orthodox Christian, never again to be free from guilt because of her own falsehood.”

  “But he was my father, as well as her husband! All those years I felt incomplete—not like the other girls in the office—because they had fathers and I didn’t. Don’t you see, Phillip?”

  He stood up. “Well, I’m so glad, Felicity,” he said with a suggestion of formality. “Now I must be getting back.”

  “But you can’t go at this time of night! All that long way to Monachorum. I simply won’t allow it,” she declared, with assumed gaiety. She put her arms round his chest, and laid her head against the rough tweed jacket, swaying gently, as though to soothe a child. “Come, darling, sit down by the fire, and rest that weary head.”

  She sat at his feet, her arms round his knees, resting her own head. This was not comfortable, so she got upon his lap and with arms round his neck kissed first one eyelid then the other, and descending with light kisses on each cheek-bone, she gave him a gentle kiss on his lips, saying, “Bless you. There now, lie in this chair, while I make up a bed on the couch.”

  When the bed was made up she lay beside him and stroked his hair. He turned to her and laid his cheek against her neck so that she felt the soft hair of his head against her cheek, gentle upon her flesh like a little boy’s hair. She felt tenderness.

  “How Barley must have loved you.” She sighed. “So must Melissa. You belong to one another, my dear.”

  “I love you, too.”

  After tucking him up she went upstairs to her room, thinking joyfully, Now I can see how my novel should go. But this afflatus departed with her excitation. An inner dullness returned. This, too, went in the morning light when she saw how Phillip and her father took to one another. She felt a richness in her living, she was happy at last.

  Chapter 6

  RESURGENCE

  Richard returned, after walking from the Halt with steady stride and tense face, in the late evening. He said nothing of what was on his mind, avoiding all his wife’s hesitant questions, until it was his time to go to bed.

  “I don’t know what your wishes are in the matter of remaining here, Hetty, but I intend to leave in two weeks’ time, at the quarter day, and return to live out my days at Wakenham.”

  “Oh dear, is anything the matter, Dickie?”

  “You should know the answer to that question. I’ll say goodnight,” and with that he went to his bedroom.

  After trying in vain to read his newspaper, he went to her room, knocked on the door, and at the threshold said, “I should like one matter to be made clear. Did you—or did you not—help, or advise, or help to procure in any way—the presence of Elizabeth and Mrs. Willoughby at the house I particularly lent Phillip for his own use?”

  This was the old Wakenham Dickie speaking, the side of him which she hoped had gone for ever. The tone of voice was higher.

  “I am waiting for an answer.”

  “Oh no—well, you see—I really can’t say, Dickie.”

  Richard had held to the illusion of all being changed in his life while he had been at Rookhurst, despite disappointment over what he had anticipated, with a feeling almost of the renewal of his youth, that his son would prove to be the friend and companion he had always lacked since, at the age of seventeen, he had gone to London: that together they would follow the old paths he had walked with John and Hilary—perhaps even so far as the Chase—that sunlit tract of down and woodland which had lived in his memory as a symbol of unclouded childhood.

  As he lay in bed unmoving he said to himself, I am a broken man, I might as well be dead.

  Some places, equally with some incidents, retain throughout life a power of illusion which determines the personality. In this, both father and son were alike. The continuity of both lives had been broken in early youth: Richard’s by the extravagances of his father, by which the base of life, the land, was lost: Phillip’s by the obliteration of the country adjoining London. In those woods, along those paths through field and heath which he had followed in boyhood, often alone, Phillip had experienced an ecstasy, a joy of living, which was now lost under bricks and mortar in row upon row of little houses, killing the land, mortifying the spirit of love.

  *

  Hetty met her son at the door, with a smile to hide her dread. “It’s Phillip, Dickie.”

  “Good morning, Phillip. I’d like a word with you in private in the smoking room, if you please. Hetty, will you kindly allow us to be alone.”

  The door of dark oak closed. Hetty hovered in the passage, then went to her boudoir to sponge the leaves of her aspidistra—that faithful friend, as she thought of the fern, which had been with her ever since the early days of her marriage. Things will be all right, she thought to the lank dark leaves.

  Richard began formally. “Well, Phillip, first I must thank you for coming to see me so promptly upon receipt of my letter.”

  “I’ve just arrived from London, and came over to see you at once, sir. May I say one thing now—please believe me when I say that your feelings are more important to me than my own.” When his father did not reply he went on, “You lent your house to me, and I lent it to others. That is inexcusable. Father, I must offer you my sincere apology.”

  “What?”

  There was another pause, then Richard said, “Oh well, old chap, let us say no more about it.”

  Made curious and apprehensive by the unexpected silence at the end of the passage, Hetty left th
e aspidistra and went on tiptoe to the smoking-room door. The silence continued. Then she heard Dickie’s voice saying, “There now, Phillip—no harm has been done. Let me offer you a glass of sherry.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Hetty went back to her boudoir, in tears of thankfulness.

  “Well, old chap, I have a confession to make to you. After all your consideration and kindness—well, I won’t beat about the bush—but the fact is, Phillip, I find the garden too big for me. I have thoroughly enjoyed the work, but, all things considered, I fancy I ought to think of giving it up.

  “You see,” he went on, “I can’t bear to think of what those fellows are doing beside the Longpond, putting up huts again, as though the war were still on.”

  “I feel the same, Father.” Phillip finished his sherry. “I don’t want to be argumentative, but in a way the war is still on.”

  “I agree with you, Phillip. It’s those Prussians, thinking again in terms of world domination. I tell you, we should have gone on to Berlin in nineteen nineteen. I don’t like the look of that fellow Hitler, with his ideas based on revenge. The old Prussian spirit that destroyed my mother’s family, the von Föhres of Württemberg, is active again. ‘Those junkers will deceive you yet,’ I remember Castleton in The Daily Trident repeating that over again and again before the Treaty of Versailles.”

  “I remember it, Father.” Phillip, to avoid an argument about the war—father torn between his English and German blood—went on hastily to say, “I suppose it’s never any good going back. I went to Reynards’ Common recently, and on the way passed the new housing estate between Cutler’s Pond and Brumley, built on the Seven Fields of Shrofften. That’s where I first awakened to the beauty of the country.”

  “I knew it when there were pheasants among the turnips, in the fields by Whitefoot Lane, Phillip. Your mother and I had our honeymoon in the keeper’s cottage at the edge of one of the woods there, or shaws, as they were called.”

  “I know, those long strips between some of the fields. I used to take my Bloodhound patrol of Boy Scouts there, in the years just before the war.”

  “I used to bicycle there, on my ‘Sunbeam’, Phillip. You and I used to go to the Fishponds together, do you remember? They were jolly days.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Hetty knocked at the door.

  “Come in, come in,” cried Richard, jovially. “Phillip and I are talking of old times. He has recently been on Reynard’s Common, of our bicycling days before the war. Looking round for local colour, no doubt, Phillip? I suppose,” he continued shyly, “you would not care for a walk together on the downs, so that we could, as it were, see out the last of the old order together?”

  “I’d love it, Father. I really would.”

  “Are you sure you can spare the time?”

  “Of course, Father.”

  “Phillip and I, Hetty, have a feeling in common that Fawley has outlived its usefulness. What do you think? I find the large garden becoming too much for me, and you, I fancy, will not be averse to returning to Wakenham, now that Lucy and Phillip have moved to Monachorum. I thought you would be relieved, old girl. Phillip, too, as I have said, feels the same way.”

  “I thought of selling the house, Mother.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be a pity, Phillip?”

  “If the war comes again, Mother, as cousin Willie prophesied, all this area will become a tank practising area, with live shell and England under martial law. As I’m still on the reserve I’ll go back again to the army.”

  And be killed this time, he thought.

  “How about tomorrow for our walk, Father? I’ll bring sandwiches for us both, and some ale.”

  “Yes, tomorrow will suit me, Phillip. I don’t know if you have any ideas, but my father, when we were boys, used to take us along what he always considered to be an extension, or possibly a switch, of the Roman road between Bath and the harbour where you have your yacht club. Shall you use your motor, for part of the way?”

  “Anything you like, Father.”

  “If you don’t mind going slowly, old man—I’m not used to them, remember. Well, as I was saying, my father used to tell us that the Romans liked to keep well above us, in order to see the surrounding country, and any hostile Saxon troops. We could, if you agree, start near the springhead feeding the Longpond, and walk due north—here is the route, marked in indelible pencil by my father, God bless my soul all those years ago—I can see him pointing out the route now, in this very room—it was a great treat to be invited into his smoking room, you know, old chap. Now we can either go north, as you wish, passing the Deverills here”—Richard’s forefinger, with the long almond-shaped nail lightly touched the worn map—“or go south, to where we cross the main Roman road to Sarum. The legions brought lead here from the Mendip mines, I recollect my father saying. I can’t tell you, old man, what a wonder it was to climb up the ox-drove of the Chase and see a distant gleam of the Channel, before going down again through the Tarrants and so to the south coast. Uncle John and I did the entire walk from here one summer, during the holidays, and back again after a rest, nearly fifty miles from one sunrise to another.”

  They decided to go north, and to start at nine o’clock on the morrow, if the weather remained fine.

  On his way home to Monachorum, Phillip passed Melissa riding with a groom. He pulled up and spoke to her, and was enlightened by the glow of happiness in her eyes. She had four more days of holiday, and said, “Will you be at the Yacht Club on Wednesday for the Lantern race? Do come if you can,” and with a smile at Phillip she touched her mount with her calves, and gave him a nod before he turned back to the car.

  *

  Thus enlivened, Phillip arrived at Fawley and greeted his parents with enthusiasm. Father and son set out on a walk which was to be remembered all their lives—the first and the last walk together since Phillip was a child. Richard, in later and inevitably sadder years, relived many times the same walk, linking it with the ‘tramps’ of his early years, he told Phillip as he stopped to remark upon the air the scent of wild thyme.

  “Ah,” said Phillip, daring to show emotion, “the sense of smell, in the words of one of the most homeless of poets, ‘raises from the rose-ash the ghost of the rose’,” words which had for Phillip a living exactitude with Marlowe’s heavenly line, What is beauty saith my sufferings then, as they walked a little apart along this myth of a Roman road, sometimes a wide and cambered paleness, a ghostliness as of grass itself weary of time, pale with the sunshine of nearly two millennia of a dwarf-yellow star ‘bursting through untrodden space’, he said, “That’s Jefferies’ phrase, Father.”

  “Why,” replied Richard, “when Uncle John and I walked here with our father we may indeed have passed by Jefferies himself. My father appreciated his writings, and once he visited him when Jefferies was living near Brighton.”

  “When he was young, I expect Jefferies would have gone by with eyes downheld, and unspeaking, Father.”

  All was passing, all would pass: the dwarf-yellow sun burn itself out, even as Jefferies, in the fury of creation and despair within his own short life.

  “Ah, he too was a wild boy, Phillip.”

  The pale thinness of the grasses growing upon the buried road led to a church, where the ghost of the road was lost. Beyond the flint tower hung the feather of the moon, pale for very weariness. From the wall of the churchyard, that acre of stone and silence, the road led up the hill, no longer visible as an interred way, but divined by the boy in Father, arisen out of the past. “Now this way, Phillip”—and so to a grassy lane, where honeysuckle hung in budding fingers and the wild rose was yet unborn. Whitethroats churred among the feathery wild carrots and taller purple-splashed hemlock. Now they had come to a field being harrowed for a catch-crop of white turnips the horseman said, glad to rest and talk a while. His toecaps were worn by kicking apart clods which had slewed past the tines of his harrow. Glad to see them, he was, as he pointed to a white
-speckled riband just discernible in the loamy soil, a braid of broken flints curved with the camber as of a roadway once metalled.

  They came to a spur of the downs, Phillip thinking of the long chalky slopes above the Somme, planning what dispositions he would make if he were commanding a company holding this spur above the lower ground and the road lying almost parallel a mile to the east. Emulate the porcupine, never forget your flanks.

  Walking up a lessening combe or valley they reached a hill which led down again to the main road lying under tarmac; and climbing once more, passed by a barrow, burial place of some ancient warrior, and following the now familiar camber under the sward along the reverse slope of the hill descended to another valley where a spring-water stream wimpled under a bridge.

  “Glassie, cool, translucent,” said Richard, peering at the stream dreamily awave with water-crow’s-foot and white blossoms along the green lengths of Sabrina’s hair.

  “I didn’t know you’d read Milton, Father!”

  “I recall that passage of Comus from my private schooldays, Phillip.”

  Richard was dreamed out, he was not used to long walks. They reached Colham, and waited for the local train to the Halt.

  “A wonderful, wonderful day, Hetty,” he said when Phillip had gone home. “I shall never forget it as long as I live.”

  *

  When his parents had returned to London, Phillip missed them. If only he had been to see them more often. And when a month later the house was empty, for the sapper officer who had rented one of the flats had gone by then, he felt that there was no life left in Fawley. Better to put it up for auction; and clear off his overdraft. The house and grounds made £1,100.

  On the day before the sale Phillip walked round the walled garden for the last time, and, driving away, left the car halfway up the borstal, going on foot to the beech-hanger where he rested, below the crest of the downs. There was no relief up by the sky. Below him lay the scene of defeat brought about by his own vacillating mind. Upon the gentle breeze came the familiar scent of wild thyme. He was sitting on an almost continuous mat of purple flowers. Large blue butterflies were fluttering about the flowers, and each other. He walked on, coming to the footpath above the white road where sometimes he had sat among the throb of turtle-doves. Now he walked sideways down the sheep-path to the brake of blackthorns and sat among the bushes to listen to their voices. One bird flew to her nest within a yard of him: had she remembered him from three previous summers, for without fear she poured the milk of her crop into the throats of her two squabs crouching side by side on the raft of twigs, while the cock bird poured his feelings into the sunshine—throb—throb—throb—love—love—love—Father, Mother, Lucy, little children—Melissa——