The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  In some small hotels where he went with Martin at night notices were displayed that Jews were not wanted, as coloured men were barred in some hotels in London and New York. Once as they were passing a photographer’s shop he saw a youth sticking a notice, about a quarter the size of a foolscap envelope, with printed words Ich bin Jude. An hour later when he returned that way someone had scratched at it with a fingernail. Nervously? Covertly? Timidly? It remained like that for three days. On the fourth day he saw that it had been removed. And that evening, sauntering down the Kurfürstendamm about midnight with Piers and one of the actors who was the juvenile lead in Black Roses, a large Chrysler car moved slowly, as though courteously by them as the three men crossed a sidestreet junction. Usually cars rushed across, having right of way. There was no speed limit in Berlin, and frequently there were tyre-squeals as drivers braked to avoid smashes. In the Chrysler were four hefty men with prominent noses. (Why, wondered Phillip, as they were about to pass by, were German Jews so much more Jewish than those born in other countries? Or was this, if so, a phenomenon of inflation: overmuch food, drink, cigar-smoking and consequent sinus troubles and need to clear nostrils by fore-finger winkling?) He was surprised to hear Piers, who had been drinking a fair amount of Schnapps, say, “Jah, Juden!”, for this didn’t sound like the normally courteous man he knew. The sequel was also surprising.

  The car stopped. Four heads turned and regarded him. For a moment Phillip thought they were going to get out to slug Piers; but after a quarter of a minute the Chrysler went on, slowly, silently as before, leaving Phillip trying to account for the taunt. Perhaps it was lack of sleep, and the strain of working long hours in what was perhaps the worst atmosphere for a writer: a film studio. Fatigue and consequent nervous overstrain caused his own manners to deteriorate, he thought: lack of sleep and too much travelling on top of writing the trout book had made him so impatient with Lucy and critical of Felicity that he had literally flung himself away to the Gartenfeste. Even the Liberal star journalist had shown fatigue on the tour: on six different occasions when they were tired of motoring, towards evening, he had said, “We must open my bottle of Himbeergeist sometime.” It had remained unopened: his humanitarian or benevolent desire seemed to be fulfilled by the thought-expression, leaving him once more on his more commonplace level of caution.

  Once or twice, Piers and I, accompanied by some of the English actors, went to the Eden bar, where various girls sat each at her table, awaiting men friends known and unknown. They were beautiful young women: cool, poised, impersonal—almost. In fact, I thought, too good to be what they were: I am an inhibited puritan with a subconscious fear of syphilis from early warnings by my father when pointing out the dreadful shambling figure of one of my mother’s brothers.

  In fact, Melissa, I am old-fashioned. My experience, slight, in the war-years in darkened Piccadilly with such women or rather girls was that they were—except one—hard, grasping, callous. From what Piers said this evening, the Eden scene is part of a rapidly vanishing Germany. Such girls apparently do not go off with just anyone: the first consideration is that they must take a fancy, then a liking for a man, who will entertain, then be entertained by them privately. Distinguished amateurism rather than professionalism. Films now being made at Neubabelsberg set a standard of graciousness and gentility—false though they are. But all good manners are a kind of falsity, in that they are calculated, or consciously so. I found from my visit to the Eden tonight that I still have an adolescent fear of female beauty awaiting male appreciation.

  The Adlon is different. No-one sits at the few tables or at its somewhat grim and massive bar. I almost expected the Kaiser to walk at any moment into the drawing room where the Imperial Effigy stands in an alcove and induces the imagination to see heel-clicking, stiff-bowing, uniform’d men with shaven necks bulging over hard collars and glint of eye-glasses fixed deep into sockets above duel-scarred cheeks.

  All that has gone with the war. The Adlon is now a period-piece, yet more solid-seeming than the present with its classless revolution and mental idiom of speed and of efficiency through speed, facing up to problems and solving them instantly through action.

  I have to watch this in myself, again and again, and try to check it. My own built-up idiom or tempo inclines to sudden peremptory action, especially after periods of inaction and hesitancy and putting-off. I suspect this to be Hitler’s Achilles-heel, too: with consequent partial devastation, even insubordination, (Röhm, and the ‘night of the long knives?’) But so far as I have seen this effect has not yet reached the masses. Proper education for the young will eliminate the need for exhortation and drive: every man his own leader.

  Yes, the Adlon gives a sense of security which somehow I cannot entirely feel in the new Germany. I expected to find lavender saches in the cupboards and drawers (no, this is sentimentality, I didn’t expect to find them) but the period is Edwardian, or late Victorian, with the old-fashioned telephone, massive bath, heavy furniture, vast looking-glass confronting a hollow-feeling me shaving a tenuous ghost staring from the reflecting film of hydrageum. (Quicksilver to you, my sprite my Ariel. I’ll continue tomorrow.)

  There is a haunt in Berlin of American and British correspondents called Taverne. I went there tonight with the retired naval officer who took us on the motor tour. There my remarks met with disapproval. On hearing me say to Herr Leutnant that our youth in Britain is generally speaking leaderless, ruled by the pre-war idiom from which nearly all the younger intelligentsia react with a sort of communistic humanitarianism, one young girl sitting with her mother at the reserved Press table leaned over and said, “You are a little Englander, and ought to be ashamed of uttering such remarks about your country in a foreign capital.” Beside her mother sat a man who was the Berlin correspondent of a leading English newspaper.

  We got into conversation, or some sort of argument, about mediocrity and that originality called greatness. She went to a school on the downs near Brighton and looked like the captain of the hockey team when she demanded across the table, “I suppose you think you are a great man?” “Oh rather,” I replied lightly. It was amusing, she was a charming creature. There were, The Times had said, some grounds for the unfriendly attitude of most journalists to the Nazis. The system of news-reporting was wrong. All news collection is essentially a keyhole business; either that, or one has to rely on official hand-outs which, as The Times correspondent near me pointed out, might give several versions, some contradictory, at intervals of perhaps several hours, in reply to telephonic enquiries at the Ministry of Propaganda.

  Exasperating for a newspaperman: the paper going to bed in London and his column still untelephoned.

  The Times man also said, significantly, “Part of Hitler is dead beyond resurrection. He is neither homosexual, nor capable of loving a woman naturally.” I said, “You mean a phoenix?”

  He addressed an envelope to Melissa, stuck and stamped it—and then threw it aside. It was awful, naked, weak stuff about the girls in the Eden bar. And syphilis—it would repel her. He picked it up from the floor and put it in the bottom of his suit-case.

  *

  That day he was taken by Martin to visit a labour camp. Young men working with the slow but steady rhythm of the body unimpelled to quickness by thinking too many thoughts. Draining marshes, reclaiming heathlands. Living in wooden huts. They looked to be limber and healthy.

  “If only Birkin’s plan to make new motor-roads, Martin, some years ago, with our unemployed, could have been put into action, instead of the millions virtually rotting on the dole.”

  “And England rich, rich, rich with gold, despite the great effluent across the Atlantic during the war!

  “Yes, Phillip! During the ’twenties, our Rhine was an effluent, all sewage and pollution. Now we do not waste the fertility of our German soil! Our Führer has got back the Rheingold! Siegfried has slain the dragon and rescued Brunhilde! The fertility of our German soil is saved, and put back on our good German farm
s!”

  Martin might have been addressing a public meeting. Once again he was a self-built image of Hitler. But how did the opera end? Valhalla of the Gods in flames, the world drowning as the Rhine overflowed to sweep all away. Was it the wave of death prophesied by D. H. Lawrence, the honorary soldier of the Western Front, phoenix in his own right——

  *

  When his Reisechecks were spent he was given 150 RM for the fare home. 4 hours and 35 minutes to reach Croydon, 990 kilometres from Berlin. Oh, the change from lyric-restored Germany. The away-feeling in the faces of Londoners. Shabby suburbs. Soot-darkened buildings of the City of London.

  *

  Sitting in the Barbarian Club was a West Countryman who had made a considerable success by writing his autobiography Farmer’s Boy. He told Phillip that many banks, which after foreclosing on mortgages, and being forced to farm land themselves had lost money that year. Hundreds of farms in every county of Great Britain were being put up for auction at Michaelmas without reserve.

  “Read my article in Farmer’s Life this week. Land in England has never been so cheap since just before Napoleon tried to have a smack at what your pal Hitler may be bloody fool enough to try and do. Now’s the time to buy land. This world slump is bound to lead to war, and then your blind trout will be growing gold scales on both sides of his body.”

  *

  When Phillip got home Ernest was in the house alone. Lucy, he said, was at the nursing home.

  “What, ill? Or the baby?”

  “Oh, it was the baby.”

  When Ernest said no more Phillip cried, “Is she all right?”

  “Perfectly all right.”

  “Ernest, please let me know. What happened?”

  “I told you,” replied Ernest, distinctly. “Lucy went into the nursing home to have a baby.”

  “But when?”

  “Oh, soon after you left.”

  “What is it—boy or girl?”

  “A boy.” He added, “It weighed seven pounds exactly. I weighed it myself, on my father’s spring balance.”

  “I left my address, you know. The Stefanie Hotel, Kurfürstendamm.”

  “Ah.”

  “Is Rippingall here?”

  “He is not,” replied Ernest. “He absented himself the day after you left.”

  Chapter 9

  OLD ORDER

  “Lucy, although it’s lovely to have you back again, I don’t think I can stick another winter in this valley. Anyway I’ve missed the ’bus—the war-book boom is long over—Graves, Sassoon, Blunden, Manning, Barbusse, Jünger, Duhamel, Aldington, Edmonds, have all written their stuff. Remarque scooped the pool, writing with the tensions of imagined dread. They told me in Germany that he was too young to know battle, but I knew it after reading sixty pages.”

  Lucy was looking through several years’ accumulation of Christmas cards, wondering which to keep and what to throw away, while half-listening.

  “All I seem to do is newspaper articles. Chettwood of the Crusader wants some more about animals. I’ll have to imitate my younger self, I suppose. I’m getting on for forty-one, and nothing done of my real life’s work.”

  His real life’s work. The words remained in her mind. What was his ‘real life’. His hopes, perhaps. Well, she was more fortunate, being a woman. She had her baby, darling little Jonny. If only Phillip could be happy. Then there were Billy, Peter, David, Rosamund, and—Jonny. He was such a darling, with dark eyes and sensitive face like the photograph of Phillip’s cousin Willie. If only Willie had lived——Perhaps Jonny would grow up to be the friend he needed. Piers was good for Phillip—up to a point. Thereafter they were different. Poor, lonely Phillip.

  “I think I’ll go to the Gartenfeste, Lucy.”

  “Yes, you go, my dear. You’re happier there really, in your Sanctum, aren’t you?”

  *

  In the pale blue October air a sparrowhawk was wheeling, cutting an arc through the lens of the Zeiss glass with wings which shone at the turn like the yellow grasses in the low sunlight. It was so quiet on the hilltop that the cries of swallows dashing at the hawk seemed to come from just above the clump of beech trees behind the north boundary of the field. But even with the eight magnifications of the lens he could not distinguish the whitish patch on each swallow-breast. My eyes are not what they were. The delayed action of mustard gas, perhaps.

  He focused on the hawk, deciding it was not the bird of prey that excited the swallows, after all. They were playing through the empty corridors of the sky—but not empty for them, for the birds were feeling the tribal message to migrate.

  The sparrowhawk returned, and cut spirals against the candent blue of the sky. The swallows, fleeing back, rose up to another mock attack. They wheeled around it like a German fighter geschwader keeping the ring for their ace aircraft, circling in tight turns above, to dive out of the sun and pour tracer into a lone enemy. There was a continuous singing twitter while calmly the hawk soared, tracing a flat spiral (so it seemed, but of course it was losing height) upon the sky. Sometimes one of the winged specks seemed to hurl itself upon the hawk, but to flick up again hurriedly to join the agitated throng above. Phillip watched until the birds were out of sight behind the dingy-leaved beech trees.

  He sat in the calm autumn sunshine, trying not to think how in a few days his poor trees, cut by Atlantic winds to the shape of a porcupine, would be black and bare as their topmost boughs already killed by incessant salt blasts. Soon the last brown leaves would be streaming away in the wind. And the swallows, which roosted in thousands among the reeds of the lakes behind Malandine sands, would be on their way to the African sun.

  A hopeful grasshopper was risping in the grasses, fiddling away with his hind legs for a last chance of love. No blighting Puritan conscience about that soulless little harlequin. He, too, was born to die, as one of the inscriptions over a German youth camp declared—‘for Germany’. All things pass away. That marvellous psalm, ending in ‘dust to dust’ … The Abelines would soon be gone; masons, carpenters and plasterers take over for the new coeducational school to be run by a refugee from Germany. How had he got the capital to alter the place, since a refugee was supposed to have come out with no more than ten shillings, owing to currency regulations?

  *

  When he returned from the Gartenfeste, Lucy said, “Melissa was over yesterday, Pip. She didn’t know you’d been to Germany.”

  “I did write to her, but didn’t post the letter.”

  “Oh, why not. She would have appreciated it, I’m sure.”

  Phillip had read it to Lucy in the nursing home. “It was clear, and very interesting, at least I thought so, but then I’m not really capable of judging. Did you see Piers while you were in the field? He rang up, and I told him you were there. Oh, before I forget, there’s an Urgent parcel of proofs for you, from Plymouth.”

  “The Blind Trout! Now I’ll know if the prose is any good!”

  He tore open the parcel, and read at random. The prose was hard, it was true. He felt a glow. “I’ll go through them later. How are the children?”

  “Oh, just the same. Peter likes going to school with Billy. They walk across the deer park every morning, and back again in the afternoon. Melissa is staying for a few days, she said, to pack up her things.”

  “Is George there?”

  “I think she said he’d gone to Norfolk to shoot partridges. Why not give her a ring, I’m sure she’d like to see you.”

  Melissa opened a side-door before the main entrance to the Abbey.

  “I saw you from my room. Come on up, chuck your coat anywhere.”

  She had a flat in the east wing, once the land steward’s quarters. A gramophone, a piano. Cut-out pictures on the walls. On the chimney shelf, part-covered by displayed telegrams, photographs. Her school; hounds, horses, yachts, friends and relations. Fourth of June occasions. Offered him her armchair, then sat at one end of the sofa.

  “What was Germany like?”

  “Q
uite different from the newspaper stories.”

  “Did you see that photograph in the Crusader of five hundred Opel cars all lined up at Southampton docks?”

  “No.”

  “They were imported by a Piccadilly firm to be sold here at sixty pounds each. I saw it in The Daily Crusader, with the caption, All going back to Germany. The boycott, I suppose?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “Lucy showed me some postcards you sent to the children. I didn’t know you had gone there.”

  “I did write a letter to you, but thought it was pretentious, so didn’t post it.”

  “May I see it?”

  He pulled the addressed envelope from an inside pocket. The stamps bore Hitler’s profile.

  “He looks determined enough to get what he wants,” she said, then lifted her eyes to Phillip. “I like a man who knows what he wants.”

  “Regardless of the consequences?”

  “As long as they don’t hurt others.”

  He began to feel insubstantial. She recognised this feeling, and said demurely, “May I keep the letter for my birthday present?”

  “I wondered what all those telegrams were for. Congratulations, and many happy returns.”

  “I’m twenty-one. My own mistress, I suppose.”

  He thought of her father’s remark at the hunt dance. She sensed what he was thinking, and moved beside him. “Aren’t you going to kiss me on my birthday?”