The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  “No, Father, but I can play draughts.”

  Richard brightened at the prospect. After a couple of games he played the gramophone, and put a decanter of sherry on the table. Phillip went down to the fried fish shop in Randiswell, to return with a double portion of cod and potatoes. It was the first time that Richard had tasted such food, which he pronounced to be capital tuck.

  Phillip had only intended to spend a few minutes at his old home, but he had stayed nearly three hours.

  At last he said that he must be getting on his way.

  “Won’t you stay the night, old man?”

  “Well, thank you very much, but I must see someone in Suffolk tonight. I’m thinking of buying a farm on the East Coast. I’ve had some prospectuses from a land agent.”

  “Well, you know best I expect, old man.”

  “Oh, by the way, Father, I wonder if it would be a good idea for Mother to have her aspidistra fern with her? It means a great deal to her, I think. I can easily take it in my car, and I have to pass there on my way to the Blackwall tunnel.”

  “Are you sure it won’t be any trouble, old chap?”

  “None at all. May I tell her the fern’s from you? I am sure it would please her.”

  “You do what you think is right, Phillip.” Richard added a little ruefully, “She will listen to you.”

  After delivering the fern—“With Father’s love”—Phillip went through the tunnel under the Thames and through docks to Romford and the road to Colchester and Ipswich.

  *

  There was one place on heavy Suffolk land which he wanted to visit for an ulterior reason. In the vicinity of Little Ypene lived a girl who had written to him several times. She had an extraordinary surname of Wissilcraft. In her last letter she enclosed poems which seemed to him as beautiful as they were strange and rhythmical, reminding him of the poems of the dying D. H. Lawrence; but these verses were no mere imitation of that poet’s mood. Was this another Emily Brontë, a girl Shelley? She wrote that she would meet him in the village of Ypene, near Skarling, at the Wooltod Inn, and come on a bicycle, with a red riband tied on the handlebars.

  It seemed a queer way to ensure recognition. Would she take the bike into the pub with her? The name of Little Ypene was an added attraction. Ypene—Ypres—hadn’t refugees from the Low Countries come to Suffolk at some period of persecution? Huguenots? Ypres was the centre of the Flemish cloth trade. Perhaps Suffolk wool was imported in the Middle Ages, and a colony of merchants had decided to settle there, calling the place Little Ypres, now corrupted to Ypene? There were probably kabarets called after wooltods—big bundles stitched in hessian sacking and loaded high on waggons—in the Salient before the war. By 1917 the walls would have been used as shuttering for those massive concrete and steel fortresses called mebus by the Germans and pillboxes by the British troops, ringed by calcium flares at night and tempests of fire by day while the battles for Passchendaele were raging. They would have names like Vampir, Kronprinz, Von Tirpitz …

  The fancy was not dispelled when he came to the Wooltod Inn. It was little more than an ale-house for passing carters and waggoners, with a few regulars among local farm labourers. He had written to ask for a bedroom for the night, and supper to which he had invited a guest, he said. The room he was shown into was overcrowded with furniture, pieces bought at local auctions because they were cheap. Pictures and steel-engravings hung on the varnished walls. On entering he thought that she must have left the room—a bicycle, less red riband, was outside—but seeing booted feet under a cracked Chinese screen, he thought she was having a joke with him, and said, “I spy, with my little eye, your pedal extremities, Laura Wissilcraft.”

  She made no reply, so he peered round the screen and saw her in an armchair upholstered in black horsehair: a nondescript young woman in dark clothes, with red hands which she did not try to hide, and wearing a black overcoat which might have been her mother’s.

  “I expect you’re tired after your bicycle ride,” he said, wondering how he could get out of the place and continue his journey north, to find a proper hotel. She did not reply.

  “What happened to the red ribbon? It wasn’t on the handlebars.”

  “I put it on the war memorial.”

  “Yes, it will be Armistice Day soon. A fine gesture for a poet.”

  The sitting-room apparently adjoined the public bar. Loud voices ceased when supper was brought in, eggs-and-bacon and strong tea with home-made bread and butter. She would not eat, but sat in the chair.

  “No need to feel shy with me, you know. Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don’t fit in with normal healthy people.”

  *

  In that half-moribund hamlet, in the museum stillness of the inn, now that hobnailed footfalls had passed away down the lane, in the light of an oil-lamp hung from the ceiling, she was unable to arise from out of her environmental self … winding lanes overgrown with thorn hedges; water-logged arable and meadowland black with wilding thorns; broken field-gates, waggons and carts unpainted, half-rotten; decaying thatch on cottage roofs growing nettles and grass, sodden woodwork of doors and window-frames with broken panes stuffed with sacking and paper—all this visual decay had made her passive with frightening nihilism. Her silence wore out his resistance, he heard himself being rude to her, angry that she could think only of herself, of her own pessimism and misery. Had he not been like this in his own formless past, before he had reformed himself into some sort of rectitude on paper? Blowing black smoke in other people’s faces? The root of pessimism lay in loneliness, then despair.

  He tried to explain her to herself: she the effect of causes which must be rejected: the heavy Suffolk clays, ditches fallen in, tile-drains choked, thorns spreading over fields which no one would buy at any price, tall thick hedges which kept the drying winds from the small thistly sheaves of August; threshed-out samples unwanted in the Corn Hall, wheat grown for nothing——

  “I know it all, truly I do. Beans grown to feed bullocks which cost more to fatten than the market prices the beasts fetch. Barley for pigs that don’t pay. Drip of thatch, fallen bedroom ceilings, green mould inside the putty-rotten, loose panes of glass——”

  “Why are you talking like this?” she cried wildly. “You don’t understand! You haven’t had to sleep with a snoring grandmother since you were three years old!”

  “I’ve tried to sleep in a military hospital with men snoring because they were shot through the head! Or burned by phosphorus bombs,” he added, suddenly quiet.

  “You took part in that war! You helped to keep it going on!”

  “I must go outside for a moment. I’ll be back.”

  The air was frore, stars glittering. The loneliness, lovelessness, deathfulness of an ardent spirit snored over in a feather-bed, suffocated in the death of a hundred hens with broken necks or cut throats; this girl’s fertility encased in the black beetle-shard of a living death. This spirit a clear stream which had written the poem on the Saxon brook, this dark Ophelia seeking a water-death to carry her spirit through eternity …

  How to move her from the darkness of a lost self? Could she share with him his feelings of Mother dying of cancer, that great sooty crab walking sideways out of polluted Thames to confront office and factory workers … despair and inner struggle of the young to escape from the death, death, death of a dying civilisation, whose only freedom was in war, the enemy of Carcinoma.

  “Laura, you can arise out of yourself if you try. But you must start. You are like a tree embedded in peat.”

  “You don’t understand!”

  His star-renewed sympathy was leaching away. Damn this could-be pretty girl who would not respond, who wouldn’t help herself. Her spirit wasn’t strong enough, which meant clear enough. She preferred to drown. “You are polluting the clear stream of yourself. You prefer to drown. You’re like a blind, black trout——”

  His supper was cold, congealed in fat. He sat down
with knife and fork. “Come on, eat up. Be a pal, Laura. Make your craft whistle!”

  “Food! Who wants food!”

  “I do. I’ve come over sixty miles from London to see you.”

  “You haven’t seen me yet.”

  “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. I’m going to pay for my bedroom, then go on to Yarwich. How far away do you live? Three miles? And you haven’t got a lamp on your old boneshaker.”

  “I can see in the dark.”

  “Right you are. Now I’m going to pay the bill.”

  She sprang up and stood with arms spread across the door.

  “Let me pass, please.”

  “No. You must not go.”

  “Laura, be a good, kind girl.”

  Her face was different. She had beauty, her mouth quivered into a gentle line, her eyes had become blue he saw as he stared at them.

  “Very well, I’ll stay here for tonight. Are you expected home?”

  “My mother said it would be good for me to see you. She understands me.”

  “I’ll see if they have another room for you. It’s freezing outside.”

  He saw the landlord. “This lady is tired. Have you a spare room for tonight?”

  “I’ll ask the missus, sir.”

  Candlesticks to the cold rooms. At her door, “Well, goodnight—see you tomorrow.” He went to bed in a room with coving ceiling and sloping floor, and lay sleepless. After a fume of negative thought he got out of bed and listened at the open door. Silence. He went back to bed; got out again and went down the passage, opened her door and got in beside her. He was shivering. She lay passive.

  “I hope I won’t make you cold, Laura.”

  She was warm. He put an arm round her, laid his head on her bosom. Her breasts were firm. He felt them, his hand moved down to her stomach. It was hard, she was rigid. If only she would respond to tenderness. How old was she? What would her parents do if she did not return? Bang on the door and find him in bed with her? Then up with the old rusty gun? He began to laugh to himself, a little hysterically.

  “How old are you, Laura?” She might be any age between twenty and thirty.

  “Eighteen.”

  “One day you’ll fall in love naturally, then all your thoughts will change into happiness. Now go to sleep, and rest your weary head.”

  He got up quietly and opened the door, and went back to his smothering feather-mattress. In the morning, at breakfast, it was the same again. “Food! Who wants food!”

  “You do. Now eat and be sensible. Don’t be intransigent. It’s a long word for a long process. It means you will not come halfway to meet me.”

  “Nor will you.”

  When he said goodbye on the main road, out of sight of the Wooltod Inn and started to drive off, she sprang on the running board and with desperate eyes stared into his face and cried, “I love you!” He stopped lest she fall off.

  “I wish you did love me, but you do not. Everyone needs tenderness.”

  “It is you who are afraid of love, not me.”

  She jumped on the running board crying, “Take me with you”, clung to him. He wanted to hit her. He stopped the car, and said quietly, “Laura, I must go. I’ve got three farms to look over, then I must go back to London tonight. My mother is dying.”

  “You’ll write, won’t you?” She was pale, her eyes tragic.

  “I’ll write. And you start writing a novel.”

  *

  All that day passed in near-hopelessness. His sense of failure was deep. He had already given notice to leave Monachorum at Christmas. Where could they go? Fawley: no, that was out-worn, like Monachorum. Did he really want to farm? To have the old conflict between ‘pen and plough’ all over again? Yet it would be a good thing for the family. And he could earn money writing about the family’s adventures. So, with mixed feelings, Phillip bought three hundred acres of waste and wild land beside the coast of the North Sea for £5 an acre. Subject to contract, he told the land-agent. It would take several years to get the land back in heart. The farmhouse, once an Elizabethan seigneurial manor, was in a state known as dilapidation.

  Chapter 10

  VALE

  “Lucy, ought we to cancel the party?”

  Lucy could feel the underlying tension of his thoughts. She divined what he was suffering over his mother, and that his stoicism had grown out of a life-long despair. She knew, too, that he was worrying about the farm he had bought.

  “Oh, you know, I feel sure that Mother would not want us to do that.”

  “But can you make all the arrangements? I can’t really face the idea of taking on anything more just now.”

  “I am sure I can manage, Pip.”

  “Shall we ask Felicity to come early, with Brother Laurence, and give you a hand?”

  “Yes, if you like.”

  “And I’d like to ask the Channersons down from London. He’s the war painter, I’ve met him in the Club, his wife is jolly. He isn’t really appreciated, so I’d like to give the party for him.”

  “Well then, I’ll write to her, shall I? Oh yes, Becket Scrimgeour, the vicar’s brother, is staying at the vicarage. You like him, don’t you?”

  “Yes, he’s quite amusing. But a little too cynical for my taste.”

  “He called here yesterday, while you were away, and played all the afternoon with Billy. I don’t think,” she added, with a smile, “that he and the vicar exactly hit it off. But then Becket is artistic.”

  “If we ask him, we’ll have to ask the vicar and Mrs. Vicar. That will make twelve. How many can our table hold?”

  “Twenty at least.” She saw distress held behind his eyes. “Don’t you worry, we’ll manage.”

  “I’m thinking of Father. No, of course he couldn’t come.”

  “I suppose there’s no hope, really, for Mother?”

  “When I went to see Father yesterday he said to me, ‘Phillip, the Harley Street specialist told me to expect the end within ten days. She has the smell of death, the specialist told me,’ I asked Father if those words had been used. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘they are exactly what I was told.’ I suppose the specialist has seen so many like it that, for the moment, he forgot he was not talking to a colleague.”

  She thought how kind Phillip was really, how he understood others. Poor Pip, few really understood him. “How was Father, Pip?”

  “Oh, he was in one of his tense moods which we all, especially my Mother, found so tiresome in the old days. But there was a reason for his distraught condition. You see, every morning at the same time he walks over the Hill, and down past the dead Randisbourne, which held trout and roach when he was a young man. A hopeful, clear stream of bright water, now cancerous under the spread of civilisation, otherwise unplanned drainage. But I’m wandering into my book! The point is, that morning he was late, and he knew Mother would worry when he didn’t come——”

  Lucy had a busy morning ahead of her, but she did not like to interrupt the flow of his thoughts, knowing that often he got ideas while talking to her.

  “Father said to me, ‘I left an envelope, which came addressed to your mother, on her drawing-room table, Phillip. Now I cannot find it. I have looked everywhere, upstairs and down. I suppose my memory is failing. Wait until you get to my age, you will then know how life wears one away. The only way by which I can account for the missing letter is that your sister, Mrs. Willoughby, called this morning, but why should she want to take such a thing? As you know, I have forbidden her the house, owing to her abrupt and withdrawn manner towards me, her downright rudeness in fact. Well, I must be off.’

  “I offered to take him in the car, Lucy, but he said exercise helped to clear his head. So when he had gone I went round to Doris’ flat in Joy Farm, on the Gordonbrock fields, which I knew as a boy, with my cousins Bertie and Gerry Cakebread, both killed in the war. All the hedges gone, it’s now a mass of yellow brick houses surrounding the seedy farmhouse. Doris had the letter. And what do you think her explanatio
n was? That Mother had asked her to put a florin on a horse with Chamberlain the butcher in Randiswell, and the horse had won nine to one and Mother had won a pound. Mother didn’t want Father to see the envelope because he disapproved of betting. So she asked Doris to go to Hillside Road and ask for a book which she had left there years ago, and get hold of the envelope. Which Doris had done. When I told Doris that it was wrong to have taken it she went stubborn and said curtly that I was always on Father’s side nowadays, and was growing just like him. I tried to explain, but she was adamant and said, ‘I do not wish to hear anything more about it.’”

  “Poor Doris,” said Lucy. “She does rub people up the wrong way, doesn’t she?”

  “I got to the nursing home in front of Father, and asked Mother why she had proposed to Doris such a thing. She cried, and said she had done it for the best. And the ironic part of it is that when, later on, I told Father that Doris had taken it out of loyalty and a feeling of protection for Mother, I put my foot in it, as Father used to say. ‘Are you, too, against me?’ he said, with a return of the strained voice. I said I was only trying to put Doris’ point of view, while well aware of her gaucherie, which came from a single-mindedness at times amounting to rudeness. My God, Lucy, it’s as tragic as a play by Tchekov. He said, ‘My dear boy, I have known for a long time that your mother bets on horses, but she does it with her own money, and what she does with her own money is not, and never was, my affair.’”

  “Poor dears,” said Lucy. “Oh well. Now I really must get the washing ready, the van will be here any moment.”

  “I’ve hindered you. Let me help. Give me your orders. Shall I write down the items while you call them out? Anyway, talking about Mother’s money, Father got on to Elizabeth. ‘She’s a vulture,’ he said. ‘She goes down to see your mother nearly every evening after her work in London solely to get money from her, in order to dress herself up in all her finery. I’ve known for years that she has bullied your mother for money, but now, with your mother lying helplessly there, your sister so plays upon your mother’s feelings that in the end she has to give way.’ It is tragic that Father cannot see that he is partly the cause of his daughter’s alienation.”