The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  Jonathan scowled. To avoid him feeling that he had asked something silly, Phillip said, “That is an interesting question. Pheasants eat almost anything, including corn, worms, beetles, apples, mice, small snakes, grasshoppers.”

  “I know what they eat, Dad, I mean sir, but are they vegetarian food for us?”

  David rolled laughing off the arm of the leather chair on which he had been sitting. He collapsed and hid his long thin face in a cushion. Stifled laughter came from the cushion. Billy remarked sardonically, “Are pheasants vegetables?”

  Jonathan’s eyes showed mortification.

  “I know, darling,” said Rosamund, going to the rescue. She was Celtic, dark like her small brother. She sat him on her lap. “You see, Johnny, pheasants eat clover and peas and corn, and when we eat them, we also eat what they have eaten, so in a way they are vegetarian. Vegetarian food means things like milk, butter, honey, and nuts. Figs, too, and dates, then there’s apples, potatoes, beans and peas, oh, lots of lovely vegetable food.”

  “Jolly fine grub,” said David, his toothy grin reappearing for a moment over the arm of the brown leather chair. “I want to be a vegetarian.” With a merry glance at Jonathan, he hid his head again.

  “Shut up, boy!” cried Jonathan. His dark eyes showed his hurt. Phillip made a sign to David not to pursue the joke further.

  “Now then, how about these horkey hats? I guess we won’t wear them through the village, or they will think the Corney Band Boys are going to play somewhere.”

  The Corney Band Boys was a family joke, an imaginary dance band made up of children, cats, pigs, foxes and mice all playing musical instruments together in the Corn Barn where the harvest horkey had been held on a September night of the previous year—the year of Munich.

  Chapter 16

  EXTRICATION

  That was the month when British corn prices suddenly dropped over 100 per cent in price, because much of the corn harvest of Central Europe had been bought by a group of financers in the City of London to prevent it going to Germany by barter. Before that year’s N.S.D.A.P. rally at Nürnberg Hitler had cried, Germany must export or die; and Germany shall not die!

  *

  The corn was yellow in the fields beside the winding coast road.Over the flat windscreen the heated air rushed with the smell of sap in stalk and leaf. The barley was topped with the hail, the oats were in jag, wheat berries were already hardening. Phillip rejoiced in the colour and light of sky and field and line of sea; he told himself that he was a farmer of this famous malting district where on the light soils and in the foggy dews of early morning some of the finest light-ale samples of barley in Britain were grown. His spirit rose buoyant in a sense of freedom because the harvest was not yet; there were two weeks, perhaps three—or even four weeks clear before the barley stalks would bleach white in the sun and the prawny heads hang down dry and brittle—sign that it was fit to cut. The wheat would be earlier than the barley, and the oats too; but Luke had said there was no need to worry. And the reaper-and-binder had been serviced at the blacksmith’s; and the shackle-bolts could be refitted to the frame of the green trailer; and a broken wooden lade repaired by a village carpenter. If only he hadn’t worried!

  “We won’t get in no muddle,” Luke had said. “And if there’s war declared, you’ll see, your barley will fetch a good price. You’ll see I’m right.”

  “I wish we’d bare-fallowed all the arable last year.”

  Phillip’s plan had been to grow no crops at all for the first two years, but to concentrate on restoration work, including meadow drainage and reconditioning of farm cottage buildings; the arable to be ploughed and cultivated only. Thus weeds would chit. Further cultivation would then kill them. Phillip meant to keep on doing that, killing crop after crop of weeds, throughout the second summer. The special wing-shaped tines on the tractor cultivator covered ten acres a day. There were two hundred acres of arable: twenty days a month, for one man, during three months.

  The next season they would have started with a new farm. But he had allowed himself to be turned away by the earnest pleas of Luke and Matt. Without pressure, in their own time—a whole clear year—they would have built pigs’ houses, repaired the roofs of stable and cowhouse, made a liquid manure tank, drained the meadows, bridged the dykes, even planted new spinneys of larch and oak in the centre of the largest field; and in that spinney, a crowstarver’s hut, like the one he had seen in the Big Wheatfield, with cousin Willie, during his boyhood.

  But, not to hurt their earnest beliefs that the farm ought not to miss a year’s cash-cropping—(had he been too frank about the smallness of his capital?)—he had sown barley against his own judgment, because he did not want to discourage Luke. They had sown a hundred acres; and after the following harvest of 1938 had met the greatest slump in British corn prices for many years.

  Phillip had offered samples of his barleys in the Corn Hall. The best bid did not cover the costs of fertiliser, seed, labour, depreciation, and rent. His chronic weakness: Oh, why did he always consider other people’s wishes? It made him bad-tempered; he was always denying himself. No pigs’ houses or liquid manure tank; meadows remaining undrained and the old dyke-bridges fallen in; no trees planted. There would have been hardly a weed left by now on an arable revitalised by exposure to sun and nitrogenous air.

  *

  It was an old-fashioned English summer, like that golden year of 1914. There was to be, in years to come, another illusion of summer of dreaming sunshine and of life everlasting.

  A drift of Painted Ladies was crossing the North Sea. Many butterflies were dancing over the seeded flowers and brambles of the hedges lining the wide extent of arable susurrating with the wind in the corn, the wind drawing a different sound from sprays of oats, from braided heads of wheat, from yielding sweep of bearded barley.

  Phillip stopped the car. “My father would love to see those butterflies.”

  “Why don’t we ever see your father, Dad?” asked Rosamund.

  “I’ve never seen him,” said David. “What is our grandfather like?”

  “According to photographs, he was exactly like you when he was a boy. But he never had a decent chance.”

  “Why don’t we see him?” persisted Rosamund.

  “He never answers my letters. He’s worn out, I expect, after fifty years in an office, and no-one to look after him.”

  “I’d love to look after him,” said Rosamund.

  *

  In brilliant clear light for which the coast had long been esteemed by landscape painters, the open car, holding five children in its seats, passed through little coastal villages of flint and brick and pantile, to arrive at the end of a narrow lane, overset by thorn hedges, where at the edge of marshes azure with sea-lavender in bloom across their wandering flats and channels stood Captain Runnymeade’s cottage, behind a tall garden wall of round grey pebbles.

  There the children got out, whispering to one another to be quiet while they adjusted their horkey hats. They wore their blue working overalls, washed and ironed for the occasion. There was a last-minute flurry while the hats were taken off, exchanged, tried on, rejected, and the originals handed back again.

  In addition to the hats, the children had brought several instruments capable of producing sounds and noises. These were, indeed, the instruments of the Corney Boys Band. The master-instrument was a French cor-de-chasse, eleven feet of tapered brass piping curling like the shell of a wentletrap, but, unlike that sea-snail, capable of uttering when blown a range of notes, said Phillip, of an historic gravity of tone.

  “For a thousand years in Europe, long before that, indeed, in Charlemagne’s time, the wild boar has quivered and grunted to hear the echo of these notes, even as the horn of Roland in the Pass of Roncesvalles. Pay attention, Billy. I am giving you priceless gems of culture.”

  Billy was laughing, but not at what his father had said in a mock school-master voice. He was thinking of Captain Runnymeade as a wild boar, quivering and
grunting with rage at the sight of them all hurtling into his garden party.

  “The small and crumpled bugle you carry will perhaps detract from the majesty of my salute on the cor-de-chasse.”

  “It won’t,” said Billy, pouting a little. He looked defiantly at his father, not sure whether he was being got-at. Billy had a great but concealed admiration for his father, mixed with sighful perplexity for some of the things he did, one of them being the mobbing of Mum, otherwise complaints and sometimes cross words.

  “Well, you can hardly help it, on that battered object, Billy my son. Anyway, it’s all supposed to be a joke. Peter with the cuckoo pipe, Roz the quail, David the wood-pigeon, Jon with his water-whistle.”

  “Dad,” said Jonathan, anxiously. “I haven’t got any water, so I can’t be a nightingale.”

  Billy and Peter doubled up with silent laughter.

  “Shut up, you bastards,” cried the child, his eyes flashing and his cheeks flushing. Rosamund put her arm round his shoulders, but he wriggled away.

  “We can’t really go in playing our instruments, you know,” said Phillip to Roz.

  The children waited, watching the play of feeling and indecision on their father’s face. “I knew he’d change his mind,” whispered Billy to Peter. Phillip heard him, and looked with a flash of anger towards the boy; at once softening as he saw a look of Barley on his face. “Well, Billy my son, it’s Captain Runnymeade’s show, and I don’t think we ought to gate-crash it.” So the horkey hats were removed, and hidden with the instruments in the car.

  Docile now, the children prepared to follow their father as he opened the postern gate in the garden wall to see, framed in the doorway, a lawn upon which two figures were posed, and before them a score and more of children sitting in a polite arc, and behind the arc a dozen uniformed nursemaids and an elderly nanny or two.

  Of the central figures upon the lawn, Captain Runnymeade was sitting with nonchalant ease upon a chair; while the other, pale of face and sombrely dressed was standing at a table, and holding in his hands a wand, a large red handkerchief, and part of a lettuce. It seemed to be a moment of climax, so Phillip motioned his children to remain still.

  Chapter 17

  PHOSPHORESCENCE

  The lawn was desiccated and shaven, a sandy mat of withering grasses studded with dwarfed plants of dandelion, plantain, and daisy, lookingas though, for too long, they had had to endure the cruel knives of a mower. And there sat the tyrant of their decimation, lord of the lawn, sitting askew in his chair with one pepper-and-salt trouser’d leg cocked over the other as he flipped a hand slightly toward Phillip in greeting before his gaze returned to regard tolerantly the movements of the magician in a frock-coat of ancient pattern, with stand-up collar and cravat enclosing the strings of his neck; now taking up a black silk hat with concave sides and noticeably curly brim—the immemorial abode, spectacularly speaking, of generations of white rabbits, the latest tenant of which was, apparently, about to reveal its presence there.

  Obviously to have made an entrance vulgarly, like something out of a Disney cartoon, blowing upon assorted instruments and wearing bizarre hats, would have irrupted the spirit of the party: although Captain Runnymeade, that mixture of the bohemian and the conventional, that agent provocateur of anything to dispel boredom and to stimulate entertainment, might not have found it unexpected. Indeed, his personality would have been partly the cause: for Phillip behaved in Captain Runnymeade’s house in a manner, or character, quite different from his normal self. He became Runnymeade-Maddison. He was a little afraid of ‘Boy’: and often wondered what was the cause. Was it because he was forced to act a part, to be pretentious, because his true or real self was unacceptable to one whose whole mode of living and thinking had been formed in a mould that was now obsolescent? Even so, what was his real or true self? Often he felt that he was many kinds of a person, his personality a mixture or layer of innumerable impressions, like an old door of a carpenter’s shop that is thick with many coats of paint from repeated brush-cleanings.

  *

  Out of the curved and curly silk hat upon the table topped with green baize was drawn a white rabbit. It squatted there, politely nibbling the lettuce, while awaiting the end of the show it probably knew by heart. Now the magician in the frock-coat had taken the hat with the curly brim, and holding it in the crook of his left arm, was pulling from it with his right hand flag after flag, each knotted loosely to its subsequent fellow, thus to fall in swathe on swathe of colour upon the table and thence to the level of the magician’s elastic-sided boots, and to the bitter grasses of the lawn. Flag after flag cascaded down—France, Montenegro, Servia, Russia, Japan, Belgium, Roumania, Italy, the United States—all the flags of the Allies were there—but stay, where was the Union Jack?

  The Magician paused, holding out his hat. Polite applause greeted the apparent end of the performance; but the audience was deceived, the climax was to come, for with a triumphant flourish the magician pulled out the Union Jack, then the Royal Standard, holding them high amidst a silence of unuttered cheers. Then he presented the Union Jack to Captain Runnymeade, who, having uncrossed his pepper-and-salt trousers, arose slowly to his feet, and with a smile on his ruddy face, held it up somewhat sheepishly for an appropriate moment of simulated appreciation before draping it over his chair-back with a gesture that seemed to Phillip to be saying, Thank God that’s over.

  Yes, the show was over: for the face of Rippingall, sans waxed moustachios, watching from behind the curtains of the sitting-room, was withdrawn; and hardly had Captain Runnymeade congratulated, and thereby dismissed, the magician, scarcely had he begun to move among his guests when from around the rear of the house appeared a file of white-capped-and-apron’d women led by Mrs. Rippingall and bearing between them the component parts of two trestle tables. Having fixed these, and laid thereon white damask tablecloths, they wheeled about, and filing back the way they had come, reappeared with a succession of trays bearing jugs of lemonade and ginger beer, plates of bread-and-butter, ice-cream, cakes of plum, ginger, fruit and macaroon, some iced and others heavy with almond paste set with walnuts and preserved cherries, together with bowls of various sliced and peeled fruits. Having put these down, they formed themselves into line as rehearsed by Rippingall, who then appeared, collar’d, cuff’d, and tail’d, to set in the centre of the table a silver-gilt engraved bowl holding a couple of gallons of cream, forthwith to be ladled on the plates of sliced and chopped apples, oranges, bananas, pears, apricots, peaches, grapes, plums, dates, and other fruits for the young mothers and their children.

  Before this, while the conjuring had been going on, Phillip had glanced at the faces of the women, searching for beauty and light. Of the women he recognised only Felicity, but then, searching anew, he saw a face which quickened his spirit as no other face could. How calm and beautiful Melissa was, her fair hair under a Tyrolean straw hat, banded with little coloured flowers, set on the back of her head.

  *

  Captain Runnymeade was moving among the children and their mothers with an air of satisfaction in his face as he basked in soft looks. Had he once been a confident Edwardian, ‘popular among the ladies’? What was ‘Boy’s’ true self? Phillip imagined him as a small, lonely child who through the years had built up a façade of self-assertion to cover feelings of insufficiency and failure.

  Stefania Rozwitz had told him that ‘Boy’ had had “a beautiful butterfly of a mother” whom he seldom saw. She had bolted from his father, after which her name was never mentioned. The boy had been left to a governess and later a tutor before going to one of the ‘only three possible schools’. A gilded youth, with the right connexions—but always that sense of inadequacy. Freud had become significant only after the ruin of the former European plutocracy in the war. In ‘Boy’ the last of the Edwardian world was dying. He was a ghost still enfleshed.

  “Ah, ha, Maddison. How’s your god-dam’ farm?”

  Phillip presented the children. ‘Bo
y’ nodded to each, stroked Rosamund’s head a moment, remarked, “Your father considers that leisure is a vice,” and having seen that they had something to eat, led Phillip away into the house and poured him out a large glass of gin and lime-juice, while Phillip vainly protested, “Not so much please——”

  “Then leave it.”

  The glass was topped up.

  While they were there Stefania Rozwitz came in and said, “‘Boy’, you’re a damned fool to drink that stuff if you want to make Felicity your mistress,” and taking the glass from his hand, she went out of the room.

  “The absence of manners in the world today is to be regretted,” remarked Runnymeade, pouring himself some whisky which he promptly swallowed.

  Phillip sipped his drink, waiting for a chance to get rid of it. He followed Runnymeade, who seemed to have forgotten him, into the garden, seeing past the open kitchen door the magician sitting at a table revealing shirtless bony shoulders and chest covered by a dickey tied on with tape. Starched cuffs were likewise secured to his wrists. There the old fellow was, enjoying himself with Guinness and platetful of York ham.

  And there stood Rippingall, eyeing the bottle of Guinness, until the voice of Mrs. Rippingall said sternly, “Rippingall! Remember that Guinness is not good for you!”

  Likewise this bloody gin, thought Philip, as he shot his glassful beside the threshold, by a rambler-rose root.

  In the garden Billy and Rosamund and the other children were enjoying themselves. They had forgotten their disappointment at having missed the chance of seeing the rabbit slipped into the hat where obviously the flags had been hidden all the time. However, there was compensation, for the animal was now hopping about on the lawn, seeking not grass but bits of bread and butter and cake from small hands carefully guided by sleeves of grey uniforms. He saw Penelope, and went to her.