Young Phillip Maddison

by Henry Williamson

  When he had shinned over the railings to search, the nest had turned out to be that of an accentor, as the books called the modest little hedgesparrow. What a wonderful discovery! The mother robin had given away the food her own young did not want! And yet the books said birds acted only and solely from instinct, and could not think for themselves!

  It was heaven to lie on the chalky earth, among the slightly prickly beech-covers, far away from all people. He picked up one of the covers, from which the brown seeds, shaped like wedges, had fallen. What ate them, besides woodpigeons? Was it mice that had made stores, which he had found in cracks and crannies of trees, or was it birds? It might be squirrels; though those cranny-stores looked more like trickles than mast packed in. Perhaps they had dropped in as they fell from the tree-tops, and had become chance stores of gravity? That sounded rather nice, chance stores of gravity. Everything fell, sooner or later, back to earth again. He repeated the phrase to himself. It sounded like wind-borne. Dandelion and thistle seeds were wind-borne, drifting on the wind, riding airily in little spheres of light, glistening as they turned slowly over in the blue sky under the high invisible larks, their destiny unknown, wind-borne, to fall to earth by chance. Yet not a sparrow fell to earth, frozen dead in a hard winter such as the one Father had told him of, before he was born, without its Maker knowing of it.

  Did the Maker know everything, then? Even a pebble from his catapult whizzing through the air and falling on the slate roofs of the flats in Charlotte Road? Mother would say that was coming from the sublime to the ridiculous. She would say Hush Phillip! She often said that to him. The best thing was not to tell her anything. Father objected, and withheld his permission; Mother tried to hush him. O, why was he thinking of things at home, out here in his hunting grounds? He felt his cheeks to be thin again.

  Wood-pigeons were cooing in the glade under the high cathedral beeches, a lovely spring sound, like the cry of lambs running and leaping at play in the field below. Many of the holes of the gally-birds, as the woodmen called them, so high in the beech bough above must be old ones; perhaps they did not nest in thoroughly rotten wood, knowing it to be unsafe. Did grubs feed on quite rotten wood, or did they need sap? If so, by the time a tindery bough was ready to fall, heavy and sodden with rain, the last grub would have left it. Could wood-lice climb so high from the ground, sixty feet or more? If so, would the gally-birds eat them? Spiders did not like wood-lice, they cut the silk to drop them off when he put them in their webs.

  He got up, brushed the dry prickly mast-covers off his knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket, and walked down to the edge of the wood. Strands of wire kept the sheep in the field from straying among the trees; and getting through the fence, he went to his next place of call, a spinney beside the road, at the edge of which stood the cottages of the woodsmen and farm labourers. Here the trees were thinner, being larch and ash-pole. The ground was covered with ivy. In places old rusty tins lay, half overgrown: and in one of them, an ancient biscuit box standing on its side, the paint on it nearly obliterated by exposure, was a robin’s nest. Near it was a thrush’s, on the ground at the base of a larch. These were duly photographed by the Brownie.

  There were long gardens, filled with cabbages, between the border of the spinney and the cottage back-doors, which was pleasing, for then no-one could overlook what he was doing, and find his nests. A row of pollarded elms ended the gardens, and Phillip was peering into one of these, which was hollow, when he jumped back, thinking he had disturbed a snake: for the spitting, hissing noise had come as he was about to put his arm into the hole. Then he noticed a rat’s tail, and some feathers. Could it be an owl? His heart beat wildly with excitement. An owl’s nest! It would be as wonderful as finding a hawk’s! He retired to sit down in the ivy, in a circular and waving patch of sunshine, and delay the pleasure of exploring further.

  He was watching the side of the hole, when a furry ear appeared, then a whisker, and finally part of a kitten’s head. His disappointment was great; still, it might very well be a wild cat, judging by the renewed spitting and yowly noises which greeted his face at the entrance of the hole. Accustoming his eyes to the darkness within, he counted five faces, all crouching against the far end. Well, it was quite an adventure, and something to write and tell Desmond about.

  Creeping to the next of the old trees, which was covered with dead ivy, he found a robin’s nest about four feet from the ground, built between three intertwisted bines. It was made of the usual dry grass, and lined with moss and black horsehair; the eggs were a pale greyish-yellow faintly dappled all over the brownish-pink; there were five of them … but wait a minute! One was larger than the others, wider, less pointed, more rounded, faintly lavender-purple mottled … could it be? It was, it was a cuckoo’s egg! Value two shillings, in Watkins and Doncaster’s catalogue! Not that he would ever think of selling such a treasure; but such a very high price showed just how rare it was. None of the boys at school who collected eggs had ever found a cuckoo’s.

  Putting it back in the nest with extreme care, he walked away, making his mind a blank, pretending not to have been near the tree, or that any nest was built in the dead ivy. It did not exist.

  After wandering around as though aimlessly, while trills of happiness ran up his body, he approached the tree once more, as though casually; and re-enacted the surprise of seeing the larger egg with the pinky-brown robin’s eggs. At length, taking out the egg, he strolled away in the direction of the gate, where his bicycle was hidden. Then, removing the tools from his tool bag, he put them in his pocket; and again holding up the egg to the light to confirm that it was fresh, he wrapped it in his handkerchief, and with the greatest care placed it in the leather bag.

  He decided to go to Farthing Street, and the village beyond, where Charles Darwin’s house stood. Charles Darwin was dead, of course, but it would be nice to see where the author of The Voyage of the Beagle had once lived. Also in that village was a shop which sold very good buns, with more currants in them than ordinary ones, and flavoured with some sort of spice. They were a halfpenny each; one would do for his tea. That left a halfpenny for a spill of broken biscuits at the old dame’s shop on the way home.

  Cycling onwards, he came to the gate of the drive leading up to the explorer’s house, and passing it, got off and crept through the hedge. On the edge of a wide lawn stood a thin cypress tree, and peering into its close, upright branches, he found a nest. It had young, but an egg lay under the nestlings. Lifting it out between two fingers, he shook it by his ear. It was sloppy, infertile. Now he had a greenfinch’s!

  He crept back to his bicycle, and ate his bun while listening to nightingales in a green shade, while waves of happiness rose in him so strongly that he could scarcely stop himself from warbling with joy.

  That night, in the height of the sky, he saw the comet—a silver bird with a great sweeping tail. The world was a wonderful place!

  *

  So the spring advanced for Phillip, two half-days of freedom a week in the country, in his own especial private places; five days of tedium, evasion and passive resistance in the classroom, wherein the spirit was never moved by wonder or beauty, but where, in periods of rumination, the psyche could wing to its true or natural habitat, by way of pictures in the mind: of chestnut and hazel coverts, white-starred with wind-flowers growing out of the layers of skeleton leaves which fed them, as a mother her children; and the dead-leaf pattern of the hen-pheasant’s back, on her eggs in the nettles, her back sun-dappled. Nature was a relation of all life, said Father, when he had brought him, once, some leaf-mould from under the elms in the Backfield, for the garden-bed. Leaf fed root, as the rabbit the stoat, and spring became summer.

  It was sad that everything had to pass away; that it was no longer spring, that the nests were forsaken, the young birds flown—or dead. Phillip felt sad; all things had changed, except himself. He was left behind. A tear dropped on the History book, momentarily magnifying part of the print which gave the date of
the burning of Joan of Arc by the English at Rouen.

  *

  The corn was high in the third week in June. Hundreds of little pheasants in the big wide cage in the heathery clearance of an old covert, where the stubs of oak and ash were sprouting again, ran to the keeper when he appeared out of his hut with a pail of mixed maize, wheat, and barley. The cage was of wire netting, top and sides. Rats, foxes, stoats, weasels, and other vermin moved round it by night and by day, in vain said the keeper. Only the nightjar sang now, reeling its song, like bubbles blown in water from a hollow grass-stem, in the calm summer evenings when the moths were about. From the gibbet trees most of the bird and animal corpses, shrunken thin and nearly shapeless, had fallen to the ground, where the plants of dog’s mercury were a deeper green, thicker in stem and leaf.

  Phillip saved up to buy a packet of twenty cigarettes for each of his new friends in his preserves. It was already July when he cycled out to give a present to each of the two keepers, a woodman friend, and the man who looked after the livestock at the Home Farm. Dare he call on the Dowager Countess, to thank her also? He dared not. A last visit to his favourite places—the birch tree whence the young woodpeckers had flown, the silent rookery, the spinney where the two robins’ nests were worn shapeless, the quiet swallows’ cups in the cowhouse, the empty paddock where once the Troop had camped, and grass had grown over the charcoal patches of ancient fires.

  As he cycled away, he saw a gipsy sitting in the wood beside the road. He was singing a plaintive song, all by himself, about lavender. Who’ll buy my sweet lavender? Phillip remembered hearing it in the streets, when he was very small, before the elms were cut down in the High Road, before he had gone to his first dame school. It was the time when the ningaring man came with his barrel organ, the Italian man with his little girl, who played the tambourine and danced, for the penny Mother gave him for her.

  He stopped at the bend of the road, and heard the gipsy still singing. There was no other sound in the air, except the buzz of flies shooting past, above the glaring white dusty road.

  Goodbye, he said to himself, goodbye woods, goodbye birds, until another spring.

  Chapter 20

  THE OLD MEN ON THE HILL

  THE midsummer hum of insects—most of them blue-bottles bred in dustbins, and an occasional green Spanish fly from the sheep-fold—was upon the Hill, idly heard by Thomas Turney sitting on his usual seat, with other elderly and retired habitués of the Open Space.

  Most fine mornings, upon that seat, conveniently near to one of the rustic shelters built of herring-bone brickwork in a timber frame, Thomas Turney was to be seen with any number up to three of his regular acquaintances. There was the tall, thin white-whiskered figure of Mr. Newman, in grey frock coat and trousers and either tall grey (called white) hat, or less formal Panama; beside him, Mr. Krebs, a large man with shaven head and pendulous cheeks, jowl, and neck, all as pink and as clean as the carcass of a scrubbed pig. Mr. Krebs was a south German who lived on the other side of the Hill with his English wife. Krebs was a name understood to be the equivalent of Crabbe.

  Since Mr. Turney and Mr. Newman often appeared to be on the point of irritating one another—being different types of men—the presence of Mr. Krebs was helpful to both: he was an excellent listener and sympathiser, as ugly, bare-headed, with his hat on his knee, as he was invariably courteous.

  There was a fourth man of the little group; but he never sat down with the others on this particular seat. In the first place, although intended for four people, the seat could not possibly hold more than any three of them, and then only with considerable restraint—a condition second-nature to thin Mr. Newman and fat Mr. Krebs, but not to Tom Turney. As for Mr. Bolton, the fourth man, he never wanted to sit down; he came up from his house in Charlotte Road for a constitutional, with his fawn-coloured dog. Invariably affable, Mr. Bolton nevertheless was a man apart, a man aware of all men, but attached to only two—His late Majesty the King; and his son.

  Mr. Bolton was always most circumspectly dressed. He wore, in the hottest weather, a high-lapelled tweed jacket, a Gladstone collar with wide starched wings and a satin cravat tie, in which was a gold pin set with pearls and diamonds in the shape of a horse-shoe—gift, of which he was modestly proud, of the Earl of Mersea. Mr. Bolton’s narrow trousers were always freshly sponged and pressed, his boots boned and polished under their protecting spats. Even on the brightest days he arrived in a Covert coat of pale brown melton cloth, with velvet collar, and carrying his gold-topped clouded cane in one hand, and the lead of Bogey, a pug-dog, in the other. Mr. Bolton, bowler-hatted by Lock of St. James Street, wore his grey beard and moustaches in the style of the late King Edward the Seventh, from whom, it was understood, he had received many a confidence.

  More than once Mr. Bolton, in a shadowed background, and with appropriate deference, had bowed the Royal Personage into the London club of which he had been the steward. Mr. Bolton, now retired on pension, lived with a housekeeper and his only son, a clerk in the Bank of England. Beside his pension, Mr. Bolton enjoyed an income of six per centums from his investments—life-savings of presents from the gentlemen of his Club, as well as commissions from purchases of food and wine; the latter, of course, having been snared with Chef and Wine Steward.

  “Good morning, gentlemen, I trust I find you well,” was Mr. Bolton’s invariable greeting, as it was usually Thomas Turney who replied,

  “Good morning, Mr. Bolton, come to join us, eh? I was just saying to Mr. Krebs here, that——,” while he made but the least pretence to shift up on the seat. After the gesture, he sat as before, knees apart, dressed in one of his numerous blue serge suits—he bought new ones every year at the January Sales, and never gave away any of the old ones—Panama-hatted, tie passed through a diamond ring, both hands clasping his oak walking stick, to help distribute his weight.

  “Thank you, gentlemen, but I am about to take my morning stroll upon the grass, to exercise Bogey here.”

  At this point Mr. Bolton would lean down carefully to give Bogey his expected reward for climbing the steep gully—a rub under the collar with his gloved hand.

  “I was saying to Mr. Krebs, Mr. Bolton, that I had a letter this morning from South Africa, from me eldest son Charley, coming home for the Coronation, he says.”

  Mr. Bolton had never travelled; he had always had to work to maintain himself, while looking forward to seeing the world after his retirement—when he had felt himself to be too old. However, he had a fund of travelling memories gained at secondhand during more than twenty years of sharing, at a correct distance, and with perfect discretion, many lives in the famous Voyagers.

  “Yes,” Tom Turney continued, “the news came only this morning, by letter, that m’eldest boy, Charley, is already on his way home from South Africa, with his wife and little family. He’ll be a stranger, we haven’t seen him for twenty years, since Hetty and I went over to pay him a visit in Manitoba. He was trying his hand at farming, shovelling muck all day on to sledges, at the dungstead, he-he-he, he didn’t seem to relish the work very much.”

  Tom Turney’s cat usually accompanied him from his house up the gully to the crest of the Hill, every morning. It was a neuter cat; it had a truculent tail-swishing attitude to the tame dogs it saw during the walk behind its master. Once on the Hill, it contented itself by sitting under the seat, behind the boots of the elderly men. It had a guarded friendship with Mr. Bolton’s pug, and allowed it to share the shade beneath: the one watching movement upon the gravelled path, the other, despite its snivelling nose, regarding the smells which were wafted under the galvanised iron frame. The animals, like the men, knew their places, and kept them.

  “I perceive, or rather I hear,” quavered Mr. Newman, “that the cuckoo in the cemetery is already out of tune. How the days slip by! Why, only yesterday it seems, your grandson Phillip came to show me his cuckoo’s egg. But to my amazement, he told me that it was last year! How time does fly, to be sure.”

&n
bsp; It was peaceful on the Hill during the summer mornings. The few figures to be seen there were quiet: nursemaids in uniform with perambulators; small servant girls with mail-carts; an occasional three-wheeled invalid’s chair pulled or pushed by a hired man; a keeper in the brown livery of the L.C.C. picking up paper and cigarette packets on a steel point; and transferring the litter to a brown canvas side-bag; odd figures taking their constitutionals, among them the lonely figure of Hugh Turney, walking slowly with the aid of two rubber-ended sticks. He never went near the four old men, if he could avoid it.

  A quietness lay upon the Hill, for those others who had managed to get out of the main stream of life and business without undue maiming of body or spirit—and this quietude would remain for another fortnight or so, until the schools broke up, and the green tranquillity of the Hill would be adorned with coloured kites of many shapes and designs, model aircraft powered by elastic threads—some with aluminium frames, others of wood, all monoplanes—and remotely interrupted by the smack of cricket balls and the softer thud of tennis: and among these quieter pursuits of the young, a harder-eyed movement, shrill of voice, leaving its rubbish of rag and torn paper and orange peel cast upon sward and path.

  *

  “Yes, your grandson showed me a very fine specimen of a cuckoo’s egg, as I was saying, Mr. Turney,” went on Mr. Newman. “I fancy it had been laid in the robin’s nest by mistake, for it had the purple shading of one usually found among the tit-larks, or tree pipits.”