The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  HENRY WILLIAMSON

  THE GALE OF THE WORLD

  To Kenneth Allsop

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author is indebted to Mrs. Farrar for leave to print some prose and poems by her son, James Farrar, R.A.F., killed in action in July, 1944. The verse, and some prose pieces, are taken from The Unreturning Spring, published by Chatto & Windus.

  The author gives thanks also to Sir Oswald Mosley, for permission to quote from The Alternative, a work written in 1946 and privately published in 1947; and herein ascribed to a character in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight called Sir Hereward Birkin.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  MOON OF THE HOMELESS GHOSTS

  1 Shep Cot

  2 Brother Barbarians

  3 Laura

  4 Three Letters, One Telegram

  5 Gothic Interlude

  6 Bruderschaft

  7 Ariel Confined

  8 Family Reunion

  9 Meeting with Riversmill

  PART TWO

  LADIES OBSERVED

  10 At Cousin Molly’s

  11 The New Horizon

  12 Flowerless Love

  13 Hallowe’en

  14 Winter On The Moor

  15 Princess Eirēnē

  16 Boy On A Bicycle

  17 A Visit From Rosalie

  PART THREE

  SUMMER IN ANOTHER LAND

  18 Osgood Nilsson Investigates

  19 From The Vasty Deep

  20 To The West

  21 Enter Peregrine

  22 The Sun In Virgo

  PART FOUR

  ST. ELMO’S FIRE

  23 Cloven Hoof

  24 ‘The Smoke Of My Resolution’

  25 Watershed

  L’ENVOI

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  MOON OF THE HOMELESS GHOSTS

  ‘We are all living under the harrow.’

  Sir Winston Churchill

  to H.R.H. The Duke of Windsor,

  May, 1946

  Chapter 1

  SHEP COT

  The tides which flow and lapse in the Bristol Channel are often distained by the freshets of many streams falling through wooded coombes below the moor. This tableland, covered by low, wind-bullied plants of heather, furze, and whortleberry is dissolved by clouds when the south-west gales are blowing. It is a sea country. Westward lies the Atlantic, open to far Labrador.

  The flow of the streams rushing down from the moor is short. The longest is the river Lyn, which has two wide-gathering arms —the East Lyn and the West Lyn—embracing roughly a hundred square miles of catchment area. There are three score tributary streams in the area, or waters as moormen speak of them. These waters start as runners from the upland bogs, which are of peat, or turf, overlying rock.

  The highest area of Exmoor is called the Forest. Here the turf, which is brown to black, lies many feet deep, veritable graveyard of millenia of rooted plants; but never a tree. The Forest is one vast sponge. Annually sixty inches of rain fall there.

  Throughout long summer days the Forest yields its tribute waves to both Severn Sea on the north and English Channel on the south coast of England, ‘the precious stone set in a silver sea’ of Shakespeare; and, at the time of the opening of this tale, ‘a disused aircraft-carrier lying off the continent of Asia’, in the words of a once German Ambassador about to be hanged by the neck, with Field-Marshals and others who had held high office in a defeated country.

  *

  The high moor, the Forest, is no place for husbandry. In the 19th century a rich Worcestershire ironmaster had the idea of converting Exmoor into an arable estate. He planted belts of Scots fir and beech to shield his crops-to-be from the prevailing south-west winds. He built farmhouses and thus attracted Scots highlanders who could endure life upon the incult moor … until it should become, in the eye of the new squire, a fertile region of waving corn, mangolds and roots for winter keep, and hay for fodder to see through the horned stock during the dark months of late autumn and winter. The squire also mined for iron—the successful ironmaster did this, where there was no coal; and where the lanes were steep to the little ports of the Severn Sea.

  *

  Today the beech hedges stand along the verges of motor roads; nearly all the pines are dead, and remote cottages derelict. Heather, ling and rush have returned upon thousands of acres of moorland once ploughed and cultivated; where seldom a corn crop ripened. Arab stallions let run among the herds of shaggy, semi-wild ponies improved the breed but not the weather. As for the iron-mines, they had no commercial value, costs of haulage alone were prohibitive. The would-be squire lost a fortune, made near the Welsh marches, in a cloud-capped dream; for he was no Victorian Prospero. Inevitably the moor returned to Ariel.

  The topmost hills of the Forest, with its draving wet winds, are no place for either tree or man. There is no mother-earth, no meat soil, no Demētēr to bring forth food for man; but her daughter Persĕphŏne is known to wander there, for in her footsteps spring the flowers of a sparse wilderness, the white blossoms of cotton grass, wind-shaken among mosses and seed-tufts of sedge grass empurpled under summer clouds smouldering in an Atlantic sunset.

  And when the sun had gone beyond the rim of the ocean, there comes upon the solitary writer, who has come to live in a long-disused shepherd’s cot below The Chains, a sense of great loneliness … until Night yields its secrets, with planets in glow among the starry constellations—immortal friends guiding manners upon the waste spaces of the sea: steady Polaris, around which the universe appears to turn; Andromeda, more beautiful than the Nāĭdes, nymphs of running water; Cygnus the swan, lying wing-spread on its side to the east; Bootës the waggoner, to whom slide those silent meteors of the summer night, by their dazed and wan fires of estrangement seeking lost love; Ursa major and Ursa minor, Big Bear and Little Bear; while Antares, most passionate of summer stars, blushes above the southern horizon.

  And the summer dawn coming up beyond the beacon of high Dunkery brings the curlews into air, to fly in circles above their young walking among the bedraggled white blooms of the cotton grass, their parents crying warning that the carrion crow is searching, searching; a cry to hide among the clumps of sedge-grass, to quit the bare patches of peat until rapine blackness has flapped away.

  Wild deer live in the wooded coombes below. At night they travel to farmlands below the moors, to feed on the crops grown by farmers. They are seldom seen by day; but occasionally a stag is perceived, diminutive antler’d, momentarily against the sky as it crosses the horizon of the Forest. Then the moving speck is gone; minutes pass; a cry from the onlookers, far below, as a smaller speck followed by another, another, another in line astern, goes over the horizon. These are the stag-hounds running mute on the line of the deer, following scent from slot-marks in the peat, and brushed upon the leaves of sedge.

  Hounds and quarry have been known to travel sixty miles from the stag’s day-time harbour to where the quarry stands at bay in water, its last refuge.

  The stag-hunting season begins in August. By the beginning of October, as rutting time approaches, it is ending.

  *

  One early October morning, when hounds were kennel’d, no longer on a hunting diet of cooked horse-flesh or offal (with oatmeal baked in square tins) but on meal only—the tiny figures of two riders appeared on the skyline of The Chains. As they descended the steep northern slope, and came near to the common below, it could be seen that one was an elderly man on a hunter, breeched and jacket’d but wearing a pre-1914 velour hat at a jaunty angle; while his companion was a young girl o
n a cob. She wore blue jeans and jersey, while her long dark hair was left to fall about her shoulders. Following the cob was a white goat.

  “Nobody makes good cyder in the farmhouses nowadays, Miranda. At best it was a wry business. The trees gone to canker and lichen growing on unpruned branches. Unwashed hogsheads turned the juices to acid, otherwise vinegar, thus giving some substance to the local name of ‘tanglilegs’. One wasn’t so much tipsy as full of acid. But everything’s changed since the war. Even painting’s gone to hell. Look at those layabouts in Chelsea—their work’s as formless as their lives. The war’s got a lot to answer for. However, it’s saved the red deer from extinction, since thumping farm-profits have turned many tenant farmers to owner-occupiers. And since deer, both stag and hind, are crop-thieves, damaging more than they eat, hunting flourishes. Without hunting, they’d be poached to death, maimed by shot-guns, their wounds a fester of maggots. The Hunt Committee is the deers’ patron. That’s why the deer have lived here since before William Rufus. There’s the shep cot! See it?”

  The descent from The Chains was fairly steep. “Steady, gel!” he said to his mare.

  Frederick Riversmill, the painter, had a great store of country lore, like most people with the seeing eye and sense of form. “I’ve seen Ernest Bawdon the huntsman galloping down here, all his mounts had cat-feet. Go easy, now. It’s a bit boggy below, source of the West Lyn, so walk your cob.”

  They dismounted before a small building, which Riversmill had come to view. “What d’you think of it for a pied-à-terre, to keep canvases and painting clobber? Good place for picnics, too, during our swampy summers. One of half-a-dozen similar shepherds’ cots built by John Knight during the last century. Like Hitler in Russia, he was defeated by General Winter. Almost as bad are the tempests that break upon this high ground. Ever seen a thunderstorm on The Chains? One lightning bolt split the Hoar Oak in the valley over there.” He pointed with his riding whip. “Struck it a stunning blow one August morning.”

  “General Zeus, pourer of rains, hurler of thunderbolts,” said Miranda. “The Greeks couldn’t have known that it’s the intense heat of a lightning flash which splits the trunk of a tree.”

  “Golly, is that what they teach you at school?”

  “The sap boils, and steam bursts the trunk.”

  “Well I’m damned. It would never have occurred to me.”

  A remarkable kid, thought the painter. Molly Bucentaur had certainly thrown a good filly in Miranda. If she was any criterion, a dam’ fine generation was on the way, provided they kept their heads and didn’t fling themselves to the devil.

  “I wonder if they have the key in the farmhouse over there. This place is in better shape than I’d imagined.”

  The cot had a mason’d wall of stone. Riversmill took a spare shoe from its leather case attached to a saddle ring, and using it for hammer struck a projecting lump of mortar. It was soft.

  While he was doing this, a little dog was standing still, watching him from a distance of about ten yards. It took no notice of the goat, which wore a crimson collar around its neck.

  “The builder skimped his job, Miranda. He should have used Welsh lime, brought to the kiln at Lynmouth from the pebble ridge near Barry. That makes the hardest mortar, the Normans knew that. They were craftsmen. Their walls will be dry, their cathedrals still be standing when the jerry-built farmhouses and cottages of Ironmaster Knight are forgotten.”

  “What about Westminster Abbey? The stone is wasting away.”

  “They didn’t foresee the Industrial revolution, with its filthy acid smoke, and later carbon monoxide and diesel fumes.”

  “Is it true there is oil under the moor?”

  “What! Oil under Exmoor! Oil rigs and new concrete roads! If the Americans hear of it, they’ll be on to it like a shot. We’ve already lost enough to them in the war, by God!”

  He looked through the window. Table with paper, bottle of ink, pens, books. Pile of small, slim magazines with yellow covers. “‘The New Horizon’,” he said. “That’s Wallington Christie’s quarterly. Someone’s forestalled us, Miranda! Let’s go to the farmhouse yonder and find out who it is.”

  The dog followed them at a distance. It stopped a dozen yards from the house, unmoving spectator of Riversmill knocking at the door. “Is that your dog?” he asked, of the farm-wife.

  “He belong to Aaron Kedd down the coombe, zur. The gennulman what has rented the cot took a vancy to the little dog, who be waiting for’n to return.”

  “What’s his name, d’you know?”

  “He gived me his address, on a card with printing on it. I’ll fetch’n, zur.”

  “‘Barbarian Club’,” read Riversmill. Then, “Good God, it’s ‘the Norfolk Hero’, Phillip Maddison!”

  “Who wrote ‘The Water Wanderer’?”

  “That’s the chap, Miranda.”

  “But why ‘the Norfolk Hero’?”

  “‘Buster’ Cloudesley’s name for Maddison, after he was shot by commandos on his own meadows. They were there without notice, doing a practice assault, with live ammunition. When ‘Buster’ went to apologise to him in hospital, Maddison apologised to ‘Buster’, saying he had forgotten he was no longer on the Western Front, where no one in khaki ever shot at him or his men.”

  The girl laughed. “It’s like in a play by Oscar Wilde!”

  Riversmill asked the farm-wife when he was coming back.

  “He only said he had to go up to help a friend what was in trouble.”

  During these exchanges the dog had remained still, listening to what was being said. The goat went to inspect it in the friendly manner of one who had been the companion of children since kidhood. The dog recognised this, and gave a wag of its tail.

  “That dog’s intelligent,” remarked Riversmill, watching the girl stroking it. “Foxhound in’m somewhere.”

  “That’s right, zur. His mother came from the varxdog kennels, his father was Nip, the hunter terrier.”

  “Get’s his brain from his dam. Well, we must be going,” and touching brim of his ancient hat, Riversmill mounted the hunter and the two rode away, followed by the goat.

  Chapter 2

  BROTHER BARBARIANS

  Taking long strides, forcing himself against fatigue to pass other figures in the shabby, half-starved London masses moving almost automatically on wide pavements to bus-stop and underground station, Phillip missed the turning and found himself in a narrow passage between Piccadilly and Regent Street. He saw the name-plate on the wall with a shock: Man-in-Moon Street: he had come too far: and hastening down the short passage, turned west and soon recognised where he was by the bombed church on the south side of Piccadilly and the gap before him where the V1 rocket, fired from Holland, had fallen. Over the ruins hung the wraith of the moon in full shadow of the earth. He hurried up another lane in gathering darkness, lit by one solitary street-lamp, and there was the dugout entrance to the Swallow Dive. Down steps of frayed linoleum, porter sorting envelopes.

  “Any message for me?”

  “None that I know of. I’ve only just come on duty, sir.”

  “Have you seen Sir Piers Tofield recently?”

  “I have,” replied the porter, “very much so.”

  “Was he all right?”

  “In a manner of speaking, in that he’s not dead, so far as I know.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Did you notice any glass in the gutter when you came in? Anyway, the police took most of it away as evidence. And,” he added, “the bold, bad bart’s Aston-Martin.”

  “Did he have an accident?”

  The porter put down the letters, and looked at Phillip. “You’re a friend of Sir Piers, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know his little ways,” and the sorting of letters was resumed.

  “Do tell me what happened.”

  “It’s none of my business, but between ourselves, your friend was asked to leave this club last night, and I understoo
d the lady with him insisted on takin’ ’im home, and Sir Piers didn’t want to go, so to settle the argument, he fired a burst into the engine. And up come the police, and round to Vine Street went Sir Piers and the lady. Haven’t you seen the evening paper?”

  “I’ve only just come up from Devon.”

  “You might find something about it in here.”

  Banner-line across page one,

  LAST PLEAS AT NUREMBERG

  He turned pages, and found

  ‘BANDIT’ BARONET FREED ON BAIL

  “He won’t come here tonight,” said the porter. “My orders are not to let ’im in, tommy gun or no tommy gun. Not after last night. Sorry, sir,” as Phillip gave him half-a-crown before hurrying away up the steps. He must eat; nothing since breakfast.

  Food was short, rationing of Utility clothes still in force, London partly in ruins. Sitting at the dinner table of the Barbarian Club he heard with deepening aloofness what the others were saying. Why all this farce of a trial of war criminals? Why hadn’t they been shot out of hand, or strung up as the Russians had done? He shut himself away with the paper, reading a report of the last day of the Trial.

  Row of white-helmeted military police behind them, defence counsel a solid phalanx in front, defendants in two rows, pale under Kleig lights, smartly groomed, uniforms specially brushed and pressed.Reichsmarschal Göring, two stone lighter after six months in prison, called on to speak first by Lord Justice Lawrence.

  Göring’s voice quiet, “Only motive behind actions ardent love for his people and its fortunes, freedom and life.” Complained the prosecution accepted as truth every statement supporting indictment, rejecting as perjury all evidence refuting it. “One day history will justify that we never wanted war. What Germany did in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Greece bears no comparison with what occupying powers are doing in Germany now—dismantling industry, confiscating money of millions, interfering with the people’s freedom.”