The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  The parson surprised that I asked that the nails be left in. Christ on the cross, nailed by Pharisean Establishment. Love thy enemy in the desert, and your tribe is soon extinct. Ring out the old, ring in the new, for God fulfils Himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Hitler burned at his own stake. I must begin my novel series, or I’ll die.

  “Thank you. Please send the bill to me. Here is my address.”

  Father, I am sorry, truly I am. Is there revelation after death? If so, you will know all things, Father—

  He felt to be at one with his father.

  But not with Mother. And yet Mother was in spirit like himself—

  *

  He could not sleep. Elizabeth had said that as electricity was rationed, he must not switch on the light in his bedroom. He sat up in bed and wrote by his flash-light torch.

  In my young childhood my mother, one night, came, dressed for going out, into my dark bedroom. “I am going away, Father does not want me any more, little son.” I lay still. When she had gone I felt a sort of invisible darkness come upon me. I lay there without any feeling. When Mother came back, and knelt by the bed and asked me if I wanted to kiss her I said, “No thank you”. I did not kiss her, nor do I remember ever kissing her again. I avoided all her attempts to kiss me. When she was dying of cancer I kissed her on the brow, without emotion. After her burial I prayed to go down into the grave with her. At the same time I silently shouted within myself that she leave me alone. And in times of stress my thoughts of her have been impatient: that she was so afraid of father, that she extended his nervousness: the result being that I grew up in fear of him, and a coward.

  In the morning Phillip thought to present himself to his godmother, Aunt Victoria. He asked Elizabeth for her address.

  “Don’t blame me if you get a cold shoulder. Have you forgotten that she looks on you as the black sheep of the family?”

  One of the older, Victorian houses among pines. Garden a wilderness. Weedy carriage sweep, overgrown rhododendrons, door green with dusty algae. The bell pull. A jangle below. Waiting. Windows barely visible through branches of laurel. Then a curtain corner moved, glimpse of white face, curtain dropping back.

  When there was no further movement he thought to write a note and drop it through the letter-box. Was seeking paper when a quiet voice said, “The door is screwed up, will you come round to the kitchen door, by the lower gate?”

  He found the way to a pale and rather beautiful ghost, dignified and thin, composed. He bowed to the ghost, who responded with the least inclination of the head, and led the way to what had been, in the old days, the housekeeper’s room.

  “Well, Phillip, this is a surprise.”

  “I could not leave without calling to pay my respects, Aunt Victoria. I’ve never forgotten the book you gave me when I was a boy, ‘Our Bird Friends’, by Richard Kearton. It changed my life.”

  “Oh,” she said; and after a pause, “I did not feel equal to going to the funeral of my brother Dickie.”

  “I—I feel I should have come to offer escort, Aunt Viccy.”

  At the mention of her familiar name she smiled wanly. “We were such a happy family when we were young, you know. Your father was so kind to Dora and Effie and me, the younger ones. It was a jolly family, you must know. At least, when we were all together at Fawley.” She sighed. “You should jolly well have stuck it out there, you know, when your Uncle Hilary bought back the land, Phillip! Hilary looked upon you as the heir.” She looked at him steadily, “What is it in you, Phillip, that made you always so perverse, so ‘agin’ what ordinary decent people regard as the right thing?” She shook her head, and sighed. “Dora says you were the unhappiest small boy she ever knew, but what was it in you that got up against your father?”

  “I think we were all just a little afraid of him. He was usually —well—irritable, and liable to be angry.”

  “It was the lies, Phillip that upset him. He could never rely on Hetty’s word. She used to—what is the word—well, prevaricate. And you seldom told the truth to him, did you, Phillip? Come now, old chap, speak like a man!”

  “I was a thief, a liar, a coward, and a mischief-maker on all planes, Aunt Viccy. Also I was, as you said just now, usually very unhappy.”

  “But that surely does not explain everything? Many of us have been unhappy at times, and had our cross to bear, but we did not, well, we did not behave oddly on that account. You were always what your father called the wild boy, you know, and caused him much grief and unhappiness. Punishment did not seem to alter you in any way.”

  “I suppose I was what he called a ‘throw-back’. But the point is that the book you gave me helped enormously, in that I came to love the countryside, and particularly wild birds. They—they were almost my only love.”

  “I must say I enjoy your country books, you are certainly at your best there, as a writer. But your Donkin novels I found dull and dreary. You should not try to write novels, you know. It is not your line. Hilary, Dora and Dickie are all agreed about that. But why, oh why, did you put in that Donkin’s grandfather died of drink? Surely that was muckraking, Phillip?”

  “Well, you know, some people do take to drink. A wrong marriage—let me see now—how can I say it—well, a square peg in a round hole—”

  God in heaven, what am I saying, I’m back in the Land of Victorian clichés.

  “But my parents were ideally happy, Phillip, at least when we were young! It was the trouble with the land, you know, and the depression of the ’eighties in farming, and the loss of tenantry. Papa had to forego rents, even then, the farmers had to give up. So mortgages had to be arranged. My father was by no means alone, you know; many other landowners were forced to sell their properties about that time. And my father’s family had held their land for more than five centuries. And yet, when Hilary bought a considerable part of it back, you virtually refused it from Hilary. Why, why, why?”

  “I suppose because I’m a throwback, Aunt Viccy.”

  “It comes from your mother, Phillip! I am sorry, but it is the truth. It was a case of mixed blood. The Jews, you know, have been the cause of the ruin of our country. Not that I hold with Hitler, he was an Austrian upstart, and took advantage of the defeat of Germany to impose his own evil will upon dissident elements, in alliance with the Catholics and Freemasons! Of course he used both on the way up, then turned against them when he had achieved what he set out to do. And what caused him to be a wild man, Phillip? Shall I tell you? It was his Jewish blood!” Leaning forward in her chair she said earnestly, looking almost with appeal into his face, “Once a Jew, always a Jew! The leopard cannot change its spots, remember.” Then she said, “Well, now tell me something cheerful about yourself, Phillip. Come on, show a leg, as Hilary would say!”

  He thought to lie back in the chair, hold up a leg, and waggle it, but all he did was to say, “I don’t want to say anything to hurt your feelings, Aunt Viccy.”

  “I see you have begun to learn your lesson, Phillip. Other people’s feelings are as important as one’s own.”

  Well, well, well! he thought, feeling Tim’s face upon his own. “Well, Aunt Viccy, I have tried to know my own defects.”

  “That is something, Phillip,” she said earnestly.

  “My sort is really alone. And my needs are simple. I’ve got a shepherd’s cot on Exmoor, and shall earn my own living by writing, as I did in my cottage at Malandine after the first war. Well, I am so glad I dared to call on you.” He got up and kissed her on the cheek, summoning resolution against upwelling emotion to say, “I am taking Father’s ashes to scatter on the the Chains of Exmoor, he too was a wild boy locked up in duty, he was happiest alone in wild places.”

  *

  There was just time to call at the bank, to see a copy of his father’s will made during his illness. A local branch, had, according to Elizabeth, been appointed executor and trustee.

  St. Martin’s Little Summer appeared to be the time for the migra
tion of souls in that town of the near-spent and the aged: for in the room marked Trustee Department several people were waiting as in a dentist’s ante-room, but without bestrewn and dated copies of Punch, diminutive Strand Magazine, and Tatler. A man, apparently a bank official, in his late ’twenties, and wearing a suit appropriately dark, was standing in one corner, explaining something to a customer. When Phillip’s turn came the official, before attending to someone else, gave him a copy of the will to read, together with some papers which related to money due to him from a trust made by his mother, the income of which capital sum having gone to his father for life, was now to be divided among her three children.

  The will was brief and clear. It had been signed and witness’d three weeks previously. Cottage and all its contents, together with all moneys to Mavis Elizabeth Maddison. Nothing for his ‘little friend’ Myra. Having read the two-page document, Phillip signed the trust papers, to save time. The official was standing near him, but when some minutes later he gave the papers to the official he was told that the signatures were not valid.

  “You signed your name without being witness’d. You must sign again.”

  “I thought that as you were in the room—”

  “I can’t see to everyone at once. You’ll have to write your signature again. No, not now, I am called to the telephone.”

  When the official returned he said, “Your sister, Miss Maddison, has just telephoned to enquire if you have seen a copy of your father’s will. Now, if you will sign your name again, I shall be able to act in the capacity of witness.”

  When this was done Phillip said, “I hope I was not out of order in asking to see the will?”

  “You have, I understand, seen a typescript copy. If you wish to see the will, you should follow the procedure laid down by my department, and apply through your solicitor for a certified copy. The alternative is to wait until the will is proved, when a copy will be available at Somerset House in London. Good afternoon.”

  Poor young clerk. Your hopeful flesh battered by the words, words, words of old flesh. Young flesh reserved from the services, denied freedom from civilian servitude. Better the chop than the slow mortification of an office saturated by the fears and anxieties of the living dead. Laura and himself. Laura crying, I must be free—from the power of the past: the dead. Where can I go to be saved. Where can I die, and my body never seen again? The sea’s priestlike ablution—the salt, estranging sea—the deep, the green, the serpent-haunted sea.

  That night when he saw Laura in her room in Old Compton Street he asked her if she would return with him to Exmoor.

  “What now, Phillip? I’m afraid I can’t, I must look after Beth, my friend who is in trouble. I’m sorry. And I must finish my novel before I come to you. I’ll write to you. You will write to me, won’t you? And when I come down to ‘Buster’s’ place, you will be near, and we shall see each other, won’t we? I am with you, always.”

  Chapter 9

  MEETING WITH RIVERSMILL

  I wish I had kept my Norton motor-bicycle, my ‘Brooklands Road Special’ model, belt-driven with Phillipson automatic expanding pulley. Why did I let cousin Arthur swindle me out of it, he was my best friend in those days after the old war. God, it’s a quarter of a century ago that I and my lovely bike bounded up this narrow road for the first time, up and up to the Great Plain, with its barrows and beech hangers, grey grass and air of lonely space and almost primeval wildness. My hair was black in those days, I returned so hopefully to the West Country in 1919, just after the war. Then, two years later, Valerian Cottage with Julian Warbeck. What books would we write, what fame seek together! But Julian wrote his books, as they said in the pub, with a pint pot; ergo, Julian arrogant and quarrelsome. That marvellous summer of 1921! The footprints from the sea, I followed them with my head held low, playing a game, and they led across the sands to my first sight of Barley sitting beside her mother, their backs to a rock above the tide-line.

  Long brassy summer of 1921, no rain falling between April and September. On the rough grazing above Valhalla maggot-loosened skins of mad sheep flapping as their feet rattled on hot shale scree, always moving on but never escaping the foetid buzz of blowflies. Flies were merciful on the summer battlefields. The Yorkshireman with arm blown off in wide no-man’s land between Croiselles and Bullecount in the Hindenburg Line. Wound cleaned of suppurating flesh by maggots. He lifting arm-stump above elbow void of proud flesh, happy to be back, grateful for ‘them fookin maggots’. I must write, write, write, for the night cometh.

  Shall I turn south for Exeter, and the Channel Coast? Malandine Village and Barley’s grave? How shall I my true love know, from another one, save in words, words, words? Only by words shall I see myself again beside her, transformed, sharing all day the unnumbered smile of ocean with Aeschylus, while we walked home above the wine-dark evening sea of Homer.

  Or turn north to Lynmouth, and Aunt Theodora in her cottage beside the rushing Lyn? How old is she now—well over seventy. Perhaps she won’t want to see me, she turned against the Germans —her mother’s people—in the war. And against me too, according to Elizabeth. She knows about your illegitimate son, by that girl. So did Father. That’s why he left you out of his will! Still, I mustn’t let that stop me doing my duty. I’ll go by Minehead and Porlock and stay only a couple of minutes.

  True love is like sunlight; it casts no shadow on the soul. The feeling between Laura and me is not love, it comes from the blue halls of Dis. Are we ‘dead souls’ seeking resurrection through the non-existing inner peace of the other? You say you have never been at ease with any man, Laura; nor have I with any woman save Barley. No, not really with Melissa. What was it that stopped me? Made all feeling blank? She offering her natural love, revealing the compassion of her body, all gentleness—and courage. For she was virgin. Yet I was never ‘withdrawn’ from Lucy. Because I did not love Lucy? I was sealed off entirely from Lucy, my selfish little ego practically raped her on the marriage night. My personality was decayed—scattered—in dark fragments. Is it the same with Laura? A woman corroded by fear, or despair, crying save me, save me, from fear of loneliness. Yet who am I to talk? Am I a disintegrating old man needing a young woman, almost any young woman who is comely—to sacrifice on my altar of fear?

  If personality—essence—is reality, then I am but an apparition from the Western Front, which was in being for millions of other youths long before August 1914. For we were the heirs of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ minds; our bodies purged their sins on the battlefield. We that were left grew old, for age to weary and the years to condemn, and at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, no-one to remember them.

  And yet—in a way, yes—I enjoyed the war, by and large. For the war did not maim me, it released me. For it was the Greater Love War!

  Down the hill: mind the sharp bend to the left: slow down to fifty: there on the right lies bleak Stonehenge. If only I was on my Norton, lying along the tank, arms spread to wide handle-bars, moulding my body to the breast-like swellings of these hills, bracing myself to accept the sudden plunging hollows lying all Danäe to the stars. God, I had hope in those early days after the war!

  The Great Plain like the Somme country: eroded landsherds —lychetts—lanchetts where flints had fallen from chalk-breaks in the turf acidulated by the centuries’ rains. John Masefield’s The Old Front Line one of the great books of the 1916 Big Push. Machine gun nests on the landsherds of those wider downs above the Somme, Moonrakers and Back-to-Fores—Wiltshire Regiment and Dorsets—mucking the aerated wheat-fields of Piccardy. Six-foot subsoiling, all free—Somme cornlands in heart for a century, the composted lost heart of England. O my friends, come home, come home!—be with me, Baldwin and ‘Grannie’ Henshaw, ‘Spectre’ West and ‘the boy General’—Colonel Kingsman and the Iron Colonel—Lance-Corporal Hitler shepherding his sixteen-year students, arm-in-arm across the Menin road and through Sanctuary Wood, to be shot down in stumbling masses. Zandevoorde and the Brown
Wood Line, and Cranmere yelling Up ve old Blood’ounds. Jesu Christus, help me with your compassion to write my Greater Love War!

  Onwards to the West, by Mere and Wincanton, Langport and Taunton, turn north down the valley under the Quantocks for Dunster with its brown-stone castle on a motte, or hill; left-handed to Minehead and the road winding through coastal meadows to Porlock. Here, petrol and oil for the Eagle, beer for the driver. Now I’m for it! Porlock hill and its two steep bends, the second said to be one in four, but more like one in three. Before the first turn, change to bottom gear. This turn is right-handed, it must be charged, one is well away up: now for the left-handed bend, looming steep as the wall of a house. The Silver Eagle takes it in its flight! And on and up and up, second gear now, third—faster—faster—change to top gear, passing the thousand-foot contour to see an embered sun, and the charred ruins of sulky nimbus strewing the world’s rim upon the Atlantic. The moon is over my shoulder, the hosts of heaven are there to greet me! Wonderful how much better an engine runs when the driver has had a pint!

  Mechanical man and metal eagle flying along through heather and furze, seeing twinkling lights along the Welsh coast across the Severn Sea. The sun’s disgust mouldering to little pieces of dying ember. We are all more or less in ruin. Poor old Eagle, the springing isn’t what it was, shackle-bolts worn, shimmer in the steering: and suddenly they were descending from the moor, and there was the Blue Ball Inn before them. It’s a poor heart that never rejoices, battle cry of Julian Warbeck, armed with a pewter pint-pot! That voice, out of the past.

  Phillip longed to see old Julian. And having toasted the imagined arrogant face he went into Devon, round and about the snaking road until, abruptly, there was Lynmouth far down below. Now he was down, and turning right over the bridge. I haven’t seen Aunt Dora since before the war. Ionian Cottage, named after her beloved Greece visited during Edwardian days. It was somewhere beside the river. Can this be it? A wilderness garden, astrew with waste paper blossoms of dead summer days? Unpainted door and window frames, curtains seeming fixed behind dull bubbled glass panes. Sad. He tried to knock, the knocker resisted. It was set in rust. He tapped. Nothing. Wrenched free knocker, it banged unexpectedly loud and hollow. Had she gone away, died? Elizabeth would have told him. Rapped with his knuckles. Knelt to peer through letter box. A globe of light approaching, oil lamp borne by a ghost. A voice, weak as the pith of a reed saying,