The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  “It required only two such sections of displaced rock to arrive together under the bridge to crack the masoned structure, which then gave way, releasing a secondary volume of water which carried with it sufficient force to destroy walls of some of the boarding houses and cottages lining the street below.”

  “Then you’d say that the chief factors causing the disaster are:– (a) the steep descent of gorge; (b) the dislocation of rocks and boulders already part of the river-bed, which got wedged under the bridge and caused a battering-ram effect of rock and water together?”

  Hallucination passed. He remembered with stony despair where and what he was. He recognized the questioner as ‘the man from the paper of the times’.

  He said to the sergeant of police, “My sister and a friend are marooned in a cottage about sixty yards down the street. There is an eddy or backflow coming up the street, caused by backpressure of the main flood in front of us. Will you help me to get down a canoe, please?”

  “Afraid not, sir. You’d never make it. There are trees under the white water down there, and great boulders, even motorcars.”

  “I must get across to my sister.”

  “Sorry, sir. But I’d like to say this: the flood is receding, and those houses which are damaged are likely to stand up. Your ladies are on the upper floor, where they’ll be safe. May I enquire your name, sir?”

  “Maddison.”

  “Captain Phillip Maddison? Then this gentleman of the press has some good news for you. Your son Peter is safe, together with his mother and the other children, and staying in the Lynton house of Mr. Osgood Nilsson, whom I think you know.”

  “That’s right,” said the reporter. “Mr. Nilsson managed to get to the camping site in good time, to tow out your caravan, with others, from Green Meadow, before the main force of the flood arrived there.”

  “That is correct,” said the police sergeant. “This gentleman took up your son, Peter I think he is called, with a chum of his to the house, earlier this evening. Catch him! He’s all-in. Let him down gently. Here, put him on my cloak. He’s wet through poor sod. Come from off the moor, got across Barbrook bridge with a young woman just before it gave way.”

  “Who was the girl?” persisted the reporter.

  “Secretary to Lord Cloudesley, a Miss Laura Wissilcraft.”

  “Funny name. Is it her own?”

  “So far as we know. She’s been with his Lordship some time. She brought down her glider on The Chains. Captain Maddison went up apparently to make a beacon to guide both gliders down. Only one arrived.”

  “Does anyone else know this? Any other reporter, I mean?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “There will be a fiver for you, old boy. I’ll get on the blower to Fleet Street! See you later!”

  *

  Phillip was wondering why the two men were speaking in dialect.

  “All they poor souls to Shelley’s cottage, them’ dade, I reckon.”

  “Aye, them’ all dade, surenuff.”

  “This one be a visitor, I reckon.”

  “Noomye, ’tes the gennulmun what lives by isself in thaccy shep cot up to Vuzzle.”

  “He with thaccy li’l ole dog of Aaron Kedd’s?”

  “Aye.”

  A white and shimmering radiance broke in the sky. Above it, in a circle, moved a helicopter, showing a small red light.

  “What be thaccy?”

  “Tes a light, I reckon.”

  “Mebbe a rocket.”

  “Tidden no rocket, else us’d zin’n goin’ up, like.”

  “Aye. Tidden no maroon vor th’ live-boat, else us’d’v heard’n.”

  “Tidden no maroon, midear, no live-boat cud get past they rockses scat abroad when the Rannish tower went.”

  “Aye. Th’ watter be up to th’ Risin’ Zin, they’m tellin’. My Gor, ’tes a loss’.”

  The solitary parachute flare wavered as it sank slowly down.

  The Germans were across the Ancre Valley. Why had all his men left him?

  Piers kneeling beside him. Had he been hit? He heard his own voice saying, from a rent in an immense darkness of fear, “Don’t leave me!”

  “You’re all right now Phil,” said the voice of Piers.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Oh, some time. Now just relax, we’ve sent for transport.”

  Piers put a rolled coat under his head.

  *

  Phillip awakened to a sense of dolour which became ease and well-being when Lucy came in to tell him the good news that both his sister and Melissa seemed to be none the worse for the night’s ordeal.

  “In fact, my dear, I think it’s done Elizabeth a world of good. I’ve never seen her quite like this before. Melissa said she behaved calmly after the first shock, and able to cope cheerfully with the little dogs, who slept in her bedroom, afraid of the lightning and thunder, all together in a large clothes basket.”

  “What, Aunt Mavis and the dogs?”, cried Jonathan.

  “No, the little dogs, darling,” said Roz, coming in, “Anyway, I wouldn’t mind sleeping with them. Where’s Bodger, Dad?”

  Lucy said, “Well, he was ill, wasn’t he?”

  “Mum,” said Peter, downstairs. “What will Dad say when he learns about his little house—”

  Peter was sad for his father; but happy for his new friend, the boy whose parents had survived the flood.

  Later in the morning they walked down Mars Hill to Lynmouth, and picked their way over and through obstacles to the cottage. Elizabeth and Melissa had cleared the kitchen and the sitting room of most of the debris and mud. Phillip went to his sister and kissed her on both cheeks. She felt his tears on her cheek.

  “There now,” said Elizabeth, “don’t worry.”

  Later she said, when they were alone, “I did mean to look after Dads, you know. Only I couldn’t get two nurses, it was a terrible time. I did try.”

  “It was just after the war, dear sister, and everyone young was with the Forces. And Bournemouth must have had more elderly invalids than any other place in England.”

  “You can come and live here, if you want to, when the place is rebuilt. I hear that a Fund has been started, to help everyone.”

  “Thank you, my dear.”

  “You know your little cot is gone, don’t you?”

  “I thought it might.”

  “You don’t seem very worried.”

  “I’m not. I shouldn’t have needed all my notes, anyway. They were preliminary clearance, only. They were emotion recollected without tranquillity. May I look upstairs?”

  “Of course! It’s your house for as long as you like.”

  Melissa was looking down at the wreckage which spread away in all directions as far as could be seen. She took his hand. “Elizabeth was thinking of you, so often. I told her what happened at the cricket match, and do you know what she said? ‘It isn’t fair!’ You see, while we were all on the beach here, with Lucy and the children, Lucy told her a lot about you, and Elizabeth’s eyes were opened.”

  “I think I needed some shock before things could come into adjustment.”

  “The angels are trying all the time, Phillip.”

  Elizabeth called up the stairs, “Come down and have some coffee. Mr. Mornington has just called.”

  He had come down Mars Hill to tell Phillip that Miss Laura had gone to hospital; and that neither Lord Cloudesley nor the Brig had returned to The Eyrie.

  “No news of their whereabouts has been reported by either police or coastguards. I hope you won’t mind if I accompany you on the beach, sir?”

  “You are one of my best friends, Mornington.”

  It was possible to cross over a light Bailey bridge erected by the sappers below the wreckage of the West Lyn Bridge. Great beech trees lay upon boulders and stones which spread fanwise from the changed course of the two rivers: trunks, branches, lesser branches even twigs—all white. Bark scaled in the frantic trituration of racing sand, grit, pebbles, st
ones, boulders; the frantic grind of rocks whirled, bashing and rebashing, dragging, scraping, paring, shredding. A wide new estuary of grey stone had arisen above the old narrow watercourse; a levelled valley of bricks and broken walls upon which rested a vast litter of planks, doors, rafters, smashed furniture, beams and joists—enough to build half the beacons of the West Country, thought Phillip. Pyres for the dead—speckles of fire arising on hill beyond hill across the West Country to far Cranborne Chace, under starlight!

  Motorcars lay upon the desert of grey stones, some half buried. Ancient little Austin Sevens and cumbrous taxicabs of the ’twenties, wide wings crumpled and compressed, abraded of all rust and paint, new-burnished in action between rock and water until some had become cigar-shaped, save for rubber tyres bulging sullen and contorted.

  Trees stuck out of the stained sea a hundred yards from the tide-line. In one tree was lodged a bedraggled white object, shapeless and still. The three brothers went down to the water’s edge to get a clearer view. Jonathan’s sharp eyes detected a crimson collar below an unmoving head.

  Two military frogmen, in black suits were flapping down the beach towards the sea.

  *

  The three-score runners feeding the East and West arms of the Lyn river had. between them, swept away or broken nearly half that number of bridges. The Lynmouth sewerage system was destroyed, so nearly a thousand people were to be evacuated at once. A new wide water-course, it was already being said, must be built east of the old and narrow river-bed.

  Rest centres had already been set-up in Lynton. A missing Persons Bureau was opened by the Devon Constabulary. To this office came telephone calls from all over England and Scotland. Some were from the Continent of Europe, since the flood had been classified by Whitehall as a National Disaster, and thus covered by the Press of the World.

  At various points some miles inland from the coast, police road-blocks had been placed. The general public, arriving in a succession of motorcars, pony traps, motor-bicycles and pedal cycles were stopped from further progress north; and asked to return. Only those holding official positions in the Army, Ministry of Food, Civil Defence, British Red Cross, etc. were permitted to enter the area of devastation. Some had been present the previous afternoon, in an official capacity, including the Lord Lieutenant, the G.O.C. South-Western Command, the Chief Constable of Devon, and Lt-Col. and Mrs. Peregrine Bucentaur.

  *

  Now, as Authority moved in little groups about the ruinous scene, Phillip kept his distance along the low-tide-line. Mornington followed, on guard. His immediate concern was to prevent a confrontation between Phillip and Colonel Bucentaur. For by now what had happened on the cricket field was common knowledge.

  So Mornington followed beside the wet lash of distained wavelets breaking upon boulders, now scoured of green algae, until Phillip, seeing Lucy and Melissa talking to the Bucentaurs, decided to return.

  “Would you do that, sir?”

  When there was no reply Mornington said, “I understand from the police that Miss Miranda’s name is posted among the Missing.”

  He followed, still keeping his distance, until he saw that the Colonel, (“a ramrod type waiting with one knee bent, as though standing at ease during a rehearsal of Trooping the Colour,” as he said later to Mr. Corney) had turned his back on Phillip’s approach.

  Phillip went to Molly and said, “Your sweet child is never out of my thoughts.”

  Peregrine about-turned and Mornington heard him say, “Did you abduct my daughter from the cricket field?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That smallholder, Kedd, told me he saw you with her!”

  “Oh no,” said Lucy. “Rosamund saw Miranda walking up the cliff path to Lynton, while Phillip went the other way.”

  Thank God, Mornington said to himself. He observed that two press-men were approaching. One with a camera said, “Excuse me. Colonel Bucentaur, but I think I’m right when I say your daughter went about with one of your white goats?”

  “Well?”

  “There’s a white goat hanging in a tree out there, and it’s got a red collar.”

  Peregrine shouted, “Do not attempt to take any photographs!”

  Frogmen were wading into the water towards the tree. They submerged; to return with the body of a young girl with long black hair.

  Later, when Peregrine was asked by the Chief Constable to go with him to the sea verge, Phillip took Molly’s hand, while a voice seemed to be whispering under the azure sky, Ariel from Miranda hear, This message that the sea-waves bear—

  *

  While Peregrine was with the Chief Constable and a doctor, Molly said to Lucy, “What a sad end to your holiday, my dear. You must all come back with us”—thus seeking relief from remote terror growing in her mind. To Melissa she said, “Go to Phillip, my dear, he needs you”, for he was now walking alone towards the Foreland cliffs, at the base of which waves were breaking.

  If only I had remained at the cricket field, and given of my true self to Miranda, and Peregrine, by behaving as though nothing had happened—for nothing ever happens if one remains true to oneself—

  The waves are the tears of Christ breaking on the stones of the world.

  No! Christ was real, I am an escapist—a romantic: untrue to myself.

  When Melissa came to him he was sitting with arms held across the front of his crumpled jacket, the sea-wind blowing the silvery hairs of the bowed head … a figure almost of stone, she thought, conscious of life’s beginning in the rocks fused by fire, eroded by water and air—creating the soil for which life had left the sea, to arise and fall in ‘the ceaseless flow of the fountain’.

  She sat beside him, he was shivering. “Come with me to Old-stone, where I’ll be able to look after you. Lucy and the children have gone home with Molly, and Elizabeth is returning to her Dorset cottage.”

  *

  There followed an anxious week for Melissa. Pneumonia developed in both his lungs. She was with him during most of the nights and days, resting on a couch in the bedroom, seldom leaving him. And as the fever abated he felt himself to be floating blessedly in her presence. There were moments of recrudescence, when he would cry, the face wrinkled, the voice self-accusing.

  “Darling, it is wrong for us to be too hard on ourselves—”

  “My father clung to his roll of lavatory paper, but they took it away!”

  What could it mean? When he was calmer he said, “If only I had remained with that poor, lost creature!”, and told her about the nursing home. She was relieved, having feared that the lightning stroke might have hurt the brain.

  That night she lay beside him, facing him as to an anxious small child who may so easily feel lost when the mother’s back is turned upon it. Then as he dropped into sleep quietly she turned over to ease her cramped body, but keeping touch by the palms of her feet held against his legs. And her virtue flowed into him, giving a feeling of peace which he had not known since his first wife Barley had died after the birth of his son Billy.

  In the mellow sun of September he sat in the garden at Old-stone, once visited by Mornington and Laura; then he was strong enough to go for a walk; but not into Lynmouth, not under The Chains. Melissa took him by bus across the moor, and down to the shallow coast by the estuary of the Two Rivers.

  One morning as they walked through the sand-hills wild sweet calls came down from the sky as a gathering of curlews passed overhead to feed at the tide-line—survivors of the storm upon the moor, crying delight at the gleaming sands below.

  “The curlews recognise you, Phillip. You kept the crows away from their young.”

  “They’re calling to Bodger—”

  She took his arm, he felt the little dog was near him as they sat on the shingle by Airy Point, above a white bicker of cross little waves under the sky’s windless blue. “Willie is safe, too,” he said. “The dead are safely over.” He got up and wandered over wet pebbles, trying in vain to recall the end of Birkin’s book, the one compos
ed in prison during the war. He went back to her.

  “Melissa, I used to know the peroration by heart, but now—”

  “I remember it.”

  “You do?”

  She quoted, “‘It is the age of decision in which the long striving of the European soul will reach fulfilment, or plunge to final death’.”

  “I remember!” he cried, “‘Great it is to live in this moment of Fate, because it means that this generation is summoned to greatness in the service of high purpose’.”

  She moved close to him, “‘From the dust we rise to see a vision that came not before’.”

  “‘All things are now possible’.” He kissed a scarred cheek lightly.

  “‘And all will be achieved by the final order of the European’.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I hope, in a very small way, to complement Birkin’s dream by writing my novels. What trials that man has endured for his country. He is a statesman at present without state in the seen world. I must reveal the past of our generation to your generation, indirectly; to reveal truth by a study of the past—the truth, overlaid in nearly all those I have known, yet also invisible and neglected— Will you help me?”

  She took his hand. “‘Whithersoever thou goest—’” She felt his tears on her forehead as he stammered, “I – I saw my past life while I was l – lying there, on The Chains— I felt I was being led back out of Hades— Never leave me,” he whispered, hiding his face against her breast.

  “I never have, Phillip.”

  “With you I shall be able to begin my chronicle! Do you know, I’m glad I didn’t write the novels before. They would probably have been angry and satirical if written in the ’thirties. Now I think I can understand every kind of man and woman. Particularly my father. Yes!” he cried, getting up and walking about on the sand. “I shall start my chronicle in the mid-nineties, on a spring night, with that reserved, shy young man walking up the hill at Wakenham. He was carrying his dark lantern, eager to see what moths were on his ‘strips’, as he called them—pieces of old flannel steeped in a mixture of rum and treacle pinned to the bark of one of the elms. And one night in the beam of the lantern, he saw a rare Camberwell Beauty! My father must have felt it was an omen, for the girl he loved was born in Camberwell, then a village. She became my mother. She was dark and intuitive, like Miranda—”