The Gale of the World (30 page)

On the second day of the summer holidays, at the beginning of the fourth week of July, the three brothers—Peter, now
seventeen
years old, and still on the small, thin size; David, thirteen and not yet come to puberty; Jonathan, eleven, small and dark,
spiritually
aware with sharp sight and sympathy connected directly with insight—were strung out in a line of fifty yards, and
pedalling
, with heads bowed, on the left of the road, into a strong south-west wind. All three were thinly clad, the two smaller boys in reach-me-down, threadbare suits.

They were now in the fifth day of their journey. Owing to wind blowing from the south-west into their faces, they had so far covered little more than two hundred miles. At times the wind was so strong that they had to stand on the pedals to make progress.

It began to rain again, so they stopped under an oak-tree beside the road.

“Cor, I’m what-you-call tired,” said David.

“Ah, ’bor,” agreed Jonathan.

“How long before we reach Father?”

“Well, if the wind changes direction, we might get there
tomorrow
night, Jonny.”

“Cor, that will mean we’ll do a hundred miles in one day!”

“
If
the wind blows from little old Birdy House,” said David.

“We’ll have some fish-and-chips as soon as we get somewhere,” Peter promised.

Money was low. David had lost his £3, and Peter had spent thirty shillings on a new chain and sprocket. Peter hadn’t liked to ask his mother for more, and his father had little money, too, he thought.

The rain fell through the oak-tree, so they pedal’d on. There was no fish-and-chip shop in the next village, so they bought three kippers. Coming to a wood beside the road, they made a fire and each boy grilled a flattened corpse impaled on the sharpened end of a green stick. The kippers tasted of tar. They ate them in their fingers, glad that the rain had stopped, but not the wind, and went slowly on their cape-flapping journey.

“Cor, I hope we won’t be late for what-you-call seeing the Brockholes goats scrapping out of the horse van, chookies!”

“Ah, ’bor. Don’t forget the cricket, too. I hope it won’t rain all the whole time.”

“Wet weather in Devon clears up suddenly,” said Peter, as rain fell again.

*

The caravan was damp, so was the cot, what with all the rain, so Phillip had arranged for the boys to spend the night of arrival at Shelley’s Cottage where, he had written to Lucy, Mrs. Piston would welcome them.

“No charge, Masson, for troops coming out of the line into billets,” said Piston. “After all this rain, your young soldiers will be pretty well out, old lad.”

Phillip was anxious. The boys were overdue. He was worrying,
too, because of the presence of his sister Elizabeth at Ionian
cottage
. Aunt Dora’s will had been proved: Elizabeth, after death duties, had inherited £11,000. He bore no resentment that he had been left nothing; he was nervous at the thought of her in what he regarded as his territory. Her presence always had
diminished
him.

So he avoided walking down the main street above the river by climbing up the lane which, descending along a path through the slopes of the woods to the quay, brought him to the harbour mouth. There he hung about, hoping to find the boys, for surely the first thing they would make for was the sea.

Osgood Nilsson was fishing. He called to Phillip, “Hullo, there! The school peal are running!”, and fumbling in his inner pocket, he held up two small sea-trout seemingly linked together. “I’ve just taken this one, pound and a half, I guess.”

Puzzling: alarming: for now beside Osgood was another figure like him—Siamese twins standing in a twin-waved sea below the duplicated pebble ridge on the east side of the channel marked by tall poles, each one topped by a herring gull. While he stared, a gull flew to a pole and alighted on the back of a gull already perching there. He felt faint, his heart thudded in his ears. Am I losing reason as well as sight?

“Hullo, Dad,” said the voice of Peter beside him. “We thought we’d find you here, somehow,” and coming towards him were two blurred figures with elongated heads, which settled into the recognisable outlines of David and Jonathan.

“Cor, look at that gull up there, sitting on another one’s back!” cried Jonnie.

“There
are
two gulls, then?”

“Why yes, Dad!”

Peter was looking at him anxiously. Phillip could see his son’s face clearly now. He felt suddenly happy. He could see Nilsson clear and undivided. He felt a rush of affection for Peter. “How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour, Dad. Mr. Osgood saw us and asked if we belonged to you, and when we said yes he took us into a cafe and gave us coffee and doughnuts!”

“Cor, we were what you call hungry,” said David.

“We hitched the last fifty miles by coach,” went on Peter.

“The driver gave us a lift, and put our bikes in the back with the luggage,” added David.

“We didn’t have any lamps, you see,” explained Jonathan. “It
was ever so dark until the moon rose up behind us.”

“You travelled at night without lights?”

“We thought we’d be late for the ceremony of the white goats,” said David. “Peter said we shouldn’t bike in the darkness, but we felt so cold trying to sleep beside a haystack we decided to get warm pedalling.”

Peter explained that they had seen the headlights of the coach a long way behind. “We got beside the hedge to let it pass, but it stopped. The driver said he recognised us two days back, in the rain, this side of Salisbury.”

“We went to look at the Cathedral, and stopped there to get warm, Father,” said Peter, a little afraid.

The emotion passed, yielding to affection when Phillip said, “My poor children, why didn’t you go to a Cyclists Touring Club lodging, as I suggested?”

“We didn’t have enough money for lodgings as well as food, Dad.”

Peter explained that a pound had to last either for four nights with no food except breakfast, or if with supper they must sleep out.

“Oh God, what an awful father I am!”

“You’re not!” cried David. “Any way, we loved coming, didn’t we, chookies?”

He yawned, he was pale and drawn.

“Well, you three tough guys are to sleep at Major Piston’s cottage tonight. He’s an old friend of mine from the first war. Go to bed early, you’ll sleep the clock round. By the way, don’t forget to thank Mrs. Piston when you leave tomorrow, and also write her a letter, Peter.”

“Very good, Dad. Is this your little dog?”

“Yes, that’s Bodger.”

He left them with the dog, saying he’d have a word with Osgood Nilsson, and then they’d all go up to see ‘Buster’.

“Have you got a chain and padlock for your bikes? Good. By the way, you should address our host as ‘Lord Cloudesley’ and not ‘Buster’.”

“Of course, Dad,” said Peter. “Mr. Osgood gave us a canoe, he said he was too big for it now.”

“Well, you must never go out to sea in it, any of you.”

“We thought we’d only go in it in the harbour, when the tide is coming in,” said Peter.

“You can all swim?”

“Yes, Dad!”

After Phillip had thanked Osgood for his kindness, they all went up the lift to Lynton, and down a path to The Eyrie. There they had poached eggs on toast with baked beans, their favourite food.

“Sir—I mean Lord—is that right, Father?—”

“My name is ‘Buster’, Peter. It helps me to feel not so old. What were you saying, David?”

“Do you believe in flying saucers, sir? I mean Cousin ‘Buster’.”

“Unidentified flying objects have certainly been seen by accredited witnesses, pilots flying over the Atlantic, for example, David. But some may well be due to ice-dust layers, which can diminish and so give an illusion of moving away from orthodox aircraft at a considerable rate of knots. They are similar, in my view, to what my father, in one of his letters here,”—he held up a bundle tied by faded ribbon—“speaks of as ‘the queer circular rainbow’ in front of his scout ’plane—or fighter aircraft as you would have called them in the recent war. The rainbow, or
rain-circle
, is visible in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, due to the refraction of light into the colours of the spectrum. What do you think, Brig?”

“Possibly, ‘Buster’, possibly.”

Brigadier Tarr turned to Peter. “I want to apologise to your father’s eldest surviving son for my bloody-mindedness towards him during the war. I was arrogant, and somewhat shaken after I came back from Narvik. It was I who told the troops on your farm in Norfolk to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. I thought all German sympathisers were—well—not my cup of tea. I learned differently in Holland, after the drop at Arnhem—” He raised a shaking glass and shouted into the air, “Where Eisenhower left us alone to be cut to bloody ribands!” He drank, then said quietly. ‘Yes, I was bloody-minded then. I’m fairly humble now. Lost me arrogance, thanks be to God.” He emptied the glass. He stared into space.

“All my men went west at Arnhem, while we”—banging his fist three times on the table—“waited—waited—waited for American help!” He glared at nothing and yelled, “In my opinion Eisenhower ought to be shot!” A glisten of sweat broke on his bald pink pate. Bodger crept under Phillip’s chair.

“I understand, sir” replied Peter. “My father was very upset at the time.” In fact, sir, he shouted, too!”

The Brig, went to Phillip, patted his shoulder, and left the room.

“Well,” said ‘Buster’, “it’s a rising glass, I think I’ll go gliding Do bring your boys to see me again before cricket week, won’t you,” to Phillip.

At Shelley Cottage, when their father had gone, Jonathan said, “Cor, I what-you-call like this place, Chooky.”

“Yar right, ’bor.”

“It’s the best holiday I ever had,” said Peter.

*

The rising glass hovered, then fell. Rain beat upon the common. The boys passed the time in the caravan, leaving Dad to his writing. Soon Peter had taken over the house-keeping—such as it was. Daily on their bikes the brothers went down to Lynton, returning with what they could get off the ration—usually kippers, as sold at that time throughout Britain—black oily split fish which had been dipped in creosote to give the appearance of having been smoked above a dull smouldering of oak saw-dust.

Chalk was still an ‘additive’—scientific jargon word—in bread.

“Blast, I wish we had some of our own wheaten scones” said Peter, who looked thin and pale.

“And Mum’s honey” said Jonathan.

“Don’t forget our own butter,” added David.

“What about some rabbits? Let’s take sticks, and Bodger to hunt them!”

“He’s too old to run fast” said Peter.

“I know! Let’s watch the buzzards, and when one drops, send Bodger arter’m!” suggested Jonathan.

So the boys went down Horrock water, where rabbits lived. They were not so common as before the war, and the great
dusky-winged
hawks were fewer, in that country of the sea-winds. Before the war as many as a dozen were to be seen at once,
sailing
in tiers above the hills; somtimes plunging down the invisible precipices of the wind, crying their plaintive cries, and on
up-tilted
wings sweeping up again; or, falling away in the east, to the oakwoods where they nested, each bird growing smaller and smaller until but a tawny speck showed at the turn, from dun undersides of out-stretched wings.

The boys surprised one of the great hawks on the ground
holding
a rabbit in its claws, and flapping. They killed the rabbit and in triumph bore it back to the cot.

*

Now the cot was ‘home’, Phillip began to view the past happily. He told them how, on opening the door during the past winter, he had seen the constellation of the Plough lying above the eastern end of a beech clump, near the end of the lane across the common, and pointing to Polaris, the constant star of the North. In frosty weather, after the blizzard, and at the turn of the year, he had heard owls on his roof-ridge calling with a throbbing softness. They seemed to be following one another from hunting-perch to perch, to be playing in the quiet of the night, their cries gentle with pleasure. And now, when the rain had stopped, and the nights were quiet under the stars, the owls seemed to be playing again.

“Perhaps they are the young owls of this year” said Jonathan.

It was a warm and gentle night. Four of the Maddison family dining in the caravan by candle-light on rabbit which for three hours had simmered in the crock hanging from the chimney bar. With the rabbit were potatoes, carrots, onions, and half a bottle of O.K. sauce.

“Very tasty” said David. “Good old Peter!”

Phillip felt a little guilty that he had left all the cooking to Peter, that loyal and uncomplaining aristocrat among the children. Soon they would be leaving; their mother was coming down with the baby, to camp in tents and caravan beside the West Lyn below Barbrook, going to sleep to the gentle music of water playing on stone beside them.

Phillip felt already an underlying poignancy that the boys would soon be leaving him. Still, they would be happier in the caravan beside the Lyn, on the Green Meadow camping site, with their mother. Also, he must carry on with his notes for the novels.

Yes, the family would be happier in the caravan on Green Meadow. They had got so wet walking through the heather, day after day of rain, that he had told them to give up wearing shoes and stockings, and walk bare-footed. And those poisonous kippers! White bread and margarine, and a tiny ration of cheese—poor diet, with an occasional orange and apple. The main diet was soup of potatoes and cabbages boiled in the cast-iron crock.

They felt contentment after the rabbit stew. The three boys and their father were sitting in the yellow haze of candlelight when a wood owl hooted almost with flute-like quality on the roof of the cot, forty yards away. It was the bubbling, quavering call, a little uncertain, of a young bird which had lost its parents and was seeking hopefully for an answer to its feelings. Phillip replied
with a short, clear note, the call of a male bird. After awhile the quaver came again; and upon being called once more, the bird flew nearer. The conditions for mimicry, or art, were perfect: the upright, solitary candle-flame: the immobility of the boys, their alert faces: the windless night wherein sounds travelled afar—they could hear an owl crying in the valley leading down beside the Lyn a mile away. No cloud over The Chains, only stars. There had been no rain for three days; gossamers strewed the heather, mushrooms were appearing in the enclosures behind stone-walls topped by furze and bramble. The voice of the young female owl seemed to become more tender as it cried again through the darkness.