Read The Phoenix Generation Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
The Phoenix Generation (13 page)
The water in which he was standing was about ten inches deep. It blurred as it began to deepen towards the edge of the run. The sky-reflecting water had shown a gleam as he had raised his rod. The salmon was swimming slowly up the run, to pass within a few inches of his wet trouser-ends.
Very slowly he turned his head to watch the fish. After some moments of quietude it turned on its side and sinuated along the gravel as though trying to scrape away the itch in its gill-rakers, for freshwater maggots were clustering there. It actually pushed itself against Phillip’s left foot. And there it idled before beginning a series of gentle rolling movements, porpoise-like … until it accelerated up the run, pushing waves from bank to bank, to make a slashing turn in water shallower than its own depth and to hurtle down the run again, making a thruddling noise as it passed.
Entering deeper water above the bridge it leapt, and smacked down on its side. It came up the run once more and idled there, maintaining place with the slightest of slow sinuating movements, scarcely perceptible now that the sun had gone down in the west.
He stood there, still as a heron, watching the lonely salmon playing by itself—a fish, three feet long, imprisoned in a few square yards of space, threatened by asphyxiation in warm water, by gaff of poacher, by beak of heron; by eels which would eat it alive when the fungus grew in yellow rosettes on its wilting scales; by otters; by many other hazards. He stood there while the sunset faded to dusk, and full darkness came to the earth. Moths whirred past, sometimes alighting on his hair, their wings brushing his brow. It was nearly midnight when he went back to the house. There
were no lights in the bedrooms. Lucy, and the children were asleep. He wrote until the first light of day, and when he set out for the London road the downs were dark against the sky, and ‘the rosy fingers of dawn’ (a physical love-image, surely) were arising in the east.
11 Hillside Road,
London, S.E.
One moment I am in despair, dearest Lucy, with my guardian urging me to go to live in his Oxfordshire cottage, and my Mother wanting to let this house and take me to the Lake District with my grandmother, when a certain sports-car draws up round the corner and within ten minutes all my things are under the tonneau cover and we are crossing the Thames and safe upon the Surrey side! A wonderful day for a joy-ride through Richmond and on to Kingston and over the chalk downs to Cheam and Cross Aulton and the lovely country which Phillip told me was once all herb fields and dog-carts when he was a baby and his mother left her home to have him in her very own little house in Wakenham.
We drove past the Crystal Palace, where we stopped awhile to gaze up at the tall glass towers and the roof glittering like the wings of an immense dragonfly. And at last up Hillside Road, with the beautiful park-like Hill opposite. I can hardly believe it—that I am in Phillip’s bedroom where he lived before going down to Malandine after the war.
I have already met one of Phillip’s sisters, the younger one, whom I saw in Devon during that lovely holiday by the estuary. Of course, she is very unhappy, her husband having left her. Doris is very kind, and I like her very much, but poor woman, her irritability and pessimism and don’t caredness are all against my nature. However, I look forward to helping her with the two small boys. It will be grand to have her company for the time being, but I don’t think this house will be suitable when my babe gets lively later on and wants to start crawling and possessing. The front, or drawing room, is the most unlived-in room I have ever seen, I don’t suppose Phillip’s mother often, if ever, had any time to rest, let alone relax here.
So I’m still keeping my fingers crossed and hoping to find a 5
s
. a week place somewhere in Phillip’s old haunts near Reynards’ Common; and where I can grow my own vegetables. I know such cottages are to be had in plenty.
By the way, I am known here in Wakenham as Mrs. Rivers, wife of an absentee American husband. (I choose Rivers as a good luck symbol for Phillip’s new book.)
During my first evening here we went for a walk in the High Street, and Phillip showed me ‘Freddy’s’ which he used to haunt during the war with Desmond Neville his friend, whom he hasn’t heard of for years, he said. We also went to Nightingale Grove, and saw where the Zeppelin torpedo fell, destroying eight cottages and killing Lily Cornford, who
is to be a heroine of his Somme novel, which he feels he will never be able to write; but we shall see! The cottages there are all rebuilt and only here and there a gash in a brick wall remains. Phillip seems more than ever wanting to avoid the present; I suppose his mind is, like Shelley’s, always dwelling in the past. He did not speak of Barley (whom I resemble but fail to live up to) but I felt that she was very much behind those sad and speculative eyes. Also he seems to feel that in some way he has let me down, but as I told him, he needn’t worry on my account, because I am perfectly content here for the time being and there is the green Hill to go to, with its views and sunshine and many shady trees. At the same time, I am finding, as Phillip told me I might, that D. is obstinate as a mule. She is obviously worn out physically and mentally, but all my efforts to get her to talk, not by being inquisitive of course, are without effect.
She lives too much in the past. I already knew, of course, about her boy being killed on the Somme, and that she had married, after the war, his friend in the army. She did tell me, however, that he tried to strangle her before he left home. Apparently he argued with her all that night, before he lost control. She is extraordinarily obstinate. Phillip told me that she was set as a child against her father, because he used to make her mother cry. He explained it all to me. “Doris was the only brave one of us three children; she set herself against Father, and was thus petrified in part of her. When Percy Pickering was killed, she reverted to the rock.” It all seems very tragic.
Doris told me that her mother had offered to pay the fees for her to see a doctor and get a tonic, which she needs, and which probably would make no end of difference to her health and spirits. But she says she can’t be bothered to go. Well that seems to me to be utterly inexcusable. There
must
be something wrong: she goes to bed never later than 10 and sleeps very well, gets up at 7.30 feeling heavy and cross and half-awake. I feel desperately sorry for her and wish I could be allowed to nurse her. However, there you are. But I shall continue my gentle pressure and as I always feel very cheerful and full of energy in the morning it may react on her some day.
She is rather naïve. The other day she asked me if Phillip was going to the U.S.A. to find my absentee husband, Rivers!
Later.
I’m afraid I’ve held this up for a couple of days. In the meantime I have met Phillip’s mother. She stayed here last night and seemed very cheerful. She, also, asked after my American husband. Doris persists in calling me Mrs. Rivers, by the way: I wonder if this is transference, (if that is the Freudian term) because her father still refers to her as Mrs. Willoughby?
I have met Phillip’s other sister, Elizabeth, who arrived here last evening with her mother in Phillip’s car. She brought three large
suitcases
. According to Doris, she spends all her money on clothes and must always have the latest fashion. Elizabeth would be very pretty were it
not for her sharp, almost imperious manner of judging others and abruptly dismissing them. Thus much of what Phillip said to her she scoffed at—I could feel her underlying tenseness. Also she is unkind to her mother, indeed when she asked her for money she was so persistent in a neurotic way that I could not bear it, and left the room, following Phillip, who had a drawn look on his face. Later Doris told me that Elizabeth has fits at times and her mother always gives in to her because otherwise she gets very upset. What a desperately unhappy home it must have been for Phillip when he was a small boy. No wonder he says that the war was the happiest time of his life.
Phillip’s mother is very sweet. I enjoy hearing her merry little laugh. I can see where Phillip gets his sensibility, and also his sense of fun.
Well, my dear, I do hope you and the children are very well and happy, and that the coming summer will be full of sunshine, physically and metaphorically.
My love to you,
Felicity.
P.S. Phillip told me that he is going to do some sailing this season, and wants to buy Piers’ twelve-foot sailing dinghy. I am so glad he has Piers for a friend. Phillip is full of Hereward Birkin too, as a saviour of Britain and the Empire. He talked of a small field he used to lie in, rather high up above Malandine, and said he thought of buying it, if he can get it cheap, and making a cattle shippon there into a place where he can work. He says he cannot work here, now that Elizabeth has joined the household, he feels she is filled with broken glass.
Why does she want to write and tell me all this for? thought Lucy. As for Phillip’s sisters, he and they are worlds apart, and should stay apart.
Then she thought, Would Phillip be happier if I went away with the children, and looked after Pa and Ernest? I know I am no good for him, nor is Felicity, I suppose. Yet how well she writes. Oh dear, what a muddle. Well, I must make my blackcurrant jam now.
*
The dinghy Phillip had bought from Piers was built for
bass-fishing
in the running seas of the Channel beyond the inland arm of the harbour. It was clinker-built with bluff bows and broad in the beam, with a high strake or combing above the gunwhale against lipping seas.
He had an idea of sailing down the coast, putting in at various places for the night, until he arrived at Esperance Cove, and so to the village of Malandine in South Devon which he had first known
a decade previously. There, in a linhay on the hilltop field he had often visited, with Barley, he would be able to write. He had the money to buy the field, because—his literary agent had written to tell him—his New York publisher had agreed to pay 3,000 dollars advance for
The
Blind
Trout
, half on signature of contract, half on publication day.
As a safety measure against the hazards of the down-Channel voyage—particularly past the turbulent tides of Portland Bill—he had had two long cylindrical tanks of phosphor bronze—called yellow metal by the boat-builder—fitted under the thwarts. If
Scylla,
as he had already re-named the boat, were to capsize, she would float.
First, he must explore the mouth of the harbour. One late July morning he hauled up the brown lugsail and put the nose of the boat westward. The sail, filled with the offshore wind, drove the dinghy to ride and slither over the smooth waves of the ebb while leaving behind a satisfactory pattern of foam and bubbles. Running before the wind at six knots, he came to a large wooded island to leeward. It was marked Bere Island on the 1 inch Admiralty Chart. The channel beyond was marked by buoys.
There was a Club race that morning. A flight of white sails was down by the Bar Buoy, which they would round before returning on the next leg of a triangular course. Piers had told him of sudden swells on the bar at low water; but the tide had another two hours to lapse, so the sandbars on either side at the harbour mouth were well covered. He would be safe with an offshore wind.
So far, he had not sailed in any of the Club boat races, and knew nothing of the hazards of a spring-tide ebb—the moon was new—with an offshore wind.
The leading yachts, which had presented broad sails before the wind, were now putting about, close-hauled against wind and tide.
Lolling in the stern seat of his little boat, tiller under arm, sheet held in hand, Phillip passed west of Bere Island, and
recognised
one figure in the leading boat now creaming through the water past him. He was hailed. “Hullo, ‘Farm Boy’. Come and dine with us tonight.”
“It’s very good of you, but I shall probably be too late
returning
.” He didn’t want to go to the Castle, to have drink forced upon him.
He noticed one of Runnymeade’s crew: a young girl with fair curls to her shoulder. It was almost a shock to see her looking at him, so startling was the resemblance to Barley.
Runnymeade hailed him again. “Where are you bound for?”
“Oh, just to have a look at the form.”
“You won’t get back on this ebb tide, ‘Farm Boy’.”
Phillip waved and sailed on. His mind was held by the image of the field on the high ground above Malandine, where he had lain in the grass beside Barley, watching a pack of swifts—those strange thin, unearthly birds—flying with faintly shrill cries a thousand feet in the air above and barely visible to his eyes.
Do
swifts
beat
first
one
wing,
then
the
other?
he could hear her voice saying. His admiration had grown from that moment: for the poise, the observation, the penetration to essential truth of a mere child of fifteen, who on the way back to the village had taken his hand and led him to Irene, her mother, and their cottage during that
wonderful
summer of nineteen twenty-one, so that they should be friends again, after a slight misunderstanding over Julian Warbeck, that arrogant young poet, with whom he shared his cottage at that time. God, how time passed, leaving only ghosts. What remained of that bright image of Malandine—only the grave among the
tombstones
of drowned sailors, a solar wraith among ghosts of the sea: a fret and scatter of piteous bones under the headstone carved with reaping hook and severed rose-bud.
Selfishly transfixed by the past, by hopeless thoughts, he sailed into a choppy sea of waves raised by wind against tide, and, still steering south, passed a chequered buoy wallowing on its chain visible with green weeds clinging to its links.
Scylla
rolled past the great sea-top turning its head as though with weariness this way and that. She began to plunge and rise as her bows were smacked by waves which broke into spray and wetted sail and thwarts alike. The wind had changed, it was now coming up channel from the sou’-west. He dare not put her over, she would capsize and swamp with the brutal weights of water in conflict from all directions. So he steered to run before the wind, to edge the boat round to avoid losing way, while realising that he was being carried into the open sea.
