The Phoenix Generation (5 page)

“I did
not
teach Billy to swear. He picked up ‘words’ as Lucy calls them, from the other little village bipeds playing in the village street. One of the first things I heard him calling Lucy, with a happy smile, was ‘dirty old cow’.”

Felicity laughed with delight. She looked so young, so fresh, so tender that he pushed her gently backwards into his leather arm chair and, kneeling before her, wound arms about her with that sudden impulse that always made her yield with beating heart and desire to bring him fully to herself—her wayward, her
distraught
, her innocent child.

*

“Parson Scrimgeour was a prison chaplain at Strangeways Gaol in Manchester, Lucy. He is obviously used to executions, for he said to me, ‘Why did you, of all people, write that horrible book,
The
Phoenix?
’
So I turned the other cheek and gave as my own, Bernard Shaw’s reply on the first night of
Arms
and
the
Man
, when the audience applauded wildly, and called for a speech. G.B.S. held up a hand. In the silence a voice from the gallery cried ‘Rotten!’ G.B.S. held up his hand again for the laughter to stop, and said, with the friendly, open manner of a man who has been trained and self-built in pain, ‘Yes, I agree with you, sir, it is rotten, but what are we two against so many?’”

Lucy had heard that story many times, but all she said was, “I hope it made the vicar laugh.”

“No, he didn’t get the joke. ‘So many?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘Oh, only my bad joke,’ I replied. ‘Oh,’ he said. Then he asked me if I had seen the notice in
The
Ecclesiastical
Times
when it appeared a year ago. I said, ‘Oh, yes, my wife’s father saw the review before he read the book, and remarked, after he had read the book, “H’m, my son-in-law’s an ass”.’ Scrimgeour then gave me a toothy smile and said, ‘Well, do better next time,’ and
asked me to play badminton in the winter at a little club he had got up, by permission of Lord Abeline in the old coach-house of the Abbey.”

Out of friendship for the new vicar, who was not popular, Phillip went to church after they moved to the new house. Whether by chance or design, on his first Sunday the sermon was on the theme that Truth had been discovered among men already, and there was no need for further search in the world among individual writers and philosophers. Afterwards, while the vicar stood by the porch, to bow to and pass a word to the more established of his parishioners going out, he said to Phillip, who had remained in his seat hoping not to be noticed, “I haven’t the gift of words that you have, Mr. Maddison, but I did my best to make the Christian point of view clear.”

“I listened with great interest, Vicar.”

“It is up to men like you, who have gifts, to help influence others for good. I think your hero is wrong-headed, but I wouldn’t go so far as your respected father-in-law as to say he is altogether an ass.”

“Oh, that was applied to me as a person, Vicar. At the same time, it is only fair to add that, as my father-in-law considers that the novels of Dostoievsky are unreadable and the music of Wagner a horrible noise, in a way perhaps he was paying me a compliment.”

“Oh.”

“Well, I must not keep you, Vicar.”

“No hurry, I assure you. How is Rippingall behaving himself? Well, I hope?”

“Yes, he is in good heart, I think. He and I have already worked happily together for several weeks, drinking only tea.”

“Oh yes, Rippingall goes ‘dry’ as the Americans say, but you’ll have to watch him all the same.”

Monachorum House stood among trees, a couple of hundred yards outside the deer park of the Abbey, home of the landlord, built of chalk and limestone blocks and thatched. Pear, peach, and greengage trees grew against the south wall, with hollyhocks and sunflowers. It had paths of limestone chips, and two small lawns. Lucy loved it. Soon a cheerful cottage woman, glad to have extra money, since her husband earned little more than twenty shillings a week, took the place of Mrs. Rigg, who had promised to work for ‘Mr. Phillip’s mother’ when the old people moved down from London.

The first guests at Monachorum were Piers, and his wife Virginia
who had been living in Austria with her mother. Phillip did not ask questions, but he had the idea that there had been some trouble, but the two were now reconciled. The three went sailing together, Phillip now a member of the Yacht Club, from the quay of which they set out to distant parts of the bay, spending long sunny hours lying on the sand, talking and idling. Felicity joined them, bringing her pencils and pad, in case Phillip wanted to dictate; but Phillip told Piers that he would start writing seriously in the early autumn. Piers agreed that he would be better for a long rest, lying in the sunshine.

“After all, you’ve had a pretty hard time since leaving the army, one way and another, and your batteries need recharging.”

*

The valley lay in a dream of sunshine, it was St. Martin’s Little Summer. Rosamund, lying in her perambulator, struggled against late morning sleep and the straps which confined her. She was weary of the shade of an apple tree. She wanted to be with Dad and the boys playing in the river water. She understood nearly all that was said, taking in expressions and sounds with her ears and translating life away from her pram as all-smiling, no shushing and no babydarlinggotosleeptheresagoodgirl. The sixteen-month-old girl screamed at times because she was strapped in when she wanted to climb over the side and walk away.

When the apples began to drop the pram was moved to the lawn, beside an overgrown box hedge. The lawn was humpy, she could rock the pram. It was uneven because often the drainpipe from the kitchen was choked, and every time this happened Phillip had to dig up the lawn. Not only were the pipes choked at the open joins by the movement of earth worms, he told Lucy, but far too much muck went down the 4-inch-diameter pipes. Would she ask Miss Kirkman, the lady-cook (as she described herself) to try not to let any solid matter go down the kitchen sink?

Baby Rosamund—‘Roz’ to her brothers—slept every day, well wrapped, in the shade of the bushy box-tree, while Phillip tried to work up above in his writing room. He felt a dark eye
half-concealed
in hair topping the fat little naked body regarding him. While Dad was up there, Roz was content. And hearing the gurgling of the kitchen drain, and seeing a grey fluid spreading over the path below, she knew Dad would come downstairs and play with her. Before digging up nice wet grey mud.

Rippingall now worked outside, in the garden. His headquarters were in a thatched summerhouse with open walls of rustic work.
There, being of a literary turn of mind, he planned his cultivations and croppings for the year, writing many notes and reminders of what should be done. These details were interspersed with ideas for ‘Monograph on Trutta trutta, or the common brown trout’, which he planned to write in order to present it as a birthday present to help ‘Phillip my gentleman’.

In the kitchen a local girl helped the lady-cook, who had been a governess in Brussels with a Belgian baron and his family. Miss Kirkman had advertised in
The
Lady,
a
periodical taken by the vicar’s wife, who had brought round, on her bicycle, a marked copy for Lucy to see. Miss Kirkman was overweight, reddish in colour, and overwhelmed by the primitive cooking stove—a paraffin-burning Valor Perfection—which filled the kitchen with fumes. Phillip thought that the genteel Miss Kirkman was best avoided. A rancid odour seemed to accompany her presence. This did not altogether originate, he thought, in the condition of the drainage pipes which lay, irregularly, under the lawn. They were field drains, of the kind laid in the nineteenth century under heavy land, without collars and unglazed.

“Lucy,
do
ask Miss Kirkman to let only liquid go down the sink.”

“I have asked her. She is careful, you know. However, I’ll speak to her again.”

He said to Miss Kirkman, “I know it’s the fault of those
field-drain-pipes
. I’ll replace them when I’ve finished my book.”

*

There was no St. Martin’s Little Summer that November, it was washed away in rain, rain, rain. The springs broke early, soon the river was swollen, but never turgid, swilling bank-high and drowning, below the park, the water-meadows which gleamed grey and cold with the reflections of low clouds dragging past in the sky.

Billy, the elder boy, was now rising five years. He and Peter and tiny tottering Rosamund had their nursery in one of the damp downstairs rooms, all of which burned coal in early Victorian grates. Phillip missed the open hearth of Skirr farmhouse, and went to the Steward’s office behind the Abbey to ask permission to uncover the wood-burning fire-place in the large square sitting room. This grate, like the others, threw out almost no heat since it was virtually a hole through which flames roared into the cavernous chimney enclosed behind a square of thin cast-iron.

“Cold air is sucked under the doors the more fiercely the flames
roar up the chimney. And just as James Watt watching a kettle boiling got the idea of harnessing steam, so our sitting-room
fireplace
gives the idea of a refrigerator combined with an oven, for while the flames draw the cold air to freeze the back of the body, one tends to be roasted in front.”

The Steward laughed and said he would send round the Clerk of Works.

This individual, upon arrival, told Phillip that the house had once been three cottages in a row, but a century before had been made into one for the then-Steward’s occupation. Phillip thought that in those days the iron hearth must have appeared to be a most genteel thing, burning gentlemen’s coal instead of the common oak or beech sticks which still smouldered under the iron crocks and hanging kettles of the cottages upon the estate.

“I suppose all social aspirations are in a sense anti-social,” he said to Felicity, when the Clerk of Works had gone. “Look at this great black shell, entirely anti-social. The more coal we shove into it, the more scoured of warm air becomes the room.”

At night while tawny flames edged by smoke roared up the chimney to join with the remote thunder of the gale above the square exit of the blackened tun, he and Lucy and Felicity drew up their chairs and thereby were in the more concentrated bore of cold air feeding the flames. Lucy usually went to bed early. She felt sad, while concealing the feelings that her dream of herself and Phillip being like her father and mother—inseparable and hardly wanting any visitors—was not to be.

And every day the valley views were dissolved in rain. Every walk by the river, now swirling past the stick-matted trunks of the willows, was ended for Phillip with sopping trousers and squelching shoes. Trying to dry his legs before that early Victorian grate, while he waited for the mason to come, was a nightly act of frustration, for he winced from the idea of making a complaint as the weeks went by and no one came to open up the hearth. At last he wrote to the Steward, apologising for not having said during the interview that of course he would pay for the work to be done.

The elderly Clerk of Works reappeared one morning and gave Phillip more local history, mixed with scandal of the previous century, and at last took his leave, saying that he would see what he could do. Phillip gave him his idea of what the back of the open hearth should be, not straight up, another warmth stealer, but with a back built to slope forward until four-fifths of the frontal area of the fire-, or rather flame-place, was reached; then it should
go back sharply in order to allow the flow of flame to take itself up the chimney, passing the smoke-box where the slope joined the ascent of the chimney proper.

“I’ve been reading about this in the
Country
Gentleman’s
Maga
zine
,” he explained. “It’s the same with water. There’s always an eddy at a bend of a river, I’ve noticed, where the water tends to travel backwards. And so with air. In a straight-up old-type open hearth, the hot air revolves just under the lintel, and in turning round causes the smoke to bounce off the hot-air ball, and into the room.”

To this the Clerk of Works made no reply. He hadn’t
understood
a word of it.

A week before Christmas a mason arrived and Phillip repeated his idea of what an open hearth should be: it must have a back sloping forward, then sharply back. No gate-crashing cold air must be allowed up the chimney.

“Aye, zur. I’ll ’ave ’e out in no time,” and bringing a pick the mason took a swing at the cast-iron shell and then lugged it out in a cascade of soot and mortar dust. Sheets were brought down from off the children’s beds to cover chairs, table, and bookcase.

There was a worn blue Delabole slate before the hearth, and Phillip knew that this would conduct the heat from the fireplace and make it pleasant to stand on in his socks, after writing, which usually made his feet cold—November, 1914: the flooded Diehard T-trench under Wytschaete ridge——

“So leave the slate. Delabole slates are wonderful things. They warm the farmer’s feet in life, and stand guard above his skull when he’s dead. I’ve got to go to London now, to give my first broadcast. I’m scared stiff, like the poor old farmer under the stone, because I’ve got to do it without a script—you know, all written out and read from a script, I mean—but this is to be without a script. Have you got a wireless set?”

“No, zur. Us poor men can’t afford it, like the gentry do do.”

“Good. Then you won’t be able to hear what a fool I make of myself.”

This made the mason laugh, and he forgot the idea, which was to leave the splendid slate, worn by centuries of feet on winter nights, in position.

Phillip left before dawn the next morning, to be able to rest in the Barbarian Club before the talk, which was one of a weekly series on Tuesday nights after the nine o’clock news. Richard and Hetty listened, and found it embarrassing; for Phillip had stopped
on the way at a friend’s house, and had drunk claret most of the day, with various cheeses; to arrive only a short time before he was due on the air. He had rehearsed his talk on the way up so many times, each with a variation, and when the green light changed to red in the studio he felt hopelessly mixed up. The producer, a Scotsman, stared at him almost with anguish; then after a gulp of water Phillip began.