A Solitary War (18 page)
Authors: Henry Williamson
The terms
hen-houses
and
rabbit-hutches
were euphemistic: what he wanted to avoid was the usual village assembly of old boards and banged-out iron sheets of empty bitumen barrels of
road-repair
knocked together anyhow to form some sort of shelter, covered with decaying sacks or flapping bits of rotten canvas.
Mrs. Valiant had promised to keep all neat and tidy, and having got the cottage, her sad face had become almost a shining morning face, beside that of her seventy-year-old husband.
Below the top cottage, in the middle of the three, lived an old pensioned labourer with his wife. She had been a cook in service. They had moved from the two-roomed cottage which had become known as the Children's, next to the farmhouse.
*
“We won't get this bloody stuff up the stairs of River View,” prophesied Teddy Pinnegar.
“We shan't need to. I put brass screws into the eastern metal window-frame, for its easy removal. The furniture can be hauled through when I've taken out the entire window-frame.”
When the job was done âPinwheel' said, “Welcome to your new home, sir.”
âPinwheel' did not look altogether happy. That morning he had said to Phillip, “Tactical error, sir. I should have got leave from you to offer myself to Melissa in person, instead of by letter.”
“You'll find the right girl one day, âPinwheel'.”
That night Phillip slept in River View. It was cold. The three portable electric fires he had bought before the war were keeping the farmhouse bedrooms warm. It was freezing harder outside. There were no blackout curtains, so he hung his thin 1914â18 army blankets on nails over the windows. There was the old sack from his other cottage, BODGER GREAT SNORING, on the floor for carpet.
The floor was dusty and sand-grit and plaster in the grain after
George the bricklayer had finished the partition. Phillip liked George; he was a quick, cheerful worker, his flint walls were a delight to see. He was the son and grandson of bricklayers, of the quality known as tradesmen.
Robert Bodger of Snoring, late of âthe Bad Lands', farmer
long-since
dead and passed away, judging by the excellent
hand-stitching
of the four-bushel sack, felt Phillip's bare toes on his memorial in ice-cold mornings. Remembering the frozen
battlefields
of his youth, Phillip told himself that he was a fortunate man, but as the days went on he found it harder to face going into the adjacent farmhouse.
The
Daily
Crusader
had published Phillip's article about seals, and a second about the shoot: a factual description of ewes on yellow mustard in a hollow sheltered by coverts of beech, oak, sycamore and chestnut, from which barley-plump pheasants ran and flew. There were glimpses of distant sea pale-blue between
copper-flaked
trunks of pines; white lines of waves breaking on sand-bars in autumn sunlight; the jocund yeoman sportsmen.
Very
good,
farmer,
wish
I
had
been
there,
wrote Chettwood in a letter of that single sentence.
Other letters followed, re-directed from the office. One was startling when Phillip read the signature,
Desmond
Neville.
He had neither seen nor heard from him during the past sixteen years.
Desmond wrote that he had come home from Natal to rejoin the gunners. âIt's Death or Glory for me this time.' Before he reported at his depot, might he come and see Phillip on a very important matter?
Phillip read this letter with various feelings. He remembered the last meeting with this great friend of his boyhood and youth. However, he could not very well refuse the request of one who had once been a friend, so he asked him to come down for a few days, saying that he had very little to offer in the way of hospitality, being in the throes of trying to reclaim a poor farm, but anyway he looked forward to seeing him.
Desmond Neville replied that he was only killing time in a London hostel, having worked his passage from Cape Town in the stokehold of a liner. That sounded good and workmanlike. But no more hanging round my neck, as in the old days, thought Phillip, disturbed by this visitation from out of the past.
One of the other letters, in a clear but rather childlike hand, was even more disturbing. It was from a young woman called Laura Wissilcraft whom he had met, for a night, while he was looking over âthe Bad Lands' before deciding to buy. It had been a
blighted, almost destructive occasion. Yet when she had written later her script was clear and flowing, beautiful in thought, original in detail.
My Prospero. Your voice. Your eyes. You have the power to bring me out of my state of confusion. Tears! During the days and nights since you left me I have thought of you, I have written a dozen letters in my mind, had strange dreams in which I was in London watching a satirical musical
revue
of the war, the whole audience howled with laughter at the image of Hider as a ventriloquist's dummy on the lap of a great fat man who wore a pickelhaube drunkenly on his head. I was suffering for you during this skit because looking round I saw you waving your arms, pale with despair your face, and when you tried to walk out the audience rose up and chased you. I tried to help you but my feet would not move although I tried to pull myself along by my arms, my hands clutching the back of a seat. The rest of the night seemed spent in climbing up and down stairs and going on long train journeys searching for YOU.
In the morning I walked along a footpath in the sun, and lay down on the headland of a field with wheat beginning to tiller with the larks above as my attendants. I felt as though double-barred gates inside me had been at last pushed open.
What do you feel, think of me? I do so want us to be good friends. And the rest? I dare not think, plan or hope now. I wish life could be as simple as this short piece of D. H. Lawrence's:
âThe youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on and the horse looks at him in silence. They are so silent they are in another world.'
If relationships could be as pure, as lucid as that! A peaceful
participation
to the greater glory! I cannot talk when I am in your presence, I feel at times suffocated. Are you one of the dead of 1914â18? Help me O God, to see you as Shelley plain. You are so understanding about my predicament, that alone makes me weep. You alone seem
instinctively
to know the workings of my mind and spirit. I feel optimistic for you on your farm. You will achieve all things if you do not allow anyone, anything, in this ghastly war to break your wand, to sink your book deep in the sea of your dilemma.
Your articles I'm sure will be good if they incorporate what you wrote me about this strange stillness in the war. â1914â18 was a purging period of loss, it will lead to be a resurgent period of new creation, and a fairer vision.' God, you are right to be an optimist. I wish I could be. I have over the years become a fully-fledged patron of the philosophy of expressionism. I wonder if there is basically just this difference between us? But why go on searching for an explanation? Why am I so
heart-divided
? Why do I long to rush into your arms, yet when you are here equally I want to rush away again? Is it the quest for aloneness, which
was so necessary for Richard Jefferies and D. H. Lawrence, indeed for all great artists? I do not know. At times I want to hide myself away in shame, fearing that I have exploited you, and others, for my âlittle ego', as Hitler calls it.
I think of you. Often. Oh so often.
L. W.
He had replied, urging her to write. Only thereby would her spirit come to flower.
Let your story grow like mushrooms undisturbed in heat and
darkness
. The darkness is there all right; it is discernible in your eyes, in your very soul sprung from the dark clay of Suffolk, which, properly drained and cultivated, grows twenty sacks of wheat an acre. You should think steadily of Treherne's âorient and immortal wheat, from everlasting to everlasting'. Only
you
are stopping yourself; nobody else; let nothing stand in your way; write, write, write yourself clear and free and uprising as Ariel out of your dark experience, your aloneness. Let your light come clear from under the stifling bushel measure, let your spirit rise to the sun and upper air where poets feed.
Letters from Laura Wissilcraft, which had arrived about once every four weeks, as the moon was waxing full, were laments, veiled cries of pain: passages of vivid prose describing the
constriction
of life by day in a small thatched cottage where she lived with her parents; and the agonies of darkness spent in the same bed with her grandmother. For the past twenty years, ever since her childhood, she had lain awake, in agony, enduring snoring, snoring, snoring; even as during the day she had to feed her father's pigs, the noises of which were but a continuation of the darkness noises.
Her last letter had come a fortnight before. He had replied, urging her either to join one or another of the Services, or to write, write, write.
Dear Laura,
Agarics and other fungi called poetry often arise directly out of a permanently distressed human frustration, from a deficiency of love in childhood, from mortification similar to the pearl bubbled up to close perforation in an oyster's shell. A minor literature comes from opposition, which refines experience beyond the agony of the commonplace to truth and beauty. Sometimes a major literature, but that is rareâDostoievskyâas the compassion that suffering engenders.
I am much like you. My present unhappy position is due wholly
to my own defects of character. My wife and children have left me. I write this sitting with my feet inside a corn sack stuffed with straw and labelled BODGER GREAT SNORING: while the more the fire roars in the hearth of this floorless roomâa mere pit in damp earth, for building was stopped at the outbreak of warâthe greater the
refrigerating
effect of the draught rushing to gate-crash the flames. Nothing is what it seems, remember; the most fortunate people, so considered by others, are often the most unhappy. So please take heart and write the book I know you have it in you to write.
To this pit-like room, where Phillip sat writing, Billy brought a telegram. It was from Desmond Neville. He was to arrive that night at Crabbe station on the 7.12 train from London. Phillip drove the Silver Eagle to the station, taking Billy and âPinwheel'.
“The man who is coming used to be in my Bloodhound Patrol of Boy Scouts.”
“Good heavens, sir, what are we coming to. Well, one more won't make any difference to the âConvalescent Home',” said âPinwheel'.
The approaching lightless train hooted in the crepuscular night. Rattle of wheels around a curve was borne through to them, a ruddy glow throbbed on low clouds. He felt nervous and uncertain as the train clanked to a standstill amidst a cloud of steam.
A few shadowy figures alighted and hurried away, their faces looking like masks. Phillip, hidden behind a loaded trolley, recognised the outline of Desmond's head. Overcoming reluctance, he went to meet him. After a brief greeting he took the other man's suitcase and they walked together to the ticket office and passed under a masked light, by which he saw that Desmond had not altered in any way. He was as lithe and fit as ever, without a grey hair.
“I expect you would like a drink?”
“Yes, there was nothing on the train.”
They drove down to the quay and pulled up at the Schooner Inn.
Over a pint of beer the visitant declared that he had received a shock in the dimness of the station. “I saw a skull-like grin through the steam, and heard a voice which I did not recognise.”
“You look exactly the same.”
“I can't get over your changed appearance,” went on Desmond. “Not only is your hair grey, but your whole attitude and
personality
are different.” He repeated, “I didn't recognise you when I heard you speaking, and saw before me the grin of a nervous death's head.”
Evidently you have not learned that âwords are given us to conceal our thoughts', thought Phillip. Aloud he said, “I'm probably inside out by now. That inside was always escaped from in the old hectic days. I am conscious now with my subconscious mind. Which means I live outside time.”
“âThe asylum of time',” quoted Desmond. “I forget exactly what poem that comes from.”
“Someone said to me I looked as though I'd really died in the war. It wasn't that. The war hardly touched me.”
“Then what was it?”
*
That night as they lay in bed with the door open between the bedrooms, Desmond told his troubles. Estranged from his wife, he had fallen in love with a younger woman who had recently left him. She had gone home from Africa to her parents in England with a child that was his. He had followed her to England. Being a Catholic he could not get a divorce. He had not slept for many nights, thinking of her.
He added one more night of sleeplessness, for he talked on into the small hours.
Phillip was tired. He knew if he did not sleep he would be jaded and prone to anxiety the next day. He lay awake, acquiescent in his own hopelessness while Desmond's voice went slowly on and on: how his father had deserted his mother, and now, his uncle having died, his father, being a crook, would do him out of an inheritance of fifty thousand pounds left to his only brothers' eldest son subject to his father's life interest, which meant the income.
“For I've had found out,” went on the voice, “that my father had never been married to my mother, and therefore my father's son, by a legal marriage, will inherit. And I have no funds with which to contest the case. Also my father's a solicitor, so I've not much hope. Look how he treated my mother.”
“How is she, Des?”
“She died of cancer while I was abroad. Two years ago.”
There was silence for a while, then Desmond went on with his story. And the slow voice continued heavily from the next room at intervals throughout the night. All his capital was in a gold mine. If the mine were worked properly, he would make his fortune. At the moment he was very hard up. He had spent his last pound note on the railway ticket from London.
Phillip began to wonder if after all he were not dead: if the events of the last few months were but parts of a phantasmagorial
variation of the past returning in the distorted etheric vibrations of the death-released spirit of the world. In a higher sense he himself was more than half-dead; so was Desmond; Teddy and âYipps'; his sister Elizabeth was dead. Lost to life. Hitler was dead. None of them knew they were dead. The black-out was that of the nether world. They were all in purgatory, unaware of their deaths, struggling to get through to the living world through the veil of daemonic possession. Hitler was Faustus, trying to bring a millennia of youth to the dying Western world.
Back to Desmond. There was neither art nor culture in South Africa among white men. So Desmond had not developed
intellectually
in what to a white man was alien country, possessed by the spirits of innumerable dead Africans. So Desmond had stayed spiritually static, homesick for lost life. More fantasy. Indigestion. Worry. Be sensible. You know, you can't help feeling a liking for Des. They were almost like brothers again, as he had felt in 1922, lying in the little bedrooms of the cottage on the Devon coast, where Desmond had come to visit him. It had been a calm and serene September; and through most of the darkness they had talked as in the then-far-off nights of the war when on leave together.
But the break in 1916, over Lily Cornford, had remained. And in 1919, when he had written to ask Desmond, then set-up in Essex by his uncle, if he could pay back some of the money he had lent him, Desmond's reply had come on a postcard, calling him a swindler. Poor Des, how he had felt betrayed by himself over Lily Cornford. Especially after she had been killed by a Zeppelin torpedo.
*
Giving up the idea of sleep, Phillip told Desmond of the farm, of how the family seemed to be falling apart, and what was left of life with it. He told him of the underlying facts of the war, as he saw it; and prophesied that at the end of it the European markets would be closed to Britain: that when the gold reserves were gone, and Britain was forced to turn to the Empire under a new systemâor perish as a first-class powerâBritish land would be the precious heritage of the nation, and with stable markets farmers would bring back a healthy England.