The Phoenix Generation (51 page)

Birkin shifted his weight from the leg ruined in the war, and with eyes averted he said, “They might shoot me, as Jaurès was shot in Paris in August nineteen fourteen, for opposing the war.”

Phillip waited another few moments.

“I shall keep on, Maddison, while I can, to give a platform for peace, should our people want it.”

Phillip paused with his hand on the door-knob.

“I cannot see my country sink, without trying to do something to save it.”

“I understand, sir.”

Outside in the street the newsbills read:

NAZIS SEIZE DANZIG CUSTOMS

On the Saturday morning as Phillip was leaving his club the hall porter, who was sorting letters, said casually, “Well, it’s begun. They’ve bombed Warsaw this morning. Will you be wanting your bedroom tonight? I could do with it. Members are returning to Town.”

“No, thank you. Who told you?”

“Mr. Olson just came in and told me. I’ll cross your name off No. 10 then. Going home to the farm?”

“Yes, I’m a farmer this war. How queer.”

“Yes, it’s a queer business altogether,” the porter replied grimly. He was an old soldier from Belfast, with a wound from the Schwaben Redoubt at Thiepval on July the First, 1916, still
unhealed
. “Bloody queer, if you ask my opinion,” he iterated, and as his grim stare was maintained upon him, Phillip began to wonder if Irish Jack thought he might be responsible.

“I heard where you’d been last night,” he said in a lowered voice, “and I reckon Ould England could do with a few more blokes like him.” Then in a harsh Belfast brogue as another member came in, “I hear the Nationals of Golders Green and St. John’s Wood have bought up all the bully beef in London, and all I can say to that is, they can have their bully beef. Well,
goodbye
, sir, and good luck to ye. I’ll post any letters on to you. You’re lucky to be a farmer. Well, you got in at the right time. Wish I had your head. Goodbye, and don’t forget a turkey for me at Christmas.”

It was a dull journey home. All the way he passed omnibuses and coaches, filled with children with labels on their jackets. Nobody where he stopped for food or drink or petrol spoke of the war. England seemed quiet, as at something that was passing away; the old way of life, the old world.

“Oh,” said Lucy, as Phillip walked into the parlour, “so you’ve come back.” She seemed disappointed. He sat down in a chair. “I didn’t expect you,” she went on. “So I’m afraid you’ll find the place rather untidy.”

“I am sorry to haunt your mind so greatly with my horrible tensions of tidiness and efficiency.”

“If I had known——” she said. “Oh well, I expect you’ll want some tea. But, if only I’d known, I could have got everything ready for you. Rosamund said she would polish the table, but the little boys wanted to go bathing on the marshes, so she took them, it’s been so hot today. I’ll get you some tea.”

“Didn’t you get my letter?”

“Oh, did you write to me? I didn’t see any letter. Here’s your post.”

“What could have happened to it? Are my letters being censored already?”

He lay dejectedly in his leather armchair before turning to the heap of letters. Looking at the unopened envelopes, he saw that his letter to Lucy was among them. He was relieved; and put it in his pocket.

Lucy went into the kitchen. He heard her filling a kettle. The electric motor with its automatic switch throbbed with the pump, and water from the well splashed into the tank above.

Through the open door he saw the swallows, which had a late brood. One dived twittering from a purlin supporting the rafters. It returned almost at once, and flew into the parlour, and fluttered delicately from corner to corner, hesitating by the beam which crossed the ceiling, where hung a pipistrelle bat, a small model of a Sopwith Camel, and another of a Bristol Fighter. Then the bird fled silently through the doorway into the air outside.

The family was as used to the swallows, as the birds were used to them. The children loved them; as they loved the pipistrelle bats which sometimes at night came in the open windows and flitted to and fro across the room, to and fro erratically. One flitter-mouse had apparently decided that it liked the place because it lived by day on the beam. It flew off at twilight, and when it returned it did so by making an Immelmann turn, to cling with its feet and then to hang, with folded wings, beside the model of the Sopwith Camel, and watch with its jetty glinting eyes. It was tame.

Now the bat had a baby at her breast. Once Phillip had given her a drop or two of sherry on a match-stick; for bats like sherry. After taking several drops the bat flopped about on the floor
ticking with emotion. But with a nursing mother one had to be careful; alcoholic milk might cause her child to lose its grip on her fur, then it would fall off.

“Oh yes,” said Lucy, coming into the room, “before I forget. Captain Runnymeade called here while you were away, with Melissa and that Polish dancer, Stefania Rozwitz. They stayed to tea and got on very well with the children. The children
remembered
Stefania at the magician’s party.”

“Did Melissa say anything?”

“Only that she had to go back to London the next day. Oh yes, she asked me to tell you that the hybrid roseate tern had flown. Well, that’s about all that’s happened since you went away. Oh, how silly of me, I nearly forgot. Captain Runnymeade rang up this afternoon, and asked me to tell you he will be at the Frigate Inn tonight, and would you dine with him. I told him you were away, and I didn’t know when you were returning. He asked me to give you a message. He said, ‘Tell him that this war will mean the last of the country houses’.”

While she was getting tea he burned the letter to Lucy. Then, sitting on the floor he hid his head on his arms resting upon the form, and said, “I’ve been thinking that we ought to make a hiding place under the Bustard Wood, tunnelling into the chalk half-way up the steep slope from the meadows. It ought to be on the pattern of the German dug-outs in the downlands of the Siegfried Stellung. After all, the harbour here is the only
deep-water
anchorage at all tides on this coast. The children and you will be reasonably safe there during any bombardment.”

He noticed that Lucy was stitching some black cloth. “What’s that for?”

“The black-out curtains. It’s on the wireless, and also in the papers.”

“Half-way up the Bustard Wood will ensure good drainage. The entrances must be concealed, and the tunnel go deep into the hill. At night we can make a fire in the stove removed from the granary, and cook. The smoke can go up a shaft to the ground above, and up a pipe into a hollow tree there, where it will stray away.”

He saw himself stealing down at night to fetch water from the spring which flowed along a dyke in the meadow below. Rabbits abounded in the wood; he would shoot them with his yew-wood bow. Barley could be stored in one of the galvanised bins he had bought, and ground for griddle cake with pestle and mortar.
When bombs fell, and perhaps rockets, and the invasion passed on, they would come out. If the rest of the countryside were laid waste they would have a chance to survive for a week or two.

Lucy made the tea and put a cup near him on the floor.

“Yes, the children will love the idea of living in a cave. Oh, I forgot—my memory nowadays is like a sieve—Mr. Riversmill the painter came over this morning, and was painting the church across the river when Billy came down from scuffling the stubbles on the Bustard, and saw that he had taken one of the millboards out of your trouser press, and had painted the view on it. Mr. Riversmill turned round and shouted at him to go away. Billy said, ‘You’ve got my father’s trouser-press board, he wants that.’ ‘Who cares?’ said Riversmill. ‘This painting is more important than your father’s damned trousers.’ Billy told him you wouldn’t be able to get the picture of the church off, because paint hardened on cloth. ‘It’s my picture, you damned boy,’ shouted Riversmill. ‘And it’s my father’s trouser-press’ said Billy. He was quite upset. Anyway, I told him it didn’t matter, we could easily get some more board.”

“Good for Billy.”

“I suppose in London everyone was very much occupied with getting their children away?”

“Yes, there were lots of them obediently holding hands in queues.”

“Did you see anyone in particular?”

He lifted the cup slantingly so that it spilled a little before he put it down without seeming to know what he was doing. “I saw Birkin. He was rather subdued.”

“He did try so hard, poor dear.”

The bat dropped from the beam to his shoulder. He did not move, but sat there with head on arms.

“There,” said Lucy, “someone wants you, you see.”

The bat shuffled to seek the warmth at the back of the bent head, and settled against his neck.

“Did you like Birkin when you met him at Lady Breckland’s?”

“Oh yes. He was so courteous to everyone, wasn’t he?”

Henry Williamson (1895–1977) was a prolific writer best known for
Tarka the Otter
, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including
The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream
tetralogy and the fifteen-volume
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
, all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds.

His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, ‘He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.’