The Phoenix Generation (19 page)
Read The Phoenix Generation Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
*
The theme of
The
Blind
Trout
was formulating itself. Phillip wrote rapidly.
In the stricken rivers of Great Britain, first the small invisible forms of life, diatoms and cyclops, deprived of oxygen, cease to exist, with the microscopic vegetable growths on which the underwater nymphs live. Then the nymphs—Olive Dun, Pale Watery, Iron Blue, Grannom, Green Drake—are no more. Trout eggs, laid in autumn in the gravelly shallows, are attacked by fungus disease. Gradually, as more sludge pours into the rivers, a creeping paralysis of death spreads down its bed, once alert with multitudinous life. There comes a period in summer when the heat of the sun takes what little oxygen the water holds in solution from the air: the moment of lifelessness, of asphyxiation, of untruth, suddenly arrives. Older trout, which hitherto have survived, thin and dark, turn on their sides, gape irregularly and drift downstream without poise. Pick one up, and you will see it covered with a grey mucus—the sweat of asphyxiation.
The so-called coarser fish—carp, roach, tench, rudd—exist sluggishly, but as more oxygen is absorbed by the silt of decay, they, too, die. Last to remain are the eels, but even eels must breathe; and when the water is entirely dead, acid and sour, they are gone. Once a pure English stream, there remains now but an open drain, the divine life once within the living water destroyed by an uncontrolled industrialism.
Will all our English rivers die, or will the spirit of resurgence, now animating the few, spread until our nation is reborn? There is yet time. There is still hope. And there is faith. For in all those rivers of Great Britain which are pure in spirit the smolt are going down to the sea.
That to me is a marvellous thing, like the music of Delius, and green corn growing: like swallows nesting in the porch of our farmhouse, and the moon—the nightingale moon—rising over the marshes which lie to the sea; like the Rhine music of Wagner, when the lyric gold of life is safe with the Rhine-Maidens.
Smolt are little salmon which, born in the headwaters of rivers and their tributaries, and wearing the moorland red-and-black spotted dress of trout for about two years, suddenly become strangely excited, assume a silver sea-coat, and seek the ocean water of ancestral memory.
No longer than a man’s hand at two years and weighing between two and three ounces, a smolt may return to its native river after two or three months in the sea, weighing four or five pounds, the length of a man’s forearm.
Or it may remain in the sea two years, and return a forty-pounder.
For some reason unknown, many of the Wye fish stay two and
sometimes
three years feeding on herrings of the Greenland shoals, and prawns of the deep submarine ledges of Europe’s end below Ireland; this has made the Wye the most famous salmon river in England.
I have stared at smolts jumping in a West Country river as they went down with the current, always head to stream in the clear water wimpling over the blue and brown stones at the tail of the pool; or, in the fast runs below, prickling the brown water as they dashed at the frail water-flies dropping their eggs at sunset.
I have seen hundreds dropping over the weirs of mill-ponds; while the turtle doves from Abyssinia were throbbing in the blackhorns, I have followed them down the valley, ever widening with its steep
hillsides
of oak, spruce, larch, and rock-set grass, to the broader pastures which end in the marshes and sea-walls of the tide’s head.
From western Wye and Irish Shannon, Tay, Coquet and Usk, Hampshire Avon, Scottish Tweed, Devon’s Otter, Taw, Torridge and Tavy—from scores of fresh rivers in Britain, Germany, Sweden, and the eastern seaboard of Canada—the smolts find theirs home in the Atlantic; and from there they return in their season to their native rivers, as salmon, where, if they can escape their enemies during the months of spring and summer, when they do not feed, they will spend themselves for the spirit, or future, of their race; and, thus achieving immortality, will die, and so return to the Atlantic in dissolution; as salts of the sea to the great father.
Once upon a time before the pollutions of the Industrial Age, there were salmon in all our rivers. Romans saw salmon leaping in the Thames, and named them Salmo Salar—the Sea Leaper.
One day our children, or maybe their children, will see salmon
jumping again in the Pool of London; and watch them rolling up, showing their square tails in play, below the piers of London Bridge.
One day our children, or their children, will save millions of pounds—the hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of factory waste, sewage sludge, and other valuable chemicals now cast into our rivers, and after treatment, put them on our land, our England—the great mother of our race.
Anciently the fish was the symbol of regeneration: as baptism is the symbol of the new consciousness of faith, of hope, of
clarity.
We are aspiring, struggling, learning—just beginning to believe we can build a fine new Britain. We are passing through an age of industrial
darkness
; but beyond it, I can see salmon leaping again in both the Rhine and its ancient tributary Thames.
Once again it was St. Martin’s Little Summer, and time to plant trees—scores of little trees—in the field above Malandine which Phillip had bought for
£
100. With Rippingall’s help, he marked out three triangular areas at the corners of the field, to be put out as wind-shields. There were two kinds of pine trees, the
quick-growing
insignis
and the slow
austriachus,
for the front line defences. And a hundred beech trees, two feet high, with some ash, sycamore, and oaks. These were for the support line. Within their shielding were the reserves, mainly larches of two varieties, Japanese and the English. He imagined doves nesting in these, and perhaps a sparrow-hawk. Behind these three lines hawthorn bushes and silver birch would lighten the interior of the field.
Rippingall told him the village opinion: no trees would survive the blasts of the salt south-west winds in that high and exposed place. Certainly in the adjoining plantation in a higher field the beeches and firs had died out.
“I don’t want to hear village opinion.”
“I agree, sir, I was wrong to listen to ‘the gossip of the servants’ hall’.”
Phillip told him he remembered when first he had come to Malandine, in the second summer after the war. Most of the firs were then leaning from rotted roots, their trunks bored by
woodpeckers
and old nests of sparrowhawks and magpies in their disverdured tops. Now all but one trunk was gone, cut and removed as firewood by the villagers during the General Strike of 1926. The one fir-tree that remained stood at the narrow end of the plantation, and farthest from the cruel sea-winds.
The epithet was not sentimental, he declared: the trees had suffered a slow asphyxiation from hard-blown salt upon the leaves by which they breathed. Slowly they died where they stood.
“Like the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, if I may be so bold as to say so, sir.”
“Year after year after year their lung-cells have been blighted by Channel gales. A tree’s life is a man’s life, which, Conrad wrote, you may recall, has one basic theme: he was born, he suffered, he died.”
The Gartenfeste—the Garden Strong-point—was the name Phillip had given to the garden room of his grandfather’s house, where he had lived after the old man had died—an empty house, resonant with his own footfalls as he walked about, during those winter nights after he had left the army, excited by the scenes which arose before him while he was writing his first novel. That had been his true life: the life of the spirit. Now, thirteen years later, he must recapture the mood of that secret and exciting time of the first flowering of his spirit. The semi-ruinous linhay on the hill was to be converted to a studio, with a concrete dugout below. It would be lit by electric light supplied by a car-dynamo driven by a propeller on top of a pole. Here he would live alone, and keep, like Arnold Bennett, to a strict routine, with every morning and part of the night given to his writing.
“We’ll have to sleep in the tallet over the linhay, Rippingall.”
“Sir, I can sleep anywhere—on the ground under the stars, if necessary. At Mons,” reflected Rippingall, “when we arrived on that Sunday afternoon, we all bathed in the Canal. What a relief after those Hommes forty, Chevaux Huit railway trucks. As I was saying, we were all enjoying ourselves in the canal, when suddenly, on the skyline, a row of horsemen was presented to our wondering eyes. The Alarm was sounded. Every man back to his unit was the order. There the Uhlans were, lances and flat-topped helmets, beating it back to Berlin. I slept that night under a G.S. waggon,” he added, inconsequentially.
The first thing to do in the field was to make a map of it. With the leather-cased tape borrowed from Pa, Phillip measured the lengths of the hedge boundaries while Rippingall took bearings with the prismatic compass. The field lay almost due south, facing the Channel. Behind the northern hedge stood a
semi-ruinous
beech plantation. This he hoped one day to buy and replant with oak, the native tree of the seaboard country.
They had brought sacks and sleeping bags in the car, with kettle, trivet, and frying pan. It was cold in the tallet, the loft over the cattle shed. The fire below filled it with smoke. So they kipped down by the fire. At dawn Phillip got up and walked about the
hilltop. Above the plantation Polaris shone, coldly but faithfully, six lengths from the beam-end of the Plough. The earth had
revolved
since he had climbed to the tallet, so that the
constellations
of night appeared to have moved from east to west. The moon, too, had come up from below Dartmoor, which lay north, and now was descending to the ocean whose great pulse came from the moon. How strange that the moon, captive in her own serene orbit, ruled not only the tides, but all phases of human life. As Richard Jefferies had written, the sum of all nature was maintained in the beauty of Eve, the great earth mother: in the tenderness and sympathy of woman extending far beyond her own species. If man was the essence of the sun, woman was the essence of the moon, which ruled the menstrual or monthly phases of woman—the ‘flowers’ of the Victorians, the ‘curse’ of the Georgians. Why the ‘curse’? Was it from the Garden of Eden: the fall: the serpent’s wisdom: or some visionary forecast or prophesy that woman would one day rule the world, as the female dominated in the lesser worlds of ants and bees? The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine——
He had brought the saplings with him from the weedy nursery of the Fawley Estates. Rippingall and he had dug them up at night. The War Department would only let them grow wild and then probably uproot and burn them.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Hullo, old soldier. How did you sleep?”
“Mustn’t grumble, sir.”
Day after day Phillip and Rippingall dug holes for the saplings, stood them in, spread the roots, shook soil over them gently so that the rootlets would have no checking air-spaces. Then each hole was filled and trodden down firmly before the soil was tumped hard with a post to prevent evaporation.
Phillip was not used to physical work, of shovelling and bending down hour after hour. During the first days before the rhythm of body work was established, there was a confusion of mental dross due to the changing metabolism of the body. In physical stress it seemed that the world as he had encountered it was largely a mosaic of lies. Most of what had been told to him and said of him in the past was untrue. The figment of his old
headmaster
often reappeared to tell him he was the worst boy in the school; and now, ironically, according to a recent letter from the same source, his achievements in the literary world had added lustre to that institution which was proud to number him among
its Old Boys. And the spirit of the school, unwittingly, had failed to recognise the talent which now was applauded.
But that was the dross of thought. Mankind learned painfully, by trial and error. It was a good life. The digging and planting cleared his blood, and so the mind. He became optimistic. The light had broken through the darkness of England, and of Germany too. There would never be another Great War.
“Time for tea, old soldier.”
Every day was of the same pattern. Phillip made a fire of sticks and boiled the kettle. While the autumnal afternoon was absorbed in a dull quietude of solar decline, Rippingall made toast of brown bread, butter, and bloater paste. The tea warmed Phillip, sudden joy expunged the querulous fatigue-thoughts of the last quarter of an hour. Food was important. How fortunate he had been, how kind in intention his parents had always been. Likewise his old headmaster: how generous of the school to welcome him back as one of its
alumni
! And greatest of all he had the
friendship
of one whose faith was based, like Barley’s, on pure intelligence. He imagined Melissa’s face, calm and steadfast in its own beauty, a spiritual love like that of Matilda Wesendonk for Richard Wagner. Now he would be able to re-create scenes and faces passing through his mind no longer in fatigue like a much-worn and patched film through an old bioscope. The spirit of Barley had come again into his life. Here in this field, here on this very sward had they lain side by side, at this very place where the blue flowers of wild chicory bloomed every summer. And now her spirit was intertwined with that of Melissa, for both were of the same essence.
*
Ernest arrived one day at Monachorum to tell his sister Lucy that their father was dead. Since his bronchitis Pa had been sleeping in the glass-walled annexe to the sitting-room of Down Close. Ernest said he had found Pa lying on the floor when he went downstairs that morning. His eyes were fixed in a stare, his face had a look of suffocation. Had he tried to get to Ernest in the night? There he lay, having tripped over the thick cord of his dressing gown. There was a bruise on his forehead. His hands were half-shut with trying to claw himself up from the parquet floor of discoloured deal.
Ernest told Lucy these details in a voice unaffected by emotion. What was worrying him was not so much Pa’s death—after all he was eighty-two—but what would become of himself now that
‘those thieves’ of the Legal Reversionary Society would have all the family money.
Three days later Pa was buried beside his wife in the small graveyard of the smaller Saxon church above the river. At least, Ernest thought his mother was buried there; her grave had no stone; the only mark was an overgrown flowering-currant bush. This bush also served for Pa, since brother and sister agreed that Pa would not want a stone on his grave either.
“What will happen now, to Ernest, Lucy?”
Phillip knew that Lucy’s three brothers had sold their reversions years before. As for the house, which had belonged to Ernest, that carried a first and second mortgage. The family trust had provided the money for both mortgages. The trustees were
members
of the Copleston family, together with the so-called family solicitor; for the legal business, or firm, had changed hands twice since Pa’s marriage settlement was made. Ernest having declared that he had no money, the mortgagees took over Down Close, with its two acres of garden and the Works which had been built on part of the land, and put it up for sale. Within a few days it was sold. Phillip asked Lucy how much Ernest had got for it.
“Nothing, according to Ernest,” said Lucy. She went on to explain that the only offer for the whole lot was seven hundred pounds, which Ernest had accepted.
“But it’s worth far more than that. What did Ernest mortgage it for?”
“I think Ernest said seven hundred pounds.”
“But there is the second mortgage, of three hundred pounds, which you provided.”
“I don’t really know anything about it, Phillip.”
So Phillip abandoned his tree-planting and sought out Ernest, who was reading
Cohen
on
the
telephone
in the coach-house of Down Close.
“That was the only bid, so I sold it.” He muttered, “I’ve had just about enough of those thieves.”
“But, Ernest, you signed the reversion deed, after all.”
Ernest would say no more, so Phillip went back to Monachorum.
“I think he means when the Boys sold their reversions, they signed away all and any moneys which might come to them, and now the lawyers are claiming the legacy from Aunt Andromeda which she promised to Ernest when her lady’s maid died. The lady’s maid had the interest during her lifetime, then the money was to go to Ernest. Her maid died a month before Pa, and now they say Ernest has no right to it.”
“But a legacy isn’t a reversion.”
“I don’t really know, but Ernest did sign for everything that might come to him, one way or another.” Lucy looked flushed. Why could not Phillip let Ernest get on with his own affairs? It was Ernest’s own lookout if he lost his money.
Phillip went into Shakesbury and saw the house agents who had sold Down Close.
“I must admit I was surprised when Mr. Copleston told us to accept the offer of only seven hundred pounds. He asked us to find a buyer some time ago, and the only offer was from Mr. Solly, the farmer down the lane.”
From the house agents, Phillip went to see the farmer, who lived in the lane beyond Down Close. Mr. Solly weighed about eighteen stone although he was not very tall. He was jubilant about his good luck.
“I wor prepared to go to sixteen hun’erd, my bid was in for years, cor’, wasn’t I surprised-like when Mr. Ernest let it go like he did.”
Phillip motored back fast to Monachorum. Ernest was staying there with Lucy.
“Why didn’t you try and get the bid raised, Ernest? Solly tells me he was prepared to go to sixteen hundred pounds.”
“Oh, I was fed up with the whole business. After all, that was the only bid.”
“But the house was worth more than seven hundred, otherwise the trustees wouldn’t have allowed that second mortgage of three hundred. And the money came from Lucy’s share of the marriage settlement. The fact is, you owe her three hundred. What are you going to do about all that machinery in the Works? Those lathes and other stuff, as well as the gas engine, are bolted to the concrete floor of the Works, and so don’t comprise landlord’s fixtures. Would you like me to go to London, and see the family solicitors? I’m sure there must be some mistake about your having signed away any legacy from elsewhere, as well as the reversions.”
“I thought about going up myself.”
That evening Phillip and Lucy had the house to themselves. She told him that Ernest, who had always been considered a confirmed bachelor, had met a girl while following the local
otter-hounds
. They seemed to like one another, for he had gone down for the week-end to meet her mother.
“Has she got any money?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“I sound like a bad, acquisitive character out of Jane Austen.”
“Oh no, my dear.” Lucy smiled uncertainly. “But I do wish sometimes that you would not take on other people’s troubles.”
Ernest came back looking glummer than ever. Only when asked did he mutter, “If I lived to be a hundred years old, I’d never see eye to eye with those thieves.”