The Phoenix Generation (43 page)

Birkin's brown face, with its long bony structure, giving the idea of inheritance from some Florentine Renaissance forebear, seemed to smoulder with controlled life.

“Yes, it is their religion, the Golden Calf. But there are as many Gentiles as Jews involved in the money racket. It is not exclusively the Jewish banker we are up against. It is the obsolescent
world-finance
system which we strive to get altered, by the will of the people at a General Election.”

“May I ask you a leading question, Sir Hereward? I have met two men who have left the I.S.P. One was Frolich, the other Jock Kettle. Why were they expelled?”

“William Frolich was appealing almost exclusively on an
anti-Semitic
platform. As for Kettle, we found out that he was a burglar in his spare time, and used to crack cribs when we took him with us to our big meetings up north. Also he is rabidly anti-Jew. Our party was not and is not anti-Semitic. We have said again and again that, just as our Empire consists of many races and creeds, so we are not concerned with what might be called racialism. But if any man or group of men, such as Communists, act in such a manner as to cause division we shall, when we come to power, give warning that any disloyalty to Crown and Empire will bring expulsion, by withdrawal of passport. We all know that many Jews fought for Britain and Empire in the Great War. How then can we, ex-service men ourselves, be against our old
comrades
-in-arms?

“Maddison, I will say this. If war is declared on Hitler it will not be because he wants Danzig, which is German, to return to the Fatherland; nor will it be because he demands the Polish Corridor, which is Silesian and therefore German. These places are no concern of the British people, or of the British Government. If war is declared, it will be a war of the Moneylenders' Revenge.”

One morning in late July of the year 1939 Phillip was standing in the weedy garden of the empty, dark and damp cottage which he intended to recondition and live in by himself one day, when Lucy appeared by the open farmhouse door a few yards away, and said that he was wanted on the telephone.

“It’s Rippingall asking if you would speak to Captain
Runnymeade
. He sounds
very
reformed, I suppose it’s his marriage.”

Rippingall was back with his old master once more. Mrs. Rippingall cooked.

With a feeling of dread, of one more weight upon his mind, Phillip picked up the receiver lying on the refectory table, and listened to the voice of Rippingall asking him to hold on a moment, he would fetch the Captain.

He imagined the ruddy-faced, pepper-and-salt trousered figure pulling itself out of an armchair beside a silver tray holding
decanter
of whisky, glasses, and syphon of soda: saw him moving, slightly bent-backed, through the doorway to the telephone on the wall of the passage outside. Soon he heard footfalls and breathing; a pause while the figure seated itself beside the little table: then the familiar slow and somewhat drawling tones were asking him if he would care to bring the children over to a party that afternoon.

Phillip hesitated; and his hesitation communicated itself, for the voice said, “Leave that goddam farm, Maddison, and give
yourself
a break. A friend of yours tells me she is looking forward to seeing you.”

“Thank you very much for the invitation,” Phillip replied, with forced joviality. Was it Melissa? He forebore to ask. “I’d love to come. All the children? There are five, you know.”

“Bless my soul,” the voice was slightly mocking. “Very well then, at three o’clock this afternoon. Bring any friends you like.” The receiver went down abruptly at the other end.

Oh, why am I so weak always? I
don’t
want to go. He saw
himself
surreptitiously pouring away most of Captain Runnymeade’s over-generous drinks into the hearth. He hadn’t been there since the early spring, when there had been a fire to conceal his furtive act, for the flames of the seasoned logs of split ship’s-timber had been of the same hue and lambency as those of the alcohol leaping up the chimney.

While he was trying to arrange in his mind all the jobs that needed to be done as he sat on the stool by the table, Lucy came into the parlour from the kitchen. She carried an armful of clothes, for she had been ironing the shirts, pants, vests, and other smalls belonging to the seven individuals of the family. There were two little daily maids, but since they were untrained the burden of the general work fell upon Lucy.

“Did I hear something about the children and a party?” she
enquired
lightly, as she put down the clothes on the corner of the table.

“I shouldn’t have accepted! I
must
go to Yarwich market today! I don’t like those rich social fritterers at Staithe. They’re idling while the country is declining into war.” There was the worried look on his face that she knew so well; and dreaded. “Why
must
you carry the ironing in your arms? Haven’t I bought you a special basket for the job? They look so higgledy-piggledy, carried like that.”

To help lighten Lucy’s tasks he had bought several wicker baskets of differing shapes and sizes; one to carry the ironing, others for egg-collecting, shopping, clothes-pegs, picnics on the marshes, kindling wood for the fire—but, like most good intentions, this one had gone awry.

One or another of the baskets was as likely as not to contain such varied objects as a cat with kittens; a heap of old magazines and papers; a mass of rotting weeds left in the so-called garden, or worn and patched shoes belonging to the children.

The shoes were usually old, for Lucy was economical, keeping each pair, as a child outgrew them, for the next child. Some of them were almost heirlooms, with the clothes. Thus Jonathan, the youngest, wore, when he came out of the bathroom in the evening with David, the old faded blue dressing-gown, with faint suggestion of yellow stain that no amount of washing would
remove
, which had been made with such loving care for Peter, her first-born, twelve years before.

“Yes, of course a basket for these clothes is proper, but I had to come in here so I grabbed them without thinking.”

“Today is Saturday, and I’d planned to go to market and buy two calves. Also a new stackcloth, as corn harvest is near. I bought a good cloth at auction two years ago, now it’s lying in the Corn Barn, ripped and near-useless, after flapping for two days through a half-gale last season on one of the barley stacks up by the Great Bustard Wood.”

To prevent it flapping loose on the stack in that exposed place he had taken up a heavy rope for Matt and Luke to tie round the stack. To this heavy girdle the lesser cloth-ropes were to be secured, he had told Luke; but when he had gone up the following day to look at it in a high wind, he had found the new rope unused, while each of the guide-ropes of the cloth had been tied to a heavy lump of steam coal. These weights had torn the ropes from the cloth in places, leaving eighty square yards of jute to thunder and beat with the wind under them. In two days the cloth had flapped itself to tatters.

“Also I must get some shackle-bolts to set-up the torn-off spring of the green trailer. This is the fourth time they have been torn off by backing the trailer when it is hitched to the tractor. But I don’t suppose I’ll find my tools in the workshop, to do the job. The men take them without authority and never put them back.”

Lucy waited beside the pile of children’s clothes. She looked pensive. She was waiting for Phillip to stop talking, before getting on with her work. She tried to be patient with Phillip, knowing that he could, when tired, talk himself into desperation.

“It’s all very difficult, I know. But you’ve done splendidly, considering what the farm was like when we came.” She made to move away.

“But we haven’t
started
yet! There’s no change in the mental outlook on the farm, so there is no material change. Look at the pigs! I’ve asked Matt again and again that the used sump-oil from the tractor, which I put in a special can, be used for rubbing on the pigs’ backs to kill the ticks. But day after day, week after week, the pigs’ backs remain studded with grey rivets, sucking away all profit. ‘What do yew want to do that for? Nobody else does it about here. Pigs always have ticks, ’tis nature,’ says Matt. I’ve proved that the ticks die when the oil is squirted on them, too. It’s the same in the cowhouse. Never a cow washed before
milking
, and water laid on from the artesian well by Brother Laurence.”

Lucy said gently, “I think you should try to get another cowman.”

“You know very well I can’t. I haven’t a service cottage! You
know I let outside people have them, when they come with their hard-luck stories. Luke lives in a council house, I have no service cottage for another cowman. Do you know, the splashes of dung dropped by cows belonging to the old tenant, who left bankrupt all those years ago now, are still on the concrete floors! As for germs, they are ‘book-squit’. ‘Whoever saw a garm,’ says Matt.”

“Yes, I know,” said Lucy, wearily. “But you must take Matt as you find him. He says to me, when he brings up the milk, ‘I’m always serving the master’s interests, but I don’t seem able to please him.’ He’s good with young stock, you know, he’s splendid. But he
is
afraid of innovations.”

“Of course I realize that Matt works hard, that he has a lot to do, seven days a week—stockman, shepherd, pigman—looking after forty ewes, all the young stock, cows, and pigs in the yards generally, and helping with haysel and harvest. But I don’t want a farm like that of the late tenant. That failed because everyone on it was what he was. I want a new farm. So we must start with the human beings. If we are to do better, we must all change in our minds first. The mental blue-print of the present is no good. Listen to what Runnymeade and nearly all of his sort say about farming—only a fool or a crank would put his money into it. Every bloody time I go over there, he says the same thing! ‘What beats me, Maddison, is why you waste your time and talent on that goddam farm. You don’t get anything out of it, as far as I can see, except worry. Then why do you go on with it? You’re an odd fellow, Maddison. And why the devil do you listen to that fellow Birkin?’ Then like a fool I try and explain that Birkin is attempting to do on a national scale what I am trying to do on a small scale: a sort of desperate attempt to avoid the coming smash. Then the hunt is on. Runnymeade throws in remarks to cause a row, which he enjoys, as he sits back, stimulated to help himself to more whisky. You know his Polish mistress, Stefania Rozwitz? He likes to see us arguing—he tries to get me to make her lose her temper—he’s impotent, his desire for stimulation and excitement covers a hollow man, so he cannot bear to be quiet. Or it may be, ‘Tell us about your pal Schicklgruber, Maddison, you met him at Nürnberg. Is it true he’s a pederast?’ Like a fool, I run, trailing his aniseed. The hunt is up, Runnymeade fills the glasses, and before long I am the fox, or the aniseed-dolly on a string, doubling all the time to answer his questions, his provocative damned silly idle-bodied bloody questions, while knowing all the while that he is hoping that Stefania will turn on me and make a meal of the hunted fox.”

“Still, perhaps at a children’s party it will be different.”

“Great Britain has become either Prolonged Dole, or Great Cocktail. Talk, talk, talk, nobody taking off his coat to do
anything
, Idlers and sots, indifferent to the truth that the soil of a nation is its mother, that the fertility of the mother of Britain is going down the metropolitan sewers into the sea, polluting the rivers——” He unclenched his hands. “I’m sorry, Lucy. You’ve heard all this rant before. Mental to physical, and physical back to an occluded psyche—the minds of the people polluted with money-based ideas.”

Yes, Lucy had heard it all before, many times, so many times that she had come to accept it, together with his chronic
complaining
and increasing irritability.

“I’m an interfering waster, not Runnymeade. Oh well—if war comes, I’ll dye my hair and rejoin my regiment—
if
they’ll have me.”

He went out. His eye took in the garden. Hours of hoeing needed to kill the weeds. And, fatally, he peered inside the adjoining cottage, which was called the Children’s. It was chaotic like the farm. Toys broken and flung about anywhere. Draw-leaf table stained with spilled tea and cocoa. Boots, shoes scattered over the floor. A feeling of anguished desperation came over him whenever he saw it, for it seemed to him that his hopes of a family strongly and truly based on the land—order, neatness, strength—were being infected as by spores from the decadent past. And lately his thoughts had taken a dangerous trend: that the Copleston pattern was visible in his children. Thank God that Billy was like his mother, the nonpareil Barley. If only Billy were four years older, and eighteen. Oh no. Billy would have to go into the army!

Yes, he would dye his hair, and get away in time. Then Billy would be in a reserved occupation.

Lucy was upstairs, tidying the children’s night nursery and making the beds. Phillip went up to her.

“Lucy, please help me. I feel that if you don’t
insist
on tidiness it will wreck both the family and the farm, if order is not insisted on with each of us. Look at your two maids in the kitchen. You allow them to leave the sink dirty after washing up. Can’t you see that they clean it, and wring out the mop, and stand it up to air, and that they keep the soap-dish clean? And those lower shelves in the cupboards—they’re an awful example for the children—there is no good in the old broad and easy-going way—
it will bring the family to ruin—where is the four-thousand-acre estate of your family——? Stop! What did I do with the Fawley land? I behaved in such a way, with my silly little bits of writing, that I virtually threw it away.”

Utter weariness overcame him; words ceased. He leant his head against a wall, feeling that the
mortmain,
the dead hand of Copleston, would inevitably reduce him to failure.

“I do
try
and get the children to be tidy,” said Lucy,
desperately
. She thought that Phillip’s remarks were utterly unfair;
she
had never been the one to squander money. She remembered what Penelope had said to her, and how
true
it was.
Isn’t
it
better
for
children
to
be
happy,
even
if
they
are
a
little
untidy,
than
to
be
subject
all
the
time
to
restraint,
and
perhaps
fear?
That was what Phillip was always telling people, and also had written in the Donkin novels—when she first knew him.

“Don’t heed what I say. I’m using you as a scapegoat, Lucy. Please forget it all.”

He returned downstairs to the parlour. Even so, why won’t she pay the shop bills weekly? She promised she would. I bought her a book for the grocer’s account, I give her the housekeeping money regularly. Now she owes four weeks’ account at Dodman’s. It isn’t fair, those little people have to pay on the nail for their goods. I had to pay for those four weeks yesterday. No! She is overworked. She is kind. She forgets, as I forget—what I——

He sat by the telephone, trying to persuade himself to telephone Runnymeade and make his excuses for not taking the children to the party.

While he was sitting motionless on the form Jonathan, the youngest, appeared in the doorway. At first the child did not see his father. He was four years old. He resembled Phillip at that age except for the colour of the eyes, which were brown. He reminded Phillip of his cousin Willie. Recently he had fallen and broken an arm between wrist and elbow. It was now encased in plaster-of-Paris. Several of Jonathan’s street friends among the village children had written their initials and made crayon
drawings
in various colours upon the cast.