Young Phillip Maddison (31 page)

Lying on his back, knees crossed, one foot idly lifting, Phillip pondered what he had seen. Birds did do queer things sometimes. There was the robin who had the nest in the steep bank in the Backfield, immediately behind Mrs. Rolls’ garden fence. One morning it had flown with food to its nestlings, who were asleep. They were not hungry, so slept on. The robin spoke to them, they took no notice, so the mother bird had flown away over the spiked railings above the Rolls’ fence, where the Hill began. There were may bushes there; and from one of them had come the noise of hungry nestlings, chirruping with open beaks. Could the robin have two nests?

When he had shinned over the railings to search, the nest had turned out to be that of an accentor, as the books called the modest little hedgesparrow. What a wonderful discovery! The mother robin had given away the food her own young did not want! And yet the books said birds acted only and solely from instinct, and could not think for themselves!

It was heaven to lie on the chalky earth, among the slightly
prickly beech-covers, far away from all people. He picked up one of the covers, from which the brown seeds, shaped like wedges, had fallen. What ate them, besides woodpigeons? Was it mice that had made stores, which he had found in cracks and crannies of trees, or was it birds? It might be squirrels; though those cranny-stores looked more like trickles than mast packed in. Perhaps they had dropped in as they fell from the tree-tops, and had become chance stores of gravity? That sounded rather nice,
chance
stores
of
gravity.
Everything fell, sooner or later, back to earth again. He repeated the phrase to himself. It sounded like
wind-borne.
Dandelion and thistle seeds were wind-borne, drifting on the wind, riding airily in little spheres of light, glistening as they turned slowly over in the blue sky under the high invisible larks, their destiny unknown,
wind-borne,
to fall to earth by chance. Yet not a sparrow fell to earth, frozen dead in a hard winter such as the one Father had told him of, before he was born, without its Maker knowing of it.

Did the Maker know everything, then? Even a pebble from his catapult whizzing through the air and falling on the slate roofs of the flats in Charlotte Road? Mother would say that was coming from the sublime to the ridiculous. She would say
Hush
Phillip!
She often said that to him. The best thing was not to tell her anything. Father objected, and withheld his permission; Mother tried to hush him. O, why was he thinking of things at home, out here in his hunting grounds? He felt his cheeks to be thin again.

Wood-pigeons were cooing in the glade under the high cathedral beeches, a lovely spring sound, like the cry of lambs running and leaping at play in the field below. Many of the holes of the gally-birds, as the woodmen called them, so high in the beech bough above must be old ones; perhaps they did not nest in thoroughly rotten wood, knowing it to be unsafe. Did grubs feed on quite rotten wood, or did they need sap? If so, by the time a tindery bough was ready to fall, heavy and sodden with rain, the last grub would have left it. Could wood-lice climb so high from the ground, sixty feet or more? If so, would the gally-birds eat them? Spiders did not like wood-lice, they cut the silk to drop them off when he put them in their webs.

He got up, brushed the dry prickly mast-covers off his knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket, and walked down to the edge of the
wood. Strands of wire kept the sheep in the field from straying among the trees; and getting through the fence, he went to his next place of call, a spinney beside the road, at the edge of which stood the cottages of the woodsmen and farm labourers. Here the trees were thinner, being larch and ash-pole. The ground was covered with ivy. In places old rusty tins lay, half overgrown: and in one of them, an ancient biscuit box standing on its side, the paint on it nearly obliterated by exposure, was a robin’s nest. Near it was a thrush’s, on the ground at the base of a larch. These were duly photographed by the Brownie.

There were long gardens, filled with cabbages, between the border of the spinney and the cottage back-doors, which was pleasing, for then no-one could overlook what he was doing, and find his nests. A row of pollarded elms ended the gardens, and Phillip was peering into one of these, which was hollow, when he jumped back, thinking he had disturbed a snake: for the spitting, hissing noise had come as he was about to put his arm into the hole. Then he noticed a rat’s tail, and some feathers. Could it be an owl? His heart beat wildly with excitement. An owl’s nest! It would be as wonderful as finding a hawk’s! He retired to sit down in the ivy, in a circular and waving patch of sunshine, and delay the pleasure of exploring further.

He was watching the side of the hole, when a furry ear appeared, then a whisker, and finally part of a kitten’s head. His disappointment was great; still, it might very well be a wild cat, judging by the renewed spitting and yowly noises which greeted his face at the entrance of the hole. Accustoming his eyes to the darkness within, he counted five faces, all crouching against the far end. Well, it was quite an adventure, and something to write and tell Desmond about.

Creeping to the next of the old trees, which was covered with dead ivy, he found a robin’s nest about four feet from the ground, built between three intertwisted bines. It was made of the usual dry grass, and lined with moss and black horsehair; the eggs were a pale greyish-yellow faintly dappled all over the brownish-pink; there were five of them … but wait a minute! One was larger than the others, wider, less pointed, more rounded, faintly lavender-purple mottled … could it be? It was, it
was
a cuckoo’s egg!
Value two shillings, in Watkins and Doncaster’s catalogue! Not that he would ever think of selling such a treasure; but such a very high price showed just how
rare it was. None of the boys at school who collected eggs had ever found a cuckoo’s.

Putting it back in the nest with extreme care, he walked away, making his mind a blank, pretending not to have been near the tree, or that any nest was built in the dead ivy. It did not exist.

After wandering around as though aimlessly, while trills of happiness ran up his body, he approached the tree once more, as though casually; and re-enacted the surprise of seeing the larger egg
with the pinky-brown robin’s eggs. At length, taking out the egg, he strolled away in the direction of the gate, where his bicycle was hidden. Then, removing the tools from his tool bag, he put them in his pocket; and again holding up the egg to the light to confirm that it was fresh, he wrapped it in his handkerchief, and with the greatest care placed it in the leather bag.

He decided to go to Farthing Street, and the village beyond, where Charles Darwin’s house stood. Charles Darwin was dead, of course, but it would be nice to see where the author of
The
Voyage
of
the
Beagle
had once lived. Also in that village was a shop which sold very good buns, with more currants in them than ordinary ones, and flavoured with some sort of spice. They were a halfpenny each; one would do for his tea. That left a halfpenny for a spill of broken biscuits at the old dame’s shop on the way home.

Cycling onwards, he came to the gate of the drive leading up to the explorer’s house, and passing it, got off and crept through the hedge. On the edge of a wide lawn stood a thin cypress tree, and peering into its close, upright branches, he found a nest. It had young, but an egg
lay under the nestlings. Lifting it out between two fingers, he shook it by his ear. It was sloppy, infertile. Now he had a greenfinch’s!

He crept back to his bicycle, and ate his bun while listening to nightingales in a green shade, while waves of happiness rose in him so strongly that he could scarcely stop himself from warbling with joy.

That night, in the height of the sky, he saw the comet—a silver bird with a great sweeping tail. The world was a wonderful place!

*

So the spring advanced for Phillip, two half-days of freedom a week in the country, in his own especial private places; five days of tedium, evasion and passive resistance in the classroom, wherein the spirit was never moved by wonder or beauty, but where, in periods of rumination, the psyche could wing to its
true or natural habitat, by way of pictures in the mind: of chestnut and hazel coverts, white-starred with wind-flowers growing out of the layers of skeleton leaves which fed them, as a mother her children; and the dead-leaf pattern of the hen-pheasant’s back, on her eggs in the nettles, her back sun-dappled. Nature was a relation of all life, said Father, when he had brought him, once, some leaf-mould from under the elms in the Backfield, for the garden-bed. Leaf fed root, as the rabbit the stoat, and spring became summer.

It was sad that everything had to pass away; that it was no longer spring, that the nests were forsaken, the young birds flown—or dead. Phillip felt sad; all things had changed, except himself. He was left behind. A tear dropped on the History book, momentarily magnifying part of the print which gave the date of the burning of Joan of Arc by the English at Rouen.

*

The corn was high in the third week in June. Hundreds of little pheasants in the big wide cage in the heathery clearance of an old covert, where the stubs of oak and ash were sprouting again, ran to the keeper when he appeared out of his hut with a pail of mixed maize, wheat, and barley. The cage was of wire netting, top and sides. Rats, foxes, stoats, weasels, and other vermin moved round it by night and by day, in vain said the keeper. Only the nightjar sang now, reeling its song, like bubbles blown in water from a hollow grass-stem, in the calm summer evenings when the moths were about. From the gibbet trees most of the bird and animal corpses, shrunken thin and nearly shapeless, had fallen to the ground, where the plants of dog’s mercury were a deeper green, thicker in stem and leaf.

Phillip saved up to buy a packet of twenty cigarettes for each of his new friends in his preserves. It was already July when he cycled out to give a present to each of the two keepers, a woodman friend, and the man who looked after the livestock at the Home Farm. Dare he call on the Dowager Countess, to thank her also? He dared not. A last visit to his favourite places—the birch tree whence the young woodpeckers had flown, the silent rookery, the spinney where the two robins’ nests were worn shapeless, the quiet swallows’ cups in the cowhouse, the empty paddock where once the Troop had camped, and grass had grown over the charcoal patches of ancient fires.

As he cycled away, he saw a gipsy sitting in the wood beside
the road. He was singing a plaintive song, all by himself, about lavender.
Who’ll
buy
my
sweet
lavender?
Phillip remembered hearing it in the streets, when he was very small, before the elms were cut down in the High Road, before he had gone to his first dame school. It was the time when the ningaring man came with his barrel organ, the Italian man with his little girl, who played the tambourine and danced, for the penny Mother gave him for her.

He stopped at the bend of the road, and heard the gipsy still singing. There was no other sound in the air, except the buzz of flies shooting past, above the glaring white dusty road.

Goodbye, he said to himself, goodbye woods, goodbye birds, until another spring.

T
HE
midsummer hum of insects—most of them blue-bottles bred in dustbins, and an occasional green Spanish fly from the sheep-fold—was upon the Hill, idly heard by Thomas Turney sitting on his usual seat, with other elderly and retired
habitués
of the Open Space.

Most fine mornings, upon that seat, conveniently near to one of the rustic shelters built of herring-bone brickwork in a timber frame, Thomas Turney was to be seen with any number up to three of his regular acquaintances. There was the tall, thin white-whiskered figure of Mr. Newman, in grey frock coat and trousers and either tall grey (called white) hat, or less formal Panama; beside him, Mr. Krebs, a large man with shaven head and pendulous cheeks, jowl, and neck, all as pink and as clean as the carcass of a scrubbed pig. Mr. Krebs was a south German who lived on the other side of the Hill with his English wife. Krebs was a name understood to be the equivalent of Crabbe.

Since Mr. Turney and Mr. Newman often appeared to be on the point of irritating one another—being different types of men—the presence of Mr. Krebs was helpful to both: he was an excellent listener and sympathiser, as ugly, bare-headed, with his hat on his knee, as he was invariably courteous.

There was a fourth man of the little group; but he never sat
down with the others on this particular seat. In the first place, although intended for four people, the seat could not possibly hold more than any three of them, and then only with considerable restraint—a condition second-nature to thin Mr. Newman and fat Mr. Krebs, but not to Tom Turney. As for Mr. Bolton, the fourth man, he never wanted to sit down; he came up from his house in Charlotte Road for a constitutional, with his fawn-coloured dog. Invariably affable, Mr. Bolton nevertheless was a man apart, a man aware of all men, but attached to only two—His late Majesty the King; and his son.

Mr. Bolton was always most circumspectly dressed. He wore, in the hottest weather, a high-lapelled tweed jacket, a Gladstone collar with wide starched wings and a satin cravat tie, in which was a gold pin set with pearls and diamonds in the shape of a horse-shoe—gift, of which he was modestly proud, of the Earl of Mersea. Mr. Bolton’s narrow trousers were always freshly sponged and pressed, his boots boned and polished under their protecting spats. Even on the brightest days he arrived in a Covert coat of pale brown melton cloth, with velvet collar, and carrying his gold-topped clouded cane in one hand, and the lead of Bogey, a pug-dog, in the other. Mr. Bolton, bowler-hatted by Lock of St. James Street, wore his grey beard and moustaches in the style of the late King Edward the Seventh, from whom, it was understood, he had received many a confidence.

More than once Mr. Bolton, in a shadowed background, and with appropriate deference, had bowed the Royal Personage into the London club of which he had been the steward. Mr. Bolton, now retired on pension, lived with a housekeeper and his only son, a clerk in the Bank of England. Beside his pension, Mr. Bolton enjoyed an income of six per centums from his investments—life-savings of presents from the gentlemen of his Club, as well as commissions from purchases of food and wine; the latter, of course, having been snared with Chef and Wine Steward.

“Good morning, gentlemen, I trust I find you well,” was Mr. Bolton’s invariable greeting, as it was usually Thomas Turney who replied,

“Good morning, Mr. Bolton, come to join us, eh? I was just saying to Mr. Krebs here, that——,” while he made but the least pretence to shift up on the seat. After the gesture, he sat as before, knees apart, dressed in one of his numerous blue serge suits—he bought new ones every year at the January Sales,
and never gave away any of the old ones—Panama-hatted, tie passed through a diamond ring, both hands clasping his oak walking stick, to help distribute his weight.

“Thank you, gentlemen, but I am about to take my morning stroll upon the grass, to exercise Bogey here.”

At this point Mr. Bolton would lean down carefully to give Bogey his expected reward for climbing the steep gully—a rub under the collar with his gloved hand.

“I was saying to Mr. Krebs, Mr. Bolton, that I had a letter this morning from South Africa, from me eldest son Charley, coming home for the Coronation, he says.”

Mr. Bolton had never travelled; he had always had to work to maintain himself, while looking forward to seeing the world after his retirement—when he had felt himself to be too old. However, he had a fund of travelling memories gained at secondhand during more than twenty years of sharing, at a correct distance, and with perfect discretion, many lives in the famous Voyagers.

“Yes,” Tom Turney continued, “the news came only this morning, by letter, that m’eldest boy, Charley, is already on his way home from South Africa, with his wife and little family. He’ll be a stranger, we haven’t seen him for twenty years, since Hetty and I went over to pay him a visit in Manitoba. He was trying his hand at farming, shovelling muck all day on to sledges, at the dungstead, he-he-he, he didn’t seem to relish the work very much.”

Tom Turney’s cat usually accompanied him from his house up the gully to the crest of the Hill, every morning. It was a neuter cat; it had a truculent tail-swishing attitude to the tame dogs it saw during the walk behind its master. Once on the Hill, it contented itself by sitting under the seat, behind the boots of the elderly men. It had a guarded friendship with Mr. Bolton’s pug, and allowed it to share the shade beneath: the one watching movement upon the gravelled path, the other, despite its snivelling nose, regarding the smells which were wafted under the galvanised iron frame. The animals, like the men, knew their places, and kept them.

“I perceive, or rather I hear,” quavered Mr. Newman, “that the cuckoo in the cemetery is already out of tune. How the days slip by! Why, only yesterday it seems, your grandson Phillip came to show me his cuckoo’s egg. But to my amazement, he told me that it was last year! How time does fly, to be sure.”

It was peaceful on the Hill during the summer mornings. The few figures to be seen there were quiet: nursemaids in uniform with perambulators; small servant girls with mail-carts; an occasional three-wheeled invalid’s chair pulled or pushed by a hired man; a keeper in the brown livery of the L.C.C. picking up paper and cigarette packets on a steel point; and transferring the litter to a brown canvas side-bag; odd figures taking their constitutionals, among them the lonely figure of Hugh Turney, walking slowly with the aid of two rubber-ended sticks. He never went near the four old men, if he could avoid it.

A quietness lay upon the Hill, for those others who had managed to get out of the main stream of life and business without undue maiming of body or spirit—and this quietude would remain for another fortnight or so, until the schools broke up, and the green tranquillity of the Hill would be adorned with coloured kites of many shapes and designs, model aircraft powered by elastic threads—some with aluminium frames, others of wood, all monoplanes—and remotely interrupted by the smack of cricket balls and the softer thud of tennis: and among these quieter pursuits of the young, a harder-eyed movement, shrill of voice, leaving its rubbish of rag and torn paper and orange peel cast upon sward and path.

*

“Yes, your grandson showed me a very fine specimen of a cuckoo’s egg,
as I was saying, Mr. Turney,” went on Mr. Newman. “I fancy it had been laid in the robin’s nest by mistake, for it had the purple shading of one usually found among the tit-larks, or tree pipits.”

“I remember that m’ Father once shot a cuckoo with an egg in its beak. He had it stuffed and set up” remarked Tom Turney. “He said at the time that it was flying to put it in another bird’s nest.”

“Ah, but you said, Mr. Newman, that the
kuckuck,
what you call googoo,
laid
its egg in the nest of another bird, did you not? Then how, would I ask you, why should Mr. Turney’s respected Father’s googoo be carrying the egg in the beak also to lay it at the same time?”

“That, my dear Sir,” began Mr. Newman, in his throaty voice, turning to Herr Krebs, “is a most interesting controversy, and one that has engaged the speculations of many naturalists since Gilbert White of Selborne. Perhaps our little friend Phillip, who
shows such a bent for field study, will be able to solve the problem one day, with his camera.”

Another valetudinarian shuffled past, pulled by a bulldog. From under the seat came the steely growl of Thomas Turney’s cat, followed by an uneasy or sneezy sniffle from Bogey the pug. They had recognised a well-known ugly landmark in the local animal world.

“What is your son’s line of business, Mr. Turney?” said Mr. Bolton, somewhat diffidently.

“The latest is, or was, so far as we know, something in the import business, but perhaps he means the term to apply only to himself, ha-ha-ha!”

Tom Turney’s laughter was from his belly, beneath the blue serge waistcoat stained with wine and cigar ash; the jacket almost purple, faded in the sun of summers upon the Hill.

*

Sometimes Phillip cycled to school; but most mornings he preferred to walk over the Hill, as there was more to see that way. He was always happy when he walked with Milton; he felt clearer, simpler, somehow, in Milton’s company. They talked of the coming summer holidays: every day brought the enchanted prospect nearer and nearer. There was an almost breathless magic in the words
Summer
Holidays!
Phillip saw them in his mind as sunlight for ever upon the grass and under the shade of familiar trees; kites dancing in the wind; baking spuds in the embers of his camp-fire in the Backfield; expeditions with Desmond to the Seven Fields; cycling with roach-tackle to the Fish Ponds of Reynard’s Common; playing tennis with Mavis and her friends on the Hill. Perhaps, who knew, one day Milton and Helena, with his sister and her sister, might be playing there; perhaps they might invite him to join in with them—it was almost too much to be hoped for.

Phillip loved tennis. Mother said they might take up a tea-basket and have a picnic in the holidays, when they played. Aunt Theodora had sent them some racquets and balls, from her Somerset school which had closed down; also a box of croquet sticks and hoops; but they were no good in the garden, the lawn sloped too steeply. Anyway it was too small, unlike Cousin Percy’s at Beau Brickhill. O, the summer holidays! They were going again to Hayling Island, he told Milton, and he was looking forward to taking some snaps of the life-boat house, the
fishermen with their net, the west floating-pier where the naval steam-pinnaces came in, bringing officers to play golf, and the wonderful blue Channel waves crashing on the shingle shore by the life-saving cable, and big hauls of striped mackerel and green-boned garfish slapping on the brown pebbles.

If only Milton and his people were coming to Hayling, with the Rolls—for the two families went away to the seaside together, every summer. But they were going to the Isle of Wight—far across the sea from Hayling. Still, he could think of them there in the sunlight, gay laughter and merriment all the time. He could lie in bed at night, and think of the beautiful people, in the darkness of the nights over Hayling Island.

Bad news: they were not going to Hayling after all! Mother had left applying for apartments too long, and so they would not see the sea that year! The sea that was the same sea in which
she
would be swimming—he would not be able to speak, in secret, to the waves of the tide sweeping from the Isle of Wight, around the shingle shores of Hayling!

Phillip walked to school by himself for two days, after that news. Then his spirits rose again. Mother said if Aunt Liz would have them, they might go instead to Beau Brickhill. Still, there would be dear old Percy to be with, and singing duets at the piano at night, and games of billiards, bat-shooting in the twilight by the ivied stable walls; and the ponds full of roach and dace. Summer Holidays! If only the end of July would come quicker!

One Saturday morning, hastening home alone from school, Phillip was beckoned by Gran’pa, to the seat where he always sat with other old men. He wanted to pass on, pretending not to see or hear Gran’pa; but since it might mean a penny for an ice-cream in the refreshment shelter, he decided to go and see what he wanted. No such luck, however; all Gran’pa wanted was to tell him that his cousins would be coming home soon, from Africa, a thing which he knew already. Gran’pa, of course,
had
to ask about lessons, as he always did, telling him to make the most of his opportunity while he was young.

And, of course, the inevitable question, “Are they going to teach you Spanish at your school? The future of world commerce lies in South America.” Phillip made his escape as Gran’pa turned to the other old men and said, “If only my boy Charley had taken it into his head to go to the Argentine, he would have shown better sense.”

What would Gran’pa say if, one day, he answered that all he knew about Spanish at school so far was about Spanish Fly? That was a powder prepared from dried green-bottles, which if rubbed gently into the back of a girl’s hand, as you pretended to stroke it, would make her hot. Phillip had heard this with some uneasiness, as he thought nowadays of girls only in the abstract; smiles, eyes, gleaming brushed hair, alluring wonder; except Helena Rolls, who was his Ideal.

At first the talk about Uncle Charley was of little interest to him; but as the days went on, and the Union Castle liner passed the White Man’s Grave, and entered the Bay of Biscay, as recorded in
The
Daily
Telegraph
which Gran’pa read, Phillip began to form a picture of this new uncle as a sort of rolling stone, a mixture of Lieutenant Oakfall of the Kent Guides, (who had turned out to be not a real lieutenant at all, but a swanker like Mr. Prout) and a ne’er-do-well remittance man who lived on his wits, as in the stories he read in magazines. Would Uncle Charley arrive in a khaki suit, and Stetson hat, a revolver in his hip pocket? Phillip had these ideas from remarks he had overheard from time to time, in both houses. Father, cross as usual with Mother, had said that most of her people were either wasters or remittance men: and since Uncle Hugh was obviously meant as the waster, Uncle Charley must be the remittance man. He discussed it with his mother.