How Dear Is Life

by Henry Williamson

  Having said this in his dry voice, the parson sprang from his seat to fling another pinch of dust out into the air. As the train rounded a long curve, he continued to throw out pinches.

  “We go under the road in a minute, rocks in shadow. I must hold my fire.”

  The noise of wheels echoed back from rocky walls green with ferns.

  “Now look out, dear boy, and observe the effect of the declining sun on the brick of the Chill’em viaduct! ‘A rose-red city, half as old as Time’, you know the allusion, no doubt. We have to put on all power here, to get up to Chill’em station.”

  While speaking, the parson was collecting more dust meticulously from his pocket. Phillip wondered if he were throwing out seeds—as he had once done himself.

  The train was climbing through the woods; and suddenly was upon a bridge of several arches, but much taller than those seen from the train to London Bridge. It was built of white brick apricot-yellow in the light of the westering sun.

  “Some visitors object to the white bricks, they look too much like a London underground lavatory, they complain, but I tell ’em it’s the clay of the country, from Dolton and Marland beyond Bideford. The materials of the country can’t be wrong. We’re seventy feet above the road, now. That’s the view I wanted you to see.”

  The hillside station was enwound along its margins with rambler roses, hollyhocks, and sunflowers. Phillip saw the name was Chelfham. No one got out, no one got in. They seemed to be the only passengers in the train.

  As they went on, the parson explained that he hoped to see in a year or two, upon the sides of the cutting, various flowers in bloom, including stocks, wallflowers, pansies, night primroses, and balsam. “Good for bees,” he said, “as well as adding to the gaiety of nations. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Phillip. “I threw out some bluebell seeds last year on the Bermondsey embankment, near London, but none have come up yet.”

  “Good man,” replied the parson. “Good fellow. They will! You’re on holiday from Town? Got your rod, I see. Nice length for the glen, for sideway casting under the bushes. Fish wet or dry? Hawthorn gets ’em this time of the year, dapped, when the water’s gin clear. You fished the Lyn before?”

  “No, sir, but my father has. Oh, by the way, I wonder if you can tell me the local name for a buzzard?”

  “I don’t know of any, unless it is ‘hawk’.”

  “I heard someone just now calling them something like ‘serrards fessans’, and have been wondering what that means.”

  “Oh, I can answer that! Sir Edward’s pheasants!” cried the parson. “The woods are so poached by fellows coming out from Derby, this end of Barnstaple, that Sir Edward hasn’t a bird left. So the hawks are, in effect, his only pheasants, I suppose. Well, I wish you a pleasant holiday. I get out here at Bratton. Good day to you!”

  The parson got out among more roses and hollyhocks. “Don’t forget to try a hawthorn!” he called out, as he prepared to get up into the trap waiting for him.

  “Good day to you, sir!” cried Phillip, waving his straw hat out of the window.

  He was now alone in the train: rather a sad thought. His eyes became melancholy: the moment, the friendship, was gone for ever. To console himself, he sucked another orange, thinking that the parson was rather like Mr. Mundy, hail-fellow-well-met with everyone, high or low, riding his bike on the Hill, against the regulations, and on the pavements. Mr. Mundy even rode his bike into the Free Library, balancing while he got the swing doors open.

  His new friend had told him to look out for the four farms on the hillside—Knightacott, Narracott, Sprecott, and Hunnacott—and for the streams sometimes passing over the top of engine and coaches by wooden aqueducts. Phillip looked for these, until the train had climbed away from the deep valley. From now on it ran through rocky cuttings and high embankments on which yellow furse bloomed, filling the carriage with its sweet smell. Bees wandered through the open window, like the butterflies of hours ago; long ago in the morning of the day whose eternity was now ending.

  *

  It was a dream country, floating on sunshine, the world lying far below. Were some of the shaggy men with dogs, drovers of cattle, descendants of the Doones? The train had stopped at Black Moor Gate; in a drowse of dream he listened to strange words and voices of rough shaggy men with sticks in hand shouting at bullocks among barking shaggy dogs. All seemed to share one language. At last the stamping was finished, and with the cattle truck coupled, the train went on, crawling to Parracombe Halt. Thereafter views of the moor, purple above the far smooth azure Severn Sea; then a louder chuffing of Yuffing Yeo, or whatever the old engine was called, echoed from the trees of Wooda Bay—another name mentioned by Father, Little Wood Bay. They were now surely at the highest part of the moor. It was shimmering, with the shimmer of a bee’s wing! Leaning out of the window, he gazed upon the calm, grey-blue sea stretching to a layer of white bubbled clouds above a far land. Good lord, it must be Wales!

  He had travelled a great distance to be within sight of Wales! He waved his arms, and jigged upon the carriage floor.

  The last orange was eaten, the last glaze of the sun upon the sea was glimpsed, and then Yuffing Yeo was running down above the oakwoods of the Lyn valley, to the terminus on the side of of the hill above the town. Alas, the journey was over. He said goodbye to his carriage, and to the valiant little engine that had pulled him to his destination; and got out, to the melancholy belving of cattle behind—and saw he was the only passenger.

  A woman with projecting teeth stood on the platform.

  “Are you Phillip?”

  “Yes.”

  He raised his straw hat, and stared at the strange face which smiled and said a name of which he heard only the first part, Sylvia.

  “Dora is rather tired, she is so sorry she was unable to come. She thought you might like to walk up to the town, and go down the cliff railway. It’s rather an experience, if you haven’t done it before. You must have had a trying journey, nearly twelve hours! Can you manage the bag, if I carry the rod?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He did not like her face. She seemed dowdy. Her smile seemed rather forced. He had no idea that she had suffered in prison. He walked in silence uphill beside her, awkwardly. After the long sunny day, it was dull in the shadow. It was different, too, from what he had imagined.

  “I expect you are tired after your long journey, Phillip. May I call you Phillip? Do call me Sylvia. Everyone does.”

  “I’m not tired, really, thanks all the same.” He did not like to call her Sylvia. She had a nice smile.

  He felt that she would think him rude. Father had often told him he was rude, without manners. Uncle Hilary, said Father, had noticed it too. He walked on, feeling like a ghost of himself, rather forlorn that this was the first time he had come to the seaside without Mother and the girls. He felt very sorry, now, for having spoiled their holidays, so often in the past, by his bad behaviour. It was too late now. What was Mother doing at that very moment? Perhaps playing chess with Father; or next door playing picquet with Gran’pa. She was at everyone’s beck and call, including his own. Why was he always so impatient with her? He never really meant to be. Poor little Mother, her cheeks often grew flushed, and her eyes had the shine of unshed tears in them, when Father was more beastly than usual; and now he, her son, who did at least know better, as often as not, criticised her too.

  He did not know that his thoughts came from nervous exhaustion. He had imagined so much that his power was gone.

  At the top of the climb were shops and hotels. He felt more cheerful to be in sunshine again. Several boys and girls in riding coats and breeches and little bowler hats were passing down the street on ponies, followed by a groom. He heard two speaking so politely to one another that they seemed almost unreal.

  His guide led him along a narrow road beside a curving stone wall, obviously a garden wall, to a sudden view of blue sunlit sea and red cliffs far below. It was alm
ost breath-taking. He stopped and stared with delight.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” said Sylvia.

  “Yes,” he said fervently.

  They came to a big painted iron water tank and a glass office, with a turnstile before it. Sylvia bought two tickets. This was the cliff railway, she said. He saw steel lines with grease on them going down fearfully steep to a tiny roadway below. He saw the tiny white fringe of sea breaking on grey boulders. The sea was nearly black, like a stain, beyond a dwarf quay. He felt giddy, and put down his bag; smiling at Sylvia to conceal his feeling. She noticed that his hands were clenched.

  “It is rather awful the first time one sees it, like the view of London Bridge and Billingsgate from the Monument,” she said. “It certainly terrified me.”

  “I’m not very good at heights,” he smiled.

  “The odd thing is that one doesn’t notice it at all when going down. It’s rather clever, the way it’s worked. They let water into a tank underneath the top lift, then down it goes, slowly, pulling up the one below, on a stout cable. At the bottom the water is released into the sea, and our cab is ready to be hauled up in its turn. Newnes, the Tit-Bits man, had it built.”

  “Oh, really.” He was amazed to think of Tit-Bits being heard of in Devon.

  He was not afraid of going down, once he was in the cab: on the contrary, he felt satisfaction that he was quite calm. On firm ground once again, Lynmouth with its jetty and light-tower, fishing nets drying, boats at anchor, and blue water and tiny cottages was better even than he had expected from the picture postcards stuck in Mother’s book.

  “Can it really be you, Boy? How you have grown! What a pleasure to see you again!”

  How old Aunt Dora looked! Some of her teeth were gone. She looked yellow and wrinkled. Of course, she had been ill.

  She took his hand between her two slender hands, hesitated whether to kiss him, decided he was too grown-up, and asked forthwith if all at home were well. He gave her his parents’ messages of good will, and followed the ladies into the cottage, thinking that if he had seen Aunt Dora anywhere else, he would not have recognised her, so thin was she. The fair hair he remembered was ashen grey; and worst of all, the gaps in her front teeth made her voice sound funny. It looked as though he were not going to have a very nice holiday.

  During tea of boiled eggs and brown bread and salty butter, followed by raspberry jam and cream, in the cottage with the sound of the Lyn rushing around the boulders in its bed below, the light came back into Phillip’s face, and met the light in the face of Theodora, and in the face of her friend Sylvia. They were both really very nice and kind, he thought, and ever so jolly; how very strange that they were also suffragettes.

  Chapter 8

  SUMMER’S LEASE

  THE EARLY days were a delight of sun and sea and heather; of steamers nearly dissolved, under faint smoke-trails, in the misty blue of the Severn Sea; of fishing boats sailing offshore in waters sometimes reflecting the red precipices of unscaleable cliffs; of green and white tumbling water in the tree-shadowed glen, Lyn noisy with spray of fall and cascade; of gravelly pools lit by sun-shafts piercing the green glooms of the forest rising to the sky where gulls sailing over were like tiny specks of winged sea-shell. Hawthorn flies, heavy with black lace and trailing wings, coupled on ash and oak and alder leaves, sometimes fell into the pools between the smooth boulders—splash!—the lovers died together. He must get some quickly!

  Aunt Dora told him of a cobbler who tied flies. He bought a dozen hawthorns for sixpence, and was shown how to tie a turle knot through the eyed shank, with gut wetted to prevent it snapping. There were other flies, too, said the cobbler—the true water-flies which hatched out of the stream, not from the earth and trees like the heavier hawthorn flies, and beetles and moths which fell in from above by accident. The true flies were Blue Upright, Pheasant Tail, and Olive Dun.

  He watched the true flies over the morning waters of the glen. This was what he had read about. They were little slow whorls of light, rising from the clearest water, to seek rest on the leaves of ash and alder. There they shed their skins, wings and all: and prepared to mate. They were spinning over the runs and pools in the afternoon and early evening, rising and falling to drop their eggs, while the swift spotted trout watched from under water: to leap, sometimes to feel the prick of the “hypocrit”, as he thought of his fly being dapped gently in imitation of a spinner.

  Proudly, casually, he took home his first red-speckled trout, for Aunt Dora’s and Sylvia’s breakfast.

  What fun it was in the cottage; they were old, yet they seemed so light-hearted. Strange, too, that there were no disagreements, no arguments. What was wrong with them? And what masses of post they had: almost as much as came in every morning into the office, renewal premiums not counted.

  In wonder at his marvellous new life he had to send off postcards; many postcards, each with a variation of that statement. Poor people, left at home! So coloured postcards went to Mother, Mrs. Neville, Gil Fitcheyson, Aunt Dorrie, Cranmer, Willie at Rookhurst, David Wallace, Hubert Cakebread, Aunt Liz Pickering, Mr. Graham, Hern the grocer, Desmond at school in Essex, Mavis at Thildonck (give my love to Petal), Tommy at Brighton—and who else? Ah, he had forgotten the Branch! Mr. Howlett. Downham? He hesitated some time: he could not bring himself to write to Downham. To Mr. Hollis? Yes. But—might not Downham feel left out, if he wrote only to Mr. Howlett and Mr. Hollis? Edgar? Well, that might offend Mr. Hollis. So three more, these three please. They were written. Who else? Polly. The idea set up a discord in him. To Helena Rolls? No, no! Why not? NO!! Might he, perhaps, send one to Mrs. Rolls? Yes, that might be all right: she always spoke to him in a very friendly tone.

  So, greatly daring, he sent a coloured view of Hollerday Hill to Mrs. Rolls, with This is a delightful watering place, the country of the Doones and Lorna, with every good wish from Yours sincerely Phillip; and then the date, 22 July 1914.

  Composing that, and especially the address, left him feeling slightly shaky; so buying sixteen green ha’penny stamps, he stuck fifteen of them on at all angles, a gesture of his new freedom; but the sixteenth was set with every care, exactly upon the rectangle provided for the purpose.

  Coming out of the little post office, which sold everything from cast-iron cooking pots and cough linctus to voluminous bathing costumes and tomatoes, he saw the blue sea and his mind at once was transfixed with the eyes of Helena Rolls.

  When they were posted the morning seemed vacant. He perked up on hearing the notes of a horn, and looking up the street, saw some blue-coated men in white breeches and grey bowler hats by the arched bridge over the Lyn. He ran up the street, and soon was among wet hounds, which bayed dolefully and dripped water from the hair under their bodies and slung drops from their waving tails. He learned that an otter had been hunted down through the glen, and lost under the bridge.

  Then a hound bayed among the boulders in the bed of the stream below, and the small red-faced man in dark-blue uniform blew the copper horn again, and cried out a sort of nasal chant. He took off his grey bowler and scooped it towards the river bed. The hounds plunged down into the water, and baying loudly, ran and swam towards the sea. Someone said the otter had gone that way.

  This was exciting. He ran down to get a better view. He saw his aunt and her friend looking out of their door.

  “Shameful,” said Sylvia. “So many against one small animal.”

  “It will get away,” said Aunt Dora. “They won’t turn an otter in this water. It will get down to the sea, if I know anything about the beastie.”

  He hastened away down the street, to get a view from the seawall beyond the cottages. The green and white water poured and rushed among the grey boulders, on which gulls sat, making their yakkering cries. The tide was coming in, past the black posts of the salmon weir or trap at the edge of the boulders on the other side. Weeds made the water dark blue. Somewhere among them the otter was swimming, underwater. What would it look like? If only he cou
ld have one glimpse of it.

  He got down. Oh, what luck, it was crawling out of the water, brown as seaweed, dragging a long thick tapered tail on a boulder! Shaking itself, spiky-haired, looking back! He saw its whiskers and its flat button-eyed face as it stared. It stood up, seeming to sniff the air. A gull dived at it, hung with yellow webbed feet yakkering; the otter gave it the least look, then sinking down slipped head-first into the water. It was gone! Although he searched from the shore, he did not see it again. Then, looking up to the wall of the quay above, he saw many brown crabs laid there, having been lifted from a steaming cauldron. They looked like a row of broken brown houses.

  The otter-hunters went into a hotel, while the hounds sat in a yard, licking one another, yawning, and rolling on their backs in the dust, while the huntsman in navy-blue uniform and black nailed boots talked to them out of the corner of his mouth. His horn was placed between two buttons of his jacket. Phillip hung about, wishing he had remembered to bring his Brownie camera. He wanted to go into the hotel, to listen to what they said; but felt not good enough.

  Later, he followed them up the steep hill to the town above and the railway station, where he watched the hounds being put in a closed waggon. Many of the otter-hunters got into the carriages. They had come from Barnstaple, he learned, where the kennels were.

  Well, that was an adventure! When the engine had puffed away, he went for a walk along the cliffs, high above the sea with its ships looking so tiny upon the wide silvered spaces to Wales. The cliffs below were wooded. All the trees had gnarled limbs. The path rose and fell among them. He thought how wonderful it would be if he could build a hut, secretly when no one was about, on the slope of the cliff, and live there on the simplest food, cooking on a wood fire. He could shoot rabbits and pigeons with his saloon gun, catch trout in the Lyn, grow his own potatoes, and drink only water.