It was Hitler who used to say, during the struggle for power against the Communists in Germany, that his S.S. men and S.A. followers would meet terror with terror; now it seemed that was the Allies’ plan—to destroy the German working-class districts of all the large towns in Germany, and the workers in their homes: the adopted plan of a man of British genius who was ruthless and steadfast enough to frustrate Hitler’s ideas of ‘peace in Europe for a thousand years’.
It was beyond Phillip. He felt the war of the cousin-nations, England and Germany, to be the macrocosm, while the Bad Lands were the microcosm, of the sickness of a dying Western World. There was talk of ‘justice’ in bringing the leaders of Germany—in all spheres of command, from banking to building—the army, the navy, the air-force—to trial as ‘war criminals’. It seemed that, among the Allies, there were no war criminals. That would be left to history to decide. The Allies were saved by their scapegoats, the German nation.
Billy came over one afternoon, and finding Phillip in the Studio, went to him and hid his face on his father’s shoulder, seeking refuge. Phillip clasped him, kissed the fair hair, stroked the imaginative ‘bump’ at the back of the skull, while his eyes purged away all false pride—or suffering—and self-rectitude. It was as though Barley had come to him, and he to her, in this their child of love. The Billy was gone, and for awhile, Phillip felt all of himself to be clear, and redeemed. He was not able to face the others for some hours after Billy had driven away in the 1928 Morris he had bought for £5.
*
The corn was pricking through the cobbly seed-beds. The willows by the river were in leaf. On the home meadows the grass was growing with the shine of the wind. The wild duck led her young from the nest in the clump of reeds in the dyke. Phillip watched her swimming beside the aged blackthorn hanging over the water of the Old River, its lower branches hung with wisps caught in last winter’s floods.
To the church the children took willow branches from the Osier Carr. At night the red tiles of cottage roofs glowed mysteriously under the full moon. It was a tradition that on Easter Sunday men of the village walked on the road above the New River with their wives and grandchildren, to look across the meadows to the woods coming into bud and leaf. Phillip opened the gate, and bade them welcome to all parts of the farm.
In the market-place, farmers said they had drilled the last of the war-time sowings. And they asked one another: What is to happen now?
It seemed a long time since the thousands, the tens of thousands of wheels had rumbled through the village street on the way to the south coast. Now the Allies were over the Rhine and deployed for final victory. And yet, though the sun shone, behind all the transient beauty of the earth, was shadow. Every man and woman in the village knew what this shadow was: a subconscious fear that never again would life be lived in contentment. They did not know why; superficially it was unreasonable, for Britain and her Allies had nearly won the war.
Down by the Old River, where the wild duck watched her young near the nest in the reed-clump, the twisted blackthorn hung down its branches, some to drag in the water moving so slowly below the wood. The Old River drained the meadows, where soon the young Red Poll heifers would be put out to graze.
The blackthorn was what is called self-sown. The seed was perhaps dropped by a bird, or maybe it was cast there originally by a boyish hand, for do birds eat those small acrid wild plums, or sloes, which are the fruit of the blackthorn? All country boys taste, at least once in their lives, the blue fruit with the deceptive grape-like bloom; but one bite is enough before, with wry face, the wild plum is hurled away. Was that how the blackthorn started its life?
For Phillip had come to feel self-identification with the black and spindly object growing there. There were the marks of its suffering visible to the eye. The trunk was writhen and bent back upon the earth from which it sprung. Its shape was part of its experience. Tall sycamores and ash trees grew in the wood above it, taking light from lesser saplings and bushes which strove to grow under them. Many of these saplings had died after a few years of vain struggle for the sun they could not find.
Every spring when the time came to pull reeds and other water vegetation from the Old River Phillip had looked at the writhen blackthorn and said to himself that it ought to be cut down, for it spoiled the look of the otherwise clear dyke.
But somehow it was not cut down. He knew how it had striven to grow out of the shade of the wood to find the sun, he felt its struggle to live under the greater trees. And of a sudden, about the time of the spring solstice, there burst upon its blackness a fragility of white blossoms, breaking out of the dark-spined branches while yet the winds of March held back colour from the earth. Blossom glowed beside savage spines and on contorted branches, so startling and tender a sight confronting human thoughts which for so long, within the interior heart, had almost lost hope.
*
How could he bring back life to the Banyard brook? When he peered into the water, from the upper meadows, he saw that in the heat of the sun bubbles of carbon-dioxide were arising from the sludge of pollution.
Although it was chalk country this was never a pure chalk-stream; yet not so long ago it had, as Josiah Harn told Phillip—“I carried the net for the squire of the Old Manor when I wor a boy”—a firm bottom of sand on clay. That bed was overlaid by a foot and more of black and deadly filth. The sludge was from road culverts, drains of houses and cottages, and ‘lactoria’ standing on or near the banks.
Lactorium was a new-world term for cow-house. Twice daily the floor of the lactorium above the village bridge was sluiced down with disinfectant of a chlorine base. The effluent drained direct into the river. It was as deadly to the delicate underwater life within the stream as airborne chlorine gas drifting over No-man’s-land in the Salient in 1915.
“Sewage will kill a stream slowly,” he said to Josiah Harn. “It takes the oxygen by which all underwater life breathes. And chlorine-based chemicals from cow-houses are fatal, even diluted to one in a million. Add to them effluents containing photographic chemicals from the sewage tanks, and drains from airfields on higher ground near the source, and there is my stricken brook. Will the Rhine, cleansed by Hitler a decade ago, die back. again?”
“Yar right there, sir,” said Josiah Ham. “Yar can’t do without money.” He thought Phillip meant rhino.
Is it mere illusion to link the pollution of an English river with the general pollution of European vision, and attribute both to a cast of thought which accepts such things as ordinary, whereby the truths of the interior heart have been overlaid as the sandy bed of this brook with the sludge of dead life? Must a Christ perish in torment in every generation, because people have no imagination? as Bernard Shaw wrote in Saint Joan.
When the waters moved past cloudy-dark he knew the Catchment Board men were above, pulling weed as they called the dark green skeins of algae which grew from the sludge-shoals on the bottom. The mud-pullers worked with rake and down-turned shovel, each tool clamped on a long handle of willow. With these they hauled forth and lifted out upon the bank the stuff called spoil, while below them the soiled water moved slowly down with bubbles of carbon-dioxide fizzling on the surface.
A polluted river, as distinct from a river chemically poisoned, dies slowly. Once upon a time the Banyard brook was beautiful with mayfly and trout-ring and leaping dace, with dance of sedge-fly and silver-horns at evening. In the noon of a buoyant day clouds of the Pale Watery had swayed like etherial fountains over the water-cress clumps under the banks. Now it was the daylight bomber aircraft which gleamed palely in the height of the sky.
In a pure river—a river of God—the sedge-fly and its cousin silver-horns live for a year as crawling nymphs in small houses made of stone and stick, cemented together by a secretion in their jaws. Pull a bine of water-weed from a living stream and you will find a caddis on it somewhere. After a year of underwater living the caddis swims out as a nymph, its pellicle or skin splits and a fly crawls fort
h, having done forever with food or drink and the business of living. Its brief life thereafter is a dream. There is a dance in air, a brief skiey mating, and at evening a descent to the water-mirror to drop its egg-clusters, thus commending its spirit to life after death as the winged one falls spent upon the waters. A slow-widening ring, and a trout has taken it.
Silver-horns is a dusky little fly with antennae looking as though they have been touched with aluminium paint. It flies to and fro near the surface of the water in its wedding-dance swiftly, for time is short: one brief summer day, without drink or food, and the innocent life is over.
Eight years before, Phillip had vowed to restore the pristine life of the little Banyard brook by both word of mouth, and by writing articles for The Daily Crusader, and when this was done, action—to the river bank!! Shade must be made from the deoxygenising glare of the summer sun. He planted willow slips on the south bank—it was legally his land bordering the meadows—to grow into trees which would give shade to the water, and also provide osiers for basket-making and beauty to the valley. For in its quiet way it was a pleasant little valley, and with proper care and renewal of things past it could indeed be beautiful once more. That was his ambition when first he had seen the farm: to work to make a small parcel of English land and water harmonious again, for its own sake.
And together with good grass and trees and flowers and cattle on the meadows, he wanted to see trout in clear water again—not so much to take them with a fly, as to see all was well with the brook. The willow trees would shade the water in the critical hot months. Their eddy-washed roots would give cover for trout. So Matt and he had planted a thousand willow slips one long spring day and evening. Very soon they were either pulled out or struck down by the men employed by the Catchment Board to keep the river clean, that is, bare as a canal.
Undeterred, Phillip experimented with an idea to scour the silt on the river-bed. At intervals elmboards were staked diagonally across one half of the bed, to quicken the flow and help to shift the silt downstream, and so out under the sluice-doors in the sea-wall at low tide. These boards, each only about a foot deep, were regarded almost as a personal affront to the mud-pullers, one of whom, the gaunt foreman with a cancerous lip, told him that he was not going to listen to any instructions from any foreigner, despite the fact that the Drainage Board had given Phillip a free hand for one year.
Phillip had tried to reason with him. “The wider the river-course is made here, presumably to drain away water, the slower becomes the water-flow. And the slower the flow, the greater the deposit of silt. In winter there is inevitable flooding, all because you will make the river into a wide canal, with a minimum turbulence. Make the water shift that filthy silt. Let the stream throw it about. My elmwood cruives will create turbulence. The water will whirl the mud about, and so lower the level of the bed. Thereby the river will carry more water in winter.”
“Now look you a-here! I’v’a’bin a-pulling mud for over twenty year, and be frigged if I be going tew listen to a Denchman, or any other furriner!”
A neighbouring landowner, a fly-fisherman who had fished the water in the time of its health and heyday, told Phillip that a race of unique hybrid trout had lived there. They were a cross between native brown and imported Californian rainbow, he declared. Two and three pounders were common. The hybrids had a pale pinkish hue along their flanks, which he thought showed rainbow-cross. And big sea-trout came up in the summer.
“The river’s finished,” he said. “You can’t put back the clock, Maddison.”
Could the brook survive? It became a problem involving his personal living as the years went on. It seemed to him people were destroying themselves after a certain age; and that youth died for their lack of truth.
*
At the bottom of his garden he made cruives of stones to sharpen the flow of water and thus to oxygenate it. Gradually he cleared the garden of stones and bits of broken brick and tile, for once a bullock yard had stood there. He wheeled barrow-loads to the river and tipped them over the bank. Then with a rake he spread the shards as groins or cruives diagonally downstream to form a series of slight barriers, each two or three inches deep, to the middle of the river-bed. This quickened the flow on the further side, and caused a pleasing ripple on the layers of stones below the near bank. The faster running water began to scour the stinking black mud under the further bank, and soon new and deeper channels had been cut to the old gravelly bed of the river. The ripple made a music, the stream was singing. It made him immensely happy to hear it. He felt like a man resurrected.
Inevitably, the mud-pullers of the Drainage Board levelled the shallow groins. Some of the village children threw back into the river the pails, bottles, bully-beef tins, rags, and old green sheep-skulls Phillip had dredged out and pushed into holes of the opposite bank.
“If he doan’t like our ways, why do’m stay here? Level you out them ridges of flints, and holl you the trash back into the river again, the right place, for it. We all know what he is.”
Village youths, trousers rolled to the knee, were wading in the water, peering into the banks. Each had a long stick with a fork tied to the end of it. With these weapons they were prodding every hollow of the underhung banks to stab any sea-trout hiding there. They were surly when Phillip asked by what right they were poaching in property belonging to someone else. One declared that the war was being fought so that everything belonged to anybody. Another said that the fish came from the sea and were free for all. It was no good arguing, so back into its case went the two-ounce split-cane rod unused since Dorset days at Flumen Monachorum.
*
The temperament of the artist is resilient. It is chameleonic. It responds to all objects and images. One morning as Phillip wrote in the Studio, he heard the footfalls of Lucy in the yard. She came in the open door with a tray of scones, and a mug of hot, milky tea.
“Well, anyway,” she said, “someone is on your side, for in the Women’s Institute Meeting last evening, it was remarked how nice the stream looked after you had cleaned it out.”
This encouragement led to a visit—Phillip’s first—to the Village Whist Drive, where faces were friendly. Among them was ‘Scroggy’, the old cavalryman of Le Gateau. A beneficial levelling of the mind followed. So Phillip continued his work of clearing the stream, raising the cruives or shallow stone-bars as before. When the Catchment Board Engineer came out one day he was sympathetic and helpful, adding that he could only protest, like Phillip and others, against the pollution, since his Board had no power to stop it, despite the Rivers Pollution Act, and the Public Health Acts; but when Drainage and Sanitation were under one control, things would be different, he declared.
“This is a wonderful occasion,” said Phillip. “I was falling into the error of thinking myself to be a man alone.”
A morning or two later, listening to the sounds of the stream at the bottom of the garden, he became aware of a brownish-purple movement in the water, and as his eyes became accustomed to the dance and swirl, saw that fish were moving just under the surface. A reddish-brown fin cut the water, and at once a dozen fish jostled after it. Backs and flanks were to be seen. There was a splashing in the run. They were roach come to spawn. They had found a clear area of gravel, of water enlivened by ripple and flow, and had chosen the place to lay their eggs.
A female roach of about a foot in length was attended by half a dozen males. The splashing was made as she turned on her side to flap in order to extrude strings of jelly-like eggs. At once the male fish dashed forward to cover them with their milt. He saw nearly a hundred fish cruising about, or lying in calmer water below the run. And farther downstream were half a dozen of Lucy’s ducks eagerly quapping the eggs in the water-weed where they had lodged. He did not mind, for he wanted to see trout in the river rather than roach.
*
As the sun rose earlier and moved higher in its curve, so the level of the river rose slowly with the growth of green water-weeds. And walki
ng by the meadow, with Billy, on leave, now so keen to see all that had been done while he was away, Phillip told him that he saw this phenomenon from several aspects: as a grazier, for when the tidal sluice-doors were closed the water in the dykes brimmed higher and moved up the shallow ditches and so checked the growth of the good grasses: as a fly-fisherman, for weeds gave off oxygen in sunlight, and also provided cover for the few trout which otherwise in a bare river-bed would be easy prey for herons and poachers prodding under the banks with their flat-fish tridents; as an amateur botanist, he noted the white flowers of the water-crow’s-foot, the clumps of water-cress at the bends, the rare emerald starwort, darker green of Canadian pondweed.
“That weed, Billy, is to English rivers what the rabbit is in Australia. It spreads and finally can choke a stream. But it’s the black sludge I dread. It’s the devil. One day you’ll fish for trout here in a pure water brook. You’ll see the water-birds sporting on the faster, wimpling stretches. It’s comic to watch the courtships and rivalries of moorhen and dabchick. And beautiful to see the delicate fluttering, crook-winged flitting, of summer sandpipers. And the snipe flying in throbbing flight over the meadows thick with persicaria and meadow-sweet …”
“Well, I think that some of the weeds should be cut, Dad, but not all of them. But the water-cress at the verges should be left. If the centre of the river is kept clear it will quicken the flow and scour a channel there.”
“A good idea, Billy. I’ll get on the blower to the engineer, and tell him your suggestion.”
The engineer replied that all three men would be put on the job at once.
*
It was said that ideas come hard to the East Anglian head. Old ideas died hard, too. Seeing the river brimming two feet higher by excessive weed growth, the authorities were, as recounted, informed by telephone. The engineer acted immediately, saying the weeds should be cut that very day. A telegram to the river-men was sent off. The river-men, who lived in the village, were dismayed. For the only knives owned by the Board to cut weeds were twenty miles away.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 56