by Denton Welch
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Where Nothing Sleeps
The Complete Short Stories and Other Related Works, Volume One
Denton Welch
CONTENTS
I Can Remember
Narcissus Bay
At Sea
The Happiest Time
The Coffin on the Hill
I First Began to Write
The Barn
The Trout Stream
Mr Clarke
Some Memories Evoked by Music
A Visit to my Bois Relations
A House Lost in the Darkness and Wintry Fields
At Sir Moorcalm Lalli’s
The Packing-case House and the Thief
Mrs Hockey
A Child Meets Church and State and Poetry in Strange Places: Lady Astor
The Death of My Mother
The Big Field
An Afternoon with Jeanne
When I Was Thirteen
An Old Boy Takes Me Out at Repton
Ghosts
The Earth’s Crust
The Youth Rang the Bell
An Encounter by the River
Back to Repton as an Old Boy
I Left my Grandfather’s House
A Free Ride
When I Was an Art Student
A Novel Fragment
About the Author
It is so difficult to wait in graves,
To watch the flowers at the lip,
To sleep wide-eyed beneath the sky;
For centuries, to watch the stone.
It is so difficult to wait,
In your grave
—Alone.
Denton Welch 1940–41
I CAN REMEMBER
I
I was born in China but I am not Chinese. My Father was English and my mother American; her family had been early settlers in Massachusetts and we had old glass and silver and china of theirs and some lovely christening robes, quite yellow, with lace like spun milk. There was also the great tablecloth we used at Christmas, covered with sheaves of arrows and eagles and peacocks and palm trees, inscribed with the names of four generations.
I think that one of the first things I remember is the summer we spent in the Diamond Mountains in Korea. There was a lake with petrified logs in it and amber and the whole ground was littered with sparkling quartz. I have never forgotten the thrill of finding this lovely crystal. I treasured most the spikes of treacle black.
I can remember the strange hats the Koreans wore and the terror I felt when in a car we crossed a stream on two planks.
One day, when I ran down to breakfast, my eldest brother was excitedly telling how a bear had been seen on the road through the forest above the house. I hardly dared venture out that day for fear of being hugged to death.
My two brothers would bathe naked in the rock pools. They looked beautiful against the trees and sky, but at three I had a strong sense of shame and was too self-conscious to join them—besides, I loved to wander alone in search of precious crystal and amber.
The next spring we came to England. This was not long after the end of the First War and I shall never forget my astonishment at seeing England intact and undamaged. I had known there was a war between England and Germany and could not understand why my parents wanted to go back to a country that must surely be nothing but a mass of gaunt and smoking ruins.
First we went to Frinton and stayed in a house on the front which had been lent to us. There were crackled green tiles in the hall. I could never understand how the crackle was done. Upstairs in the nursery was a tiny toy butcher’s shop, which fascinated me; there were beautifully carved joints of meat laid out on a marble slab, a curious subject for a child’s toy.
Our nurse gave us cod liver oil and malt after lunch and supper, and in this way stopped us from having the two sweets we were allowed a day. She said the malt was just as good.
I can remember finding myself at the bottom of my bed under the clothes and screaming terribly because I could not find the way out. I thought I should die, but my nurse came; she seemed an angel of goodness for once.
The wind whistled like a ghost round the four corners of this house and I can see myself sitting amongst the cushions in the dark drawing-room and feeling terrible mournfulness.
Soon a friend of my mother’s came to stay with us, bringing her daughter who was, I suppose, about sixteen. The friend’s name was Phyl. I hated her and called her Fidgety Phyl, as I had been told that this was a very evil person. Whenever she saw me downstairs she would send me up to the nursery, and I can never forgive the time she sent me to have tea with the nurse when I had permission to come down. Everyone seemed to obey Phyl.
Her daughter was quite different. I loved and admired her for her talent. She painted a wonderful picture of pansies on a vase and put real silver paint on the vase. She made a handkerchief box for her mother which I thought far too lovely for such a woman. It was covered in pink taffeta and lace, and had marvellous cherries and leaves in velvet and satin all stuffed and raised up in three dimensions.
One night the grown-ups and older children had a fancy-dress party. I was allowed down in my pyjamas and saw my eldest brother, who must have been about eleven, dressed as a cave man in a leopard-skin, carrying a big club with which he hit my mother hard. There was also another boy, dressed as a girl, with curls painted in black on his forehead and cheeks. I thought he looked very depraved.
My brothers used to ride on ponies while we were here and I would follow at a distance with my mother. She had a mustard yellow hat and scarf which I thought utterly spoiled her beauty. I implored her not to wear the dirty colour, but she persisted and now it is one of my own favourite colours.
One day our nurse took my second brother Paul and myself to the police station to inquire about a lapis lazuli carving my mother had lost. I was terrified, I thought that I was being taken there to prison because they believed I had hidden it. I was amazed at their barbarity in taking me off without even asking me privately at home. I could not believe that my mother meant me to go, but the nurse insisted and teased me all the way there. She was a wicked woman.
On the beach there was a great round mine, left from the war. I was told that the fuse had been taken out, but I felt that it still might explode and was in a fever when my brother used to go up and hit it with his spade.
We found little miniature flat fish and crabs on the beach, which I loved. Unlike most fishermen I tried to catch the smallest, not the largest.
At Christmas we went to my grandfather, who lived in Sussex. The house was strange; it had had many additions and alterations. There was a miniature grand staircase, as there is on ships from the deck to the saloon. I thought the furniture very ugly, but I loved the coloured window at the top of the stairs; every pane was a different colour and one looked through each one in turn at a garden transformed.
This last was trim and intimate, with lawns and roses and a wonderful tree called Black Jack’s apple tree after a famous local smuggler. It was hung with mistletoe and my mother told me that this was the Druids’ sacred plant, and how they cut it with their golden sickles. Then there was the hot-house for the early grapes and the greenhouse for the grapes and peaches. How I loved the hot scented steam that passed for air in these houses.
In the bath one night my face flannel went down the waste hole. I thought it had sailed out to sea to vanish for ever. The next morning I saw—lying in the grating at the bottom of the drainpipe—my flannel. I rushed up to my mother with it, expecting her to be delighted, but she said it was dirty and must be thrown away—I thought this very w
anton.
On another day I had my first introduction to paper money. Paul and I were building little houses out of twigs and mud and leaves, for caterpillars to live in, and when I found a piece of paper on the grass, light and crisp, I thought it would make an excellent roof. Just then my grandfather passed and, stooping down, saw what I had used. He picked the pound note up and spoilt my house. He asked me where I’d found it and when I told him he said he must have dropped it. I could not believe that it was really money. I thought money had to be precious like gold or silver.
My aunt had a new kitten at this time and I loved it and I racked my brains for the most lovely name there was. At last I decided on Yellow Rose Bud; pink roses, I felt, were prettier, but something told me that yellow ones were rarer and more sublime and I knew that my mother, when she picked roses, only liked the buds. My aunt, with great kindness I now realise, for ever afterwards called her cat Yellow Rose Bud.
We stayed with my grandfather until late spring; it was then that I went to my first fair.
Our nurse made Paul and myself kneel down at our beds to say our prayers in the early afternoon, so that when we came back from the fair we could get straight into bed. I thought it very unnatural and hated doing it. When it was over she led us to the common, where the merry-go-round was in full swing. I hated it all and carried nothing away but the impression of grotesque squalor which haunts me even now in circuses and fairs. I can remember too the first time I was taken to a musical comedy—how the rows of kicking girls appeared so sinister to me.
When my mother had finally settled my eldest brother at school, we left my grandfather for Canada, where we spent the summer on a ranch as the guests of some friends. There were great maple trees everywhere and a herd of Jersey cows whose cream was wonderful. Every morning we started breakfast in the cold dining-room with oranges cut in half and sugared. I loved this particular way of eating them for some reason. Then for lunch there would often be the wonderful lemon pie topped with white of egg and rich cream which my brother and I were so seldom allowed to touch. We would watch with terrible envy our nurse eating it while we toyed discontentedly with our rice pudding. In the drawing-room there was a copy of the Venus de Milo. I thought it very ugly and asked my mother if she knew what the arms had been like. She said, ‘Perhaps Venus was holding up a mirror.’ I thought that she ought, if anything, to be holding up her dress.
We used to go for long walks with our nurse, who was always whistling and murmuring, ‘I’m for ever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.’ She said she thought it was the cleverest song in the world. She used to take us to the dairy on the ranch where the woman made the most delicious cakes. They were dark and rich with chocolate and iced with Hypolite or marshmallow. Then there was angel food, pure white like bread.
She had a daughter called Sally who taught my brother and myself American or Canadian slang. This made my mother laugh. Every day we had maple syrup too and hard sandy chunks of maple sugar. There was a lake to bathe in, with a boat house that I longed to live in always. If you wandered up the hill, pushing through the bushes, you came to the ruins of a house that had been burnt. I found a lump of melted glass, quite purple, like an amethyst.
II
We left Canada. By 1921 we were back in Shanghai again, in our house with its long, heavy arched verandas aflame with Virginia creeper. Inside it was cool and lofty, the floors smelt of polish and the drawing-room was scattered with baskets of flowers that friends had sent to welcome my mother on her return.
Now settled in a time of living almost entirely in myself, the last stage of infancy, a quiet time of playing with my brother in the garden, building houses in the bushes and hiding in the branches of the camphor tree. We would ask the cook for eggs and sugar, then would rush out with them to the summer house and whip them together into a honey-coloured froth. This we would then eat with outward relish, but I did not like it really, it revolted me a little. We had a swing shaped like a boat; it would fly up at one end into the scented bushes, and one was lost for a second in the pink froth, to be torn out again like a rushing wind.
At the bottom of the garden were the coach-house and stables, over which the mafoo, or coachman, lived, for at this time my father still kept a most antique carriage which had belonged to my grandmother; it used to stand next to the cars, one open and one closed, looking like a broken-down aristocrat trying to keep pace with two smart parvenus.
I adored the carriage; it was our special vehicle. My brother and I looked on it as almost our own. One day when a mouse ran out from under the seat I was almost mad with excitement. The leather was so cracked with sun and weather and so polished that it seemed to resemble some ancient lacquer.
Oh the joy of starting out for the afternoon with the old mafoo in his green braided coat with many capes, and his little conical hat. Girlie, the white horse of twenty-three, would be between the shafts and our nurse would be sitting in the middle of the back seat, the aromatic and fusty mole-skin rug over her knees, keeping a nervous eye on Paul and myself as we stood upon the steps on each side pretending to be firemen. For this purpose we always would insist on taking our topees with us, winter or summer, so that we should have something which vaguely resembled a fireman’s helmet. And it was lucky that we did, for one day, in a frenzy of excitement, my brother fell off the step, while we were in motion, and landed on his head; he was not hurt a bit, and after the first shock I thoroughly appreciated this artistic touch to our fireman act.
It was about this time that another accident happened which I remember well. Paul and I had our coats on and were waiting in the hall for nurse to take us out for our walk. We were playing with a walking-stick of my father’s; it was made of flexible steel and bound with polished leather. After a little while there was an argument and, still no nurse appearing, we each gripped one end of the stick and pulled, trying to gain possession of the whole stick. I somehow mounted the stairs step by step, pulling hard; then there seemed to be a deadlock and, suspecting that my brother meant suddenly to let go, I leant forward so that he should not have the satisfaction of seeing me fall over backwards.
He let go, I overbalanced and fell headlong downstairs on to a corner of the iron radiator.
There was blood, great oozing drops of it seeping into the terracotta carpet—I lay half stunned, a great cut on my forehead. My brother screamed and nurse came rushing down, enveloped me and carried me, still dripping, up the stairs, my brother running at her side shrieking, ‘Will he die? Will he die?’ It did not hurt; my mind was like a clear pale page on which these happenings were written.
Nurse laid me on the sofa in my mother’s bedroom and rang for basins and hot water; the doctor was fetched. Soon I lay still and peaceful, my head a satisfying mass of bandages. I felt most pale and interesting. My chastened brother hung about the sofa and nurse seemed almost human for once. Soon I heard the wheels of the car on the drive. There was the opening of the front door and a noise of voices—then, swiftly; I heard my mother running up the stairs. She kissed me many times and laughed and smiled and brought me all her jewels and trinkets to play with; she knew that I loved these winking bright things better than anything else and trusted me implicitly to take care of them.
Soon after this I had strange dreams—I floated slowly down the stairs, I skimmed their surface. They were built round three sides of the hall, and at the second flight I saw my mother. She lay by the telephone, in a heap, her hair over her face and she was crying. I could not stop; I glided by into the horror of the dark hall.
The banisters of these stairs seemed built for sliding down. They were large and ample; turning the corners was horribly exciting. At the bottom, fixed to the pedestal, was a sort of pagoda of bells, of all sizes and tones, used for calling us to meals. The fun of striking this on landing was tremendous.
In the well of the stairs hung a full-length portrait of my mother, at a desk with flowers and pictures on a wall behind her. She sat there for ever with a long s
tring of ivory beads round her neck.
Another part of the house that I loved was the attic. This was large and divided into four rooms, two large and two small. In the first large room my eldest brother had at one time had boxing lessons with some other friends. It was not kept locked and so was comparatively commonplace. We used sometimes to try sliding down the stairs on a tray and I always remember the time I tried to pick myself up by sitting on the tray and pulling at the two handles on either side of me.
It was the other three rooms that were so exciting. They were always kept locked except when my mother went into them for some reason. Sometimes I would hear her in there and would rush up so that I could be let in too. One passed first through a little dark room in which was kept an old dressing-case filled with Victorian jewellery which had belonged to my grandmother.
There were strange, thick, gold bracelets, a great ring with a fleur-de-lys on it in fire-opal, a mourning brooch of jet and pearls, a long necklace of white sapphires fitted into a chain; scent bottles, chatelaines, vinaigrettes and belts of cast silver. The whole case seemed filled with treasure to me, and I never tired of undoing the little leather boxes and unwrapping the faint-mauve cotton wool.
Also in this room were the white elephants, the wedding presents that my mother did not like: grotesque carved blackwood tables and chests.
Through this was the other big room. Trunks were ranged all round the walls. In these were stored all the small relics of the past that I loved so: the yellowed christening robes, a flowered waistcoat of grey satin, little wax dolls, a card case of cut velvet and another of tortoise-shell and gold, a strange old cribbage set in ivory and satinwood, the picture cards all having feet instead of the two heads of today. There were the old tablecloths and shawls, the fans, the lace, the miniatures, the wonderful book of flower pictures meticulously painted by my great-grandmother.
The farthest room was a cul-de-sac; in it slumbered a baby’s cot and the remnants of a lacquer screen, with curtain rods hung with great wooden rings.