Where Nothing Sleeps

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Where Nothing Sleeps Page 27

by Denton Welch


  How stuffed and stuck in the mud people are! I thought. They ought to have enjoyed having me and told me to come again. I remembered that I should write a thank-you letter to my aunt, but because I did not know whether to spell Maggie with a ‘y’ or ‘ie’ I felt that I should probably never do it. And I never did.

  That night I arrived in Winchester. I was tired but I had walked off some of my aching. I was beginning to feel broken in. This was to be my first night in a Youth Hostel. I followed the directions in my little booklet and found the front door to the City Mill down the narrow side street. Before finding the right turning I had looked from the stone balustraded bridge in the main street, and seen the old red-tiled mill crouching over the clear rushing water.

  It seemed an exciting place to spend the night in. I knocked rather nervously on the door and was let in by a stocky young woman with very short hair.

  ‘Nobody knocks here,’ she said gaily and rather boisterously. ‘I’m the warden,’ she explained. ‘I’ll show you where everything is.’

  I found myself liking her, although I doubted if she would altogether like me. She seemed to accept me as I was, with no more questions, which was reassuring.

  ‘This is where you can cook,’ she said, leading me into a low dark room, fitted up with many gas-rings round the wall.

  ‘Or if you don’t want to do your own meals, we’ll make something for you,’ she added.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got some food already in my rucksack,’ I said.

  ‘Good, less trouble for us,’ she answered. She took me up a ladder-staircase and when she had pulled the sacking curtain away at the top I found myself in a huge barn with windows on two sides and a large open fireplace. There were tables, chairs, some tattered books and maps on the walls.

  ‘This is the Common Room. It separates the sheep from the goats,’ she said archly. ‘The sheep sleep up in that loft.’ She pointed to one end of the room where another ladder-staircase led up to a dark, curtained region. ‘And the goats sleep in the dormitory through here.’ She led me across the room, into a bare windy shed where iron beds stood in rows.

  ‘Underneath are the men’s wonderful washing arrangements; come and see.’ She took me down below the dormitory. The sound of the rushing water came up to meet us. ‘Go in there,’ she said, pointing to a door. ‘I won’t, because they’ve probably none of them got a stitch on.’

  She chortled, and left me staring at the door. I opened it and saw a mass of pink bodies laughing and dancing about as they stood in the middle of the rushing water, holding on to a stout rope.

  The river passed right through the building here, under two shallow arches. The room was simply a covered-in section of river, with two bricked and beaten-mud banks and a rope from wall to wall, on to which the bather-washers had to cling because of the swiftness of the current.

  ‘Don’t let go, lad,’ someone yelled out ribaldly. ‘You don’t want to be washed out in front of the public bridge. There’s always plenty of watchers leaning over to see what they can see.’

  I laughed, and started to pull my clothes off hurriedly. The atmosphere was exciting and gay. I wanted to feel the clear white water tearing past me. The people washing and shaving in the enamel basins ranged along one wall seemed tame and rather sordid.

  I jumped in and was almost knocked over by the current. I grabbed desperately at the rope, caught it, and then had time to feel the wonderful, clear, biting coldness of the water. Its mad racing gave it the tingle of soda-water.

  ‘What did I tell you, lad,’ the same person cried out to me again. ‘You were nearly washed out in your birthday suit; then I suppose you’d have expected me or someone else to come and rescue you.’

  I looked up at him and saw that he was a big red-skinned man with ginger hair. The clash in his colouring and the water pouring off his huge limbs made him look absurd and rather likeable. I smiled and laughed and danced about in the water, but never letting go of the rope for a moment. Under the arch I could just see the foot of the bridge, and when I put my face down to the surface of the water I could see the people and the traffic passing over it.

  Someone else was talking to me now. I turned round and saw a young man almost bald, with very thick creamy skin, dark eyes and rather rabbit-like teeth.

  ‘Terrific current,’ he said, in what are known as cultured tones.

  I agreed and said how much I enjoyed the water after my day’s walk. He asked me how far I’d come, and seemed very eager to have someone to talk to.

  When we had both got out and were drying our hair and bodies in one corner of the room I noticed that he stuttered rather badly. When we were in the water the noise had been too much to notice anything more than the general shape of his words. I thought with rather a conventional pang of annoyance that I always attracted rather dreary oddities and not the interesting people that I wanted to know. Then I tried to stifle this unpleasant feeling and listened to him with more attention. He was asking me which way I meant to go on the next day. I said, towards Salisbury.

  ‘Oh, great, perhaps we could walk together,’ he suggested. ‘I’m going that way too.’

  I knew that I would have to walk with him, but I felt doubtful and unhappy about it. Physically he was certainly repellent, and his eager, stuttering, cliché talk would become very tiring.

  I smiled at him and said that that would be fine; then I left him and went to cook my evening meal on one of the gas-rings in the low kitchen.

  Others were already there, running about with frying-pans and kettles in their hands. I got out the eggs and tomatoes I had bought. I dropped a large lump of butter into the saucepan and threw on two eggs and some peeled tomatoes; then I made cocoa with the rich milk I’d bought, and rushed my meal up to the common-room on a crazy tin tray.

  I was delighted with my own cooking, as I always am. The deliciousness of the scrambled eggs and tomatoes, and afterwards the cocoa with biscuit and jam and a chocolate bar, made me utterly contented and happy. I began to read one of the tattered books, and felt that this Youth Hostel, at least, was a pleasant place.

  After my meal, when the lights began to appear on the bridge across the stretch of river, I grew restless at being indoors and wanted to go to explore the town. The warden shouted after me as I went out of the front door, ‘We lock up at ten, so don’t be late, else you’ll have to sleep in the ditch.’

  I walked up the narrow lane to the main street and looked up and down. People were parading in couples and talking and laughing. I knew that the cathedral would be closed, so I walked by the banks of the Itchen until I came to an iron seat. I sat down and for some reason I began to think of red crayfish. I don’t know why, perhaps I remembered that I had once been told that they were caught in rivers. A huge yellow moon began to rise and cast its oily wriggles of light on the water. It was a magic moment, with the lovers talking softly and laughing near me in the dark.

  A man came up and sat down on the other end of the seat. He lit a cigarette and I saw that he had a silk scarf round his neck. ‘Some night!’ he said with emphasis, blowing out the smoke and stretching his legs forward, so that they were stiff.

  He seemed bored and dissatisfied, and said, ‘Purple passion!’ when a particularly loud giggle and kiss were wafted to us. He seemed to be laughing at the lovers, yet I knew that he wished to be one himself. He told me that he was in the Army and that he was home on leave. We walked on a little way forlornly. He said that he would show me a different way back to the City Mill. He led the way up a steep bank and gave me a hand as I slipped backwards over the crumbling earth. We pushed on through the bushes and I think we came out somewhere near the school. I seem to remember its grey walls shimmering under the moon, on the other side of the water.

  He told me the way to the Mill and I said goodbye hurriedly, feeling that it must be getting late. I left him standing by the water, hunching his shoulders disconsolately and wondering what he should do for the rest of the evening.

  I ran back
through the streets and arrived at the Mill just before ten. A moment afterwards I heard it striking from some tower. People were already in bed in the dormitory. I unpacked my sheet sleeping-bag and put it between the hostel blankets. I had no pillow but that did not matter, I always slept with my head low.

  Furtively I slipped off my shorts and jumped into bed in my shirt. When in bed I discovered that my neighbour was an American. He leaned across and affably asked me questions, about what I was studying, what my father did, where I was heading for.

  He was interested when I said that my father was in China, and seemed to take it for granted that he was in the Diplomatic Service. I told him that my father was a director of rubber companies, and wondered if this would make him feel less interested, but it did not seem to. He told me of his impressions of England, of the awful socks and underclothes he’d had to buy, because there were no others. I found myself becoming a little ruffled and annoyed, and was careful to explain that although my mother was also an American from Boston, yet I did not find the English clothes so very much worse than the American—in many ways I thought them decidedly better. I underlined this rather snobbishly, I think, fixing my mind as I spoke on the difference between a pair of English trousers and a pair of American ‘pants’.

  Someone shouted exasperatedly to all the people who were still talking, ‘Oh, do shut up.’ And I suddenly remembered with a pang my own agony at school when I could not go to sleep because of the droning voices of the others. I would talk no more to my American companion, and fell asleep soon, lulled by the roaring of the water as it dashed between the arches underneath us.

  I dropped my ivory comb on the concrete floor, in the morning, and broke one of its teeth which enraged me. But I dashed down again into the racing mill-stream and forgot it.

  After breakfast the nearly-bald stutterer (whom I must call Williams as I have forgotten his real name; this might even be it—in any case it was a name of that type) came up to me smilingly and asked when I wanted to start. I suggested that we should first go to look at the cathedral, and we left the hostel together, telling the warden that we both hoped to come again to the City Mill.

  I could not really enjoy the cathedral with Williams. I had seen it all before, but I decided that on my return journey I should come to it again, and this time alone.

  We stared at Jane Austen’s tomb and at Professor Tristram’s reconstructed murals. We gazed at the black carved font and at the Norman arches, always so much more impressive to casual visitors.

  Outside in the sunlight and warmth again, I felt more friendly to Williams. He was talking to me animatedly the whole time and I found for once that I had very little to do but listen.

  We left the town behind us and started to go down a narrow lane, which we had looked up on our maps. It led at first between suburban houses, but soon ran over a wide wind-swept plain. The cloud-shadows raced across the grass and my companion started to tell me all about Eric Linklater’s Juan in America. He almost became inarticulate when he described how the woman lion-tamer took Juan up in her mouth and held him over the banisters, about to drop him down the staircase well. I was amazed that he could tell me a story from a book at this length.

  We passed a wonderful beech wood and a huge field of some green vegetables; then we came to a stone obelisk on a hill. I insisted on going up to read it and, of course, cannot remember now what it was all about. I feel it was a private monument to some old general, or was it perhaps to commemorate some disaster?

  Williams now began to tell me of his family. He explained that his hair began to fall out the year before, when it was very hot and his grandmother was ‘kicking the bucket’ in the tiny London flat.

  ‘The doctor says it’s due to nervousness and because of the heat and the strain of having my grandmother like that in the next room,’ he said.

  Now it may have been stupid, but at that time I did not know what ‘kicking the bucket’ meant. I did not realise for some moments that she had been dying. I could not completely understand his story, and heard with disgust that he was ordered to cover his scalp with castor oil every day.

  ‘Is it beginning to grow again?’ I asked politely. ‘Oh, yes; I hope soon to have a thick crop.’

  I said nothing more, for I saw no sign of it. We were now passing a long range of gnarled sloe bushes. I imagined them later in the year, bearing their heavy load of dusty blue fruit.

  We sat down to eat our lunch. My companion produced unappetising food and ate it with no discrimination at all. One moment it was there and the next moment it was not there—that was all. He took all I offered him of my own and swallowed it in the same way.

  So far we had walked entirely in the open country, following rutted lanes and narrow foot-paths; but after our meal we struck a road which led into a small village. A goose was walking in the road and the rattling bus, as it came along, ran over the goose and stopped with a jerk. I was sickened and turned away, but not before I had seen the goose subside and squat on the road, as if it were resting. It turned back its meek, long-suffering, stupid head in a way that seemed to express its acceptance of the incident as something quite in order.

  I was horrified and said something to Williams. I heard a woman say, ‘Oh, poor thing; they oughtn’t to drive so fast in the village.’ We walked on hurriedly, not looking at the mark on the road, as soon as someone had taken the goose away. It was still alive. Oh, how I wished they’d kill it!

  Nether Wallop was the charming name of the village we were aiming for. A hostel was marked on one of the main roads which crossed the plain. Soon we were on the edge of the whistling telegraph-wire country. The hostel was a shack. One of those ‘good-pull-in’ places where lorrymen and drivers eat huge pasties. The sleeping quarters were in another hut, some distance from the other, and off the road. The woman who took us across to it smiled, and I thought what lovely teeth she had, until I realised they were all false. They gleamed and glistened in such pretty regular rows. She really was a charming woman, her small head, dark hair and concentrated, compact little body were full of so much animation. She seemed delighted to see us, laughed and joked, and asked us all sorts of questions.

  The sleeping hut was wonderfully neat and clean with rows of low little beds with bright blankets. The flimsy beaver-board walls seemed to give me a sense of security; I suppose because they made me realise clearly what wind and weather were on the other side.

  We left our rucksacks on our beds and went back with the woman to the other hut. A large young A.A. man had come in and was sitting rather impatiently at one of the tables. The woman immediately went to a corner, where there was an oil stove, and began to cook him three eggs and four rashers of bacon in a frying-pan. When she brought the cooked eggs and the sizzling bacon to him; still in the frying-pan, the A.A. man turned to me and, slapping his hands together dramatically, said, ‘That’s something like, isn’t it! Give a man a meal like that when he’s been on the road all day!’ He cut a huge slice of bread and started to wolf the eggs and bacon silently.

  I went up to the counter and bought a bar of chocolate. I slipped out, leaving Williams behind, and ate my chocolate in the fields, where I watched some children playing.

  The night was noisy and troubled in the hut. The wind beat against the thin walls and made the windows squeak, and Williams snored slightly. But I felt happy and contented, although I lay awake. The next morning I contrived to lose Williams. I think I managed it by saying that I wanted to see Amesbury, which was not on the way to Salisbury. I left him outside the hut; we both smiled affably and said we hoped we’d meet later in the journey. I was in terror that he would suggest accompanying me to Amesbury, for I could not tell which book he would choose to describe in detail to me today.

  I passed many army lorries on the road and Amesbury itself seemed full of khaki. I went into the abbey-church and sat staring for some time at the carving of a mitred head. The nose was broken and the whole thing seemed so full of ancientness and magic
for me that I loved it. The dusty sunlight from a window bathed and played about it in heavy liquid spots; and a shining bluebottle teased and buzzed, settling now on the broken nose, now on the curls of the beard.

  I sat there reading some of the history of the place which the vicar had so thoughtfully provided. I learnt about Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry. I thought of the apron which she would insist on wearing on all party occasions.

  Leaving the church I went and stood on the bridge and looked towards the house where they’d lived. I could see very little; so after a few more moments of gazing I decided to set out for Salisbury. The hostel there was again a mill, but the whole atmosphere was very different. It was at West Hownham just outside the city, in fields split up and divided by streams. I walked down a tarred path under willows, evidently a promenade for the city families and lovers. At one point one passed over a white bridge. Water-lily leaves covered the water under it, giving the impression that the buttercup richness of the fields had overflowed the banks. When I saw the medieval flint-work of the Priory Mill I felt delighted. The hard, glistening squares, so neatly put together and framed in stone, gave me pleasure. A painted sign hung out from the front of the building. I noticed that the sign had glass over it, which struck me as wrong and inappropriate.

  At the door some smart waitresses met me. They still wore their stiff gauzy caps, but they were pulling them off as fast as they could and it was clear that they were going home for the night. They laughed and joked between themselves, but took no notice of me. At last, when they had all gone, a large lady in black came towards me. Her manner seemed harassed, but there were attempts at graciousness.

  ‘Have you come to spend the night at the hostel?’ she asked.

  I said, ‘Yes,’ and she told me that it was in a building behind.

  ‘But first let me show you my mill,’ she said.

  She took me into a long, pleasant tea-room and then upstairs, where the roof sloped and there was a large grand piano.

 

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