The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  “By Jove, all this is most interesting, Phil. I used to be keen on nature when I was young, Lu and I used to explore all around our home before we moved to Down Close.”

  “You don’t mind the rain?”

  “Not in the very least.”

  The hillside rose steeper, and they went down once more to the river-bed, now a succession of boulders. While walking upstream they heard a dull, far-away report, succeeded by a swishing noise, and with a loud plop a dud shell fell fifty yards away. Phillip remembered that this part of the moor was an artillery range; they were under the arc of fire. As they went on they heard behind them the familiar chromatic whining of heavy stuff. Near the summit of a tor on their left front there appeared the fan-shaped bursts of high explosive shells. Womp-womp-womp-womp. The heavy detonations of the salvo smote the air of the valley. It was a strange sensation, that of being two personalities at the same time: one in the past, the other in the present. He thought now that if the War came again, he would have no apprehension about death. It was only the very young who longed for immortality.

  He thought himself back into the rain of Third Ypres, ‘Spectre’ walking beside him up to Zonnebeke, and beyond to the Passchendaele ridge, by way of the railway cutting. When, when, when would he be able to finish his book of those days? God, over twelve years had passed since the British Expeditionary Force had fallen back in exhaustion before the right wing of von Kluck’s army-group, and the London Highlanders were awaiting orders to go overseas. It seemed but yesterday that they were marching through the Surrey countryside, while villagers and farmers came out with baskets of fruit and jugs of milk and beer for the brigade. How hot was that August sun, how heavy their equipment, how sore their feet, how proud they were afterwards that not a man of the battalion fell out, although in the wayside shade many soldiers of other battalions of the London Regiment were lying there, pale-faced and exhausted. How they had longed for that burning sun three months later, standing all day and working all night in the flooded trenches south of Ypres.

  Now the whining of the shells almost drew the heart out of his breast for those vanished scenes and faces. He must finish the otter book, and then write of the truth of the war. O, why had he allowed himself to become a farmer?

  Then he was thinking how good it was to be alive and free on the wild moor, life clear and natural as the water running on the rock all around him.

  A herd of ponies moved away casually yet surely from their approach. They were small, shaggy, with bodies like little barrels. Or was this fatness an illusion due to an almost permanent distension, caused by cropping grass that most of the year was wet? The entire moor was running with water. The soil was thin, compost of ancient grass and rush and heather, growths which slowly crept, thousands of centuries ago, from the sea to these granite hills. Had it not been for the Atlantic rains, had these granite hills been in another part of the world where rain was infrequent, they would be gaunt and dull glittering with crystals left by the crash of genesis.

  Talking about these things to Tim, who listened and expressed his interest with an occasional ‘Ah!’, they climbed steadily up the narrowing valley of the Taw and came to a wilder and more broken aspect of the moor: peat hags like little islands in a lagoon of bog, extended everywhere across the misty summit of the Great Kneeset.

  At first Phillip feared to tread in the bog, mindful of the many stories of strangers being lost on the moor and never seen again. After some minutes of hopping from hag to hag, followed by Tim, he trod gingerly on the black spread of bog, and pressing harder, to his surprise found that it was firm peat, the nailed impress of his brogues hardly penetrating a quarter of an inch.

  “I remember reading now that the ‘bogs’ of fiction are the green ‘quakers’, hollows in the rock which are filled with water and poa grasses, with duckweed and starwort on top, Tim. This ‘bog’ is only dead heather layers, too soilless to rot down to genuine humus. I don’t suppose there are many worms up here to break down the acid peat, and precious few bacteria.”

  “Ah,” said Tim.

  “After all, if one thinks it out, nothing but rain comes here to increase the life of this high ground. However, rain or snow must add to the nitrogen in the peat. Look at the wind-harried condition of these peat-hags.”

  He wrote in his note book, Islands of desperate vegetation.

  With the 1-inch contour map set by prismatic compass, they went on to find Cranmere Pool. A mist was drifting across the hill; Tim acted as marker, advancing on the lubber line of the magnet to the point of fading visibility, then to stand as marker until Phillip caught up with him for the next advance. It was rather fun, Tim agreed; they were explorers.

  “I fancy Pa has cousin George’s prismatic compass somewhere, just the thing for Australia.”

  Soon they came upon the slight hollow which was Cranmere, an empty pool of about a rood, with broken grassy banks. There was a post driven into the turf, and below it an iron box containing a book with the signatures of former visitors, together with a post-office stamp and ink-pad.

  “The idea is to post your letter here, and the next visitor takes it away to put it in a letter box, so Pa told me,” said Tim. “He came here once with Cousin Suff, and they brought back a small bottle of water from Taw head.”

  “You mean the uncle of Mary Ogilvie’s mother?”

  “I think it probably was, but blessed if I really know, Phil. Pa once told me that he had reckoned up that he had over eight hundred cousins, but we know only about thirty or so.”

  They wrote their names in the book, a fairly new one; the original book, which had contained the signature of the Prince of Wales, had been stolen by some curio collector, Phillip told Tim. “I read about it in the South Hams Gazette, when I was living on the coast south of here. A pity; it should have gone to some museum.”

  “I agree, every time.”

  Phillip wandered around the dry tarn, while Tim waited by the haversack, not wanting to disturb Phillip’s thoughts. Beside him was a hummock, on top of which was a slight yellow patch and small dark blobs with specks of white in them. By Jove, they were an otter’s spraints! He walked over to tell Phillip of this tremendous find. Phillip hastened to the hummock and knelt down.

  “You’re right, Tim.” He bent his head to sniff. “Yes, a sweetish smell. You know, Lutra may have crossed over the watershed here. We must look for his spoor.”

  They found no tracks. Phillip wrapped the spraints in his handkerchief. “When we get back I’ll put them in a glass of water, as I used to do with owl’s pellets, and find out what he’s been eating.”

  “By Jove, yes,” remarked Tim, gratified that he had found an important clue.

  “Talking about eating, you start on the sandwiches, Tim. I want to take some notes about the source of the Taw, also of the Torridge, which must start near it—brother Taw and sister Torridge.”

  He found the rise of the Taw, a slight channel about four inches wide and six deep, a mere trickle of amber water, and followed it until it broke its first bubble upon a stone of white granite made yellow by algae. Not far off was the Torridge, a diminutive pool hardly big enough to bathe a baby. What a place to baptise Billy! He sat awhile in the heather, his mind living other days, until the inevitable sigh of resignation, and return to the present.

  Now he must go to the southern slope of the hill, and find the sources of Tavy, Teign, and Tamar. Yes, he must carry Billy up in the spring and touch his forehead with the water where perhaps Lutra had touched, Lutra who had known the warmth of her breast, but not Billy.

  *

  While he was eating egg-sandwiches beside Tim the rain, which had held off during the last part of their climb, began to fall again. All was now obscured by mist; they plodded back the way they had come, while the afternoon grew darker with clouds thickening about them. The motor-bicycle outfit was still by the gate, a welcome sight. Along the granite track with its plashy potholes they bumped, through rain that poured steadily during al
l of the return journey. Their clothes were heavy with water. The only stop on the way back was for petrol.

  Lucy was out when they returned. He asked Mrs. Rigg where she was.

  “She’s gone up to see Squire, sir.”

  “Did she say when she’d be back?”

  “After tea, sir. Shall I get ’ee something to ait?”

  “No thank you, Mrs. Rigg. Is the fire in, for hot water?”

  “Us’v run out of coke, sir. Th’vire be gone out.”

  Phillip turned to Tim. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you a hot bath.” He added, “I should have ordered the coke myself. But one doesn’t think of such things when writing.”

  “Ah,” said Tim. “Anyway, I’m quite all right, I do assure you.”

  “I’ll lend you some clothes, and you can wash in the bathroom. Mrs. Rigg, will you fill the kettle on the lapping crook? I’ll build up a fire. It won’t take long, Tim. Go you up, my dear, and cast your sobbled clout, then zit you down yurr, by the vire, do! How about that for a farmer, Mrs. Rigg?”

  “Aw, ’tes proper, my dear.”

  When they had washed and changed their wet clothes, they had tea, sitting in the blaze of split beech logs, while Phillip thought what fun it would be if Tim, instead of going to Australia, were coming to live at Skirr, and learn to farm. He would have a deputy, an adjutant; and be able to write more often, instead of being chronically shocked out of a state of dreaming with his eyes open, which wasn’t so bad a phrase, he thought, to describe the act of writing.

  He was about to speak of this idea to Tim, but saw that he had dropped asleep in the heat of the flames; and going up to his room, he added to the notes which the rain had interrupted.

  Cranmere is a hollow with broken peaty banks. A horn winds out of its northern end, filled with stagnant water.

  It would not be true to write that the rivers begin as ‘bright threads of water’. Taw slinks through turf in a narrow, winding, grass-covered channel which splodges out into peaty slides after twenty yards or so.

  The Torridge (Ockment on map) begins in broader channel. Water the colour of Irish whiskey. It becomes bright when it meets the slope of the hill, where granite makes its first bubbled music.

  Black-faced sheep appearing out of mist.

  Torridge rises in maze of broken humps of turf, rounded by grey moss—the otter rolls in moss in sunlight.

  The Great Kneeset is occluded. In cold wafts and hollows the vapour drags past. I sit among the clouds.

  How to convey the occluded moor in rainy winter weather? How could he re-create, in words, the muffled silence—omitting the cliché muffled? Descriptive prose must be brief, it must startle with an immediate picture in the mind. It must feel cold.

  The waters wan, and the water wap

  Malory’s Morte d’ Arthur: seven words of a necromancer, calling up the ‘tarn in the hills’, the ripples breaking on a sandy shore, sere reeds vibrating in the wind, amber waters ‘lonely as a cloud’. ‘Poets live on air’, and nourish one another.

  Cranmere is a hollow with broken peaty banks——

  No good. He went downstairs, and heard Tim gently snoring in the armchair.

  *

  The December month darkened with rain. Colder winds brought sleet, which wandered aimlessly over meadow, field, and down. The sleet foreran snow, which thawed; then from the north-east whirled a blizzard all through a night and a day and a night. Telephone wires lay distraught; a man, with strips of sacking tied to above his knees, and a corn-sack over his shoulders, his eyebrows melting icicles, called with a message that the ewe-flock on Turk Farm was buried. Wonderful, blood-warming action followed: the war without fear and dereliction. Phillip was out until only two ewes remained unfound. This was the life.

  “I ’eard a raven,” said the shepherd, “callin’ another lewside thak barrow by th’ ould thorn up Comberley. Reckon ewes be ther.”

  Stars, and the keen air of eternity, walking beside Joby the Shep with crook and dog—men in the moon—lantern casting grotesque shadows as their foot-pressures squeaking with wadded snow. The wind was gone, stars glittered, this was the life—and he had a warm room to go back to.

  They found the ewes under a riven white-thorn growing out of the lee side of the barrow, burial mound of some ancient British chieftain. One ewe already had two lambs, the other was soon to give birth. He stared at the scene, eager for details; the ewe squeezing out its young head-first; the lamb slithering out, fish-like, seeming to be entangled in the jelly-like placenta streaked with blood. Entoiled in what was now cold slime, it rested while it breathed for strength. It became a fawn-head in the lantern light, piping weak cries in reply to the bass mutter of its dam lying still, save for slight head-movements, on her flank. There followed the first small struggle of the lamb to use its feet. It found them, struggled up, to sway on unfamiliar legs which had their own independent motions ending in collapse. It gave weak cries for help; answering mutter from the diaphragm of the ewe, urging it to come to her. The wet thing remained trembling on its knees; the ewe called again, encouraging it to use its own strength. ‘Take up thy bed and walk.’

  Another effort; lamb struggling upon small cloven feet, to sway about, to appeal again, to be encouraged to ‘stand on its own feet’, thus to get to her.

  Joby the Shep was encouraging the ewe. She gains strength from his feelings, she feels the shepherd’s kindness, she knows that her flanks are protected, she can go forward into the attack upon the world’s latent evil with confidence. Krok-krok-krok of raven under the moon.

  The ewe passed on her love to the lamb. Baa-baa! It tottered forward under its own stilt-like powers, going forward by instinct, that inherited spiritual resolve. Encouraged—the very word!—by that low mutter it grows in determination; it finds the dug; its exaltation shows in the throbs of satisfaction passing through its body and wriggling down its spine and out of its tail. Mother and child were joined in love; and all the time the shepherd’s dog, silent and still, eyes lambent in lamp-light, was flairing its nose for scent of fox or badger.

  The next ewe, a dozen yards away, lay with her ‘double couple’ of two lambs. He didn’t like to ask Joby if ‘double couple’ meant that both had shared the same umbilical cord. The phrase was enough. The ewe had had her twins an hour or so, she was licking them to help dry their tiny pelts, the small curled wool of which looked like the burr of the walnut table top in Lucy’s boudoir.

  “Us must bring them whoam, young maister.”

  “Give me your orders, Joby, I am your ’prentice.”

  “Yar’ll do, maister.”

  It was now Joby’s turn to encourage the ewe. With a lamb in the crook of each elbow, he held them low while Phillip placed the lantern so that she could see them, for a cloud was over the moon. She lay still, calling them; but now it was time to enter a dimension created by man. She must forget her established shelter, her base of warmth, she must begin again. Her loneliness must be transcended; it must be shared, for her world was civilised. The shepherd walked slowly backwards, showing her the lambs, encouraging her to get on her feet. With a trace of protest, of weakness, of self-pity in her middle-range baa-baa she got up and after a moment of bewilderment took their scent, replied confidently to Joby’s bleating.

  It was now Phillip’s turn to persuade the ewe with the single lamb. At first, perplexed by his scent, she was flustered. He touched her nose with the lamb, before withdrawing to walk backwards to make her get up. She arose in a flurry of wool and glinting water-drops of melted snow and ran to its bleat, eager now, bumping gently into the back of his knees as he carried the lamb beside Joby on the way to the lambing fold in the lee of the wood.

  Sometimes the shepherd imitated the bleating of his couple snuggled under his shoulder sack to get his ewe to follow.

  The fold, a double row of nutwood-hurdles, straw packed between them, was built in the form of a square. Within the square, under a roof of more hurdles roughly thatched with barley straw, was a
range of cubicles, or cubby holes, whence came the happy cries of lambs warm with their dams, tenants of a now familiar city. The newcomers settled in, their natures full of proprietary regard re-established within the security of the flock. Phillip’s ewe began to gnaw a swede root, after turning to give a happy sniff at the anus of her lamb. Then, snuffled in oat straw (Joby would have no barley rubbish within his fold) the newcomers lay with their lambs half hidden in their fleeces.

  *

  The writing trauma was disrupted at the dark end of the year. For Christmas they went to Down Close, Phillip to feel defeated by the same unreturned acid carboys, in their rusty cages, five of them worth £25; the Tamp, half embraced by brambles, becoming a skeleton under the Workshop windows; and Miss Calmady, good-natured, fat, and untidy, the front-half of her hair falling over her forehead, the back hair enwisped as a feather knot at the back of her neck. The garbage pails outside the scullery door were solid with ice. The dropped door of the derelict smith’s shop stuck half-open to allow a sight of rusty anvils, new bellows, tools, clusters of horse-shoes lying about. Broken china and glass, tins, rags, and decayed cardboard boxes littered the yard.

  More snow fell on Christmas Eve and covered all gently with white. Trooping to church in the morning; Tim leaving to spend the rest of the day with Pansy and her mother. The Christmas festivities, otherwise the roasting of the turkey, had been postponed until Boxing Day. The previous evening Phillip had overheard the reason.

  “I knows ’ee won’t mind if I spends me Christmas ’oliday with me friends up th’ lane, will ’ee, Master Tim?”

  “By all means, Miss Calmady, by Jove yes, that will be quite in order.”

  He had wanted to spend Christmas at home, before his blazing hearth; but Lucy, he knew, wished to be with her father and brothers; it was probably the last time the family would be together. After a partly silent and wholly indigestible lunch of the cold remains of a fragment of hard, overcooked cow-beef and acid yellow pickles, he went for a walk by himself, while thinking of his parents spending Christmas alone, since his sisters were still forbidden the house in that sad, drab suburb of London.