A Test to Destruction

by Henry Williamson

  *

  The notes of reveillé floated through the grey February air. He heard a stir, and knew that Allen, his room mate lying against the other wall, was awake. Allen practised deep-breathing as he lay in bed, slowly drawing in air, and letting it out as slowly. Allen was usually very calm, he said he breathed eight times a minute. Phillip had timed his own breathing; twenty-eight to the minute. He was a shallow breather, using only the top of his lungs, according to Allen. So for two months he had breathed deeply. It had produced calmness. While boxing or running, he was no longer easily puffed.

  What was Allen thinking? He was just nineteen, and was on the roster for the next draft. Allen did not know this, and would not think of asking Phillip for information. He was an only child, his father a parson. Still, drafts were not very frequent, now that infantry brigades in France had been broken up into three battalions, which meant that every fourth battalion had been disbanded to feed the remaining three.

  Phillip waited, feeling the little dog’s silky hair against his throat. Then black and white ears arose. Sprat had heard the chink of cup on saucer. He crawled out of bed and stood up, tail-stump and pied blotched face quivering. Then with a yelp of joy he sprang off the bed to greet the batman entering with the morning tea.

  As soon as this was swallowed, Phillip and Allen got into bathing slips, put on shoes and burberrys, and with towels round necks left the billet to trudge over shingle to the sea, now a tarnished coppery-leaden hue with the sun about to move over the far horizon, where a speck in silhouette was the mast of the Cork lightship.

  “Looks bloody cold today, Jimmy.” Allen’s reply was to run into a pebble-jumping breaker. Phillip hesitated, clasping ribs with elbows, while Sprat stood some way behind him: he had been thrown into the water some days before, and now kept well clear. Phillip walked down to the white pebble-rush of a wave’s withdrawal, while looking south towards Landguard House, where the Colonel lived. Usually that tall Viking figure, bearded and almost totally enclosed in blue-and-white striped bathing suit of late Victorian pattern—he was said to possess a dozen of such suits, made specially for him in the Burlington Arcade—went into the sea about that time. Ah, there he was, striding down in his white bath-robe. At that moment the rim of the sun blazed upon the horizon. Phillip raised his arms, and diving into a wave, emerged to see Allen apparently making for the Cork lightship.

  For Phillip, two minutes in the water was enough. He waited to be swept up the concave of wet pebbles, and holding against the drag of water, crawled out and stood up, giddy for the moment while his heart thudded in his ears. A couple of slow deep breaths, with slow respirations, equalized him with the day; while his skin showed pink, and the golden glow, reward of winter bathing, possessed his being.

  He had to shake Sprat off his towel—a thin, war-time affair—whereon the dog had been chewing a bit of flotsam. As he bent down within the towel he noticed that the hairs were beginning to grow again on the insides of his thighs. He must have ridden well over four thousand miles from first to last, during the past year in France. The new hairs were thin and without sharpness, unlike the hairs on jowl and chin, which were made stubbly by constant cutting. Allen’s moustache was no more than an eyebrow; the hairs, thin at the end, had been left to grow naturally from the start, for he had never shaved his upper lip; his moustache was soft and thin like that of youths in Italian pictures of the Middle Ages. It was rather attractive, like the faint little soft hairs on an adolescent girl’s lip. Did women like young men with soft hairs on their lips, young men unaware of their callowness? It was unlikely, for only the female had beauty, while the male had strength. He looked at his own thin arms and legs.

  Allen came out of the sea, and picked his way over the pebbles to him. It was strange that Allen seemed to like his company. Phillip rubbed his legs vigorously, taking care to hide the ugly purple wound-scars in his left buttock.

  A hundred yards up the coast the Colonel’s lady had joined Satchville. She wore a sort of crumpled woman’s motoring hat down to her ears, held on by a ribbon, and frills round the neck of her dark blue serge jacket. Her bloomers also had frills below the knees. Black stockings and canvas shoes completed the costume; while her lady’s maid stood just above the wave line, holding a cloak for her mistress, and, for some reason, an umbrella, although it had not rained for several days. The Colonel was playing ring o’ roses with his wife. Then they took turns to dip one another in the waves. They were so free and easy, behind the amiable dignity which both maintained.

  Phillip wished that Father and Mother could have been like that when younger … far away across the North Sea some of the enemy were perhaps bathing in what they called the German Ocean, before getting into their uniforms as grey as the winter waves which beat upon the coast of England.

  “Ready?” said Allen. The two had a competition every morning, to see who could reach the doorstep of No. 9 in the least number of hops over the shingle and roadway. This was the greatest fun for Sprat, who did his best to impede both competitors by jumping around them.

  There was a pile of old picture magazines in one corner of the room, collected from the mess sergeant by Phillip’s batman. They helped to augment the coal ration, since fires were not allowed to be lit in billets until 5 p.m. each day. The way to burn Tatler, Bystander, Illustrated London News, etc. was to roll them into cylinders, which were stood upright in the grate and fired from below. Flames crept up with the forced draught, and a pleasing column of fire roared while they dressed to a record of Chopin on the new trench gramophone.

  *

  In the ante-room of the Officers’ Mess, by the door, was the letter-rack, with pigeon-holes lettered from A to XYZ. In the M hole was a letter for Phillip, addressed in pencil, from his mother. He had asked her not to write in pencil; why had she done so again? He kept the letter until he was in the lavatory before opening it, thinking that it was the usual scrappy note; but the contents made him literally sit up.

  My dear Son

  I hope you are well, and that no news is good news, of course you are very busy with your new appointment. Soon it will be Spring, it will be a good thing when the weather changes. I have some news for you, dear, which I must tell you. Father says he is going to join up, apparently he is not too old for the Pioneers of the Labour Branch, making roads in France or perhaps looking after the vegetable gardens attached to a hospital on lines of communication.

  Phillip was soon back in his room, dashing off a letter in reply saying that the Labour Corps worked right up to the front line, that during Third Ypres thousands were killed, almost as many as the soldiers who had gone over the top. He had seen men older than Father working under shell-fire, men who were grandfathers, with white hair. No, Father must not go; he would never be able to stand the life. He wrote with desperation, he must save Father from going through what he would never be able to stand. It was unthinkable.

  So, upon reflection, or rather in reaction, was his letter. He tore it up, and wrote another, putting aside his feelings.

  Dear Mother,

  Please ask Father not to do anything until he has seen me. I may have to go out again to France very shortly; also I may be home tomorrow, Saturday, for a brief week-end. Meanwhile please tell Father that his work on the allotment is helping the country enormously, for if the submarines go on as they have been, sinking ships, we may be beaten on the Home Front. Food is everything. I’ll try to bring some butter, I know how hard it is to buy anything nowadays. We in the mess are eating horseflesh for beef, and potatoes are not much in evidence. In great haste, and love to all,

  Phillip.

  He had pretended, on the whim of the moment, that he might be sent out to France again: the great thing was to stop poor old Father from doing something which he would soon wish he hadn’t. Scores of poor old codgers had been hit in the night-long German machine-gun barrages. No, Father must not do such a thing. What would Mother do if he were killed?

  And it was on the cards tha
t he himself might be sent out again! He wasn’t C3, but only B2, and might easily be directed to some base, or lines-of-communication, job in France. Also, he would be passed ‘A’ at his next board, in less than a month’s time. Indeed he was perfectly fit now, so why bother about a Board? He had only to add his own name to the ‘A’ list, by typewriter, and no-one would know the difference.

  It was 8.45 a.m. There was a quarter of an hour before Captain Henniker-Sudley, the adjutant, left his furnished apartments in Manor Terrace, where he lived with his wife. Phillip hurried to the orderly room, and taking down the files, removed his last medical history sheet, classifying him B2, and put it in the stove. After this, he typed his name on the ‘A’ list. Later in the morning, casually he gave the roll to the sergeant to be re-typed.

  When the fair copy was brought in, he checked it with the sergeant, found it correct, and put the old copy in the stove. Then after initialling the new copy he took it to be signed by the adjutant. That evening it was included, the weekly Nominal Roll of Officers Available for Active Service, in the dispatch bag to Eastern Command.

  *

  When she came to the shops past the hoardings Hetty saw a line of women outside Hern the grocer’s; she went on to the butcher’s, her smile a little anxious. Mr. Chamberlain, fat, bald, with pink shiny head, raised his cleaver in salute. Mrs. Maddison was much liked in Randiswell, for she had a smile for everyone. “Nothing left fit for you, ma’m!” he announced. “Only tripes and offal. Sorry, my customers all come early now!”

  She should not have stayed so long with Papa, or called in at No. 134 to see Dorrie; but Dome’s youngest boy Gerry was badly wounded, and her sister wanted to try to get to him at Etretat, where Gerry was in hospital. How could she help? Perhaps she might see the authorities at the War Office, instead of Papa, who had said he would go there himself. No; Papa must not be allowed to go out, not yet awhile at any rate. She must pray for help to Saint Anthony.

  Hurrying down to the High Street, she had crossed the bridge over railway and Randiswell brook, and was between the Public Baths and the Police Station when flakes of snow began drifting out of the sky, to melt at once, she saw with relief, upon the paving stones. Then, as she was walking under the high-walled garden of St. Mary’s vicarage, it seemed that her prayer was answered. She would call upon Canon Hough on the way back! Perhaps he would be able to help.

  Going on down past the new row of shops—they had been built in Edward the Seventh’s reign, but to Hetty they were ‘the new shops’—she heard a bird singing, somewhere high above the discoloured High Street. It must be in one of the trees in the garden of the last old-fashioned house left there with its stucco pillars, before the carriage drive, plastered over with old bills.

  There the bird was, on the highest branch of a lime tree, singing into the drift of sleet. She recognized it as a missel thrush, or storm-cock Dickie used to call it, because it challenged the elements bravely in the coldest part of winter. She recalled, with another sigh, how once upon a time, when they were first married, Dickie had been so interested in birds and the country, particularly the butterflies.

  Oh, the butterflies in the herb fields of Cross Aulton, when she was a girl, so happy with her brothers, and sister Dorrie! The wonderful colours, section after section of lavender and thyme, licorice and rosemary, chicory and aniseed! And the thrush in the garden, of a summer morning, seeming to say, Get up, Hetty! Get up, Hetty! And now, suddenly it seemed, she was nearly fifty years old. Fifty—half a century! How had the time gone by? Mamma and brother Hughie gone, sister Dorrie an invalid; dear, charming Sidney dead of enteric in the South African war—could it be seventeen years since he and Hughie had left in a cab at midnight, for Waterloo station? She could see the stars in the sky now, as the cab went down the road, the horse’s shoes striking sparks from the flints, and Phillip staring with tears in his eyes. They’ll die, he had said, sleepless in bed that night, such a nervous, anxious little child, I know they’re going to die. And Hubert, Sidney’s eldest boy had been killed; and now Gerry, the youngest, badly wounded and in hospital. Thank God that Phillip was out of it. Perhaps the war would be over in the coming year; but they had said that in nineteen sixteen, and again in nineteen seventeen. How quickly all life wasted away! And every life so precious to its owner, the Roll of Honour filling sometimes two columns of small print in the newspapers every day—and no end to it all. Papa, at bezique the night before, had stopped playing to talk of trains rolling day and night across the Rhine bridges, coming from Russia with one and a half million German troops, according to Sir Auckland Geddes, to make a great attack in France. All those poor boys out there, every one with a mother hoping and praying …

  A sad-sweet smile came over the small face, with its lines of experience at variance with its child-like look: the brown eyes, shrunken within the orbits, filled with tears, the lips trembled; then with cheerful resolution she went on down the High Street, past Electric Palace and Penny Bazaar, and so to the food shops behind the market stalls of the Borough.

  Yes, one must always hope for the best, like the bird singing through the sleet. She remembered the baby missel-thrush Phillip had brought home from Whitefoot Lane Woods one day. He had been out with two boys from his school, looking for nests, and one boy had climbed up a tall pine tree and finding only one chick in the nest had thrown it down before Phillip could stop him. It had been hurt, but for three weeks it had lived, and become quite tame; suddenly it had died. Phillip had buried it next to his museum, a hole in the flower bed covered with glass, and put up a little cross over the fledgling’s grave. She could hear his voice now, It isn’t a sparrow, but there’s not much difference, anyway it fell to the ground, so God must have noticed it. So thoughtful a remark for one so young: and what a strange mixture he had been, kind and thoughtful one minute, and the very opposite the next, although he had never hurt anyone deliberately, at least never since that sad occasion when he had egged on Peter Wallace to bully poor Alfred Hawkins, for ‘daring’ to speak to Mavis over the garden fence. How strangely children grew up!

  There was her elder daughter Mavis, who now liked to be called Elizabeth. Nothing seemed to satisfy the girl. She was always in a hurry, and nearly always late—and never able, it seemed, to live within her salary from the office. Her bedroom showed only too well the state of her mind. Shoes flung anywhere into the bottom of her clothes’ cupboards, underclothes in the drawers tumbled together, bedclothes thrown back in disorder. And yet she had been such a neat little girl, taking pride in having all her clothes just so. If only she would remember not to comb out her brush and roll up the loose hairs and drop them out of the window, where Dickie always seemed to find them, and complain. Slut, he had called her, a dreadful word to use before a young girl! Elizabeth had flung herself out of the house, letting the front door bang. But she must not look on the dark side of the moon, as Phillip would say.

  Thank goodness for her younger daughter’s calm steadiness, but she wished Doris could be a little less brusque in manner towards her father. If only Dickie would understand that Doris’s manner concealed her feelings about her cousin Percy’s death in the Somme battle, eighteen months before. Doris had never got over it, but being reserved, did not easily show her feelings. But now that Doris had got a scholarship to London University—she was going to Bedford College at the beginning of the summer term—she would meet many new faces, and the change of scene would do her good.

  Looking on the bright side, Hetty came to the busiest part of the Borough. But the sight of hundreds of women in the food lines before the shops momentarily overcame her. Then thinking that everyone standing there was like herself, with the same hopes, she took her place before Winner Bros. shop.

  She had been waiting in line about ten minutes when an old woman wearing cape and bonnet, and carrying a bass fish-basket from which stuck out the top of a flagon bottle of porter, approached in a rollicking gait, due to the perpetual discomfort of corns consolidated by misfit
boots given to her by various mistresses for whom she worked in rotation, charring. She stopped when she saw one of them in the line before Winners’, and a feeling of embarrassment came over her, that Mrs. Mad-dison should have to wait in such company.

  None of this feeling was shown in her manner when she stopped before her. “Good mornin’, ma’m. The weather is getting better, I feel it in me corns,” she remarked cheerfully. “Hope you won’t catch cold, m’am, waiting here. But it’s the times, m’am. I sometimes wonder what it’s all coming to. Still, it’s not for the likes of me to say. I’ll be along at nine o’clock tomorrow, m’am. How is Master Phillip? Well, that’s good news. He deserves a rest, if anyone did. After all, he’s done his bit,” she concluded, using a phrase that had gone out of common use since the battle of the Somme, when the realization that what Lord Kitchener had said about a long war had been proved right. “Mr. Turney is better after his bronchitis, I hope? Ah, that’s promising! Good-day, ma’m.”

  After waiting nearly half an hour Hetty had an immediate view of the shop. How empty it looked, with its rows of polished hooks holding only here and there a shrunken fragment. She was fourth away when the butcher cried, “Joints all gone, ladies! Only offal’n sheep ’eads left! Eat a sheep’s brains, they’ll improve your own!”