A Test to Destruction

by Henry Williamson

  “I’ve got on my second-best suit,” he complained. “If I’d’ve only known, I’d’ve put on my third-best.”

  “Only think!” cried Phillip, as they went on with squelching shoes and dripping trousers, “We are free! We can be under a real roof at night! And sit by a fire, and sleep!” He would find a shed somewhere, or make a lean-to in Knollyswood Park, and have a fire. “Forward, the crab-wallahs! The Steenbeke used to be something like this, I suppose. No! It was in the country. It wasn’t debased by yellow-brick suburbanism creeping out like dry-rot. I wish I had seen the Steenbeke before the war. I wonder if they will ever get it back to what it was, with trout and roach in it. Blast the London County Council! They had no excuse for polluting this Kentish stream! They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it has to come through the mind, not the pocket. Look at this ghastly muck-up!”

  He peered through a gap in a tattered garden fence, to see sickly rows of thin-stalked cabbages, the upper leaves of which had been riddled by caterpillars in the past summer, while the lower leaves were grey with blight, stricken upon a limeless soil.

  “‘Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, Thy tribute wave deliver: No more by thee my steps shall be, For ever and for ever,’” he declaimed to the air.

  “F—k everybody except me!” shouted Ching, and kicked in two planks of the garden fence.

  “Oi!” yelled a face out of a little window. “Mind what you’re at, knocking down my fence like that!”

  Ching shoved his head through the gap, crouching and waggling his arms like an ape, then gave the face at the little window a double two-finger insult; while Phillip raised his cloth cap to the face and bowed, and stepping backwards, fell sprawling over a broken galvanised pail half-hidden among tangled grasses.

  “Serve you bloody well right!” shouted the face at the lavatory window, as Ching helped Phillip to his feet before flinging the pail into the stream.

  “Don’t add to the filth in the water, you bloody hooligan!” shouted Phillip. “What the hell are you doing? Come on, let’s get on with our walk, or we’ll never get to Reynard’s Common!”

  Ching’s answer was to jump into the stream, haul out the bucket, and heave it over the tattered fence.

  “Oi!” yelled the man at the window. There was the noise of a lavatory plug being pulled, again and again.

  “Poor chap, his ball-cock’s out of adjustment,” said Phillip. “Come on, get a move on!”

  They approached the dying hamlet of Bellingham, with its occasional elm trees, tumbledown field-barns, and yellow-brick cottages dulled by coal-smoke.

  “Jack Cade’s men assembled here you know, Tom, before they marched on London, not to raise rebellion, but to protest against starvation conditions. Did you know that?”

  “More bloody fools they! What did they get out of it?”

  “A row of heads stuck on the spikes of London Bridge, I suppose. At least there are no bones here on what, if the City of London lawyers hadn’t been so cunning, might have been a battlefield.” He stared around, and said bitterly, “It would have been better if they had all been killed here. ‘And never a bone the less dry for all the tears,’ as Francis Thompson wrote of Keats in his essay on Shelley.”

  “‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit,’ bird thou never f——g well wast!” replied Ching.

  Phillip went on, “I remember my father telling us children about Jack Cade, when we came here for walks. The brook was alive then, and one winter day we saw wild duck flying down to feed, a wonderful sight.”

  Scum moved slowly down the surface of the water-course. Ching said, “See those soap-suds? When I ran with my bayonet at the colonel, to dodge the attack on Inverness Copse, I had it all worked out. I munched up a bit of soap in my mouth to make it frothy, as though I was in a fit. Luckily I spewed when I fell in the mud, so there wasn’t any evidence left.”

  “I really don’t want to hear, Ching. Let’s get on, why must you always stand still when you talk?”

  “As soon as I got up the line, and saw hundreds of corpses lying about, I made up my mind to get away as soon as I could,” persisted Ching. “I tried eating cordite, to give me a bad heart——”

  “I know, I know. You weren’t the only one. See those birds over there, like an eyebrow? They’re green plover. Thank God they’re still about.”

  “—but all I got from the M.O. was a No. 9 pill. Then I tried to get a few breaths of phosgene when we were carrying up duck-boards one day, but the sergeant saw me lifting my mask, and said he’d get me a court-martial if I tried to swing it that way——”

  Phillip tried to jump across to the other side, to get away from Ching, but he jumped short and fell in. He floundered about among old tins, bottles, and nearly went face-down over a bent bicycle frame, but recovered; to be splashed a moment later by Ching jumping in beside him.

  “Let’s pretend we’re in the Steenbeke near Langemarck, Tom! If we raise our heads, we’re for it. At any moment the counter-barrage will come down. Listen! Psst-psst-psst-psst! Their machine-gun barrage sweeping the timber tracks! That’s the Cockroft in front! Our only hope is to keep down until the tanks come up the road to Poelcappelle. Ah, there they are! See the smoke screen?” A train going into Kent was passing to the west side of the brook. “The Jerries are running out!” He stood still. “I don’t feel a bit tight, do you? Vörwarts Cutler’s Pond! Let’s wade there.” Perhaps that would take Ching away from his self-accusing memories.

  It was too slow, too muddy, too cold, playing this game. He got out and pulled up Ching, and they squelched onwards, leaving behind the last of the run-out streets of terrace houses. Now the course of the stream lay through cabbage and potato fields, fighting a forlorn rear-guard action against the London County Council he thought. The burst heads of bulrushes gave an illusion of the old brook, and he peered hopefully for fish, sign that the water was not yet dead, but he could see not even a stickleback, which had lived there when he had walked along those same banks, leading his Bloodhound patrol of Boy Scouts, and tried to tell ragged boys from Deptford and Botany Bay not to take them home in jars, to die in airless water: some poor little father fish, faint red marks on its scales, raced away from a small bundle of sticks and drowned grasses, the nest made for its wife to lay her eggs in.

  Why had he come back again? All the old life was hopelessly gone; so was his own life, now that he had a chronic disease.

  A thousand suns will stream on thee

  A thousand moons will quiver,

  But not by thee my steps shall be

  For ever and for ever.

  “Come on, Tom, we must get a move on if we’re going to get to the Fish Ponds on Reynard’s Common, and see the source of this stream.”

  They had by now reached the main road, the stream running shallow in a stony bed beside it. Electric trams ground past, to the terminus at Cutler’s Pond. When they reached the woods, the real walk could begin. They approached the Tiger’s Head, once an inn for carters and waggoners coming in with vegetables by night to Covent Garden market, but now a modernised flash place, rebuilt about the time, he recalled, that King Edward had died.

  “Perhaps we could get a drink if we tried the back door,” suggested Ching.

  “I don’t want any, I’m still feeling muzzy. Come on!”

  “We might want a drink later. I’m going to try to get a bottle.”

  “I’m going on. I shan’t wait this time!”

  Relenting by the railings of the pond, his thoughts returned to the Salient, no bird or animal or even earth-worm could have lived on or in the battlefield of Third Ypres. Were there any watermills in Flanders before the war, or were they all driven by wind? There used to be a windmill on the crest near Passchendaele village; would it be rebuilt, or was it a thing of the past, like the original pond here, which used to have posts-and-rails, and reeds around the edges, before the L.C.C. built a brick wall below the road and crowned it with a spiked iron railing?

  At the foot
of the wall the muddy bottom was pale with newspapers thrown in; and the old mill-house, where Father had told them that bayonets were ground for the Crimean War, was ruinous and overgrown with ivy. Did nothing remain in the world the same, for year after year, or was all doomed to fall into ruin, and pass away? Was there hope anywhere? Bones and flesh came from the earth, as phosphates, calcium, and carbon; and back they went after a space of time. Must natural beauty die, too?

  He strolled to the top of the pond and waited by the road-bridge under which ran the brook coming from a wood which hid a house said in boyhood days to be filled with the lunatics of a private asylum. There Ching joined him, the top of a rum bottle wrapped in a page of The People sticking out of his third-best jacket pocket. Phillip felt scorn for this concern with clothes, until the idea came that Tom’s father, the bread-winner, was dead, and Tom was probably the main support of his mother. Supposing his father had died; where would Mother be then? It was too late now to go back to the office, he thought, as they climbed down beside the bridge and pushed through undergrowth along the bank of the stream. Out of sight of the road Ching offered him the bottle.

  Phillip ignored him, and pushed on by himself, regretting that he had ever had anything to do with Ching; he had only tried to help him, out of a slight resemblance, in face only, of Ching to Driver Mobbs, a genuinely shell-shocked infantryman transferred to his transport section of 286 Machine Gun Company in 1917. Mobbs had been fundamentally decent; Ching always had been soggy, human fungoid. Perhaps some human beings had pre-evolutionary primeval traits still in their natures; others—the killers without self-knowledge—had traits of tigers and predatory beasts, Zippy-like torture-pleasure which stimulated the sex instinct. Somehow all cruelty was involved with thwarted sexual appetites …

  “How about a drink?”

  “I thought you wanted to know the names of birds?”

  “There aren’t any left here, are there?” Ching tipped the bottle and poured past his back teeth.

  They were being watched. A man in an old-fashioned tweed suit with high lapels and knickerbockers was standing, with the aid of two sticks, on a path leading away from the water. Behind him was a wheeled chair. As Phillip went near he saw that the stranger had dark hair and eyes with a dark look in them. By his attitude, confirmed by his speech, he was a gentleman.

  “You have a problem on your hands, I see.”

  “He’s a sort of faked shell-shocked case. And a bore, because nothing about him is real. Morally disintegrated by knowledge that his father committed incest with his own daughter, after having rated the son for the same offence.” Phillip felt himself disintegrating as he spoke; for Ching had told him that in confidence.

  “A case of paternal idealism gone wrong! Although in my case it is the other way round.”

  Phillip, now recovered, told himself that he must on no account show curiosity or ask personal questions. The other man observed this and went on frankly, as to an equal, “My father cannot forgive me for having a bullet in the base of my spine.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “Unfortunately yes. But an operation might kill my father’s remaining son, which would entirely upset what remains of his hopes of partial immortality of his possessions through me.”

  Phillip wondered if the set stare in the eyes indicated a mental case, but what was next said made things clear.

  “I was hit in the spine by a sniper when going to help one of my men hit by the same sniper a minute or two before. It was against regimental orders, of course, for an ensign of Guards to do that, you follow me? And my father is a soldier, regarding himself pre-eminently in that character, but with a confusion similar to that of Nicodemus, who, you may recall, had great possessions. I am, or was, his heir, my two elder brothers having been killed.”

  “But you saved a man’s life, or tried to——”

  The other continued, his eyes glittering, “For a year my father barely endured my presence after I returned home. I was a half-man, he said, as I footled about in a wheeled chair. My occasional clumsiness irritated him until he could not bear the sight of me. If, for example, on entering the dining-room, my dragging feet caught in the carpet edge, or a wheel scraped the door, or my hand caused the soup spoon to rattle, it was the sign for an explosion in my father. Towards the end of his patience he even rated me before his guests, until one night a friend of the family went for him, and there was almost a brawl. The result was that I was sacked, and here I am in the Cads’ Club, the unofficial name for this so-called private nursing home for so-called gentlemen. Have you, and your tippling friend over there, come to join us?”

  “No, we’re passing through. I’ve just been hoofed out of home, too.” Phillip was as frank about himself as the other had been in his story.

  “Aren’t they a purblind generation, our fathers? Sitting in their damned clubs, talking about having ‘given their sons to the war’? I suppose one should be as charitable as you are, and try to see causes of effects, but there is a limit to one’s physical resistance.” He looked at Ching. “Surely he’s not going to finish that bottle? What is it, rum? He knows how to put it away, doesn’t he? Needless to say, the Cads’ Club is unlicensed. We’ve got some pretty bad cases of shell-shock here. One fellow, of the Black Watch, goes dippy whenever he hears a tree coming down, and wants to scupper what he calls the British Huns. They have to put him in the padded cell, poor chap. He can’t bear the idea of a tree crashing down, after Bourlon Wood. No, not the Cambrai show in ’17, but last September, when the Hindenburg Line was broken. You missed that? That’s where I got hit, and was lucky not to be burned by the phosphorus bombs they lobbed over among our fellows.”

  Ching came along, and offered the bottle. The stranger hesitated, then accepted. Phillip drank after him. It became a second party; but Ching’s contribution to the conversation was an obstacle, his remarks being based upon his own very limited experience, which to him was ‘the truth.’

  “Here’s our tree-hero approaching,” said the man with the sticks. “He’s normal today, it being Sunday, and no felling.”

  A tall man with untidy black hair and large black moustaches passed by unspeaking. He wore a loose-woven tweed suit, bramble plucked and shapeless; and pushing past, hat brim pulled low over his eyes, he continued along beside the river.

  “Why are they throwing the timber?”

  “They’re going to build a new suburb, apparently.”

  “I knew they were going to build on the other side of the road, but not here as well. What a pity.”

  “Yes, indeed. Everything is to be swept flat, and the brook, which still holds trout, by the way—farther up by the watercress beds—is to go into the sewer. The only good point about it all is that the Cads’ Club will be pulled down, too.”

  “Did you hear that, Tom? There are still trout in the Randisbourne! So there’s hope yet! I thought the poor old stream was dead! Come on you crab wallah, we must do an allez! No, don’t chuck the bottle in the river, you ass. Bury it decently.” To the crippled man, “We’re supposed to be exploring this cold rivulet to its source on Reynard’s Common. Goodbye, and good luck!”

  Onwards; a little sad that another friendship was to end as soon as begun. Ching was no consolation. Phillip determined that this really was the last time he would see him. And so it turned out: but not quite in the way Phillip meant it to be.

  Soon they were through the wood, with a sight of large oaks and ornamental trees either thrown and stripped or marked with blue paint for felling. The brook ran clear through the watercress beds above the wooden mill known in Bloodhound patrol days as Perry’s, now derelict; but the cedar tree still leaned over the mill pond beside the road.

  Beyond were gaps where willows and poplars had been felled in low-lying ground, and the makings of a new road, bright with red and yellow crushed bricks, lay through the loppings and toppings beside the trunks.

  Half a mile from the watercress beds they crossed a wide clearing whe
re stood stacks of bricks and heaps of gravel. The drink had made Phillip lethargic, and he sat down near a wooden hut beside the broken brick road, feeling heavy and ugly, his tongue sour, his head thick. How could he shake off Ching? Where could he go? Down to Devon, on the Norton? Willie was in France; there was only Aunt Dora at Lynmouth. But she had written a letter to him at Folkestone, warning him against ‘treading the primrose path.’ What had she heard, and how? She was an old maid, and would not understand. Well, for the moment there was no need to decide. He would find a shelter in the woods for the night.

  Then Ching’s voice, more guttural than usual, said beside him: “How about having a fire here? A match to that heap of shavings beside the hut would soon set things off!”

  “What do you mean, set fire to the hut?”

  “No one would know who did it. We could always say we found it alight, and were trying to put it out, if anyone came. It would dry our clothes all right!”

  “We’ll make a fire in the wood over the railway, if you like.”

  “All right. I’m just going to look in the hut. There might be some beer inside.”

  Phillip lay back again, until Ching’s voice brought him out of his reverie. “I looked through the window and saw an old man inside, reading a paper. There’s a lot of shavings round the other side. One match, and it would soon be alight.”

  “I’m going on alone, if you don’t stop talking like a prize bloody fool.”

  “But I am a prize bloody fool, didn’t you know that?”

  Phillip decided to leave him. He had got through the wire strands of the railway fence when he heard a noise of breaking glass, and looking back, saw Ching running towards him, and smoke rising in the background. As he watched, a man appeared round the side of the hut, yelling to an unseen mate before starting to give chase.