This collection first published 2001
Ebook edition 2013
Smashwords edition
The Henry Williamson Society
14 Nether Grove
Longstanton
Cambs
Text © The Henry Williamson Literary Estate 2001
‘Henry Williamson’ by Fr Brocard Sewell © British Province of the Carmelite Order 2001
Cover illustration © Mick Loates 2001
ISBN 978-1-873507-43-8 (EPUB)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners
Contents
Editor’s Note and Acknowledgements
Henry Williamson, by Fr Brocard Sewell
Out of the Prisoning Tower
The Christmas Truce
When I Was Demobilised
Richard Jefferies
A First Adventure with Francis Thompson
English Farming
The Winter of 1941
Indian Summer Notebook
Editor’s Note and Acknowledgements
This present selection of Henry Williamson’s work comes from a number of sources. It consists of little-known introductions to books; contributions to anthologies and magazines; a series of articles in the Evening Standard, and an important essay in the edition of Francis Thompson’s The Mistress of Vision issued by Saint Albert’s Press, whose publisher was Fr Brocard Sewell.
If the selection has a theme, it is one of people, places and events that had a significant effect on Henry’s life – his schooldays, the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in 1914, the writer Richard Jefferies and the poet Francis Thompson, his Norfolk farm and, of course, North Devon.
The Henry Williamson Society dedicates this book to the memory of Fr Brocard Sewell, who died on April 2, 2000. Fr Brocard had a very high regard for Henry, both as a friend and as a significant author. In the post-World War II years he championed Henry’s writing, and in particular the early volumes of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, in the literary magazine that he founded and edited, The Aylesford Review, one issue of which was devoted solely to Henry. When the Society was founded, in 1980, three years after Henry’s death, he became a Vice-President, and at its first meeting gave a memorable paper on ‘Henry Williamson: Old Soldier’, with readings by the late Frances Horowitz.
In tribute to Fr Brocard, we include as a preface his article ‘Henry Williamson’, which was first printed in John O’London’s Weekly in 1961. It is reprinted now by permission of the British Province of the Carmelite Order.
The Henry Williamson Society gratefully acknowledges the permission of the Trustees of the Henry Williamson Literary Estate to publish this collection.
John Gregory
Henry Williamson
by
Brocard Sewell, O. Carm
Henry Williamson’s first book, The Beautiful Years, was published 40 years ago, in 1921. Over this long period, he has maintained a steady and prolific output of novels, nature writings, essays, and works of autobiography. The Beautiful Years, a novel of childhood, was begun during the last year of the Great War, through the whole of which the young author had served on the battlefields of France and Flanders. It was well reviewed, and sold 520 copies. Its sequel Dandelion Days (1922) was less well received and was soon remaindered. In its later, revised edition Dandelion Days is a serious, yet immensely entertaining, story of boyhood and schooldays. The truth and humour of the classroom scenes are balanced by passages which presage Williamson’s later fame as a nature writer.
The story of Willie Maddison, the hero of these early novels, is completed in The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway (1928). The narrative, reflecting in part the author’s own experiences, now takes on a graver note. The Dream of Fair Women describes Maddison’s rootless life after the demobilisation of 1918 and his disillusionment with the post-war world. The Pathway, a story of unhappy love ending with the hero’s tragic death by drowning, reveals Williamson’s gifts as an observer and interpreter of West Country life and character, to be developed later in his Tales of a Devon Village.
The Pathway, which closes the series of four novels known collectively as The Flax of Dream, was immediately recognised as the work of a potentially great writer, and was praised by John Middleton Murry and Edward Garnett for its truthfulness and sensibility.
The Flax of Dream was a subjective or romantic treatment of the theme of redemption. Its underlying motif derives in part from a central event in the life of the writer. References to this experience abound in Williamson’s works, but the fullest description, of which we can quote only an extract, occurs in his later book The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1939):
On Christmas Eve of 1914 we were in the support line, about two hundred yards inside Plugstreet Wood. It was freezing. Our overcoats were stiff as boards, our boots were too hard to remove, but we rejoiced. The mud was hard too! Also, happy thought, we would be able to sleep that night. Then came a message from brigade headquarters. Wiring parties were required in no man’s land all night. And there would be a moon. We would have to work only fifty yards from the German machine-guns in the White House opposite the eastern edge of the wood . . .
For an hour we worked in silence, in a mysterious soundlessness. What had happened? We began to talk naturally as we drove in stakes and pulled out concertinas of prepared wire. There was no rifle-firing either up or down the line . . . At midnight we were laughing as we worked. We heard singing from the German lines – carols the tunes of which we knew. I noticed a very bright light on a tall pole, raised in their lines. Down opposite the East Lancs trench, in front of the convent, a Christmas tree, with lighted candles, was set on their parapet. The unreal moonlight life went on, happily. Cries of ‘Come over, Tommy! We won’t fire at you!’
A dark figure approached me, hesitatingly. A trap? I walked towards it, with bumping heart. ‘Merry Christmas, English friend!’ We shook hands, tremulously. Then I saw that the light on the pole was the Morning Star, the Star in the East. It was Christmas Morning.
After the war of 1914-18 Henry Williamson obtained a post in Fleet Street on The Evening News. In the offices of that paper he met Arthur Machen, who was employed as the paper’s star reporter. Machen’s books, The Hill of Dreams and other works of near-genius, were not widely read, and their author regarded his career as a journalist as a kind of slavery. Out of the bitterness of his own experience Machen strongly advised Williamson not to try to be a writer, but to ‘go and keep pigs’.
In Fleet Street, Williamson, whose hobby as a boy had been natural history, soon began to make a reputation for himself by his articles on wild life, some of which were later collected in his books The Lone Swallows and The Peregrine’s Saga.
In 1928, the year of The Pathway, came his first great success with the publication of Tarka the Otter. This was at once recognised as a great piece of nature writing, in the tradition of Richard Jefferies and W.H. Hudson but with its own note of originality. Tarka was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and was acclaimed as a masterpiece by John Galsworthy.
After his early Fleet Street days, Williamson had left London and settled in a tiny cottage in North Devon. There he acquired a strange family of cats, dogs, gulls, buzzards and magpies: and also a tame otter cub. After being caught in a trap the otter cub was lost. Afterwards, when out with the Hunt, Williamson always dreaded seeing his own otter killed; and so, as Elinor Graham says in her introduction to the Puffin edition of Tarka, ‘he entered the otter’s world for a time and it became more real to him than the world of men.’
With the general public it is on Salar and Tarka that Williamson’s fame chiefly rests. The public like an author to stick on the whole to one vein of work, so that Henry Williamson is usually thought of as a nature writer who has written some novels as a sideline. This is an ill-balanced concept which reminds one of how Baron von Hügel, when acclaimed by The Times as ‘the greatest living apologist for the Roman Church’, replied that having hoped to do well in the dog class he was much discouraged at being first prize among cats! Henry Williamson, understandably, feels much the same when he is asked: ‘Why don’t you write something else like Tarka?’
It had always been Williamson’s intention to follow The Flax of Dream with the story of Willie Maddison’s London cousin Phillip, who appears here and there in the book. This complementary series of novels was intended to present the same underlying theme, but to be written on the classic or objective pattern. ‘Twenty years were to pass before the first sentence of the new series of novels was written. And during those twenty years the proverb of William Blake was chronically before my mind: “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence”.’
At last, in 1951, Macdonald and Company published The Dark Lantern, the first volume of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, which will probably comprise thirteen books in all. Eight have appeared so far; the ninth The Innocent Moon is ready for publication, the tenth nearly so.
The Dark Lantern recreates in loving detail the lost world of late Victorian London suburbia and mercantile materialism, and describes the courtship of Richard Maddison and Hetty Turney, ending with the birth of their little boy Phillip. Donkey Boy and Young Phillip Maddison are the story of Phillip’s schooldays; with How Dear Is Life we reach the last summer of the pre-1914 world. A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, and Love and the Loveless are the record of Phillip’s soldiering life: at Loos, the Somme, and Passchendaele. In A Test To Destruction (1960), Phillip is with the Fifth Army in France during the terrible battles of 1918, after which we leave him, demobilised, about to try to earn his living in Fleet Street. The whole series is planned to end on the eve of the war of 1939-1945.
So far the saga has made its way slowly; but among critics who have recognised its rare merits are outstanding names such as those of Middleton Murry and George D. Painter. There are signs that the tide is turning. With the publication of A Test To Destruction last autumn many of the reviews took on a new tone, and readers were given, for the first time, some idea of the scale and importance of the work on which Williamson is now engaged.
‘What, I am asked,’ says Henry Williamson in Some Notes on The Flax of Dream, ‘is the basic feeling, or faith, of my authorship? . . . Shall I confess what I believe deeply within myself? That life is a Spirit; that the artist is but a medium of the Spirit of life.’
Henry Williamson is not usually thought of as a religious writer; but such, in the truest sense of the word, I believe him to be. He is a man who has lived from Christmas Eve 1914 until today haunted by the darkness of men’s minds, yet knowing that light shines in the darkness, and that the darkness cannot extinguish it. In saluting this ‘giant writer’, as Maurice Wiggin has recently styled him, on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of his first book, I feel I cannot do better than to quote from the concluding paragraphs of his Wedmore Memorial Lecture of 1959 on Some Nature Writers and Civilisation:
It seemed to me that now the age of so-called ‘idleness’, or leisure to relax, was a possibility: and that possibility was in part due to wars after which, despite all, the slums had begun to die. And that the ‘near-madness’ of the fully-articulate of one age can sometimes be sanity and clear-sightedness of the next.
But we must not condemn those who do not see so quickly as the visionaries, for it is only a question of time: and in the words of Richard Jefferies, ‘Now is eternity; now is the immortal life’.
John O’London’s Weekly
21 September 1961
Out of the Prisoning Tower
Nearly all of my generation in Britain when young lived under a fairly strict Victorian discipline. Generally speaking, discipline was imposed at an early age in the nursery, and continued more or less rigidly – the cane alone being pliable – through one’s schooldays. Not all children lived with the spirit of fear, however; but it is mainly true to say that many a small boy suffered malformation of the spirit in the first place through chronic fear in his father’s home.
If on the other hand there was love within the home, both parents being in balance together, that and not fear was the base on which the child formed its existence, and its future living.
A child lacking love forms itself alone. It will live mainly in a world of fantasy. Francis Thompson, writing his essay on Shelley in the Nineties, startled many good people with his revelations of what the child was, something which felt more keenly than even adults. ‘Thus beset, the child fled into the tower of his own soul, and raised the drawbridge.’ Had Thompson been born a generation later, he might have added the epithet loveless before ‘child’; and that sometimes the loveless child rushes wildly out of its prisoning tower, to steal (fortifying itself with possessions); to release tensions by setting fire to dry grassy fields; to arm itself with a horse-pistol costing ninepence in a junk shop, to load it with black powder and rammed newspaper wads, thus to advertise, amidst wonderful blue smoke, its own importance; to cherish under his Norfolk jacket a white rat which he loved more than any member of his family; and to suffer paternal canings which, on the naked flesh, raised weals, as seen in the looking glass of the bedroom, lasting up to ten days.
Thus, in all classes – and a repressive discipline was often the more severe as family property was the more extensive – was ‘character’ or eccentricity formed, often to produce results in later life ‘due to sturdy individuality’. Men are animal at base, and animals are essentially fine creatures in the wild, unlike the half-tamed creatures of early nomadic tribes, whose literature speaks of them with fear, contempt, and warning, for that they were scavengers, often of the dead, and as such barred as food. The pig, for example.
School was an extension of my ‘wild boy’ (my father’s words) fears (my words). But I was not always afraid. Looking back over nearly fifty years to my boyhood, I realise how fears were often evaded, if their effects are not entirely lost in the elderly man today.
I attended what was originally described as ‘the Free Grammar School in the Borough’, established ‘of all the best orders and exercises in use at the Free Schooles at Westminster, Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’ School, and in the Public Free School at Eaton’.
The school was at Blackheath. Its founder, in the days of his youth before he created the school partly as an act of penance about 230 years before I arrived there, had badly blotted his copybook by making a speech in favour of the beheaded Earl of Essex, in the hall of Christ Church at Oxford. The speech was reported as sedition to the Lord High Treasurer of England and, his arms bound with cords, the undergraduate was taken to Newgate. But the Lord High Treasurer advised the Queen to show mercy to the youth, who, in his later age, as a priest of the parish of Loos’m, as it was still called when I was a boy, devoted himself to good works and the re-establishment of a Free School.
The masters of this establishment, when in due course my nervous self attended there, in a cousin’s reach-me-down Eton jacket and trousers and hobnailed boots, with one exception, were amiable and kind. Among the bigger boys of Low
er School there were bullies, who occasionally hunted and sat on me in one or another of the dark lobbies, during the luncheon hour. They held my head underwater while I was learning the breaststroke in the Ladywell Baths, the reason being, I think, that the small thin child with the abnormally large brown eyes gave out an irritating timidity and inability to be as other boys. These roughs, as I thought of them, were escaped from by climbing up a chimney between two buttresses supporting the southern walls of classrooms abutting on the playground. By pressing with plimsolled feet and shoulders alternately, one could get to the top, trembling and suppressing cries, and claw oneself up to an acre or so of roofs and chimney stacks high above the ordinary world.
A sack stuffed into the chimneypot of the Head Master’s study caused some bother one winter; the culprit confessed the instant he saw that his crime was discovered, and received five strokes of the cane, while with eyes shut (as ordered) he was stretched over a chair in order that, as far as was possible, the insulating effect of loose cloth be eliminated.
Canings had an invariable ritual, or dogma, on such occasions. The Head Master was gentleness itself, during this preparatory phase. ‘Close your eyes; and think.’ Pause. ‘I have misbehaved.’ Pause. ‘It shall not happen again.’ Pause. A smut floated down upon one extended hand. Wallop. ‘Think!’ Pause. ‘It shall not happen again.’ Wallop. ‘Think! Quite still.’ Wallop. ‘An extra one for wriggling, sir. Think now. “I must get that mental power! I must not waste the time of others like this again.”’ Wallop. ‘You wriggled again, sir! Quite still, now. Think! “I must raise my standard of honour.”’ Wallop.
I had the whack about a dozen times a year, on average, when I was a member of the Upper School. As an insurance against pain, part of an old leather satchel was sewn to the inside seat of my knickerbockers. Did the wallops resound somewhat alarmingly loud? My tears flowed the more abundantly, my face expressed despairing contrition, the less the stings failed to penetrate my shield. At sixteen years, to my shame, I still had a small body, treble voice, and staring brown eyeballs, not blue like all proper boys, as my father told me at three years of age. His eyes were blue, like the Head Master’s, mine took after my mother’s, which easily filled with tears like my own, to my father’s exasperation and complaint.
Indian Summer Notebook Page 1