Indian Summer Notebook

by Henry Williamson

  What did I learn there, beyond the need to be shifty, two-faced, and the realisation that I was the ‘worst boy in the school’, as so often one heard while staring at the carpet in the Head Master’s study? In the Upper Fifth we were taken by the Head himself, for Latin, Euclid, Trigonometry, and High Mathematics (or the foothills thereof, by way of the Binomial Theorem, Differential Calculus, and Projectiles – which very soon afterwards some of us were to experience in practice). I confess that these subjects were, without exception, mysteries to me. On the margins of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and other incomprehensible volumes, I made pencil notes of birds and their eggs, trees, fish, and animals around the lakes and trees of the Dowager Countess of Derby’s park and lands at Keston, where I had permission to roam and where I freed myself of all home and school thoughts. Thither I biked on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons on my £4 19s. 6d. three-speed Swift, over the new roads of jarrah-wood blocks in which the rails of electric trams were embedded. Pheasants, hares, plover, pigeons could still be seen in the fields a mile or so from the school; trout idled in the upper reaches of the Ravensbourne, although the roach, rudd, and willows of its tributary Quaggy were gone, the brook running smooth and unwimpling in a concrete bed under a pavement before new tall shops in the High Street. I felt this change mournfully, for the spirit of wild life was now dominant in my secret living.

  In winter, fogs of deep yellow often made dark the midday and it was cold. The windows of the Sixth Form were invariably closed, where thirty-two boys sat in pairs at sixteen varnished desks, grooved with many a knife, pencil, and pen recording initials and devices, while unending thoughts moved without will through heads avoiding the keen blue eyes and pink dome of wisdom, truth and honour everlastingly striving to uplift dull nature to the peaks. The classroom had for me a distressing smell, with hot air arising from pipes under gratings. Ceaselessly the Head, a brilliant scholar named F.W. Lucas, urged us to work harder, to get that mental power, illustrated by clenched fist vibrated like a metronome across his own brows. In his young manhood this exceptionally gifted man had obtained first place in the honours list for English History, Language and Literature at London University, together with first place for his M.A. Degree in Logic, Philosophy, and Economics; he had also taken a research course in Psychology for his Ph.D. at Freiburg, under Professor Munsterberg.

  ‘Hard at it, boys, hard at it! Get that mental power! I saw your eyes, Williamson! Foxy, sir, foxy! No sugar in your tea for a week? Agreed? Very well. Now concentrate. Quite quiet, boys, quite quiet!’ He would leave the room for a few minutes. Immediately the silence would erupt into gusty relief. ‘Open the window, for God’s sake. I’m stifling!’ One unheeded cry among a buzz of voices. Perhaps the study door behind us would open suddenly, catching a figure pointing at the moisture running down the windows.

  ‘Come along, sir! I’ll gi’e you that cane! You will have to leave this school, sir, if you are not careful!’ etc. Perhaps the offender would be reprieved, owing to the (exaggerated) terror on his face, and sentence be commuted to the Head’s favourite charity. ‘Do you agree to pay tuppence to the Fresh Air Fund, sir? You do. Put Williamson’s name down for tuppence, Latymer. Next time, sir, you will not get off so lightly. You are the worst boy in the school, sir!’

  But he was not always the falcon stooping upon lesser birds who could not emulate his flight and vision. He was courtesy itself to those pleaded headaches, toothaches, earaches, etc.

  Many did, to excuse lack of preparation. I discovered a rare bird, then almost unknown, during a ‘visit to the dentist’ in the Fox Grove Woods at Beckenham – a willow titmouse.

  In my own eyes, without undue concern, I knew myself to be a coward, poor at games, an idiot at Euclid, etc. etc. I left just before the Great War arose in my mind with excitement and fear and secret hope that it would not subside into peace, on that blue and sunlit August Bank Holiday of 1914. If I was the worst boy, the most brilliant scholar, who in my second year at the Heath School (to give it its original name) went on to Rugby, was the Head Master’s son, F.L. Lucas, now a don at Cambridge. He was older than I, but I remember my admiration for his achievement, which was to head the Senior Cambridge Local list throughout Great Britain for the year, with First Class Honours and distinctions in many subjects, including Greek. I can still see him standing by the parallel bars in Big Hall, after the Lists had come and the Head had said: ‘Now you shall know your fates!’ as he stood modestly outside the Sixth Form room, his blue eyes lowered in the sensitive face of a poet.

  My tears have been clouds these many decades; my hate, or strangled love, was never strong. ‘The Old Bird’, I have often thought, took on a heroic task; he should not have worn himself out in a London suburban school of 300 boys, but have been a tutor at, soon surely to have become Master of, one of the colleges at the ancient Universities; for his mental range was wide and he lived to instil and to pass on his abiding love of the flowers of our western civilisation, based on ‘the radiance of Hellas’. I remember him with affection, as I remember most of the faces of my time at the school, including the hundred or so of my generation who were killed in the 1914-18 War.

  Contribution to John Bull’s Schooldays, edited by Brian Inglis

  Hutchinson, 1961

  The Christmas Truce

  The First Battle of Ypres was over. The deluge in the second week of November 1914 decided that. Our battalion of the London Regiment (Territorials) was out at rest, leaving a memory of dead soldiers in feld grau (field grey) and khaki lying in still attitudes between the German and British lines. ‘Rest’ meant no more fatigues or carrying parties; it meant letters from home, parcels, hazy nights in the estaminets of Hazebrouck with café-rhum and weak beer, clouds of smoke and noisy laughter.

  After 48 hours clear, a daily route march, leading to nowhere and back again, with new faces of the drafts which had come up from the base. The war was now a mere rumour from afar: a low-flashing, dull booming beyond an eastern horizon of flat, tree-lined and arable fields gleaming with water in cart-rut and along each furrow.

  In the first week of December 1914 the King Emperor George V arrived at St Omer in northern France, headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force. Orders were given immediately at all units to prepare for a royal inspection.

  The King, in the service uniform of a field-marshal, brown-booted with gold spurs, brown-bearded, prominent pouches under his blue eyes, passed with Field-Marshal Sir John French and various general staff officers down the ranks of silent, staring-ahead, depersonalised faces thinking that the gruff tones in which the King spoke to the commander-in-chief were of that other world infinitely remote from what really happened.

  Behind the King walked the Prince of Wales, seeming somehow detached from the massive power of red and gold, the big moustaches and faces and belts and boots and spurs all so shining and immaculate between the open ranks of the troops standing rigidly at attention. The slim figure of the Prince, in the uniform of a Grenadier, appeared to be looking for something far beyond the immediate scene – a slight, white-faced boy in the shadow of Father.

  The next afternoon the platoon sergeant walked from billet to billet, with orders that we were going into the line that evening. A waning moon rode the sky, memento of estaminet nights, moon-silvered cobble stones, colour-washed house-fronts of the Grande Place. The decaying orb was ringed by scudding vapour; a wet wind flapped the edges of rubber groundsheets fastened over packs and shoulders of the marching men. A wind from the south-west brought rain to the brown, the flat, the tree-lined plain of Flanders.

  Going back was by now a prospect of stoical acceptance, since marching in the rain absorbed all personal memory, leaving little for coherent thought beyond the moment. We marched along a road lined with poplars towards the familiar hazy pallor thrown on low clouds by the ringed lights around Ypres – called ‘Ypriss’ by the old sweats who had been out since Mons. As we came nearer, the sky was tremulous with flashes: the night burdened by re
verberation of cannon heard with the lisp of rainy wind in the bare branches of trees above our heads.

  At last we halted, and welcome news arrived. The company was in reserve. We were to be billeted for the night in some sheds, and thatched lofts around a farm. Speculation ceased when the platoon commander said that we were taking over part of the line the following evening. The Germans, he said, had attacked down south; the battalion was to remain in the brigade reserve. It was a quiet part of the line. There was to be diversionary fire from the trenches, to relieve the pressure.

  ‘Cushy,’ we said among ourselves as we entered our cottage, to sleep upon the floor. There was a large stove, radiating heat. Bon for the troops!

  The damp December dusk of next evening was closing down as No. 1 Company approached the dark mass of leafless trees at the edge of a wood. Through the trees lay a novel kind of track, firm but knobbly to the feet, but so welcome after the mud of the preceding field. It was like walking on an uneven and wide ladder. Rough rungs, laid close together, were made of little, sawn-off branches, nailed to laid trunks of oak trees. As we came near to the greenish-white German flares, bullets began to crack. The men of the new draft ducked at each overhead crack; but the survivors of the original battalion walked on upright, sometimes muttering, ‘Don’t get the wind-up, chum,’ as the old sweats had said to them when first they had gone into the line, many weeks before.

  We came to a cross-ride in the wood, and waited there, while a cock-pheasant crowed as it flew past us. Dimly seen were some bunkers, in which braziers glowed brightly. The sight was homely, and cheering. Figures in balaclava woollen helmets stood about.

  ‘What’s it like, mate?’ came the inevitable question. ‘Cushy,’ came the reply, as a cigarette brightened. These were regulars, the newcomers felt happy again. Braziers, lovely crackling coke flames!

  The relief company filed on down the path, and came to the luminous edge of the wood, beyond which the German parachute flares were clear and bright, like lilies. The trench was just inside the wood. There was no water in it, thank God! One saw sandbag-dugouts behind the occupants standing by for the relief. It was indeed cushy!

  Thus began a period or cycle of eight days for No. 1 Company: two in the front line followed by two days back in battalion reserve in billets, two in support within the wood and two more again in the front line. It was not unenjoyable: danger was negligible – a whizz-bang arriving now and again – object more of curiosity than of fear – news of someone getting sniped; work in the trench, digging by day, revetting the parapet, and fatigues in the wood by night; for the weather remained fine. One trench had a well-made parapet with steel loopholes built in the sandbags, and paved along a length of 50 yards entirely by unopened tins of bully-beef taken from some of the hundreds of boxes lying about in the wood. These boxes had been chucked away by former carrying parties, in the days before ‘corduroy’ paths. The trench had been built by the regulars, now no longer bearded, though some of their toes showed through their boots. It was said that a cigarette end, dropped somewhere along it, was a ‘crime’ heavily punished.

  All form, and shape even, of the carefully-made trenches disappeared under rains falling upon the yellow clay which retained them. One was soaked all day and all night. The weight of a greatcoat was doubled by clay and water. ‘We volunteered for this!’ was an ironic comment among those in water sometimes to the waist.

  After the rains, mist lay over a countryside which had no soul, with its broken farmhouse roofs, dead cattle in no man’s land, its daylight nihilism beyond the parapet with never a movement of life, never a glimpse of the Alleyman (Allemand – German) – except those who were dead, and lying motionless in varying attitudes of stillness day after day upon the level brown field extending to the yellow subsoil thrown up from the enemy trench, beyond its barbed wire obstacles.

  At night mist blurred the brightness of the light-balls, the Véry lights or flares as they were now generally called. The mists, hanging heavier in the wood, settled to hoar, which rimed trees, corduroy paths, shed and barn; and clarified into keener air in sunlight. Frost formed floating films of ice upon the clay-blue water in shell-holes, which tipped when mess-tins were dipped for brewing tea; the daily ration of tea being mixed in sandbags with sugar. It was pleasant in the wood, squatting by a little stick fire. Movement was, however, laborious now upon the paths not yet laid with corduroy by the sappers. Boots became pattened with yellow clay. Still, we said, it might be worse – for memory of the tempest that had fallen on the last day of the battle for Ypres, of the misery of cold and wet, the dereliction of that time, was still in the forefront of our minds.

  One afternoon, towards Christmas, a harder frost settled upon the vacant battlefield. By midnight trees, bunkers, paths, sentries’ balaclavas and greatcoat shoulders became stiff, thickly rimed. From some of the new draft came suppressed whimpering sounds. Only those old soldiers who had scrounged sandbags and straw from Iniskilling Farm at one edge of the wood, and put their boots inside, lay still and sleeping. Lying with unprotected boots outside the open end of a bunker, one endured pain in one’s feet until the final agony, when one got up and hobbled outside, seeing bright stars above the treetops. The thing to do was to make a fire, and boil some water in a mess-tin for some Nestlé’s café-au-lait. There were many shell-fractured oak-branches lying about. They were heavy with sap, but no matter. One passed painful hours of sleeplessness in blowing and fanning weak embers amid a hiss of bubbling branch-ends.

  As soon as I sat still, or stood up to beat my arms like a cabby on a hansom cab, the weak glow of the fire went dull. My eyes smarted with smoke, there was no flame unless I fanned all the time. My arms were heavy in the frozen greatcoat sleeves, mud-slabbed and hard as drainpipes; while the skirts of the coat were like boards. I went back to sleep, but pain kept me awake; so I crawled out again and was once more in frozen air, bullets smacking through trees glistening with frost. I was thirsty, but the water-bottle was solid. Later, when it was thawed out over a brazier, it leaked, being split, but there were many lying about in the wood, with rifles and other equipment.

  We were issued with shaggy goatskin jerkins. Did it mean that the battalion was intended to be an Officers’ Training Corps? That there would be no more attacks until the spring? The jerkins had broad tapes which cross-bound the white and yellow hairy skins against the chest. Officers and men now looked alike, except for the expression of an officer’s face, and the fact that one appeared to stand more upright; an effect given, perhaps, by the shoulder-high thumbsticks of ash many of them walked about with.

  Senior officers also wore Norwegian type knee-boots, laced to the knee and then treble-strapped. I thought of asking my father to send me a pair, but a thaw came at the beginning of the third week of December, and the misery of mud returned. And then, with a jump of concealed fear, orders were read out for an attack across no man’s land to the German lines. It was two days after the new moon. We were in support. The company lay out on the edge of the wood, shivering and beating hands and feet, in support of a regular battalion of the Rifle Brigade. The objectives were a cottage in no man’s land called Sniper’s House, and thence forward to a section of the enemy front line that enfiladed our dangerous T-trench.

  The assault of muttering and tense-faced bearded men took place under a serried rank of bursting red stars of 18-pounder shrapnel shells, and supporting machine gun fire. Figures floundering across a root-field in no man’s land, with its sad decaying lumps of cows and men. Hoarse yells of fear became simulated rage; while short of, into and beyond the British front line dropped shell upon shell to burst with acrid yellow fumes of lyddite from the British Long-toms of the South African war of 1902, with their worn rifling.

  The order came for the company to carry on the attack. Survivors, coming back through the wood, wet through and covered with mud, uniforms ripped by barbed wire, were stumbling as they passed through us. When they had gone away – away from the line, death behind the
m – a clear baritone voice floated back through the trees, singing Oh, for the wings, for the wings of a dove – far away, far away would I roam. They were wonderful, remarked a sergeant, a rugger-playing Old Blue in peacetime. Yes, because they were going out, I thought; they were euphoric, hurrying to warmth and sleep, sleep, sleep.

  This local attack failed on the uncut German wire; but Sniper’s House was taken. Our colonel, one heard later, had protested against the carrying on of the attack by our company. Later, it was reported in ‘Comic Cuts’, or Corps Intelligence sheets, that the attack had been ordered to aid the Russians, hard pressed on the Eastern front.

  We laughed sceptically at that; a beginning of disillusionment with ‘the well-fed Staff’.

  I had no fear at night, and used to wander about in no man’s land by myself, to feel some sort of freedom. One night I was sitting down by the German wire when a flare hissed out just by my face, it seemed, followed by another, and another, while machine guns opened up with loud directness, accompanied by the cracking air-shear of bullets passing only a few inches, it seemed, above my neck. Then up and down the line arose the swishing stalks of white lights, all from the German lines, by which one knew that they were not going to attack, but feared an assault from our lines. This was remote comfort, as I felt myself to be large and visible, sweating with fear of sorts, while bullets from our lines thudded and whanged away upwards in ricochet. The sky above me appeared to be lit by the beautiful white lilies of the dead, as I thought of them.