It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  In silence she led him past garments lying on the floor—and Lucy usually so tidy—to draw him beside her on the bed.

  Gould this gipsy be the modest and passive girl all of whose being he had thought to have discovered already? With tremulous anticipation he took off his jacket and hung it on a chair-back; then his other clothes, folding them calmly and neatly for the first time in his life, laying them on the seat of the chair the while a warm satisfaction of life spread through his being by which all thought was quelled. It was as though his blood knew what was wanted, beyond the antics of the brain, and was quickening with its own purpose. Without speaking he went to where she was lying, waving a foot in the air, and felt himself to be one with the night and the singing, and the stars beyond the window.

  *

  In the morning they walked upon the Romney Marsh, and he said they would go on to Folkestone on the morrow. They stayed that night at Rye, and the next at Lydd after wandering over the Denge Marsh. Then to Folkestone—where, avoiding the places he had known during and after the war, he said suddenly, “I want to go home.”

  “Yes, dear, I’m quite willing. Do you mean to Speering Folliot?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Well then, to Wakenham?”

  He shook his head.

  “Bless the boy, where then?”

  “To Down Close. Perhaps the Boys are in a muddle.”

  “Bother the Boys,” said Lucy. “Why can’t they look after themselves?”

  “Young soldiers can’t, you know. I’ll tell you what—let’s go to Rookhurst and camp out on the meadow beside the brook until Midsummer! Then we’ll start farming, as Hilary wants us to!”

  “How lovely!”

  They went through the flat country of dykes and sea-walls to Dungeness, and lay about on the shingle by the coastguard station, idly listening to the piping of ring plover and the fragile breaking of summer waves on the shore.

  He sat apart, watching the gentle girl playing with his son. When Billy put his arms round her neck and said “Billy’s mummy, Billy’s mummy,” he looked down at the pebbles for a few moments, before moving close, with head averted, to put his arms round them both.

  Journalized: Artois—Somme, 1924–1925

  Drafted: Florida, 1934

  Recast and rewritten: Devon, March 1961—July 1962

  By the Same Author

  by Henry Williamson in Faber Finds

  THE FLAX OF DREAM

  The Beautiful Years

  Dandelion Days

  The Dream of Fair Women

  The Pathway

  The Wet Flanders Plain

  A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT

  The Dark Lantern

  Donkey Boy

  Young Phillip Maddison

  How Dear Is Life

  A Fox Under My Cloak

  The Golden Virgin

  Love and the Loveless

  A Test to Destruction

  The Innocent Moon

  It Was the Nightingale

  The Power of the Dead

  The Phoenix Generation

  A Solitary War

  Lucifer Before Sunrise

  The Gale of the World

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Henry Williamson Literary Estate, 1962

  The right of Henry Williamson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–32349–4