He put on his clothes and went out, and helped the searchlight men pour sand on the incendiary bombs. One had fallen on a wasp’s nest that he had meant to burn out; but now, as one of the men cheerfully remarked, Hitler had done the job for him.
*
The night was warm and quiet. He climbed to the crest of the Home Hills and lay on his back, seeing the stain of the Milky Way high above him, and its dark patch of the Coalsack. He looked for the stars once known as faithful friends of many a summer night; but there was no feeling in those silver sentinels as of old: there was no feeling to spare within himself, he was no longer a vessel of his own personal feeling. The stars were void, their only message a high and remote brrr-brrr as aircraft flew from west to east, sought by the pale rays of searchlights.
No longer was the summer night-sky a tranquil space in which a man’s mind might find rest. Not only were German bombers and reconnaissance aircraft now passing over a blackened England, but the air was filled with voices, hundreds of voices in scores of languages, each urging its aspect of truth. The cool air of night, wandering over the Western Hemisphere, was vibrating with a myriad voices. They could be divided into two main categories, he said to himself: one, in the service of gold; the other, to the disservice of gold.
One of the voices, speaking English with a nasal voice, he had long recognised as belonging to the pink-faced man with the razor-scar whom he had met, just before the outbreak of war, with Hurst on the stairs leading down from the room in Fleet Street. Over the air from Germany this man’s voice was known through out the British Isles as Lord Haw-Haw. This nickname had originally been given to another voice, by a Fleet Street journalist called Jonah Barrington: that other voice had been high and soft, with an obstruction in delivery that might have been due to adenoids. The fluffy voice, the original Haw-Haw accent, had been a joke, and many English people had listened to it as a joke. When the fluffy voice ceased, and the nasal voice took its place on the air, the title Lord Haw-Haw remained.
*
The searchlights flicked out. The sky was silent again. It was a warm night. He was content to lie there. Around him his little ewe-flock was grazing. The ewes always grazed on the top of the Home Hills in the early mornings, and late nights, of summer. Here was coolth in the sea-airs eddying about the plateau of the hills; the grass was dewy; thyme grew there, and rest-harrow. The ewes fed in silence, their lambs quiet among them.
He thought of the old simile, that the majority of people were like sheep, and considered how true it was, especially at this time; of how British justice, once a thing to be proud of, was now being impelled by the same fear which possessed the majority in village, town and city. That poor little fellow in Leeds, for example: would people ever know the truth of how he was trapped by agents provocateurs?
Going over the air of the British Broadcasting Corporation at that time, among the voices serving their aspects of truth with passion, scorn, vituperation, obscurity, and sincerity, was a doggerel song made audible by two good-humoured cousins from Birmingham calling themselves the Western Brothers. The title of the popular song was Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen. Many listeners who possessed a short wave band on their radio receivers, after hearing it, must have, in curiosity, he reflected, sought the original voice lampooned by the two comedians. Zeesen was on the 25-metre band, near to Daventry, Rome and Moscow. The nasal voice of Haw-Haw was to be heard several times by day and by night, and from stations other than Zeesen since the lost battle of France, among them Calais and Hilversum. A sixty-fourth turn of the dial by finger and thumb, anti-clockwise, and the lardidah voices of the Western Brothers on the Forces wave-length faded into the nasal tones of the prefatory and triple Jairmany calling! Jairmany calling! Jairmany calling! of William Frolich.
Listening to Lord Haw-Haw had been one of the nightly home-interests or amusements of the majority of curious Englishmen during the winter of 1939 and the early spring of 1940. Teddy Pinnegar and he had often listened to it. And after the collapse of France, the tuning-in to Zeesen or Calais or Hilversum or Stuttgart or Bremen or Berlin became a regular evening event with many British people, because they were bewildered and heavy-minded, having been told in the courageous and rasping tones of Winston Churchill that the possibility of invasion was imminent.
If invasion came, it came; and most men, including himself, would do what they were told, each hoping he would not disgrace his country by being too afraid or downhearted: that was, as he saw it, the attitude of ordinary men in the village (who after the Rector’s sermon had decided not to resign from the Defence Volunteers). For himself, he considered that he might be re-arrested if the Church bells rang out to give warning that the dreaded parachutes were descending: but if not, he intended to put on his old tunic and steel-helmet of the last war, and with Winchester Repeater, ask to be allowed to help in the defence. If they shot him then and there, at least it would be quick. And he would be shot in his old uniform.
However, he had told Lucy, he expected to be re-arrested early and removed to a barb-wire cage somewhere, if invasion came.
Lying on the crest near his sheep, peacefully in the summer night, he thought with irony that, a few days before, newspapers had reported how the mother of an English boy, once belonging to Birkin’s party, now dissolved and made illegal, had been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for passing to a neighbour over the garden wall a piece of paper on which was written the wave-length of one of the stations from which the voice of Haw-Haw usually uttered its preliminary triple Jairmany calling! The woman’s son, aged eighteen years, who wrote the figures on the piece of paper, had been sentenced at Leeds Assizes to five year’s penal servitude for ‘an act likely to help an enemy’.
How the piece of paper got into the hands of the authorities; at whose instigation the numbers were written on it; who had asked that they be written down on paper, to be passed over the garden wall, to be secured at once as evidence for a police prosecution—when the required information could have been spoken in the usual way without any trouble—were points not printed in the newspaper report.
Phillip was wearing his pair of corduroys bought some years before, and washed so many times that they were now white. They were useful at night in the village street, being visible to motorists. Now, as he lay on the grass under the dimming stars, he wondered if he were visible from the village, his legs making a white V sign. Would it be taken as a signal to the enemy, a request for more incendiary bombs to burn up more wasps’ nests? It was an idea daft enough to be taken seriously. If a learned judge could not perceive any parallel between advertising Haw-Haw in a small way over a suburban garden wall on a bit of paper passed by a poor little unsuspecting Yorkshire mother and son, and advertising Haw-Haw in a big way over the air of the British Broadcasting Corporation by way of a comedy song, how could any obfuscated village mentality he expected to discern the difference between his V sign on a local hill and Mr. Winston Churchill’s V sign on the newsreels of the entire country and Empire?
*
It was cold on the Hill, it was lonely. Soon a new day would dawn. He stood up. The morning star was rising in the east, to lead up the sun to shine upon the earth.
In the light of the sun was truth; the sun saw no shadows. In broad sunlight the morning star was dimmed, shorn of its beams; its radiance, beautiful and inspiring in the darkness, was lost.
The morning star was Lucifer, the light-bringer of mythology; Lucifer the fallen angel, Lucifer the prince of darkness.
Journalised: Norfolk—Devon 1941
Novelised: 1949–1957—Devon
Recast: Devon—London 1965
About the Author
Henry Williamson (1895–1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds.
His politics
were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, ‘He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.’
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Henry Williamson, 1966
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 978–0–571–27971–5
A Solitary War Page 44