The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  *

  Rippingall stood to attention. As a serving soldier, he had been up for more ‘crimes’ than any other man in his regiment. As an old soldier, he made a parade of the military virtues, so-called. Rippingall now said, “Up the rebels!” and took uncertain steps into the summerhouse which he called his G.H.Q.

  “Here’s what the first leader of The Crusader says, Cabton. ‘Here was evidence of hard work, concrete thinking, and of a real political conscience, and the House, after the soft abstractions of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, the Prime Minister, rejoiced to feel solid ground beneath its feet. After today’s speech no one can think of Sir Hereward Birkin as a rich dilettante in politics. This industrious and able young man, if he keeps his health and his industry, must be regarded as a candidate, some day, for the highest honours’.”

  Cabton shut his knife and said, “Where can I find that pool, what d’you call it, ‘Fossetts’?”

  “Rippingall will show you.”

  Rippingall returned, and said to Phillip, “The monk asked me if I knew where Miss Felicity was living.”

  Phillip was trying to write when an open car drew up in the lane with Hilary and Irene. He went to meet them.

  Irene’s smile made him exclaim, “How good it is to see you,” as she held her face to be kissed on the cheek. “Hullo, Uncle Hilary, this is an unexpected pleasure. Lucy will be glad to see you. You both look awfully well. She and her helper, you know Felicity, don’t you, are in the midst of a spring-clean.” He added, “I hope it won’t disturb you.”

  The two girls came out to meet the guests, who were on their way to the south coast of Devon, to stay at Turnstone and play golf, said Hilary.

  Phillip noticed how much fitter his uncle looked, he had shed some of his fat. He heard him telling Lucy that he had been dieting under the eyes of Irene, after a visit to Finland where both had regularly had sauna baths, in steam from water poured on hot stones, followed by beatings with birch twigs and a plunge into ice-cold water.

  “There’s nothing like it, Phillip, for clearing away the cobwebs.”

  “Talking of cobwebs, have you read Birkin’s speech following his resignation from the government, Uncle Hilary?”

  “Yes, I have, and in my opinion it’s a lot of unrealistic idealism. Birkin was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and yet he pretends to be the friend of the working man.”

  “He is the friend of the working man, Uncle Hilary, surely? His generation led them in battle, after all.”

  “That’s not enough to run a country in these difficult times, with a world slump threatening to become worse. Noble sentiments I agree, but they come from a hot head. Birkin wants to ignore world conditions, which rule our overseas markets. He knows nothing about finance, which is ruled by the world situation, as I said,” replied the older man, his voice between the persuasive and conciliatory. “I hold no brief for Churchill, but he was right when he urged the raising of the Bank Rate, which stopped Labour’s wildcat schemes. Now Birkin, in resigning, has turned his coat again, as once before he turned it when he was a Conservative. The fellow lacks stability.”

  “Birkin said that Churchill, who raised the Bank Rate, is like a man who sets fire to his house, then throws stones at the fire brigade.”

  “If these wild-fire socialists came to power, the first thing they would do would be to block Sterling. Then where would our export markets be?”

  “We could export to the Empire, surely, and invest all Sterling there, chiefly in raw materials.”

  This did not please Hilary, who wanted to be free to invest his capital where he could get the biggest yield.

  “Now look here, Phillip, we’ve had all this out before. Such ideas as yours will get you nowhere in your writing. Look at this——” He held out a copy of The Morning Post. “Read it out. That bit there.”

  Phillip read, “‘The sounds of cheering in which the explanation of the resignation terminated were—ominous sign—common to all three parties’. I should say hopeful sign, instead of ominous sign, Uncle Hilary.”

  “We’re a democracy, Phillip, and not a dictatorship. You should have been with us in Finland, and heard what they said there about their neighbour, Russia. And Germany is on the verge of civil war. Although,” he added, “Hitler is at least anti-red.”

  Seeing the bleak look coming on Phillip’s face, Irene said, “How is your trout book going?”

  “I’m still trying to find a theme for it, Irene.”

  “That’s your line, you know,” declared Hilary. “Now, my boy, show me where I can wash my hands. I had to change a sparking plug just outside Salisbury.”

  When Phillip returned, Irene was waiting. “Come and show me the river, P.M.”

  On the way through the garden she peered at Rosamund lying naked in her pram. “Isn’t she a darling? I can’t wait to see Billy when he comes home. It’s over a year since I saw my grandson. How are you, my dearest P.M.?”

  “Oh, getting along, more or less.”

  “Isn’t the scent of the meadow-sweet wonderful. And those ragged robins. Don’t you love it here?”

  “I’m really offset from it, thinking how to do my book all the time.”

  “I suppose you get more freedom now that you have help with your correspondence?”

  “Oh, yes, but there’s not much to be done, really.”

  “Felicity seems to be a nice girl.”

  Phillip led the way upstream, away from the figure of Cabton, who, despite the request that fly only be used, was casting with a spinner. As the two walked on, a heron flew up before them. “That bird does a lot of damage. I thought of asking the keeper to shoot it.”

  “Oh, it’s such an addition to the landscape.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  They stopped to watch the heron now at the top of a tree a hundred yards away.

  “Phillip, you don’t sound very happy.”

  When he did not reply, she said, “I’m probably leaving myself wide open to a snub, but what does Lucy think about that girl being here?”

  “Oh, she doesn’t mind. We have only the children in common. Nothing else, really.”

  “And what do you have in common with Felicity?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “That girl adores you.”

  “I wish she didn’t.”

  They walked on, watched by the nervous heron until the bird could bear its anxiety no more, and with a curse flew away.

  “Irene,” he said, stopping to face her, “I can’t ever forget Barley.”

  “Of course neither of us can ever forget that darling child. I am still her mother, and seldom is she out of my thoughts, Phillip. But we must let her spirit sweeten our lives, not embitter them.”

  “I try not to let my thoughts sap me, Irene. My father kept his dream, or illusion, shut up inside him, and so became chronically irritable with my mother. He loved Jenny, Uncle John’s wife, you know, who died when Willie was born. Are you happy, Irene?”

  “Oh yes, as much as one can expect to be happy, I suppose. Hilary is a pathetic little boy at heart—and it means something to a woman to be wanted, you know. But, P.M. darling—there’s always Billy, remember. Barley lives in him, you know.”

  *

  After a light luncheon of herb omelette with watercress, Hilary suggested that he and Irene take Lucy and the children, together with their little nurse-maid, to see her father and brother at Down Close. Felicity continued her re-arrangement of the writing-room—her surprise for Phillip, as she called it. Meanwhile Phillip had gone back to the river to look for Cabton. To his relief the fellow was gone. As he walked beside the familiar runs and weed-beds, he stopped and peered for signs of trout having been gripped by a heron’s beak—dark lines across their shoulders like a scissor-cut—in the shallows of the gravel beds. He had come to regard the heron as his particular enemy, thus venting his own frustrated feelings upon the thin, grey, cautious bird.

  Alone in the house Felicity
worked happily, and with animation at the thought of the writing-room being more orderly for Phillip by the time he returned. She was also quickened by an idea to go to London to have a sauna bath to get rid of what she thought she was now too old to regard as puppy fat. Her growing plumpness had continued despite exercises in her bedroom, and running with the boys on the lawn every morning before breakfast—a device to get them promptly out of bed. Felicity wanted to be slim and admirable in Phillip’s eyes always, as Barley, from her photographs, had been.

  When Phillip came back from the park, where the heron had, as though lazily, oared itself by its wings from the gravelly shallows long before he could get anywhere near it, he was in a constricted mood. He had waded in to get a fish lying on its back by a weed-bed, with a cut on its head from the bird’s beak. Going upstairs he smelled furniture polish, and saw to his surprise that the door of his wall-cupboard was open, with the key left in. Here, some time before, he had placed relics of his dead wife, including the pair of shoes she had been wearing at Malandine just before she had gone to the maternity home. The shoes were missing; also the lace which she had broken when she had been tying it.

  At once feelings of anguish and resentment arose in him. He ran downstairs to where Felicity was sitting at the sewing machine in the day nursery, and said, “Who has opened my private cupboard? Where are the shoes that were in it?”

  Rippingall heard the distraught voice as he was sitting in the summerhouse reading, with every approval, Birkin’s speech of resignation from the Labour Party. He listened for a few moments, then getting up, took the almost empty wine-bottle which that morning had been filled with methylated spirits, dyed blue, and drank the remainder. He was putting the bottle down when through the thin hedge he saw the priest, seen up the river, standing there.

  “Christ Almighty,” said Rippingall, just as Phillip’s voice was heard shouting through his open upstairs window, “Why don’t you answer me? Answer my question, damn you!”

  Rippingall crept under the eaves and stood still. He heard Felicity’s soft voice saying, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I thought they had been left there by someone before we came.”

  “They were left there by someone before you came! What did you do with them?”

  “Oh, I think I put them in—in the summerhouse—for Rippingall to burn—with the other rubbish.”

  “But why in the summerhouse?”

  “I—I—don’t know. I get nervous sometimes and hardly know what I am saying.”

  Rippingall floated to the kitchen door as the voice cried out, “If those shoes are burned I’ll never see or speak to you again!”

  Phillip jumped downstairs, slid on the lime-ash floor, recovered, and ran into the garden. He saw Rippingall taking off the lid of the dust-bin outside the kitchen door. There the shoes were, placed side by side on top of a Quaker Oats carton. The lace that Barley had broken when trying to tie her shoes on the morning of her labour pains, before the night of her death, was inside one shoe.

  “Did you put them there, Rippingall?”

  “I can’t remember, sir.”

  He turned to Felicity. “Did you?”

  “I think I must have done.”

  Without a word he carried the shoes back to his room and locking them in the cupboard put the key in his pocket. Then ignoring the tearful apparition at the bottom of the stairs he returned to find Rippingall sitting in the summerhouse with a foolish smile on his face. The empty bottle lay on the seat beside him. Rippingall struggled to stand up and salute but fell back, murmuring, while his eyes glassed over, “All pres’nt an’ c’rect.”

  Still unspeaking, Phillip left the garden and, getting into his motorcar, went to his bank in Colham, drew out ten pounds, had the tank filled with petrol, and set out for London.

  When Lucy returned with the children in her brother Ernest’s motorcar, the house was empty. She saw Cabton sitting in Phillip’s chair in the garden. Had he seen the others?

  “No.”

  “Oh well, they’ll come back sometime, I suppose.”

  Cabton stayed to supper, and when about ten o’clock Lucy said “What are your plans for the night?” he said, “I never make plans.” So Lucy made up a bed for him, and he stayed three days, fishing all day up and down Phillip’s beat, while Lucy said not a word. She thought Phillip might have given him leave to fish there; but knowing Cabton, she very much doubted it.

  *

  Phillip went through Randiswell hoping that no-one would recognise him, and feeling that he never wanted to see the place again. Most of the shops had been modernised and the place looked like any other conglomerated suburb. It was no longer a village with its own distinctive character. Driving up Charlotte Road he turned the corner and saw a furniture van, and a shallow looking as though it belonged to a scrap merchant, parked outside No. 11. At the door his father met him with the well-known exasperation on his face. He heard voices above.

  “What’s happening, Father?”

  “You may well ask. Better to go upstairs and see for yourself, old chap. Your mother’s ways are beyond me.”

  Upstairs Phillip found three men, bare-headed, standing outside his mother’s bedroom door. Two wore green baize aprons. The third looked particularly humble to find himself in what he seemed to believe to be such posh surroundings.

  “Ver lady’s upset, just a little, sir.”

  “I’ll speak to her. Hullo, Mother, may I come in?”

  He found her wiping her eyes, and trying to smile. A hammer of the kind for breaking coal lay on the floor. The brass bed was dipped forward thirty degrees to the normal, its back detached and leaning against the wall. The mattress and bedclothes were piled against another wall. Hetty said nearly inaudibly, “All you children were born in this bed, Phillip.” More tears fell.

  “Whose bed is it, legally speaking?”

  “It’s—it’s—your father’s. He has sold it to the barrow man.”

  “I know exactly how you feel, Mother dear. I’ve inherited some of your genetic traits, don’t forget. I know the power of past association.”

  “Of course you do, Phillip. I am being silly, I know.”

  “That’s not altogether complimentary to me, Mother. Do you want this bed? I can get it stored for you quite easily.”

  “What will your father say, Phillip?”

  “Nothing. Leave it to me.” He went to the open door. “Did you buy this bed?” he asked the humble barrow man.

  “That’s right, guv. Paid the gent a dollar fer it.”

  “Will you take a profit?”

  “Oo me, guv?”

  “Yes, you, mate. I’m a farmer, I buy and sell. Will you take a profit of half a dollar?”

  “Phillip, may I have a word with you, please?”

  Hetty was hovering by the door. He went to her, saying audibly to the men, “The chaps will need a wet after all this. Now what is it, you poor dove mourning for its nest?”

  “Perhaps after all it would be best for the bed to go. I know I’m being very silly——”

  “No, you’re not being silly. But my presence has fortified you, and three pints of Bass in the Barbarian Club have fortified me. In addition to your presence, of course. You know what you told me once about Barley, not to let thoughts of her spoil my life with Lucy?”

  She smiled and took his hand. “Father has bought such a comfortable new bed, for you and Lucy when you come and stay here. There now, I’ve given away his secret. Promise you won’t let him know? He wants it to be his surprise, you see.”

  The barrow man went down Hillside Road whistling with his bargain. The bed was an affair of many thin steel lathes which supported a mattress transversely. Brass knobs and rods comprised the upper frame. He had been given an extra half-crown by the young gent.

  The new walnut-veneer’d bed from the Stores’ van had replaced it, together with a thick and sumpy mattress of dark blue ticking with pompoms, patented with the name of Driftasleep. Thanking the guv’nor (Phillip) the tw
o green-apron’d removers departed, each, like the humbler scrap-man, with the price of five pints of best. Everyone was pleased; but while Phillip was driving on the Dover road he could not rid himself of the feeling that he had let down both Father and Mother, for he had told them that he and Lucy would definitely not be living at Fawley.

  At Maidstone he stopped and sent a telegram to Piers, saying that he would be staying at Skindles Hotel, Ypres, for three days.

  *

  “Well,” said Mrs. Ancroft, sitting upright in her chair and switching on the shaded reading lamp beside her, “Now you can tell us all about it, my girl.”

  Felicity’s guardian sat in the armchair across the unlit fireplace. He felt pleasure in the sight of the young woman in distress before him. Felicity was sitting, as though half-collapsed on the sofa. She had arrived in a hysterical condition, in tears and almost incoherent. After an omelette and tea she had recovered a semblance of composure. Now, behind the timid mask of her face in the presence of both inquisitors, she had decided to say nothing about the real reason of her sudden return.

  “Philip asked me to go up and see his publisher about his trout book.”

  “But by your general appearance of being upset, I might almost say in a state of shock when you arrived here, I imagine that something must have occurred to upset you. Besides, my darling,” Mrs. Ancroft went on, “your letters have not been altogether happy letters. I have thought I could read between the lines, and so concluded that all was not well with you.” Her voice took on a winning note. “After all, Girlie, I am your mother, and I have not known you since you were my dearest little baby, without coming to understand your inmost thoughts.”

  “Oh mother—please——”

  “Very well, dear, I won’t play the heavy parent. But I am naturally concerned for your welfare. You may speak frankly before Fitz who has your interest at heart almost as much as your mother has.”

  When Felicity said nothing, her mother went on, “How do you get on with Mrs. Maddison—or rather, Lucy, whom I feel I know so well from your letters?”

  “She is a very sweet person, Mother.’