The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  *

  After a hot bath he sat by the fire in his dressing-gown, one foot in plaster, the other carpet-slipper’d. There was a glass of whisky untasted by his side, a writing pad on one knee. It was a remarkable moment. He had just written the first paragraph of his story of the blind trout. Suddenly the form had come to him!

  The entire locale, or scene of the story, was transferred to that part of Kent, now London, which he had known in boyhood. The river was the Randisbourne, that once-fair stream which arose, bubbling and clear, from Caesar’s well above Reynard’s Common—the Randisbourne which had died as soon as it reached the hideous suburbs of County London. Weep for Adonais, he is dead. Here lies water whose name is writ in pollution.

  The moment of inspiration, of shock, had been preceded by a mood of agitation due to apprehension, even fear. It was not easy to break the habit of years; and for years he had felt himself to be not sufficiently able to write such a book, despite the compiling of innumerable notes from other books by acknowledged masters, and every copy of the Salmon and Trout Magazine from the first number at the beginning of the century to the present time.

  The pure water-springs that filtered through the chalk beds of the North downs—falling first as dew or rain from the drifts of moisture in air moving in from the Atlantic and forming into cumulus, cirrus, nimbus, and other cloud formations over the contours of the land. He was a spirit of water echoing with a thousand genetic records and impulses of colour and light; all was guided from his being by the Imagination. At two o’clock in the morning he closed the manuscript book and pulled himself by the banisters to his writing-room. He lay there, warm with thoughts of creation, withdrawn from ordinary living, at last; knees drawn up, left arm round neck, one cheek of his head lying companionably upon palm of one hand. Through the immense ossuary of the chalk of the North downs—only a few miles from polluted London—the gentle waters filtered, by trickle and drop finding their way through the flint beds deposited by floods which had abated millennia since—thus to congregate in dark water lakes which rushed from every spring-head to feed brook and rivulet born at the foot of each its hill.

  *

  He lay on his couch, seeing the stars through the casement until his imagination returned to water, flowing cold and clear past the green beds of waving crow’s-foot, the flowers shut against the rising of the sun; and with a sigh of release that at last the spring had broken out of his being, even as a rill from the dark and immemorial chalk beds of the downs, he fell asleep. And when the morning came, and Lucy in her dressing gown brought a tea tray and he saw two cups in their saucers, he said, “Oh, you look so sweet,” and later in the year she wondered, with hope, if she was going to have a baby.

  *

  Week after week he wrote with determination to allow nothing to stop the flow. Sometimes he took Rippingall to the cinema, a fleapit with wooden seats and flickering silent pictures, for the talkies had not yet reached the small country towns of the West Country.

  Rippingall was an unexpected help. Phillip read what he had written to him after every stint, thus to see the story in perspective, instantly to detect false or inferior passages. He was working against time, too: the publishers had announced the book in their preliminary autumn announcements to booksellers.

  “God, how time has flown. Tomorrow will be All Fools’ Day, Rippingall. That’s us, old soldier. Now be a good fellow and take this chapter to the post-box.”

  The mail was due to be collected at the box near the road-bridge in an hour’s time. It was nearly five o’clock. Billy and Peter were just home from the village school. David was shouting Good-ni’—Good-ni’—Good-ni’—which meant he wanted more milk. Rosamund in the kitchen was asking for her tea. Phillip was adding, in his new and regular Arnold Bennett manner, an entry in his Journal.

  31 March, 1935

  Although it is hardly spring, today is the first whole day of this year. It was fine on March 22 until 1 p.m. when the wind changed and rain fell. Peter saw a red squirrel in the holly tree at the bottom of the garden. Lucy heard a willow wren singing from the honeysuckle bines over the runner or brooklet where I saw the first olive dun of the season.

  Gossamers are gleaming in the faintly misty upper air. Midges and ephemeral water-flies cross and float by my window in scores. The south wind has melted winter’s ice upon the heart.

  A greenfinch disappears into the top of the eastern yew tree on the lawn, a dry grass in its beak. Tortoise-shells on the flowers of aubretia, with bees. This morning I went downstairs to take off the clothes of Rosamund and David, and they ran about on the lawn singing in delight. Everything was in gleam: leaves of holly and box-hedge, budding branches of hazels, ashpoles growing over the brooklet.

  Five o’clock has just floated over the deer park from the stable clock of the Abbey. I am sitting on the lawn, my old indoor winter self is shed like a pellicle. The sun enlarges me. Closing my eyes, I fancy I can hear the buds of the blossoms breaking in the espalier pear-trees on the wall.

  There is wind on the downs, but none in the vale. For weeks the treetops seen through my study window have swayed to the mindless north wind. For months—Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water-carrier, Fish—hope has been locked in the earth. And suddenly this morning the cream-coloured distempered walls within the house were glowing with light, a bumblebee was prospecting under the thatch, and the great titmouse was vigorously ringing a little hand-bell in the lichened branches of the apple trees.

  Surely it is no fancy, or sentimentality, to say that Hope is in the vale. Hope is here in the sun-light. Daffodils which have drooped on the borders for days, bullied by the mindless north, now lift up broken heads to the southern glaze of the sun. During wind and rain and snow they have waited; then with the shining of the risen sun the green stalks and leaves glistened with renewed hope. Slowly their yellow heads turned to the heavenly fire.

  All day there has been a delicious presence in the vale. Far away the cawing of rooks tells that they too are rejoicing in the new lease of life. That lease is not yet signed: the north wind may return, perhaps with snow and sleet to wilt the pear blossom, numb the bee, tatter the tortoise-shell wing, silence the little tinkling bell of Master Tit: but the lease is drafted. Now the fire of spring is about to rush with the south-west wind over this sea-board country. Voices of willow-wren and chiff-chaff call up a general bird-song: wallflowers smoulder in dark brown beauty: aubretia on the borders opens massed blue flowers for the bees’ delight. The plashes in the lane are shrinking, the ruts under the limes—desolate daily sight for many months as I walked the same way in all weathers—will be trodden out, grass will gleam there again.

  My eyes catch a dark flick on the wall beside me, near one of the many rusty hand-forged nails to which in the past pear-branches were tied. Or is it my imagination. Sometimes down my sight there appear zigzag lines, like electric flashes—these recurred at times during the war, ever since I was buried by that shell on Messines Ridge on Hallowe’en, 1914. The flashes seemed to be bombarding my brain when the mustard gas got me in April, 1918.

  I think more remotely, nowadays, of the scenes and faces I have lived with during those nights and days of the war. If only death were a reabsorption into the sun again, beautiful as this present thought and feeling is. Ah, that flick again. It is not my eyes, it is a lizard. He has just moved behind a flake of plaster, partly cracked away from the limestone wall. He’s come out again. His eye never blinks. His scales glint slightly with his swift and shifting dry-leaf movements. Each movement forward is a scarcely audible rustle. He is looking for flies to lance with that thin black tongue. He sees my eyelid quiver and flicks back into shadow. Come forth, little one, to the god of the golden sun. We shall not harm you.

  10 April

  I began and completed an entire chapter, starting at nine o’clock this morning, ending half an hour after midnight. It wrote itself. One is a medium in touch with forces of the imagination. Then I lay down on my couch, fully dressed
under a rug. I awakened with a clear feeling of joy. A star burned brightly over the tops of the spruce firs. Wood pigeons had not yet awakened. A star? Such a steady shine surely was of a planet. It had not the soft lustre of Venus, which will soon be rising behind my head, in the eastern sky over the hills of the Chase. I have not looked at a star-map for years. This planet was, perhaps, Mercury?

  During several mornings I have wakened into a blue darkness filtering into the sky, and watched this planet moving as though slowly toward the west. When I turned away for a while and closed my eyes, to breathe deeply of the cold air stirring to live again—for the airs of night and day are different—the planet was gone. By moving my head sideways I saw it glittering among the topmost branches of another fir.

  Before songlight, mated birds begin to whisper to one another. The greenfinches which nest in the yew on the lawn immediately below my window start with a low and rapid under-twitter, surely the inflowing of mutual joy, like to my own. They have nested every year in that tree, I am told by one of the estate workmen; either the same pair or their off-spring. One small bird coherently revealing its essence to another small bird: what I feel, incoherently, when I am with Melissa, despite the clarity of spirit.

  The feeling between paired birds is keen and uncomplicated. They have not the worries, stresses, fears of the highest mammals beset by conscience and transience.

  While I have been writing this the star has gone from behind the spruce-top. Turning to look through the eastern window, I see a pale tide of light flowing up to the zenith. The dawn wind, a least stir of air, is passing from open window to open window across my face.

  A flute-like sound from beyond the garden, very gentle, and repeated twice: an otter is going back to the river after travelling up the runner which tinkles now and then below the bottom garden hedge. About twice a year I hear that cry. It comes from an old dog-otter who during the day often lies on the mossy bough of an oak over the weir-pool of the grist mill down the vale. He goes up the runner after eels.

  I must have floated off because when I next opened my eyes I saw a sky of azure, while cirrus spread high over the valley; rooks noisy and pigeons floating across the garden to rise and, just before the point of stall, clap wings and glide down again; while the middle of this house is filled with bumps and cries of laughter: the children having their early morning rough-and-tumble.

  A south wind was moving up the vale. Phillip, freed by the writing of the trout book, felt that the grass was shining with joy. It was visibly growing. He could feel the temperature rising. And he knew what to write next—his chapter would be entitled South Wind. Soon those sensitive dwellers under water, nymphs of the olive dun, were swimming up the limpid surface of the river. Bulging rises showed up and down the water, the trout were taking them under water. As the current took the nymphs downstream they struggled to break from the pellicles and so to open new wings and arise into what to them must be a delirious dream-life. As soon as they began to hatch, the trout moved up to be just under the surface.

  Staring down from the parapet of the bridge he saw only water a-swirl with the fishes’ rises. They were moving gently up on their air-bladders and taking the swimming nymphs just as they reached the surface. After each take the trout returned to its stance to watch for the next nymph floating down. Each trout had its special place in the food-stream, its own sky-light window below which it watched. This window, or area of visibility, is forward and above it, and is limited by the angle of refraction, which means that all outside a fairly steep slant is blank in the fish’s sight, he thought.

  The bridge over the Flumen had three arches which stood on two piers built into the river bed. Each pier had a cutwater, the point of which lay upstream, to divide the force of current. From either cutwater there was a rebound, causing a cushion of water where all that came down in the current was momentarily checked. These two cushions of water were therefore the best place to be in when any food was coming down, because a fish could stay there with the least effort. It could, while hovering, see any nymph arriving in either the right or the left stream of the divided current. So a big trout was usually to be seen there during a hatch of fly. The lesser fish got for themselves the next best places, in order of strength or size. If any fish dared to move into those places he was, if smaller, at once driven away.

  Sometimes a small fish took up position in front of a big trout, but in swifter current beyond the big fellow’s window, where it could swim forward to left or right and seize nymphs floating down. Then the big trout would go hungry. The black trout, which Phillip thought was blind, had recently taken up its stance just above the bridge, on the edge of one of the cushions of water by a cutwater. It had a whitish mark on one flank, as from the grip of a heron’s beak. He thought it must be the original black trout, because there was no similar fish in the old stance farther up by the water-meadows.

  Every day that spring the black trout was there, hovering as though wanly, waiting for nymphs to float down but seldom taking in food because three smaller fish were in advance of the cushion. It was blind, he decided, because its eyeballs had a greyish look about them. There it was, noon after noon during the midday hatch of fly, seemingly thinner and darker, a thread hanging from its vent, probably a link worm, part of a colony joined head to tail which absorbed, through the main head in the gut, most of the food the black trout took in its mouth. There it was, Trutta Niger, idling slowly with a split tail-fin, in the conventional best place although its economic significance, to use a dull business term, had changed. Had it sight, it would have been a cannibal, driven by starvation to feed on smaller fish.

  He had stood on that bridge hundreds, even thousands of times. Today there were twenty-five unseen trout feeding in thirty yards of water; unseen because the water surface was reflecting white cumulus clouds an oar’s length above the bridge. But he knew every fish by its shape, movements, and pattern of red spots amidst the predominating black. Among these residents were some mere flicks in the water: these were fingerling salmon parr, still in trout-pattern coats but with three inky finger marks on each flank, which small trout did not have.

  Another rise of fly was on. Sometimes half-a-dozen bulges appeared together: these trout were nymphing as it was called. He stared and stared, and at last, as the low clouds thinned with rising thermals, he began to see one after another of the twenty-five residents in ghostly or shadowy outline, sensed at first rather than seen; a faint white line of dorsal fin; a group of spots within a phantom stream-line. He wanted to stay there during all the morning’s light and grace, forgetful of time and place, forgetful of the urgent need to finish the book, because there was little money coming in nowadays: he wanted to become thoughtless with the Spring: but he must return and write about the fluorescent hues of crow’s-foot bine, bankside flint, otter’s spiky hair, duck’s feathers floating down—all objects glowing with their own mysterious fluorescence in the darkness of the night.

  *

  The prolonged strain to force words on paper told on him. Often he had to leave the table and walk about to relieve constricted thoughts. The placidity of the Coplestons—Ernest and Lucy—emphasised the stillness of the valley in the heats of young summer. And feeling himself out of it—his master unable to continue the book—Rippingall went on the drink.

  His tipple now was methylated spirit. This liquid was dyed blue by law, a horrid steely colour to Rippingall’s dreaming eyes, so he changed the colour to brown by the addition of brown boot polish; to which was added eau-de-Cologne from the bathroom, and a dash or two of Lysol disinfectant from Lucy’s Red-Cross cupboard.

  From the summerhouse came snatches of song, all of a melancholy nature. And one evening Rippingall’s bedroom was empty. In the morning Ernest found him stretched out on the compost heap. Ernest stared at the sight for about a minute; then deciding that Rippingall was probably dead, he returned to the kitchen to cook himself some breakfast. Later on, while having a second breakfast with the family,
Ernest mentioned casually that Rippingall appeared to have had a heart attack beside the compost heap. Phillip ran out at once with Billy and the other children, but the corpse had apparently evaporated.

  “Rippingall’s a silly fool,” said Billy. “He’s his own worst enemy, like you are, isn’t he, Dad?”

  “As long as I don’t become, in due course, your worst enemy, Billy——”

  “You should not say such things,” said Lucy, to the boy. Whereupon Billy, feeling snubbed, disappeared. He was later found in the stable workshop by Ernest, in a dark cubby-hole he had arranged under the pile of wood. His uncle fed him on bread and treacle, a tin of which Ernest had hidden on a ledge by the stable eaves. Only when Lucy became worried, lest the absent boy had fallen into the river, did Ernest say where Billy was.

  Ernest lived most of his day in this stable workshop. There he ruminated before getting on with a bee-hive which was being made at Lucy’s suggestion. There was so much honey in the lime-trees in the park, and why not get some of it? Ernest thereby would be helping to earn his keep. The honey would save sugar and jam, some of it anyway, off the house-keeping money.

  Every morning as the hour of twelve was tolled from the Abbey stable-clock across the park Ernest walked with measured tread to the kitchen to fetch what he called his elevenses—an egg beaten up in milk and sugar. Returning to his workshop, Ernest added a table-spoon of port from one of the bottles of Cockburn ’96 hidden from Phillip’s eye. There had been nearly three dozen of this old and crusted wine when Pa had passed away. Ernest had brought them to Monachorum in his motorcar and hidden them behind some old doors and planks of wood in the stables.

  *

  Ernest had a chronic dislike of his brother-in-law’s interfering ways. It was all very well, years ago (he wrote to his brothers in Australia) when Phillip had been trying to help get things going in the Works, but it should have been obvious to him even then that they had all been fed-up, and simply didn’t care what happened once the Works had stopped when the money had given out. Now it was beyond the limit when Phillip had taken the furniture and other things which had belonged to Pa at Down Close and stored them in the building he had put up in his field in South Devon.