The Phoenix Generation

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by Henry Williamson


  In starlit darkness hundreds waited to boo and jeer. In small packs to enclose around one or another of the known party men, pressing around him, to assail him with obscenity, and if he seemed to quail, to strike with fist, or knee in the groin, then to stamp on his face. The women were the more dangerous, Phillip could see, for against them there was no defence. They knew where to give a man the sharpest pain.

  He lost Brother Laurence, Lucy and Penelope. Moving about, Phillip realized he was the object of a shout, “He’s one!” Immediately pale and distraught faces began to press around him. They aroused no fear; for he did not feel any evil in them, only weakness. He waited as though nonchalantly, hands in pockets, and they moved away. How sad, he thought, that the man who had given much of his great inheritance to the poor, was taken by them to be their enemy. The women looked to be overwrought, like the men, their very words and expressions and faces and bodies corrupted by poverty and the very things from which he would save them, and millions like them.

  But not all of them were of the local poor. He saw an alert bunch of men, most of them dark, with horn-rimmed spectacles, and foreign-looking faces, jumping down from a lorry. Spread out like a rugger forward line before action, they made for Birkin’s waiting motorcar, police helmets around it.

  He pushed his way to the car, to get a sight of Birkin moving with bent head through the human gangway of his followers standing two deep with arms linked against the pressure of the crowd, led by the lorry-load of dark men now in full insult. There were cries of Turn the car over and Fire it, but the police were pushing and thrusting; and amidst cheers and boos and shouts the small M.G. car drove away.

  He saw Brother Laurence standing by Penelope’s motor. Lucy said, “Lady Breckland asked us to a small party to meet Birkin, and I’ve accepted. I do hope you will come, Penelope—it won’t be very late.”

  “Well, I shall have to leave early, I have some letters to write.”

  “What did you think of the speech?”

  “I found it most interesting, Phillip, but I can’t bear people who shout. Brother Laurence is coming with us, he knows the way, and I’m much slower than you.”

  Phillip let the oil warm up before he drove away from the Square through narrow streets leading to the long straight road up to the ridge from where, in daylight, the sandy heaths and forests of pines stretched away for mile upon mile to the south and east. There he stopped, for a cylinder was missing.

  When he got out to change the plug he saw that the sky to the north was glowing with colours of red and green and yellow, shifting and changing, as he stared, into zones of light shot through by spokes and rays arising from the rim of the sea. A wonderful sight; a portent; a glory of the heavens to match the resurgence that seemed to be waiting upon the world!

  He found a detached lead, fastened it to its plug, and getting back into the car, raised his arm in salute to the flushes of light among the zones of copper-green—“Hail, Dawn of the Winter God!”—and putting the sports-car into gear, screamed away down the road in full-throttle acceleration, until he saw the cream-coloured car half a mile in front of his head-lights.

  *

  The hall was of dark oak, and lofty, with exposed beams, purlins, kingposts and rafters. In the light of candles in sconces and branched silver upon the tables gleamed suits of armour, pikes and halberds, lances and swords, among them a tin-hat and gas-mask of the Great War.

  In the hall stood a number of people all seeming to know one another, by the animation and amiability of each face. Through the mêlée of talk, as sandwiches were munched and cups of tea and coffee sipped and held expertly, moved Lady Breckland, with Sir Hereward Birkin in tow, making introductions at the rate of two or three every couple of minutes. To each in turn Birkin gave his sudden smile, flash of eyes opening wide, hand clasp, and ready appropriate words about each, from what Lady Breckland said. “Lady Penelope is most interested in watching our wild birds——”

  “We must see, with Maddison’s help, that they remain a national heritage, no more glass cases. How the old-style sportsman liked to shoot and stuff everything, Lady Penelope.”

  “Mrs. Maddison, with such a fine family of sons, Sir Hereward——”

  How like Daddy, thought Penelope, before an audience turning on the charm.

  “All keen to follow their father, about whose work of reclamation I read with the keenest interest. How are you, Maddison?”

  A firm handclasp, a feeling as of rare poured wine, words that were not heard by anyone else, “You can write, I can speak. Let us go forward together into the Age of Renaissance.”

  Phillip felt he must not monopolise Birkin. He saw Melissa, and went to her.

  “How are you? Did you like the speech?”

  “I think he’s up against too much. He’s like Sisyphus. The stone is eternal. How are you, Phil?”

  “Oh, getting along—rolling my little stone up and down the Bad Lands.”

  Lord Abeline came to them. “Hullo, Lucy, you look prettier than ever! So do you, Lady Penelope. Lucy, why didn’t you see that Phillip invited us to shoot your high birds? What about this high bird, Birkin, are they going to shoot him down? You look out for yourself, my boy, or they’ll get you, too. Come on, Melissa, we must be getting back. Do come over, Lucy. And bring Lady Penelope. Au revoir.”

  Lady Breckland was saying, “I do hope it will have some results. You know, I don’t think any good can come from our class, they are so static, they are—impenetrable. It was so good of you all to have come.”

  Phillip wondered if anyone had told Birkin how good his speech was. Heavens, he had taken it for granted. He went to him. “I didn’t want to bore you with praise, Sir Hereward, but your speech was tremendous. If only you could get back into Parliament, and have a platform there.”

  “All the old parties are tied to Money, Maddison. And I don’t think I would stand a chance of being elected. No, we prepare ourselves for the smash. It is bound to come. The Tories will scuttle as soon as they see the depression deepening, and get out, leaving Labour to face the music. Labour will not be able to do anything, for all the old parties are tied to the financial system. Labour will lose control, three million unemployed will go out on the streets, and one small incident will start off a condition of mob rule. The Communists will try to take over; then we shall step in, smash them, and seize control. That is what we are organised for.”

  Phillip saw Brother Laurence standing near. The friar was going with Penelope and Lucy in their car, Phillip to follow.

  “I mean, it looked serious last September, until Munich, didn’t it?”

  “It is still serious. Hitler has kicked out Money, and Money wants its revenge. The economic war is on now, the bombing war may follow. The Germans are trying to barter; finance is trying to frustrate every export move they make. Ah, Brother Laurence, must you go? How good of you to come.” Birkin had seen that the ladies were waiting for the friar. When they had gone Phillip said, “We used to have on our farm a young man who worked in one of the richest private banks in the world. Hurst was in the London branch, which had a staff of about a dozen clerks, all Gentiles. They knew only about the current accounts of customers. The real business was done by the two Schwarzenkoph cousins. They kept their ledgers, with details entered in their own handwriting, in a safe within the vault. The young man, who chucked his job and came to me because of some book I wrote, had to code and decode cipher telegrams, and he said that literally millions of pounds sterling were moved down one line, transferred from this country or that country by another line, by means of short-term loans or their non-renewal. It made me feel quite ill, to think that such masses of money could depress an industry, causing the ruin perhaps of an entire community, by the calculated thought of two men of inherited desert genius, working in the religious belief of their service to their jealous God.”

  Birkin’s brown face, with its long bony structure, giving the idea of inheritance from some Florentine Renaissance forebear, se
emed to smoulder with controlled life.

  “Yes, it is their religion, the Golden Calf. But there are as many Gentiles as Jews involved in the money racket. It is not exclusively the Jewish banker we are up against. It is the obsolescent world-finance system which we strive to get altered, by the will of the people at a General Election.”

  “May I ask you a leading question, Sir Hereward? I have met two men who have left the I.S.P. One was Frolich, the other Jock Kettle. Why were they expelled?”

  “William Frolich was appealing almost exclusively on an anti-Semitic platform. As for Kettle, we found out that he was a burglar in his spare time, and used to crack cribs when we took him with us to our big meetings up north. Also he is rabidly anti-Jew. Our party was not and is not anti-Semitic. We have said again and again that, just as our Empire consists of many races and creeds, so we are not concerned with what might be called racialism. But if any man or group of men, such as Communists, act in such a manner as to cause division we shall, when we come to power, give warning that any disloyalty to Crown and Empire will bring expulsion, by withdrawal of passport. We all know that many Jews fought for Britain and Empire in the Great War. How then can we, ex-service men ourselves, be against our old comrades-in-arms?

  “Maddison, I will say this. If war is declared on Hitler it will not be because he wants Danzig, which is German, to return to the Fatherland; nor will it be because he demands the Polish Corridor, which is Silesian and therefore German. These places are no concern of the British people, or of the British Government. If war is declared, it will be a war of the Moneylenders’ Revenge.”

  Chapter 15

  COMPLICATION

  One morning in late July of the year 1939 Phillip was standing in the weedy garden of the empty, dark and damp cottage which he intended to recondition and live in by himself one day, when Lucy appeared by the open farmhouse door a few yards away, and said that he was wanted on the telephone.

  “It’s Rippingall asking if you would speak to Captain Runnymeade. He sounds very reformed, I suppose it’s his marriage.”

  Rippingall was back with his old master once more. Mrs. Rippingall cooked.

  With a feeling of dread, of one more weight upon his mind, Phillip picked up the receiver lying on the refectory table, and listened to the voice of Rippingall asking him to hold on a moment, he would fetch the Captain.

  He imagined the ruddy-faced, pepper-and-salt trousered figure pulling itself out of an armchair beside a silver tray holding decanter of whisky, glasses, and syphon of soda: saw him moving, slightly bent-backed, through the doorway to the telephone on the wall of the passage outside. Soon he heard footfalls and breathing; a pause while the figure seated itself beside the little table: then the familiar slow and somewhat drawling tones were asking him if he would care to bring the children over to a party that afternoon.

  Phillip hesitated; and his hesitation communicated itself, for the voice said, “Leave that goddam farm, Maddison, and give yourself a break. A friend of yours tells me she is looking forward to seeing you.”

  “Thank you very much for the invitation,” Phillip replied, with forced joviality. Was it Melissa? He forebore to ask. “I’d love to come. All the children? There are five, you know.”

  “Bless my soul,” the voice was slightly mocking. “Very well then, at three o’clock this afternoon. Bring any friends you like.” The receiver went down abruptly at the other end.

  Oh, why am I so weak always? I don’t want to go. He saw himself surreptitiously pouring away most of Captain Runnymeade’s over-generous drinks into the hearth. He hadn’t been there since the early spring, when there had been a fire to conceal his furtive act, for the flames of the seasoned logs of split ship’s-timber had been of the same hue and lambency as those of the alcohol leaping up the chimney.

  While he was trying to arrange in his mind all the jobs that needed to be done as he sat on the stool by the table, Lucy came into the parlour from the kitchen. She carried an armful of clothes, for she had been ironing the shirts, pants, vests, and other smalls belonging to the seven individuals of the family. There were two little daily maids, but since they were untrained the burden of the general work fell upon Lucy.

  “Did I hear something about the children and a party?” she enquired lightly, as she put down the clothes on the corner of the table.

  “I shouldn’t have accepted! I must go to Yarwich market today! I don’t like those rich social fritterers at Staithe. They’re idling while the country is declining into war.” There was the worried look on his face that she knew so well; and dreaded. “Why must you carry the ironing in your arms? Haven’t I bought you a special basket for the job? They look so higgledy-piggledy, carried like that.”

  To help lighten Lucy’s tasks he had bought several wicker baskets of differing shapes and sizes; one to carry the ironing, others for egg-collecting, shopping, clothes-pegs, picnics on the marshes, kindling wood for the fire—but, like most good intentions, this one had gone awry.

  One or another of the baskets was as likely as not to contain such varied objects as a cat with kittens; a heap of old magazines and papers; a mass of rotting weeds left in the so-called garden, or worn and patched shoes belonging to the children.

  The shoes were usually old, for Lucy was economical, keeping each pair, as a child outgrew them, for the next child. Some of them were almost heirlooms, with the clothes. Thus Jonathan, the youngest, wore, when he came out of the bathroom in the evening with David, the old faded blue dressing-gown, with faint suggestion of yellow stain that no amount of washing would remove, which had been made with such loving care for Peter, her first-born, twelve years before.

  “Yes, of course a basket for these clothes is proper, but I had to come in here so I grabbed them without thinking.”

  “Today is Saturday, and I’d planned to go to market and buy two calves. Also a new stackcloth, as corn harvest is near. I bought a good cloth at auction two years ago, now it’s lying in the Corn Barn, ripped and near-useless, after flapping for two days through a half-gale last season on one of the barley stacks up by the Great Bustard Wood.”

  To prevent it flapping loose on the stack in that exposed place he had taken up a heavy rope for Matt and Luke to tie round the stack. To this heavy girdle the lesser cloth-ropes were to be secured, he had told Luke; but when he had gone up the following day to look at it in a high wind, he had found the new rope unused, while each of the guide-ropes of the cloth had been tied to a heavy lump of steam coal. These weights had torn the ropes from the cloth in places, leaving eighty square yards of jute to thunder and beat with the wind under them. In two days the cloth had flapped itself to tatters.

  “Also I must get some shackle-bolts to set-up the torn-off spring of the green trailer. This is the fourth time they have been torn off by backing the trailer when it is hitched to the tractor. But I don’t suppose I’ll find my tools in the workshop, to do the job. The men take them without authority and never put them back.”

  Lucy waited beside the pile of children’s clothes. She looked pensive. She was waiting for Phillip to stop talking, before getting on with her work. She tried to be patient with Phillip, knowing that he could, when tired, talk himself into desperation.

  “It’s all very difficult, I know. But you’ve done splendidly, considering what the farm was like when we came.” She made to move away.

  “But we haven’t started yet! There’s no change in the mental outlook on the farm, so there is no material change. Look at the pigs! I’ve asked Matt again and again that the used sump-oil from the tractor, which I put in a special can, be used for rubbing on the pigs’ backs to kill the ticks. But day after day, week after week, the pigs’ backs remain studded with grey rivets, sucking away all profit. ‘What do yew want to do that for? Nobody else does it about here. Pigs always have ticks, ’tis nature,’ says Matt. I’ve proved that the ticks die when the oil is squirted on them, too. It’s the same in the cowhouse. Never a cow washed before milking,
and water laid on from the artesian well by Brother Laurence.”

  Lucy said gently, “I think you should try to get another cowman.”

  “You know very well I can’t. I haven’t a service cottage! You know I let outside people have them, when they come with their hard-luck stories. Luke lives in a council house, I have no service cottage for another cowman. Do you know, the splashes of dung dropped by cows belonging to the old tenant, who left bankrupt all those years ago now, are still on the concrete floors! As for germs, they are ‘book-squit’. ‘Whoever saw a garm,’ says Matt.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Lucy, wearily. “But you must take Matt as you find him. He says to me, when he brings up the milk, ‘I’m always serving the master’s interests, but I don’t seem able to please him.’ He’s good with young stock, you know, he’s splendid. But he is afraid of innovations.”

  “Of course I realize that Matt works hard, that he has a lot to do, seven days a week—stockman, shepherd, pigman—looking after forty ewes, all the young stock, cows, and pigs in the yards generally, and helping with haysel and harvest. But I don’t want a farm like that of the late tenant. That failed because everyone on it was what he was. I want a new farm. So we must start with the human beings. If we are to do better, we must all change in our minds first. The mental blue-print of the present is no good. Listen to what Runnymeade and nearly all of his sort say about farming—only a fool or a crank would put his money into it. Every bloody time I go over there, he says the same thing! ‘What beats me, Maddison, is why you waste your time and talent on that goddam farm. You don’t get anything out of it, as far as I can see, except worry. Then why do you go on with it? You’re an odd fellow, Maddison. And why the devil do you listen to that fellow Birkin?’ Then like a fool I try and explain that Birkin is attempting to do on a national scale what I am trying to do on a small scale: a sort of desperate attempt to avoid the coming smash. Then the hunt is on. Runnymeade throws in remarks to cause a row, which he enjoys, as he sits back, stimulated to help himself to more whisky. You know his Polish mistress, Stefania Rozwitz? He likes to see us arguing—he tries to get me to make her lose her temper—he’s impotent, his desire for stimulation and excitement covers a hollow man, so he cannot bear to be quiet. Or it may be, ‘Tell us about your pal Schicklgruber, Maddison, you met him at Nürnberg. Is it true he’s a pederast?’ Like a fool, I run, trailing his aniseed. The hunt is up, Runnymeade fills the glasses, and before long I am the fox, or the aniseed-dolly on a string, doubling all the time to answer his questions, his provocative damned silly idle-bodied bloody questions, while knowing all the while that he is hoping that Stefania will turn on me and make a meal of the hunted fox.”

 

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