The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  Phillip had written an article about that, ending with an ironical supplication to the President of the Society, which neither owned nor leased the sandhills of the Point and certainly did not own the wild birds of the air, to spare this solitary chick which was not responsible for its parents’ sin.

  The article, printed by The Daily Crusader, had made him locally unpopular. Who is this fellow from nowhere to lay down the law to us, the President had asked at a meeting convened to see what could be done about such unwelcome publicity. The paid watcher had made it known in the local inn that if the man who wrote the article came on the Point again he would pitch him back into the sea.

  The fledgling was not in the same place. He sat down to watch for a tern’s breast with a pale pink tinge. He focused his Zeiss monocular. There she was, sprat in bill, dropping behind a dune with its fringe of marram grass. Walking there he saw the print of feet smaller than his own. Topping the dune he saw Melissa.

  She was pale. He sat beside her. She said, “I’ve hidden it. That’s it over there. It can almost fly.”

  Cries of redshank and greenshank, curlew and stint, sandpiper and dotterel filled the morning air. And the larks. The steel of the sky was being drilled by a hundred drillings, bright minute steel dust sprinkling down.

  “It takes after the hen,” she said.

  “Poor little Shicklgruber. He took after his mother, too.”

  The tide went out. The river-water in the channel was now shallow. They walked along the sea-wall in the direction of the harbour, which was silted. No ships ever called at the quay, which was of rubble and clay raised behind trunks of oak trees driven in as piles, with hand-sawn planks spiked to the posts. Beyond stood a malting of red brick and pantiles. It was empty and silent, with other warehouses. The walls were of flint and flaked brick rose-red in the intense clear light of the sky. The port was the home of small yachts. There had been a race that morning; the sharpies had just made their moorings against the ebb. Now the harbour was a prospect of mud, sand and reeds.

  “Are you staying on at Marsh Cottage?”

  “My last day tomorrow.”

  “I shall miss you, Melissa.”

  “I saw your face at the window. ‘Boy’ was warming my feet, after you’d gone. He’s a kind man.”

  “I should have warmed all of you, Melissa.”

  “Darling Phillip——”

  Hand in hand they walked back to the dinghy. The sands of the Point shelved, the ternery was afloat in mirage above the line of the sea. As they came near the end of the sea-wall a fresh breeze sparkled incoming waves. The tide had set north. It carried the dinghy at seven knots, soon leaving behind the drift of terns. The Great Barrier Sand lay to starboard. Upon this mound timbers of wrecked sailing ships stood up. Above one tatter of seaweed sat a cormorant.

  Beyond the Great Barrier Sand the waves were smoothed stretches of foam.

  “You’re brown all over, Phil. Why does a woman have to ‘observe the so-called decencies’?”

  “Hold your arms over your head.”

  He pulled off her jersey, she wore nothing under it. She was chaste, she was beautiful. She took the tiller while he uncoiled the mackerel line and dropped overboard weight and spinner. Soon a fish was tugging.

  Dropping the tackle over the thwart he took another fish. He stopped fishing when six were threaded on a string, enough for the family. Then he thought of Luke and Matt and the two other men who worked on the farm. Mackerel were cheap, a penny each, he told her, sometimes two a penny, from the monger who came round in his horse and trap.

  “But a gift of fresh fish is always acceptable, better than boughten fish.”

  “Boughten, that’s a good old English word.”

  She was beginning to feel small. Why did he avoid looking at her? Oh, why had she said what she had about the so-called decencies? But if he had been a little shocked, then why had he taken off her jersey? She felt cold.

  “You look cold, Melissa. No wonder, with me, I’m no good.”

  “You are too good, I sometimes think.”

  “Why do I allow myself to be constricted, to be driven by this incessant idea to tidy up and to renew all the let-go things on the farm? People in the village are untidily happy, apart from their chronic anxiety about being out-of-work. They get by somehow, they’ve got cockle beds, and butts to spear in the creeks. Good fat fish they are, too. They get a bit of fowling in winter. And their gardens for vegetables.”

  “Yes, and they’ve got the night-cart, with its smoky red lantern, clop clop up the street in the darkness, tired horse, weary man—I thought he looked something like you, a good, little-boy face under his grey head—slopping contents of privy pails and creosote. All this poison spread, with ashes and broken glass and tins and other rubbish, on the glebe field, together with the blood and guts of the local slaughter house. Flies, rats and stink. Now do you see I’m with you, Phillip Maddison?”

  “You’re a bloody fine girl, Melissa.” He felt his blood beginning to thrill.

  Scylla slipped and wallowed past a seal that stared with opaque eyes. The sands of the Point were now remote. Inland the heat-misted Great Bustard Wood quivered above the line of the sheepwalk bordering the marshes—the woods that would be Billy’s one day, and Billy’s son after him—and perhaps more land until it was a sizeable holding of five or six hundred acres—and a house built among the beeches and pines above the chalk quarry. And forsake poor Lucy?

  She drew the jersey over her head, she seemed to know his thoughts. Then he saw they were coming near to Marsh Cottage. He poled the boat up a creek. Got on the turf with the anchor.

  “Do you want to see ‘Boy’, Phillip?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Let’s go back then!”

  They returned down the creek, and came to a strand of shingle, and lay on their backs among pink crab legs, the white and blue and grey of shells, amidst feathers and corks and dry seaweed under the bright stare of the sun.

  *

  This was what he had dreamed before he came to the East Coast. Here he was at last on the marshes with Melissa, among water-filled crevasses in the salt turf, the piping of birds, remote flicker of terns dropping to rise with sprats into the pale-blue sky above hundreds of acres of sea-lavender covering innumerable islets and peninsulas made by the wandering sea, which lay in the wider creeks wherein brown ribs of ancient wrecks rested.

  They were alone with the sun. The breeze had left the earth. He sat up. The marshes were vacant. Far away, half-lost in mirage, a few lone figures on distant mud-beds bending over as they scraped for the ‘blues’, the dark-winged shells of fat cockles. He lay down again.

  He dreamed of the time when Billy, helped by Peter, would be old enough to take over management of the farm, of the pedigree dairy herd and the modern equipment he would build up: and he would be free to come every day and wander in the beautiful desolation of this strange archipelago of the tides, to wander at will to the salt water, and sail out to Point of Terns. Scylla slipping and slapping against the tide. And when the sun was risen hot, to sail inshore and sit by the marram grasses, beside the shells and corks and bleached crab-legs in the sand; lie on his back, sun on face, thinking of what he would write in the books that had lain twenty years in his mind, and always on his spirit. Wavelets grating gently on shingle, farm in order, harmony dwelling there, all British men working their best at their jobs, flag of St. George floating over Merrie England again.

  “Sir Henry Royce once said, ‘Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble.’ By myself, I dream of the past, or the future. With you, I live in the present.”

  *

  At home there was a letter from Hurst. It was on writing paper with embossed address and armorial crest.

  Dear Phillip,

  For God’s sake come to town and give us your help. Your name means such a lot to my generation. Cannot commonsense and the hopes of the common man prevail? Is 1914–18, despite the terrible lesson t
he world is supposed to have realised in the ’twenties, to be in vain? A line in one of your books haunts me: I think you quoted it from one of the minor poets killed in the war. Speak for us, brother, the snows of death are on our brows. Please come and help us. There is a meeting in a room in the Strand on Wednesday next. Could you come up for it, and speak? I hate to bother you, with the harvest imminent, and knowing you must be pretty weary with all the work to be done, but if you can’t manage to come, perhaps I could come down and see you? I could sleep in the hay barn, among the pigeons …

  “I’ll have to go to London, to prevent Hurst coming here again,” he told Lucy. “Or down to Kent, where he is working for Major Bohun-Borsholder and incidentally using his employer’s personal writing-paper. I don’t want to go,” he repeated. “At the same time, this is a crisis in history. I often wish I had kept a diary all through the last war, instead of in spots. I’ve been keeping one for two years now, but most of the entries, except those dealing with farm details of crops, are what a critic of Conrad’s letters to Edward Cornelian, published about nine years ago, called ‘cries of pain’. Hard facts are best, they last longest. Though not the ‘hard facts’ of that columnist in The Daily Crusader, Tom Gamm, who is a Communist and loathes Birkin. I saw what he wrote about Birkin last week at Runnymeade’s. All observed details, clawing the air, the bull-roarer, the contorted face, et cetera, but nothing about the ideas behind the words.

  “It reminded me of what H. M. Tomlinson wrote about Kipling after the war, or during the war. It was to the effect that if Kipling had been the only recorder of the crucifixion ‘we would have had a picture of the smells, the crowds, the physical scene, the three uplifted figures, that would have been immortal for its fidelity to common experience; but we would have known no more about the central figure than that he was a cool and courageous rebel’. It’s a beautiful bit of writing, but might also with equal truth be turned around to prove that Tomlinson knew no more about Kipling than he declared Kipling knew about Jesus. The fact is, Kipling hated the war. He saw it as the old men’s subconscious hatred of the young, their own fear of impotence with young women. Is this boring you?”

  “No, but I must see that the stove in the wash-house is lit. Mrs. Valiant is coming to wash today.”

  “I must go to London first thing tomorrow morning. The barley won’t be rotten-ripe for a few days.”

  It was a fast run over empty roads. He left the village at half past four, and had to go slowly at first, owing to the number of turtle doves picking up grit on the lesser road to Wordingham, but once through that town and on the better roads beyond it he kept his foot down and was passing up the broad and empty White-chapel road at half past six—an average speed of fifty-four miles an hour.

  Hurst came round after breakfast to his club. They sat on the grass of St. James’s Park.

  “London can be very pleasant,” said Phillip, turning over to lie on his back. “These elms are fine creatures, lifting their arms to the sky. Byron must have known them, and Keats, and Shelley. W. H. Hudson, too. I saw a green woodpecker here in nineteen-twenty, during my first year in Fleet Street.”

  “How can you talk about that when the world is on the brink of a war that will end in the bolshevisation of Europe?”

  “Did I ever tell you that my cousin Willie met Hitler at Beyreuth in nineteen-twenty-three, after the abortive putsch? My cousin said Hitler was the most sensitive and eager creature he had ever met, or was likely to meet. He was all idealism and hope and naked sensibility. And he had almost a mystic admiration for England. Willie, as an ex-service man, was invited by Frau Cosima Wagner to sit in her box during a performance of Parsifal. Hitler sat at the back, concealed from the audience. He was on the run. The music moved Hitler so much that the tears were running down his cheeks.”

  “I’d have given ten years of my life to have seen Hitler. He is everything. Birkin is a clod compared to Hitler.”

  “Now look here, Hurst! I’ll be glad if you’ll kindly keep such remarks to yourself, or to your pickpocket pals. Birkin is my generation, he is English of the English. I think it is a great pity that he resigned office from the Labour party. But then all history is a great pity. He belonged to the war generation, and we survivors all resolved to do something, to be something different when it was all over on the Western Front, that great livid wound that lay across Europe suppurating during more than fifteen hundred nights and days—torrents of steel and prairie fires of flame, the roar of creation if you like. Birkin should have remained in Parliament—that was his platform—but what’s the use of talking about should-haves, or might-haves? Birkin remains the only man of prominence in England with the new spirit. He limped away from the battlefield determined that never again would it happen. Perhaps such a spirit can only be acceptable to a new generation after another war. When he is dead. And I hope I’ll be dead, too.”

  “I still say you are the better man.”

  “I couldn’t lead a party. I can’t even lead my men on the farm. I used to think I could inspire a new way—through my books—but I’ve outgrown that conceit.”

  “Talk like that tonight, Phil! Let yourself go.”

  “I’ve got nothing to let go, Hurst—except my life. And who wants that?”

  “England does.”

  “I’m afraid I am now only Hardy’s ‘man harrowing clods’.”

  *

  Hurst briefed Phillip about the meeting as they finished their tea at a shop in the Strand.

  “The meeting has been called by a man who was one of the ‘Iron Ring’ around Birkin. He says that Birkin is the weakest man in England.’’

  “Every man is the weakest man in England at times. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear any more of your reflections on Birkin.”

  “Very well. You’ll see all kinds of people. There’s Lord Eggesford, for a start. He’s an authority on soil conservancy, and wrote a very fine book, according to Major Bohun-Borsholder.”

  “I’ve read it.”

  “Then there’s the Admiral who commanded the Mediterranean Fleet in the last war. He’s Anglo-German Link. Then there’s the ex-M.P. who seized the mace in the House of Commons some years ago. I think you know the Duke of Gaultshire? He’s promised to come. There are also heads of all sorts of societies, and associations, including an M.P. who fought with the Coldstream during the first battle of Ypres in nineteen-fourteen and was badly wounded. You’ll meet a lot of men who were once with Birkin, but left him. The idea is to try and form a Committee to include all who see the danger of war, and want to try and form some sort of front to stop it. If you feel at the meeting that you can say anything, I do promise that it will be listened to eagerly. We desperately need a rallying point.”

  “I’m a smoking flax.”

  “For God’s sake don’t run yourself down so!”

  They walked through ambient sunshine to the meeting. It was to be held in an upper room in a building off the Strand.

  There sat and stood about fifty people, both men and women. They looked to be a little odd, all different, all of differing minds and animations. The Chairman briefly stated why the meeting had been called.

  “We hope to try and find a formula of united resistance against the threat of decadent democracy’s last resort to save itself by going to war. As Chairman I suggest that we listen to those who wish to speak. I must ask speakers to be as brief as possible, for time is short. Afterwards we hope to form a Committee, as a prelude to united action.”

  He sat down.

  Speaker after speaker followed. From them came suggestions; qualifications to suggestions; diversions of the qualifications of proposals; counter-proposals, counter-suggestions. Phillip thought that a surrealistic painter might have had an idea for a picture of circular stones grinding faces like axes, while each arm turned its own grindstone heedless of all other abrasive circular motions.

  Nothing was agreed upon, nothing decided when the meeting broke up.

  Hurst, who h
ad somehow become acquainted with various famous people, introduced Phillip to some of them. He said, “I am a member of Birkin’s Party.”

  No comment was made by the polite faces; but the Duke of Gaultshire, whom Phillip already knew, invited him down to Husborne to see his collection of rare and uncommon pheasants in his park, saying that he had read his books with interest and instruction, and they might talk things over quietly together.

  “I was a patient at the hospital, Duke, in nineteen-eighteen.”

  “So I am told,” said the Duke, with nervous courtesy. “I do hope you will be able to stay. But of course your corn harvest is imminent. Pray propose yourself at any time.”

  What a gentle creature he was. A sad family, father against son, son in the wilderness. So it was throughout all classes of human society.

  “His social credit programme isn’t any good,” said Hurst. “Come and see some of the fellows who believe in direct action.”

  A discussion was taking place on the wooden steps leading down to the lavatory. Talk ended when he and Hurst arrived. Phillip had an idea that he was being assessed.

  “Tell us what you think,” said Hurst.

  “I believe in Birkin’s potential. He is a true leader, if given the chance.”

  “He’s had the chance. He can’t work with anyone,” said Hurst. “Everyone here knows it. They have all tried to do so, and he’s failed us.”

  The Chairman, who had white hair and a young and hopeful face, squeezed past the group. “Still talking about Birkin?” he said. “Well, he’s the weakest man in Britain.”

  He passed on down, and Phillip was regarded by six or seven composed faces.

  “For years that chap was one of the Iron Ring around the Bleeder,” said Hurst, “and he knows what he is talking about.”

  “All men talk about themselves. And so, perhaps, you won’t mind not using that expression again,” said Phillip, looking Hurst in the eye. “Derision does not become you or me or anyone else. Our words are boomerangs. As we judge others, so we judge ourselves.”