As they approached the rustic bridge, three or four figures were to be discerned in the moonlight by the low railings under the weeping willow tree. Phillip nudged Jack Hart and whispered, “Don’t say anything to them will you, if they speak to us?”
“Who the hell wants to speak to them?” replied Jack Hart with his rough laugh, “They’re only fourpenny bits. They’ll take a boy for nothing, as a change from the usual beery buck navvy.”
Phillip began to wish that he had not come. It would be awful if Jack Hart went with one, and he was left on his own to face the others. He would rather die than do the horrible thing of which he had first heard from a bully called Mildenhall before he had got his scholarship. Mildenhall had said he was a tool-greaser to his Father, and thinking of Mother, Phillip had felt unutterable horror and shame. Fat-lipped Mildenhall, big red face with little pig-eyes, and his heavy, cold way of sitting on smaller boys, grinding their bones beneath him on the hard playground until they shrieked! Ah, in the end Mildenhall had turned out to be a funk, when he had punched him on the nose and tapped his claret! How strange that Mildenhall had been afraid, in the end, of him, Phillip!
Trepidant beside Jack Hart, Phillip came to the figures; passed by without any words being spoken by them; reached the near-safety of the bridge. There the reason of silence was startlingly obvious. Darkly upon the bridge, distinct in the amber light of the declining crescent moon, was a helmeted policeman. Phillip nearly said, in his relief, “Good night, officer,” but another kind of fear, that of the policeman himself, kept him from speech.
As they came near the exit gate, Jack Hart said, “I know who that slop was. That was Garrott. He gets money from those old horse-collars. He waits to spy on chaps sitting on seats with girls, creeping up on ’em, hoping to catch them. He’s a hypocrite, for in plain clothes he’s no better’n anyone else. I tell you, one dark night somebody’ll wait for Garrott and he’ll get a bloody good hiding, and serve him right.”
*
The Fordesmill skating rink was near the Bull Inn, whence came a mild roar as a door opened. The Rink beyond roared, too, with a roll of wheels on the boarded floor almost hidden by a swirl of skaters, some old (quite twenty) but most of them boys. Phillip noticed at once two girls wearing red woollen caps with pompoms, white jerseys, blue skirts, and brown high-laced boots. They swung round the circular floor, holding hands crossed behind them. They were ethereal!
Jack Hart offered to pay for his skates, but Phillip was afraid of falling. He sat behind the wooden fence, and after a while, to his excitement, the two girls came to sit near him while they took off their skates. He caught the dark one’s glance, then looked steadily away, to show he was not rude. Then they were going out … ah! the dark one, with swing of plait, had glanced back, at the door. His mouth went dry, as he got up to follow.
Outside the Bull they stopped and looked back. He stopped, too. They went on; he followed at fifty yards. They stopped again at the next corner. The fair one beckoned. He trembled, feeling in a fume. They went on up the road. He followed, until, with anguish, he saw them entering their gate.
When the door was shut, he dared to walk past, but not to look at the number. He wanted to write the dark girl a letter; but he walked on, back to the High Street, to the bright lights of shop and tram, which made him feel more lonely than ever, as he returned to his home.
Chapter 19
WOODNOTES WILD
Now there was something to live for, in the woods and coverts, where the new leaves speckled the sunlight upon the old skeleton leaves below.
The nightingales had arrived, and were in full song among the bluebells and windflowers. The boy cycled through yellow shadow-slanting evenings to where the white owl flew over springing corn, and the smaller spotted woodpecker drummed on dead branches of oak trees. Rooks cawed across the lake in the new place he and Desmond visited one evening for the first time, on their way back from Knollyswood Park. This new place, on Shooting Common, was only five miles from his home.
The coverts were planted with hazel and sweet chestnut. Long grassy rides bisected them, all imprinted with the nob-nailed boots of the under-keeper. There were thousands of footmarks, all firm and going the same way, just as he remembered from the wood he had explored with Joey the old dog when, many years ago, he had run away from Aunt Viccy’s house one Derby Day at Epsom. The coverts stood between fields green with rising corn, enclosed in a wire-netting fence about four feet high. The fence was to keep vermin out, and rabbits in, the under-keeper told them. From what Father had told him, Phillip knew about vermin; and to show his knowledge, he enquired where the gibbet was to be found. The under-keeper, a dark man who grinned and nodded usually instead of speaking, pointed with his stick to the corner of the covert they were approaching.
There was an ash sapling resting horizontally to the ground between the forks of two small oak trees, near the ditch which drained both field and wood. From the pole hung scores of bedraggled stoats and weasels, some very old and falling to bits, others put there so recently that the brown congealed blood was visible on nose and paw. They hung by the neck, on pieces of string from the pole. Among them were hedgehogs; rats, carrion crows; brick-brown, black-striped kestrels; and jays, the inquisitive ones of the forest, Father had said, their crests still raised as though in a last surprise.
Phillip and Desmond stared at the hanging corpses long after the under-keeper had left to continue his search for nests. He was collecting pheasants’ eggs to put them under broody hens in coops.
There were planks laid over the ditches at each corner of the coverts. In the middle of the planks were traps, concealed under wire-netting threaded with reeds. There were also drain-pipes near each gibbet tree, with sods on them, and inside each was a trap baited by pieces of rabbit. A weasel or stoat, the keeper said, could not resist going down a drain.
Phillip collected skulls of both hawks and owls, to take back for his museum. He felt no pity or regret for the dead hanging there; only curiosity to examine the teeth, all bared, of the stoats, who were thrice as big as the weasels, and had black tips to their rather thin little tails. The weasels seemed to have died biting, too, or trying to bite. But what harm did hedgehogs do, asked Desmond. They suck pheasants’ eggs, said Phillip.
Across the oat field was a pond, into and out of which a small brook ran fast.
“Good Lord, this must be the Randisbourne on its way to the Thames from Caesar’s well above the Fish Ponds!” cried Phillip, astonished by his own discovery. “Fancy, this goes all the way from here to Cutler’s Pond; then through those meadows beside the main road where Jack Cade hid after his rebellion had failed, and they cut off his head; under Fordesmill Bridge, through the Rec.; behind the houses you see from the train, and then by the dog-biscuit mill I pass on my way to school! But it’s filthy there now, all the fish are dead!”
*
After the holidays, when Desmond had gone away to a preparatory school, Phillip went alone to the woods, seeking for new nests, and revisiting the ones he had found already. In hedge and hollow tree, hanging branch of fir, arching bramble, and in the reeds of the lake before the big red Queen Anne mansion, he had his places of call. A softer look came in his eyes, his face lost its furtive strain of fear, its expression became clear and simple in the sun, though in moments of memory the melancholy (the hunger for the mammalian warmth of love which had come upon him since his earliest years, from his aloneness) was to be seen upon his face. Thus he grew in secret love for the birds he watched in their nests, away from the constrictions and denials of home and school.
The woodpecker’s nest in the silver birch just inside the footpath gate leading off from the common had been completed, judging by the increased number of chips lying on the grass below. The hole leading down into the wooden-water-bottle-shaped interior was too small for his hand, so he tried to get at the coveted white eggs within with a bent spoon. This proving useless, he thought to chop the hole bigger, using the small a
xe from the chest of tools Father had given him years before. It was very blunt, with a rounded edge; and after hacking for ten minutes, when he had not got so much as a finger’s width in from the bark, he gave up the attempt; reflecting how strong the bird’s beak must be, and its neck, to be able to chip and break off dozens of splinters of living wood as long as his little finger, while with his axe he could make but little effect.
Would the bird desert the eggs which must be inside, now that the hole was disfigured? He hoped not. There was another aspect, too: would his chopper marks around the hole be noticed? He found some clay and smeared it over the mutilated circle, which had been so round and neat before, half-ashamed of his work.
Apparently his house-breaking efforts had not frightened the bird too much, for on the next occasion, as he approached the nesting tree, he saw a starling fly to the hole, straw in beak; and, clinging to the rough bark, it made as if to enter the hole. The next moment the starling fell back with a squawk, as a long beak and red cap poked out, and looked about it. Phillip wondered if his clay plastering had deceived the starling into thinking that it was just any old hole in a tree. If so, Mr. Starling had got a shock!
The squirrel’s drey of light buff oak-leaf sprays was deserted. Phillip decided that the mother had taken her young away to one of her spare dreys. He was disappointed that she had not trusted him, though of course, as he wrote to Desmond, the dam could not possibly tell the difference between him and an ordinary human being.
*
He came to feel with the birds, with their delicate and joyous ways. Each egg was a miracle: creamy pale blue of the starling in hole of tree; grey speckle of wagtail in chalk-face of quarry; frail white, faint with pink speckles, of blue titmouse who would not leave her eggs, but puffed herself up and hissed as he peered in her cranny in a tree; the almost spotless pale white of the wren. Starlings were noisy, workmen-birds, their nests a jumble of straw, dropped anyhow: yet so glossy, so summer-skiey, those wonderful eggs. The wren’s nest in a haystack was made of hay, lined with feathers and round with a hole in the side; or of green moss if in ivy, and of dead leaves when placed in dead ivy. Fingers gently inserted into a nest; a hot soft flutter within: the mother bird was on the eggs: oh, gently, gently stroke her neck with top-side of finger, and then quietly withdraw, so that she would have no need to fly out like a moth and drop her beady notes of alarm as she drew her brown wool through the tapestry of the woodland. Or the chaffinch’s nest, with its brown-stained grey-blue eggs, in the marvellous cup of horsehair and feather lining within the moss and lichen mould. Everything in its place in the chaff bob’s nest. And the bullfinch’s, so frail-looking, rootlets and black horsehair: yet strong, like the whitethroat’s built in the nettles, all grass, only a little horsehair inside, almost transparent, weighing perhaps a tenth of an ounce. He saw them all for the first time, a new and secret and miraculous world, and began to think why the varying colours and patterns, and how had they come to such patterns? They were not all for protective coloration; they were perhaps beautiful just to be beautiful, in the eye of the bird who knew what they were for.
Phillip was sure that birds knew as much about their eggs and young as human mothers felt about their children; he once watched a thrush get off her eggs and listen to hear any movement of tapping within the shells—they were hard set—and while he lay hidden, watching, he heard her give a little trilling talk to herself, or the air, by which, he knew, they were starting to hatch. The thrush’s eye, over the rim of her cowdung-plastered nest, while she had been sitting with only tail showing and throat and beak and head, had had a look of his mother about it; the same look in the eyes. Mother said the thrush was her favourite bird, so she must have a sort of affinity or soul-likeness to it. If she were a bird, she would make a thrush’s nest; she could never make a chaffinch’s, or a goldfinch’s, but a rough and ready thing like a thrush’s, good enough, but not much skill in it.
There was an area in the upper side of the park, adjoining the common, which was more or less open, bracken on the floor, and old oaks, most of them hollow, growing there, where white owls lay up by day: the mysterious barn owls which floated dream-silent at twilight and mused by day inside hollow limbs and holes from which old branches had fallen. If only one would be his friend, and perch on his shoulder, and let him stroke it! They would have a secret friendship of the forest, he and the lovely bird of evening, of the sad still hours of twilight in the glade of the oaks, in the silence and peace of the wild Kent country. But perhaps he would have to die before he could know the birds as they really were.
It was always a sad moment when he had to return home, to the noise of trams and omnibuses, raucous cries in the streets, and the deadness of school books and lessons. At home and at school he was someone else, doing and saying things that had nothing to do with what he really was.
*
During the past month, in the evenings at home, he had been training for the school sports, which were to take place in the second week in May. Three times a week, at night, he had been running in shorts, singlet, and plimsolls round the Hill, four and five times without stopping. He was no good at sprinting, but he could run long distances without getting puffed, at least when by himself. On the track near the Crystal Palace, where the school had held their sports the previous year, he had come in last in the junior mile, as his throat had dried up with nervousness before the pistol fired; and he had started off as though the race had just ended, instead of begun. This year, he would do better, after hard training.
Sports Day was on a Saturday, in the afternoon. In the morning there was no school; and when Father had left for the office, Phillip went into the Backfield to watch where the skylarks dropped, hoping to find a nest. He was sitting in his camp near the red ballast heap when a peculiar sound came from over the ragged grassy crest above, beyond which were the unseen spiked railings enclosing the south-east limits of the Hill.
Getting up, he crept through the grasses, Indian style, to avoid being seen as he went to the railings.
On the path, walking slowly forward, was a kilted Scotsman, playing the bagpipes. Phillip had occasionally seen him on the Hill, wearing his tartan. Sometimes he was to be seen in the High Street, on Saturday nights, playing outside public houses. The Scotsman was now playing a tune that he recognised, from a gramophone record of Father’s, as The Flowers of the Forest.
Phillip climbed over the fence, and walked towards the figure in uniform, striding forward with head erect and cheeks blown out.
Except for the bagpipe player, the Hill seemed empty. It was early for children and old men to be about. Phillip followed the Scotsman, past the tennis courts, past the public lavatory, and so to the main path which led to the elms in the distance. What was he doing, playing all alone, in the quiet sunny morning?
Phillip saw another figure coming towards them. It was Uncle Hugh, moving slowly with his two sticks. As the Scotsman came near him, Uncle Hugh stood to one side, and balancing on his legs and one stick, removed his straw hat. The Scotsman passed without looking at him, playing all the time.
As he came to Uncle Hugh, Phillip saw that he was crying. What was the matter? Uncle’s face was working. Uncle glanced at him, then looked down, as though trying to speak. Phillip felt shaken, why, he did not know. Then he heard the sound of a distant gun.
“Well, Phil,” said Uncle Hugh, at last, “this is the end of an age.” His voice quivered. “He was a good fellow, was Teddy.”
Another gun boomed from far away. And upon the flag staff of the Grammar School roof Phillip saw that the Union Jack, was flying half mast. “And Halley’s comet, the great oriflamme, doth blaze across the heaven!” recited Uncle Hugh, like an actor.
Phillip ran home to tell the important news to Mother. Then he rushed in to tell Gran’pa; then Mrs. Bigge. The King was dead! While Halley’s comet was blazing!
Afterwards, he decided that the School Sports would not be held; and with relief set out for his woods inst
ead.
As it happened, the sports were held, after some discussion by the authorities; but Phillip spent the time in Knollyswood Park, visiting his nests.
*
In the afternoon heat he sought cool solitude of sun and shadow under the beech-wood near the Home Farm. Here were very tall trees, growing out of the chalky slope, some of them old. The dry ground beneath was littered with beech-mast covers. It was a mossy place where the sunlight fell in little pools and patches from the pale green canopy far, far above, as he lay on his back, hands held like opera glasses before his face as he watched the woodpecker holes along a grey trunk, and wondered if he would see one of the many-coloured, laughing birds pushing itself up by its tail, as it clung to the bark and listened for the boring of grubs within.
Keeping still, he saw what he had waited for. Round the bole the green and red bird came, moving with a series of jerks; its head held sideways as it listened, while the forest seemed to pause. Even the rooks were for a moment silent; then furiously the woodpecker threw back its head and struck again and again, tearing away bits of tinder wood, which floated down from the great height above. It seemed to get what it was after, as it swallowed upon prods with its beak-tip, and then suddenly an amazing thing happened. Another woodpecker flew up with a loud ringing yaffle-yaffle-yaffle, and clinging to the bole fluttered its wings like a fledgling and begged to be fed. It looked like a cock bird, judging by the brighter colours on its feathers. While it was still begging, the first bird dropped away and flew down the sun-dappled glade, followed almost at once by the begging bird. What could be the explanation? Had someone or something robbed the hen of her eggs or young, and so the father bird begged for the food?
Lying on his back, knees crossed, one foot idly lifting, Phillip pondered what he had seen. Birds did do queer things sometimes. There was the robin who had the nest in the steep bank in the Backfield, immediately behind Mrs. Rolls’ garden fence. One morning it had flown with food to its nestlings, who were asleep. They were not hungry, so slept on. The robin spoke to them, they took no notice, so the mother bird had flown away over the spiked railings above the Rolls’ fence, where the Hill began. There were may bushes there; and from one of them had come the noise of hungry nestlings, chirruping with open beaks. Could the robin have two nests?
Young Phillip Maddison Page 29