The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  “You’re trying to save the world, I can see that, sir. Well, the best of luck to you. Now about that telephone call. I think it was the Medicine Club, or something like that. To tell the truth, I couldn’t make head or tail what he said. Of course, the call may not have been for you at all, the lines get so crossed these days. It’s all these Americans in London, they will put florins and half-crowns into the telephone booth boxes. I got a haul one day when I went to telephone and pressed button B. Showers of silver, nearly half a quid, not bad considering.”

  With the patience of the defeated, Phillip made a show of listening.

  “Yes, as I was saying, the telephone system has more or less had it,” went on the night porter. “The other night someone asked me if I was Attlee the Prime Minister, would you believe it, and told me to scramble. Still, members of the Government are like anyone else I suppose, liable to fits of absent-mindedness. It’s the awful food we get, don’t you think? Though you as a farmer are doing pretty well, I suppose. Anyway, just in case, I thought I’d ask you if you knew Attlee. Perhaps it was his personal secretary who wanted to ask you to accept a Cee Bee Eee. Like many other famous writers, I suppose. Commanders of the British Empire. Well, as there’s practically nothing left of the British Empire, it means you’ll be a Commander of Nothing. Not very polite is it, to infer that so many writers are as good as Nothing? Anyway, if the call was for you, this fellow said he’d meet you at Piccadilly tube station—there’s a place for queers if you like, and he’d wait there for you. Glad it’s you going and not me, at this time of night. London’s full of spivs and cosh boys, isn’t it?”

  “You appear to know more about it than I do.”

  “I say, you referring to me? Well, I suppose I am a bit of a spiv. I’ve got something to drink if that’s what you mean. How about a nip of brandy, or whisky?”

  “I’ll have brandy, please. Don’t bother to come up with it now, I’ll come down to you.”

  “Your consideration touches my heart, sir, but I cannot take advantage of your generosity. One double brandy. That’s set you back ten bob. Cash first, please. Thanks.”

  “I’ll come down for it,” said Phillip, taking the lift to his bedroom

  Do you remember the events of December, 1944, when the Prime Minister, then Winston Churchill, flew to Greece, having left his bed where he was convalescent after pneumonia? The Times, and most of the other British papers reproved him for interfering in the war of liberation in Central Europe. I had a card at that time from Birkin, then ill and under house arrest. He, too, like Churchill, was a man anguished for his country, lest it ‘sink into eternal night’. The card said, Trust Churchill; he knows. For Stalin is a dictator more terrible than any that has arisen in Europe for centuries; and owing to American inexperience it looks as though there is nothing to stop the 200-odd Soviet divisions now in Poland and East Germany from advancing to the northern coast of France, There were 11,000 guns bombarding Berlin during the last battle. When the city fell, rape and sadism preceded slow murder. Neither those ‘war criminals’ nor their Russian Generals are being tried at Nuremberg.

  A knock on the door. Mr. Globe-Mornington entering with tray holding tumbler, miniature bottle, and large jug of water.

  “Don’t let me interrupt your love letter.”

  And singing The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la! the night porter left the room.

  What of the so-called Allied War aims? We are impotent to do anything about the loss of Poland’s integrity; Czechoslovakia also is absorbed; and Jugo-Slavia (by correlation). Greece, going that way, through civil war, meant the end of Great Britain, or her spheres of trade and influence maintained by her naval and other powers.

  From the view-point of those who feel that such powers as finance and service-strength are the only realities and basis of life, of Britain ruling the waves, the signs were, to both Churchill and Birkin, alarming. For if a Napoleon, a Hitler, or a Stalin, unites the economy of Europe and makes it self-supporting, independent of bills of lading and loans and imports, it spells the doom of Great Britain. For this is what the war was about; it was not directly about Synagogues burned down or heads shaved or Catholics saying Mass or anything else which the man in the street was told, since that was ALL he can comprehend. The war, was, and remains, an economic war; and historically speaking, the misery of a generation is less in eternity than a wave expending itself on a rock. The European wave breaks; and is no more.

  A whistle pierced the attic. It was the blower—relic of servants’ quarters from the butler’s pantry in the days of the most noble marquess. Phillip pulled out the whistle and listened at the rim of the pipe.

  “Globe-Mornington here, sir, from the bowels of the building. I’m worried about your friend Squeers—someone has just rung up to say he’s about to resume his ride of the Inner Circle—all on the same fourpenny ticket, round and round, I gather, until closing time. Marvellous isn’t it what you can do underground on fourpence. Anyway, Steers will look out periodically for you at Piccadilly, on the Inner Circle, he’ll wave a banana at you from the open door of his carriage. Right? Right!’

  The pipe ceased to whisper, and Phillip plugged back the whistle, before reading aloud what he had written.

  “‘With Stalin holding the Dardanelles and Gibraltar, Britain becomes ‘a disused air-craft carrier lying off the coast of Asia’, its power minimised, its ports decaying, its factories idle, its people in civil war. Where will the socialistic sympathisers of the ‘gentle classes’ be then? Where was the tolerant Kerensky in 1918?’”

  The whistle gave a bleak note.

  “Sorry for troubling you, sir, but I feel I must correct a faulty impression I think I gave you—to wit, in one word—banana! Shows how reading the papers brain-washes you, doesn’t it? Bananas are ‘news’ just now. It was a bandanna Squeers said he’d wave to you. Bandanna—an Irish potato-pickers handkerchief, I think is the right description.”

  “Yes, he used to wear them, with his friends of the Bright Young People.”

  “Talking of bright young people, there’s been a little to-do in the bar just now—Dylan Thomas throwing a bottle at Osgood Nilsson, who called him a fake and a no-good man. I’m about fed up with this club, honest I am. I suppose you don’t know of a country gentleman down your way who wants a, major domo, do you? A butler—valet—chef? House-parlourman is the modest term used nowadays among the new-poor, I believe.”

  “I’ll let you know if I come across a country gentleman. There’s Mr. Osgood Nilsson, of course. He lives not far from me, in North Devon. Shall I ask him on your behalf?”, and Phillip let the whistle-plug dangle as he took up his pen.

  And but for Churchill’s intervention during that Christmas of 1944 every male German, from six months upwards, might now be dead, with every Polish bourgeois, every Czech and Slovak likewise; and in turn every Dutch, Belgian, French and Spanish tradesman, priest, banker, etc., gone down before the Tartar hordes. And to think Stalin, despite the humanitarian-dreams of our parlour bolsheviks, is other than the sworn and dedicated enemy of Great Britain is to have a very short memory. Hitler was never the real enemy of Great Britain; and my belief in Hereward Birkin is all the firmer when I remember something else he wrote to me; ‘It took a man of genius to frustrate another man of genius; but Churchill could not build.’

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Excuse my coming once again, sir, but I felt you would want to read about your friend in the Late Night Final. If Sir Piers Tofield needs help, and he surely does, I’m his man. I can cook, mend, clean, sing, cut the lawn and do the gardening, so do remember me, won’t you? This is positively my last appearance. I hope it won’t be your lady’s after getting that letter!”

  “It’s to Professor da Silva Hendrade, perhaps you’ll give it to him when you see him.” And signing the letter, Yours in Brotherly Barbarianship, Phillip Maddison, he stuck up the envelope and went down the lift with the porter.

  *

&nb
sp; Once again through St. James’ Square to Piccadilly. It was 11.25 p.m.: he must find Piers. Down the escalator to meet the last train from South Kensington. It roared in; he hurried up the platform: a few tired-looking people got off, he hurried down the platform, thinking that when he had been there during the war the platform had hundreds of metal bunk beds along the wall, filled by bombed-out families. Perhaps Piers was asleep? All passengers to the station appeared to have got off. The engine pulled out before he could get to the end of the train. Carriages flashed by with a roar of shaken metal and he could not discern faces, his left eye, which had been stinging while he wrote the letter, was now sharply hurting. It had been like that, when he was tired, ever since Billy had driven his fist into it. Whenever he thought of his eldest son, it was as though he was speaking to Billy’s image: Never worry, if you are near me, Boy Billy, it was all my own fault. We were both breaking down on the farm, the war was within us. I love you dearly, Boy Billy; I love you.

  Chapter 3

  LAURA

  He was about to return up the escalator when he was touched on the arm. The girl who had been sitting beside the Commando colonel in the Medicean Club said softly, “Hullo. I don’t expect you to recognise the grub who crawled to see you at your farm six years ago. I was dumb, now I have wings! How are you Phillip Maddison?”

  “Laura Wissilcraft!”

  “You do remember?”

  “Yes, to my shame! You rode on your bicycle miles up the coast to my farm, and I was bloody to you. You see, I was horribly frustrated, because the war with the old Alleyman, as we called him in nineteen fourteen, had come again. So I was no good to anyone. I was particularly bleak to you, I remember.”

  “That’s all you remember?”

  “And your eyes. I must find a friend I missed at the Medicean.”

  “Piers?”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He may be upstairs.”

  “He is. Or was.”

  Piers falling down the ascending escalator, turning over and over, first one leg uppermost then an arm. He managed to get to his feet and began to run down, a treadmill action in reverse. Then he got across the dividing barrier, but slipped on a descending tread and fell, tumbling to the bottom, where he got on his feet laughing with that sudden loud laugh remembered by Phillip: Piers then seeming to be clear and enjoying life fully, living outwardly as he had seldom been able to do in the constrictions of his father’s home, overlooked by a mother dedicated to the higher life of a Victorian heaven, after the death, in a seizure, of her elder son, who had passed on when eight years old. So little Piers had always been part of her grief. When Piers laughed like that he was outside the penumbra of childhood and school, thought Phillip, now face to face with his friend after nearly four years: a face sharply thin, dark spaces under eyes, hair grey above ears. Half the front teeth were gone.

  “How are you, Piers?”

  “Oh, not so bad. Hullo, Laura. I must apologise for spluttering, my upper denture must now be somewhere in the machinery. How’s the farm, Phil?”

  “Gone. Force majeur.”

  “Where are you living now?”

  “Shepherd’s cot on Exmoor.”

  “You’ve travelled in a circle. How about Lucy and the children?”

  “They’re in Suffolk. I bought a house for them.”

  “Your shepherd’s cot sounds ideal for a writer. I must find one, having found myself homeless.”

  “Have you given up the flat?”

  So far Piers had been avoiding Phillip’s gaze. Now after a quick glance at his friend he went on, “I see you’re in the picture, as they say in the army, with the Wissilcraft. Well, I mustn’t keep you.”

  “We’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’m practically on the run. Deserter. However, that’s enough of me. If you’ve nothing better to do, shall we all go back to the Medicean?”

  They returned up the escalator. At the top Piers said, “I must go to the lavatory, you won’t mind waiting.”

  “So must I. See you in a minute, Laura.”

  Standing side by side, Piers said, “She’s quite a girl. She found me lying in the gutter in Soho, stripped of nearly everything. If you don’t want her, I’ll take her on. Where did you meet her?”

  “Six years ago in a Suffolk pub, one evening. Daughter of a smallholder on the heavy clay of Suffolk. Later she bicycled all the way up to my farm. Was almost entirely silent during the twelve-hours she was there. All I could do was to urge her to write.”

  “If that’s all you urged her to do, no wonder she was silent.”

  “It was rather a difficult time. Others were involved.”

  “People always did revolve round you.”

  “How long have you been home, Piers?”

  “Three days. Sent a signal to Gillian telling her when the troopship I jumped at Rangoon was due to berth, and she promptly skipped. The morning of the day I arrived, in fact. With some American colonel who dug himself a foxhole on the beach at Arramanches on D-day as soon as he got ashore, and remained there, saying he had battle-shock. Never stirred, not one thought for his men. So a commando type who hangs out in the Medicean tells me. Back came the American colonel with a Purple Heart decoration and not only slept with my wife in my flat and at my home at Field Place, but drank my port, wore my suits, and didn’t even bother to send my shirts to the laundry. I found them chucked in one corner of the bedroom.”

  “Oh Piers, I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t blame him. Looting is traditional in war. I gave Gillian power of attorney when I went out, and you know my woods going down to the Benbow Fishponds? She had all the timber thrown, and paid the nine thousand pounds from the timber merchant into her private account. That was two months ago. Well, it’s good to be with you again, Phil.”

  Piers began to cry.

  Phillip waited, hoping that Laura would not have gone when they got outside.

  *

  Piers’ longing for love, while fighting in the jungle with the Fourteenth Army, had made him idealise his wife, who had been his mistress before Virginia, his first wife, had divorced him while still loving him. Piers was what the Victorians called ‘two people’. His mind had a deeper bifurcation than most men of imagination marred by the prison house of an Edwardian childhood. The darkened Piers came out when he was drunk, the thwarted child of a stiff-starched nanny behind the discipline of his grace and awareness of the feelings of others. Thus his wives, first Virginia, and to a lesser depth Gillian, had been unable to remain with him.

  Piers’ despair on finding himself forsaken had found no relief, certainly no solace or satisfaction, with the anonymous tart he had taken to his flat the night before, there to try to impose on her personality the image of the wife who had left him. Being unable to conjoin with her body he had begged her to whip him, but without the desired result: so he had beaten her in the hope of sadistic erection—in vain. Then to the brandy bottle, oblivion, and waking to find the flat pillaged. Even the unwashed shirts in the corner of the bedroom had gone. So he had sought to find another image of love. The same thing had happened; and he had come-to in the gutter, to see a gentle face above him. She had helped him upstairs to a room, he had awakened to find her writing in a book of bound foolscap paper. She had looked at him and said quietly, “I am Laura.”

  *

  The three stood in Piccadilly waiting for a taxi. Tarts, male and female, hung about in darkened doorways, one little more than fourteen years old, hoping to meet American soldiers, black for preference, they were honeys, their skins soft, like a baby’s. But almost all had gone home to the U.S.A.

  “Where are you sleeping tonight, Piers?” Phillip asked, as a taxi drew up.

  “God knows. You remember my Ulster one-and-a-half litre? That American colonel Gillian hooked drove my motor until the canvas showed through the tyre treads. Didn’t use the right engine oil either. The bores were badly worn, you could drop pennies past the
rings, the plugs oil up every few miles. That Aston was my real wife. I’m going to get her put in order, then build a pantheon for her near the house in the woods beside the lake, with a plaque. God!” he shouted. “I haven’t got any woods! That bitch Gillian sold them all!”

  The taxi drove away.

  “Come down to the Medicean, and have some supper, Piers. Then we’ll get your ’bus repaired, and go down to Exmoor and write.”

  “A hard life, that’s a soldier’s end. You know it, too, Phil. Everything is money now! You can sell old rope in Bond Street. A faked Picasso was bought by Gillian’s colonel, ha! ha! Sold to him by Archie Plugge, for a thousand dollars in cash. I left Archie, dead drunk on the sitting-room carpet, plugged full of surgical spirit. Remember Archie? He’s a major, or was; fought the war at desks all over India and Ceylon, never without a glass in his hand. Good old Archie, he has an infallible instinct for where the going’s good. I wasn’t back in my flat an hour, with one call at the Medicean before unlocking my door, when Archie turned up. Fatter than ever. After the collapse of Germany he got a job as British Gauleiter in some Rhineland town or other, was sacked after a week—dead drunk most of the time, when he wasn’t fraternising with the enemy. Monty was hot on fraternising, so Archie got the push. He got as far as Southampton with a camouflaged B.M.W. motorcar he’d looted, left it there before questions were asked. Don’t tell him about your shepherd’s hut on Exmoor, or he’ll smell you out. Tells me he may get a job as public relations to an American Doctor of sorts, called Schwenkfelder, who hangs out at Oldstone Castle, near Lynton. A new religion, I gather, based on a sort of psychology of the psychic mind, plus vegetarianism. That won’t suit Archie, I fancy. God, look at all the tarts. Is there a decent woman left in London?”