The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

“You’ll never forgive me, Pip, but I didn’t get a divorce. The judge said I did not make out a case.”

  “Well, now we can have some coffee in the Strand together! And if you’ve nothing better to do, will you come with me afterwards to St. Paul’s Cathedral? I want to make notes, also to hear a service; for it was there, in November nineteen fourteen, my mother and Grandfather. Thomas Turney attended the memorial service for the funeral of Lord Roberts who died in France. It was also a service in mourning for those of the original B.E.F. who were killed during the first battle of Ypres. I could not be present, for I was one of the survivors.”

  Lucy thought, This is a new Phillip. How quietly he talks. They went down some stairs. Sitting at a table, he went on, “Altogether in my territorial battalion we lost more than five hundred of our chaps, when the battle ended on the fourteenth of November.” He sighed. “But that war is now as far away as Waterloo or Hastings. Perhaps no-one will ever want to read about it again.”

  During a second cup of coffee in the Mecca basement room he told her about meeting Laura Wissilcraft. “She’s rather a wonderful girl, you know. She seems to know everything I am thinking. Almost we don’t need to speak. We’ve got the same sort of eyes, only her’s are young and beautiful, unlike mine now, one of them dead, and the other misty at times.”

  “Do try to do less, and not strain your sight, Pip. We’re all rather worried about you, you know. You seemed to bear the whole war, both sides that is, when we lived at Banyards. Do you know,” she said, turning to him and speaking with a decisiveness he had never seen in her before, “I used to hate Luke, the steward! It was he who led Billy to be untruthful! He was what they call two-faced. He used to say one thing to you, and then behind your back tell the men to do another!”

  “Poor old Luke, he felt awfully frustrated by me, I feel sure. He was always anxious lest we were getting in a muddle. After all, he knew only what he knew. And he was but a labourer, suddenly promoted. And had never left the village. That was his entire world. No, I can’t blame Luke. I failed as a leader, and I know it. Look how I was always shouting—not at him, thank God—but usually when I was alone—like an overheated threshing machine!”

  “Poor Pip, you had always far too much to do.”

  This use of his intimate name before marriage made him wary, which in turn made him feel mean. Poor Lucy. Then he thought how she had always strained to interest herself in what he was writing, the music he loved—far beyond her capacity as a mother happy with her children.

  Lucy divined what he was feeling, and said, “Well, perhaps you will find someone cleverer than I am, and then you can divorce me for desertion. I shall be quite happy with the children at Hill House, with Tim and Brenda and their little family.”

  “And wash your hands of me, Lucy?” he said gently.

  “Not at all, my dear. But if you are free, we shall be able to meet as friends, won’t we? Anyway, do let’s see St. Paul’s Cathedral! I’ve never been inside, and I would so like to.”

  Laura Wissilcraft came down the stairs. She saw Phillip at once, but went to sit alone at a table.

  “It’s the girl I told you about. Would you like to meet her? She knows your cousin Melissa, they were nursing in India together.”

  “Are you sure she isn’t waiting for you?”

  “She came with a friend of hers, an ex-Commando who was hit rather badly in the war. Of course, you know him! He came with you to the hospital after I was hit by a stray bullet on the farm. ‘Buster’ Cloudesley!”

  “Oh yes, of course! What a small world it is, after all!”

  “His wife skipped while he was in hospital.”

  “Well, perhaps he’s well rid of her,” she replied, blushing.

  “You seem to be quite resolute, all of a sudden.”

  “Well, I liked Lord Cloudesley. He had manners. He’s a sort of connection—a cousin of my cousin, Molly Bucentaur—who lives somewhere in Somerset, I think.”

  “By the way, Piers is very much on his own now. He’s back from the Far East. His wife skipped the day before he returned. She went off with some American.”

  “Oh dear, everyone seems to be in a mess, don’t they? I wonder which wife it was, now. I liked Virginia, the first one. Then there was the girl who came to luncheon once, do you remember, the time when you and Felicity went on to the Yacht Club? What was her name, now? Gillian, of course! Well, I hope things will come right for Piers in the end. He was so charming, I always thought. Do introduce me to your friend.”

  Laura was shy at first, but when Lucy spoke of Melissa, light came into her face.

  “She was wonderful,” she said, in a soft voice. “When she was slashed by the—” She stopped, feeling Phillip’s shock pass through her. “It was only her face, her cheeks. Oh, I’m sorry if I’ve said what I shouldn’t. Didn’t you know, Phillip?”

  “Did you know?” he asked Lucy, whose cheeks were again colouring.

  “Well, yes, I did hear something, when George Abeline called in as he was passing the other day. He told us she’s going to have skin-grafting done by McIndoe, you know, the man who has done such wonders with pilots burned in the R.A.F.”

  “Yes,” said Laura. “‘Buster’ was much more badly damaged than Melissa. Anyway it’s my fault for speaking out of turn. And perhaps Melissa didn’t want you to know, so you mustn’t blame Lucy!”

  Phillip said, sharply, “Of course I’m not blaming Lucy! What happened? No need to mince matters!”

  “I never mince matters!” she replied as sharply. Then, softly, “Melissa happened to be off duty, and was walking in the garden. It was a hospital in Calcutta, where we had many Indian soldiers back from Jap prison camps, where they had been tortured. Melissa was walking under a deodar tree on the lawn when a Sikh soldier who’d been hiding round the trunk sprang out and stroked both cheeks with his razor. When she was stitched up,” Laura went on, “there was an identification parade, but she would not say who it was, because she could not be sure, and an innocent man might have suffered for her mistake. She did know who it was, and I knew, too, but he had been one of the tortured, and was beyond himself, mistaking her for me, for I had let him make love to me.” She went on quietly, “After that, the men in the wards couldn’t do enough to help the sisters and nurses, but I had to go to another hospital, for white soldiers. Do you mind if I smoke, Lucy?”

  “Please do.”

  “I’m sorry I was so gauche.”

  “I suppose people during the Crimean War thought that Florence Nightingale was gauche,” said Phillip. “Well, au revoir, Lucy. Enjoy yourself—and give my love to all at Hill House, especially to Tim.”

  “Oh, aren’t we going to St. Paul’s Cathedral?”

  “Yes, of course! Won’t you come with us, Laura?”

  “I don’t think I will, but thank you for asking me. I promised to wait for ‘Buster’, who’s rather upset at the idea of seeing his wife again, although it’s in Court.” She fumbled in her handbag, while Lucy went on slowly, to let them have a word together. “Here’s my telephone number. You will see me, won’t you?” With upward glance of eyes filled with blue light, and, “Say goodbye to Lucy for me, isn’t she sweet?”

  *

  They sat in the nave. Lucy prayed on a hassock, Phillip knelt on the stone. She was surprised to see tears running down his face when he sat up; she dared to take his hand. He showed her the telegram of his father’s death, while the organ began to play a fugue by Bach.

  “How are you getting on with your brother Tim and his wife?” he asked, as they went down the broad steps of the cathedral.

  “Oh, quite happily! We all fit in very well. They have one wing of the house to themselves, but we find it easier to have our meals in the kitchen together. Tim has one room for his special workshop, making things on Pa’s old lathe. And how are you getting on?”

  “Oh, I’m still living. I hope to settle down soon to writing again, then I’ll be able to send you some more money for the little
boys’ schooling. How are the children? Do they like the new house?”

  “Oh, yes. There’s plenty of room for everyone, and it’s a lovely house to play hide-and-seek in, with its three staircases. Jonathan has what he calls a hidey-hole under the rafters, which is his den. He likes to watch the bats up there, hibernating upside down as they hang from the rafters.”

  “May I come and see them one day? I won’t stay long.”

  “Stay as long as you like, my dear!”

  “Thank you, Lucy. Have you any luggage, now I mean?”

  “Only this hand-bag. I came up on a cheap day-return ticket. They’ve started again, it will be so easy to spend a day in town now. Which reminds me, I must be getting back soon.”

  “I’ll take you to Liverpool Street Station in a taxi.”

  *

  Nearly a year had gone by since Lucy and the children had moved into the house in the quiet Suffolk village, together with brother Tim and his family. Tim loved Hill House. He and his comely young wife never crossed one another; she was an Australian girl, with none of the complications of a European civilisation exhausted by industrialism and its internecine wars. So Tim, with a quiet, slow mind which accepted all that happened as part of normal life, was deeply happy. Since his wartime job in an aircraft factory had ended, any worries he had had about how to earn a living were gone when he and his family had been invited to live as Lucy’s guests in her new home. There Tim had had a splendid idea. He had his father’s wood-turning lathe, a rare Holtzappfel, one of the delights of Tim’s life, and capable of turning every kind of small object, from a steel or brass screw to three hollow ivory balls, one inside the other. When Pa had bought it there were only ten such lathes in England: machines of hobby-work for rich Victorian country gentlemen, costing six hundred pounds each.

  In one of the larger ground-floor rooms Tim had his own machine-shop, fitted with a large coke-burning stove; as well as the workshop in the courtyard behind the house, where stood a full-size carpenter’s bench brought down by Phillip from the farm. The workshop adjoined a loose-box and coach-house. Pottering about these buildings, Tim was thoroughly at home, feeling to be his own master. But best of all he liked working the lathe, making objets d’art in ivory for a Bond Street shopkeeper.

  Ivory, he told David and Jonathan, whenever they came to watch him, was one hundred pounds a ton, a price which had not varied since the ending of the Great War.

  So in Hill House, standing on high ground and adjoining an old coach road through the heart of Suffolk, never a cross word was heard, or intrusive reminder of the late war.

  Chapter 6

  BRUDERSCHAFT

  Well, not entirely. For there remained the prisoner-of-war camp in the park of a local land-owner. At night the sky north of the village glowed with neon lighting, although the tall platforms around the electrified barbed-wire fencing were no longer manned by armed sentries. For the camp was now occupied by Displaced Persons, nearly all of them ex-soldiers of a Ukrainian Division which had fought beside the Germans against Soviet troops: and such men could not be allowed to return to the Ukraine, their home. If they went back, all would be executed by the Russians.

  Within the park, which extended upon some hundreds of acres, stood a large country house, which had been uninhabited during the years between the wars, when its old life had gone, and a new life not yet come to being. During the second war it had been used as an American hospital for airmen. While the war was on, the hospital had not been guarded, other than by the normal team of doctors, nurses, and orderlies on duty. But now it was guarded; for within the hospital was the German Feld-Marschall von Rundstedt, together with some of the aides-de-camp, including his doctor. And that doctor, who had been at Stalingrad and escaped being taken prisoner by the Russians, occasionally sat with Tim, Lucy and Brenda at the supper table of Hill House.

  It had come about this way. Lucy and the others had gone to the village hall to attend a concert given by members of the Ukrainian division. There had been dancing and singing—strange dancing, some of it—done almost sitting down on the stage, and shooting out jack-booted feet—before an audience of local people; but the majority of the listeners were Ukrainians. It had been for them an occasion of deep emotion, for they had heard nothing of their wives and families left—to what fate?—behind what was now called the Iron Curtain.

  And during the concert Tim has spoken to the doctor sitting next to him, who had mentioned that he had read, in the hospital library, a book about a man called Donkin, an old soldier who, like Hitler after the 1914–18 war, had striven for clarity of thought between England and Germany; and perished because of his dream of Bruderschaft. And Tim, who normally had guarded feelings about Phillip, replied modestly, “I know the man who wrote that book. As a matter of fact,” his voice dropped with modesty, together with his eye-lids, “he is my brother-in-law.”

  This led to a call at Hill House from the doctor, who with some punctilio explained that his wife had died during the Russian invasion of East Prussia, his home. Now, he said, he had made great friends with an English nurse, and hoped in time to marry her. He begged that his request, which he made after great hesitance, was not offensive. But might he bring the lady to meet Mrs. Maddison?

  Lucy was agreeable; and thus had begun a series of visits for supper, after which the two were left alone, before a fire of oak logs which Phillip had brought from the farm the previous year.

  One evening, as they sat at Table, the doctor told them that Hitler had ordered Feld-Marschall Rundstedt to halt the German tanks before Dunkerque, declaring that he had no quarrel with the English, and wished not to invade or injure in any way a ‘cousin nation’.

  “Ah,” said Tim.

  “The Führer said that if the British Empire went down, the Germans, although they would win the war in Europe, would go down under Bolshevism. Because we did not command the sea as well.”

  “Ah,” said Tim again. He was a little embarrassed, for it was outside his experience.

  Through the curtain’d window came a slow but steady beat of iron-shod boots as pairs of Ukrainians slowly passed in the twilight up and down the street, as they passed every night, upon the narrow cobbled foot-way below the window.

  These were men lost forever to their native land—their wives, parents, sweethearts, children. There was talk of emigration to Australia, Canada, even the United States, after ‘re-education’.

  “All Europe is in passive despair, dear Mr. Copleston! The old way of life is in ruins like the cities in all countries!”

  And the Russians, went on the doctor, speaking as though words to him were as broken glass, together with the look in his eyes, would soon have the atom bomb.

  “Ah,” said Tim, nodding his head slowly. He wanted to go on with his lathe-work in the adjoining room.

  “If your General Montgomery had gone through at Arnhem, Stalin would now not have any of the German scientists what you say ‘in the bag’, Mr. Copleston.”

  Tim had worked ten hours that day at his Holtzappfel lathe, turning circular boxes of teak and sandalwood, to be inlaid with ivory. Phillip had promised to buy two, at ten guineas each. That was Phillip’s price: Tim would gladly have given them to him.

  The meal ended. The nurse offered to help clear away, to wash up. The doctor stood up, respectfully.

  “Oh,” said Lucy, “Brenda and I can manage, thank you. Will you forgive us if we leave you? We’re both making clothes for the younger children in the nursery.”

  The doctor clicked heels, and bowed; the nurse smiled. Tim led them to the sitting room. Lucy came in to say,

  “Do please make up the fire if you feel cold. The logs are in this basket. Would you like some tea later on? Oh no, it’s no trouble at all, I do assure you.”

  Later, when she brought a tea-tray, Lucy said, “I must write and tell my husband, for I know he will be glad to hear that you came to see us. He was a soldier in the first war, and has the highest opinion of German soldier
s. He was in the truce in no-man’s land on Christmas Day, nineteen fourteen, and it left a great mark on his life ever afterwards.” She coloured as she said this, and with a nervous smile, went out of the room.

  Chapter 7

  ARIEL CONFINED

  “I suppose I’m what’s called a bird,” Laura said aloud, as she lay in the bath. “A farmyard hen, to be trodden by any old cock! O Phillip, I need you so much. Will you write to me, I wonder? No, you won’t. Why should you?”

  But if I drown myself then they will see my body—

  The bath was a Victorian pattern of cast iron on three lion paws almost wholly hidden under coats of paint. The fourth paw was replaced by a broken brick. The bath itself was a scabby affair, showing scars of violence, for the house had suffered from bomb blast. Half the roof was still covered by a tarpaulin. On a wall above the bath was a copper geyser the barrel of which was as green inside as it was outside, judging by the pale layers of drippings down one end of the bath. The course of the cold tap drippings were brown from rust, she supposed—an iron pipe. The bath might symbolise the war. Green—brown—red. Red for the blood of abortion, she left alone after the ‘doctor’ and his felt hat, which never left his head, had gone. Leaving her with fear of bleeding to death, alone. Looking at three streams, two mere water-courses, dead cascades, and blood’s dull drip-drop in the plug-hole.

  Ever since that time, whenever she had lain in the bath, Laura had been possessed by the same thoughts, turning her against her true feelings.

  I hope he won’t write or phone. I never want to see him again, I am only good for writing—traumatic escape from the blood and cloaca shed in the bases of life. I don’t want to see Phillip, it is always the same pattern with every man.

  Life was, as Shakespeare wrote, ‘a tale told by an idiot’. And told to an idiot. A woman was a forked ex-quadruped, with breasts like bags slung from her collar-bones. By which the parasitism of human life was maintained. She would never have a child. Not in this bloody world. Supposing it had been Phillip’s child. No! Romantic delusion was death. She lifted a leg and put her hands, tips of thumbs and fingers together, round the thigh. The tips just met. She was not running to fat. Sexy legs, men always looked at them, imagining what was at the top. Was that all love was? The water was getting cold. I could drown in the bath and no-one would know. Painful to breathe-in water. Swallow aspirins, and fade out. No, he won’t telephone. I’m no good anyway. No-one ever waited, made love so that I really wanted it. Or stayed afterwards. Perhaps she was a repressed homosexual, men unconsciously wanting revenge? What made female cats attack a eunuch tom-cat? Because it was a peeping tom, and if strong, pounced on other courting toms—scratched, bit them, likewise females. Out of spite? Am I like that, really? Wanting revenge, because my father raped me when I was a child, was it punishment for coming on him when he was frigging the nanny goat behind the hedge? If I wrote that, no-one would believe it. Mother found out and I had to sleep with Grannie ever afterwards. The torture of her snoring. Could she use the phrase in that 1918 war-book about flying, which ‘Buster’ had given her to read, when the pilot was in hospital, sleepless … ‘the hours were black monarchs who ruled by torture’. She must get out, and write the scene. White bags and all. Was it when we started to walk upright? Animals are shapely, compared with women after twenty five. Black brassieres and French knickers—trap for John Thomas, Esquire—and finally cancer of the breast, from too much mauling. God, I am human bait, nothing more, for Klingfor’s purpose.