Authors: Henry Williamson
“I think Willie, too, Uncle John. His letters from France are very vivid, don’t you think?”
“Oh, he never writes to me, Phillip.”
In the morning he went south to the coast, meaning to follow the lanes as far as Land’s End, and so up to North Devon. He bathed from the Chesil Bank, and in the late afternoon went on; up and down hills, first turning away from the sea then winding
back again, until the declining sun made him think of a room for the night. By now he had passed through Exeter, and was following the road to the coast, seeing the blue tors of Dartmoor on his right turning purple as the sun went down behind them. His wrists ached with the bumpy, twisting road; at long last he came to a town built down a hill, with a narrow High Street leading to what he thought was the sea, but arriving at a quay, saw it was mud-flats. There would be flat fish there when the tide came in, he thought, and wild duck flighting in winter. After talking to a sailor beside a moored sailing boat he went on up another hill, and through more twisty lanes until suddenly before him and below lay a wide valley of pasture land. He stopped, arrested by the sudden strange appearance and change in the countryside. The grey road descended before him, to rise, after a curve at the bottom, up the reverse slope. But what had startled him was the sight of the dark mass of a church on the horizon, with a shortened spire on its western end. It was as prominent a landmark as the church on the Passchendaele ridge before the bombardments of Third Ypres.
He waited there, astride the Norton, held by the atmosphere of the place. Above the lower grape-dark horizon floated red and yellow islets and peninsulas of sunset; below the sombre silhouette of the church, with its suggestion of a magician’s pointed hat the valley appeared to hold a living shade. Gulls flighting overhead in silence gave thoughts of generations of drowned fishermen and sailors whose wooden ships had been battered on the rocks beyond the church, whose spire had perhaps held a warning light in black stormy nights of winter.
He heard a partridge calling somewhere in the lower gathering gloom, and from farther off came the tooth-comb scrape—
crick-
crick,
crick-crick
—of a corncrake. Then down the reverse slope of the valley a barn-owl came in wavy, hesitant flight, moving irregularly above the mice runs in the grass: at the bottom it hovered, then came up the near slope towards him, suddenly to check, throw up its white wings and drop to the grass. One more mouse had copped it. He sighed, and holding back the valve-lifter, paddled off down the hill and rushed with deep-drumming exhaust to the bottom, leaning over into the curve at the bottom, and then full throttle up the farther rise as the moon was showing its top rim over the sea.
Passchendaele village, as he thought of it, was bleak and unfriendly, no one about; he returned down the valley, and taking
a side-lane, descended another valley and came to a village, where he lodged for the night at the post office, kept by a Miss Potts who had a red tip to her nose and charged him 5/- for bed, breakfast, and supper of cold beef and pickles. The village, he learned, was called Malandine.
He was up early, and soon on his way below the southern boundary of the moor to Tavistock, and so to Launceston and then Bideford, where he had luncheon in an old hotel by the bridge across the Torridge.
Afterwards at a book shop half way up the steep High Street he bought a half-inch Ordnance map; and at Barnstaple was in more or less known country. The Norton flew with crisp exhaust note beside the estuary of the Taw, and turning west along the Ilfracombe road, climbed to high ground from which the mountains of Wales were seen. From there, after losing his way several times, he found the village of Breakspeare St. Flamnea and went down on foot to Rat’s Castle, a semi-derelict lime-burner’s cottage above the tidemarks of a cove on the rocky coast, hoping against hope that Willie would be there.
A window was unlatched. He got inside, and walked across a floor bestrewn with plaster, bits of torn-up writing paper, and owls’ crop-pellets. Upstairs the one bedroom was equally desolate, with splashings like lime-wash on the floor. Books lay about, their covers warped by damp. A heap of bracken along one wall was apparently Willie’s old bed. Looking closer, he saw the white faces and yellow plumage of three young barn owls. Willie’s favourite bird was the barn owl: what fun that they were holding the fort for him!
He spent the rest of the afternoon there, until the westering of the sun began to cast a shadow on the beach; and feeling melancholy (he had eaten only bread and cheese since noon) he said goodbye to the little cove, thick with sea-shells, and climbed up the brambly path to the lane above. Should he make for Aunt Dora’s cottage at Lynmouth, or return across Dartmoor and stay a few days in Malandine, where he had slept the previous night? But Aunt Dora’s faint disapproval in a letter of some time back —warning him against ‘treading the promrose path’—decided it: he would run back to Malandine.
There he arrived at twilight, and walking up a steep narrow lane above the stream, spoke to a labourer pumping water just off a turning, below which were two stone-built cottages, their front walls bulging slightly in places and covered with yellow
lichen. Learning that a thatched cottage was to let lower down the path, he went there and spoke to another labourer who was picking peas in the garden in front of the cottages, which had a common wall. Asked if he would like a cup of tea by the labourer’s wife, he entered their rather stuffy kitchen and sat down on the settle by an open fire of wood. At once he felt at home with the old fellow, and learning that badgers, foxes, and all sorts of wild birds lived along the coast, and in the woods, decided to spend his holiday at Malandine. Miss Potts, the post-mistress, put him up that night; and next day, hearing that the cottage adjoining that of his friend the labourer was to let, he sought the landlord, and looked over it with him.
There were two small rooms upstairs, divided by a stud-and-plaster wall. They looked clean, having been recently brushed over with lime-wash. The roof of thatch seemed to be waterproof —there were no patches of damp on the ceiling—and although the coal-burning range in the north wall of the single room downstairs was rusty, and half-hidden under a heap of soot and mortar from the chimney, he was already determined to take it. What would the rent be, he wondered. He would go up to
£
30 a year.
Not liking to discuss money, he asked about the water.
“Us pumps it from th’ pump up th’ lane. Tes good water.”
“I suppose you don’t know where a bed can be bought?”
“Into town, I reckon. But furniture be turrible dear. Tes the shortage of wood, you see. So prices be hup, my gor’, bant’m, tho’!”
“By ‘Town’, you mean Queensbridge?”
“Aye.”
Rents too, thought Phillip: no doubt the grasping peasant had spoken of the rise in prices as a preliminary to charging a whopping great rent.
“Where be you from, zur, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“London.”
“Lunnon? Vancy that now! You come all that long way. Well, well.”
At last Phillip asked about the rent.
“Would vive pun’ be too much, zur?”
“What a week?”
“Noomye! Tes by the year us lets’n.”
“Five pounds a year?”
“Aiy.”
“How good to meet an honest man!”
They shook hands on it, and Phillip paid a year’s rent then and there in pound notes. He had a home of his own!
He went into Queensbridge, and bought the first furniture he saw in a second-hand shop. Meanwhile he had remembered a talk with Jack O’Donovan in the gods of the Opera House, of spending a holiday together; and as soon as he had bought two beds he sent a telegram, c/o
The
Age,
Fleet Street, inviting Jack to come down. The next day O’Donovan arrived by train; Phillip met him at the station, and took him on the back of the Norton to Malandine. “Welcome to Valerian Cottage!”
While he had been waiting for the London train, a wooden-frame bed, costing
£
4—12/6 before the war—had arrived by carrier. It had rusty springs and was accompanied by a dumpy mattress and a camp-bed, some war-surplus Australian sheepskins, two feather pillows, and a length of old brocaded curtain which, ripped in two pieces, would do for coverlets, he told Jack.
That morning he had collected a sackful of driftwood from the beach, and bought from the post-mistress an old Beatrice oil stove, a tin kettle, and a china tea-pot. With a couple of cracked cups lent by his neighbour, Mrs. Crang, and a couple of soap-boxes for table, he set about preparing tea.
“I say, old lad, ought you to boil the eggs in the kettle? Won’t it give us warts?” asked O’Donovan. “There are limestone beds somewhere here. I’m a civil servant with the Metropolitan Water Board, and looked up the charts before I left. It’s red sandstone around Exeter, by the look of the fields, and Dartmoor water is acid, from the peat layers.” He looked in the kettle. “I thought so, look at that lime deposit.”
“It’s a kind of shale round here, Jack, I think. The guide book says the cliffs are gneiss and schist.”
O’Donovan made a joke about this, at which Phillip tried to look amused as he said, “Right, I’ll light a fire, and put on a saucepan for the eggs.”
The drift-wood fire soon had the little pan bubbling; milk from the dairy lower down in the village, butter pats on home-made bread with eggs, then honey—this was the life! Afterwards, while washing up, Jack began to hum an aria from
Bôheme
through his nose, interposing with lips and throat a queer imitation of an orchestral accompaniment, while beating time with a tea-cup. He was conductor, orchestra, and singers in one, while
his eyes beamed with happinesss. Then looking round the cottage, “This is grand, old lad, much better than I hoped for! All it wants is a couple of Musettas to join us. We ought to hire a car in the town, and go after them.”
“Well, I’m not awfully keen on getting-off, Jack. My idea is to walk, and explore the country.”
“But if we can get a couple of birds as well, the more the merrier! Oh, I forgot, you’re in love with your Mimi, aren’t you? Nice girl, just a little too
spirituelle
for me. I’m sex-mad, of course. Almost anything in skirts. Time I had a nice wife to keep me from roaming.”
They went for a walk, Phillip hatless, Jack sauntering along, wearing at an angle his pre-war Homburg grey hat, with its white-braided brim upcurled, a little frayed from much fingering. He was a short, sturdy man, his amiable red face showing the blue of shaven beard. He picked a campion flower for his button-hole, and walked along, swinging his stick; an obvious townee, thought Phillip, with his manner between the bland and the cocky, and—he winced from thinking it—a little bit of a bounder. He hoped he would not get off with any village girls if they met any. But there were none on the cliff path, to Phillip’s relief.
They returned for tea, by which time Phillip was glad that he had Jack with him, he gave out humour and a sort of innocent kindness. He was also considerate; he got up in the morning and prepared the breakfast; before this he had brought up two cups of tea, drinking his while sitting on the end of Phillip’s bed. “I’ve always wanted a real pal, you know, Phil. Someone I could help, in my crude way. I’ve even dreamed of writing an opera libretto with some unknown musical genius, and finding fame with him. But I’ve got no real power of expression. You have, Phil. What you read me last night was the real thing.”
“Do you
really
think so, Jack?”
“Sure of it, old man. I’m only an old penny-a-liner in my spare time, but I know quality when I find it. Your story reminds me of
Village
Romeo
and
Juliet
—remember Delius’s opera we saw together? And your description of the nightingale singing, and that lonely chap listening to it has something in common with Stravinsky.”
“That’s what I felt, when I first heard his opera!”
“Every great artist recognises his own sort. What they have in common is extreme simplicity. That’s what beauty is—simple. At base, I mean. Decoration can be complicated, but
still be simple, if you know what I mean, like a fugue of Bach.”
“You mean the whole work is made up of genuine parts, like varied flowers and birds in a jungle?”
“That’s a good description of Stravinsky’s
Sacre
de
Printemps
.”
“I wish I could hear it. I suppose a jungle is really very sinister, all the bright birds and flowers high up on top, striving to live above the lower darkness.”
“You’ve got it, old lad. One day you’ll get up among the flowers in the sun.”
That was the Jack he warmed to, who, as they prepared supper that evening, waved his arms as though he were conducting an orchestra, humming
Parsifal
through his nose—then breaking off, as his primary nature asserted itself through the stimulation of imagined music, to examine his face carefully in the one small-looking glass in the cottage and pluck hairs from his nostrils; then with a sigh, to return to his humming, imagined baton in hand, a look of innocent happiness on his face.
Phillip felt shame that he had thought of dear old Jack as a bit of a bounder. The following afternoon, a Sunday, they went down the lane to the sea, making for Malandine sands. There to his apprehension he saw in front two girls walking slowly, side by side. They overtook them; the elder girl was not pretty, but the younger one had a small sweet face, and a pigtail tied with green riband. Jack stopped, and raised his awful old Homburg with its band stained by hair grease. Phillip made the best of it as they sauntered beside a reedy lake dammed by sand-hills, and sat down. Jack and the elder girl were soon laughing and kissing; it was embarrassing, so Phillip got up and said to the girl beside him that he wanted to see the burnet roses, mulleins, and plants of viper’s bugloss which grew on level sandy ground behind the outfall of the lake, where it cut its way through the sands to the sea. She walked beside him, telling him that teacher used to learn them about wildflowers at school, but she did not remember any names.