The Phoenix Generation Read online

  Phillip’s mother is very sweet. I enjoy hearing her merry little laugh. I can see where Phillip gets his sensibility, and also his sense of fun.

  Well, my dear, I do hope you and the children are very well and happy, and that the coming summer will be full of sunshine, physically and metaphorically.

  My love to you,

  Felicity.

  P.S. Phillip told me that he is going to do some sailing this season, and wants to buy Piers’ twelve-foot sailing dinghy. I am so glad he has Piers for a friend. Phillip is full of Hereward Birkin too, as a saviour of Britain and the Empire. He talked of a small field he used to lie in, rather high up above Malandine, and said he thought of buying it, if he can get it cheap, and making a cattle shippon there into a place where he can work. He says he cannot work here, now that Elizabeth has joined the household, he feels she is filled with broken glass.

  Why does she want to write and tell me all this for? thought Lucy. As for Phillip’s sisters, he and they are worlds apart, and should stay apart.

  Then she thought, Would Phillip be happier if I went away with the children, and looked after Pa and Ernest? I know I am no good for him, nor is Felicity, I suppose. Yet how well she writes. Oh dear, what a muddle. Well, I must make my blackcurrant jam now.

  *

  The dinghy Phillip had bought from Piers was built for bass-fishing in the running seas of the Channel beyond the inland arm of the harbour. It was clinker-built with bluff bows and broad in the beam, with a high strake or combing above the gunwhale against lipping seas.

  He had an idea of sailing down the coast, putting in at various places for the night, until he arrived at Esperance Cove, and so to the village of Malandine in South Devon which he had first known a decade previously. There, in a linhay on the hilltop field he had often visited, with Barley, he would be able to write. He had the money to buy the field, because—his literary agent had written to tell him—his New York publisher had agreed to pay 3,000 dollars advance for The Blind Trout, half on signature of contract, half on publication day.

  As a safety measure against the hazards of the down-Channel voyage—particularly past the turbulent tides of Portland Bill—he had had two long cylindrical tanks of phosphor bronze—called yellow metal by the boat-builder—fitted under the thwarts. If Scylla, as he had already re-named the boat, were to capsize, she would float.

  First, he must explore the mouth of the harbour. One late July morning he hauled up the brown lugsail and put the nose of the boat westward. The sail, filled with the offshore wind, drove the dinghy to ride and slither over the smooth waves of the ebb while leaving behind a satisfactory pattern of foam and bubbles. Running before the wind at six knots, he came to a large wooded island to leeward. It was marked Bere Island on the 1 inch Admiralty Chart. The channel beyond was marked by buoys.

  There was a Club race that morning. A flight of white sails was down by the Bar Buoy, which they would round before returning on the next leg of a triangular course. Piers had told him of sudden swells on the bar at low water; but the tide had another two hours to lapse, so the sandbars on either side at the harbour mouth were well covered. He would be safe with an offshore wind.

  So far, he had not sailed in any of the Club boat races, and knew nothing of the hazards of a spring-tide ebb—the moon was new—with an offshore wind.

  The leading yachts, which had presented broad sails before the wind, were now putting about, close-hauled against wind and tide.

  Lolling in the stern seat of his little boat, tiller under arm, sheet held in hand, Phillip passed west of Bere Island, and recognised one figure in the leading boat now creaming through the water past him. He was hailed. “Hullo, ‘Farm Boy’. Come and dine with us tonight.”

  “It’s very good of you, but I shall probably be too late returning.” He didn’t want to go to the Castle, to have drink forced upon him.

  He noticed one of Runnymeade’s crew: a young girl with fair curls to her shoulder. It was almost a shock to see her looking at him, so startling was the resemblance to Barley.

  Runnymeade hailed him again. “Where are you bound for?”

  “Oh, just to have a look at the form.”

  “You won’t get back on this ebb tide, ‘Farm Boy’.”

  Phillip waved and sailed on. His mind was held by the image of the field on the high ground above Malandine, where he had lain in the grass beside Barley, watching a pack of swifts—those strange thin, unearthly birds—flying with faintly shrill cries a thousand feet in the air above and barely visible to his eyes. Do swifts beat first one wing, then the other? he could hear her voice saying. His admiration had grown from that moment: for the poise, the observation, the penetration to essential truth of a mere child of fifteen, who on the way back to the village had taken his hand and led him to Irene, her mother, and their cottage during that wonderful summer of nineteen twenty-one, so that they should be friends again, after a slight misunderstanding over Julian Warbeck, that arrogant young poet, with whom he shared his cottage at that time. God, how time passed, leaving only ghosts. What remained of that bright image of Malandine—only the grave among the tombstones of drowned sailors, a solar wraith among ghosts of the sea: a fret and scatter of piteous bones under the headstone carved with reaping hook and severed rose-bud.

  Selfishly transfixed by the past, by hopeless thoughts, he sailed into a choppy sea of waves raised by wind against tide, and, still steering south, passed a chequered buoy wallowing on its chain visible with green weeds clinging to its links. Scylla rolled past the great sea-top turning its head as though with weariness this way and that. She began to plunge and rise as her bows were smacked by waves which broke into spray and wetted sail and thwarts alike. The wind had changed, it was now coming up channel from the sou’-west. He dare not put her over, she would capsize and swamp with the brutal weights of water in conflict from all directions. So he steered to run before the wind, to edge the boat round to avoid losing way, while realising that he was being carried into the open sea.

  *

  The small brown sail was being watched by telescope from the roof of the clubhouse. The owner of the motorboat which took the crews to their yachts and brought them back to the slip after the race was hailed by the Commodore.

  “I’d never get through the white water of the Race, sir.”

  The Commodore accepted the opinion, and telephoned to the Lifeboat station. He was told that the coastguard lookout on Horsabury Head had already reported the sail, now approaching the five-fathom contour line a couple of miles offshore. The Commodore accepted responsibility for calling out the Lifeboat. A warning maroon was fired. The shell travelled up leaving a thin white thread, broke into a red ball, and slowly descended. The echoes of the explosion rebounded over the water. It was followed by a second maroon. The Lifeboat crew left their jobs and assembled at the slip.

  *

  An everlastingness of sliding, white-streaked slopes was passing in long roll and lip past the combing, each crest a yard or more above his eyes succeeded by a trough opening well below the combing of the gunwale. He was wet and cold. His mind forked; should he put about and make for the white water of the Race over the bar, or continue in this dreadful wallowing, with waves sometimes almost masthead-high above where he sat in the stern? Before he could decide he put the helm over and at once hung fearfully sideways on a crest, before slithering. The tiller swung idle as the sail flapped loose. Thank God he had tied the end of the sheet-rope to the ring beside him, so that the rope could be hauled in. The sail filled; bow responded to rudder, but he had shipped gallons of water. Thereafter Scylla was a toboggan, wallowing along a ridge, bumping into a crest, water showering past his eyes before the inevitable pitch downwards. He was going to be drowned. O God, why had he done it? He thought of Conrad’s admiration for Stephen Crane’s phrase in The Open Boat—‘the waves were barbarous and abrupt.’ These waves were monstrous and crashing. If only she would hold herself steady before the tip, stagger, and bump of
the next wave.

  Ahead of the bow lesser waves were hurtling down and spreading into a grinding bickering of white water. He pulled up the centreboard, remembering Piers’ words about the shifting shingle bank during the heavy spring tides. Should he tie himself to the sheet-rope? No: if the boat rolled over he would be entangled. He must keep the sail filled, drave into the white water—drove——Keep you a-goin’‚ he heard the voice of Ned the bailiff of Skirr farm saying, keep the ploo-point a-draving on so far as the meat soil—the thin four-inch top-soil turning over with the share or shear. The ship ploughs the ocean. Keep you a-goin’! Poor Ned, was he on the dole now?

  They were lurching and sliding. Scrash! She was hanging in a massive shower of water and pebbles. She staggered. Christ, pebbles were showing in the waves. We’ll go down. Billy—Peter—Roz——

  Scylla was riding, she was passing over the shingle tongue. Pebbles were rolling with the bilge over his feet. Bere Island was coming nearer. He was over the bar. The Lifeboat approached. A rope was flung. His hands were too cold and feeble to hold it. With detachment he saw the strake of Scylla held by a boathook. He was being pulled over the smooth side of the red and blue of the tubby white boat. Men in oilskins. Stiffness of wrapped tarpaulin. Brandy was gasp hard. Thank you. Feeble. Tears.

  *

  While he was being helped up the quay steps someone in the clubhouse poured away a quart bottle of Swan ink and filled the bottle with hot water, which was then wrapped in the cover of a cushion which had been ripped up. He felt ashamed and stammered an apology to the Commodore and thought with anguish that he had forgotten to thank the cox of the lifeboat.

  He saw the girl who had crewed ‘Boy’ Runnymeade looking at him. When he had slept after being given hot milk and sugar and brandy, he got up and put on a tweed suit belonging to Captain Runnymeade, and went downstairs among the faces in the bar, feeling as foolish as the youth-masked old-man dancing in the Guy de Maupassant story.

  In character, he insisted on driving himself home. Left the Silver Eagle with the front section of the tonneau cover unfastened against the rain. Walked with hands before him and stinging eyes half-closed—lids raw with salt—up the stairs and felt his way to his writing room.

  When Lucy came in he was sitting on the couch.

  “Hullo,” she said.

  “The sleeves are too short for me. This suit belongs to ‘Boy’ Runnymeade.’’

  Her hand sought his. “You are a poor one, aren’t you? Why did you do it?”

  “You know, then?”

  “Yes. Melissa told me on the telephone.”

  “Melissa?”

  “Melissa Watt-Wilby. She said she recognised you from when you were in hospital at Husborne during the war.”

  “Lady Abeline’s daughter! Good Lord!”

  “I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle, my man, then some hot milk.”

  The water-meadows were in flood, there was nothing to do. It was quieter than ever in the house by the river now that Billy had gone to the village school, wearing so proudly his father’s cheap old leather satchel with its frayed and ink-stained leather.

  Every morning he sat in his room, paper before him. Something was wrong with the trout story. He did not know enough about fish. He started a novel The Irritable Man, using his parents as characters, but the narrative was thin. He was not wholly in mind to portray his father as he had been; nor his mother; nor grandfather Thomas Turney and other faces of the past. What he had once thought of as satire, with the title of Soot, had become—tragic. His father had dreamed all his life of the downs and the hangers, the Longpond and the family home—and now the reality of being back was almost too much for him. The weather was partly to blame; it rained nearly every day; he could not work in the garden at Fawley. But the truth was that both he and Mother were lonely. Father missed the cinema. He was too nervous to ride in a motor-car. As for Mother, she was homesick for the old faces, she missed Doris and the two little boys, she missed Elizabeth, she even missed her occasional flutter on horses with Chamberlain the Randiswell butcher, who privately kept a book for a few of his customers.

  His parents were not happy at Fawley. Hutments were being built near the spring-head which fed the Longpond. The enquiries from army officers about renting the upper and middle flats seemed to upset both his parents.

  He sat at his desk, staring at the panes of glass in the casements before him. They were old and discoloured. Some were curved, flawed with bubbles and twists in the glass which distorted the trees outside. The view from the window was enclosed, for the house stood in a combe descending from a spur of the wooded Chase. Cancelled drafts of The Irritable Man followed scrapped pages of The Blind Trout into a drawer.

  *

  What could he do, where could he go? He knew every grain and crack and mark on the surface of the table; day after day and night after night he had heard the same lesser sounds about the house—the crack-crack of the hand-sawn oak floorboards when the hot water was turned on in the bathroom and the iron pipe along the joists expanded and tried to push up the boards; the rustling gallop of solitary rat down the interior of the wall just after half-past eight every night; the voices of small children crying ‘appul’ or ‘bikky’ or swear words which Lucy tried not to notice; the chirping of sparrows at the thatch; the dry flitter at the window of tortoiseshell butterfly regretting that it had missed some of the autumn sun; the varying notes of the van engines of newspaper man, baker, butcher, and fishmonger; the distant cawing of rooks at the October-sown corn; the voices of children coming home from school, Billy with them; the tottle-tonk of the African cattle-bell which called the members of the household to meals at the long oak table in the room below—the table which took five men to lift, and which Lucy kept polished by a ‘secret receipt’ given her by the vicar’s wife.

  How fortunate to be like Lucy: to accept all things as they came with an equal-mind. A mere writer saw the same walls and the same row of books every day, and the flawed grey window-panes with the dull and distorted trees on the combe-side. He saw these things as insubstantial surfaces. They were not of the real world, which for him was in his mind. He wrote, he saw, he lived in past scenes, which arose before and around him with an integrity to which he trusted. He must trust that other self, that scarcely-known visionary ghost which lived independently and often with torment within his being, if his work was to have any authentic life.

  *

  Billy knocked on the door. “Let me in, please, Father! Let me in!”

  “Why, what’s the matter, Billy?”

  Billy stood before him, then pushing a grubby hand into his leather satchel he pulled out an envelope marked Special Delivery.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Mrs. Chowles gived it me up to shop, Dad.”

  “Thank you, Billy. The telegraph boy usually has sixpence. Here you are.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Goodbye.”

  “You off?”

  “Aye. There be some good conkers in the Lord’s park. Isn’t the sun lovely?”

  “Yes, let’s go for a walk, shall we? I must read this letter first. Wait for me downstairs, Billy.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Ward 16

  Queen Alexandra’s Hospital

  Marylebone Road, N.W.1 Tuesday

  Dear Phillip,

  I am very happy that I have a son, tho’ I can’t really believe it yet. He was born today, at 2 a.m. which was what I wanted, as it’s a ‘special’ anniversary for me—three years ago I first read the Wanderer, so I fixed it, and here we are. It wasn’t too bad, and very interesting and exciting. I’m sorry I couldn’t write before, but my hands are still very silly and flabby, from clenching them I suppose. Will you please help me to choose a name for him—do you like any of these—

  Wilfrid, Richard, Douglas, Anthony, Hubert, Gerard, Charles, Edward, Simon.

  I am avoiding fancy names, but like any of these. But mind you I am still very flabby and can’t think of much,
so am open to any suggestions. But I shall register him while in this district—I believe a man comes round here. But I’ll see.

  It’s hateful not to be out in this sweet sunlight of St. Martin’s Little Summer. They are not very keen on fresh air here. Do you remember in the Game Pie nightclub where I imposed a piece of purple prose on you as though it was spontaneous, about the nightingales under the downs ‘ringing the night with song’. I did it to impress, and now look at me. I’m a bad girl, but so happy, bless you.

  It’s now 8.15 a.m. and I’ve been up and tidy since 4.45 a.m. Not bad, after what the nurses called my little do.

  Just before I came here I was in the middle of writing you a letter about a lovely walk I had the evening before. I was alone on the windy Hill with the rain coming down like aught out of a sieve, as countrymen say. All the usual crowds were in their brick boxes and only me on the grass. And I pretended that you and I had put on macs and rubber boots and were walking beside the Longpond in the moonlight and the mayflies were hatching and Major Bill Kidd was poaching trout ‘of aldermanic proportions’ as fast as he could pull them out, but we left him to it and returned wet with dew to Skirr farmhouse for supper by candlelight. But it was a lovely walk we had though there was no Longpond on the Hill, never mind.

  For I’m very pleased with everything. Thank you for this nice present. It is a very sweet one. I must write to Lucy, I had such a sweet letter from her, full of rapture for David. (Don’t be alarmed, it’s her private name for him, when he deigns to come forth to greet the sun.)