Lucifer Before Sunrise (28 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
He got pen and writing block, but was too tired. He went to bed in his clothes, it was cold in the cottage.
‘The menace must be presented as preceding from a malignant enemy, unprovoked by our rulers; and so World War II is depicted as a struggle forced on the Allies by “the sole wicked nation in Europe” led by the Ogre from Austria,
not
as a war rendered inevitable by the chain of follies and crimes reaching from 1906 to 1919, and foreseen by countless observers long before Churchill and Vansittart resumed the defamation of Germany which had paved the way to World War I.’
—
Thomas
Callander
,
formerly
Professor
of
Greek
,
Queen’s
University
,
Kingston
,
Canada
,
in
his
book
‘
The
Athenian
Empire
and
the
British
’.
âShould it happen that a man of action, exercising supreme power, is also an artist, then God help him. He will have to change his nature to survive.'
â
Lord
Moran
One morning in February Phillip went to London by the 8.5 train from Crabbe. It missed its connection at the junction. He waited beside half a dozen cold and tired-looking American airmen on the platform for two hours. They were fore-runners of the 8th U.S. Army Air Force. He had heard from Charles Box, who was on the committee of the War Agricultural Executive, that land had been taken for two hundred bomber airfields on the East Coast.
The American airmen were tired. They seldom spoke. They slept all the way to London, which was reached at 2.45 p.m.
From the grim and shattered environs of Liverpool Street Station Phillip went by ’bus to an hotel off the Strand where Teddy Pinnegar, his commanding officer of 286 Machine Gun Company during part of 1914–18 war, was living. The two had had a trial partnership, during the winter of 1940, on the farm. It hadn’t worked out, so Teddy had left; and was now in one of the war-time Ministries. He told Phillip it was all ‘slow and indolent’, and that life in blacked-out and bombed London was ‘dull, drab, and purposeless’.
Phillip enjoyed the night at his hotel, just off the Strand. There was no hot water, cause for complaint by Teddy, but he did not mind, for nowadays he had a cold tub in the morning for the exhilarating effect. The breakfast was poor (again he did not care) —watery milk (powder), thin Oliver-Twist gruel, about
one-twentieth
of an ounce of butter each—a mere shaving. Almost as a privilege a tiny egg-spoonful of nondescript pease-straw jam was smeared on each guest’s plate by an overworked waitress, but only if asked for, said Teddy. The Jews, he said, who owned the hotel, were making fortunes out of the war.
“When Amery told Chamberlain last year when the blitzkrieg was on ‘In God’s name go!’ he should have said, ‘In Jehovah’s name, go!’”
Before breakfast Teddy had come into Phillip’s bedroom in a dressing-gown and thrown a newspaper on the bed, snorting, “God, read that!”
Scharnhorst
and
Gniesenau,
two German battleships which for eight months had been bombed by the R.A.F. in dry-dock at Brest, had steamed through the Straits of Dover, under an umbrella of a thousand fighter aircraft, and got into the North Sea.
“What the hell are our people doing?” he cried, with a slight stutter of indignation. “They got almost through the Channel before they were spotted! We haven’t a chance of winning this goddam war! Look at the Japs! They’ll clean up Java and Sumatra, and run through India!”
Phillip found that his agitation was calming; and perhaps this mood of his helped Teddy, for soon he returned to his normal kindly, sentimental self, and asked after the farm. “How’s dear old Boy Billy? Still suckling Nimrod his calf, with that little stockwhip in his hands? I loved that boy, you know. I often think of you all down there, while I rot on my feet up here.”
Phillip stayed the next night at his club, and found there a general depression over the progress of the war. Churchill seemed to be unpopular: several older men declared that he was going to lose the war. For his part, Phillip did not say what he thought, which was the war should end, with the Ostmark well to the East; and Britain minding its true, or real estate, business in the Empire.
There was some talk in the Barbarian Club about the many Jews in the black market; but Phillip avoided such talk, not for reasons of his own safety, but because he did not, despite the
supposed
wrong-headedness of his politics, feel any personal antipathy to them. Also, he knew of Anglo-Saxons in such dealings. One remark made by that redoubtable Scotsman, the Steward, struck him as ironic, since at the outbreak of the war the Steward had shown some indignation on behalf of the Jews. With narrowed eyes, on that first day of September, 1939, he had looked at Phillip and said, after a remark about the millions of British capital being invested in Poland—‘And what about the persecutions of the Jews in Germany, Mr. Maddison?’ Phillip’s silence, then, may have been taken to indicate guilt; but now, nearly two and a half years later, when the Steward asked the same question—‘And what about the Jews, Mr. Maddison?’—Phillip’s silence seemed to be of guilt, for the Steward went on, “Can you explain to me why the
only
members of this Club who have come to me and tried to get a
bottle of whisky on the quiet, are all the Chosen People? Tell me that, Mr. Maddison!”
“As a would-be novelist I’d say that they need food more than others, because of their anxieties at this time. They have a double strain on their minds—for this country, and also for their
coreligionists.”
“Don’t you think we
all
have strains upon our minds, Mr. Maddison? Except perhaps you farmers, who are in clover.”
“Ah!” Phillip assumed his hare-personality, and fled the field.
He met another odd bird later the next morning, Becket Scrimgeour. Hailing Phillip with affection, Becket invited him to his club to have a drink.
“I mustn’t stay long, Becket, I’m due in Bond Street at one o’clock.”
Becket led him to the smoking room, a large area filled by scores of small round tables and leather padded chairs, most of them occupied by groups of men sitting and talking. They were around one such table with some acquaintances or friends of Becket’s when suddenly Becket said, “Phillip Maddison says he hopes this club will be blitzed, together with all Whitehall, and then Birkin will make peace with Hitler.”
Silence followed these words. It didn’t altogether surprise Phillip, for the remark was typical of one side of Becket’s agent-provocateur nature. A failure as a composer of music, Becket was liable to utter, with a snigger, similar destructive remarks coming from a frustrated imagination: jack-in-the-box ejaculations.
At the door of the club he said to Phillip, “It’s through you being my friend that no newspaper will take anything I send in.”
He appeared to have forgotten what he had told Phillip, on a former visit to London, about his ‘news items’ obtained from the woman secretary, with whom he was having an affair, of one of the Cabinet Ministers.
“You should be more careful of your choice of friends, Becket. Do you do any other war work for the Ministry of Misinformation?”
“Ha, ha, that’s a bit of wit!” exclaimed Becket, with snorts of self-derision. “They’ve appointed me ‘Mr Sensible’ for our district in St. John’s Wood!”
“‘Mr. Sensible?”
“There’s one in every district. My job is to boost
morale,
to laugh off Haw-Haw’s threats over the German radio, and generally to create a feeling of calm. All I get out of it is a free drink now and again, ha, ha!”
Phillip thought, I never want to see you again.
He telephoned Francis, who confirmed that Phillip was to be his guest at a luncheon party.
“Some of us are greatly worried by the conduct of the war, Phillip. We have got together to discuss what can be done. Now you are a man of action as well as an artist, so your views, as an old soldier of
our
war, will be listened to.”
He went on to explain that the Chairman of the luncheon party was Lord Hankey, an old Marine who had been Secretary to Lloyd George’s ‘Garden Suburb Cabinet’ in the first war, and that Balfour had put on record that, without Hankey, Britain would have lost the war.
Phillip, so much alone, so much of his life lived in his head, began to feel anything but a man of action.
The chief speaker was a Belgian philosopher. Others arose to address the table. Then Phillip was asked if he wanted to speak. Why was everyone clapping when he stood up? He spoke briefly; and sat down to more clapping.
Finally Lord Hankey arose to speak. He began by declaring, “This is a Cads’ War!”
*
Phillip caught the eleven o’clock train from Paddington to Queensbridge, to arrive at his field while tawny owls in the beech plantation were calling—the hen-birds bubbling, the males replying with hollow cries. It was St. Valentine’s Day: in the western hemisphere innocent forms of lesser life were turning to feelings of renewal, through love.
The news was bad. The Japanese were in the woods above Singapore. In
The
Times
he read that the British airfield had been put out of action; the last fighter had been bombed, or shot into the sea. He walked above the cliffs of Valhalla, trying to feel that it was like old times as he sat under a scaur of rock above the
precipice,
unable to eat any of the food brought from the farm—cold boiled bacon, wheat-cakes, cheese, and a quarter-bottle of red wine found in the Gartenfeste. The grey Channel waves crashed
mindlessly
upon the rocks below. The day was warm; the sea blue under a glittering wind which only just ruffled the lines of rollers. No falcons held the air. They had been shot by order of the
Government,
lest they take message-bearing carrier pigeons released from Coastal Command aircraft, which were ordered to maintain wireless-silence. For centuries the eyrie down the cliff-face had been occupied, and the eyesses taken for falconry. Now these natural lords of the air were no more.
The news of the fall of Singapore came on the evening of the following day. He was sitting in a friend’s cottage in Malandine and heard the Prime Minister’s speech after the nine o’clock news. Mr. Churchill seemed much shaken, but the breadth of his courage and the power of his tenacity were apparent. As Phillip walked up the hill in darkness he felt deeply sad, heavily bruised within. The weather was again frozen and bleak, as though even the Gulf Stream had forsaken Britain (as indeed, it had).
I had come to the Gartenfeste to write; and I wrote, sitting at the yew-wood three-legged table I had made at Monachorum years before. I sat there while the Siberian wind swept across from the moor, to find every crack in the window-frames, to be drawn to the flames of the open hearth. Pungently burned the oak logs; the dugout was warm; but it was hard to press against the thoughts and emotions of so many millions of one’s fellow countrymen. It was as though, with guttering candle, one’s ghost were trying to illumine the abysm and the dark of midnight on a planet ruled not by life, but by death.
Lying in bed that night, I prayed for Melissa in the Far East.
Today
The
Times
prints an article declaiming the reasons or causes of the fall of Singapore. ‘Sloth’, ‘selfishness’, ‘no belief in local leadership’ were words and phrases used by their correspondent out there. The article declares that only one General, an Australian, had the power to inspire his men, and he was ‘bitter, savage, contemptuous, outspoken’. Towards dawn I managed to sleep; but not to rest.
I sat in my underground room, trying to write, but nullified by my fancy that nothing could be done while the ideas of the massed and domiciled remained unchanged; and frustrated. The gulf between the old ideas, and the new ideas—as yet unpollinated and unsprung—the ideas of the generation which will be released from the Forces after the war, to accept the truth now denied—seems too deep and too wide. After another day of frustration an idea came to me as wildly, as
hopelessly
impracticable as the idea of flying to see Hitler in August 1939; and, later, as another idea to persuade the editor of a London daily
newspaper
to print an article which I had written and smuggled out of a police cell in East Anglia in June 1940, when detained under regulation 18b. Now the same impulse possessed me—the hopeful-hopeless impulse to arise beyond the transfixion of the age, and to try and persuade Churchill that in prison there lay a man with a potential inspiring force that amounted to genius: if only he were free to help inspire our people —instead of being imprisoned, and regarded as a traitor when the
Government
knows the opposite to be true—our people, with the right touch, would spring to the fulness of life. Birkin wrote to me from prison, in June 1941, saying, ‘
Now
that
Hitler
has
attacked
Russia,
let
us
withdraw
from
the
war
,
arm
with
the
might
of
the
Empire,
and
await
the
victor
of
the
Russo-
German
clash,
if
any!
’ I told them this at the Hankey luncheon: adding that Churchill, of course, would not be able to see me, even if I had not been of the same mind as someone he had called, after the Norwegian soldier who had known the ultimate danger from Stalin, ‘a filthy quisling’.
Shall I write this now, in a letter to
The
Times,
also quoting what Lucy and I had been told in the home of a friend and neighbour of the Sovereign a few months previously at Lady Breckland’s house near Sandringham. While we were there the King’s Chaplain arrived, with a message from ‘a very High Personage’ to our hostess. He said that ‘no traitorous evidence of intention had been found in Sir Hereward Birkin, but for his own protection it is necessary to keep him in custody’.
If it were acted upon it would bring the Government down, the Communists on the streets with processions, and perhaps to the
barricades.
A man might burn at the stake and not recant; in spirit walk on air; but his physical body by itself cannot walk on water. He will drown if he tries.
No sleep that night: a procession of the spectres of the mind—or of the liver? Or such ravagement of feeling due to a recurrence of pulmonary tuberculosis? There was blood in his phlegm. That dull patch, which started after Passchendaele, opened up again? But it was not bright blood; it was darker veinous blood, due to a septic throat. That evening he ran a temperature, and should have gone to bed, but sat by the radio listening to, among other items of ‘nation speaking unto nation’, some amusing and unwarlike remarks, on the short wave band, describing life in Berlin, by a mild-voiced man who turned out to be P. G. Wodehouse, a humorous writer whose school stories he had read in
The
Captain
when he was a boy. Would he, once so popular in Britain, be vilified for this innocent ariel prattle?