The Gale of the World (12 page)
Read The Gale of the World Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
There was a bottle of whisky in the corner cupboard. He drank from it; and feeling better returned outside to say aloud to the moon, “Attend me, all my dear comrades of the Greater Love War!” Then to write in his note book.
I must never allow my personal constrictions with Elizabeth to occlude the truth that she is lonely because loveless as the hunch-backed moon. Did Richard Crookback stutter? My poor moon, deprived of its full light by mother earth—withered, dead. Stutter-stumbles eternally through the sky; lifeless, childless.
Open door casting wan shadow on lime-ash floor. He lit the cold wick of the candle in its latten stick: faithful friend. The moon gave her wasted light, rising to challenge taper. Match to dry furze sticks in open hearth. Kettle on lapping crook. Thank God I washed up plate, cup, knife, fork and spoon before I left. I must eat, a duty to keep the mind calm. Lay supper, be tidy—plate, knife, mug, spoon—I and my father, Richard Maddison—are you with me, poor father, from your glass jar of ashes and coffin nails on the chimney shelf?
Then another shot of whisky, imagining Cousin Willie to be with him—“Your health, old boy!”
Switch on radio.
Late night news from the American radio in Occupied Germany, facing the Russians.
Ten Nazi leaders, ‘not one uttering a word of regret as he went to his death on the scaffold’, hanged at Nuremberg. Scaffolds erected in gymnasium under ten fierce electric lights.
Ribbentrop
held his head high. Handcuffs removed, hands tied behind back. At scaffold, “State your name!” Followed American officer up steps. Feet bound. “Have you any last words to say?” In ringing voice cried, “God protect Germany!” Black hood over head. Noose adjusted Crash—bump. Rope hung tautly through open trap. Eerie sounds as rope cracking as it swung to and fro. Twenty minutes passed, then doctor pronounced death.
Three scaffolds; one used, two held in reserve.
Field-Marshal
Keitel.
As on parade. Shaved, washed. “I call on the Almighty that He may have mercy on the German people. Over two million went to their death before me. I now follow my sons. All for Germany!”
Interval for smoking. French and Russians exchanged cigarettes, Americans puffed at their own.
Kaltenbrunner.
Slow walk. Efforts made to save his life after a cranial haemorrhage were unsuccessful. Dressed all anyhow. “I have served my German people and Fatherland with willing heart. I regret crimes committed in which I had no part. Good luck, Germany”.
Alfred
Rosenberg.
Followed by two padres but declined their
services
.
Frick
in check sporting suit, scowled at guards, yelled, “Long live eternal Germany”.
Streicher
burst through the door, and was thereafter held and forced across floor to scaffold. Roared, “Heil, Hitler!” and later, “Now to God! The Bolsheviks will get you next!”, to the guards. Then, “Adele, my loving wife!”
Sauckel
refused to dress, taken to scaffold screaming, “I pay my respects to American soldiers and officers but not to American Jews! I die innocent! God protect Germany, and my family!”
Field-Marshal
Jodl.
Smart, soldier-like. “I salute you, my Germany!”
Seyess-Inquart.
Limping, tired, formal. Executioners were Woods of U.S. Army; Pierrepoint the elder, Britain’s own.
Having made a fair copy of hastily scribbled notes, Phillip went to bed supperless, thus failing to sleep except in snatches, and lying open to the Furies. The only thing to do was to light a candle, and write.
Herman Göring shot down Manfred Cloudesley over Mossy Face wood at Havrincourt in 1918. He saw that his enemy, who had killed nine of his Richthofen Staffel pilots, had the best surgeons and treatment in hospital. This morning Göring committed suicide. Better to have died on the cross, old Knight of the
Ordre
pour
le
Mérite.
The same moon hung above the broken roofs of London as ‘Buster’ Cloudesley left his club in St. James’ Street and walked in the direction of Old Compton Street. There was little traffic. Petrol was still rationed; old motor cars had yet to make top prices in a sellers’ market. He had some stored in various places in the Home Counties, having bought half-a-dozen Rolls and Bentleys during the 1940–41 blitz on London, paying no more than £200 each, at their various mews and garages. Their owners’ insurance policies did not cover the risk of damage by riot, civil commotion, or war.
“What a ‘Peace’!” he said aloud. Bananas were news. There was a half-page photograph of a bunch in
The
Daily
Crusader.
Ah, the whirligig of time! There was Wallington Christie, once of the original Peace Pledge Union, urging, in his literary-
philosophical
quarterly magazine
The
New
Horizon
that the Allies drop the atom bomb on Moscow!
‘Buster’ had read the article while flying back from Norway, and thought it was merely the swing of the pendulum in the life of a man starting out as pacifist and ending up prang-merchant. Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary, pacifist in War One and
fire-eater
in War Two. There was an old Tolstoyian type living on Exmoor, vegetarian conscientious objector when young, Home Guard hero in War Two (given an all-wooden dummy rifle lest he knock off one of his chums). My father, who collected five gongs in War One—including the Cross for his lone fight against the Richthofen squadron in 1918—threw them out after the
Armistice
, and went into reverse to a watery grave.
‘Buster’s’ pale moon-shadow slanted away from his moving feet, a Doppelgönger knocked askew, moving always apart from his marionette-like walk. I am encaged like the remains of Europe.
Those emigrant Yanks letting Russia into Eastern Europe—strategical ignorance of top-brass Pentagon, following the tactical ineptitude of Eisenhower, desk major when the shooting war started. Stalin sitting pretty with most of the German scientists of the Baltic experimental station in the bag. Soon the Ruskies will have the know-how about rockets, and then—a fallen-out England carcinomatical sans all mammalian life—birdless,
treeless
, even flealess, surrounded by a bitter sea.
‘Buster’ stopped, regarding his shadow. An ever-torturing
mental
picture inhibited all his hopes of Laura. He saw her blue eyes bulging with sexual frustration as she got out of bed to take benzedrine pills, she coming back quietly to say
Darling
it
doesn’t
matter.
I
want
to
look
after
you,
but
will
you
mind
if
I
make
love
to
Phillip?
She
make love! He cursed her image: and moving his feet into reverse, returned to his club.
Ah well, matriarchy was on the way. Maybe there would be foxes, birds, trees and fleas again in Old England!
*
In the morning Phillip walked down to Lynmouth to buy his weekly rations and collect letters marked
Poste
restante.
He sat on a stone wall, below which the river rushed amidst great boulders.
My Prospero!
I must be honest with you, and myself, if I am to be good for you. Why, perhaps, I am difficult in that I am like Brunnhilde, ringed in flame; and perhaps charred within. You have read Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender
is
the
Night,
and so you will know the cause of the problem of Nicole, the schizophrenic wife of Dick Diver. Well, the same cause here. Although Nicole was paternally raped at sixteen years, I was at eight. But truly, I did not pick you from a father-fix, but because I knew you were me inside. I knew it at a glance, and I hoped you would penetrate behind my Gorgon-mask.
Darling, I hope to join you soon, when the moon, which I talk to every night as I retrace our foot-steps along the Embankment, is full. O, Dian’s heavenly light, so serene, so calm with all wisdom! I thought of you as I watched it rising, and your poor little lost-boy stutterings to me, so war-bloody-minded the other night! I hope to see you soon, for I must earn my bread and margarine, and by so doing help my dear ‘Buster’ as his part-time secretary. At the moment I am looking after a little friend, who looks like sixteen but is
twenty-eight
. She may, later, go to work at ‘Buster’s’ place with me. Beth married a sadist who broke her, he aborted her again and again, she wanted a child, he forced her to take a lover and she pretended to have one, while he used to whip his mistresses. Then he gave her drugs to stop her worrying but really because he wanted her to die. Her baby was started before she fled from him and it died last year when it was four. A darling little girl, and ever since my friend has been suicidal.
Now for a secret (I know I can trust you, a
prieux
chevalier
)
.
This morning I stood outside a London prison where they were to hang my little friend’s husband. We both wore slacks, she with her long brushed hair hanging down her back, sobbing and wringing her hands. I wept too. When we hang others we hang ourselves.
You would like Beth, Phillip. As I said, she may come down with me shortly, but for the time being I must remain in London. I know you will regard all I’ve written in confidence. There are many girls like Beth in London, alone and dying for want of loving kindness. She is so sweet and kind, she still grieves for her husband even after his sadistic murder of that poor prostitute whom he got to write a suicide note before he turned on the gas, after he’d given her those pills, but he left his finger-prints on the tap as you may have read in the papers.
There’s something very wrong with our civilisation. Perhaps if we had lost the war we might have revived as Germany did under Hitler in the ’thirties. London is now a terrible jungle, the jackals are on top.
When I first came here, after the war, I got a job with a man who said he was a photographer. I knew nothing of London. He had a studio and one day he appeared in a black brassière and things and begged me to whip him. He cried when I stopped. He grovelled! I
fled, while he screamed at me to be a Christian! London is full of fairies, queens, and oddments. No, I don’t intend to put them in my books, not like that anyway. I see them through a prism, not as you do, through a glass darkly. That sort of art died in your war, it died before the big battalions began to disinherit the earth. You are really the unknown soldier, miraculously reprieved—or are you the Flying Dutchman? O I love you so, I’ll die if ever you leave me. I don’t care if you’re ninety or nineteen, you’re my sweet darling Phillip and I want to be with you in the country. I love the sea and walks, and to live a very quiet private life, very slow tempo. Do you know I prayed, after I met you, to God to thank Him for sending you to me.
Piers, poor boy, is in deep trouble. He is sleeping in my bed while I write this by my candle, a solitary gleam meditatively moving its light slightly one way then the other as though in unison with your presence hovering about me. No, Piers and I didn’t make love, or rather try momentarily to out-range our derangements and tensions through coitus. What a word! Snaky. Poor boy, he is broken by his wife having left him. He spoke so restrainedly to me in the Medicean, and mentioned you, and I told him of my ride on my cycle up to your farm during the phoney war and back again next day after I’d flung the food-money you gave me at you, or rather I skidded the coin, what was it, a crown, over your shiny refectory table. I went to London soon afterwards, and later, during the blitz, joined the Q.A.N.S. I loved living in a community of nurses, and men being healed after wounds and burns. Didn’t you like your war, too, because you were with the chaps?
All my love, darling Phillip, from Laura.
P.S. I have just heard on the wireless that they have hanged all those loyal generals and others at Nuremberg. Weep no more, my Prospero, for the sins of the world! Your staff shall never be broken, your books never sink deeper than plummet sound: never, never, never while this machine is to your Laura.
Sitting on the wall, wondering whether or no he should call on Aunt Dora, Phillip saw a man he had known in East Anglia looking down at the river. Riversmill, the horse painter, greeted him cheerily with,
“Well, my lad, I heard you’d travelled in a circle, and come back to the West Country! You can’t beat Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, now East Anglia’s all derelict airfields and rusty wire barriers along the coast from Lincolnshire to Kent. I know your shepherd’s cot, thought of it myself for a studio, but it’s just a little too far up the coombe. And dam’ sight too near that
American
who calls himself among other things Caspar Schwenkfelder, Doctor of Diaphany of Little Rock Academy. All a money-making
racket, like spiritualism and all the usual sort of nonsense that starts up, like a virus, after every war. Lynmouth’s full of cranks these days. There’s a chap going around, calling himself Piston, who believes in flying saucers!”
“I wonder if it’s the same Piston who was here in nineteen
sixteen
, after July the First? He was a crazy sort of chap.”
“He’s crazy all right. But harmless. But that fellow calling himself ‘Doctor of Diaphany’ is a menace. Lives in that Victorian Castle—it lies on the coombe-side east of your cot. It was built by the Sugar King who went bust playing the organ all day and night when the bailiffs were in. But that was before your time, when I was a young Edwardian buck of sorts.”
The sharp eye of the painter saw that Phillip looked tired. He changed his manner. “How’s the family? Still in East Anglia. Well, you’ll need to be on your own, until you’re bedded down in your novels. Come and dine with us tonight at Molly Bucentaur’s. She knows your books, and likes ’em, so do I. ‘Buster’ Cloudesley’s coming, he’s a great man! Spends his time
gliding
. We can give you a shake-down for the night in our cottage at Willowpool. Be there at seven and we’ll take you on to Molly’s. No, of course don’t dress. Come as you are. I’m going up the glen to paint now, the light changes every minute under those beeches. Right, see you later.”
