Waterland (28 page)

Though – let’s be clear – the people of Gildsey had no cause in that same prodigious year of 1911 when Ernest departed from them, not only under the literal smoke clouds from his own brewery, but under the darker pall of scandal, scorn, rumour and allegation, to concern themselves particularly with Helen Atkinson – then an innocent and overawed child of fifteen. But in 1914, when she is eighteen, the matter is different. For while a majority of the populace – especially now this long-expected war has at last begun – is prepared to continue to revile the former brewer, a fair portion – notably the young, male, soon-to-be arms-bearing, cannon-daring portion – is in love with his daughter. And though Helen is seldom seen, living as she does with her father in that gloomy retreat at Kessling and never emerging save in his company, this in no way alters the picture. For young knights, as we know, need their damsels – especially the beleaguered, inaccessible ones in forbidden towers. And it is all still at the dreamy, chivalrous, make-believe stage, this war born in the August haze.

Shall we add to the list of indulgences – superstition, tale-telling, despondency, the bottle – to which these stick-in-the-mud Fen-dwellers are prone, another: Beauty? Especially the kind that can be invested with inspiring, exalting qualities. And need we point out how Beauty has already exerted its bewitching power both on this now
tarnished Atkinson family and (by virtue of portraits with black dresses and the like) on the town which it, in turn, has for a good long century influenced?

But Helen, this last of the brewer’s daughters, is surely in no danger of suffering the fate of that former beauty, the first brewer’s daughter, and being turned into a local deity. Because, firstly, she is in possession of her mind, which for fifty years of her life, Sarah Atkinson was not. And, secondly, she belongs not to Gildsey and its credulous citizens, but to her father. And, though in 1914 the town would have liked to woo back this budding daughter, with her unloved father (unloved save by her) she remains.

Yet, for its own satisfaction, the town has to find some way of explaining that incongruous, twofold sequestration. It has to find a way of reconciling those two seemingly incompatible faces: the father’s lugubrious, old-before-its-time countenance, with its sudden unsettling smiles and flashes of dark fire; the daughter’s virgin limpidity. So it invents the easy myth that Helen, far from being swayed by filial motives, was compelled against her wishes to live with her father, indeed was forcibly imprisoned by him, away from the bright and beckoning world (bright and beckoning – in 1914), in that ogre’s castle of his at Kessling.

A myth … Yet in every myth there is a grain of truth …

But what does Ernest say? We haven’t heard his side of the story (we haven’t heard Helen’s either, but that will come out later, a little slowly and reluctantly perhaps). Does Ernest deserve this villain’s part? Did he deserve those malicious barbs which followed him into his retreat? For what is the evidence? That he spoke out against the coming Chaos? That he spoke out against empire-building and flag-waving? And when words didn’t work he used action, and the action seemed itself like the invoking of chaos? Yet the chaos wasn’t his fault. Because
he
knew how to use that revelatory ale of his. He could drink it
without its turning him into a madman. Quite the opposite: it soothed his inward melancholy and warmed and lightened his spirits. And as for that imputation that he himself had set fire to the brewery, in order to get the insurance money … The people had set fire to the brewery – just as the ale had inflamed their senses. And as for the insurance money, which indeed came his way – though it wasn’t as much as was rumoured and a large part of it was eaten up by payments of compensation and the costly process of winding up his business – it was used in the end to endow a convalescent home for war victims, the site for which was none other than his own once-sumptuous family estate, Kessling Hall. This Kessling Hall Home (Ernest Atkinson did not wish his name to be in any way commemorated in the foundation) became in due course the East Cambridgeshire Hospital; and today, rebuilt, expanded, with only a small portion of the original Hall still standing and used for administrative purposes, it is one of the principal psychiatric institutions of East Anglia.

But this is to jump ahead. Kessling Hall was not converted to its new purpose – and Helen Atkinson did not decide to become one of its first contingent of nurses – till 1918. And Ernest and Helen did not move into the former Lodge – a kind of miniature version of the larger house with its own small plot of enveloping trees – till the autumn of that year. So that for a good four years Ernest lived, with his daughter, the life of a determined recluse in the old hall, gradually abandoning and shutting up its rooms, letting the outbuildings fall into disrepair, gradually reducing the small retinue of servants till in 1918 there was none, save Helen herself who became housekeeper, cook – and nurse – all rolled into one.

Only once in those four years between 1914 and 1918, if we exclude those various, discreet trips to settle his affairs, did Ernest Atkinson make any public appearance in the town his grandsires had once ruled. And that, of all
occasions, was in the spring of 1915 at a parade and inspection of the Royal Cambridgeshire Militia – at the Gildsey performance, that is to say, of the local travelling recruiting circus. Ernest, by some administrative bungle, quite defeating the local powers of veto, received an invitation to join the token muster of military staff and civilian bigwigs on the stand where the salute would be taken; and for some sly reason best known to himself, did not ignore it. Perhaps he saw the chance to raise again his old cry of protest, perhaps he came to scowl in silence. At any rate, in the event, he kept a low profile. Which was not difficult, with his daughter beside him.

A thronged market-square. A band going through its heart-stirring paces. Flags, bunting— But we’ve seen enough of this sort of thing in the town before, so if we add a lot of khaki, some old-buffer colonels with medals and shaving-brush moustaches, some bawling and shouting, some strutting recruiting sergeants, some rifles; and don’t forget to deduct something too, from the background: a brewery chimney – we’ve got the picture.

The march-past begins. The saluting brigadier takes his position. The first ranks are composed of judiciously picked and well-drilled regulars out to display just what the Army, with a little spit and polish, can do with a man; the remainder – but these are the real persuaders – consist of recent, untrained and excitable recruits, apt to march in imperfect step, to flush and, in an effort not to grin when they shouldn’t, to wear unduly solemn expressions.

The first ranks pass the stand and give their salute – perhaps with the barest split-second’s mistiming – in the manner expected of them. But when the turn comes for the successive eyes-right from the main body of new volunteers, something is patently wrong. For before the eyes-right order comes, a good many eyes are already turned right; and not towards the saluting brigadier either, or any of the other florid-faced chiefs, but towards Helen Atkinson, who’s sitting by her father on the makeshift
platform amongst the civic dignitaries, to the right of the saluting point. Once they get a glimpse out of the corner of their eyes, they have to take a proper look. And once they take a proper look, they can’t wrench their eyes away. Now, isn’t that a prettier sight than a brass-hat with medals …? And because they are constrained even to look back over their shoulders and not to want to pass this object of attention quickly, all pretence at keeping step or holding line gets abandoned, ranks behind tread on the heels of ranks in front, someone trips, a rifle falls – this march-past turns into a shambles …

My mother told it differently (so I never knew whom she meant or how false modesty was being dismissed): Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl at a parade of soldiers, and the silly soldiers with their rifles bumped into each other and forgot how to march because they all wanted to look at the beautiful girl. And the general turned red, and then he turned purple …

And the watching throng, on that spring day, had their own story: It’s
his
doing – they say he’s here somewhere on the platform – he’s put them up to it somehow …

Though the ones who were close enough to pick him out and might indeed have shared these accusatory sentiments, had their gazes, and their wrath, diverted: My, what a gem she’s grown up to be – and what a shame, what a crying shame for her sake, that she is who she is …

And the town dignitaries told themselves: Something’s gone wrong with our town – we can’t seem to stage a Big Event any more …

And the visiting top brass said: Damn filly on the stand goes and wrecks the whole show. Mind you, quite a stunner …

And the
Gildsey Examiner
reported: ‘It would be churlish to dwell, in these urgent times, on an unfortunate disarray …’

And just a few, amongst the older sectors of the community (notwithstanding that we’re already fifteen years into the twentieth century of hard facts and hard technology), had yet another version: It’s
her.
It’s her work. She stirred up those floods in ’74 when she should have been lying quiet in her coffin, then she got inside those bottles of beer, drove everyone crazy and got the brewery burnt down; and now she puts the jinx on our recruiting parade…

But all these variants upon the same incident meant nothing to my grandfather beside the fact of his daughter’s sudden power, without the need for either word or action, to make a mockery of these war-mongering proceedings – when his own words and actions had failed. And perhaps it was then, on that April day in 1915, that my grandfather fell in love (if this can be properly said about the feelings of a father) with his daughter.

After April, 1915, my grandfather never showed his face in Gildsey again. After that inauspicious parade he became not only a thoroughgoing recluse but a worshipper of Beauty.

(This is no supposition. Not wild invention. I have my grandfather’s own authority: a journal, which he almost destroyed, but in the end didn’t …)

For having done all within his power, in his own small corner of the world, to warn the world of the calamity approaching it, what more could he do now that calamity had arrived, now that, across the sea in France, the world was systematically constructing a hell-on-earth, than cling (I only paraphrase his words) to some left-over fragment of paradise?

What is happening to my grandfather? Can it be that he too has succumbed to that old Atkinson malaise and caught Ideas? And not just any old idea, but Beauty – most Platonic of the lot. The Idea of Ideas. Can it be that my grandfather is lapsing – heaven knows – into gobbledy-gook?

But this is no idea. It’s a living being. It’s his flesh-and-blood daughter.

And there’s nothing Platonic about it.

A strange thing, but the more the war progresses (if that’s what wars do), the more it loses its fairy-tale flavour, its rally-round-the-flag, all-over-by-Christmas flavour and becomes something appalling, something quite unlike a fairy-tale, so the more beautiful grows this daughter. And the more despairing (of mankind) and worshipping (of his daughter) grows Ernest. Till – while George and Henry Crick join the forward march of history and end up in muddy madness – Ernest Atkinson beats a headlong retreat, backwards, inwards, to Paradise, and starts to believe that only from out of this beauty will come a Saviour of the World.

It’s said that after his withdrawal into complete retirement in 1915, Ernest Atkinson’s former desire to make his countrymen look to the future converted into misanthropy (though it’s hardly misanthropic to endow a hospital). The terrible truths of the war, which by 1917 were beginning to come home (along with George Crick’s personal effects and a letter from his CO) gave him no cause for self-satisfaction or for exultation over his former detractors – they only deepened his disgust for humanity. It’s said, variously, that he destroyed all remaining stocks of that deadly Coronation Ale along with all records of what went into it; that he became a teetotaller; that he kept a cache of bottles but he never drank them; that he did drink them, and not only this but he and Helen continued to brew, in that private experimental brewery he’d set up at Kessling, further supplies, for purely domestic use, and that this continued imbibing, whether it calmed his Jeremiahical humour or fuelled it, certainly awoke some pretty strange urges, and drove him plain out of his wits.

In November, 1918 – when the Hall at Kessling was being prepared to receive its first batch of patients and Helen and her father were settling, just like man and wife, into the Lodge – the people of Gildsey and the Leem villages might have forgiven Ernest Atkinson. Because this founding of a hospital, to be sure, scarcely looked like the work of a madman – or a degenerate. And perhaps all those rumours—

But there’s something the people of Gildsey and the Leem (and not just them but people everywhere) wanted to do more than forgive; and that was forget. They wanted to forget the nasty things that, in four years, human nature can get up to. But a Home for war victims (albeit hidden by thick woods) is a pretty big reminder (now could this just be Ernest Atkinson’s gesture of revenge?). And so the simplest way not to be reminded, not to be made guilty, and at the same time not to let that man off the hook, was to say: Oh yes, he may have endowed a war hospital all right, and very fine too, but just take a peek at what’s going on in that Lodge, go on, and then see what you think. Yes, we all know that there’s nothing like public virtue for hiding private vice. And we don’t want to hear, no, thank you very much, about a hospital that’s built on shame …