Tales of My Children

I

AS the children grew bigger, the valley became a happy place, although always part of it was in shadow. Ceaselessly the sun rolled over from hill to hill; his work was everlasting. From the gazeless orb of brilliance energy poured down: magnificent to the earth, but a mere dwarf-yellow star of diminishing magnitude in stellar space. It was burning out.

Likewise the human mind, concentrated on one line of thought, was diminishing in energy and light.

Always the river was flowing, by which we walked and watched, and played. Never shall I forget that bright, clear water, into which I gazed from Humpy Bridge, pool side, and down from the branches of riverside trees.

One warm spring morning Windles and John watched the trout being turned into the river. How the fish leapt with joy at being free from the confining ice tanks! They were Scottish trout, from Loch Leven. They were greenishblue, with black and yellow spots; whereas the native trout in the river were a golden-brown with black and red spots.

The first thing I noticed, as I stared through field glasses at the fish below, was that when the Loch Leven trout had been living a few weeks in the pool above Humpy Bridge their yellow spots turned red, and their bluish-green sides became tinged with golden brown as though they were turning into wild Devon trout. Windles and I used to stand on the bridge and look at them as they lay in the clear water below. The summer sun shining down through the water lit every stone and speck of gravel, every wave of fin and curl of tail, every spot, every crimson opening of a gill cover as the fish breathed. Each fish had its regular place; it lay on the gravel, always head to stream, watching the water before and beside it for food floating down. The biggest fish had the best place; the next biggest had the next best place.

The natural food of the trout were the flies which hatched out of the water — not buzzing flies of the kind which bite or sting or are a nuisance in the house, but beautiful, gauzy-winged creatures which lived only a brief while, laid their eggs on the water at evening, and then fell spent, to float away, their brief aerial life over. In time the eggs they dropped out of their long slender triforked tails, or whisks, hatched, and became tiny creatures crawling on the gravel, some building themselves homes of sand-speck and bits of leaf and twig, others hiding in the water mosses and feeding on the little vegetables which grow on the gravel. These vegetables were very small, and looked to our eyes, as we knelt by the riverbank, like a thin brown slime on the stones, but to the creatures they were what a pasture is to grazing cattle. After living about a year underwater, the creatures turn into nymphs, which swam up to the surface, break out of their cases, and arise, very tremulously, as winged flies of the stream. They are frail, delicate, fairy-like things, and live but a few hours. Often in summer we watched them dancing over the water as the sun was setting —they rose and fell as they dropped their eggs, dipping in the water and flying up again —until a ripple broke, and became a ring, and a trout had risen to take one.

I used to feel sad when I thought of these lovely, dreamlike creatures dying in the sunset of their one day of life, but after watching the river for a long time, and seeing how all life renewed itself, how the salmon returned from the sea and laid their eggs in the gravel, and died, and the little salmon hatched and fed on the nymphs, and went down to the sea, and returned again to the river of their ancestors, — spring, summer, autumn, winter, season after season like a wheel turning slowly round, the great stars of heaven wheeling in eternity, — it seemed to me, when I had watched this wheel of life turning, always the same complete turn every year, that all life and death made up the beauty of the river, which had flowed through the valley thousands of centuries before the children and I walked under the hills, holding hands and laughing and peering at the strange life of the river, the beautiful, limpid, shadow-dreaming Bray, the stream which would be flowing a thousand centuries after we were all forgotten.

Summer after summer we stood on Humpy Bridge and threw spoonfuls of food into the pool, and watched the trout coming down like torpedoes, each with its little bow-wave, and saw them slashing round with open mouths to take the food with heads upstream. Always they feed upstream, for the water has to be poured through the gills for a fish to breathe. Therefore a trout faces upstream, not only to watch for its natural food coming down, but for the flow of water to pass through its gills. How they leapt and splashed, under the showers of food! Big trout and little trout, samlets and even eels, all came to the daily banquet. The curious thing was that while this food — which was like brokenup dog-biscuit meal — made the wild brown trout look like the greenish Loch Leven fish, the natural fly-food in the river made the Loch Levens resemble the native brownies! How did that happen? Obviously the color of the spots came from the kind of food the trout ate. Indeed, some of the Loch Levens, which went on upstream and lived entirely wild, looked after a few months exactly like the golden-brown, scarlet-spotted natives! Only by their shape could we tell the difference.

Windles was five when our first tame trout were put into the pool. He used to lead Baby John by the hand across the Deer Park, following me, and Baby John used to stand by the stone coping and always, his eyes wide and solemn, point towards the Railway Viaduct a mile up the valley and lisp, ‘Sheed-er-shish? Dad-dad go sheed-er-shish?’ He was too small to look over into the river, and one day as we stood there he became very excited, and said, ‘Look, sheeder-shish!’ and lo, his idea of feeding the fish was a goods train passing on the viaduct of the Great Western Railway.

The next year John was just big enough to look over the bridge when standing on a special stone placed there for him. The fish remained in the pool during the winter floods, when the water ran too heavy and fast for us to feed them. They became thin, but some fattened again when spring brought nymphs and flies and the showers of food from the familiar figures on the bridge. Sometimes a salmon lived with them awhile, aloof and solitary, never feeding, waiting for the autumn and the spawning season, when its eggs would be laid. I used to see Windles and John creeping over Humpy Bridge, heads down, slowly to peer over into the water below. A fourth pair of eyes was trying to look over when another spring came round — Baby Margaret, led there by John while Windles was at school. John used to grasp Baby Margaret round the middle, and struggle and strain to heave her up on the stone so that she could see Daddy’s Tame Shishes. These trout were now three, four, and even five times as big as they were when we put them in the river. Always we missed one or two when a new spring came and we returned to feed them. New, smaller trout took their place—their children perhaps.

A heron speared the biggest fish one year, and we found it dying in the shallows. Perhaps otters took others. The little fingerlings of one year became the big ones two or three years later. Time flowed away as the water; it was always Now, always the same river, always the trout were there, waiting below for the showers of food during the summer.

Margaret was leading Baby Robert to the bridge to see the fish. Sometimes Rosemary came too; and then there were five small heads peering over as the spoonfuls were cast upon the waters.

Afterwards the children would undress in the sunlight, and with shrill cries of joy and excitement would splash about at the edge of the stream, while I lay still in the shallow water, on the golden gravel of the ford, watching the clear cold water foaming over my body, watching it whirling the sand-specks and scooping the stones in little waterfalls and eddies along my length, feeling myself and the children part of the great stream of life, and deeply content for the gift of being alive in the world.

II

But, alas, house life was not so easy as when the sun shone down on us. I was supposed to be growing up; I was now Father, with a capital F. ‘Be quiet, babies! Silence, I say! Our Father’s thinking!’ hissed Windles, frowning terrifically upon them. The cottage, which had seemed so spacious when first we went there, was now too small. The sitting room and the day nursery led one into another through a door with upper panels of glass. Once when I was sitting by the hearth, wondering what to do with myself, I saw five faces peering at me through the glass, two small faces at one end, or rather eyes and foreheads above fingertips pressing there. They vanished! Father must not be disturbed.

But in the open air this strange uneasy difference sometimes fell away, and I was one of them, Arkernoo, a person who provided all kinds of unexpected excitement. Arkernoo was a name originally invented by Rosie, and copied by the other children. Perhaps Windles, and his friend called Sleeboy, son of Farmer Slee, Dolly Ridd, John, and Margy, Harriet Bowden, Rosie, Robbie, and others, would be playing in the Deer Park, and the car would appear with the trailer hitched on behind, to get wood from one of the dumps in the park. ‘Come on, get in, everyone!’ ‘Hurray, Arkernoo’s come! Now for some sporty behavior!’ cried Windles. ‘Coo, I bet we whizz!’ said John, pinkcheeked with quiet excitement. ‘Yes, us’ll whizz now, won’t us, Rosie?’ echoed Robert. ‘Yes, us’ll whizz now, won’t us, Robbie?’

Across the grass the trailer swayed with its laughing, shouting cargo, and coming to a smooth place, where no anthills were, would accelerate, and go round and round faster and faster until all were shrieking with laughter. Or the engine would be stopped and the children chased; or a football match organized, and the wood forgotten. Father, thank God, was forgotten; I was one of them; I had got back, for a while, to the land of enchantment, of unselfconsciousness, to the world of otters, deer, salmon, water, and moonshine — the only world in which perhaps there was consistency, form, integrity. Back again in the house, with letters, bills, typescripts, contracts, the ever-pressing need to turn feelings into words, this world too often faded, and the children were problems of noise, dirt, and even irritation — but never of resentment.

As they grew older, I saw how different the children were. John was the easiest-going. He was seldom put out, always adaptable. At seven years he was long-haired, soft-voiced, wide-eyed, ever ready to help anyone do anything. Solemnly he made cakes in the kitchen — real cakes, not mud pies or mere hardened lumps of dough — or laid the dinner table, helping with the washing up, writing his book of twenty-six chapters (A-bout my Life, by Mr. J. Williamson), and tending his garden (about one square yard). He helped make the beds, he took Rosie and Robbie for walks, he knitted a pair of socks for Sleeboy’s baby brother, he held the net for me while I threw a fly upstream under the alders. Wouldn’t he rather go away and play with the other boys? It must be dull for him waiting about while a waterabsorbed fisherman, with catlike intentness, moved so slowly upstream, casting a red gamecock-hackle fly foot by foot higher in the runs and eddies. Oh no, said John, he liked carrying the net; he liked looking in the grass and seeing ants and spiders and ‘other lings.’ He was quietly happy, enjoying whatsoever he was doing.

Windles was restless, impetuous, imaginative. He came home from school one day in the twilight carrying something carefully in his hands. ‘Look!’ he cried, with a kind of possessive triumph in his voice. He held out a shoddy bundle of feathers from which depended white legs with clenched claws and lolling head. It was a barn or white owl, dead. Its eyes were glazed and shrunken.

‘Did anyone shoot it?’

‘I don’t know. I found it just like that, in the Deer Park, lying on the grass,’ he replied, a little anxiously.

‘He wants to know if he can have it stuffed,’ said Lœtitia, gently, in my ear.

Taking it in the hand for examination, one noticed first of all its extreme lightness. Although the barn owl in flight looks twice, and, in some lights, thrice the size of a pigeon, its body is no larger than a pigeon’s. The pigeon is a fastflying bird, with tight feathers; the white owl fans slowly over the mice runs in the grass and around the ricks and faggot piles. The pigeon’s flight quills are hard and narrow; the owl’s broad and soft, fringed with filaments of down which wave in the least breath of air.

They are the silencers of flight; an owl beating down the hedge at sunset is not heard even by mice. It has a mothlike softness, hovering and fanning with large dark eyes in a heart-shaped face peering down; the wings close and the softness becomes a powerful grip of talons. Mice are swallowed whole, after being killed with claw and beak. Later, bones and fur in a casting, or pellet, are ejected from the owl’s crop.

Now how had this owl died? It had not been shot; its wings were not broken; its breast was white, although draggled. But how light it was, held in the hand — a few ounces only, a feathered skeleton.

‘Look, Windles, at its legs. They’re broken.’

The legs were about two and a half inches long, covered with short hairs of incipient feathers like silver wire. One leg appeared to be broken in the thigh. It was withered. The foot of the other leg was maimed; one of the toes was missing. The wound was half healed. The bird had died of starvation, after struggling in and escaping from a rabbit gin.

Standing with my little boy in the lane, the owl between us, I gave him an imaginary picture of its life since it had escaped from the gin. At first, wild fright and freedom: crooked and tottery, perching on an oak branch; falling off; a rest spread-winged in the grass below. Pain, bewilderment, glancing about in the grass for an unknown enemy. An owl’s eyes were fixed; it could turn its head a whole circle on its neck. Hunger, and, after a painful take-off, to the air again. A mouse moving below; descent and grip upon the shadow; the mouse escaping. The owl falling over, and flapping upright on useless feet, bewildered.

A very hungry owl, it would seek its barn or hollow tree, there to stare in pain throughout daylight, its great ears, hid under feathers, hearing the movements of wood lice, shrews, even worms in the leaf mould below. At sunset it would climb out laboriously and fly along its regular evening ways.

It would catch no mice. Always it would fall over as it tried to grip them, and flap upright again, and stare about it. There were no beetles or moths in the grass of winter for it to catch. It would begin to feel cold, in spite of its feathers.

At night the flashes of the Dog Star above our valley seem to liquefy in the north wind pouring from the high ground of Exmoor. Perhaps that thin skirling cry we heard coming from the direction of the farmer’s haystack a night or two ago, when the constellations were so big and bright, was the death cry of this bird. We saw an owl flying strangely, do you remember, Winny? Wan and irresolute in the wind it passed, a white blur drifting and swaying; we saw it from your bedroom window, do you remember? The starlight made Farmer Slee’s haystack and the hedge very clear. Perhaps the owl did not see the stars, for death is a darkening of the sight, the world fading away. On it flew, tumbling blindly and crying, to fall in the grass, and sleep away from the cold and the pain, until you found it and brought it home, this poor little ghost of a bird. Ah no, boy, it isn’t fair to make you cry. Let’s all go for a walk on Santon Sands tomorrow! All of us! It’s Saturday; no school tomorrow, hurray! Shall we, Windles? John, Margy, how about a walk tomorrow?

‘Shut up,’ says Windles. Then, ‘I don’t want the owl. John can have it.’

‘Coo, can I? Thanks, Windles.’

‘No, Windles ought to get it stuffed,’ I said. ‘It’s our family totem, the owl, and the eldest son shall have it to hang over his bed, with wings in flight. It will keep the rats out of your bed,’ I said to Windles.

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ replied Windles, with hollow laughter.

III

It was amusing to watch how ideas became fixed in their minds. That summer was a brilliant season, with much heat. One morning I took my two-ounce rod from its stand in the hall and went trouting in the river. The air was oppressive. Fishermen had told me that trout were most susceptible to atmospheric pressure; it sent them, dull, to the bottom of the river. I thought I would test this for myself.

Over Exmoor, thunder was rolling. I felt the pressure on my head, on all my body. The river shone with a white grayness that hurt the eyes. The green of pasture and oak leaves had an extraordinary stillness. The valley light was underwater light.

Nothing was happening in air or earth or water. Life was static, stagnant. The heat lifted in bourdons of sound that traveled leagues, and returned to meet new shocks from the skies.

I realized that I was part of the suspended life. I stood at the edge of the run, at the edge of the fast water running into the pool.

My split-cane rod lay on the grass. The fly box was open in my hand. There was no energy to select another fly. Nor was there reason; nothing stirred.

For half an hour I had been moving upstream, throwing a hackled fly into all likely places. That was all.

Whiter and whiter the river had gleamed, as though it were oil moving there. The eyes were hurt by it. The sky was a vast slate quarry.

Even the horseflies, which during the past two days of subtropical heat had risen in thousands, were gone. Heavywinged and burring, they had flown to rest on alder leaf and bramble.

I was wrong; there was movement somewhere. I heard a cry.

A quarter of a mile upriver two small white figures were running on the bank. The children were bathing under the slight summer waterfall. Rod in hand, I walked slowly upstream.

It was now greenly dark. Violet flashes ran down the clouds above the lower slopes of the moor. A pheasant grated wildly in the tenebrous spruce plantations on the hillside.

A young sheepdog appeared along the cart track through the park, fleeing silent and fast, pursued by something we could not see.

Margy, deep brown of leg and arm and pale of body, skipped about in and out of the shallow water with John, whose fair slight body was ripe barley hue. The boy picked up an old brass candlestick lying on the gravel and held it high, laughing gleefully at the idea of a candlestick in the water.

Suddenly that candlestick appeared to be alight; the air crackled; colossal noise fell grayly; the figures were blurred. Everywhere glassy toadstools grew on the river.

Cries of terror came from the children. They were getting wet in the rain!

Oh, oh, where were their clothes? Far away in the house! Not even a mackintosh between them! Oh, oh! Cries of despair and misery.

‘Quick, quick, Daddy! Can’t you see we are getting wet?’

‘But you’re wet already!’

‘Quick! Oh! Oh! It’s raining.’

No argument or exhortation consoled them. What was the difference between one wet and another? Weren’t the large raindrops quite warm, much warmer than the river?

No use. It was raining, they had no mackintoshes, they would be soaked. Margy sobbed. John gibbered with rage because I would not share their plaint, but laughed callously.

While John was crying, I threw off coat and trousers, and splashed into the river. It was a strange feeling, swimming with multitudinous pillars of water arising level with one’s eyes, millions of ice-flowers growing instantly and blossoming with white water-drops spilling. It was a delightful feeling, sheltering from the rain in the river. Come in, children, it’s fine fun!

‘Gitoom, you darned old vool, you!’ cried John. ‘Us be wet through to the skin, can’t you see?’ He and Margy ran home, weeping — because it hadn’t happened before.