The Lost Novel of F.W. Harvey: A War Romance E-Book

F. W. Harvey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 327

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Published to coincide with performances of the play 'Will Harvey's War' at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham from 30th July to 2nd August 2014. Part of the Gloucestershire Remembers World War I programme. Discovered only recently, this unpublished novel by F.W. Harvey tells the fictionalized tale of Will Harvey and his journey from a rural Gloucestershire childhood to the frontline trenches of the First World War. It is a sentimental story of young boy finding love for the first time and being separated from it, it is also a story of how war changes men forever. The novel offers a rare insight into the poet's own experiences of the First World War and his struggle to come to terms with his lost youth.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword

Biographical Note

Author’s Note

Preface

Publisher’s Note

Part I Childhood

Part II School Days

Part III Vocation

Part IV Temptation

Part V ‘The Line’

Part VI Captured

Part VII Escape

Copyright

FOREWORD

Poet and composer Ivor Gurney was a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital on 20 October 1925, the day he received a visit from Helen Thomas, the widow of another poet of the First World War, Edward Thomas. She was escorted to the hospital by Gurney’s steadfast friend, Marion Scott. Scott had arranged the meeting, perhaps hoping that it might provide him with some momentary relief from the bouts of intolerable mental illness that he suffered from. Gurney was lucid that day, and Helen Thomas had a ‘wonderful time’ speaking with him about their mutual admiration for her late husband’s poems, some of which Gurney hoped soon to set to music. This clearly meant much to the widow, who asked Gurney, ‘Is there anything I can do for you – anything that would give you pleasure?’ Without hesitation, Gurney replied, ‘Don’t do it for me – do it for Harvey. Please get a publisher to publish his novel.’1

Though suffering from extreme mental illness and the tedium of a life in confinement, Gurney’s compassionate thoughts drifted to the disappointment felt by his best friend, F.W. Harvey, for having failed to find a publisher for his war novel. Gurney would remain in the City of London Mental Hospital until his death in 1937. Harvey was still approaching publishers about the novel until that same year.2 He then seems to have given up, and the novel was forgotten.

Despite this singular failure, Harvey had many literary successes to be proud of. He had gained national fame with his poetry written during the First World War and he had played a key role in founding the first of the British trench journals, the 5th Gloucester Gazette – the voice of the 1/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment. The periodical’s debut came on 12 April 1915 in the front lines of Ploegsteert, Belgium. Harvey provided much of the copy that kept the paper alive in its infancy; he would eventually publish seventy-seven poems there. This led to Harvey’s poetry attracting the attention of national publications: the critic and anthologist E.B. Osborn observed in The Times Literary Supplement that Harvey’s poetry helped to make the 5th Gloucester Gazette ‘the most literary of the British trench journals’.3

The positive reception of Harvey’s work led the well-known firm Sidgwick & Jackson to publish his first poetry collection, A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad, in September 1916. The volume was primarily a reprinting of his poems from the 5th Gloucester Gazette. It saw excellent sales, going into six impressions over three years.4 Sales were aided by Harvey’s reputation as a soldier: he had earned the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM)5 during a night-time trench raid in August 1915, and only a month before the collection’s release he was captured by the Germans and made a prisoner during a daring solo reconnaissance mission. September 1917 saw the publication of his second collection, Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp. German prison camp authorities had allowed Harvey to mail poetry manuscripts home and to correspond with his de facto literary agent, Bishop George Frodsham, Canon Residentiary of Gloucester Cathedral. Gloucestershire Friends has the distinction of being the only collection of First World War poetry to be published while the author was a prisoner of war.

Following his release at the end of the war, Harvey returned to his beloved Gloucestershire, and in 1919 published another collection, Ducks, and Other Verses. Many of its poems were also written in prison camps, including his most famous, ‘Ducks’. In 1920 he produced an autobiographical account of his time as a prisoner of war, titled Comrades in Captivity. Both saw disappointing sales, as a war-weary public had lost interest in such works. Still, these were followed by further poetry collections: Farewell in 1921 and September and Other Poems in 1925. Harvey’s poetic output began to decline at this time, due to the demands of a legal career and family life. September would be his last major publication with Sidgwick & Jackson, as the firm began to doubt his commercial viability. Despite this, many of his poems continued to feature in popular anthologies, and do to this day. His In Pillowell Woods (1926) was published by a small, local publisher in Lydney, Gloucestershire, and was largely forgotten. The last volume of Harvey’s poetry that he would live to see printed, simply titled Gloucestershire, was published by Oliver & Boyd in 1946.

Harvey died in 1957 aged 68, at which point his property, including his house of Highview at Yorkley, passed to his son, Patrick. The legacy included his personal papers, which contained the manuscript of this novel. Patrick was highly protective and kept the papers largely sequestered away from the public eye.

When Patrick died in 2007 ownership of Highview passed to F.W. Harvey’s daughter, Eileen Griffiths, and her daughter, Elaine Jackson. They discovered Harvey’s papers there, including the manuscript of this novel, tucked away in a chest. They appointed Roger Deeks and Teresa Davies, both leading members of the F.W. Harvey Society, as trustees of the collection to see that the papers were preserved at the Gloucestershire Archives. Through their work, and that of archives directors, the papers were brought to the attention of Professor Tim Kendall, Head of English at the University of Exeter. He secured funding to support a doctoral researcher to work at Gloucestershire Archives to catalogue, preserve and study the papers, and to complete a dissertation on F.W. Harvey’s work. Appointed to this role, I was given the opportunity to be the first academic researcher to have access to a cornucopia of literary and historical treasures.

The novel was the most surprising find among the papers. It was thought that Comrades in Captivity was Harvey’s only serious venture into prose. Yet here was a full novel, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and notes for lectures, ranging across a variety of topics and genres. From the hundreds of letters found with the papers – including the letter from Marion Scott mentioned earlier in this foreword – we can begin to piece together the history of this novel. Letters from Sidgewick & Jackson, and from Gurney, indicate that Harvey began work on it as early as 1920. Gurney’s comments above indicate that the novel had been finished and rejected by publishers by 1925. In 1935 Harvey contracted a former wartime comrade, N.F. Nicholas, to act as his agent in a new attempt to find a publisher.6 It seems that Nicholas was responsible for the creation of the surviving typescript that is presented here. In 1937 Nicholas returned the typescript, writing that no publishers were interested.7 Harvey shelved the novel at that point and never mentioned it again in correspondence. Surely this disappointment was compounded when Harvey’s great friend, Ivor Gurney, died in the asylum that same year. (A letter from Scott informing Harvey of Gurney’s death was also found among these papers – it was torn in half.)8 The novel then lay unread among Harvey’s papers until their rediscovery.

Harvey’s Author’s Note states that the novel is fictional, but semi-autobiographical. The novel’s value comes from analysis of which characters and events are based on reality, and which were purely the author’s invention.

The Author’s Note also states that none of the characters in the story were based on still-living people at the time of writing. This is not entirely true. The character ‘Will’ or ‘Willie’ was clearly based on Harvey himself, who was known as Will to family and friends. There is also his mother, who is a significant character in the book. Contemporary accounts of her align very closely to the character as described in the novel. Her death in the novel is an invention, as Cecilia Matilda Harvey did not die until 1942. Ivor Gurney fleetingly appears twice in the novel, though otherwise remains absent.

The most prominent character aside from Will is his brother Eric. In reality, Eric served with distinction in the Gloucestershire Regiment, earning a Military Cross and Bar,9 but was killed in the final offensive on the Western Front in October 1918. That same month Harvey, still a prisoner of war in Germany, was preparing for movement to neutral Holland through a prisoner-exchange programme. His papers show that he received the letter informing him of Eric’s death either just as he was leaving Germany or immediately after arriving in Holland.10 In Comrades in Captivity, Harvey stated that ‘the whole sting of [the prisoner’s] position, that which makes it so intolerable, is … his friends and brothers are “out there” killing and being killed. He cannot help them. He is futile … There is no more terrible reflection for a man.’11 This guilt was compounded in the case of his brothers (his youngest living brother, Roy, was also fighting). In this novel, Harvey does not go so far as to save Eric from his fate, but he does at least save himself from the guilt of being a powerless non-combatant during his brother’s death. He places himself right beside his brother at this fatal moment. In this novel he states that Eric had ‘taken the bullet meant for his brother’, demonstrating Harvey’s deep sense of survivor’s guilt. Eric’s real death is not mentioned at all in Comrades in Captivity, but described in vividly imagined detail here. It seems this event was something that Harvey could only approach through fiction. In reality it was too painful.

Other characters seem to be purely from Harvey’s imagination. There is no known basis in reality for the gypsy girl – known only as ‘Gypsy’ – or any of the characters associated with her. Mrs. Bransbury-Stuart, the married woman his character has an affair with, also seems to have been an invention.

These two women are possibly allegories for different aspects of England itself. Mrs Bransbury-Stuart is the materialistic wife of an industrialist, and uses men for her own means and then discards them, seeming to personify the industrial England that Harvey calls a ‘fretful, profiteering, foolish, feverish place’. Conversely, the gypsy girl represents his ideal ‘England of quiet lives, and misty orchards’ in her purity, and with her knowledge of and love for the countryside. He claims that his idealised vision of England is the only England worth fighting for, and thus this brave woman who represents it overcomes the obstacles of her gender to do just that. Harvey saw the war as an opportunity for a rebirth of English society, what he called ‘a New England’, free from social and economic inequalities.12 Believing that the war would bring about social revolution was what carried him through its hardships, just as the gypsy girl struggles through in the novel.

The setting for the affair with Mrs Bransbury-Stuart is based in reality. Following his certification as a solicitor, Harvey began working and living in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. At the time, Chesterfield had become a coal-mining town, and it is represented here by the fictional ‘Eccleton’. His correspondence shows that he fell into depression there and hated his work so much that he quit unexpectedly in April 1914, leaving so suddenly that he abandoned his coat in the office.13 He seems to have gone on a walking tour subsequently.14 He found a new vocation in August when he joined the army.

Throughout the novel, Will and Eric remain privates in the Gloucestershire Regiment. In reality, both enlisted initially in the ranks and eventually received commissions (as did their brother, Roy, while their sister Gladys worked as a nurse). Eric initially joined the army with his brothers in August 1914. As in the novel, he was temporarily discharged due to family hardship reasons. In reality, this was so he could to return to look after the estate of the family farm following the death their youngest brother, Bernard, in a motorcycle accident. During this time he also completed his studies at Oxford, and thus received a commission on his return to the army, eventually reaching the rank of captain.15 F.W. Harvey deployed with 1/5th Gloucesters to France in April 1915, earning a reputation as a scout, just as he does in the novel. In reality, he was promoted to lance corporal in recognition of this. As in the novel, he received the DCM following a night patrol that saw the destruction of an enemy listening post. The patrol was led by Lance Sergeant Raymond Knight, who is mentioned briefly in the novel. Knight and Harvey both received DCMs, and both were sent to England to receive commissions. The newly commissioned second lieutenants returned to the front in mid-1916; Knight would be killed on 22 July and Harvey captured on 16 August.

The final adventure of the novel concerns Will Harvey’s escape from Germany to Holland. The character is used as a forced labourer, as was the accepted practice for prisoners from the other ranks. Aside from the obvious economic benefits for the captors, the long work days also gave the men little time to plan for escape. Conversely, officers were exempt from this forced labour, and were instead held in all-officer prison camps. Largely left alone by their guards, they had ample time to plan a getaway. This was Harvey’s condition in real life. Though he did attempt escape, he was unsuccessful, and was only able to return home at the war’s end. He is kinder to his character in allowing him to make it across the border.

As he suggests in his Author’s Note, this novel was Harvey’s attempt to explore themes of youth and war through the eyes of a fictional character. This allowed him to move freely between reality and fiction while telling his story – not to tell the facts of his experience, but in a way to present his truth.

James Grant Repshire

F.W. Harvey Doctoral Researcher

University of Exeter

Notes

1 Letter from Marion Scott to F.W. Harvey, 20 October 1925, Gloucestershire Archives (henceforth GA), F.W. Harvey Collection (henceforth FWH) D12912/1/2/89.

2 Letter from N.F. Nicholas to F.W. Harvey, 19 July 1937, GA, FWH, D12912/1/4/149.

3 E.B. Osborn, ‘Trench Journals’, The Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 1916, 769, The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive online (accessed 5 April 2013).

4 F.W. Harvey, Ducks, and Other Verse (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1919) pp. 73–5.

5 The DCM was an award for valour for members of the other ranks, second only to the Victoria Cross.

6 Letter from N.F. Nicholas to F.W. Harvey, February–September 1935, GA, FWH, D12912/1/4/140.

7 Nicholas to Harvey, 19 July 1937, GA, FWH, D12912/1/4/149.

8 Letter from Marion Scott to F.W. Harvey, 26 December 1937, GA, FWH, D12912/1/2/90.

9 The Military Cross was, at the time, a third-level award for valour, awarded only to officers holding the rank of captain or below. The Bar represented a second award of the same medal.

10 Letter from Matilda Harvey to F.W. Harvey, 17 October 1918, GA, FWH, D12912/1/1/70.

11 F.W. Harvey, Comrades in Captivity: A Record of Life in Seven German Prison Camps (Coleford: Douglas McLean Publishing, 2010; originally Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1920) p. 51.

12 Harvey, Ducks, pp. 73–5.

13 Letter from John Rawcliffe to F.W. Harvey, 6 May 1914, GA, FWH, D12912/1/5/10.

14 Rawcliffe to Harvey, 6 May 1914, GA, FWH, D12912/1/5/10.

15 Anthony Boden, F.W. Harvey: Soldier, Poet (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1998) pp. 52–3.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Frederick William Harvey, known as ‘Will’ to family and friends, was born in Hartpury, Gloucestershire, on 26 March 1888. His parents were Howard Harvey, a successful horse trader, and Cecelia Matilda Harvey (née Waters). Shortly after Will’s birth his father purchased an estate in Minsterworth, which he named The Redlands. It was at The Redlands that Will spent his formative years learning to love the Gloucestershire countryside. Will was followed by three brothers, Eric, Roy and Bernard, and a sister, Gladys. He was educated as a ‘day boy’ at the King’s School, Gloucester, and then attended the Rossall School in Lancashire as a boarder. Following this, he was articled as a solicitor’s clerk to Frank Treasure Esq of Gloucester, to begin qualifications as a lawyer. However, his heart was not in the law, but rather in the love of poetry, and he therefore did not apply himself to his studies and thus failed his exams in 1911. His family then sent him to an intensive law course at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, where he qualified as a solicitor in 1912. He then began to practise law, though he never fully embraced the vocation.

At the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted in Gloucester’s Territorial Force battalion, 1/5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment. He arrived in France with the battalion in April 1915. In the 1/5th he became a founder of the first of the famous British trench journals, the 5th Gloucester Gazette, which eventually brought his poetry to national attention. Serving in the infantry, he often volunteered for night patrols into no-man’s-land, earning a reputation as a scout and promotion to lance corporal. In August 1915, he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, after a night patrol that saw the destruction of an enemy listening post. He was recommended for a commission, which he received. Now a second lieutenant, he returned to England for several months of officer training. During this time he arranged publication of his first poetry collection, A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad, published in September 1916.

He returned to the front with the 2/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, in July 1916, but was captured during a solo reconnaissance of the German front line on 17 August. He spent the rest of the war in various German prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, despite attempts to escape. He continued to write poetry in confinement, and was allowed to mail home manuscripts of what would be published in September 1917 as Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp. He returned home from the war in February 1919, and later that year published a poetry collection titled Ducks, and Other Verses. In 1920 he published memoirs of his POW years titled Comrade in Captivity.

In 1921 he married an Irish nurse, Sarah Anne Kane, and returned to practising the law. His collection, Farewell, of 1921 announced his intention to leave the literary world to focus on his career in law; however, he could not contain his desire to create poetry, and in 1925 published September and Other Poems, followed in 1926 by In Pillowell Woods. As early as 1928 he began writing and performing in BBC radio programmes, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. He also saw many successful settings of his poetry to music by his accomplished musician friends Ivor Gurney, Herbert Howells and Herbert Brewer. During the Second World War, he served in the Home Guard and worked with veterans’ organisations to support local men and women serving in the military. As a solicitor, he was known primarily as a defender of the poor and downtrodden. He would rarely act for the prosecution – in part due to his disdain for the prison system – and was well known for his willingness to waive fees for those who could not afford them.

Following the war, his health began to decline quickly. Still, in 1946 a final collection of his work was published, Gloucestershire: A Selection from the Poems of F.W. Harvey. In the final year of his life, 1956, BBC radio recognised his contribution to English poetry with a radio programme dedicated solely to his work, titled Sing a Song of Gloucestershire. Harvey died on 13 February 1957, just short of his 69th birthday. He was survived by his widow Sarah Anne, his daughter Eileen Griffiths (née Harvey) and son Patrick. His work continues to appear in anthologies, particularly his wartime poems ‘In Flanders’, ‘If We Return’, ‘The Bugler’ and his most popular poem ‘Ducks’.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All art is autobiography.

Whatever happens, happens to oneself. And whether events happen in the flesh or in the soul; they happen.

This is small satisfaction to the scandal-lovers, but it is all that they will get from me.

For the reassurance of others, I will say that no living person has been depicted in this book, but that events (such as the Great War) have been used only as factual rivets in a story which is essentially a pondering upon life itself and not a representation of personalities or topics.

F.W. Harvey

1935

PREFACE

This is a war book. No one wants to read war books now-a-days; and I, who came through, do not want to write one. Only I cannot rest for the dead.

However we dislike it, the fact stands that for this generation the war must be the supreme historical event. For until the sacrifice is understood and justified our hands are unclean.

When it is understood there will be no need to wash. To realise is to be cleansed. No one can realise Truth without acting it.

Truth will give to each a personal responsibility for the dead and their dreams, which will not rest till it has appointed representatives worthy to carry those dreams into effect and seen that work engaged upon in letters and in spirit.

Then we may forget if we will. But then we shall not wish to forget.

Does a good Christian wish to forget the death of Christ? It is his shame and his glory. But to the bad Christian it is shame unglorified.

Therefore the war must be obsession to all; and until we have realised it, it will be a shameful one.

Will Harvey

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

We have endeavoured to present this book as true to its original form as possible. By reproducing the text as it was intended, we have tried our best not to interfere with the author’s voice.

PART I

CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER I

‘Will ye give us a glass of wine?

We be the English soldiers

We’ll not give ye a glass of wine

For we be the Roman soldiers.’

Deep and ancient, that pond which never in living memory had failed, was now cleaned out by four bare-footed men.

Their necks and arms were brown as all Gloucestershire in that drought, but their uncovered shins shone curiously pale above feet caked ebony in the mud which fitted like high boots.

Thrice a day this footwear was removed by washing in water almost as black, and rubbing with rushes which alone of growing things retained a natural greenness.

Then trooping, dark-skinned and bare-footed like Moslems to a mosque, those workers entered the slight flickering shade of willows to eat heartily and hand around in an immemorial ritual the tart cool cider in a pot of horn.

The poor cattle bellowed piteously in meadows for water which had to be carried to them in buckets yoked to the shoulders of the cowman.

It was the year when Timmy Taylor returning alone to his yellow-windowed cottage a little later than his wont, was met in the moonlight by rats – thousands he said – marching to the river. They were going resolutely. Their tails (he averred) were cocked, and their little light-filled eyes fastened upon him without fear. At sight of their teeth, he who was but a quiet little mouse of a man had fled. They were many and maniac.

Timmy Taylor was one of the men who had helped dig out the big pool. His mates were Sam Bridges, Charlie Freeman, and Bill Trigg, of whom much might be told, but alas, they and their doings must not enter this tale of other and different happenings.

Forget their humanity. Behold them as marionettes cutting black chunks of earth-cake from the bottom of a pond; wheeling that confectionery in barrows up a board, and depositing it in one long heap, shaped like a low swede-pile, upon the bank …

That fertile mud, accepting from all vagrant winds the various pollen they bore and scattered, chose to rear that only that it desired.

Two years later it was invisible in an army of rank and nodding nettles sprung to the height of a man’s head. And there in a daisied meadow drowsed in shadow of those nettles a nursemaid with but one leg; and by her, a little boy.

In days when bobbed hair was not a fashion hers had been cut short, making a dark oblong frame to a pale rather oval face. She had black expressionless eyes like plums in a pudding – but it was Christmas pudding, which he liked. To look at her you would say that she was town-bred, though in fact she was not.

He was five years old. She was eighteen or nineteen – but what does that signify? She was ‘grown up’ like his mother whose age and steadfastness was that of the blue Cotswolds. Years mean nothing to a child, and where it otherwise girls of eighteen are not all of the same age.

Her name? She was called Clemmy. She lay stretched in the buttercups of the meadow, her crutch near by hidden by them and big daisies.

She was telling him a story which concerned a giant so big that his eyes were troubled with the stars as ours are with sparks when we look out of a train in a tunnel – which we should not do because it is dangerous; only sometimes … The boy nodded. Sometimes dangerous things were nice.

And the clouds caught in the giant’s beard like cobwebs. Yes, Tom Freeman had pulled down cobwebs from the stable to put on a horse that was bleeding. If you should cut a finger, sticky cobwebs stopped the blood from coming out of it.

Her companion supposed that Clemmy had used them when her leg was cut off. But he said nothing. She was always cross if he mentioned her ‘other leg’.

The swallows chased across the water hunting flies. Their backs were blue: their breasts flame-coloured in the low sun.

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum! thundered the voice of the giant. He had made a dinner of little boys. But Jack who was only a little boy (like himself) had killed that monster.

Brave Jack! If only he, Willie, could kill a giant … ‘Soldiers, Clemmy,’ he cried, ‘let’s have soldiers.’ And then Clemmy began the ritual of her favourite game by singing in a deep clear tone the words which stand at the head of this chapter –

Will ye give us a glass of wine? We be the English soldiers.

The boy’s eyes brightened like little stars. But, ‘not yet, Clemmy!’ he pleaded, ‘not now.’ And the nursemaid conceded the point in favour of peace.

Yes, we’ll give ye a glass of wine, For we be English soldiers.

Then again she repeated in song her request on behalf of the warriors for alcoholic refreshment. And this time the answer was defiant:

‘We’ll not give ye a glass of wine,

For we be the Roman soldiers.’

At that with heightened colour the child seizing a sword fashioned kindly and roughly out of thatching sticks by Bill Trigg advanced gold-shod through buttercups upon the hill of nettles; and a queer smile curved the girl’s lips.

A fierce battle ensued in which bare legs were blistered – aye and cheeks and arms, and tall nettles lowered with blows. Still the girl smiled and watched,

Then after a wile, satisfied perhaps that small calves had been sufficiently stung, or fearing possibly a scarcity of foes for the morrow – ‘Willie’, she called.

‘Willie!’

He came obediently as was his custom: he always obeyed Clemmy. And though she frightened him; fear was not the motive of that obedience. Differently to his mother, but in some sure way he loved her.

He pitied her besides, and hated her foes. Those Roman soldiers (this was his interpretation of the song which she alone sang) had cut off Clemmy’s leg!

He could not know that her bodily affliction was the result of a medical operation – the removal of diseased bone consequent upon consumption. Still less could he have been expected to guess his lady to be a feebly perverted, but alas! imaginative girl.

Bred in the open air, the little boy was a loyal and stout-hearted champion. Nor was his knight-errantry play, still less pose.

The brave and glittering stories of Malory he had never heard. Stevenson’s charming Child’s Garden would not have appealed to him. He scorned all fire-lit fancy-fed games of the nursery unaccompanied by hurt. Hans Anderson, read to him by his mother, he loved; but not ‘The brave tin Soldier,’ for he could not believe in his existence.

It is the plain fact that his childhood was not that happy poetic period generally believed in. Even so early he had discovered that one must suffer for one’s beliefs, and did so joyously in the games which were his life.

Then even, the thirst (the curse, but inspiration) of his life, which never left him even when he grew up, was for reality:– for true adventure: adventure with Life. He preferred the strings of the nettle to any soft fire-lit play.

‘Willie!’

Having kissed him, Clemmy gathered her crutch and got up, hobbling towards the farm house, till remembering something –

‘Eric!’ she called.

Then another tiny figure, in petticoats, arose from the grass and followed. It was Willie’s brother, her second charge whom she had forgotten.

CHAPTER II

‘My father bred great horses,

Chestnut, grey and brown.

They grazed about the meadow,

And trampled into town.

They left the homely meadows

And trampled far away,

The great shining horses

Chestnut, and brown, and grey.

Gone are the horses

That my father bred

And who knows whither? …

Or whether starved or fed? …

Gone are the horses;

And my father’s dead.’

Not long after this Clemmy was dismissed, and passes out of the story. She had fulfilled her destiny in their life of one small boy.

He shed a few tears at her going; but Eric was not inclined to weep or rejoice. Younger by two years than Willie, be continued absorbed in quiet mysterious little games, and a soft and brooding innocence. Clemmy’s spell had never fallen over his babyhood, nor changed his play with daisies for war with nettles.

Life is a time of quick forgetting; and childhood very swiftly filled in with new experience. Other strange happenings overgrew the gap made by Clemmy’s departure. For instance Sam ‘got hurted’ … That was the phrase Willie heard uttered hoarsely in the half-light of a September morning – and then, ‘Mustard, he done it zur – the big chestnut.’

His father and mother were dressing. Eric was in the cot near by; and he, since he resolutely refused to lie elsewhere, in the big bed. Several months before he had been given a separate room, and for a week his parents were roused in the dead of night by the same small white figure scrambling into their bed. Smacking proved as ineffectual as reproof. The room allotted was in a distant part of the house, and since the child’s persistent journey in pitch darkness was along a passage which crossed two flights of steep stairs, it was considered wise to reinstate him, and a cot was procured for Eric.

So on the morning in question Willie was awakened by a sharp rattle of gravel upon the window, and heard his father informed of Sam’s accident in the words already set down.

His father immediately went out of the bedroom, and his mother although incompletely dressed slipped a shawl around her shoulders and followed.

This was queer. Willie’s curiosity was not less than normal. It was he who had startled a congregation the Sunday before by following the Rector’s stentorian ‘Get thee behind me Satan!’ with the shrill question ‘And what did he do when he got behind him?’ Willie got up.

Descending the front stairs, still in his nightdress, he came to the foot in time to see a man carried in on a stable-door by four workmen, and deposited gently upon the dining-room sofa. His father followed, directing, and his mother was fetching something in a glass for the man to drink.

Creeping unnoticed into the room Willie saw that the man on the sofa was Sam, and that Sam’s face was white and puckered.

Willie laughed at the funny noise Sam made (it was like a cow talking to herself) and then he was noticed. His mother carried him upstairs and scolded him for coming down, and very severely for laughing when the man groaned. Poor Sam was hurt. He knew that. He did not want to laugh at the funny sound, yet in the memory of it he laughed again.

His mother was surprised and frightened at this callousness. Had he been other than her own little son she would have suspected him of a bad nature. As it was she absolved him, and looked to herself for the root of the mischief. Yet she had never been cruel – beautiful unselfish woman.

Later she discovered that many unaccountable things in childhood which can neither be chastised nor prayed away do of their own accord go. For a child lives lives not his, and not his mother’s, ere he lives his own.

That little laugh troubled her many a night. She prayed that her child might not grow up cruel. Cruelty was to her strong kind nature something worse than other sins; a blacker (since a meaner and weaker) transgression than any reckless breaking of the commandments from one to ten.

In his babyhood she had cried bitterly on first discovering that pulsing of the brain discernible through the pulp of any tiny half-knit skull. God, has she borne an idiot? Now she grieved lest her darling should turn out to be a monster. Such it is to be a mother, such, though in a lesser intensity, is it (as artists know – and soldiers) to love anything that one has created through suffering and glory …

Meanwhile Willie, in bed, reflected upon everything except his conduct. The big fiery-tempered Mustard had kicked Sam, and broken his leg. Perhaps he would now have only one – like Clemmy – and the trees. Trees had one leg only though hundreds of arms. Trees stood still, but Clemmy walked. Perhaps Sam had kicked Mustard, just as Mustard had kicked Sam. This thought, which amused him, he mentioned later to Sam’s fellow workmen who then gazed at one another with amused faces while Bill Trigg said he was ‘dazed if this buoy o’ master’s’ hadn’t ‘got a yud on him’, adding that Sam ‘orter bin a cowman.’

Sam was not good with horses. Nervous himself he made them nervously restive. Then he got frightened and beat them to the accompaniment of curses and a stamping clatter of iron horse-shoes, which awoke Willie on market mornings and called down rebuke from his father who was dressing at a window overlooking the yard. (The reader has perhaps guessed that Willie’s father was a horse breeder and farmer.) The child lay dreaming. A little tapping of ivy and Virginia creeper mimicked the multitudinous clatter of hooves as a string of great shining animals tramped off to market tethered head and tail with side-lines.

Sunlight streamed further into the room awaking Eric. Presently Mother came in to dress the boys. Prayers were prolonged by a tender little sermon to the elder on kindness, to people and to beasts. Then both children went down to play with floating islands of brown-sugared porridge until that edible fairyland had disappeared, swallowed up by giants.

Breakfast over, they were cautioned not to go near the stables, warned especially against the bull in a small meadow near by, and turned loose upon the island – that is the farm – which was their world.

They saw Bill Trigg harnessing Buttercup to a spring cart, and noticing the two ladders and a pyramid of wicker pots near by, concluded rightly that the little plum orchard was to be picked, and at once attached themselves to the party.

Neither Buttercup nor Bill Trigg can be dismissed in a sentence, even if one wanted to. Buttercup had been in her day a hunter and steeplechaser – but that day was twenty years past. She had gained shining cups that now reflected themselves in the dining-room sideboard, and her owner (note that I have avoided the word master) would as soon have cast those bright trophies on a dung-heap as have sold the old yellow mare.

She was, though stiff, full of inbred race and temperament. A man or a woman might ride her, but never a fool. She held, and had always held, her own ideas as to the rushing of fences. ‘Lay your hands down, sit back, and leave me alone’ had been the principle of her mettlesome days, which hardened as she grew, older, and hoarded her experience. She would carry you (if you were fit to be carried) through a day’s hunting as well and better than horses half or a quarter her age. But you must leave her to do it.

Now, a little tired of gazing in pools at the reflection of an old stiff horse feeding in meadows less green; in sunshine less warm than it used to be, she found it (doubtless) refreshing to reach, when requested, a helping hoof to those who appreciated her – to take part in such menial tasks as these.

Bill Trigg, though he could not be said to rival in breeding the aristocracy of Buttercup, yet suggested by his appearance Frederick William the Great, grown poor and honest. His side whiskers, his despotism … But he was built on a rather smaller plan than was the old emperor: and he wore corduroys.

A reprobate juicy old man … He loved the children. And the children rather liked him.

He had served their grandpa, and having (he proclaimed) helped ‘Master Howard’ through many a youthful scrape, was permitted to do his own jobs in his own way even when that way was not wholly to his master’s liking.

‘Kim oop!’ he cried to Buttercup, and the old mare moved daintily forward with the load of hampers and ladders.

Entering the orchard with the two little boys following, Bill, Buttercup, and Timmy Taylor who had joined them, stopped: ladders were propped against trees: the mare unharnessed to graze; and the fruit-picking begun.

Eric quietly seated himself in dappled grass to play, and to eat the fallen plums. Willie followed Bill Trigg up a ladder to do the same, and to put questions concerning things in general which provoked a voluble reminiscence in the jovial old picker.

‘Are the wasps flies?’

‘Wasps’, said Bill evading the question, ‘was the little baggers with hot feet – and don’t ’e forget it.’ Willie, like the unskilful debated, was side-tracked on to this new argument. He did not believe that wasps’ feet were hot. Clemmy had shown him a wasp killing a fly. After he had killed it, Clemmy had killed the wasp, and made the wasp work his sting too, and the sting was in his tail.

Clemmy, answered Bill, was a bitch

‘A what?’

If Willie didn’t believe that there about wasps’ feet could let one stand on him ver a while.

Willie wouldn’t.

Why were wasps’ feet hot then?