Read Online The Phoenix Generation by Henry Williamson - Free Book Online Page B

night it returned. While Lucy and Felicity worked in the rooms of the old house, Phillip and Rippingall worked in the walled garden. During the back-end of the year it had been cleared, ploughed, harrowed, rolled and threeparts sown down to alsike, a pink-flowered plant of the clover family. This alsike, when dug in, would enrich the soil.
    The remaining half-acre was for tillage. Here, thought Phillip, Father will want to spend his time. He must remove the ruinous green-houses and cold frames, and so give the old boy a decent start. A small potting-shed had already been erected near the two circular lily ponds. The cast-iron garden seats were scaled and repainted dark green.
    All was now ready for Phillip’s parents to come down and occupy the ground-floor flat.
    *
    Hetty was living in a flow of excitement that soon she would be in the beautiful country near her son and his wife and the little ones; and with this feeling was an undercurrent of sadness, even of fear, that she would be leaving the house where her children had grown up—it was almost all of her life. More than thirty-five years in Wakenham: first in the little house in Comfort Road near the railway cutting, which once had been part of the Sydenham-Deptford Canal, where old Pooley, who was nearly a hundredyears old when she had gone to live there with Dickie, had once seen a salmon taken on rod and line, at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Thirty years of her life had passed in the house in Hillside Road: now she was about to say goodbye to all the landmarks of her marriage—the Hill, the trees, the church across the grass, the view of the Crystal Palace from the crest of the Hill. O, those far-off summer days, and Phillip flying his kite on what he called the Hillies!
    And now everything appeared to have a life of its own, to be appealing to her to be allowed to remain as it had been when Papa and Mamma were alive, and living next door—and brother Hughie—sister Dorrie—her boys killed in the war. At such revisitations in memory Hetty prayed silently, as she stood in her bedroom with its wide brass bed, seeing the faces of the dead with instant emotion before the expunging of all personality under another vision of the white marble forests of the cemetery. Then she would laugh as she thought of the joke of Hughie, about the engraving of the church on the cover of the Parish Magazine , newly built of red brick when they had moved into their own house. The church garden was still a wilderness of grasses tangled above the yellow clay soil. Note , the words declared below the engraving of the church on the blue cover of the Parish Magazine, the tower is not yet built. And all the years had passed, and the church had never had its tower.
    Once the church had been full every Sunday. Now it was more than half-empty. People had given up going to church since the end of the Great War.
    She peered through the nearer of the two bow-fronted windows, watching her husband wheeling his barrow up Charlotte Road. Dickie still kept on his war-time allotment beyond the farther side of the cemetery. He was tidying up his rod of ground for his successor , whoever he might be, and thereby keeping himself in trim for the work ahead in the walled garden at Fawley. He had spent the past two days picking up flints and making a neat heap of them in one corner, and cleaning and digging the ground as a matter of routine; while all the time happy thoughts of returning to Rookhurst, the village where he had been born and bred, had given him secret satisfaction. He was aloofly proud, too, of his son’s success as a writer, and looked forward to ending his years happily in the dwelling place of his forefathers.
    Richard had an idea of repaying his son’s generosity by inviting him to use the house in Hillside Road as his own whenever he cameto London. This was a happy solution to a problem which had been worrying him: what to do with the house. He did not want to sell it, nor yet to