Free Young Phillip Maddison by Henry Williamson

the Hill at night. Phillip had developed a feeling of revulsion and scorn for “lovers”, or any idea approaching the figment. They were filthy people. As for Richard’s attitude, it too was an unconscious reflexion of ideas generally held among incomplete men towards sex: a suburban horror of irregularities, based on the fear of venereal disease, and its effects on the innocent.
    This jangle of half-living had made Alfred Hawkins, in Phillip’s eyes, a figure that had no relation to the truth of Alfred Hawkins. He was a dreamy, high-minded boy, whose mother had died when he was young. His father was half-paralysed, a barber owning a little shop in Randiswell, where poor people had their hair cut; and this by itself was almost enough, in Phillip’s eyes, to show that Alfred Hawkins was not fit to have anything to do with his sister. Alfred Hawkins had gone into the Backfield to look at the house, from a distance, where the object of his dreams lived. He had stood there for an hour, elevated by the illusion of love, beauty, and service. He had been on his way back from his vigil when, fancying himself pursued by Peter Wallace, he had panic’d and taken to his heels.
    Alfred Hawkins wrote little notes to Mavis with poems copied out in them, and Mavis replied similarly. Shyly, almost dreading to meet one another, they exchanged these tokens of the spirit in a crack of one of the posts of the fence.
    “And what’s more, Alfred Hawkins, you steer clear of my sister, or I’ll know the reason why!” And with this warning Phillip went away, all unconscious that he was a pattern of his Father’s moral indignation.
    *
    For twenty-five years Richard had been going to and from the City, and in that time, as he had estimated one recent evening while compiling his diary, he had crossed upon the flag-stones of London Bridge, in the roar of iron wheel-bands and horses’ hoofs on granite, approximately on fourteen thousand five hundred occasions. He might have added, had he been a man used to observing himself objectively, that on the last ten thousand or so occasions he had done so almost entirely out of a sense of duty towards wife and family. Duty and decorum were the ruling abstracts of his life. However, in moments of unhappiness he did allow himself to reflect that, if he had not married Hetty—if he had gone away after Mr. Turney had forbidden him to see his daughter—if he had not weakly given in to the illusion of love—he would by now be an entirely different man, living an open air life of action in Australia, where his younger brother Hilary had farming and other interests.
    City life, nevertheless, had its compensations. During the spring and summer months he could cycle into Kent and Surrey, and enjoy his own life of green fields, trees, water, thesight of sheep and cattle, the song of birds, sunlit flickering of butterflies. Now once again it was almost time to take to the wheel, to wipe vaseline off plated handlebar and pedal crank, and polish the enamel of the frame of his faithful iron steed. How well was that machine named—his all-black, all-weather Sunbeam with the Little Oil Bath, built in Wolverhampton, made to last a lifetime by British craftsmanship, the finest in the world!
    Proud of his thoroughbred possession, its black frame lined with gold after twelve stove-enamellings, its bright parts solidly plated with nickel-silver, Richard, during the seasons of light and life, kept the Sunbeam polished, lubricated, and adjusted; while the Dunlop tyres were always pumped to the recommended resilience against those enemies of the pneumatic tube—the innumerable pale flints of the white and dusty roads of Kent.
    *
    At breakfast Richard announced his intention of cycling that Saturday afternoon to the Salt Box on the North Downs, for a tea of boiled eggs and brown bread and butter, should the weather keep fine. Would anyone (meaning Phillip) care to accompany him? No one apparently would.
    “Well, don’t all