## EXCURSION

On yet another evening, their voices, gathered together. One
voice, in variations.

"You're not too near the window, Gran?"

"No; thanks, dear. The wind seems to have dropped."

"This one usually does towards the end of the day." Yes.
Leaving a splendid sky: huge clouds piled along the horizon, lit
by sunset; then by afterglow slowly fading. Jane loves it just as
I do. Jane knows all about the doings of the winds,

"Thank God for that. This coast's all wind. That filthy one
last night kept me awake for hours. By the way it must be nearly
blackout. Anybody got the time?"

"Don't worry, Daph. In any case we'll see the lights vanish
across the way when they do theirs."

Jane wants to keep the sky as long as possible. But she won't
say so. Neither would I. To mention it may, or may not, pass it on
to someone who has not yet observed; but spoils it a little for
oneself.

"No lights there. I can see the windows. Besides, even if
there were, they might be watching for ours to go up when we black-
out. They're either out or gone. I believe they're gone."

"Poor Daph. You've been hoping that for days."

"Well Jane, who hasn't? You know perfectly well you've been every bit as fed up with that indescribable kid raising hell all day

2

long. Besides, you've only to _think_. All the schools have to start
before Friday. And this morning there was a car. I heard it. All
their voices shouting down the engine."

"And you didn't prance out and yell to the shover to stop that
infernal row?"

"Don't be silly. This hole isn't _town_. And it wasn't two in
the morning. Besides, I never said infernal."

"No, She said _blasted_. Don't contradict me. Hear my fact.
Decisive. A coal-cart. Yesterday afternoon."

"Peter! Why on earth didn't you tell us? That settles it.
They've _let_. All the swear-words!"

"Oh, well, Daph, it mayn't be so bad. Perhaps just those
ghosts who were there last term. Living in the kitchen. We hardly
knew they were there."

"Wishful thinking. And anyway it makes no difference to you,
with your window at the back. They don't overlook _you_ and make you
get up with stuffy curtains drawn and the lights on. Foul."

"Perhaps there's no one. Anyway we'll soon know."

"Anyway we've got to _blackout_. We may as well do it now and
have done with it."

"Aow!"

"Well, Jane, you _know_ what it'll be if we're late. Do you
want the natives banging at the door?"

"We won't forget. Anyway, even down here, the wardens nowadays
ain't so pertikler to a few minutes."

"Carried, with amendment. Police, not wardens. Meantime what about a light?"

"Yes, precious. Switch it on. You've been a lamb, Peter. Have you been cursing me?"

"Oooh-noo. Been taking in your sky-show. Extra special show."

A knife, turning in one's heart. This sky will be a part of his embarkation leave. To be remembered in God knows what circumstances. Its light is nearly gone. The light that hides the stars. Our light is on, our little indoor sun. Jane loves them both. So, I believe, does Peter. He'll now produce the book that is too big to take back to camp. Jane will keep on knitting, with an eye on the sky till blackout. I shall have to move, then, away from my little retreat, my sky-lit window seat, back again towards to-morrow."

"Now that we can see, let me tell you, Daph, on the authority of my newly-mended watch, that the time is . . . twelve and a quarter minutes past seven . . . the next part of the programme follows . . . in . . . just under three minutes. Nearly the whole of which the good man wastes in haltingly specifying the record he proposes to put on. Don't worry. I'll keep an eye."

"There's a female announcer who, if there's a gap, doesn't waste a second, puts on a jolly march."

Black and tan collie. Hurtling himself, all alone, along the

4

empty esplanade. Leaping. Barking as he leaps. Wild with joy.
His barks go up into the sky, making me look up and realise how high
it is. Up and up and up. For the first time. I didn't know. Now I
know. I've seen it, and I know, and shall never, never forget. Up
and up and up and up. But looking again is not quite the same as the
first look. It is that I shall remember, always. A secret. People
will come, later on, after breakfast. But they won't see the sky as
it is when it's alone, when there's nobody about and nothing going on.

We must have gone to bed, we youngsters, the night before,
forlorn, with seaside at an end and nothing ahead but the early
morning train at the forgotten railway station up at the back of the
town. We shall have been up betimes. Neatly dressed for the journey.
Stockings covering sunburnt legs. Mary's hair in a bun. Ellen's a
doorknocker. Pug and I in pigtails. Gloves. The luggage in the
passage. And then, the letter for Mary. "Children!" I hear her
excited voice. "Another week! Mother says we can stay another week!"
I must have rushed out, just before breakfast, unable to bear, in-
doors, the overwhelming joy. In a fraction of a second, all darkness
gone. All menace. No railway-station, its rangour enhanced by the
certainty of missing the train, by the dread of a sudden loud shriek
from some near engine. No long moments of cowering in the carriage
with my fingers in my ears until our own engine should have shrieked.
Instead, the impossible restoration of every joy. Endless perspec-
tives. To-day not yet begun. Not to begin until after breakfast.

5

Then Sunday, an interim, rich, as it drew to its close, with anticipa-
tion of the week ahead, and bringing, at the seaside, its own nega-
tive joys: no visit to Grannie, no desperate search, after the first
greetings, for something to say to her that must be shouted, several
times, down her long speaking-tube, only to hear, when at last she had
caught one's words, her querulous, disconcerting, "Is that all?"

No children's service, all humiliation, and embarrassment of singing,
without a choir, _We are but little children weak._ Crown-up church
instead, everyone looking seasidy despite Sunday clothes, and every
moment of the long day bringing nearer the days stretching away ahead
further than one can see. Each with a morning, afternoon, evening.
Bringing successive joys. Climbing the wooden steps of the bathing-
machine, away out of the bright sunshine into the dark, damp interior,
keeping one's balance as the machine hurtles, to the jerky unwinding
of its cable, unsteadily over the sands towards the sea; hurried dis-
robing and getting into the clumsy two-piece bathing-dress; opening
the back door on the sudden glinting expanse of sunlit water; forget-
fulness of everything in the shock of the cloudy salt water; loss
even of one's own identity in swimming, tadpoling about until called
to climb up the steps, plunge back into darkness and peel off one's
heavy sodden gown in the damp, cold partition just inside the door.
Paddling, breaking up with one's toes the lovely network of gold in
the sunlit shallows. Shrimping in rock-pools; glad and sorry when
the draining away of sand reveals the little wriggling forms leaping

in the net and, here and there, a large, whiskered prawn. Donkey-
rides, the warm smell of leather and donkey-skin. Sitting on the
sand round the nigger minstrels, growing more and more blissful as
each well known item faithfully returns, and hungry and hungrier as
the morning draws to a close. Fruit pie and cream every day for the
second course. More paddling and shrimping in the afternoon, after
the short rest that brings, instead of sleep, blissful listening to
the outdoor sounds. And in the evening, when at home the day would
be over, going out on to the lamplit esplanade below which the faith-
ful sea flumps or whispers in the darkness, to hear Pat Murphy sing
his songs standing up in his cart beside the cottage piano: *Father*
*O'Flynn, The Yeoman's Wedding, Fiddle and I, Off to Philadelphy,*
*Enniscorthy, Ballyhooley.* Singing refrains, with the rest of the
crowd, at the tops of our voices. Singing words, regardless of
their meaning, to lilting music:

"Willaloo-oo, and we'll all enlist ye know,
For the principles and illiments they cha-arm me,
For they don't care what they ate, if they get their
whisky nate,
In the Ballyhooley Blue-Ribbon Arrr-my."

All these things will have crowded upon me, standing together
in my enraptured mind. And then the dog barked, and I forgot them.
And now, after sixty years and more, whenever Weymouth is recalled
to me it is not the seaside joys that return, but that first dis-
covery of the sky. And each time more vividly than before. Just

7

now, I felt the shock of it pass through me like an electric cur-
rent. It is not memory.

Strange that only to-night the muffled bark of that dog across
the way should restore this experience. Often I heard him when those
folks were there before. And constantly down here one hears the
sudden abrupt bark of a collie: that great fellow at the farm,
when he is collecting the cows. Several round about the Bay, when
they chase gulls, or just let off joy in capering about untrammelled
by roads. "Association of ideas" describes the process without ac-
counting for it. Certain conditions, certain states of being, es-
pecially favour re-entry into what we call "past moments"? But
they are not past.

"One three and a half minutes nearly hup, Daph.

Peter's voice, Peter's words shutting down upon incommunicable
experience. Shutting down, too, upon his own incommunicable experi-
ence.

"They're there," she said, and saw Jane's bent head swiftly
rise, and read, in the investigating glance that preceded her smile,
an anxious question: has Grannie began to wander?

One of these days, perhaps before long, as I sit listening to
the talk of others, a chance phrase, or some sudden evocative sound,
will so deeply involve me in experience that I shall be unaware of
speaking from the midst of it, irrelevantly, into a current occasion.

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Perhaps, even worse, I shall produce the sound known as a smile giggle. Shocked, they will be. Jane, solicitous. Needlessly. Not knowing that it is the old who find, and that almost ceaselessly, cause for solicitude: for shell-bound youth. It holds me for these three. Less for Jane, who, from babyhood, has had intimations. Peter, too up to a point. But his perceptions are apt to be specialised, restricted, comedic. Daphne's excited angers measure her awareness of wealth available. And prevent the acquisition of even a farthing. Both Jane and Peter will know, when their great moments come, the worse than uselessness of trying to hold them. Yet already they have mourned, as in my own time I mourned, over the passing of a scene, a mood, a set of circumstances. Unable to recognise these as their possessions, immortal, inexhaustible. Unable to discover their wealth until they are old and "wandering in their minds." Life makes artists of us all? No longer seeing experience chronologically, we can compose it, after the manner of a picture, with all the parts in true perspective and relationship. Moving picture. For moments open out, reveal fresh contents every time we go back into them, grouping and regrouping themselves as we advance.

Smiling, she was aware of Jane, gathering up the smile, adding it to the sudden words, speculating.

"Those folks are there again," she said briskly, raising her voice against Daphne's impatient swishing of the blackout curtains: "the ones who were there before."

9

"Gran, dear, how *do* you know?"

"Their dog; just now; I heard it; inside the house."

"That settles it. Darn."

"Well, Daph, we oughtn't to expect *any* house down here to stand empty nowadays."

"For heaven's sake tell me something I don't know!"

And now the dog was barking in the open. Enthusiastically. Being taken for his evening run. Another evening moving towards its temporary end. Moving into store.

ENGLISH STORY, 1945.

WOODROW WYATT.