The Innocent Moon by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online Page A

prominent a landmark as the church on the Passchendaele ridge before the bombardments of Third Ypres.
    He waited there, astride the Norton, held by the atmosphere of the place. Above the lower grape-dark horizon floated red and yellow islets and peninsulas of sunset; below the sombre silhouette of the church, with its suggestion of a magician’s pointed hat the valley appeared to hold a living shade. Gulls flighting overhead in silence gave thoughts of generations of drowned fishermen and sailors whose wooden ships had been battered on the rocks beyond the church, whose spire had perhaps held a warning light in black stormy nights of winter.
    He heard a partridge calling somewhere in the lower gathering gloom, and from farther off came the tooth-comb scrape— crick- crick, crick-crick —of a corncrake. Then down the reverse slope of the valley a barn-owl came in wavy, hesitant flight, moving irregularly above the mice runs in the grass: at the bottom it hovered, then came up the near slope towards him, suddenly to check, throw up its white wings and drop to the grass. One more mouse had copped it. He sighed, and holding back the valve-lifter, paddled off down the hill and rushed with deep-drumming exhaust to the bottom, leaning over into the curve at the bottom, and then full throttle up the farther rise as the moon was showing its top rim over the sea.
    Passchendaele village, as he thought of it, was bleak and unfriendly, no one about; he returned down the valley, and takinga side-lane, descended another valley and came to a village, where he lodged for the night at the post office, kept by a Miss Potts who had a red tip to her nose and charged him 5/- for bed, breakfast, and supper of cold beef and pickles. The village, he learned, was called Malandine.
    He was up early, and soon on his way below the southern boundary of the moor to Tavistock, and so to Launceston and then Bideford, where he had luncheon in an old hotel by the bridge across the Torridge.
    Afterwards at a book shop half way up the steep High Street he bought a half-inch Ordnance map; and at Barnstaple was in more or less known country. The Norton flew with crisp exhaust note beside the estuary of the Taw, and turning west along the Ilfracombe road, climbed to high ground from which the mountains of Wales were seen. From there, after losing his way several times, he found the village of Breakspeare St. Flamnea and went down on foot to Rat’s Castle, a semi-derelict lime-burner’s cottage above the tidemarks of a cove on the rocky coast, hoping against hope that Willie would be there.
    A window was unlatched. He got inside, and walked across a floor bestrewn with plaster, bits of torn-up writing paper, and owls’ crop-pellets. Upstairs the one bedroom was equally desolate, with splashings like lime-wash on the floor. Books lay about, their covers warped by damp. A heap of bracken along one wall was apparently Willie’s old bed. Looking closer, he saw the white faces and yellow plumage of three young barn owls. Willie’s favourite bird was the barn owl: what fun that they were holding the fort for him!
    He spent the rest of the afternoon there, until the westering of the sun began to cast a shadow on the beach; and feeling melancholy (he had eaten only bread and cheese since noon) he said goodbye to the little cove, thick with sea-shells, and climbed up the brambly path to the lane above. Should he make for Aunt Dora’s cottage at Lynmouth, or return across Dartmoor and stay a few days in Malandine, where he had slept the previous night? But Aunt Dora’s faint disapproval in a letter of some time back —warning him against ‘treading the promrose path’—decided it: he would run back to Malandine.
    There he arrived at twilight, and walking up a steep narrow lane above the stream, spoke to a labourer pumping water just off a turning, below which were two stone-built cottages, their front walls bulging slightly in places and covered with