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John Gladwin Says . . .

by Oliver Onions

 

If we are to believe John Gladwin, the oncoming car made no attempt to avoid him, but held straight on. It held on at top speed, he says, for the first he saw of it was the sudden blinding gold of the afternoon sun on its screen, almost on top of him. He was not woolgathering or thinking of anything else at the time, and he had been for years a teetotaller. As for there not being any other car there at all, he naturally scouts the idea, for if there had been no other car why should he have made that violent and instinctive swerve? He did swerve; something hurtled past him; into the hedge and through it he and his car plunged; and where a moment before the white secondary road had run straight as a ruler for miles, he found himself on soft green, still at the wheel, his screen unbroken, his engine still running.

He says that his first thought was this — people ought not to drive like that. All was quiet on the road behind him, but the fellow could hardly be out of sight yet. John Gladwin came to life. He climbed as quickly as he was able out of the car and pushed through the hole he had made in the hedge.

Properly speaking he had not come through the hedge at all. He had broken through a thin part of it, a gap, thinly tangled over, and his car had come to rest on an old grass-grown track beyond. He looked first down the long white road. There was no sign of any other car, and no other roads ran into it. Then he looked at his own wheel marks in the dust, and they rather scared him. Heavens! What a mercy he had been crawling along! It would be just as well to report a lunatic who drove like that.

But what was there to report, except that golden flash, gone in a moment, the empty road, and his own tracks in the dust? He scrambled back through the broken hedge and climbed into the car again. At any rate he was alive.

Something had happened to the car none the less. The lever would not go into reverse. Again and again he tried; it went with ease into the other speeds, but not into the one that would take him out backwards again into the road he had left. He got out and set his shoulder to the car, but that was a younger man’s job, and the car remained immovable. Then he looked ahead, and thought he saw the best thing to do.

Old Harkness Bottom he knew the region to be called, and from the pocket of the car he fetched out the map. It was an old map, mounted on linen, in tatters with much use, but it told him what he wanted to know. Harkness itself — New Harkness the older people still called it — lay away over the hill and out of sight, and New Harkness was almost a bustling sort of place. A tarred main road ran through it, with traffic at all hours, and it had red and yellow petrol pumps, and a church already old as new churches go, with its shrine and flowers at the lych-gate and its tablet with the names of seven Harkness lads inside. But nobody ever went near Old Harkness. Something had happened about the price of corn, and its very stones had been carted away to make the new village.

But there was probably a way through and out again beyond, and John Gladwin, unable to go back, decided to go forward.

On the left of the green lane along which he bumped rose a rough slope covered with ragwort and thistles, and on his right he brushed another hedge so closely that clusters of berries, vivid and rank, scarlet and bright green and glossy black all on the same bunch, broke off and fell into the car, with strippings of deadly nightshade and fat-fruited bryony. Swish, snap, rip; it was far from being a new car, and a loose mudguard rattled and the headlamps vibrated with the jolting. For half a mile or so he drove, winding now to the left and now to the right. And then suddenly he came upon a whole world of palest pinkish-silver.

It rose steeply round three sides of a deep dell, the seeding willow-herb, deadly soft, wreathed, billowing, with here and there a maple of a gold so vibrant that the eye was almost sensible of a twang. A week or two before it must have been a dyer’s vat of the flagrant purple; now the very air was thickened with the fleece of its procreation. And down in the bottom, in the only patch the weed had not invaded, stood a church.

John Gladwin would hardly have known it was a church, he says, if it had not been for the tombstones. There were perhaps a score of these, lying and leaning at all angles, and some of them were not stones at all, but nameboards of ancient wood with finials sticking up at the ends like prick-ears, John Gladwin says. As for the church — well, there it was, what remained of it, that wrecked and ivied hummock in the middle of the field. The gap into the field had no gate. John Gladwin imagines he must have stopped his engine, for this pink and silver bowl in the hills was filled with an immense quiet. He got out of the car. Picking his way among the tombstones he pushed through coarse grass to the ruin.

The stone-movers had been there too, John Gladwin says, for half of the broken buttress over which he clambered had gone; but that ragged “V” against the sky where the belfry had been had probably fallen down of itself. He could only just force his way in for brambles and tangled rose, and a mountain ash filled the chancel, its berries already turning red. The whole church was not more than fifteen strides long. A greenish semi-darkness filled it, says John Gladwin. And all over brooded that stillness, not of peace (he says), but of the desolation of things lost to the world. He started when, with a harsh beating of wings, a thrush flew out of the chancel where the mountain ash was. But he jumped nearly a foot into the air when, loud and immediately above his head, there clanged out the single stroke of a bell.

Of course he knew there was no bell. The nearest bell was the thin-noted bell of New Harkness Church, away over the hill, and anyway its sound would have passed unheard overhead. Nevertheless John Gladwin looked up. And naturally he saw only the ragged “V” where once a bell had been. And then the note came again, urgent and earnest, as if it summoned somebody to make haste. John Gladwin, suddenly remembering that he was in a church, took off his hat.

The bell that wasn’t there rang a third time, and he bent his knee and crossed himself. As he did so he heard his name spoken behind him.

Now the most astounding statement of a number that John Gladwin makes is that of a sudden all this seemed reasonable and natural and right. Indubitably there had been a bell in that crumbling “V” above his head. It had had its own voice, earnest and urgent and compelling. But in another moment he had forgotten all about the bell, he says. What was a bell by the side of the voice that had called him by his name? It was a young voice, of a lingering sweetness, that finished each syllable exquisitely, and had always moved John Gladwin past telling. It took him back more than thirty years — and already John Gladwin was fifty-eight years old when he says all this happened. And then the voice spoke his name again.

“John!”

This time he did not turn round, as a minute or two before he had looked up at that startling ringing of the bell. What, he asks, is the good of turning round to see something that is as much you as your heart itself? Instead he replied to the voice, and his own tones shook with a still passion of tenderness.

“Emily!”

“So you were able to come?”

“I was not able to stay away.”

“You rode over on Grey Boy?”

“Yes, most loved.”

“I have his piece of sugar. It is in my muff.”

“How beautiful you are!”

“Am I?”

“Have you no kiss for me?”

And the voice said, “Hush — we are in a church.”

She had always been like that, John says, sweet and circumspect, decorous and right, so that those other moments, when there had been no need of circumspection, had been by contrast unutterably full. And when a love like that has been it still is, and dies only with the heart it has visited. So in that sense I should say that every word John Gladwin says is to be believed. He was in a church with her once more, with Grey Boy contentedly cropping in the adjoining pasture. Not the leprous silver of the willow-herb disgraced the hill outside, but the corn whispering in the sun, with the horseless reaper left where it was until Monday morning. He was less aware of the hymn book they shared than of her hand so near to his own; and he wore a cravat, and she an adorable little bonnet with ribbands, and a flounced skirt with a waterfall behind. And John Gladwin says it didn’t seem to be any particular Sunday. The Sundays seemed to run together, he says, as snowy Christmases run together in our memories, and sunny summers, and indistinguishable daisy-fields, that somehow seem the same daisies year after year.

But there came suddenly a Sunday that did stand out from the rest. As plainly as he had heard the bell he heard the parson’s voice again, pronouncing his name with hers who sat there in the square pew so consciously glowing by his side.

“I publish the Banns of Marriage —”

There was a rustle in the mountain ash that filled the chancel; the thrush had returned. Through a fissure where the ivy had forced the stones apart two butterflies could be seen at play. Morsels of fleece settled on John Gladwin’s new black armband, and something stirred among the thigh-deep nettles. But to John Gladwin it was her voice again. Thrice the Banns had been proclaimed, and none had known of any let or impediment.

“So now you can hardly run away!” the voice laughed.

“Away! Where, away from you, when you are everywhere?”

“So that’s what you mean when you say I’m the world to you!”

“You are both worlds, the bread I eat and the prayers I say.”

“Listen to him, Grey Boy! Did ever you hear such a man?”

“We are not in a church now, love. Have you no kiss for me?”

And the remembered kiss was as fresh to John Gladwin as on the day it had been given. At this point John Gladwin admits to a certain confusion as to what was really happening. His actual surroundings, he says, stood out clearly enough before his eyes. Looking up he saw the gap where the bell had been. Looking out of the breach by which he had entered he saw the spilth of silver seed, the raw gold of the maples, his car not a hundred yards away. But in some other way he cannot explain the things he saw were doubled with other things, just as by mechanical ingenuity pictures are imposed on pictures and made to come and go. It was, he says, as if one looked at a half-obliterated sketch and saw brightly through it, drawing nearer and nearer, a golden-hued irradiation behind.

Unfortunately, to question him too closely is to confuse him and make him give different answers. He acknowledges, for example, that he is not a Harkness man and that his Banns were never called in Old Harkness Church. It was in a church two hundred miles away that they were published. But Holy Church, he says, is one no matter where the location of its fabric, and wedding bells are the same whether they be a merry peal or a single blithe note.

For it was his marriage, he says, that that vanished bell next gave tongue to. Not nettles and brambles, but guests filled the church, the friends of the bride on the one side, those of the groom on the other. The gilded pipes of the little organ reared themselves among the berries of the mountain ash. The fissure where the butterflies played healed itself; and there floated into its place the placid white marble tablet of Henry Gladwin, Justice of the Peace, benefactor of the church, and owner of acres long before things had happened about the price of corn. The altar was raised again, a roof of oak shut out the September sky, John Gladwin says. And she came in on her father’s arm and was brought to where he waited for her. She wore her great-grandmother’s lace, and never, the village declared, had a bride looked lovelier.

And John Gladwin thinks that as he stood there, as one might say in two churches at once, he saw something no man has seen before — two faces also at once, not as one sees them in some old album, with the gradations of the years coming, coming calmly and imperceptibly in between, but vividly and violently contrasted, the unwrinkled face side by side with the wrinkled one, the veined hand by the flower-smooth one, and nothing to account for the fading and change. And one face was shrouded in lavendered lace, and the other had lain now for a week in another shroud. The two faces looked together at him, different yet the same, as his love had been different yet the same. She had neither utterly died nor utterly grown old. Something as inalienable as her name had persisted throughout — Emily.

So she said “I will” that day, and there was a hush, because they were in a church.

John Gladwin says that he saw himself too. He saw himself in a pouting grey cravat and beautiful tubular trousers, and he was straight-backed then and strong-limbed, and could if need be walk his thirty miles in a day instead of being glad of a coughing old two-seater to trundle him about. But he did not see himself twice over, side by side, as he had seen her, for what was there to look at in the John Gladwin who stood that afternoon among the brambles that choked Old Harkness Church, friendless, alone and very tired? Life was a thing to look back on, not forward to, and now, in this curious experience of his, he had nothing but thanks for that mad driver who, dashing past him with a flash of gold, had pushed him through the hedge and into the old lane. He heard the organ in the mountain ash again and the words joined in of themselves — “The voice that breathed o’er Eden that earliest wedding day.” He saw the throng at the sunny church door, saw the waiting carriages and the coloured favours of the horses, the showers of rice, an old shoe. He says he turned himself about in Old Harkness Church and actually saw these things, and not merely his own old two-seater waiting for him beyond the overturned tombstones. If they were not there, he says, he saw them none the less.

But some richness of light had passed away from the golden maples, a tarnish had come over the silver of the shedding weed. One could hardly have imagined a greater stillness than before, and yet the pause and hush seemed intensified, John said, as he suddenly remembered a pause and hush in his life before. Here again he admits to a certain amount of confusion. He was no longer in a church, but in his own office or study, where he kept his guns and account books and received his rent from his tenants, regaling them in the cleared barn afterwards with beef and beer. He had taken off his boots, quite unnecessarily, since his walking about could not possibly have been heard, and sometimes his brown hands were clasped before him and sometimes they touched grain samples or farm plans, or his  magnifying glass, or a strap, or some other of the objects that littered the room. He was waiting with tense nerves for news from upstairs, news of Emily.

It was brought to him, less by the doctor’s words than by his cheerful face. The child was a boy, and all was well. John Gladwin pulled his boots on again and put his hand to the little porcelain bell-knob by the side of the mantelpiece. Wine and glasses were brought — and then, without warning, he says, he was back in the church again. He was standing by the font, and when the priest said “Name this child” John Gladwin answered “George”, and by that name he was baptised in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

And a year and a half later it happened again, and the name this time was William.

John Gladwin says quite frankly that he is by no means certain as to what came next. As the light had died out of the maples so the pictures had become a little less distinct, a little more run together. Perhaps that was because on the whole his life had been a peaceful and eventless one. He had brought up his two sons in the fear of the Lord. On Sundays, in the square pew, and while they were yet quite small, he had had to tell them to hush, because they were in a church, and as they grew older, and those things began to happen about the price of corn, and the lads shot up to the height of their mother’s waist, and then to her breast, churchgoing lads they remained, as was right in the successors of that Henry Gladwin whose tablet in white marble looked down on the pew from the fissure where the butterflies were no longer at play.

John had not noticed the departure of the butterflies; butterflies go everywhere; and neither had he noticed the further sombring of the maples nor the change of light that turned the pink of the willow-herb silver to a whitey-brown. He was still, he supposed, half in the church two hundred miles away, and the Sabbaths ran together as the snowy Christmases had run together and the hot summers and the daisied fields and the birthdays of the boys. He was troubled about the boys, he says. The price of corn was becoming less and less what it should have been. The marble Henry Gladwin, gazing steadfastly from the wall into the square pew, might presently find one of the boys missing. Probably it would be George, the elder one. He spoke of Canada and South Africa. And it might be a good thing, for it was not right that John Gladwin’s labourers only should bear the brunt of a period of agricultural depression. John talked with Emily about it.

“But you have an offer for the shooting, John.”

“Which I shall take, but it is only delaying matters for another year. It is no remedy.”

“George only wants to go because he thinks it may ease matters.”

“George is not the only one who is going.”

“And then I suppose William will want to go after him.” John Gladwin vows that he heard all this again, in the broken church in Old Harkness Bottom.

“We must do what we can. And if you’re going to read, let me get you your glasses.”

But as things chanced it was neither Canada nor South Africa that took George and William. If John Gladwin is to be believed, that vanished bell against the now unnaturally hued sky spoke loudly once again. And, knowing now what was happening, he did not jump a foot into the air this time. Quietly he sank to his knees among the nettles.

“Let them go,” he said with bowed head. “I will go too. We shall all be needed.”

“John!” He says her voice rang sharply out. “They cannot take them! They did not bear them! They are mine!”

“They will go laughing. You will not be able to keep them.”

“But I shall be alone!”

“There is nursing. There is cooking. I will find you something to do.”

And again, says John Gladwin, the bell rang warningly out, as if to summon the women as well as the men.

But in the end neither did he find anything for her to do nor yet anything for himself. They wanted captains of twenty-five, not forty-five, they said, and he must wait his turn. Youngest and best first, and go George and William did. Shortly after, John Gladwin, seizing an occasion, sold his land two hundred miles away and brought his wife south and settled her in a small house not far from Harkness, and himself became a special constable since that was all they seemed able to find him to do.

And now, though he was on his knees, he was not in a place that at all resembled a church, but in some dim twilight of mud and flashes and roaring and death, that naturally he could not see clearly because he had never been there. An occasional “Pretty hectic” was all he got out of the letters of his sons, varied once in a while with a jest about its healthiness. The light through the brambles and the mountain ash became of a more sullen green. The wall tablet of Henry Gladwin, John says, dissolved away and another slid relentlessly into its place. This one was of oak, with names upon it in gold, and there was one exactly like it in New Harkness Church as well as where John Gladwin knelt. Even the names were the same:

GEORGE GLADWIN

WILLIAM GLADWIN

They were the first two of the seven. The names only survived. What had become of the rest of them neither John Gladwin nor anybody else knew.

A low muttering filled the air. It was the first rumble of the storm. There was a pale flash like the flash of a shell in daylight, and if John Gladwin wanted to get home before it came he had best put his hood up and begone. But he remained where he was, so still that the very field mice might have approached him. Then the muttering was no longer a muttering. Suddenly the heavens cracked and pealed harshly above his head. A chill gust filled the air with fleece, and a bright flash showed every leaf and berry of the ash. But between it and the crash that followed John Gladwin says he heard another voice, the voice of the white-haired New Harkness vicar, who had put the names of John Gladwin’s sons in gold on the wall.

“We bring nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out . . . The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord . . . We therefore commit her body to the ground . . . Not to be sorry, as men without hope . . . ”

Three days before the words had been spoken, and John Gladwin says he heard their very vibrations still.

“Amen,” he said with bowed head, and rose as the first great drop struck his bare crown like a falling pebble.

He was hardly out of the church when the rain crashed down. Every broken tombstone was hidden in a mist and spray of it. The maples were not to be seen, the craven silver of the weed seemed to cower under its thrashing. Rivers coursed between the old graves, and at the gap where the wedding carriage had stood, with favours on the horses and flowers in the lamps — it was only John Gladwin’s car that stood there, twanging like a drum and spouting out valances of water.

Soaked to his spine, John Gladwin bent over the starting-handle. The engine broke into a rattle. He climbed into the sodden seat and sat for a moment wondering whether he should turn round or go forward. He decided to go forward. A gate might close the old track at its other end, but he would risk it. The other would be miles round to where he wanted to be — standing before a gold-lettered name board, standing before a mound of earth three days old.

And John Gladwin says, and stands to it, that it was to the tolling of the bell of Old Harkness Church heard above the shout of the rain that he swayed and splashed in the car round the churchyard and skirted the beaten-down silver of the weeds.

First, he says, he found roofless buildings, then a solitary inhabited farm, and then a straggle of cottages along a cart track, but ever getting nearer to the known world. Then, almost suddenly because of the rain, he saw the tree line of the tarred main road. At the crest the shower ceased as suddenly as if an invisible hand had turned it off at the main. Swiftly the clouds packed themselves away behind him and ahead there flashed on his eyes a dazzle of gold. It glittered on the still-showering branches, it made prisms in the air, and as John Gladwin swung out of the lane into the tarred road he saw nothing but a glow of molten light. He says it was like looking into the middle of the Sun Himself.

And the manner of his going out of Old Harkness Bottom was as the manner of his entering it. I think myself that Death did not ride on a Pale Horse that afternoon, but took a trip in a Golden Car. John Gladwin was driving slowly; at his time of life he never did anything else. He never saw what rushed towards him (he says), but only the effulgent road. And this time it was too late to swerve. It was just where the red and yellow petrol pumps stood, backed by their sheet-iron advertisements. New Harkness Church with its shrine and lych-gate was a bare hundred yards away. John Gladwin thinks, and says, that it was the same car as before. The noise of the smash was heard by a Bentley more than a mile away.

The Bentley came up and drew to a standstill. It had come from that direction, but it had met no other car. And it was the Bentley that took John Gladwin to the cottage hospital, with a broken back.

I myself have never been to Old Harkness Bottom, and have only John Gladwin’s word for it that there is a church there at all. We go to see him where he lies. He lies on a white bedstead, with a white-uniformed nurse to make things easy for the remaining time, which we, like himself, hope won’t be too long. And he tells us these things with the dreadful candour of a man about to die.

But sometimes, with the screen at his feet and the chart over his head, without regard to where he is, in a red-roofed cottage hospital with white woodwork and a privet hedge round it, he breaks off with a gesture. His fingers go to his lips and his eyes steal round. He is in Old Harkness Bottom again, and for all I know his boys are being naughty once more.

“Hush!” he reproaches them in a whisper. “We are in a church!”

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “John Gladwin Says…” by Oliver Onions, and if you enjoyed that then there’s a number of his novels and the collection Back o’ the Moon available on Project Gutenberg for you, for free, at gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5392

There is, of course, a lot I might say about life, here, or about death and grief, or about memory and nostalgia. But I was particularly struck by the passing mention, upon which nonetheless the whole of John Gladwin’s life and regrets seem to turn, of World War I, and the deaths of his sons George and William in that terrible conflict. I am, generally, an imaginative sort, able to sit and consider all sorts of situations; but the trenches of the Great War have always been beyond me. The misery, the abject terror, the squalid, awful conditions and the squalid, awful attrition of a generation. It is a suffering simply beyond my imagining: to have existed in such conditions not for hours, not for days, but for ­years is simply incomprehensible.

I wish I could end there, with a fervent wish that we never know its like again.

This week marks the one year anniversary since the significant escalation in the Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestine; though, of course, it also goes back 76 years. Nonetheless, since the 7th of October 2023, the Israeli army has killed 40,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women, children or elderly, with another 10,000 missing or under the rubble. There are a further 90,000 injured. It has displaced 90% of the population of Gaza–1.9 million people–leaving 17,000 children unaccompanied or separated. An estimated 50,000 children are suffering acute malnutrition and 96% of the population are not able to meet their nutritional requirements[1]. Timely figures for the material destruction are difficult to find, but as of April, estimates are that 57% of all buildings in Gaza are destroyed or damaged, and in Gaza City itself as much as 74%[2], a rate of destruction without parallel in modern history and surpassing even the Allied destruction of Dresden in the Second World War; and that estimate was 5 months ago. 21 out of 36 hospitals are out of service–and let us not forget that some of that is not incidental damage but targeted.

All this in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth–a density, of course, arising from the past 76 years of illegal settlements squeezing the Palestinian people into an ever smaller strip of land against the sea.

This, all of this, is beyond comprehension. These numbers are so large, and there are so many aspects that can be illuminated by such statistics, that it becomes almost an academic understanding. But it is not academic: it is visceral. It is the daily truth of 2 million people right now, while you hear these words. This episode will probably work out to around 35 minutes: in the time since you pressed play, 5 more Palestinians will have died from this occupation[3].

Please, take the next minute–just one, before you return to a life comfortable enough to allow you the time and the technology to listen to podcasts–to imagine what life is like in Palestine right now. Your local hospital is either bombed to rubble or overwhelmed trying to support the casualty rate as one of the few left standing. Your kids’ school is probably gone–70% of them are, after all–and the odds are your home is too, though you’re almost certainly not there but in a tent 20 miles away, starving, thirsty, waiting for the conflict to catch up to you. Hopefully your kids are with you, but you may have been separated on the road, or–worse–in the rubble as another 2000-pound bomb hit nearby.

[silence]

And there is no end in sight. There is no respite. Every day is worse than the day before and the world continues to allow this to happen.

You have been told, many times by many people, of the ways you can help. Please. Help Palestine.

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[1] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaza-strip-17-july-2024

[2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240507-unlike-anything-we-have-studied-gaza-s-destruction-in-numbers

[3] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam