Lucifer Before Sunrise (12 page)

Phillip walked on to open the gate. The entrance was narrow, sharply at right-angles to the lane.

“Your best way in is to run up the lane and come back with left-hand down.”

Bert Close’s restraint broke. London gutters gushed. Phillip kept silent. He was thinking of the fragile 5-gallon paint-cans filled with petrol splitting as Bert Close struck the stone hedge, reversing and going forward several times in the darkness. Flames. Death. My children.

With a touch on wings Bert Close drove in, switched off engine, opened cab door, got out.

In silence Phillip led them to the Gartenfeste, went up the
outside
stone steps and unlocked the door of the loft. On the oaken
floor were rolls of coconut matting of the kind used as camouflage in the last war. He had bought them as wind-shields for sapling trees planted a dozen years previously. A springy mattress. Old blankets in a japanned uniform trunk. Pillows. Lighted candle.

Bert Close took off cap, unrolled matting, spread it, lay down, pulled blanket over head. The shine of the candle hurt Phillip’s eyes. Saying goodnight to Poppy he went down the steps in his heavy leather coat. The stars were clear after the rain.
Brr-brr
. Were the enemy bombers throbbing in the sky, making for South Wales?

Luminous hands of wristlet watch said half-past two. Bert Close had been driving for twenty-one and a half hours with one and a half hours for meals. He went into the basement room, built
underground
, walls plastered with water-repellent cement, lit fire in open hearth and sat down, trying to work out the average travelling speed, three hundred and thirty miles during twenty running hours: sixteen and a half miles an hour.

He slept by the fire, in leather coat. When he awoke he thought of Melissa. Would she be visiting her aunt? He wrote a letter to her at St. George’s Hospital, saying he was staying at the field.

In the past two weeks' issues of the local paper an advertisement had appeared under the
Miscellaneous
column:

Curious to see what replies it had brought, Phillip walked down the hill, and loitered until the village post-office was open. There was but one reply to the advertisement, from an official of the Board of Trade, warning him that as there was no such thing as an Approximate Ton any attempt to sell by a non-existent standard of weight would contravene the law. The writer of the letter added that he would be interested to hear any observations the
wood-merchant
cared to make on the subject. Phillip thought of asking him if he would care to accept, as a unique rarity for the Board of Trade Museum, an Approximate Ton of wood, to be preserved in perpetuity with other ersatz war-time exhibits; but on second thoughts he did nothing.

On his return to the field the lorry was standing in the drive as before. He went to the outside stone steps of the Gartenfeste and discreetly called upwards. There was no reply; and he went away with a mental picture of two figures within the loft sleeping exhaustedly on coconut matting.

It was a sharp clear morning, which might mean rain later. He went a score of yards away from the building, and sat down on the bank. But not to rest or relax: there was too much to think about. Petrol tins to be distributed and hidden in the plantations: food: the steep lane up by the wood with its choked little narrow entrance—if he could find it—to be cleared before they could start.
Could
they start? Would not the difficulties be too great? He felt cold.
due to lack of sleep, but knowing that he could not sleep in the daytime.

Difficulties? Yet somehow they were overcome. Everything was relative. He remembered how Lucy and he had laid the oak floor in the loft of the Gartenfeste some years before. The oak boards had been nicely fitted by the builder, when they had been green wood. Knowing how oak shrinks, he had asked him not to nail them down. They had shrunk a lot; and they had warped as well. Some planks had twisted into curves. Others had curled to the enclosed heats of summer. The job of laying the stubborn, writhen planks had seemed formidable. He had never before laid a floor. The village carpenter had lent him a cramp, explaining what it was. The first morning, all planing and fitting was most difficult. He sweated, after weeks of writing. Was peevish, and at times in despair. Lucy had been her patient self. At the end of the third day, work went smoothly, quietly, harmoniously, for by then he knew what to do, and so had no anticipatory fear of failure. What patience Lucy had shown…

How simple those days seemed now; yet how difficult they had been seen to be at the time. How ignorant he had been, his mind wrong-set to the working rhythms of the body.

The proper time to accustom (otherwise to break in) the body to the slow, satisfying, non-mental rhythm of sustained body-work was in boyhood and early youth. Properly organised, made
interesting
, such physical education would alter the secret-mind-life of, and give calmness to, metropolitan man. Surely it was the only way to dissolve the crystallised, or petrofact, mentality of the towns. All boards of directors would know how to use, and learn how to enjoy using, the shovel and the spade; how to load sheaves on a waggon, know the knack of lifting four bushel sacks, hoeing turnips, shifting and spreading muck. Youth was the time to learn body-patience, the easy body-rhythm. For himself, he was part metropolitan waste-land—only part natural.

“Only through understanding and realising oneself can one understand others,” he said aloud as a surprisingly cheerful Bert Close appeared round the wooden building, coming from the plantation of pines and beeches.

“Quite right, guv. Lovely morning.”

“Hello, Bert! I thought you were still sleeping.”

“Bin lookin' round. We ought to dump the petrol cans among the trees. I've mended the blow-outs. Didn't like to unload until you came. Lovely up here, ain't it?”

“Sorry I was irritable last night.”

“That's what Poppy says I must say to you, guv. But I knew I could get here, in my own time, straight I did.”

“Of course you were right to go carefully. I
would
have turned the lorry over, had I been driving.”

“You ain't used to it, that's all. I've learned to go steady. It gets you further in the end. Where's the water pump, guv?”

“Well and windlass over there, above those long grasses. The water will be about forty feet down at this time of year. There should be a stove in your loft. We brought a drum of paraffin, didn't we?”

“Poppy's already got the oil-stove working up ours, guv. We must get some rooti.”

“I've got some. Also possi. And bacon, eggs, and butter. In my basket. But no bergoo. That beats you, does it? I learned words of Hindustani from the old sweats in ninteen-fourteen. Bergoo is porridge.”

“Poppy and me was talking it over, guv. She'll do the
housekeeping
, and we'll pay our whack, and you pay yours. I'll unload the lorry after breakfast, then we'll go down and look at the wood, shall we?”

“Grand.”

They had breakfast of boiled eggs and cold bacon in the loft. Poppy had already tidied it, and set the table.

“Was the floor hard?”

“Oh, it's lovely,” exclaimed Poppy. Her cheeks were glowing. “Look at the view from the window! And it's all so clean, the wood walls and roof, and the fresh air!”

Bert Close produced his mouth-organ, and
Danny
Boy
followed, peaked cap tilted. Then putting mouth-organ back in pocket, he lit a fag and said, “How about washing the old paws, and whisking away the old whiskers?”

“The rain-water in the butts below is softer than the well-water. First, let's get a rough idea of the day. Poppy, will you provide lunch? Use the cold bacon as you like. We'll take the billy can and water to the oakwood, and make a fire for tea. Now, Bert, the idea is to cut long poles and bring 'em back every day. We'll saw them up here, and store some of the logs in the woodshed. We'll make a heap outside, and load them as we get orders. Someone in the village wants a dozen tons, at least.”

Bert Close said, after a moment's reflection, “I'll get the gear out we don't need to take with us.”

“Have a cup of tea first.” Poppy gave them each a filled mug.

*

After breakfast they set to work. It was pleasant to work under Bert's quick directions: a new life. They got the hood off, folded it, removed boxes of stores, spare parts of the lorry, and clothes. Each can of petrol was concealed under dry needles at the foot of a pine-tree. Tank of lorry filled, and chassis being greased, they drove down another lane into a valley of trees and so to a hillside oak-wood.

It took them all morning to find the area of scrub-oak which Phillip had bought a decade before. The woods, extending around a hill, grew on the steep northern side of a valley which turned away from a small moor of heather and furze and bracken lying west of the Dart watershed.

It was some years since Phillip had been there. He could not find his parcel of wood, among so many acres of trees. In search of it they crossed a culvert over a rapid stream, and went up a steep lane sunken by winter water-courses several feet below field and wood. It was somewhere in the wood which arose out of the hill-slope to their left. The wreckage of two small gates, choked by brambles, lay by what once might have been a track among the oaks. Now which gateway entered upon his piece, the upper or the lower? After several explorations he decided that it was the gateway higher up the lane.

“Blimey,” said Bert Close, “how am I going to turn in there?”

The sunken lane in which they stood was only two feet wider than the lorry. Trees met overhead, making a tunnel of green shadow. It was airless and warm. The gateway, even when cleared of growths of bramble, hazel, and ash, was hardly five feet wide. “How am I to back in there? Half a mo'. Let's work it out. Blinder?”

While they were lighting Woodbines an old dog appeared out of the wood. Phillip recognised the bob-tailed sheepdog as belonging to the farmer who had sold him the timber. The dog recognized him at the same time, and put its nose against his hand. He had fed it, all those years before, when first going to look at the wood. The chink of a mattock on stony soil came through spaces of green leaves and summer shadows.

Last time Phillip had come, the farmer had been working in the field above the wood. “I'll be back in a moment,” he told Bert Close.

Accompanied by the dog, he walked through the trees,
wondering
how they would manage to cut down such thick trunks. The scrub-oak was usually thrown every twenty-one years, and his acre had been left to over-grow by a decade. He came to the edge of the wood. There in the field was the same old fellow. He left his hoeing and came down to where the lorry stood. He was not really old, but had always seemed the same to Phillip—a man with quiet blue eyes as serene as the sky and his own soul, a kind face that had accepted suffering gently. Phillip remembered a talk they had had about Jesus of Nazareth, when the woodman had brought a load of poles to his cottage during the hard winter when he had been living with Barley. He had charged only ten shillings. He was a simple, steadfast man because peace was in his own spirit.

They walked together up a track almost obscured by
nutbushes
, and the woodman said, “Let's zee, us might be able to recognize th' marks of the bill 'ook where us marked 'n before.” And there were the marks in the trunks of two hollies, nearly obliterated by the rising sap of half-a-score years. “This be your parcel, zur. Now us comes up yurr, and us takes a line from this path to th' aidge, and that be what us reckoned was ten rod, or a quarter of an acre. Now t'other remainin' parcel be further up th'ill. 'Tes thissy way, plaize to vollow me, zur.” They followed the overgrown track, to where wild cherries were hanging in green clusters. Above the canopy of leaves a buzzard was soaring, its plaintive whistle coming down the sky. “Tes peaceful after Lunnon, I reckon?” said the farmer.

“I'm farming on the East Coast now.”

“Aw, you be up on the East Coast? What sort of land 'tes like up there? Be it hard to work?”

“Some of it. Small rainfall.”

“Aw, vancy that, now.”

“We grow malting barley, sugar-beet, wheat, oats, fatten bullocks, and have a small flock of Suffolk-Oxford-Down ewes.”

“Aw, ban't that strange, now. Us'v be asked vor grow this yurr sugar-beet, you knaw, but I reckon 'tes a bit strange like for us down these parts.”

“It's just like mangold growing.”

“Aw, it be, be ut?” The blue eyes seemed lost in wonder. “So you've left Malandine, tho'? I minds reading on th' paper that you'd married again. I must tell th' missus. I always mind that talk us had, midear, years agone, but I expect you've forgotten it.”

“No, I remember it. Especially in these times.”

They stood amidst shadow-maze on heads and faces. The faint, sweet cries of long-tailed tit-mice hunting in the branches came to them, and the whistle of the hawk soaring over the hill.

“So you'm down in these parts again vor cut wood, tho'?”

“Yes, a holiday.”

“Tes hard work, you know, midear. 'Tes best in winter, when it ban't so hot.”

“Do us good. Sweat the vice out.”

“Ah, hard work never killed a man yet.” He looked gently at Phillip. “Well, I'll be gettin' back to me roots. The thistles be getting master big this year, I'm thinking.”

“Oh, by the way, if we enlarge the gateway, does it matter? And we may want to put a saw-bench just inside.”

“Wull, if you put th' postie back, 'twill be all right. And you'll leave me the standards up yurr, won't 'ee?”

The standards were the straight single trees, not growing out from the stub-roots of previous cuttings. The standards were left, at every cycle of cutting, to grow into big timber. “'Tes me brother's after me, you see,” he said, half-apologetically.

“You're what is called the tenant-for-life, I see.”

“That be ut.”

Phillip promised he would treat the wood as though it were his own. And with a quiet word to the dog, who gave Phillip's hand another touch with its cold nose, the farmer went back to hoe his roots in the heat-reflecting stony field. 

*

After clearing the gateway with hook and slasher they sought a steep bank against which the lorry could be backed, whence to run tractor down the ramp of the hatch-board which had been Phillip's bed for a few rainy minutes at the start of the journey. They found a bank. The tractor came off easily, Bert Close up. As it wasn't licensed to run on the roads, and Phillip didn't want any questions asked by any wandering policeman, he drove it down the lane behind the lorry, over the culvert bridge of the brook, and up the steep lane and so into the cleared gateway. Soon it was hidden safely in the depths of the forest, its rainproof cover secured against any sudden ocean rain.

The next job was to dig away part of the stone bank to widen the entrance. Bert Close had discovered where, at the top of the lane, he could enter a field, reverse, and come down the lane again, so the problem of transport became simple. When the bank and
the bushes of cob-nut growing on it had been cut away, the lorry could be reversed, tail-first.

Just to feel they had made a start, they cut some of the little crooked oak-poles by the gate, stripped them of branches, and heaved them into the lorry. Both axes were blunt, though Phillip fancied his was sharp.