Lucifer Before Sunrise (58 page)

The innocent moon was now past its full shine; the tides were being drawn lower behind the main sluice-doors in the far sea-wall. There the wind was piling up sea-water, which pressed back the doors, holding up the river flood-water. By the edge of River Wood the water was five inches below the bank-top. If the water ran over, how would it drain away? Had he not levelled the guts and channers which had drained the ‘lows?’

*

Hoody crows—the Denchmen (Danishmen) of the wildfowlers—stood among the watery wheat-drillings. Herons, too. Were they after wire-worms, or seedling corn? He shouted at them out of habit and waved his stick, though he was too far away for them to bother about him. They merely glanced up before working on. Jonny and he sloshed and slithered over the black soil amidst the fine-drawn green points. The birds flapped up lazily and perched in distant trees, waiting for the nuisances to go away. But what Phillip wanted to find out was if the new tide-door at the end of his section of the Old River was holding the water back.

All was well—for the moment. The main sluice-doors in the far sea-wall were obviously open, and the sea-tide lapsing, for the water-level behind the tide-door was dropping back. A line of grassy litter on the very top of the frame revealed how high the water had pressed before lapsing. There was barely half-an-inch of unwetted wood at the top: while on the inner or wheatfield side of the door the dyke-water had risen scarcely five inches, or nearly three feet below the water on the down-side.

“It works!” Phillip yelled with glee. “We’ll see a crop of wheat on the meadows in summer, ’bor!”

“Ah, thet we will, Chooky!”

A flock of widgeon flew overhead, followed by half a dozen mallard and a pair of teal. The old twelve-bore grouse gun stood in the corner of the parlour, by the grandfather clock; the new Gallyon twenty-bore lay in its leather case. When they got home Lucy said that ‘Ackers’ bringing the milk had told her that he had seen many ducks in the dykes between the meadows.

Phillip did not want to shoot ever again.

A blizzard fell out of the sky as he was returning from market in the Ford 8 saloon. There were two Redpoll heifer-calves with him, each within a jute sack to prevent it walking about on the back seat. He was driving along the coast road when he ran into a wind so strong that at first he didn’t realise what was happening. The engine seemed to be seizing, for on a road he knew to be level the car was slowing up. He had to change into second gear. The petrol indicator showed the tank nearly to be empty. He began to wonder if there would be enough juice to get home in second gear, for the engine was tinkling. He stopped, meaning to look at the oil dip-stick. Upon opening the door his mouth was almost blown open by the blast which was threshing thorn-hedges and screaming in telegraph wires. The entire sky before him was black.

He got back into the car, his clothes riddled by cold air, his face stung by sleet which swirled and slid on the road before a
goose-feather
descent of snow. For some time he sat behind a solid grey windscreen, while behind him the calves blared and struggled to be free. When the blizzard had swirled away the countryside was white, and he wondered as he went on if he’d get the car through the drifts before him.

What a sight when he got to the farm meadows lying below the road and the river! The distant sea, piled up by the wind against the tidal sluice-doors, had stopped the flow of the river, which now was brimming level with the banks. But the wind had stopped in time, and even as he peered the water began to move
downstream
.

‘Ackers’ was waiting in the cowhouse, beside the calf-pens he had made so neatly for his charges. When the calves were snug in a box, Phillip went home with thoughts of thorn-logs blazing, deep leather armchair, slippered feet, a mug of tea. First he put away the car (about a cupful of petrol left in the tank) into the excellent new garage built by the village carpenter near the Studio, and went indoors. There were the thorn brands flaming on the hearth, the leather chair, his carpet slippers, kettle steaming on iron crook, teapot on table. He sat down. The last of the sugar-beet had gone to the factory: no need to think about that. He had not been able to do any back-end ploughing. That couldn’t be helped.

He lay between rest and rumination (a vice, said Arnold Bennett) when he remembered a promise to take Jonny sledging on the Home Hills as soon as the snow came.

The afternoon was already darkening, and he was tired. Cattle
Market was always a place he visited only with reluctance, perhaps because he was always in a hurry, or because the massed and
plaining
discontent of so many animals, and strange intent human faces and raucous cries absorbed all his energy. However, a promise must be kept, especially to a child.

Looking through the lattice window to the white hills across the valley he saw in the dusk a small black shape descending fast. It hit the well-known bump and turned over. Two dark figures—Jonny and—who could it be?—picked themselves up and ran down to the sledge at the bottom.

Boy Billy, home on leave!

Jonny liked to explore by himself; and every day during the
holidays
he was off somewhere alone.

As the winds blew colder many hares limped down to the meadows, seeking shelter under the sloping river-bank. The bank extended in the shape of a horse-shoe from west to east. Under its lee, further protected from the north-west by thick bushes of thorn and bramble, Timid Wat and his friends foregathered, Jonny could see. Their squatting places were immediately apparent by the blood-orange stains in the snow; where they had staled. Dozens must have crouched in the warm lee of the bank.

He flushed a woodcock, followed by others flapping out of snow choking the long grey-green grasses of the sea-wall. They were tired, it was not fair to shoot them after the long hazard across the North Sea.

Jonny carried a stick, which he pretended was a gun. So he did not point the stick at the woodcocks.

One arose almost from his feet with a faint whinnying cry, as though of anguish. He watched its dark pointed wings flickering away as it twirled and pointed through the grey air towards the River Wood. A second arose with a whirring like that of a partridge, and he saw its long beak as it turned in the air and made its
downward
point two hundred yards farther on, across the river by Hubert’s wheat stacks which had been badly torn about by the gale. Hardly had it pitched when an owl arose, and on slow
yellow-pink
wings began to flap in silence along the river bank, over the rough grasses of the farther slope.

“Oh!” cried Jonny. “What a lovely farm this is!”

The owl came quite near him, and dropped suddenly, as though on a mouse or vole.

This bird, Jonny was sure, was not the white or barn owl which lived in the ruined tower of the Old Manor. He knew that owl
because it had a gold back streaked and laced with ash-grey. This strange owl was pink on the back, so what could it be? It was rather like Dad’s porcelain owl Dad had bought with his first week’s Fleet Street earnings soon after the first war. Dad said it was in a shop in Bond Street where they sold Copenhagen potterv, so the owl he’d seen might be a Danish owl.

Strange or rare birds often came in winter to that coast. Many were shot to be sold to collectors. Jonny knew that in the summer a pair of quails trying to nest in Dad’s Brock Hanger field were shot by the Durston poacher. He had heard Horatio Bugg say that he had got
£
4 from a local collector, a gentleman very proud of his rows and rows of birds in glass cases.

His boots crunched upon the river bank, snipe arose before him in twisty flight and with screaky cries. All the meadow was frozen, so the snipe sought feeding by the riverside. The heron, as usual, saw him long before he saw the heron. It oared itself up on slow, wide wings, three hundred yards away, and rowed its grey skiff away to the marshes.

When he got down to where the bird had been standing—easily visible by the long broad-arrows of its toes—Jonny found the large silvery scales of a roach on the bank. The heron evidently had been banging it to kill it and then had rubbed it in the snow.

By the River wood he saw the best sight of all: the broad
five-toed
spoor of an otter, beside the mark where its low body had dragged through the snow. So another had come up the river! It looked to be a young dog-otter, for every now and again it had turned on its neck and shoved itself along on its back, enjoying the feel of the snow against its spiky hairs. Like a spaniel, an otter loves rolling in the snow, he thought. Had it been after the wildfowl in Old River? He walked there slowly, and was startled by a sudden rush of wings as a score of mallard arose and, gaining speed above the treetops, wheeled away to the east. Jonny couldn’t resist raising his stick-gun. Bang! Bang! A drake and a duck fell on the meadow. With delight he picked them up to take home—two leaves.

He crossed the ice and crisp snow of the meadow, for one of his purposes in going there was to look for an axe Dad had mislaid somewhere while clearing the meadow hedge in the autumn.

It was not in the hollow ash-tree where usually it was kept out of the rains. But the otter was. Hissing and scrambling, its whiskered flat face giving one swift intent stare before it fell out of the dry ledge where it had been sleeping. Jonny heard it pushing along the ditch.

“Ooh!” exclaimed Jonny, his eyes wide. “Dad’s new otter in
my
tree!”

*

When the ground was in temper Phillip ploughed the arable, and for exercise helped ‘Ackers’ to feed the heifers in the Woodland Yard. They were Red Polls bought as calves during the past three years. The Aberdeen-Angus bull had gone. His successor was also hornless, but with red curls between his ears. Rufus and fourteen of his young wives and brides to be were fairly snug between cliffs of straw and hay within the south-east corner of the Bustard covert. Trees and straw kept back the spears of the East wind and the bludgeons of the North.

One of the places where Phillip used to find relaxation was in the bullock yard at the corner of the Bustard field. He did not care for the view outside, but preferred the shelter of the yard itself.
Therein
he seated himself on a wooden rail, straw stack at back, and felt the contentment of the Red Polls to be his own temporary feeling.

When he first saw it, the yard among the trees was a wreck, half hidden by nettles and elderberries. Its roof of rusty corrugated iron sheets, on rafters once supported by posts and bearers, had slid down on the rotted frame. The rails had dropped off the
decayed
posts which had fallen under a weight of ivy. When it was rebuilt and snug, he could feel the life of the nettles, the
wood-boring
insects, wrens, lesser-spotted woodpeckers, even that of the rusty flakes of ancient hand-forged long nails—what life had gone by, was going by all the time!

And what life was passing in the bombers. Night after night they thundered high above the clouds, squadron succeeding squadron, until hundreds had flown away over the North Sea: ‘terror raids’, the German Rundfunk declared, town after German town—the targets, as Billy had told them, were always the working-class suburbs—phosphorous and fragmentation bombs—being reduced to broken flesh and rubble.

*

From the top of one of the straw-stacks built around the yard as protection from the wind, he saw over the marshes, and the sea beyond the sandhills of the Point. Yes, the view was fine; but the eye of the farmer saw only too clearly below him the stiff yellow clay of a sucked-out field with its thin barley-stubble darkened by thicker stalks of vast thistle-colonies cut with the corn at harvest. The sight told him for the hundreth time that one could not clean arable without stubble-cultivation, and roots grown in rotation:
that roots could not be grown without good muck: that neat stock in yards without linseed cake did not make good muck.

Linseed was a conditioner of stock. Most of its oil and substance was dropped with an animal’s dung: thus to feed plants of corn in due season.

The yellow soil had been only lightly mucked twice in eight years, and it had done no good, except temporarily on the Lower Hanger. When had the twenty-two acres been mucked before that? Probably in the Great War, nearly thirty years ago. And yet a cash crop of corn had been taken out of that field for twenty years in succession before he took the farm in hand.

For the last five years British farmers had had no linseed or ground-nut cake with which to fatten bullocks, which would have dropped on the straw they trod half the value of the cake.
However
, Phillip had to use the straw up there for the making of some sort of muck. Also bullocks did better on high ground than in the cold, damp yards of the premises below. Wooden railings and posts lasted longer, too. So did the thatch of haystacks. Up there were drying winds. The noon sun of a winter morning shone upon their animals in the snug shelter. The frosts were healthy frosts.

Down in the valley winter frosts lay all day in the shadows of trees. Most of the woodwork and doors of the premises were green and sodden for five months of the year. Up here the yard-rails and elm planks of the new root-house were wind-dry within a few hours of the most prolonged and driving rain.

To cart straw down from these higher fields, even along the New Cut to the premises nearly a mile away, and then haul it up again as muck six months later was a tedious and costly business, so the ruinous yard was rebuilt. He waited four years to give the
twenty-two
acres of the Hanger fields their first coat in more than two decades. That dour yellow soil cried upon him every time he was up there. It set brick-hard in summer, and in areas the corn grew so sparse and slow that rabbits were lords of the land.

He rebuilt part of the yard before the war, and then had to leave the work for all of those four years, after hauling up posts and rails, a 400-gallon tank, ‘bings’ (bins), and racks, all the wood having been pressure-creosoted. And now, at last, the bullock yard gave him pleasure.

Jack the Jackdaw had for some time been working for a
smallholder
in the village. His master was a butcher who was also the night-cart contractor. His fields were regularly ‘dressed’ with
human excreta in creosote, with coal-ashes and the contents of dustbins. To have to farm land like that was spiritual death.

Poppy had left working for Phillip. Poor old Jack the Jackdaw, all his mutterings and tearful pleading to Poppy had been as vain as her own secret cries to Bert Close, who had, in her words, ‘cast her off’. So Poppy had joined the W.R.A.F., to make a new life for herself.

*

Phillip sat on the lower rail, his behind pushed into a sort of cave made by bullocks pulling straws from the stack through the second and third rail from the top. It was warm there. With chin on hand and body doubled, he was in a position akin to Rodin’s
Thinker
; but without the thought. He let the feeling of the
contented
animals in their shelter enter into him. The Red Poll heifers with Rufus their lord stood or lay upon the dry litter, their bellies filled with sugar-beet tops and just-palatable barley straw. They were gentle, innocent, thoughtless.

Their sugar-beet tops came from the field adjoining the
searchlight
camp. Upon that field twenty-four Italian prisoners, as a rest from the tedium of crouching over their cooking fires, were to be seen occasionally topping the parsnip-shaped roots before tossing them into tumbrils. The crowns, or tops, after wilting for a week made excellent food. Thus the farmer had a dual-purpose crop, part of which fed the stock after the yellow parsnip-shaped roots had gone to the factory for sugar.

The twenty-four Italians, all converted from bad Nazi
Collaborators
to good Allied Co-operators, together did the work of about one proper man. It was useless for a farmer to speak of frost coming, or to complain of the slowness and deliberate laziness of the Co-operators. If one did so, the khaki-clad Co-operators ceased to operate. They were masters, and they knew it. They were also poachers, and the farmer could do nothing about that. It was a condition of the general decadence of war which had to be accepted. These Co-operators shared and trapped small birds, big birds, and game birds; they dug out rabbits and ran down hares approaching from a diminishing circle. All went into their cooking pots. They insisted on a hot midday meal before they would think of going to work; while British labourers munched bread and jam and perhaps a slice of cheese—sick-making food, day after day—and drank cold watery tea out of a bottle.

However, Phillip was learning to put unpleasant facts out of mind. The sporting on the farm was spoiled. Charles Box had
taken another farm for himself near Fenton and the shooting partnership had ended. Since the previous spring egg-thieves and R.A.F. types with guns had searched the woods and hedgerows almost as a right. Before the war these coverts held two hundred wild pheasants. During the last autumn, when Phillip had had two sportsmen from his London Club to share the shoot with him, they had not bagged a score. He had thereupon returned their
subscriptions
.

*

During the recent rains all the compost-mould they had scattered on the Hanger was washed out of the yellow soil. In parts the
subsoil
chalk was exposed. Gullies were carved a foot and more wide and several inches deep. Farther along the ridge the exposed
subsoil
was hard and barren. He was compelled by law to grow corn there again next season, but planned to under-sow the corn with a five-year layer of clover and grasses. Permission to do this had been granted by the War Agricultural Committee. With an electric fence to prevent stock straying, the idea was to let the herd wander up from the re-sown meadows to graze the Lower Hanger in the afternoons, coming from summer-heavy heats below to cooling airs above. When he was gone, and perhaps his four sons were working their own farm, the pedigree beasts would come up to rest and drop their dung, thus transferring some of that rich fertility below to the eroded arable: horn helping corn.

During the war Phillip had had an occasional letter from Hereward Birkin, who had been detained in Brixton prison since his arrest under 18b in June 1940. They were in Birkin’s usual stalky writing; but the letters clear and carefully formed. Knowing that he was allowed to send only one letter a month, Phillip felt honoured to get such a letter. But Birkin was too generous, praising him for steady courage! It did not need courage to be loyal to such a man.

One
postcard, after his release from Brixton prison, came to Phillip, revealing the writer’s vision and patriotism. It ended,
Trust
Churchill:
he
knows.
It was in reference to the Prime Minister’s recent flight, just after pneumonia. Churchill had flown to Greece, where Greek partisans were fighting the Government troops. Even
The
Times
had, in a leader, deplored Churchill’s attitude: but the Greek partisans were Stalinists and this was to be Asia’s thrust into Europe, ready for the struggle for Europe after Hitler was brought down. Birkin foresaw it, even as Churchill.
Trust
Churchill:
he
knows.
And Churchill knew, too, the quality of Birkin … but Churchill was of the old order.