Lucifer Before Sunrise (65 page)

Horatio Bugg patted the bulge of notes next to his heart. “I don’t bear no man a grudge,” he went on, “so long as he don’t try to do the dirty on me. That’s me, and always has been. I like you, do you know that? I’d like to do you a good turn. Now tell me, between ourselves—” and Horatio Bugg spat on the dusty road beside Phillip’s shoe—“it’s true, isn’t it, that Josiah Harn is taking over your farm come Old Michaelmas Day? And that you’ve got Elias Quaxter to act as your valuer, and look after your interests? Well then, you watch what you’re about.” He went, after
adjusting
the neckerchief concealing his goitre, “I tell you as a friend, mind, so don’t repeat what I’m going to say. He and Elias Quaxter, the valuer—you know, you bought that old double desk at his father’s auction in Crabbe when you first come here—well, Elias is ‘in’ with Josiah, he’s putting up the money at eight per cent to set him off, so you watch out. Well then, you know the saying here in the village, don’t you, ‘They all spit in one pot’. Although ‘spit’ is Parliamentary Language, if you take my meaning.”

Was it mere coincidence that another man, prominently patriotic in that strange summer of five years ago—“You all ought to be locked up,” he shouted as Phillip and his children had driven past his cottage—should also possess several thick wads of notes from his black-market work during the war? That short, stocky, rufous-haired man looked as though he had recently landed on the coast from a Danish galley, and having thrown away his horny headgear, had started as a small-holder. There were the horns, lying on his little bit of weedy meadow; for Ron Grigson was, like his immigrant forebear, a bit of a butcher. He specialised in old cows which, in the words of his tongue, became heifers. His words were usually of an elevated, even ethical nature, accompanied by a suggestion of grin that never succeeded in becoming a smile; for the eyes of Ron Grigson were small and hard; sly at times; on occasion, expressionless. Upon a heavy face above the broad and solid shoulders of a squat body under a suit greasy and shapeless, a look of cunning was at times fixed by his thoughts, which were nearly always of money, money, money—the ruler of his life.

“You got away with it, d’in’ you?” he said to Phillip.

“You didn’t,” Phillip replied. “During the summer you came to me and asked if you might put a ‘heifer’ on my meadows. Do you remember?”

“Could be.”

“A fortnight later my cowman told me that your ‘heifer’ was a very old cow with mastitis, bought in Wordingham market for
£
6. He said his cows would be infected. And so it turned out—three of our cows caught the disease. The rest had to be inoculated by the veterinary surgeon.”

The fellow grinned and said, “Aw, in B’ny’ds we call everything a heifer, you know.”

“And what do they call you?”

“Aw, we all hev to get along, ’bor.”

Grigson was what Luke called a grinner. He was the man to go to if you wanted a bottle of whisky—at a price different from that controlled by the Government, of course—and if you were the sort who thought the black market was ‘rather fun’, as someone who does not come into this chronicle, had in the past remarked in Phillip’s presence.

Now we must accompany Phillip and the auctioneer, who with notebook and pencil was to make a list of the cows, bullocks, calves, horses, geese, ducks and hens; their wooden houses, the circular saw and pigs’ troughs, the buried paraffin tank, the
unwanted
and unused milking machine, the tumbrils, water-carts, harrows, seed-drills, tractors, trailers, cornsacks—all the Live and Dead Stock of Deepwater Farm being sold at the change of the farming year, Old Michaelmas Day.

There would be printed notices and bills by the wayside, and on the day itself lines of cars parked by the hedge—old iron merchants with their trailers, cattle dealers with their floats, farmers in search of useful implements—all gone there, with the exception of the curious, in hope to increase their substance.

*

After the auctioneer had gone, Phillip met by appointment Quaxter the valuer, who was to represent his interests as outgoing farmer. The custom throughout East Anglia was for the outgoing man and the ingoing man each to be represented by a valuer. The two valuers would then assess the value of the crops in the ground; together with that of straw, hay, cultivations if any, the farmyard muck, and the residues of artificial fertilisers in the fields.

Should the two valuers be unable to agree upon the value of each
item then, by a law of their profession, they would select a third valuer whose award must be accepted, without question, as final.

It was the custom, also, that farmers, both outgoing and incoming, did not question the monetary award of the valuers. Nor were they shown the figures of separate items. Each must leave all to his valuer; and a farmer had to sign a printed declaration to this effect before his valuer would act for him.

Phillip had signed this declaration for Elias Quaxter. But when he enquired about the absence of Josiah Harn’s valuer, Mr. Harn said, “Oh, it will be quite all right”—a phrase that Phillip had heard before, over the matter of the price of store pigs.

How then was it to be worked? Mr. Quaxter said that Mr. Harn had agreed to accept when he decided.

“That will be quite all right,” Mr. Harn repeated, with serious face, as though he was about to undergo an operation. Or is it I, thought Phillip, who am being given a whiff of the old gas?

The three men walked around the farm together. The valuer wrote in his little book as they moved from stack to stubble, from hay aftermath to root-field. Thus they arrived at the chief item—fourteen acres of sugar-beet. The long pale roots were still in the ground. Not a very good crop. Phillip thought about eight to nine tons to the acre. Mr. Quaxter made a note in his book.

Then Mr. Harn enquired of Mr. Quaxter about getting the beet ploughed out, topped, and lifted.

“Could you do Mr. Harn a good turn and get the beet out of the ground for him?” asked Mr. Quaxter, in a friendly manner of Phillip. “You see, Mr. Harn will have a lot to do, with much on his hands, as no doubt you can readily understand, having been an ingoing man yourself in the past, eh, Captain Maddison? I fancy you’ll find no difficulty in procuring Italian prisoners to lift and top the beet for Mr. Harn, who will of course pay for the labour?”

Before Phillip agreed to this, he said, “When does this beet become the property of Mr. Harn?”

“From this very moment.”

For of course Phillip knew that beet lifted and left lying on the field would shrink and so lose weight every day it was exposed to sun and wind; and that both autumn and early winter in East Anglia were usually dry and warm. “Very well, Mr. Quaxter,” he replied, “I’ll plough out this beet and knock and top on the
understanding
that I am paid for nine tons an acre of this Nightcraft
field, which is fourteen acres in extent, and that the beet is the property of Mr. Harn from this minute.”

“That is so, Captain Maddison.”

Into the calm air of St. Martin’s Little Summer the smoke of Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s ancient fifteen-ton traction-engine drifted slowly. So still and golden-hazy was the air, as he sat on the tall yellow chair, that Phillip could hear the faraway chuffs of steam in the funnel. Sometimes a dragging, slower noise followed by the engine racing told that one of the sheaves was going through the drum with the binder twine uncut.

The Italians, with visions of Tyrrhenian skies, sang as they worked. One of them, Antonio, had worked on the farm for almost a year. He still used a pitchfork as though it were a broom. Since he was giving himself extra work, Phillip tried to show him how to use a 2-tined fork. With an unhappy face Antonio cried, pointing all around:
He
a-show
me!
Corporal
a-show
me!
Boy
a-show
me!
Everyone
a-show
me!
Now
you
a-show
me!
Me
a
waiter!
Me
carry
dishes!
Me
no
farmer!
You
a-see?
And Antonio continued to use his fork like a ladle as he dreamed of spaghetti in a deep bowl.

In their brown uniforms, with equally brown faces, the singing non-co-operators (the Co-operators wore khaki) were energetically forking sheaves to an old man with a knife tied to his wrist, who slashed the binder twine, while below him on the box another man with steel-tips to his fingers fed an endless broken wave of stalks into the roaring drum.

Phillip knew, as he returned to the high chair at the ‘
corn-merchant’s
desk’, that the man with the knife—the bond-cutter, as he was called—was trying to slash the string of three sheaves every two seconds of time. He was slow because underfed. He missed a sheaf now and then, and the sheaf went around the drum uncut, causing the whirling metal cylinder to slow up. That was when Phillip heard the engine stutter, followed by a grunt from the drum.

He knew it all; he could see it clearly as he sat there on one side of the double-desk where clerks in Dickens’ time had probably shot ink from their quill pens; and later, where Mr. Quaxter Senior sat and roared at him to go to bloody hell. He could see it more clearly than if he were there sweating and lifting sheaves two and three at a time from the pressed mass of the flat corn-stack.

For he had done that, and scores of other farming jobs, with every nerve and sinew and sense of his body; and those nerves and senses were surcharged and, as it were, crying out to express all that had been felt and known and suffered and regretted and
forgiven
in all the years of his life in the only way by which he could express himself: through the Imagination—the written word.

The corn was sold by sample, and sent away by lorry to the
railway
station. There remained the sugar beet to be ploughed out and topped for Josiah Harn. This was done.

And when Phillip had left the district, the little heaps lay on the field, wilting and losing weight during the weeks, even months, before they were carted off the field and sent by lorry to the railway trucks allocated to the new tenant.

And when Phillip was paid, by Mr. Elias Quaxter’s cheque, in January, 1946, it was not at the rate of nine tons per acre, but two tons, or twenty-eight tons in all, which was the total weight of little withered roots received at the sugar-beet factory at Fen ton.

When Phillip questioned this amount by letter, Mr. Quaxter replied that it was ‘quite fair’, since the value of the beet was as recorded in the returns from the factory. ‘And that cannot be disputed, can it?’

Phillip need not have worried about the men who were wondering if they would be workless when he had gone. He felt he was
forsaking
them; but, as it turned out, Josiah Harn wanted them to remain, at least until his three grown sons, two of them soon to come out of the Services, were home. All were keen with ambition to build up a milking herd. That was where the profit was. All four were Viking types; they would be ‘quite all right’.

But there remained Joe, the soldier invalided after Dunkirk, who did Phillip’s garden so well. He came, just before Phillip left, to say, “I’d like to work for you, I love being with you, really I do. I’d get you some good men if you will accept me, sir.”

Joe put the job first, like ‘Ackers’ did. Phillip had always enjoyed working with him.

“I’m sorry, Joe.”

“Don’t you worry, sir. I understand. And I can always get a job elsewhere.”

He told Phillip a surprising thing—it was the first he’d heard of it. During the last winter, after shooting over the marshes, Joe had tripped, his loaded gun went off, and the charge tore part of his neck. It was Lucy who saved Joe’s life by staunching the wound until the doctor came. Lucy had never mentioned it to Phillip, so quietly did she go about her work.

Poor Joe. After Phillip had gone, he took a job of loading and driving a 10-ton beet-lorry, any one of a fleet of large lorries given him. One night as he threw up beets the hand-brake broke and the lorry began to move back. He tried to stop it, instead of moving away to save himself, and was crushed against a wall, and
thereafter
disabled for life.

*

Many of the scenes of this narrative were written behind
blackout
curtains, in those nights when thoughts of the regeneration of Western man haunted the mind like the glow of the morning star
before dawn upon the fields and meadows of the Bad Lands—in those nights when, striving for equipoise, one held to thoughts of the Bengal Lancer dead, and what he had written of the guru’s teaching in India: breathing slow and deep, after uttering low vibrating notes to induce the wave of harmony. And lying there, the deep bass diaphragm note seemed to be extending from the consciousness, to be shaking one beyond oneself, to be vibrating in the very air of the lungs, in the walls and ceiling, the panes of glass in the wide window—and the heaviness of chaos returned in the breast with the crescendo of reverberation shaking the very sky of dawn as American squadrons ploughed the pale fields of heaven, leaving behind white furrows of vapour until the entire wide blue was a Grecian sapphire ruined by flaws.

Phillip was with me everywhere—in the dark before dawn upon the heights of the Home Hills, while with the glittering light of the morning star, seen through a wind-tear brimming the lower lid of one eye, came a clear insight upon the lie which like a maggot had eaten into the souls of nearly all those known and encountered: the lie with which we all sought to deceive ourselves—known faces stringing out into the colourless memory of the past—
falsehood
in the body politic slowly sickening us away from a true life, which is to build, to create beauty; and not merely to frustrate.

On the penultimate night, there was a Grand Victory Dance in the Village Institute, and as he stood in the parlour Phillip heard
a steady thumping coming through the floor. He went outside, to listen by the flint wall near the Institute door. The Oldstead Brothers Band was playing—a famous local band, all the
instrumentalists
being the sons of the steward on his neighbour Charles Box’s farm. There was Old England for you—the genial, red-faced steward on his aged cob ‘The Bedstead’, riding over the farm, his sons working for him—keeper, tractor-driver, pig-man, cowman—all married, all with children; and in their spare time members of a band for horkey dancing—thump, thump, thump on the shaking wooden floor—sweaty faces smiling—drum,
concertina
, piano, flute—wip, pop, tattle, and toot—
Roll
Out
the
Barrel
in shouted chorus.

*

Along the level brown shingle bank short grey waves of the North Sea were breaking diagonally. It was evening, and Jonny and his father had the beach to themselves. Phillip had asked Lucy to come, too, but she said she must stay and make a blackberry and apple pudding for supper. Once again they were a family, come together to see out the end of the farming venture. Jonny was not going to a private school until after Christmas. Peter had joined the R.A.F. So Jonny and Phillip went together to say goodbye to the sea.

Behind them, on reclaimed land below the sea-wall, stood the hut encampment of the Italian prisoners-of-war. Thither Phillip had brought Antonio and the others who all day had been working on the farm, squaring up the muck in the yards for Valuation. Jonny was their particular friend, as all small boys become the friends of soldiers. They had ridden together, to and from the camp, in the box body of the Silver Eagle, every day except Sunday, for the past few weeks.

The little boy and his father had gone to the sea declaring that whatever the weather they would swim from the shingle bank. They carried towels, and cake to eat afterwards. But the waves were cross and in tangle, sucking short at the shingle. The sun was small, wan, bisected by cloud, without heat, almost without light. Such were the sunsets of this coast, rarely flamboyant as in the West Country.

Far away in Devon, where Phillip was soon to go, this sun was flaring out the day in fire which filled the sky and turned the cliffs of Valhalla purple.

“Jonny, every man and woman on this earth sees a different sunset.”

The boy stopped to consider this.

“Yes, Chooky, I know what you mean.”

*

An offshore wind moved over the level top of the shingle bank, eddying invisibly above the wet slope of the receding tide. Above it in the dulling sky a butterfly was fluttering, borne eastwards on the wind which blew aslant the line of the shore and stroked the short white flashes of the waves.

The butterfly, which might have been an Atalanta, strove to fly along the line of the land, but the wind was carrying it out over the sea.

The fluttering dark speck rose higher, and they stood watching it in silence, hoping it would be able to return inland and find a shed or roof where it might fold its wings flat together and sleep during the coming rains and frost.

Could that tiny engine, fuelled by honey stored in its muscles, carry the frayed sails across the sea to Holland, or maybe Denmark, or even Norway, where the great singer, Kirsten Flags tad shared, with others, the Virgilian ‘tears of things’?

A fragment of summer was being blown away, to become again phosphate, carbon, and salt in the sea.

“Is that a sad thought, Jonny?”

The little boy considered, then shook his head. “There will be other butterflies, won’t there, Chooky?”

The sun had faltered and gone. The youthful bomber pilot, with memories of lost friends, but with love by his side, trudged up the shingle to his motor-bicycle standing in the lane. There was to be no campaign star for crews of Bomber Command, only the General Defence Medal, which put them on a par with
fire-watchers
, elderly members of the Observer Corps, and the Home Guard. Two out of three crew-members had perished; but under a dark star, of which Dresden was only one ray.

It was time to go. Crank up the engine and fill the cylinders with gas. Jonny switched on the ignition, saying, “Contact!” A flick of the wrist started the engine to rumble through the rusted silencer. Nearly sixteen years of faithful running since it left the works at Coventry; its original crank-case burned out in a blitz; but its heart, with that of the Britain we love, despite the apparent contradiction of our mind, never coventrated—to use a word coined by ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ now lying, wounded, in prison, to await trial at the Old Bailey in London as a traitor.

Small children growing up to be young men: season after season of corn turning to summer’s gold: butterflies, birds, trees, faces of friends—all, all, drifting down the stream of Time which some men dread as death.

A short-eared owl wafted down the sea-wall. Partridges had ceased to call on the stubbles. Night had come to the western hemisphere.

1941
–
1967

Norfolk-De
von