Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
“Many hills now, Bert. We go down some formidable ones and up again.”
Bert Close let this useless information pass with, “Poppy, light me a blinder,” and continued to drive with restraint. Other lorries, with six cylinder engines, larger bodies, double rear-wheels, passed them at forty and forty-five miles an hour. The lean jaw and hard eye under shiny black peak ignored them. The speedo. needle seldom moved beyond the 30 mark. “Bert Close gets there, see?”
Not that Phillip wanted to go any faster. He knew that they had enough load on board, by the body’s sway on the corners. A hundred gallons of petrol on fire—
*
Supper.
Becoming reminiscent, Bert Close told how in the lean years before the war he found himself without money for a road-fund
licence. He didn’t like to borrow from his pals, so he took a chance and ran on a road-fund licence when it had expired. Once a copper, a proper nosey parker, spotted the old licence and waited for him to come out of a maltster’s office. So he hung about and waited his chance for the copper to move away to speak to someone else. Then he slipped out, nipped into the cab, started the engine, and drove down to the quay. As he drove, he pulled the paper licence from its holder on the windscreen and chewed it. The copper came down to where the lorry was standing on the tracks of the railway. Bert Close, chewing away, ignored all questions until the licence was swallowed. Then to all questions he gave the same answer, staring straight in front.
“Your licence was expired, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ate it, di’n you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what’ll happen when you drive off, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
He was due to take a load of whelks to Billingsgate on the
following
Monday. Knowing he was being watched, he went to the fishermen and asked if they would pay for the journey before it was done. They knew that he never let them down, always got their whelks in time to market, so they trusted him with the money. Meanwhile the lorry was standing on the railway tracks, off the King’s Highway. To make up the rest of the quarterly licence Bert Close sold some of his clothes. He bought a money-order with the proceeds and posted his application to the county town. Meanwhile he wanted to take down the back-axle, because there was a slight knocking noise in the crown gear. He had a spare, bought from a car-breaker’s dump for three bob. To do this he required the lorry in his shed. He got a pal who had a garage to tow it from the land owned by the London and North Eastern Railway Company. The lorry bore the red trade-plates of the pal. On the Monday the licence came. He affixed it.
Then the copper came up to him in the street, and said:
“You’d better take care.”
“I always take care.”
“Have you got the old licence out of your guts yet?”
“You ain’t, by the look of you.”
“You won’t get away with it always, you know.”
“I’m busy,” Bert Close replied, and drove away. “He’ll get crowned one dark night, that copper.”
In pre-war days of cut-price haulage Bert Close sometimes had had to overload both lorry and trailer in order to pay his way. However carefully he drove, he had break-downs. Springs and back-axles, usually. He carried spares and did repairs by the roadside. Once he lay underneath the lorry six or seven hours on end and then completed his journey. He never over-loaded whelks or winter cabbages because if they missed the market they would be a dead loss. The breaks usually occurred on return journeys, for regularly he brought a load of old tombstones back each time from London. One of his customers bought and sold them.
“Yes, I remember, when we went to London together, Bert. I was surprised that there was black market in tombstones.”
“There ain’t, guv. Only a shortage.”
Phillip told him how bones from the ossuaries of the battle of Waterloo had been shipped to East Anglian ports to be ground in windmills as phosphate dressing for wheat.
“Go on,” said Bert Close.
“Are many other lorry drivers bringing tombstones back, Bert?”
“Ask no questions, get told no lies, guv.”
“Your lorry is very well maintained. How old is it?”
“Ten years when the war come.”
The lorry lived when at rest in a shed by the old makings, beside another just like it, built of spare parts from the knackers’ yards. Phillip had admired this duplicate built for the cost of a few pounds. With patience, both engines had been cleaned and painted red and green, the greasing nipples of the chassis touched with aluminium paint. Before he had met Bert Close, he had had a similar idea of buying a Silver Eagle he had seen in a
car-breaker’s
in Gaultford, which had been offered to him for five pounds.
*
Riding supinely, aching more in thigh bones, he thought of that twin Silver Eagle resting among the other derelict cars. Like his own, it was a 1930 model with six-cylinder, three-carburettor engine developing ninety-five horse-power at 4,500 r.p.m. And, as regards body-work and wheels, in better condition than his motorcar. But even as he considered the idea, the usual cold negation had come upon him. Would it not be just another useless, unused bit of junk about the farm? With the two ponies that no child yet had ridden, although they had been three years on the farm? Riding boots in wooden trees: saddles, bridles covered with dust and mildew: hundreds of books and manuscripts in tea-chests
of three-ply wood, unpacked, unwanted, on damp brick floor of the granary: tennis rackets—table tennis equipment—skittles board—dart-board—fishing-rods—enamelled Hardy tapered-silk lines probably tacky and spoiled on the reels—Lucy’s knitting machine that had not been used for a dozen years—pieces of antique furniture standing about the farm buildings—and all the other things that were now virtually useless since no one seemed to care for them. They were all too occupied, too over-worked, too tired to do more than think of them after each day–night’s work.
I had imagined myself painting the second Silver Eagle black like its twin, and thus having two cars; one for fetching calves and for towing the trailer, the other for pleasure. For they were hand-built motorcars of a famous vintage, and made to last for hundreds of
thousands
of miles. Since only one car would be on the road at a time one licence would serve, and one set of number plates, would serve for both. They would stand, two gleaming Silver Eagles, maintained in
first-class
running order, in the motorhouse to be rebuilt out of the ruinous turkey-house. O, that turkey-house! The rat-holes in its flint walls must be filled with concrete, and a new concrete floor replace the present unevenness of rat-cast chalk and earth. I had foreseen that as the war drained the financial strength of Britain, and left the country exhausted, motorcars would become scarce, with few new ones on the market; and spares of the Silver Eagle might be unobtainable.
And yet—to have bought that twin would have meant acquiring one more self-reproach; so I bought only the self-starter, flywheel, and petrol-tank filler-cap. Bert Close had fitted the new flywheel to my motorcar, so that the self-starter spun it without that hoarse cock-crow which, before the change, had sometimes been taken as a challenge to Hawkeye, Billy’s ferocious cockerel ‘pet’. And sitting supinely beside Poppy, the rays of the low red-gold shining into my eyes, I wondered if perhaps parts of the twin had by now fallen upon the Rhineland, dropped by some youth of the Royal Air Force who later had fallen beside them.
The sun had gone down.
“Light me a blinder, Poppy.”
Poppy passed it to her chap staring fixedly ahead.
Phillip envied his direct outlook on life, the simplicity of his
one-man
world. He was his own mechanic and driver. Perhaps if Bert Close had another driver, and two lorries on the road, he would have lost his independence. When upon occasion Bert Close had driven a ten-ton lorry for a local firm (having no haulage job of his own for the moment) he would clean the lorry, a thing which
the ordinary drivers never bothered to do. He would polish the copper pipes of the carburettor. From cylinder block and head he would remove with paraffin black oil-stains, and thickness as of dead gnats and flies from air-filter and radiator.
They were going down a long curving hill. “Have you always been tidy, Bert? Excessive desire for tidiness, some critics have said of me, is a sign of neurosis.”
“Go on,” said Bert Close. “Poppy, light me a blinder.” He inhaled; respired. “My dad died when I was a kid, guv, and an old chap looked after us. He used to belt me if I told a lie. He told me to be neat and tidy, and I did what he told me.”
“I think some types are born tidy and methodical—the Nordic type, for example. Some Celtic types aren’t, as a rule. The two can’t live together. Sometimes I think I’ve got both types in me, in dissension.”
“What am I, a bloomin’ Nordic?” cried Bert Close, suddenly exuberant.
“No, you’re a dark Celt, perhaps a Frank, from Frankfurt.”
“Blimey, little old ’Itler would be pleased!”
Bert Close let out a piercing series of whistles through his front teeth, while simultaneously with his right hand banging rapidly the iron door of the cab, making noises like the beating of drums. So abrupt and vehement was his reaction that Phillip was startled, but the outburst had not been occasioned by his possibly
pseudo-ethnological
remark, but by the headlight sight of a long-tailed dingy white collarless mongrel dog which just managed to skip out of the way of the front wheels.
“Poppy, my mouth-organ!”
The driver held this in his right hand and played
Danny
Boy
as he drove up a hill, steering with the left forearm laid across the wheel, while Poppy sang in a faint treble, to the accompaniment of music.
*
Now they were moving carefully up and along and down upon the winding grey roads of the West Country, the driver always showing care, never going faster than he deemed it safe for tyres and springs, never taking corners on the wrong side, never
cutting-in
, always signalling correctly to overtaking traffic. They were moving under the downs and beside arable fields where Phillip had ploughed his first furrow—land now covered by army hutments which had brought back the war forgotten during most of the afternoon.
Under the stars the journey began to seem unreal. He had to restrain himself from telling the driver about the steep hills and sudden turns of this ancient and familiar country. He was pressed against the door, the bones of his thighs heavy aching. The driver was silent, so was the girl beside him. About fifty, perhaps sixty cigarettes had now been smoked. The driver was peering forward, crouched over the wheel, trying to see in the weak glow of masked lights the continual curves of the road under tall trees and leafy hedges. They were going down a long hill, Phillip knew it well, why was Bert in bottom gear? Such caution must come from extreme fatigue on his part.
“Shall I take a turn at the wheel?”
“You’d turn ’er over.”
“I know this road.”
“Insurance. Must get there. Light me a blinder, Poppy.”
They came to the bottom of the hill, and began to climb up the other side. The driver changed gear—to second, to top.
“We’re going uphill now. Why did you change up?”
“’Ow many blinders left, Poppy?”
“About six or seven.”
“Christ. How far off are we, guv?”
“About forty miles.”
“Wha’s time?”
“Eleven o’clock. We’re going rather slowly, aren’t we?”
No reply from tense features. Bert Close drove on as before. When the fag was finished he drew a final deep draw of it, flipped it out of the window, and exhaling smoke said very quietly, “Give us the old mouth organ, Poppy.” For five minutes he played
Danny
Boy
. They reached the top of the hill, and were on the level. He changed to bottom gear.
“We’re on level ground, Bert. I
know
this road!”
“Can you stop a minute?” asked Poppy.
“When we get to the top of the ’ill. Light me a blinder.”
Phillip did not speak until the lorry stopped. He got out, being near the door. They were just over the crest of a hill.
“Sorry—I was wrong about those gears.”
“It’s your eyes, guv.”
Phillip thought: Am I going blind? Delayed action of mustard gas in 1918?
*
Exeter was behind, it was past midnight, and raining. Figures waved, dim-seen in screened lights casting wan glimmer in
water-
streaked
blackness and ever-lasting movement. Airmen from new station built on level ground above the hills. Two were perched on either step, by each door. Other figures suddenly loomed a few feet in front of the wheels, leapt away just in time.
“No more!” barked the driver, “we’ve got to get there.”
More shadowy figures entered the curtain of feeble light but to leap out again with curses.
“Returning from leave,” said one of the passengers. “We get off here. Thanks a lot.” They vanished. Rain-streaked darkness remained. Descending to Queensbridge, turning right-handed. … Melancholy thoughts: Here I walked with Barley, in the moonlight, after our marriage at Caxton Hall. We carried our luggage, played games as we walked, sometimes leap-frog. All life
is
a dream.
The engine boiling up lane seeming-narrow with grey-white masses of umbelliferous plants leaning out of hedge. Mudguards pushing through them. The last hill. Two hundred yards from the field a rear tube blew out. So did Bert Close.
“Christ, why did I come?” he moaned, adding that his tyres would be ruined by the flints.
With tactless but geological truth Phillip replied that there was not a flint in South Devon, for the rock formation was gneiss, schist, and old red sandstone.
Bert Close replied, “I don’t want to ’ear about your nice shit and old red bollocks.”
Phillip disciplined himself, impersonal help. Bert Close pulled out the spare wheel. Ferric-willed once more, “Get the handle, please. The tool box is unlocked. Give it to me, please. I’ll change the wheel in the morning.”