Lucifer Before Sunrise (18 page)

“You look about forty. You haven't a grey hair. How old's your son Luke, thirty-four? Then you must be nearly sixty. I think perhaps you have too much to do. I've always thought so. I'll get rid of the ewes, that will give you a bit easier time. Also they're a nuisance, their feet keep going wrong with foot-rot, and they get maggots easily, as you know. I've given you too much to do.”

Without further word Matt picked up his side-bag and walked away down the ride to the Steep and his route to the premises.

Was he preparing the way before giving notice to leave; with his son?

*

The following Sunday, walking round the meadows after
morning
service at church, Phillip came across Matt with his little flock
penned in a corner of the meadows. He was ‘flying' them. Several ewes had maggots eating into the base of the wool near the vent.

The maggots came from eggs laid by blow-flies. Many of these pests multiplied on the unburied corpses of rats killed by Matt's terrier. Phillip had asked Matt again and again to bury the rats in the yard dungsteads, out of reach of flies. But Matt had flung them out, when killed in Corn barn and stable, to lie and be consumed by nature's scavengers. It was the same with Lucy's poultry on the Home Hills. Phillip had many times asked Lucy, as she hasn't time to bury the occasional dead hen found up there, to send one of the little boys to do the job. But it was not in Lucy's nature to delegate; perhaps this was also a fault of Phillip's nature, at least in the eyes of the untrained, otherwise ignorant or unknowing. Lucy was, and always had been from her early years when looking after an old father and three brothers without any help in the house, a lone worker. She was no laggard: always cheerful, although pressed for time in farmhouse, Women's Institute, First Aid post, and other tasks she had undertaken. So now and again poultry casualties remained where they had died—perhaps in some remote corner of the Home Hills—and were soon reduced to feathered skeletons by maggots of the Bluebottle and Spanish Green Fly.

Phillip watched Matt, with the back of his stubby fingers, flipping away scores of maggots, each with a red speck showing through an ivory, semi-transparent body. The maggots, falling to the trodden ground, began to hurry away to shelter.

“They won't trouble yar no more, master.”

“Each one of those will pupate and hatch into a blowfly, Matt. They ought to be killed. It's best to dose them with disinfectant, surely?”

“I do,” he replied. “They won't come to narthin'. That old Spanish bottle-fly is the worst. They always did swarm on these meadows.”

“They also swarm on the rats your terrier kills, which you throw out in the yards, Matt. Those rats are real fifth columnists. So are our dead hens. They're symbols of decadence. They
are
the war! Look at all these maggots rushing away!” He forced himself to speak quietly. “All will have wings shortly.”

“Yar bards will pick 'em up, master.”

“Matt! Do you ever listen to anything I say?”

“Too often, master.”

Matt wiped his sweaty brow with a dirty old fragment of what looked like a shirt.

“Matt,
please
listen! If you'd been on the Somme battlefield and seen the swollen faces of dead men—hundreds lying all together—or a badly wounded man's face, come to that, you'd have seen his face masked by black flies. And if you'd passed by two days later you'd have seen the face all liquid wriggling pale.”

“This harn't a battlefield.”

“It
is
a battlefield! This is part of the war!!”

Phillip trod on all the maggots he could see, but more legions of the dispossessed were swarming into the cover of grass. “Our opposed views
are
the war!”

Matt prepared to go home. Several ewes were still crouching against the hurdles, with the patient immobility of animals in pain.

“Haven't they, too, got the fly, Matt?” he asked in a conciliatory tone of voice, ashamed of his outburst.

“No, they're just hot, master.”

“Don't you think we ought to look? And some seem to have foot-rot.”

“My dear soul, no man can't help a ewe or two goin' lame!” Matt cried, pushing cap on back of head, wiping his brow again. “Now look-a-here, master, I've looked after ten score ewes in me time, and yew can't help one or two goin' wrong. 'Tes nature!”

“I expect the meadows aren't good for your ewes, Matt. Charles Box o' Henthorpe saw them here the other day and told me he thought the grass was sheep-sick.”

“Nao!” said Matt, in contempt. “These yaws are all right. What's wrong wi' 'em? They pay yar a profit. All these people spit in one pot. He'll tell yar to sell them, and his friends will come and offer to buy them!”

“He's got much better things to do, than to concern himself with our little lot of culls and woolly bears. Now look at those ewes over there. Look how they're wriggling their tail-stumps!”

“Thet's pleasure.”

Phillip snatched at a ewe. It bundled away from him as he slipped in the black trodden dung of the pen. He tried again, and caught the ewe. Matt shook the disinfectant bottle over its rump and then raked with his fingers. Maggots showered out. Five other sheep were treated similarly. There were others with heads in the hedge. “Come on, this one!” He caught it. “That one over there is bad, too.”

It was past Matt's dinner time when they finished. Matt, he knew, had been looking forward to his one main treat of the week,
sit-down Sunday dinner with his family. So Phillip repeated what he had said before to Matt: that his job of looking after bullocks, cows, calves, and sheep was too much for one man to do. “Our sheep have improved the odd corners of poor land they were brought to tread and fertilize with their dung. Also they're not pure grassland sheep, but Suffolk-Oxford Down crosses. So I think I'll send them to next Wordingham Sheep Fair.”

Matt slowly filled his pipe with black flakes of tobacco. Then he said quietly, “They're yours. You're master,” and having lit his pipe, turned away homewards without further word.

The fact is the Bad Lands, as a business proposition, justified neither a full team of men if worked in the old manner with horses and steam, nor labour-saving equipment—combine-harvester and grain-drying plant—if worked in the manner then coming into being on larger farms in East Anglia. The capital outlay in neither wages nor machinery would yield a proper return on so small a holding of second-class arable as Phillip’s farm.

The potential value of the meadows was the key to lock the door on the Bad Lands and open another door leading to prosperity. A pedigree milking herd based on the meadows, in spring and summer, supported by fodder and grain crops in autumn and winter. But a change over to milk was not permitted in war-time. The nation, having declared war on what elsewhere was called the New European Order, was now fighting for survival. If Great Britain succeeded in frustrating the New Order in Europe (wrote Phillip in his diary at this time)

Both Matt and Luke held to the archaic belief that mushrooms came from a stallion’s spawn. The legend may have sprung, Phillip had tried to tell them, from observation that these fungi were more numerous on grassland where a ‘horse’ (i.e. stallion) had grazed. Possibly the extra ammonia from stallions, he said, was the cause of bigger and better mushrooms?

“Theory,” replied Matt, looking at him with gentle
woodcock-eyes.

“That’s what I mean,” added Luke, earnestly. “You can’t beat nature,” he went on, lamely.

“Then you believe that the father of a mushroom is a horse?”

“Theory,” said Matt; and that decided it.

“We ought to git a horse to Sheba,” said Luke. “Then she’ll grow into money.”

“You mean a mushroom farm?”

“A horse is walking the district now,” said Matt. “Shall I tell the groom if I see him?”

“Please do. Only I hope it won’t mean Sheba’ll be covered with mushrooms.”

“’Tis Palgrave Viking,” replied Luke.

So Palgrave Viking, the horse whose life was passed in walking, courting, and apparently spawning mushrooms, arrived at the premises below the Bad Lands. The groom’s fee was two guineas for service to each mare visited on his rounds. When Palgrave Viking walked up the road to the premises, he trumpeted; and hearing this call the aged mare Beatrice, standing still in the quarry while they loaded chalk into her tumbril, was immediately affected. Her docked tail lifted; the thrilling call of life caused a slight dilation in her purse as when a flower in bud begins to open. Phillip sensed her feeling, and proposed that Luke remove her thill gears, or harness.

Sheba, the black mare, remained unaffected. When the horse—his mane braided with red and yellow ribands—approached the premises, Luke closed the five-barred gate before the quarry; and having taken off Sheba’s harness as lead horse, led her by a halter to the closed gate, to introduce the stallion.

Luke, hard-eyed, sucking at stub of hand-rolled fag, said Sheba might slap into him and then the boss’d have a couple of hundred guineas to pay if she damaged the horse. Palgrave Viking, possibly aware of female dislike, stood quivering. But Beatrice accepted him. The gate was opened and the horse led in. The groom stood by to guide the entry, lest in his ardour Palgrave Viking thrust badly and injure the long black member. He sank upon Beatrice’s back, to fall away and stand, with spread legs, quivering. “One more, to make sure,” said the groom. This rocketed off as quickly as the first.

Beatrice was twenty-two years old, and had never dropped foal. Luke said it was money wasted, but the voyeur in Phillip wanted to see Beatrice have some pleasure after all the hard work she had done for the farm during all seasons.

By now, Phillip noticed, Sheba was envious. Viking served her twice before walking sedately away with the groom, heading for the next farm. For the following hour or so, Phillip noticed, Sheba shivered occasionally, and made a quiet sound to herself—a sort
of soliloquising
huff-huff-huffle.
Were these sounds to an imagined foal?

*

The difficulties of the Bad Lands were never more apparent than at threshing time, when they had to wait upon the arrival of Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s tackle, and then on casual labour to make up the requisite team of twelve.

In pre-war days there were several men unemployed in the district who would come for a day’s threshing. Now there were none. All were on airfield construction work, taking home weekly
pay-packets
double and sometimes treble the wage of a farm-labourer. Phillip had to call upon searchlight soldiers from the camp, and such was the condition and nature, generally, of these twice-culled soldiers, that he dreaded the thought of threshing as the season drew near.

The arrangement made between the County War Executive Committee and Eastern Command was that searchlight soldiers would arrive with a corporal bearing a time-sheet. The soldiers’ time was to be paid for at the rate of tenpence half-penny an hour. The money was to be payable direct to Eastern Command. Such supposition was what Matt and Luke would call theory, and the soldiers bull. Neither corporal, pay-sheet, nor men arrived at 8 o’clock a.m. double-summer-time when the job was due to start. By going hard all day, with a full team of twelve men, a stack might be finished by 3 p.m. After that, it would take the driver and his mate anything up to an hour and a half to set-in by the next stack, for the next day’s threshing. But with a late start they could not hope to finish in a day. And the ‘tackle’ was in such constant demand that Mr. Gladstone Gogney could only allow Phillip three days at most.

On the first morning the soldiers arrived an hour and a half late. Their spokesman, a pale dark youth wearing horn-rimmed
spectacles
, thereupon beckoned Phillip down from the corn stack. There he told Phillip that he and his comrades would not work without being paid on the nail. What was the offer?

Phillip told them they would get what his men were paid—a shilling an hour. He explained that they were already far behind with the morning’s work. His words made not the slightest impression. The searchlight trio stopped about every forty minutes for a smoke, while the job was held up. They were inferior
townsmen
, and the work—arduous for trained labourers—was a stress for soft bodies and wolf-spider minds. The horn-rimmed leader
had begun with a sort of conceited attitude based on comic paper and vaudeville nonsense, flourishing his fork with an air that this hay-seed stuff was easy, that the British Army would show the yokels what was what. Of course neither he nor they knew how to handle a two-tined fork, which was used without leverage and thereby the foot-poundage was doubled and at times trebled. Phillip tried to explain how to pick out the sheaves, like dates from a box.

“Take them out as they were laid in. Lift each one out by the binder-twine. It’s easier, you’ll find.”

The yobs continued to stick, to prod, to scrabble, to scratch, to heave, to strain in ignorance of the principle of lever and fulcrum. They broke binding twine, trampled grain from the heads of sheaves. The work proceeded at the slowest rate. The face of the engine-driver showed a non-committal resignation. With relief Phillip saw, about eleven o’clock, the forms of Poppy and Bert Close strolling up, and heard Bert saying, “We’ve come to give you a hand, guv.”

During dinner time Poppy asked for a job on the farm.
Otherwise
, she said, she would be called up. She had been by Bert’s side during many of the dockland blitzes. She started farm-work there and then.

Over the boundary Charles Box, despite his acreage reduced from six to four hundred when a new airfield was marked out at Henthorpe, kept a full complement of machines and men. That day he was threshing a stack on the eastern skyline, two fields away. His team was finished at two o’clock and the men went home, having done their day’s work. Phillip’s lot dragged on until
half-past
five, and then had not finished. The regular men were grumbling. They had to cloth up the last three feet of the stack. At one period seven amateurs had been on the corn-stack. Later Phillip saw a mistake in tactics: so many trod it flat, flailing out corn with fourteen nailed boots and fourteen steel prongs. The three best men should have been on the corn-stack, for then all the rest would have had to work to their speed.

So the next day Luke, Steve and Phillip worked on the
corn-stack
and set the pace for the others. When they were half-way down the stack Steve’s fork was found broken below the box. Somehow it had fallen to the ground while he was cutting string bonds of sheaves for a kneeling man to feed into the drum. One prong was snapped off. Steve accused Luke of throwing it down Luke denied it. Steve was white under his sun-burn. He was
young and strong, and, by his red hair, of Danish stock. His fork was new, costing a crown. He insisted that it had been thrown down ‘a-purpose to break it’. So far Phillip had been unaware of any tension between these two; though Steve had always been late for work in the mornings. The tension continued, Steve speaking in scarcely audible voice, Luke replying roughly, until Phillip thought they were coming to blows. He said he might have dropped the fork himself, without thinking, since he had generally moved about to help speed the work, now giving a hand to heave up corn sacks on lorry, now on straw-stack, then to corn-stack.

“I’ll buy you a new one, Steve.”

“Little snapper, I could break him like a carrot,” muttered Luke.

*

As the mellow Spratt-Archer barley—very nearly a fine-ale sample—poured out of the spouts watched over by Dick, Bert Close and Phillip lifted filled sacks, each of about 230-lb., into the lorry, taking fifteen a time down to the Corn Barn. There they wheeled the first sack on a sack-barrow to the wooden platform, level with the rear-end of the lorry, called the lewkum, which was built out from the south wall. Properly done, this work was harmonious. First, the lorry backed into the lewkum. All in one movement a sack was levered onto the barrow, which was promptly reversed on rubber tyres and wheeled off, swung round to face the postern oak doorway, where with a jerk the sack was stood
upright,
the barrow withdrawn, and set aside. Before the sack could move out of the vertical the binder-twine round its neck was unfastened, to be swiftly looped over a nail as the sack began to fall like something stunned. Pressure of one boot on its base, just before it toppled over the edge of the lewkum, held one corner on the edge and all the grains gushed out in one swift vomit, leaving the sack shrunken and empty; to be picked up, folded, and put on the pile at the very moment that its solid successor was being jerked upright off the barrow. It was easy and swift when one had the knack of it. It didn’t really need two to corn-cart, but Phillip had Bert Close by him for companionship. As they worked in harmony they talked of Malandine and the woods. Bert said it was the finest time of his life. Phillip could not remember being happier.

During the threshing of this stack the manager of a firm of
seed-merchants
with whom Phillip dealt came to look at the grain. He said he would buy it, but would decide the price in his warehouse. The alternative to trusting him was to leave the full sacks on the field, covered up, and sell the once-grown pedigree seed by sample in the Corn Hall. The usual price for such once-grown pedigree-seed wheats was half-a-crown a sack over milling-wheat price.

In the old days a farmer did not peddle his corn. His merchant took the farmer’s sample and decided the price. The farmer trusted him implicitly. That was how Phillip liked it. So, although he could feel no real confidence in this hard-eyed, rather brusque, half-bald man obviously intent on doing his best for a limited liability company, he left the price to him.