Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
While waiting for the lorry to come to take the corn, he climbed the straw-stack. From the top he could see for several miles. There was a mirage-like prospect beyond the rolling green canopies of the Brock Hanger beeches; miles away and below quivered the red roofs of the hamlet of Durston and the level distances of marshes, now blue with sea-lavender to the sand-dunes and a cloud-capped sea. He saw the prospect as for the first time, he had worked bone and sinews to a clear mind without cumber. The wheat was threshed out, cashed out.
But that night Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s tackle went away. He had given his word to return it at the end of the month to finish the remaining stacks. Soon they would need the oats in stack by the Duck Decoy to keep the cattle alive.
The seed-merchant’s lorry arrived at the site for eighty-six sacks. Bert Close and Phillip, helped by Dick, Steve and Billy loaded them—lifting half of the sacks four feet, the other half seven feet up—about ten tons in all. Then they went home, men to high tea, pub, garden, or cockle bed; farmer and his son to farmhouse parlour. Afterwards Boy Billy to the movies, Phillip to estranging work upon paper—accounts, details of overtime, payments to soldiers, farm diary.
It was weariness, but it must be done. Afterwards he thought to go for a swim; but something had been forgotten—the next day they were to drill the Brock Hanger, that field of biscuit-yellow clay, with wheat. So after supper Peter and the smaller children with Phillip went down to the Corn Barn where the reserved sacks stood. They dressed the seed with mercuric powder in the old churn—a slow job, for the seed weighed just under a ton. He sent the children back at 9 p.m. to bed, and worked on alone. He was weary when it was done, at 11 p.m.—but not so weary as the last owner of the churn, poor Dowsing, the consumptive ex-infantryman from the Somme, had looked when he had given Phillip that churn.
Phillip had allowed Dowsing to graze his one cow rent-free on the grass beside the curve of road above the river; and had accepted the churn, relic of a simpler age, earnestly offered by so decent an old soldier as Dowsing. He had been so quiet, in both manner and
speech, as he stood about the river-bank; he was dying of
tuberculosis,
legacy of the winter morasses of Thiepval and Ancre valley. Slowly he and his beast used to pass up and down the road to the grazing on the river-bank. One afternoon Phillip saw him sitting by the roadside, and heard his words, “I be all wore up.” Soon afterwards Dowsing was dead, and a cattle-float came to the riverside grass and took away his frightened cow.
*
After the threshing of barley, the selling of barley. This was Phillip’s fourth harvest in East Anglia. He was by now fairly
confident
in the market place. For one thing the pre-war position between farmer and merchant was reversed. Farmers no longer went cap-in-hand, merchants no longer shook their black
Foreign-Office
-hatted heads. Indeed they glanced about them from their raised wooden stands with the alert glances of hens in grass when daddy-long-legs are hatching. They tried to snap a sale, clinch their bargains with the speed and click of the locks of their
solid-leather
sample-cases. So eager were they to ‘fill-up’ that some forgot to say good-morning. It was ‘Let’s have a look, how much have you got, what d’you want for it?’ Trickle of corn into soft palm of hand, sniff-sniff, what d’you want for it. Farmer, cap on head, got his price. The trouble was his price might be the wrong one—ten minutes out of date. A lot of grain ships from Canada and Australia were going down; the Baltic was closed; Hitler was getting the grain of Central Europe in exchange for—some
newspapers
had informed the public—crate upon crate of aspirin tablets. From the look on some of the merchants’ faces a few were needed in the Corn Hall.
As Phillip wandered round the merchants’ stands he carried in his hand a little bag of red target-cloth made for him by Lucy. In it was a sample of Great Bustard barley. Soon he had sold it to a gentleman whose Foreign-Office hat was on his desk: feverishly he was looking round for farmers without any expression on their faces—these were the ones with samples to sell. Phillip let his go for sixty-seven shillings a coomb, top price in the market that day. Also forty coomb of another barley, with Bustard rakings, for sixty-three shillings. Afterwards he treated himself to a pint of beer made from East Anglian coastal barley in a pub called
The
Shades,
down a dark and narrow street leading off the market.
(
In
retrospect
.) If Hare had emulated Tortoise, and kept his barley in stack until the following April, and then threshed, it would have fetched
210
s.
a coomb of 2-cwt. For barley, alone of other grains, was then still a free market.
One morning as Old Michaelmas Day (11 October) drew near an incident occurred which shook Phillip, although he should have been prepared for it. It started with his discovery that the
cast-iron
hitch of the heavy rib-roll was broken. The hitch had
obviously
been broken while being backed into the hovel. Hitches and towing bars of other implements had been wrenched and broken the same way, by being jammed on the lock while reversing the tractor. This practice was dangerous for the light aluminium body of the tractor; and as spare parts were now unobtainable, he had requested that no implements be backed into the cart-shed. Also, he had asked, frequently, that all breakages be reported by the evening of their occurrence, so that repair or replacement could be arranged. This request was usually ignored.
He enquired who had broken the roll hitch, and why it had not been reported. Nobody spoke. He had either to keep silent, or to enquire into it then and there. Had Boy Billy broken it? No, he said. Did he know when it was broken? Last week, Boy Billy said. Did he know how it was broken. Boy Billy did not reply.
Then Luke said he had done it.
“Well, you might at least have told me, Luke, so that I could get another made.”
Luke replied that he’d told Boy Billy.
“Oh well, do be careful about backing heavy implements with the tractor,” said Phillip.
“There’s narthin’ but trouble here,” Luke muttered roughly. “I give up Friday!”
At the time Phillip didn’t take his words seriously. Certainly he didn’t think that Luke had been waiting for an excuse to leave. Since Luke had given up being teamsman, however, Phillip had had to return his name to the Ministry of Labour as not being in an indispensable job. Luke was therefore liable to be called up for the army. Luke did nothing in the village outside his work—no Home Guard or Air Raid Precaution duty—and Old Michaelmas Day was approaching, when the labourer’s year began.
On the following Friday Luke gave notice, and quit a week later. Phillip had never thought he would really go, and
momentarily
felt helpless: the thought of the extra work involved by his loss passed a wave of fear through him.
I hear from Steve that Luke had been after, and got, a job some weeks previously in a village a dozen miles away. It will mean his. leaving home for the first time in his thirty-three years. The experience will broaden his outlook. I owe much to Luke. He was consideration itself during the early part of our association, and keen to do well. Sometimes he has been right, and I have been wrong. I recall the picture given by his father, of Luke sitting by the fire worrying himself thin. There is something in him which warms me, even at times I feel an affection for him. I don’t think there was any real ill-feeling between us. Steve said that, as teamsman on his new farm, Luke had an
agreement
with his master to do no loading or unloading, either at corn harvest, haysel, or sugar-beet time. He is to feed and look after five horses, and lead a tumbril in the field; but no more. He will never touch hoe, dung fork, two-tined fork, or sugar-beet fork; and at the end of the year will get a bonus of twenty pounds. Big farmers can afford to pay such bonuses out of money which otherwise will be paid as Excess. Profits Tax, which is 100 per cent after the first
£
1,500. One farmer not far from the Bad Lands told me he had paid Excess Profits Tax of
£
80,000 in one year; but this is small money compared with the profits of the big building companies engaged on airfield construction. My average annual profit for the war years so far had been under
£
200, but then I do not sell milk. And we have our butter, milk, eggs, bacon and poultry ‘free’.
Luke’s help will be missed during the October-November-December sugar-beet lifting, now imminent. And—dreadful thought—the autumn ploughing may not be done—but only disastrous February and March ploughing,
if
weather permits … I shall have to work at night, by the moon; as well as get up at 5–6 a.m. to feed the horses, for I can’t expect Sarah to do it.
Sugar-beet has priority. We have begun on Steep Bottom—three and a half acres which was loamed during the making of the New Cut before the war. Since then the hedge along its south-western edge, tall and ragged with thorn and elderberry, with a pediment of three and four yards of docks, nettles, and spear-thistles, has been laid low by powerful Dick, working with Billy as his apprentice. It was a hard job, the pleaching and plashing of trunks and branches tough as alligators. The hedge should have been cut to the stub; but that would have meant making a new fence, materials for which were unobtainable.
When the hedge was down the seven broad-winged steel feet of the cultivator levelled the rabbit-mounds in the field. Formerly these mounds looked as though cart-loads had been tipped there. The weeds were torn out, left to dry, then I rolled them up with the chain harrow. Many times the teeth of the pitch-pole harrow dragged along the
hedge-border,
gathering and casting rootlets. I made bonfires, happy at my task. Later, sun and air and chalk sweetened the new lands. A compost heap, containing among other things the remains of a mad dog and.
seven calves, was spread. I enjoyed all that work, done alone. Later, sugar-beet was sown.
Phillip was ploughing, with horses, the sturdy yellow-white roots of beet out of the ground. Dick, Steve and Jack the Jackdaw knocked and topped the roots for an agreed price of seventy shillings an acre. The district-rate for such work, twenty-
four-inches
between the rows, was sixty-three shillings an acre, but Phillip made a mistake in calculation, and abided by it. Sarah, the land-girl, helped Poppy to unload beet at the lorry-dump.
Sarah had not been an easy person to get on with, as Phillip had feared when she had slapped him on the back, without warning, while he was working the power-saw in the woods. They had little or nothing in common. There was a distraint between them. Even Lucy felt that she was not altogether likeable. Her thoughts went outward from herself; she did not divine. Thus on one occasion when Phillip was complaining to Lucy about another dead hen remaining unburied on the Home Hills, she interrupted, saying, “Why don’t you try to behave like the gentleman you pretend to be?” and with a curl of her lips left the room. And after a few days of carting beet from Steep Bottom, she told Lucy she was going home.
Sarah did not add (as it later transpired) that she had already arranged with Powerful Dick that he go to South Devon and build a wall in her mother’s garden. The first Phillip knew of this was when Dick, clad in an Edwardian golfing suit with knickerbockers, came to the farm-house door and said he was taking three weeks’ holiday. So for the heavy work of lifting, topping, carting,
unloading
at dump and reloading into lorry about one hundred and seventy tons of sugar-beet off another field, they would be two men short, as well as a third to feed the three horses.
The bank overdraft is now twenty pounds short of the dreaded four figures in red. But money is beginning to come in. For the Great Bustard barley there is a cheque for
£
341. 10s
.
The seed-wheat has made 1
s
. 6
d.
a sack over milling price, instead of the current 2
s.
6
d.
(This way great impersonal businesses are built up?) Tonight I made ihe annual valuation (estimated) less the corn not yet sold.
| | £ |
| 39 bullocks, 10 cows, 1 bull, 18 calves . . | 929 |
| 48 ewes and 1 ram . . . . . | 199 |
| 3 horses and 1 foal . . . . . | 120 |
| 2 pigs, fat . . . . . . . | 18 |
| | 1,266 |
| Hay, 50 tons, say . . . . . | 300 |
| 10 acres winter wheat sown . . . . | 100 |
| Straw, say . . . . . . . | 100 |
| 17 acres of sugar-beet, unlifted . . . | 350 |
| | £ 2,116 |
When the remaining stacks had been threshed and sold, Phillip would know the value of the corn. With some anxiety he awaited the overdue return of the tackle promised by Mr. Gladstone Gogney, for soon the going would be impassable to and from the Duck Decoy, owing to hill-springs breaking, water in the grupp rising, the ground becoming sodden. And if there were no oats for the winter feeding it would be a disaster. A barley stack also stood there.
Some of the corn in this stack by the Duck Decoy was already spoiled, rotten-wet, grown-out. Matts’ undersized and half-rotten stack-cloth, ending three feet short of the eaves, had led all the water dripping down directly into the stack. An extra small stack, built below one eave of the larger stack was completely saturated. He had asked Luke to put it at the
end
of the stack, and build it with an angle roof. Luke had built it tight against the
side
of the big stack, with a lean-to roof. There it had caught all the gutter-drippings from the big stack. Phillip did not think this act was deliberate, but done without imagination, otherwise ignorance.