Lucifer Before Sunrise (24 page)

*

A scurrying of bicycle tyres on rimed gravel, a crackling of thin ice-sheets covering pot-holes in the roadway. Poppy had arrived. Soon another dark shape appeared, wheeling slower, alighting
heavier, walking with limp beside his bicycle. It was Powerful Dick, recently returned from his three weeks unleave of absence, after doing a little building job in South Devon. It was good that he had come back, for the sugar factory was closing very soon.

Five minutes later another bicycle appeared, with the red glow of a fag. Steve had come. He was punctual today; but then he was his own master. The work was taken work—so much an acre, to be divided among them as they liked.

Lemon streaks cleft the black of the eastern sky. Jack the
Jackdaw
was standing by his heap of sacks in the hedge. Like Dick, he began to wrap lengths of pulp bag round ankles and calves. Sacks were tied apron-like around waists. The team was ready. They moved to where they left off the previous evening.

Phillip led Beatrice to the centre of the field, with the mare Sheba as trace horse. Poppy lead Toby. As the first beet were tossed into the tumbril, a black Wellington night-bomber clattered by overhead, low over the trees, coming in from the North Sea. They could see jagged holes in its fuselage and wings. One of its air-screws was motionless, what they call feathered.

When it had racket’d away, they went on with the work. Each man stooped, and with beaked iron-point of small curved topping knife snicked up a parsnip-shaped root, took it in his left hand‚ struck swiftly to remove crown and tops, and tossed it into the tumbril. Bomp, bump, bomp, on thick chestnut planks.

Were the yield good there might be twelve tons to the acre. More likely there was about ten tons, which meant anything from twenty-five thousand to thirty-two thousand roots. Phillip
calculated
thirty thousand stoopings, or ten thousand each man, with a like number of left-hand tossings into tumbril, for each acre. But he tired of these calculations; and forgot what he was doing.

The first tumbril was full. He led Sheba the trace-horse, attached by chains to the shafts in which Toby was fixed, to the dump by the roadside. There the haulier’s lorry would come later, for all to be lifted again. The tumbril lumbered over old wheel-ruts to the dump, where he threw off the roots with a nine-tine fork, each tine set with a smooth iron blob at tip to prevent it sticking in the roots. Neat piles were made. The roadside roots must be built up like bricks to prevent any falling on the road.

Meanwhile Poppy’s tumbril was being filled. Roz, back from the North, joined them. When Phillip’s tumbril returned, Sheba the trace-horse was taken off and the chains fixed to Beatrice’s tumbril, which then went to the dump. This continued until
Peter returned from breakfast to help unloading, and Phillip went down to the farmhouse for breakfast; after which he walked back to the field and relieved Peter and Poppy. Poppy left to spread muck on another field, Peter to the dentist in the market town with his mother, in the weekly ’bus, so Roz led a horse.

Thus the work continued, with half an hour off for dinner, until red streaks of sunset barred the darkening west, and partridges called across furrows of the ploughed fields. Phillip sent the children home. The white owl fanned down the hedge for mice.
Searchlights
flicked on their violet beams, loud voices called. Once again the black night-bombers began to drone across the darkening sky and away east over the sea to Germany.

It was heavy work. The weekly rations were insufficient for the men. Their drink was a bottle of cold tea, rust-coloured with a little milk; their food, slices of bread from which the energising germ or ‘sharp’ of the wheat-berry had been removed, with a smear of ration margarine and nondescript ration jam, and perhaps a lump of cheese and half a dozen pickled onions.

*

By the light of the moon rising above the mists of the marshes Poppy, Dick and Steve bicycled home to their tea, the substantial meal of the day. Jack the Jackdaw helped Phillip unhitch the horses from the shafts, the tumbrils being left by the hedge. He lifted his sidebag off one tumbril, swung it over the sails of Beatrice, and walked down the gulley, followed by Sheba, Toby and Phillip. While the horses drank thirstily at the water-tank, Jack removed his sidebag from the wooden horns secured to the collar of Beatrice, and shuffled away home, with a throaty ‘Good-night’. The horses sucked steadily.

Afterwards the trio lumbered in through the doorway and each waited in its stall for its feed. Phillip removed harness, hung it on the pegs, then mixed the feeds in the sieve, and so to the mangers, where the trio munched happily.

About an hour later, after resting with the little cat in the straw, she purring and loving his fingers among her kittens, Phillip shogged off home along the path worn through the rough grass to the farmhouse. The village was in darkness, all windows
blacked-out
like a place of the dead. His footfalls clattered on the road, and to the frozen gravel of his cottage yard. The black-out curtains for the lower room had not yet been hung, so there was no bulb in the electric-light holder, for reasons of safety.

He was used to finding his way in darkness among bacon-pickling
tubs, boxes, cider barrels, carpenter’s bench and other obstacles, to his stairway. Sitting on the lower tread, he removed the wrappings about his legs, then boots and jacket, before walking in slippers over the gravelled yard to the bathroom, there to remove all clothes and enjoy the refreshment of soap and water.

In clean shirt, woollen jersey, trousers, and jacket, he entered the parlour; and with a kind of heavy despair realised that at his entry the voices of children had fallen silent. These little creatures were affected by his moods, as, a generation ago, he was affected by the moods of another parent such as himself. Nevertheless, an unreasonable mood persisted with his fatigue: was this the effect, the reward of sacrificing oneself as an artist, for the sake of the family when harder times fell upon England? But he knew such thoughts for what they were—mental feelings of fatigue.

After supper, alone in the leather chair, he heard merry voices in the next room, where before the fire sat Lucy and Roz mending and patching clothes already worn out, the mother happy with her children, Eric the cat purring among them. He helped himself to a glass of rum, and offered a drop to the tame bat hanging on the beam. She refused to be awakened. Sensible Pipistrelle!

*

The moon was high in the sky, pantiles of cottage roofs glistened with hoar. The full hard frost called black would come after Christmas. They were behind with the ploughing. There was yet time to get the work done before Siberian wind turned all to stone. So on with woollen sweater and leather coat, thick stockings and rubber thigh-boots, horse-hide gloves and flying helmet. With flask of hot milk and rum secure in haversack, he crossed the river, and up the hill to where the tractor stood under its stiff canvas cover and filled the radiator from the can below. The water was filmed with ice. Having swung the engine he waited for oil to circulate, and then set off down the furrow.

The tractor moved slowly up and down one side of the field. The shadows of the high moon fell short.

Pigeon Oaks wood was dark, the field spectral.

Timid Wat the hare came limping down his path, and found it suddenly ended. He sat up, his ears tall in the moonlight. He fled. Phillip was alone once more, in the immense night of men. What of the steppes of Russia? The icy seas of the Archangel run? The deserts of North Africa? He was fortunate, he was a civvy, an old man on a tractor, his own master, who could go home to sleep whenever he wanted to.

The tractor moved slowly up and down the middle of the field. The shadows of the moon slanted long. The cold was beginning to strike through him, to find his bones, but he kept on, up and down the far side of the field. He was a farmer, he was behind with the work, his job was to provide food. What else was there to do but work, until one died?

The moon declined to the west, the shadows were longer, and vague.

The white owl returned, to hover over its mice-runs. Nothing stirred under its gaze, for the tracks made by the feet of vole and mouse were turned under.

The shadows of the moon were lost in darkness as the orb sank feebly to the west, where frost hung thicker.

Now the bombers were returning from their long flights over Sylt, Heligoland, and Baltic. The tractor-driver’s mind was
fretful.
It began to churn up old mortifications and vain desires. The flickering snake below the left eye touched the furrow turning
behind,
the steel breast was whispering through a patch of gravel as he slewed round to watch the turning earth.

And slowly he was being dragged.

The left arm of the leather coat, worn thin at the elbow, had caught on one of the wheel-spuds. Eye-snake and furrow were one and the busted moon queerly above. It was all happening very slowly.

The tractor was going on alone. He managed to get to it before it reached the hedge, and close the throttle. Then draining the radiator he clumped down the hill to the stables, to lie in his hole in the straw, while with delicate steps the little cat came from her kittens to purr out love against his throat. He could hear the crowing of Hawkeye. Then the belving of Molly, Polly, Cherry and Dolly, the answering blares of their calves. The squealing of pigs. Matt had arrived. He fell asleep; and then it was time to get to his feet, to water, feed, and groom the horses; after which, with eyes squeezed tight, back into the straw, and the warmth of the cat, purring, purring with love for him.

Before him a fire of ‘gre't ol' bull-thorns', as Jack the Jackdaw called the logs of hawthorn. Lucy had roasted a ham in the Virginian manner, covered with molasses and stuck all over with cloves. The long polished table reflected the faces of four boys in descending order of magnitude against the wall, Jonathan the smallest beside Father, Boy Billy near the door, ready, as he
declared
with a merry smile, to make his getaway should ‘Dad get tisky'.

It was Christmas Eve, there was a feeling of relief, even of gaiety in the air. They had been working as a family team during the past three days. Billy, Peter, and Phillip had carted between them fifty tons of sugar-beet in that time. The crop would soon be off the field. The work had gone easily. Billy and Peter got on well together; and in Peter's company Phillip always felt at ease. He was a gentle, soft-spoken boy, with a quiet courage and
determination
that were entirely unobtrusive. So the three worked easily together. Perhaps it was because, of the three, Peter was the only one essentially unselfish. Billy had always felt a little outside his step-mother's family, although Lucy loved him as one of her own children.

For their lunch under the hedge they ate scones of wheaten flour ground in the High Barn mill, baked by Lucy and spread with butter and honey. Scones made out of their Squarehead wheat were fortifying, like steak.

Phillip felt again and again a continued contentment when he ate them in place of the devitalised grey bread from the village bakery: no hollow feeling, no sudden exhaustion with consequent over-running of the imagination upon work undone. And now it was Christmas Eve, there were chains of newspaper cut and coloured by Jonathan—no other sort was now in the shops. The small boy had draped them round the ceiling, with holly and mistletoe. The shaded lights on the table revealed everyone to be eating happily.

On Christmas morning they went to church. No bells rang out from among the trees at the top of the street. Bells were for
invasion
warning only. A last-minute indecision, as footfalls
receded
up the street—what hats should Billy and he wear? One should wear a hat to church, surely? There were a bowler, and three felt hats.

“I'll wear the bowler, if you, Boy Billy, will wear the dark brown felt. It will, I think, enhance your fair thick hair, the vivid colour in your cheeks, the dreamy blue of your eyes.”

He often saw Barley in those eyes, but distantly. Billy guarded his eyes now, when he saw Phillip.

“How about it, Boy Billy?”

“No thanks,” he muttered.

“Well then, this one?”

“
Must
I wear a hat?”

The lads of the village, the tractor-boys on the wall down by Horatio Bugg's of an evening, beside the rusty petrol-pump covered by a sack ever since the scares of 1940—the long-haired youths who dreamed of becoming fighter pilots—did not wear felt hats with brims. Such hats were worn only by what they called snobs, which might be anybody who didn't lean against a tarred flint wall or kick his heels after the day's work on the brick parapet of the bridge, and talk with envy of the big pay-packets of the workers on the Henthorp airfield. Billy didn't want to wear a damned hat. David, the spiritually percipient, the merry clown, the boy who as a child always gave away his sweets to other children in record time, now made a suggestion to save further
embarrassment
.

“You wear it, Dad, you look very posh in it, really you do.”

Rosamund, dark and beautiful and coming into bud, beside Lucy in a blue coat and skirt and beret with grouse-foot set in silver, pinned to the side—relic of departed days—had already left with Jonathan—for Lucy played the organ which a village boy with a head shaped like a mangold-wurzel, hair like barley straw, and eyes like two flowers of speedwell pumped up in full view of the congregation. The felt hats remained on the table; and
hurrying
up the village street bare-headed, they passed an old lady being helped by another, and slid into their pew and to their knees just in time, for the choir was coming from the vestry.

Phasianus
colchicus
upside down, wingless, tailless, headless upon a dish beside his brother; No. 6 nicked lead pellets in the flesh; roast potatoes, cut to half an inch thickness, and soft-baked with brown dripped fat; bread sauce with onion, brussel sprouts, slices of bacon crisp from basting the barley-plump breasts of the birds. All from the Bad Lands, with the whole-wheat bread, honey, butter milk and jams of Lucy's art. Also elderberry wine which must be sipped suspiciously, for while certain acid was necessary for
car-batteries
it wasn't altogether good inside the human belly.

“You been at this vintage elderberry poison again, Peter?”

“Who, me, sir?”

“Yes, you, sir.”

“I can't bestways remember, sir.”

“For belly's sake you'd bestways leave these bottles alone, sir.”

“Very good, sir.”

Peter was wearing a hand-me-down khaki uniform of his school Cadet Corps.

Inevitably David, the conciliator, must chip in. “They are screw-top bottles, Father, and they might have burst if Peter hadn't opened them to let the gas out, sir.”

“Ah, good show, Peter. M'yes. That reminds me, sir, I found
my gallon cask of port-wine, laid down for Boy Billy's twenty-first birthday, empty in the farm workshop.”

“So did I,” said Billy. “I found the barrel empty when I lifted it the other day.”

“After lifting it up, or before, sir?”

“No, Boy Billy didn't drink it, sir!” cried David. “Nor did Peter. Peter is really a teetotaller, he doesn't like wines of any kind, do you, Peter?”

“Ooh, I dunno,” murmured Peter, going pink in the face.

“Oh well, everybody thieves these days. It's all part of the new world we're fighting for. Seriously, why didn't you tell me about it before, Boy Billy?”

“Peter and I found it was empty only the other day,” said Roz, serenely. She added, “You know what soldiers are, Dad—scroungers, just as you were in your war.”

“Ah. You have a point there—a nice point—as young barristers say. H'm. Ha!”

Phillip had been acting all the time; but the younger children weren't sure if he was serious or not. Roz had come to the rescue: just in case.

“Sir, tell us about the old days, please do, Dad!” cried David.

“Yes, do tell us, sir, please, Dad,” echoed Jonny.

“Please do, sir,” came very politely from Billy at the bottom of the table.

“You're all joking again!”

“We're not!” they cried.

“Tell us what you had to eat when you were a boy, before the first war,” said Roz, adding, “everyone is interested in food.”

“Very well. When I was a boy I used to have to go to church on Sundays with my mother. I did not like going to church, it was dull and uninteresting, but there was always the relief of
after-church
to look forward to. On Christmas Day there was turkey and plum pudding, ginger and raisin wine, oranges, apples, bananas, nuts, bon-bons, muscatels, Carlsbad plums, crystallised fruits, dates, figs, boxes of fancy biscuits, tangerines, almond nuts, Guauva jelly, with other goodies on the table.”

“Coo, did you have all those things to eat?” asked Jonny.

“I can only just remember having a banana, but it was ever so long ago,” said David. “Do tell us more about when you were a boy, sir.”

“I'm off,” cried Boy Billy, and springing up he opened the door and was gone.

Phillip said, “Lucy, don't you think he should ask your
permission
to leave the table.”

“Oh, I expect his friend is waiting, and after all, Billy gets so little time off from the farm nowadays.”

“Go on, Dad, excuse poor old Boy Billy's manners! Tell us-some more about when you were a boy!” cried David.

But memory was a mirror broken before a grave far away, almost a forgotten grave, in the yellow clay of north-west Kent, now petrofact by London.

“I don't remember any more, little oafs. Lucy, what a splendid party you're giving us. Thank you very much.”

“Hurray for old Mum!” yelled David.

After dinner there was a job to do in the Woodland yard. Thither they went, and after feeding the bullocks, Phillip left the younger boys to sport by themselves, and went to his bedroom to make more notes for the series of novels he had been hoping to write for many years past, and which, it seemed now, were likely to remain unwritten.

With the electric fire warming him, he sat by the wide window with its view of the two gardens immediately below, and the walnut tree set in the middle of the farther garden. During the past spring, summer, and autumn a retired labourer had been looking after what he called the Walnut Garden, and well he did his work. But Hammett was slow with physical decay. He had a bad heart. The old fellow asked only half-a-crown a week for his work. He was paid several times that amount, while Phillip hoped he would not feel unhappy because his infirmity forced him to stand still many times every morning at his work. He was the good, kind man whose wife had taken in Phillip and Boy Billy during the hard winter at the beginning of the war. His deafness worried him, so Phillip kept away from him as much as he could. His hands were
swollen, like his legs. He moved with difficulty. He had worked hard all his life and his body, as they said in the village of an aged man or horse or implement, was ‘all wore-up'.

One morning after his work Hammett had gone to his cottage more slowly than usual. When he reached home he sat awhile in his chair in silence. He held his head on one swollen hand before he began a laborious ascent up the narrow stairs to his bed,
wherein
his remaining strength was spent. Phillip took him a
dressing-gown,
and some books to read, with eggs and milk, but his time was come. He had given up.

Since his death no one had looked after the garden, except for one ploughing by the tractor and potatoes set by the farm men, and whenever Lucy could spare a few moments from cooking, mending, keeping house for seven, looking after the bees and ducks and hens, and running the Women's Institute after the Rector had collapsed, and he and his wife had left. Lucy played the organ in church with what skill she could assemble from the memory of lessons during a schooling which had been cut short by her mother's death. The only piece she knew well was Beethoven's
Farewell
to
the
Piano
; and this had been Lucy's farewell also, since after leaving school in 1917, she had never sat down at a keyboard again until she came to sit below the organ-pipes of St. John, Banyards.

*

Between the two gardens a hedge of ash and elder straggled, tall and ragged. Elder was the poor man's hedge: a few sticks pushed into the ground, and soon there was growth, substitute for hedge. Elder grew rapidly, with sappy stems, hollow and brittle, that were useless for pleaching and inferior as a barrier for stock. It did not make a proper hedge. It could not be tamed and ordered like beech, thorn, and holly. Elder was a tree-weed. The man who made a hedge of this weed was the man who stopped the gaps of his hedge with worn-out bedsteads, ancient frames of bicycles, and rusty privy-pails. That was the standard of hedge-making in the village when the war broke out; such were the hedges Phillip took over in his garden. He saw them as a manifestation of the inertia, of the lost heart of a village that had been decaying since the Industrial Revolution, and the flight of British capital abroad.

Shabbiness and neglect were now claiming the Island Fortress, a sally-port lying off the continent of Europe. Frustration was now part of life. He had only to look out of his bedroom window, to see how England was decaying. Therefore it was a relief when the time came to draw the black-out curtains, to put the lamp on
the table and switch on the light, and with manuscript before him, and music from the radio, to try and forget the immediate world outside.