Lucifer Before Sunrise (30 page)

“Oo cares.”

“Well money talks, they say, so that is how it talks, perhaps, in wind up, so to speak.”

“Thet’s right, guv. Vere’s nothin’ you can’t buy wi’ money vese days.”

“Everything’s gone with the wind.”

“Too true it has.”

“You’re right, too true.”

A gust blew two of the flimsy paper notes from his hand. He clutched them, and as he bent down a thick roll of fivers fell from an inside pocket. Grabbing the roll he let go the two notes, which were lifted among the cabbages. He snatched one and thrust it nervously into a trouser pocket. The other was wrapped round the bundle, and smacked down with the palm of his hand.
Obviously
the stuff was a nuisance to him. He stammered. His eyes looked anywhere. He didn’t know where he was. The years upon his black-oiled acre of hideous rusting wrecks had settled him to three or four quid a week average. Now he was money-mad and furtive. He was worrying, too, that the war might end before long. He was like the Phantom, the last of Lucy’s bantams, that pale little inbred wisp of a bird that stood about by itself half-lost among the nettles and broken relics of hen-houses under the elms by the Corn Barn. The Phantom was a lost soul, he ran to tread any old hen with hopeless hope. Once Phillip saw him scrabbling on the back of a stag-turkey, crowing voicelessly in the rain.

This money-mad man of the airfields, this walking-talking machine, with its neurotic stare and stammer, went away without
the caravan. Phillip wouldn’t have sold it to him for
£
110 or
£
1100, although he didn’t want it, and the sight of its uselessness worried him. Was he going mad, too? They were all mad in the war, except the young who were facing death for civilian stupidity; but few knew it. The British moaned about Coventry, while the R.A.F. burned innumerable civilians, old and young, in
phosphorus
raids upon one artisan suburb after another in all the major German towns, night after night, week after week, month after month…

Having recovered some sort of balance, Phillip went to tell Lucy how sorry he was for his outburst. Then he returned to his bedroom and wrote a letter to Lucy’s brother, Tim Copleston, telling him of what he had done, and of his fears for the family;
ending up declaring that in future he must—he
must
—put the war out of his mind—before he went out of his mind.

Tim Copleston was alarmed. He filed the letter, after wondering if he ought to go to the police with it.

*

Great relief! There was the familiar sound of the heavy threshing tackle owned by Gladstone Gogney trundling amidst its own smoke past the empty Corn Barn!

Next morning Phillip helped to thresh the oat stack by the Duck Decoy. The team was made up of soldiers from the
Searchlight
Camp. The work went as usual: the start an hour late; soldiers knocking off every forty minutes for a smoke, thus delaying the work, and their return to camp. Lucy, as usual, brought down sandwiches, scones, cake, and a two-gallon jug of tea, into which went, by request, Phillip’s weekly ration of sugar. At the end of a long day the stack was only two-thirds done. One of the team was a native of Crabbe who had now passed his eighty-eighth birthday. He worked with his usual heroic gustiness; and set off to walk home to his village three miles away with a cheery goodnight. He was the chaff-and-cauder man, who had to endure work in a constant cloud of dust and dirt from the gnawings of mice which had wintered in the oat stack.

So great were the legions from the woods that the oat stack was one vast tunnelled tenement. There the mice had bred. Thousands had become scores of thousands, and thence on in geometrical progression. Even the rats had been driven away in disgust by the smell. Phillip estimated that during five months about a quarter of a million mice had eaten about seventy coombs, or five tons of grain.

All during the threshing hundreds of nimble little grey-silky rodents were springing and slipping, appearing and disappearing in threes and fours and twos and sixes: everywhere grey ripples, in places three and four deep, on dark-yellow oat sheaves. Mice got in his pockets, ran up his legs. Bushels passed through the whirling drum and came out limp and broken, choking the sieves again and again. Apart from the irreplaceable feeding value nearly
£
100 worth of corn had been lost. He thought of the little mouse-hawk, the kestrel of the Scalt—shot by one of the villagers invited to shoot pigeons (only) in the woods. Afterwards Phillip had found his kestrel lying dead by one of the hides in the Lower Wood. The fellow had shot it and left it there: a small detail in the torn fabric of living.

The next day they finished the stack. It took three hours. Mr. Gladstone Gogney arrived in his car to see how things were getting on. He offered to sell for Phillip both weed-seed and corn at ‘a good price’ if Mr. Maddison cared to let him take samples to the Corn Hall on the morrow. Phillip thanked him; and asked if he thought it would be any good taking a sample of mice as well, saying, that he had about a dozen coomb. With his expressionless face, resembling that of a Chinese sage, Mr. Gladstone Gogney said he did not know of any market for mice, but he would do his best with the oats and ‘carlick’.

Phillip had filled several sacks of this weed-seed, called charlock elsewhere, from a great heap that had accumulated under the threshing drum. And being suspicious of Mr. Gogney’s offer, he determined to be in the Corn Hall on the morrow and see what happened.

He had no motor of his own to take him there, for the engine of the Silver Eagle had broken down after only 3,000 miles of a
re-bore
at a small garage in the coastal town. A merchant of about thirty years of age, who lived in the village and had a stand in the Corn Hall, gave him a lift to Yarwich. During the journey the conversation turned upon enemy pilots, their aircraft wrecked, baling out under parachutes; and how pilots of the Polish squadron had shot at them while floating in the air.

“I’d kill every German pilot I found on the ground,” said the driver grimly, a hard look coming over his face. This was, at that time, a feeling typical of the inexperienced, whose imaginations were obsessed by pictures of evil men (some of them boys of eighteen) and the righteousness of extermination; but Phillip thought ironically that one could have felt more respect for the common mind revealed by this man in fine physical fettle if he had gone to fight for his country instead of remaining in the seed trade to make a great deal of money.

Then he felt ungracious for thinking like an elderly blimp, for the merchant was a kindly fellow who had swallowed all the propaganda of righteousness, without exception. He dropped Phillip outside the Corn Hall at half-past twelve. As soon as he got inside, Phillip saw Gogney talking to a bird-seed merchant. He stopped behind him. Gogney had said Carlick was worth about twenty shillings a hundredweight. The merchant bid forty shillings. Ha, was Gogney going to make a bit for himself?

Gladstone Gogney apparently had been eating carrots, for it seemed that he had magic concealed between his shoulder-blades;
he half-turned his facial front to Phillip while flickering rapidly the lids of his eyes. Whatever did this portend? Business acumen? To remain quiet while he, Gogney, delivered the
coup
de
grâce
?
Again he winked at Phillip several times with no expression on his face, then Phillip heard him asking forty-five shillings; and blinking both eyes at once in his direction, thus signalled that he was getting his price.

Afterwards Phillip thanked Mr. Gladstone Gogney, whose eyes were now roving around the hundreds of men in the market, and from his dead-pan face came a murmur, “The best offer I got for your oat-seed was twenty-four shillings and sixpence a coomb.”

Phillip had taken a sample of the same seed with him, and the only bids he had got were for feeding prices only—twenty-one shillings and ninepence—so he felt he had been unjustly cautious of one who had been trying only to do him a good turn. And he remembered that Gladstone Gogney had generously lent him twenty coomb of oats in the winter to keep his horses and milk cows going. The man in charge of the threshing tackle, known as Bob, an honest and helpful chap, had told Phillip that his master, to whom he always referred as Gladstone, would do anything to help a neighbour, but from trying to please too many people Gladstone was always in a muddle.

Obviously the trouble over the threshing had been caused by the tackle being promised to too many farmers at the same time.

“Well, thank you very much for your kindness in selling the
bird-seed
and oats for me, Mr. Gogney!”

Phillip felt much relief: here was a good, an honest man!

“That’s quite all right, Mr. Maddison. I am only too glad to be able to help anyone.”

“Perhaps I can help you one day, Mr. Gogney.”

“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Maddison. I dearly love a day’s shooting, so if you ask me to yours next season, I’ll come.”

“I’ll send you an invitation.”

Standing in the snowy twilight of the Duck Decoy, his twelve-bore gun resting on a cut branch of willow before him, Phillip listened to his neighbour talking about the war. Charles Box was a farmer, of a long line of farmers. Talking of the war meant war-time farming; for Charles Box did not concern himself with affairs outside his scope. He had served in the 1914–18 war; being blown up while in command of a battery of field-guns in France was but an interval in the history of his family life, which
continued
through him, and would go on through his son, upon the land. Wars came and ended; but the Box family continued to farm land, and to enjoy the sporting thereon.

The second war in his lifetime appeared to mean for Charles Box only the conditions of war-time farming; and farming in all the generations of his family had meant—money.

That was obvious from every utterance of Charles Box. If a thing did not pay, it was no good. Money meant capital; capital was the family of Box, continuing from father to son with five centuries of yeomen blood in the present living body.

Farming meant money; that was obvious; but like so many obvious things, not always easy to apply. Phillip had known it to be obvious; yet only during the past few months had he stopped, as it were, and faced it. His bank pass-book had forced him to face it. The thing he had dreaded, superstitiously, had happened. The red figures in the debtor column of his bank pass-book had become four, in line. Hitherto, he had avoided the obvious fact that
without
money he could not farm.

He recalled how, before the war, he had been filled with
determination,
and some conceit, to do what others had declared to be impossible. Money? What was money against the need to put England’s land in order? By his writings he would force the British public to be aware of what he was doing, and why he was doing it. It was gold used as a commodity—instead of a token—that had
brought England near to ruin. The world money system was
obsolescent,
no longer able to serve modern needs; the cause of slumps and booms, of mass-unemployment, of starvation in the midst of plenty. No export of gold must be permitted to individual
financiers.
The land and the people must come first: the idea be iterated and reiterated by newspaper article, book, pamphlet, and radio broadcast, until it was achieved. It would be achieved: that was why, when he discovered a political party devoted to Britain and to the idea of work and service within the would-be-closed sterling area of the Empire, he had joined the party.

Now, five and a half years later, the political party was broken. Sir Hereward Birkin, its leader, and many of its members who were old front-line soldiers of 1914–18, were in prison. Some, decorated for bravery on the Western Front, had died in prison. (Cabton, a writer Phillip had never liked, had called recently at the form and said, ‘You have maggots in your brain’—a metaphor more apt than that tricky little writer knew.)

Phillip was standing, while feeling to be almost deprived of soul or harmony, in twilight behind a barrier of cut willows. Charles Box, his solid-seeming neighbour, the embodiment of five and a half centuries of farming, smoked his pipe two gun-lengths away on his left. He was waiting for duck to glide down to the circular pond seen before him as a black and irregular ellipse beyond the white snow on the banks. Phillip was waiting, too; but with closed eyes.

*

Charles Box’s keeper looked after the sporting on the combined acreage of Deepwater and Henthorpe farms. To Phillip’s relief, his partner did all the organisation. For several days tail-corn had been scattered upon the verges of the pond, and a pair of tame pinioned ducks released upon the water. But whether or not any wildfowl flew there that night, he did not, for himself, care. He was hoping, while remaining still, to sleep; as one did in those Flanders trenches in the winter nights of 1914, in water to the waist.

A pigeon flew around the network of tree-tops, slowed its flight,
and with flapping wings settled in an overgrown willow in the jungle beyond. In old Buck’s time this mass of leaning poles and fallen trunks had been a neat plot of willow-stoles, from which every year slender osiers had been cut, tied into bundles, and taken in towering wagon-loads of two tons or more to the basket works in the capital town of Yarwich thirty miles away. Four horses had pulled the load, stacked, roped and borne upon a red-and-
yellow-painted
harvest-wagon. The waggoner stayed the night in Yarwich, and enjoyed an honest evening in an ale-house; to return next day with a load of coal along the winding roads the deep muddy ruts of which would be drying in the east winds. It must have been a happy farm in those days of single-minded living and working.

With almost a start Phillip awoke to hear Charles Box’s voice saying, “Don’t seem to be comin’ t’night, Phillip,” between puffs of his pipe.

“No, Charles. No.”

A moorhen flipped its white tail in the dark pond. A pheasant crowed in the distant Brock Hanger wood. Immediately
afterwards
a dull shudder slightly shook the ground.

“Sounded like one on Cromer, Phillip.”

“Yes, Charles. It did.” Eyes closed.

At home, the children would be sitting at table. Lucy would be putting food on plates. Billy would be changing his clothes after helping in the chaffing of hay and rolling of oats in the High Barn—a dusty, eye-smarting job. O why was he standing there, holding a gun. Inniskillin Farm, flares, slanting tree-shadows, crack of sniper’s rifle, tattoo of German machine-gun. The Flanders rain, rain, rain. Corduroy paths. Braziers.

Charles Box would hit every duck he fired at. He himself would miss every shadow with every pulled trigger. O God, I am late, late, late with the ploughing.

Charles Box farmed six hundred acres, less what recently had been taken for an airfield. His steward set out the work and directed it from on horseback. For five and a half centuries the big arable fields had been farmed that way, master buying, selling and
ordering;
steward seeing that master’s orders were carried out. Thus the strains of farming were divided and borne. I must close my eyes, save a little energy.

The sibilance of a missing pinion feather. A continuous circular whistling around the tall and ragged willows of the decoy pond. A small dark shape gliding steeply, wings downheld. Sudden darkness simultaneous with ruddy bang. Eyes jerked open, splash
was absolute. With a click of the ejector the empty case flipped behind him and Charles Box was ready for the next duck. The black Labrador dog by his feet never moved.

“Teal,” said Charles Box. “Wasn’t it, Phillip?”

“I think so, Charles. Yes.”

In the Great Bustard wood another cock-pheasant crowed: a second dull shuddering in the dimmit-light, another bomb fallen somewhere upon the dim grey landscape. Remotely other
cuckettings
came to his ears. He felt it was freezing harder, and wished that all the sugar-beet tops of the Nightcraft were ploughed in. The wire-netting stakes, which he had cut and stripped of bark so laboriously, left to season, and then boiled in creosote—thus to last twenty years—were already split by Matt trying to bang them into hard ground. Phillip meditated: I have spent many hours working on those stakes, fitting iron rings to their tops to prevent splitting; all waste of labour. Impractical, to be so careful over stakes for sheep-netting. Knock, bang, knock—and they were split. Matt has the iron bar, with a balled top, to make the hole in the ground; but it isn’t used. The stakes won’t last the season. Thought, care, energy—all comes to nothing, as the life of a bird, stricken by a hundred deadly pellets of lead, comes to nought.

No more duck were coming. Dare he speak about farming to the solid-seeming Charles Box? He felt that Charles thought him a poor sort of blighter.

“How long will the war last, Charles?”

“Now you’re asking me, Phillip.”

Recently they had begun to call each other by their Christian names. Phillip felt it to be an achievement, a step nearer to being a real farmer. For in this remote corner of a bleak and hard yet fascinating coast of the wild goose, in this relic of Old England, farmers were generally known by their Christian names, if they were accepted farmers, which meant that they were truly of the land. For example, in the two village pubs the men referred to the coming sale of a local herd of pedigree black pigs, saying that Hubert o’ Warham had a fine lot again; or that Bryan o’ Binham’s Oxford Down rams had made top price at the Hempton September Fair; or Tom o’ Choosley had a new David Brown tractor; or Freddie o’ Langham had been mobbing again, because the rows of muck on one of his fields had not been set out exactly, as on a chess-board; or a target drogue had fallen on Charles o’ Henthorpe’s common, and the girls had grabbed it to make knickers, the sly young maidens, with the fine red cotton cloth. Hubert and Bryan
and Tom and Charles and many others had known each other all their lives; they had shot together as boys before the Great War; as young soldiers on leave from Somme or Arras, and ever since, as farmers working the lands left to them by father or uncle, they had shot game birds every fall and winter of the years between.

Phillip had met them since the shooting on his three hundred acres had been conjoined with that of neighbouring land to make better drives and stands. The hillside woods and coverts of the Bad Lands made it one of the best small shoots for high birds in the county. Otherwise he would not have been qualified to shoot with these yeoman farmers. They were some of the best
game-shots
in East Anglia, which meant England; and he was one of the worst. In return for his coverts he had two out of eight guns in the shoot, and every day they shot he had the pleasure of sitting, together with his guest, at Mrs. Charles’s table, one among a score of faces, many of them even older than his own. They had grown sons with the Forces.

Some of the farmers’ wives came out with their husbands. A few acted as loaders. To their menfolk shooting was a serious thing. Game-shooting was an art to be studied properly. They brought their own luncheon sandwiches and ate them about one o’clock, either under the hedge if fine, or in some field-barn should the day be grey and cold. At one shoot on the earth-hard floor of a little barn of Charles’s, they squatted beside the parts of a new broken tractor. Phillip, with a little feeling of ease, observed that he was not the only one maimed by carelessness.

He looked forward most of all to the after-shoot tea, into which all tucked vigorously. Towards the end of tea the custom was for Charles’s steward to send in a piece of paper with the bag written on it. The details were announced by the host as he filled his pipe. Phillip listened to the talk of Tom and Hubert and Bryan and Percy and others with the feeling of being, for the while, part of the community.

That high deflection shot in the wind over the Great Bustard wood, when the old cock came down wing-whirling.

The partridge that flew on a couple of hundred yards, and all the time Percy knew it was a dead ’un.

Percy shot with one arm, having left the other one more or less with a cracked undercart of a Rumpetty shot down near Zillebeke in 1915.

Remember that bird, Reggie, which flew on and dropped in the Ash Carr in November, nineteen seventeen it was; we found it
hanging in a fork of elderberry, hit by a single pellet in the brain? Why yes, I was on leave from Arras then, Jim. So was I, Reggie, we were in Bois Grenier…

*

No theories or abstract ideas among these solid-seeming yeomen, no politics either, nothing subtle or two-sided, all direct and practical thinking, no taint of urban sentimentality or imaginative literary abstract. They knew seeds and weather, rates of
piecework,
men and soils and animals and yields, and they squared everything in their minds, or lives, with the formula,
Does
it
pay?
For if each little or big job did not pay, so much of the family economic life-blood, its capital, was lost; and when a farmer’s capital was gcne, his livelihood, and sometimes his life, went with it. A farmer’s capital
was
his life.

So if a thing didn’t pay, well then, cop it out—the first loss must be the last loss. Plough-in the failed roots, sell the screw, get rid of the bad labourer; in times of depression stand off all but the best men, put the fields down to grass, graze bullocks and sell milk, and wait till times got better before breaking up the grazing.

Keep the men on in bad times, and sooner or later—generally later, for going downhill is a slow process—your Live and Dead Stock will be printed in small type, boxed in the columns of Michaelmas auctions advertised in the local paper.

No stability in farming between the wars; for the Government did not, could not, alter or change basically while international Money governed. Nearly 3,000,000 on the dole in 1939 and the vast estate of Empire falling to pieces because ‘nothing could be done’.

During the 1923–1939 Depression, Charles Box and his friends had been greatly worried. Their lands were mortgaged, their cottages falling down, even as their fields were ‘tumbling down to rubbish’. Charles told Phillip that, after the high 1941 barley prices he had got for his corn, he was so anxious to get rid of the mortgage which had held him down for more than a decade that he had paid
£
750 to get rid of it at once, and not have to wait all during a year’s notice.

*

Phillip wondered if his thoughts were telepathic when Charles Box said, as he puffed his pipe, “What was all that stuff about you and Birkin, Phillip? What was he up to?”

“I think he felt that England might go right down in a war—and Europe, too. He wanted British money to develop the Empire,
not to finance, for instance, Polish coal-mines worked by cheap labour, and so make a big profit; and incidentally putting the miners of South Wales on the dole. By under-cutting prices of British coal.”