Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Charles Box relit his pipe, and said nothing.
“The City of London had money invested in Polish utilities, that’s why we guaranteed them, Charles.”
“H’m” said Charles Box, throwing away the match. “Duck don’t seem to be comin’ any more, Phillip.”
The moorhen was creeping away through the willows, but her pied tail-flip gave her away. He must say one thing more before the white point vanished. “When Hitler invaded Russia, Birkin managed to get a letter to me, saying ‘Withdraw from the war, arm with the might of the Empire, and await the victor of the
Russo-German
clash—if any’.”
“Asking rather a lot, wasn’t it?”
“One feels so fairly helpless in prison, Charles. And Birkin’s whole soul is dedicated to England—to a new and better England.”
Phillip felt his voice to be nervous. He had done nothing about the message. Now he strained to keep silent. His left eye began to ache, and soon the zigzagging flash-snake was flickering, it seemed, just outside his left cheek—legacy from a shell-burst at Messines on Hallowe’en 1914.
Charles Box said, as he sucked at his pipe, “I told you how I paid off my mortgage. Well, the Excess Profits Tax rule came in, and it was retrospective, so I’ve had to mortgage my land again to pay the tax. But E.P.T.’s not likely to hurt you. So, if I were you, old man—only don’t think I want to interfere, but since you ask me…”
He paused to fumble for matches to relight his pipe. Abruptly small dark shapes were hissing down, and
bang,
bang,
bang,
some were climbing steeply and away again. “You got one. Teal, weren’t they?” Charles knew they were teal: he had shot tens of thousands of teal: he was being gracious in thus deferring to his junior partner.
“Yes, as I was saying, if you’ll not mind my saying so, if I were you, Phillip, I’d be inclined to sell all you can while the going’s good. That’s only my opinion, mind.” A match-flame leapt to the puffed pipe. “I’d sell all the straw and hay you can, and keep the money in the bank. Your rent is under three hundred pounds, so you don’t have to pay income tax on Schedule D profits, but you’re assessed on a profit equivalent with your rent.”
“That’s a hundred and fifteen pounds a year, Charles.”
“You see, Phillip, now’s your chance to create a reserve against the bad times that are bound to follow after the war. Sell all your straw, get rid of your stock, sell all your hay. Your land’s in good heart, you’ve done it well, and it will stand two or three seasons of cropping without muck, using artificials. The copyhold’s your own, and you can always restore the fertility later on.”
“You’re right, my stock doesn’t pay, I’m afraid.”
“You haven’t the scope for sheep, old man. I know this farm. My uncle farmed it years ago, and he was a good man—farmed a thousand acres here and had a grass farm in the Shires—used to hunt six days a week with the Belvoir and Quorn—and when he died, left forty-three thousand p’un. Well, he tried this farm of yours for four years, and gave it up—couldn’t make it pay. It’s bad land. You’ve got two steep fields, you see, and about once in four years we get a dry season, or a late one, with frost lasting well into March, and then you miss a crop. You can’t stand that sort of thing.”
“These light hydraulic tractors make a difference, you know, Charles. They can get away with it quickly, where in the old days bullock-teams were very slow, ploughing.”
“Well, you do as you like, old man. It’s none of my business, but you did ask my opinion, you know. It’s only my idea.”
“Yes, and I think it’s a good one. Thank you for your advice.”
“Well, you please yourself, old man. The slowness of the horses or bullocks in the old days was offset by plenty of labour, you know. A farmer could put all he had on those Bad Lands and do the lot from ploughing to seed-harrowing in one day, with all the men he wanted. I’ve seen your Steep field with six teams on it at once—that’s thirty horses, and a dozen and more men. The land dries out quickly, that’s the trouble. And it had all the muck it needed from a ewe flock—I’ve seen fifty score o’ ewes, grazing on the marsh all day, folded on that field night after night until the land was black.”
“Did they plough deep in those days?”
“If you sell all you can now, you won’t go far wrong. Well, it looks like being over, what do you think? Pretty dark. Can’t see.”
The black retriever, which had been sitting by his master’s feet unmoving save for quivering nose, went forward at a quiet word and picked the birds out of the water.
“One mallard, three teal. You take ’em home, old man.”
“No, you take ’em.”
“I’ve got some at home. Here, give us your bag.”
Charles Box thrust them into the bag. In rubber boots they trudged back in silence through the snow. Charles got into his car by the Corn Barn, said goodnight, and drove away. Phillip walked home in the spectral light of the stars.
*
In the parlour supper had been cleared away. Spilled water and crumbs had been left on the long oak table. He resisted an
impulse
to sweep them up violently. Books and toys were scattered about the room. Thoughts of detonation struggled to obliterate his mind. Why couldn’t the children use the next-door cottage as their room? It had been rebuilt with a new floor, windows, and plastered walls. Hadn’t he distempered the walls himself?
Repainted
the woodwork? Result—broken toys and oddments thrown anywhere, table scratched and never polished, the room looking what it was, squalid. Mindless chaos, near and far;
England
in decline: all counter-efforts without hope.
There was a letter for him. From the bank. He opened it, glanced, threw it down. Striving to void himself of flash-thoughts—gun-muzzle in mouth, bottom of the garden—he put the
wildfowl
on the cold paved floor without a word and remained standing, eyes half-closed, in the centre of the room. That brindled
opportunist,
the cat Eric, or Little by Little, who always watched her chance to pilfer on the table, sniffed at the mallard. He lifted her body away with his boot, and sat down. She jumped on his knee, sniffed like a dog, and then began to pound through his trousers, claws pricking flesh. He pushed her off. She jumped up again. He tipped her off. She returned. After eight attempts she
overcame
his resistance, and stayed on his lap, purring as she settled to sleep, while he struggled with a dark and bitter impulse to eat no food. Why were the children so silent?
Rosamund’s voice said, “Mum’s at the Women’s Institute, giving out rose-hip syrup for the babies, Dad. Here’s your food.”
“I don’t want any, thank you.”
The tray was removed from the table. He sat there, entoiled in his dark self until, warmed by the fire, he accepted a bowl of bread-and-milk from Lucy, who had quietly returned to the empty parlour. Eric tried to share it with him. He resisted several times, but in the end she put her head over and licked the bowl clean.
With the food inside him he felt better, and visited the children and their mother playing games in the next room.
Eric got on his lap again, ‘playing the piano’ on his utility tweed trousers, as he lay back in the fireside ease, with a pipe and
The
Times,
while the walls and ceiling quivered to distant explosions.
It’s a bad war. It is penetrating our very bones. Charles Box feels it badly, though not in the way I do. More than a third of his farm has been taken already for the airfield. Another area, including the new orchard planted for his son in the Army, is soon to be lost to the new bulldozers and concrete-mixer machines.
My nerviness, the doctor has said, is mild compared with that of Charles Box, who often shouts and raves at his steward. Charles, a field-gunner in the first war, was blown up on the Frezenberg Ridge with most of the men, guns, and horses; and now I fancy that the sight of bulldozers on his land, trees and hedges down, reminds him of the Salient.
I sat before the fire for an hour or more after the family was in bed, telling myself that I must enter up the farm diary, and clean the gun; but I’d do it tomorrow. Sell my hay and straw, get rid of the screwy beasts and farm on artificials—on the small amount of the fertiliser ration? The war demands corn crop after corn crop, obtained at
whatever
depletion of the fertility of the soil. Nearly five years of trying to do the right thing—or five minutes, what did it matter—and for why, and for whom?—has brought me to the state I am now in. Would
someone
bearing my name be farming this land in five and a half centuries? Would he be farming it in five and a half years? The room shook again. I went to my cottage through the glittering frosty night, carrying
hot-water
bottle and Thermos of hot milk—two comforters, I have only recently discovered, with which the night, dominated by a ‘crash made’ alarm-clock treacherous as the Goodwin sands, can be faced.
During the darkness snow fell thickly upon the farms and villages of East Anglia. It covered deceptively roads and tracks already frozen and slippery. The work went on. Dick pulled the grupp under the Lower Wood, Billy and Steve brought in loads of hay against the time when, with its fifth set of cogs, the
chaffing-machine
might turn once more. Unfortunately when it did the new cog wheels were broken in the same manner as the other four lots. Phillip had a hidden last set: replacements were
unobtainable
in the county town or elsewhere, he told them.
“If the man-in-charge of the cutting does not de-clutch,
every
time
,
before changing gear, these brittle cast-iron cogs will break.”
*
It became a problem how to get water up to the Bustard Yard. Water spilled during previous attempts made the New Cut up the
Steep too slippery for the tractor to draw the water-cart. This
water-cart
was a rotund Falstaffian affair, slopping its contents about with seeming chuckles within a two-hundred-and-fifty-gallon oaken barrel mounted on an old lorry-axle and two rubber-tyred wheels. When filled, this ‘patent’ weighed over three thousand pounds. Phillip knew it was too heavy, but it had to be tried. Half-way up the New Cut it began to slide back on the slope, drawing the tractor, half its weight, after it. The tractor wheels were impotently ‘scrapping’ as in some enforced robotic mating. Fortunately the idiotic mass chanced to slew sideways into the bank away from the drop into Steep Bottom, so driver and tractor were saved from disaster. Billy and Phillip managed to unhitch the great bulb. Leaving its wheels held by wooden chocks they
returned
for the green trailer.
Into this light and low vehicle they placed tubs and filled them at the river. Having covered their tops with sacks and picked up a boy to help hold them in position, they started for the New Cut. Billy’s orders were to go flat out in top gear. He was delighted. The
outfit
slewed and slithered about, Phillip and Jonny among the tubs cheering as the contraption skidded and swayed, while water under the sacks rocked, leapt, and slopped over them. They managed to reach the Bustard Field, and with throttle still wide open came to the yard and a greeting by the massed booing of bullocks with smouldering eyes and staring coats.
“Don’t go in, Billy! You’ll be crushed! We’ll pour the water into the troughs over the rails.” Phillip leapt over the top rail, the steers backed away. “Now pour pailfuls over the rails. Wait, beasts, wait!”
Tea in the farm-house was a merry meal afterwards. “Billy is a splendid help,” Phillip said to Lucy.
*
Frost held meadow and field silent under snow. The woods looked black and thin. Every day the flying-column went up the New Cut to the Bustard Yard, taking water in galvanised bins and oaken tubs covered by the sacks. They lost half the water every journey, but they watered the bullocks, while the children enjoyed the excitements of the ride.
One afternoon on the high ground Jonny pointed to little dark dots on the flooded pasture below, and said excitedly that the duck were in. Phillip telephoned Charles Box, and they agreed to meet by the Old River.
Towards dusk he got into mackinaw, waders, mittens, and taking
his 20-bore gun, bag, and small boy, went out on the meadows, where sheets of thin ice dusted with snow crackled under their boots. After meeting Charles, Phillip went on down to Teal meadow, his guest remaining below the Decoy. Phillip usually shot better alone. That evening he got one mallard, two teal—a left and right—one water-hen, and fired only four shots. He enjoyed his first shooting alone for years. Alone? Jonny was part of himself. They saw a lot of mallard, a couple of woodcock, and some snipe, but he had no desire to shoot more than was enough for the pot. Charles Box fired sixteen times, Jonny counted; he got twelve duck, which he insisted Phillip share with him.
There was a muzzle-loading, percussion-cap hammer-gun in the gun-cupboard: should he bring that next time? There was also a powder flask, and another flask for shot. He told Jonny that he had used the gun only once for snipe, for by the time the flash had detonated the black powder, and the powder had blown out the wad of newspaper and ounce of dust-shot in a cloud of blue smoke, the snipe had taken evasive action. But he had enjoyed the bang, the blue smoke, the smell of black powder. He saw himself in an old English setting: writing at corn-merchant’s desk (with a goose quill); relaxing with muzzle-loader under arm—as in boyhood in Gaultshire, with cousin Percy Pickering … killed on the Somme.
*
The social warmth generated by the evening with his neighbour led to Phillip being invited to attend a Saturday night party given by the R.A.F. at Henthorpe.
Upon level land until recently owned by Charles Box the new airfield was taking shape—or rather Henthorpe farm was losing its immemorial pattern of hedges, spinneys, and arable. Phillip was surprised to get an invitation: the first and only one of its kind sent to him during the war.
After a long day carting sugar beet he bathed and dressed, and in a lunar dusk mounted his bicycle and pedalled across the dreary wastes of once-Henthorpe farm and down the unfinished runway to the officers’ mess, for dinner, and a succession of unaccustomed drinks with unaccustomed faces afterwards. The feeling there was alien to him; the false gaiety of herded men in a world of destroy and be destroyed. Long after midnight he returned, pedalling through the mist and moonshine of eternity, bumping and crashing over rutted ground once stubble and ley and roots where in the past he had shot at Charles Box’s stands—now a treeless, hedgeless waste. He felt his eyes to be glittering with moonlight as with a
strange sense of detachment he wobbled across freezing mud of the bulldozed land, rattling past torn-out oaks and thorns and weird machines squatting amidst ice-sheets glaring aghast upon what was once part of the heart and brain of Charles Box.