Lucifer Before Sunrise (32 page)

The sensation of a journey to the moon was exhilarating. In climax, his machine with humming spokes rushed brakeless down the hill past the Nightcraft field, round the steeper bend to the bridge over the river and maybe he’d go into the river but who cared. No lamp told P.C. Bunnied of his coming, for the lamp was not in its place, although as a precaution against theft he had,
before
starting out that evening, wired it to the forks of the bike. Someone had opened the tool-bag, but as that had contained only grass which he had put there specially to suck-in (as Luke would have said) any would-be thief, only the lamp had been pinched. But when he looked at the rimed bike next morning as it leaned against the Studio door, he found the lamp wired to the tool-bag and filled with the grass.

Whatever else Phillip had failed to do properly since taking in hand the Bad Lands five and a half years before, at least the Studio could not be called, in the departed steward’s phrase, a Silly Thing. It had been a barn, or a cattle byre, before it had decayed. It stood in front of Phillip’s cottage. Water-repellent cement now lay under a new paved floor and two feet up the walls of rounded flints. The beams and rafters overhead were creosoted. New windows let in light. The walls within were white-washed to the rafter-ends. By contrast, the first three feet above the floor were tinted a pale pink.

The Studio was satisfying not so much because it had been built cheaply, but because all the ideas intended for it had been realised.

How was this done in war-time, when all civil building was stopped, it was sometimes asked. Phillip replied that, during the years immediately before the war, he used to take his lorry to auctions at builders’ yards, to buy, at extremely low prices, far below cost, what could be stored in one or another of the farm
outbuildings
for the future repair and upkeep of the estate. This hoarding was justified. During the third year of the war, when building materials were unobtainable elsewhere, he was able with the aid of the one-man village builder to turn the semi-ruinous barn into a library.

The door was two inches thick, with glass panels at the top. It had come off a ship, and had cost eighteen pence. The two sash window frames, made of the best Baltic deal, together with cords and weights—everything new—had cost half-a-crown the lot. Bricks for the open hearth—from old cottages—were half-a-crown the lorry-load. On the floor yellow and red ‘pavers’, half a ton or more of odd shapes and sizes, and now fitted to crude pattern, had cost about a pound. He had his own sand-pit—splendid loam-free sand which made the best mortar. Quick-lime came from burning his own chalk.

In surprisingly fast time the work had been done: roof stripped of tiles: rafters, after creosoting, laid with bituminous sacking: tiles rehung—on new oak battens, too, outlasting deal four or five times. Sections of glass tiles let in the sunlight.

A village carpenter fitted some panels of three-eighth-inch tongued-and-grooved deal—also bought before the war—to slide under the glass tiles at night. An open hearth had been built to Phillip’s design, with stepped-back rows of brick on the chimney breast across one corner of the room. New shutters over the
windows
had been made, for warmth in winter, and the blackout. There was his library, or Studio—for
£
40.

And there, on Sundays, he sat before his fire, bookcases against the walls, door shutting out the Bad Lands.

*

How far away, remote, and gone for ever seemed those spacious, those comparatively free and easy days before the war, now that movement was restricted in that coastal district! Police permits were required for entry, although this was no longer enforced. Many shops were shut; roads almost vacant. Everything
un-rationed
was unobtainable except at an enhanced price. Ugly phrases like
black
market
and the cringe-making
under
the
counter
had become part of normal existence. One old soldier of the 1914–18 war had removed the medal-ribbons, including the 1914 Star, of his many-times decimated battalion, lest an inexperienced crowd of rookies deride him as hopelessly antiquated—the bow-and-arrow war, Phillip once heard one of the searchlight-soldiers call it, as he walked past the camp, eyes on the ground.

Another load went into the woodshed for the open hearths of farmhouse parlour and Lucy’s boudoir. There she could sit warm from the polar wind.

Phillip felt uneasy about the fourteen bullocks in the Bustard Yard. The yard itself was snug enough against the weather,
enclosed
as it was on three sides by straw stacks, but the main food for the beasts came from the undersized roots grown on Lower Brock Hanger. And they were almost gone.

When these roots were taken off the field, they were tossed by hand into the tumbrils to avoid damage. Before the topping, Phillip asked that they be pulled out of the ground by hand, and not lifted by the spike of the topping knife. The wound of the spike caused a black rot around the gash.

“We want sound roots, every one must be saved, especially as it is only a half-crop.”

The roots were carted into the wood behind the shed, made into a ‘pie’, or clamp, and covered with earth against growth and frost. Jack the Jackdaw had accepted the job of feeding the bullocks. Generally he was unreceptive; his poor head could not take in, without distress, anything but the simplest ideas. Knowing this, Phillip had told him that the roots, together with the long hay in the stack, and the barley-straw for fill-belly, must last the bullocks between five to six months. In order that there should be no
mistake
in the daily ration he had bought Jack a bushel skep—
two-handled
basket made of osiers—and told him that he was to grind, in the root-slicing machine, two bushels in the morning, and two bushels in the afternoon.

“We are short of keep,” he explained, while the fellow backed away from Phillip like a frightened steer.

“We have only these roots to last for twenty-four weeks, for one hundred and sixty days. So only two skeps of a morning, and two at night, Jack. Understand?”

Jack the Jackdaw turned away, making a whuffing noise. “O’ive a-fed bullocks afore!” he mumbled.

The village carpenter had built a new loft under the roof of the shed, where many hessian sacks, filled with flights and caulder
from the threshing of the upland corn-stacks, were stored. Caulder was the local term for the broken beards of barley—the prickly harns. Flights were the softer shucks of oats. They had a feeding value a little better than that of fill-belly barley-straw. Flights and caulder were mixed with sliced roots; the bullocks thereby had to munch thoroughly before swallowing. Only thus could the fodder be eked out until grass arose again on the meadows in late April.

Despite all Phillip had tried to tell him, Jack the Jackdaw had over-fed the bullocks on roots. When Phillip went up to see them, their coats were staring. Their eyes were bloodshot. They pranced on one another’s backs. Their droppings were too liquid. Their hindlegs and quarters were in a mess. Their strength had run out in scouring. They had been given practically no hay to bind them. Half of their summer pasture condition was run away in squit.

When he spoke to Jack the Jackdaw he blared, loose-mouthed, like a bullock. The gist of his rant was that he knew how to feed bullocks, that he worn’t going to be told in the village that he had starved ’em. It was useless to try and speak to him then. Phillip reckoned at that rate the rest of the roots would be gone by the end of January.

Sardonically, Matt the stockman declared once more that ‘the farmer gits narthin’ out’ve it’. Phillip had put Jack on that work to save Matt’s strength. The 30-month old bullocks probably weighed between seven and eight hundredweight apiece. They were not big-framed animals, for they took after the
Aberdeen-Angus
bull. Even so they ought to have been at least two
hundred-weight
more apiece.

Jack the Jackdaw was not really strong. The gunshot-wound from the Somme battle had taken a third of his strength. He became ill soon afterwards, and lay in bed with wheezy chest and breathing. So Phillip fed the bullocks after Peter and David had gone back to school.

It was peaceful up on the hills. He rejoiced in the sight of the September-sown wheat plants, protected by frost-slurred clods from the sharp sweep of the Siberian wind now coming over the sea. Nothing nagged at his consciousness there. To supplement the meagre root-ration he took up bags of beet-pulp and extra water in which to steep it, twenty-four hours before feeding. Each bullock was now being given seven pounds of soaked pulp every day, with one and a half pounds of mixed ground-nut and
cottonseed
cake, besides long hay in racks and barley straw which they pulled from the sheltering stacks. Phillip had bought six tons of
good cake in 1939; in addition the grey coconut-shell which had little feeding value. (This was the same muck, made into ‘
chocolate’,
which Phillip had seen on sale in a shop in the City of Dreaming Spires.) Good cake was unobtainable now, except for milk-herds; and ration-coupons were given only against receipts for milk-sales.

Powerful Dick and Steve spent their time cutting and trimming the trees of the drive under the Lower Wood. They worked in harmony, being of the same stock—the one from Normandy, the other from Denmark. Both men were good, hard workers. When some of the lower oak boughs were to be taken off, they did as asked: first making a cut underneath a bough, close to the trunk, to avoid splitting and tearing when the heavy limb fell. Thus a tidier landscape and firewood for winters ahead was assured.

*

Another neighbour rang up and invited Phillip to a cock-shoot on his land. He had met Phillip at Charles Box’s place. Phillip hesitated—dare he go? It was a question of energy; he had to force himself to leave his desk, and the book in which he was living. But once out in the keen air he felt exhilaration, and enjoyed driving over the snow to Tom’s place on the higher lands. Three of them went round the hedges and through the spinneys of Tom’s farm, after the long-tailed cocks only, since pheasant hens must be left for breeding. It was one of the winter’s coldest days on that bleak coast. Sleet drove into their faces and made the very skull of Phillip’s head to ache, yet how heartening it was to trudge with two friendly men upon a blank new world, one’s footsteps scarcely showing in powdery snow streaming over and whitely smoothing the rocky furrows! Eyes were closed to slits while wings rocketing out of white-capped kale hurtled away with the blast.

Phillip had the one shot that his gun seldom missed: the shot that seemed to order itself as the high bird passed over, the shooter’s body bending backwards as gun-muzzle stroked line of flight, and when the bird was invisible beyond the limit of bending backwards the barrel fired and the four-pound cock fell far away into the snow.

It was a body-glowing day, with luncheon in a house that seemed wide and spacious after confinement within the small rooms of farmhouse and cottage. It was furnished with antique oak, for Tom and his wife had sold their comparatively modern furniture, they told Phillip, since the market value was higher than that of the good antique pieces by which it had been replaced—so they had the satisfaction of having made a profit on the deal. People all
over England were beginning to seek and to buy in the country, for town-trade was decaying.

Afterwards they went back into a blank outdoors of wind and sleet. In an hour or two he returned home with a cock pheasant, arriving as the family was sitting down to tea. It was pleasing that Billy enquired of the bag, which was eight cocks and a rook. He and Peter occasionally went out after hares and rabbits, sharing the octagonal-barrel Holland and Holland 32-bore which had belonged to their grandfather nearly eighty years before.

The gun-cupboard stood in the Studio. Phillip kept the guns clean, and oiled against damp. One day it would be Boy Billy’s
sanctum
; the guns would be in the case.

*

The hard weather held. They could work only about the frozen acre of yards, barns, sheds, hovel, and engine-house—otherwise the Premises. What a blessing it was that the circular saw had been fitted to a concrete base in the corrugated iron shed where the tractor stood ready to drive the High Barn Machinery! This happy memorial was the volunteered work of a delicate and faithful engineer, who had come to help, after reading Phillip’s newspaper articles. Every time Phillip sawed logs there, he felt pleasure at the job the young man had done. It was economic to saw logs while the men worked inside the High Barn, for the tractor had power to spare.

While Billy ground tail-barley into pig-meal and rolled oats in the Combined Mill, Jack the Jackdaw (who had returned to work, looking after the bullocks in the Woodland yard) and Powerful Dick chaffed hay and straw; Steve helped generally, in intervals of wheeling and hoisting filled sacks into a tumbril ready to go to stable and cowshed.

During that hard weather the very last reserve set of cogs of the chaffing machine in the High Barn were broken, by the old, old error of not declutching before changing gear.

Phillip said nothing.

Powerful Dick looked thwarted. He had been ready to answer back, explosively. Phillip told Lucy, before a great fire in the Studio that evening, “His ancestor at the battle of Hastings must have split many a Saxon skull with a broad-sword, for this is the sixth time he has tried to change gear while the cutter was turning. Now the chaffing machine is out of action until the war is over. So I put him and Jack the Jackdaw for the rest of the day tidying their own untidiness in the cart-shed.”