Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Poor Gladstone! The respectable continuity of life with the Gogney family had recently been shocked, for Gladstone had an only son who had served overseas in the present war; and now home on leave, the young man had, without telling his father, siphoned the petrol—‘milked’ was the current term—from the tank of Father’s motorcar into the tank of his motor-bicycle in order to go after the girls. Gladstone was much upset by the duplicity of his own son doing such a thing; especially as the lad,
he told Phillip, had deceitfully replaced the petrol with tractor fuel. Result, Gladstone’s car wouldn’t start that morning; dense white fumes poured from its exhaust; then came a loud report, followed by a smell unmistakably of T.V.O. Ah, it was the war, Captain Maddison, upsetting a lot of people! Gladstone was genuinely grieved by the thought of his son, Launcelot, doing such an underhand thing. However, Gladstone went on to explain, he drained his tank, and managed to get to the shoot in time, and as he walked beside Phillip to the first stand he declared that boys would be boys—a fact which Phillip had repeatedly to remind
himself
that he was often in danger of forgetting in regard to Boy Billy.
*
Another guest for the shooting was as different from the
reserved
, or preserved, Gladstone Gogney as cosmopolitan
experience
is from parochial. The word cosmopolitan should perhaps be qualified to mean all experience as Fleet Street saw it. An
acquaintance
of the Barbarian Club was, in addition to being a
propagandist
of the B.B.C., a writer for a proletarian red-bannered
illustrated
weekly paper the photographic pages of which smelt of rubber solution. This journalist wanted to do an article on shooting, and so he wrote to Phillip, who asked Charles Box, who didn’t object.
Bannock MacWhippett would obviously get on in the writing trade. He learned quickly by asking questions and getting just what he wanted. So successful was he that by 1943–4 he was almost an expert on many subjects; for what Bannock
MacWhippett
knew, he knew intensely.
One afternoon he arrived from Fleet Street in a rattling old car suffusing blue smoke, with a new gun apparently with sawn-off barrels, a new pair of canvas boots, and tremendous enthusiasm. He brought with him a photographer, to get the best action pictures for the best article on ‘game-bird shooting’ ever written. Phillip had had doubts before speaking of this visit to Charles Box, for as a rule shooting men did not want publicity in war-time. However, this newsman was different; for, in time of shortage, he told Phillip that for every pheasant he took back with him to London he would send back a bottle of whisky.
At ten o’clock one late November morning, behold Phillip and Bannock arriving at Henthorpe Manor. There was interest in his gun, which was not, as Phillip had at first supposed, of the sawn-off variety, but a brand-new weapon made especially for him by Kirkben of Fornoster Square, London. A new sporting gun in
war-time! Even Charles Box was impressed. His own guns had been destroyed while being cleaned at a gunsmith’s in Yarwich during the night of the bomber raid which had crushed the centre of the city. Even Charles Box had not been able to replace his guns until it happened that a great landlord died shortly after the German raid, and hardly was the funeral over when Charles Box arrived at the mansion, with its art treasures collected from all over Europe by a famous ancestor, and bought a pair of his late lordship’s guns. There the Cheffe crest was—Charles pointed it out to his guests, engraved in gold inlaid upon the mahogany stock of the Purdey No. 2 gun.
The party left Henthorpe Manor on large muddy rubber wheels; nine sportsmen, with wives, dogs, or daughters, transported along a sandy drift or lane, all of them sitting or crouching upon a long and wide platform drawn by a yellow tractor to the first stand. Already the photographer, a young man hatless and wild-haired, an Irish look about him, was fixing Leica to eye, adjusting swiftly the lens, clicking the shutter beside Bannock MacWhippett—lean, electric, horn-rimmed eyes filled with everything.
How the pair worked! They were everywhere, peering and listening. Phillip felt that as a writer his day was done: a literary bow-and-arrow gent faced with automatic prediction. If during lunch, down by the old willows of the Common, an arm raised a bottle of beer—made of Norfolk Barley (the Polish variety
temporarily
unavailable)—instantly the camera got it. A black Labrador dog yawned; tongue, teeth, gullet, flews, all were snapped. Observe the well-known figure of Hubert, one of East Anglia’s leading Black Pig breeders, down there under the tall sycamore tree. He raises his gun a score of times in a minute, and not a bird in sight. Is he practising on late gnats strayed from the nearby grupp? There, below Hubert, is a second peering, crouching, shifting figure, Leica to eye—hovering, darting low, weaving like a mongoose, then striking—
click.
‘Just one more, please’ …
click.
There are a dozen just one more. Hubert is being groomed for one week’s stardom.
Bannock MacWhippett missed one detail, so did his camera man. During a drive a winged partridge fell wounded and was retrieved to the shooter’s hand. Without hesitation the sportsman, a hard Danish look about him, bit the fluttering bird through the brain with his eye-tooth: to drop it dead beside him only a moment before two flying partridges, hit by his left and right barrel, were dropping dead through the air together.
Phillip had listened to this farmer, during lunch, speaking of the feeding of bullocks being fattened in boxes. The question was
discussed
: How many three-year-old bullocks could a man feed? Twenty said Hubert. Twenty-five said Charles Box. “No, thirty,” said a third. “Forty!” said the skull-biter, grimly. “I make him sweat on the crank!
I
had to, when Father put me in the yards!” The crank was of course the handle of the root-slicer. “I say a good man can feed forty beasts!” His jaw was set grimly. He was paying tens of thousand a year in Excess Profits Tax. He drove about in a 4½-litre Invicta, 100 m.p.h. sports motorcar, and a Rolls-Royce bought during the London blitz for
£
300. Both were investments. His judgment was that capital values of all motorcars would
increase
by 500 per cent after the war. Slicing roots by hand was hard graft indeed, eight steady hours, slicing four to five tons a day. This is a proper farmer, thought Phillip: not the nominal owner of a Convalescent Home.
*
As on former occasions under the direction of the hospitable Charles Box, it was an enjoyable day, with some amusing, even stimulating incidents. Phillip had an interesting experience, being nearly shot in mistake for a hare, which ran out of the Osier Carr and across the Home Meadow. The franc-tireur of Fleet Street and the B.B.C. did not, apparently, observe that barrels, hare, and host were in one line as he pulled the trigger of his blue-new Kirkben. There was a blast of No. 6 shot low into the herbage, a hissing spray of moisture, a hare tumbling over dishevelled by Phillip’s boots; but himself still conveniently upright.
Had MacWhippett been dropped by parachute among French partisans quite recently? For at another stand, on stubble, just as a beater was coming to the verge of the wood before the line of guns, there occurred a second short-range blast. Fortunately only tree-leaves suffered. Apparently the new gun was a wonderful precision tool, giving the owner much confidence; in contrast to Phillip’s grandfather’s damascene-barrelled grouse-gun by Maloch, Mitchie, and Crockhart, of Stirling; which was later to be seized, with laughter, from his hand, and likened to a pair of rusty
gas-pipes
. Which was faulty observation by the reporter; for that grouse-gun, which had seen such varied sport in the Hebrides, Yorkshire, Kent, Devon, Essex, and elsewhere, had not a pittle of rust upon it. However, it was all in good fun; and augmented by the generous opinion that with a really decent gun such as a Kirkben, ‘dear old Phillip would be quite a good shot, honestly, he would’.
The other guns received this prophecy in silence.
Each one of us, at one time or another, has been what sporting writers of an earlier age called ‘a tyro at the game’. Charles Box was no tyro; nor was he a tyrant; but he had some aspects of a Head Master as he strode from stand to stand, his copper reed-horn announcing the advance to the line of beaters commanded by his steward, mounted on The Bedstead. At times his disappointment could be as vocal as my own upon the landscape. His upsets seemed natural to me. Did not crows and other birds also cry out of their frustrations? Surely it was most natural that Charles, who had planned the best drive of the day across my Great Bustard field—his beaters coming up from the sunken Common below the wood—and coveys of partridges beginning to spreckle the distant air—should utter cries of mortification when he saw, in the middle of my field, a figure laboriously spreading muck? For the coveys also had seen the muck-spreader, and they promptly wheeled to the right, three hundred yards short of the line of guns—waiting with wives on shooting sticks behind them, and dogs procumbent before them—and so out of sight.
The cries of Charles Box were to the effect that only one man in East Anglia, only that unprintable so-and-so Maddison would have thought of putting a bird-scarer disguised as an unprintable
muck-flinger
in the middle of his unprintable field across which five coveys of partridges, preserved for three weeks past in the beet field above the Common, et cetera.
Jack the Jackdaw, who despite his deafness had heard the volume of cries and oaths and whistles amidst yelled instructions, ran hither and thither about the dung heaps, wondering what it was all about. He looked up into the air, as though to see paratroops descending. At last, as a cock pheasant whistled over his head, Jack the Jackdaw literally tumbled to what was happening, and lay flat among the muck. Seeing his figure thus plainly displayed, the cock half-rolled and followed the partridges. Scores of other birds followed the cock. The view was spotted and blotted with pheasants. And not a shot fired. I thought to myself that Gladstone Gogney’s day as the Fairy Fool was done; his reputation had been eclipsed.
More entertainment was provided for the guests when I walked over to Jack to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but mine.
“I apologise for not having told you,” I said, and at this admission the serf in him sprang out like a Jack-in-the-box.
“I don’t give a bugger for you nor no one!” he cried.
“This field will feel the benefit of the muck you’re spreading,” I replied.
“Bugger the muck!” he yelled, and dancing with rage he picked up clot after clot of well-rotted bullock-dung and dashed them on the stubble.
“That’s one way to spread muck,” I agreed.
“I’ll hev my cards come Friday!” he shrieked, while a lump as mellow as black butter sploshed near my boots. He seemed to hate muck, for he grabbed more, threw handful after handful while spittle frothed the corners of his mouth. “And bugger you!” he raved, casting more missiles to the winds. “I wark my own way, I don’t give a buggerin hell for no man!” And whirling my four-tined Dorset dung-fork into the hedge, he walked off.
“What was all that about?” Bannock MacWhippett asked when I got back.
“Oh, just a farewell address. I happen to know he’s been promised another job by Josiah Harn, the Swill King.”
Phillip preferred shooting alone—and often as not, never fired a shot. He could roam quietly by himself, sit down and be nothing, relax in the quiet winter woods. For this kind of shooting it was best to be unobtrusive. Usually he wore an old green felt hat, of a shape fashionable in 1933, but washed several times since that date, without band or shape, and showing the stains of seagull-splashes of many ploughing hours. Grey locks of hair were pulled over his brow, to break the line of forehead. A brown-and-red mackinaw coat, present from
The
Atlantic
Monthly
six years before, was buttoned to the neck; while blue overalls covered corduroy trousers over pyjamas against the penetrating polar air moving in from the sea. It could be very cold in the wood atop the Home Hills, which was called Pigeon Oaks.
He went up the snow-scattered slopes well before the pigeons flew in the roost. There was time to pause and consider the state of the soil of the Home Hills, which he intended to plough up. Why always be hurrying here, and hastening there? Night would fall in its appointed time, and all human striving end in dust. How
wonderful
to be able to laugh unto the green holly with Shakespeare. While the bombers flew overhead in their massive exhaustions, it was Euripides, with thoughts of Tolstoi and Spendler, that held the frustrated writer’s thoughts.
But the farmer, too, had his problems. Would wireworm, when spring came, become active in the rotting grass of the Hills? Would those pests, as soon as the turf was compost, eat their way into many an oat-bulb of the seed he was to drill there? How about
sugar-beet
, to give an opportunity of cleaning the land of thistles and other weeds? But if there were drought, how would the plants fare in that light soil?
He thought to buy naphthalene dust to broadcast on the
seed-
bed
of the oats, later on; that was what a proper farmer would do. But if he got the stuff, the odds were that it would not be
broadcast
properly. To do any good it must be scattered evenly, that costly naphthalene dust. So he set aside the idea, he killed it, saying to himself he’d scatter peas lest oats failed, as he had done on Lower Brock Hanger. Wireworms generally did not eat through peas.
Enough: sufficient unto the day …
*
From the edge of the wood could be seen miles of sea, marshes, and arable. Below stood the Old Manor, once the home of a famous Elizabethan writer and statesman. Had he wandered over this land, once his own, with a flintlock? Would he have seen the same coverts? Surely not the same river and meadows; for the lower land had been tidal then. His house, then new—and the
banqueting
hall never finished, the roost of white owls—had stood above the tide. He would have seen scores of sea-trout jumping and flashing silver in the flow.