Lucifer Before Sunrise (54 page)

*

On Old Michaelmas Day fifty-two farms were advertised for auction in the local paper, now that all that was left of the Wehrmacht would shortly be over Rhine and Elbe. Was there any future for a small farmer in Britain? It looked as though most of the fifty-two in the district thought not.

Phillip asked Peter, now nearly sixteen and still at school, what
he wanted to be. After hesitation Peter replied that he would like to help on the farm, saying surprisingly and endearingly, “I realize that the main burden of the work falls on you, Dad, and that you also must write.”

What could Phillip reply? That the farm
could
be made to pay; but that even with the best modern machinery, it would not pay without a new spirit. For a farm did not hold together long when nearly new ladders were left out to rot: ploughs to rust:
irreplaceable
roller-bearings of tractor-wheels left unadjusted until earth got in and churned them loose and wobbling. Where was the spirit to
do
all these things, and by so doing, teach the young by imitation. It was no longer in himself.

“Fifty-two farms changing hands this Michaelmas, Peter, advertised in our local paper. Fifty-two counties in England. That means two thousand five hundred farmers getting out before the cold draught sets in by the post-war importation of cheap foreign food. No, I’m wrong, Peter! Great Britain now has little gold! London is not a world-financing centre any more. We in England will have to conserve our soil, or die. This means there will be a home market for British farmers, for at least twenty years, Peter. Do you think you and Billy could carry it on after the war?”

“You mean if you leave us?”

“I will make all into a trust, including my copyrights, to benefit your mother, and the family.”

It was decided that Peter should leave school and work on the land.

*

Hardly had the stacks been built, when they were opened for threshing. All the corn-cutting, all the setting-up of sheaves into rows of stooks, all the throwing open of stooks to dry the butts before pitching, the loading on lorry and tumbrils, carting to stack, unpitching from lorry and tumbrils, building of stack and thatching of stack—all had to be undone a week or two later, in the dread that unless the threshing was done early, before the rains came, Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s 20-ton tackle would be too heavy to move up to the Bad Lands. The engine alone consumed seven hundredweight of coal and four thousand gallons of water at every stack. Would the seasonal rain hold off and let them finish quickly, so that they could get on with the lifting of the sugar-beet, the carting and spreading of yard muck, the ploughing and the timely drilling of wheat?

Phillip got a team of twelve together—most of them casuals demanding more money than was received by the regular men—after much persuasion and bicycling by Peter here and there in the darkness after the day’s work. Five of the team were over seventy years of age—one of them indeed was a hero of eighty-eight.

Each morning of threshing, as in previous years, there was the same anxiety lest the searchlight lads fail to turn up, and so retard, if not stop, the work of shifting, lifting, and sorting twenty-two tons of corn and straw many times through various hands, until approximately eleven tons of more or less damp grain stood stacked-up, a few yards away from an eleven-ton stack of straw.

Immediately after the threshing the filled sacks must go away to the drying plant in the town—for there was more than fourteen per cent moisture by weight in the barley kernels, and if the grain were shot on to the barn floor it would certainly heat, and become mouldy; unsaleable.

Phillip called on the manager of the drying plant in an old malting by the quay at Crabbe. Here Matt was now working. The manager agreed to take the barley on condition that it was dried and weighed by him. He would pay according to the dried weight. So Phillip was entirely in his hands in the matter of payment. The question was, would the hired lorry, after each day’s threshing, turn up in time for the men to load the corn? For to make a further call on men wanting to get home: to ask Steve and seventy-year-old Tom Valiant to help him lift one hundred and ten sacks, each weighing about two hundredweight, one after another nearly five feet to the floor-board of a lorry, did not come easy. They knew that the lorry usually was late: that they would have to hang around while their sweat became chilly. Their eyes were bloodshot with dust, their half-fed muscles were tired, they wanted to get home.

That morning, as usual, the soldiers turned up late, to the unspeaking comment of the man who looked after the tackle and had to bicycle home some miles after the day’s job was done.

Phillip had taken round, at the beginning of the threshing, a couple of pounds of 1943-cured bacon each for the regular men. Thus he provided some of the lifting power of muscles. And Lucy, Rosamund, and Rachel (the dark and pretty little London guest) brought up hot sweet tea and a basket of buttered scones and cakes each day at 4 p.m.

Once Steve said to fourteen-year-old Rosamund, helping on the
stack, “The trouble with you is that you are bloody lazy,” and the child’s eyes filled with tears. Later, when Phillip took him aside and suggezted that he might like to apologise, Steve assumed a grievance, and with tears in
his
eyes, protested that he had been working harder than anyone else, and was that all the thanks he received. 

It was raining, Phillip lying in the armchair in the Studio,
wondering
how to begin an essay on the fatigues and strains of the war. Steve the labourer's outburst—for it had been that—was due to the monotony of his diet. Farm labourers were allowed no extra meat, beyond the few weekly ounces on their cards; and it was a grievance that sailors, including those who called in small ships at Crabbe quay, had up to a pound of meat daily. Farm workers had extra cheese, and were sick of it, they could not work hard continuously on it.

Towards the end of every war people were tired. When this war ended, the reaction to prolonged strain and weariness would not come at once. To be sure, people in towns would congregate and dance and have a wild time for a few hours or days: a
momentary
effervescence. The dullness of war would continue into the dullness of peace, a vacancy of lost time and living. The longer the war, the longer the dullness; for the lie would remain within the body politic. How was it last time?

People were tired after the Armistice of 1918; most of all tired of anything to do with the war. Nobody wanted to read a war-book. Publishers remaindered their war-time stocks. Few bought them, priced as they were at less than a quarter-cost. Thousands of
ex-officers
, recently demobilised, spent their blood-money, as they called their gratuities, before looking round for a job. Many lamented the passing of the only world they knew, that of
comradeship
and excitement. A few ex-R.A.F. pilots got jobs in civil aviation. Three of Phillip's friends bought an old Handley-Page day-bomber and started what was hoped to become an air-line to Spain. It didn't last beyond a few weeks. Another acquaintance, Julian Warbeck, hired a barrel-organ, and wearing a mask, played in the streets of London. Phillip used to go round with him, both derisive towards their elders.

Another started a poultry farm, which in course of time failed owing to foreign imported eggs. Friends, who once had been
in
separable
, drifted apart. It was bitter to lose the old feeling of comradeship. The world of youth seemed to perish with the Armistice. There was nothing to do. He had been fortunate; suddenly he had known his purpose of living, to be a writer; and thoughts of what he would do filled his days and nights. He walked the streets of London and the woods and lanes of Kent, generally alone, trying to resolve himself into a new vision of life. The old world and its values was entirely rejected. Mankind must start again, from new values. It was a lonely existence, but there were the poets for company, especially the verse of Wilfred Owen,
forgotten
in this war; but who, in time, would live again in his poetry.

Reading William Blake, Shelley, and other poets and
philosophers
during 1919, he had flung himself away from those who were established in the idiom of the old world. His only friend—for they thought alike—was cousin Willie. In the commonplace literary section of that world, they viewed with scorn the fashion of the distinguished non-combatants publishing their memoirs of
wartime
gossip, intrigue, and party politics. People who had not shared the fighting knew better than those who had fought. Hundreds of thick books, priced between eighteen and twenty-five shillings, arrived on the shelves of the libraries. In the end these, too, were
remaindered
, and the publication of petty memoirs and gossip ceased.

As for the musical taste of the public, thirty thousand pounds was said to have been made by the composer from a song called
Yes,
we
have
no
bananas.
Many in the streets and lanes sang or whistled it; in clubs and hotels others danced to it. The Corn Production Act was repealed in 1923, and farmers who had bought their farms at a high price a year or two before found themselves facing ruin. Ex-soldiers were workless. In an effort to bring about the British Millennium, a General Strike was organised throughout England. Winston Churchill was the man of the moment to some, the villain to others. Armoured cars protected food convoys from the London docks through the streets to Hyde Park, a vast food centre. Peers, bank clerks, and knickerbockered baronets drove trains,
trams, and buses.

Here and there, in that unhappy strike of 1926, in the larger and unhappier towns a motor-car, taking people to work, was
overturned
by the mob and set on fire. Most, if not all, working men and women were animated by a vision of new hope, of new life, that was being stifled in their anguished breasts. The General Strike failed. It was soon called off. The real power holding down life and human aspiration remained in an obsolescent system of finance, which controlled all European governments.

Three years passed, and then the full emotional reaction to the war was dominant.
All
Quiet
on
the
Western
Front
sold over four million copies throughout the world. It debunked heroism, it described the charnel house and the despair of war. Yet it included all that had been omitted from regimental histories and from the memoirs of distinguished non-combatants; it cried in ghostly pain an aspect of truth. People—the conventionally-minded, the broad masses—began to say that there would be no more war.
Propaganda
, they declared, had made men of all nations think and act as they did in the war. War finally and completely had been debunked, they said.

Was it true to think, now, that people in those days had changed only superficially? As cousin Willie had said, as long ago as 1923, the causes of another war were apparent in nearly all human beings he encountered. They were not clear, within themselves, about themselves.

He thought back to 1919, and Mr. George's election slogan of
Hang
the
Kaiser,
declaring that the ex-Emperor of Germany must be brought to trial as a war criminal. Vain words had beaten the air, nothing more. The government of old men went out. Ramsay MacDonald's Socialist government, which was to have made a new world, came to power, only to find itself without power. It fell. Later, a few young members of Parliament, led by a young soldier who had left school at sixteen years of age, who on his seventeenth birthday was flying over the German lines in
November
1914, only to crash and partly destroy a leg, set out to form a New Party. One by one his associates quit to rejoin the safer ranks of mediocrity. Soon the most brilliant constructive mind of the post-war was left in the wilderness.

By 1930 ‘realistic' war-books lost their interest. No one wanted to read them. The war was remote, and to some, ‘the Great Bore War'. Reunion dinners of old regimental comrades became thinner. Many ceased to be held. Members felt themselves to be strangers among strangers. The ‘land fit for heroes' was becoming
so in Germany; in Britain, some men of thirty had never worked since leaving school. No jobs for them. Many slum children ate only every other day. Few had seen a plateful of cooked food.

When, after being evacuated in 1939 to the countryside, some town children were given a plate of roast beef and home-grown vegetables, they refused to eat what they considered to be ‘muck'. It had not come out of a tin, or a fish-and-chip shop. It had come from Britain's countryside, from the near-derelict acres of a land of withered hope.

*

A butterfly fluttered at the closed western window of the Studio, while Phillip sat in his chair. Ten feet away, across the width of the room, there was another window, but open. Outside was the shining air to which the butterfly strove to return; for it had come in during the cold of the rains to hibernate. Now it longed to escape, to be free, to sip honey, and maybe to love. Flutter flutter, let me die for love.

Its wings were frayed with vain beating, for it did not know that if it turned resolutely away in another direction, it would find freedom—and possibly death, for there was little, if any honey left for re-fuelling.

The longing which animated those painted wings was but part of the universal desire for a fuller life; for freedom and happiness. There was the film made from
All
Quiet
on
the
Western
Front,
which told at the end, as in the novel, how a young German soldier was shot as he stretched out his hand to catch a butterfly which had lit on the parapet of a trench. No doubt the author intended it to be a symbol of a sacrificed generation of innocent youth: life shattered in the very act of striving for beauty.

That was a sentimental, a false symbolism. The butterfly was as innocent as the youth: and what virtue lay in the seizing of coloured wings in a human hand? The truth was not in it, even as the truth was not in most books published during the war. Only a Turgenev could write of all aspects of a war. For example, progress came through the war. Medical discoveries were made rapidly. An awakened social sense followed, frustrated by the re-establishment of the ‘Hard-faced Men' in power. From thoughts of the dead arose a spiritual force in the minds of the sensitive, a minority.

*

Sitting in his chair, he became aware of soft thuds from the direction of the Old Manor where, among others, Steve the young
labourer was sometimes to be seen in white flannels flicking a tennis ball over a tennis net. Owing to the kindness of the owner some young men and women of the village had been able to form a tennis club, and take turns on a hard court with soldiers and airmen relaxing from their duties.
There
was progress …

He wondered what the once lord of the manor would have said to the sight of a farm labourer, after his nine-hour day, enjoying a game of tennis in the grounds of one of his houses? Were balls of caoutchouc used in his Lordship's time, or did he and his friends still hit, with their long-handled racquets, leather balls stuffed with feathers? Did they play Royal tennis during the Marlburian wars? Perhaps the nearest the labourers of those times got to tennis was sport with hand and foot, using one of the strange new roots, called turnips, the seeds of which the Lord of Banyards had brought back from the flat heavy lands of the plain of Flanders overlooked by a little village called Passchendaele on the crest east of the
wool-market
town of Ypres.

Those roots had revolutionised English farming. No more killing and salting of beef at the fall of the year: with the roots and hay, they could be held in the yards all autumn and winter, and fattened into ‘beef on the hoof'.

Since those days much had changed with the coming of the steam engine. Gradually the towns, with their factories and banks, had absorbed the power of the landlords, which meant the fertility of the land. For the invention of artificial fertilizers led to prairie farming on a large scale, for profit; land became mortgaged. After 1918 historic houses fell to speculators but to be re-sold, becoming schools, country clubs, drunkards' homes, offices of business concerns. Some were broken up for their wood, metal, and stone. In the war many had been filled with evacuees or soldiers.

And now, in this war, village girls of fifteen and sixteen years of age, earning
£
5 or
£
6 a week, were beginning to paint their lips and wear their finger-nails long like Chinese Mandarins, via the film-stars of Hollywood. They chewed gum given by lissom and lounging American soldiers, and a few
gay ones were saying that coloured men were honeys.

At six o'clock the farm labourer was sweated out after pitching sheaves: at seven o'clock he was in ‘whites', neatly volleying a tennis ball over a net. The celebrated Banyards ghost of the former landlords—coach, black horses, and all—long since laid by wireless, daily newspapers, water-repellent cement, prontosil,
and bogus memoirs, simply didn't know what everything was coming to.

The village tennis club had been formed on the basis of the court and most of the equipment being lent. Otherwise the club
considered
itself to be self-supporting. That was as it should be, said Phillip to Steve, every tree must grow and stand above its own roots.

Phillip went out to watch. Afterwards he told Steve about the squire of a West Country village, soon after 1918, and his attempt to start a village football club.

“The squire lent the ground, he gave and erected goalposts, he presented the football, and flags for the linesmen. He built a little pavilion where coats could be hung, and a tea-kettle for boiling on an oil-stove. He wasn't a rich man. Indeed, his place was mortgaged. But before coming down in the world this gentleman did all he could to help the village, in the tradition of
noblesse
oblige.
But would the village get up a football team? It would not; and all because the squire had not provided the team with shorts, boots, stockings and jerseys. His meanness was much remarked in some quarters.”

“Well——” began Steve.

“Poor man, his house inevitably was sold, his family broke up, his heir had trouble with his young wife and shot her dead, then shot himself; and the old Eton housemaster, so courteous and selfless, ended his days alone in a boarding house of the market town.”

“He'd lived his life,” said Steve.

“You East Anglians are more independent than Saxon Devonians,” Phillip went on. “One of the first things that struck me as a ‘foreigner' coming to the East from the West was the comparative straight-forwardness of the East Anglian type to that of the West. The war, with its rolls and wads of easy paper money, revealed the facts of human character more plainly than in
peacetime
. The general absence of slyness is also remarkable.”