A Solitary War (34 page)

“Hore-Bolloka, or no Hore-Bolloka, it’s a late season. Very well, I’ll cop into it by myself.”

“You please yourself, you’re boss.”

Phillip sat on the tractor all through Saturday, Easter Sunday, and Monday upon the eighteen acres of Pewitt’s Field which
remained
after the Searchlight Camp had been built. The
cultivator
drew its seven steel fingers through the furrows which frost had flattened and made sour-sticking. They seemed to Phillip to be sour; he did not like the look of them. The furrows had sagged.

Ah, he knew his mistake now. He had ploughed this land after frost had stricken it. The furrows of that ploughing had had an unpleasant look about them as they had
squeezed
off the
plough-breasts
. Matt had fed the ewes on the sugar-beet tops (the beet of Pewitt’s had yielded 14½
tons an acre of washed roots, as Luke had prophesied) and the plough had not followed immediately after the sheep had moved on. The exceptional rains had stopped ploughing. Then in a dry period the frost had come, and when it was half gone he had brought up the tractor, to turn up behind the twin breasts strips like half-burned rubber, neither dry nor wet; glutinous, yet not sticky; sullen, cold;
slabby
in Luke’s
description
. Frozen water was in them. And the harder frost following had not expanded them further so to create in each slab
innumerable
small interstices in which air might stray.

In properly ploughed furrows—flopped over half-dry and pleasantly crumbly in early autumn—later to be rained on, later still to be expanded by frost, he had learned the secret of back-end preparation. Through such a weathered mould in the dry winds of March the harrows would ride pleasantly, the strokes of the iron claws mingling the dry top-crust with aerated earth below, thus creating a tilth of soil which it made one happy just to look at, to get off the tractor and to feel in the hand. One could feel, and see, the life in it. Soil bacteria were active in it. Air was giving it life. The elements, working in balance, were truly the servants of the mother of all life.

Of course he should have ploughed that sheep-trodden land earlier, before the rains came, or else kept off it until spring. That cold, sullen, unrisen soil of the merely reversed slabby furrows would be no good. Here was no soil light of heart; but one
frost-maimed
. He damned the sheep which had delayed the ploughing last autumn. The wire netting enclosure of the fold, held by stakes driven into the earth, had moved so slowly across the field, a small square at a time, like the National Health Insurance stamps that a farmer had to stick on the cards of his men every Friday.

“You’ll feel the benefit where my ewes trod,” said Matt.

Phillip had silently cursed the sheep, knowing the frost would come before he could turn that dung-clogged soil over.

Yes‚ it would have been better to have left the ploughing of Pewitts to the spring. It was bad judgment. However, it was done, and one must make the best of a bad job.

After cultivating the field, he took off the implement and hitched on the two-horse roll. To the oak bar he chained three zigzag harrows, and set off hauling roll and harrows across the field. It was cold. He had got up at 5 a.m. and now it was coming to evening twilight. The noise of the tractor engine was grinding in his head.

*

The small grey tractor with the hard iron seat crept up and down the field, up and down the field during fourteen hours of monotony on Easter. Sunday.

The slower the physical movement, the more active the mind. He thought of the state of the little pigs in the yard down below. Pig food had gone up half as much again since the out-break of war. It was the poorest stuff, seeming to be a mixture of powdered ground chalk, sugar-beet pulp, a grist of tail corn mixed with sawdust—the augmented sweepings of warehouses. The profiteers were already at work.

How destitute seemed the life of the farm in all its aspects. The cows were now giving even less milk. Some of the calves had died of white-scour. Matt had said it was due to a change of milk when the calves bought at market had come to suck his cows. So Matt’s custom was to leave the new calves unfed all the afternoon and night after their arrival at the premises. This apparently saved them from gorging and getting active indigestion, with trouble to follow.

Phillip thought the custom saved them from the further burden of living. The calves were probably starving in the market, for
one type of farmer would not let a calf suck when he was going to sell the cow, lest the bag be smaller. So the calf languished, and grew cold, and shivered all night with an empty belly, and a few days or weeks later, after scouring badly, was found dead.
Anyway,
he had told Matt the disease was contagious. The hot, yellow-white squitter of the tottery little calf, falling on its own tail, soon rotted all the hair on it. The disease had spread to other calves. Eight or nine had died during the past month.

He must see to two things in the future: calves brought home must be given a feed immediately; and he must buy healthy calves through the pleasant-faced dealer who bought so many in the ring for his customers. It was worth the half-crown commission the dealer charged.

*

If only thoughts would cease grinding in his head, cease beating to the harsh rattle of the exhaust and the screaming of hundreds of black-headed gulls with their almost hysterically open crimson mouths. Poor worms, they had no hope, those secret soil-makers of the night, exposed helplessly by the bumping, shearing breasts of robot steel.

He moved slowly towards the headland, parallel to the hedge. It was the last lap; he was as weak as a guttering candle. He watched an army lorry rushing down the drive behind the hedge, the surface of the road made up with such sweat and blisters by himself and others before the war. Stones were flung out by the wheels. Each rapid passing scooped and cut out increasing potholes. The largest were already two yards across, and eight inches deep.

Someone from the camp was going down to the shop for a packet of fags, or to post a letter, using the five-ton truck. He let out a shriek, and five hundred gulls fled in silent dismay from the furrows.

*

After the barley was drilled in Pewitt’s the Scalt field was next ploughed with both tractor and horses, Luke walking behind his team. And then before they could be rolled and harrowed, the furrows dried out.

Phillip thought that a poor crop would come from them. The thin grass underneath would not rot in time to nourish the young plants.

In the cold streuling east wind of the Arctic Circle the barley was put in, ten pecks to the acre. He left Billy and Luke to do the
job with tractor and Macormick Sowall for it was time to go to London and once again meet Mr. Pierre Poluski.

*

The producer told him to be available the following day for an initial conference.

Once again this was cancelled.

Phillip waited during five days.

At last he was standing in Mr. Harry Bacon’s silver and black office, and hearing to his surprise, the agent saying, “I’ve asked you two boys to come here in order to hear fairly your two sides”.

It was a further surprise to see that Poluski’s face was sweating. Like a character in magazine fiction of the ’twenties, Poluski was dabbing his forehead with a silk handkerchief. Phillip had never seen anyone do such a thing in real life, except in the harvest field. What a little frightened man Poluski was under his facade. Incredible, too, to hear him saying, or rather, pleading, “Harry, we were only at the discussion stage! Mr. Maddison comes up and I pay his expenses, and we never get anywhere. Farming is front-page stuff and I have an idea for a picture and the Ministry of Information is to back my film. Now the Ministry has changed its plan. They tell me there won’t be a subsidy. You know that, Harry, you heard it over the telephone. So we never got beyond talking. Nothing was finalised, isn’t that so, Harry?

“I hear you, Pierre. Now I listen to Mr. Maddison.”

“Well, it seems to me that it isn’t Poluski’s fault there isn’t going to be any film.”

“You hear that, Harry? Mr. Maddison is a real old English gentleman.”

Pierre Poluski dabbed his brow with his handkerchief. Harry Bacon took a turn round the room as he sucked a glucose toffee.

“I just call you two boys together to hear what each has to say, that’s all, Pierre. I want to know both sides. I want to be fair to both you boys. Well, Pierre, I’ve heard your side.”

“That’s fine, Harry. How’s the golf?”

“I was down at Walton Heath on Sunday——”

“That’s swell, Harry. Well, I’ll be seein’ you.”

When the agent returned from showing Pierre out, he said, “We’ve got Pierre on the hook, and he knows it. He’s scared.”

“Mr. Bacon, forgive my suggesting it after all you’ve done for me, but couldn’t we get a small token payment from him? After all, we’re not going on with the film. He should return my synopsis, too.”

“Don’t you worry. Pierre’s hooked, and he knows it. You leave it to me. It’s an open and shut case. I’ll give you an address of a good lawyer. Now you go to this address and they will fix
everything
for you.”

*

“Poor you,” said Lucy. “You do seem to attract odd sorts of people, don’t you?”

“Well, there was my film: it had a beginning, a middle, an end.”

“Oh, I am
so
sorry.”

“I’ll manage somehow to let you have the hundred pounds I promised you. I’ve still got my book, you know.”

“Well, I hardly like to take it, although I had arranged for Rosamund and David to go to school——”

“You shall be paid.”

“My dear, you needn’t talk like that. Only do be more careful, you’re never really taken in, but you always trust people, don’t you?”

“I might say the same of you.”

“Did you see the lawyer?”

“Without the least desire to do so, without the least hope, I went to the address Bacon gave me. But I didn’t give the lawyer the ten pounds down he suggested would cover his initial expenses.”

“What did he say?”

“He suggested, in
montage,
why the case was clear, not so clear, why it would not be easy, why it might be difficult, why it was doubtful, why it was most improbable, that an action in court would be sustained. Of course I knew that Harry Bacon, as agent for Donald Cannock, didn’t want his client dragged in as a witness in such a frivolous action. The publicity would be bad for his valuable film property. And when I looked at the letter-head list of directors of the London office of Pharaoh Finkelstein, Inc., I saw that the lawyer was one of Bacon’s fellow directors. They all split in one pot, as Matt would say.”

He did not tell her of his idea of a better farmhouse in which would be five carpets coloured powder-blue, old rose, fawn,
oat-brown
, and pale rose, respectively, which he had bought from the A. & N. Stores. Nor of the new towels, the drying cloths for silver, glass and china; a cork mat, a corner cupboard enamelled white, a rail and a large looking-glass for the bathroom. Of various rush mats for the floors of parlours and boudoir.

Nor that he had given orders to George, the village builder, to hack the old plaster off the walls of the children’s cottage, dig up
the old floor, re-lay it with water-repellent cement and then with tongued-and-grooved boards, cement the walls also with the same. The pavers of the old floor to be used for a path along the farm house front, with borders for flower-beds, and red-brick steps to replace the dangerous stony slopes.

Well, that was that: but his book was at the publisher’s—although all sales of books had apparently ceased since the
beginning
of the war.

“Well, I must be getting on, Lucy. Enjoy the spring.”

“I do hope you will be all right, ‘Pip’. How is Melissa?”

“She is a dutiful girl, like you.”

He had not the least ill-feeling towards Poluski. Poor fellow, he had been too eager, and gotten himself into a muddle. It would have been immoral to have tried to get
any money out of him.

The Silver Eagle, mascot and radiator polished by the little boys, ran north into the sunshine of a spring day, passing dummy aircraft dispersed in otherwise empty fields and bracken areas of the Brecklands.

*

As he worked in the children’s cottage, distempering and painting, he thought of Donald Cannock, wearing his light brown tweed cap and old tweed overcoat. He would have been the very actor to create the part of the old Squire who was killed in an election riot—crowned with a bottle by a hired rough (‘Fenton for Free Trade!’)—and also the character of the Squire’s son. Richard, who despite every adversity did not forsake his
obligation
to the family tradition of service to his land, until he was killed at Ypres in 1914—in the belief that natural truth would come back to England.

Donald, too, could have played the grandson who loved the granddaughter of the financial magnate. By then, of course, the first Lord Fenton would have become a model landlord in the best English tradition (like Penelope’s father). The coming of the second war resolved the conflict: bitter memories were annulled by the union of the Fenton girl and the Wycherley youth—the ghost of himself with his dream of Melissa.

The last shot was to have been young Wycherley on a tractor ploughing up the grassland of the deer-park, his land-girl-friend bringing his sidebag containing his tea, under the canopy of a great oak fading into the Union Jack and
God
Save
the
King.

He thought, as the distemper brush sighed down the wall, as its dark tongue lapped cream from the pail, that he had, after all,
lost nothing except a file of newspaper articles, and the scenario, which perhaps had gone for salvage with the volume of Cobbett. And as he worked on, hour after hour without food, he began to criticise himself for having gone to that lawyer. He had done so only because of the obligation he felt to Donald, to comply in every particular with the directions of Mr. Harry Bacon, who at Donald’s request, had put himself out for such a minor matter.