Lucifer Before Sunrise (33 page)

Before the breakage, a tumbril load of logs had been sawn, so Phillip had helped Boy Billy at his combined milling-and-rolling machine, above which was built what Luke had called a ‘patent’—an affair of spouts below a two-compartment wooden hopper, from which grains of oats and barley fell to different parts of the machine. Sacks of corn had to be hauled up to a platform in the roof of the barn by ratchet and chain, and the grains shot into the divided hopper. It was a tedious process. Billy was a dusty miller amidst the roar of grinding and rolling.

“Thanks for your help, Dad.”

“Thank you for
your
help, Billy Boy! I’ll give you a hand with loading the sacks for the stable bins, and then go up to the Bustard Yard.”

Snow drifts hid the frozen furrows of the Steep, the wind pared his eartips as he trudged up and across the Cold Old Land, and through the wood to the bullocks. They blared at him,
bloodshot-eyes.
Their coats were staring. The water in the five-hundred gallon tank had run out. The bronze tap of the two-hundred-
and-fifty
-gallon barrel water-cart, which stood there, was frozen. The tap had dripped from misuse; he had told Jack the Jackdaw a score of times not to turn the brass tap completely round, but only half-way: that it leaked if it were completely turned. Now it was sealed with ice. Batteries of lambent eyes glaring, the fog of hoarse blaring, told what the bullocks were suffering. He trudged back to the workshop for the blow-lamp, and returned with it to the yard.

When at last he freed the tap, and got the first pail of water to the trough, the bullocks fought to drink it, crushing him into a post, but with blazing eyes he yelled at them and they backed away. It was of no use to speak of it to Jack the Jackdaw, who had told him that afternoon in the High Barn, that the bullocks were ‘doing’, Phillip said to Lucy, who gave him the morning’s letters.

*

One was from his friend Francis, the Bengal Lancer, declaring that he wanted to farm. It was a natural impulse coming at that time to many elderly civilised men, to escape the darkness and the death-wish of the times. Phillip had had scores of similar letters from people wanting to get clear of what they were doing, as they imagined a bucolic freedom where eggs, bacon, game, butter, milk, and petrol were to be had in apparent abundance. The need of Francis was more imaginative, it was Faustian. He wanted, he wrote, to be only a man harrowing clods, as in Hardy’s
Dynasts
. Might he pay a visit?

Phillip replied, with disquiet in his heart, that it would perhaps be best if he came when the bad weather was over, when the sun was higher in its curve. He knew he could not help Francis. He, too, was a man in a broken world, like many of his generation. Phillip felt sad to write such a letter, especially as Francis appeared to think that his life was lived in ideal conditions—freedom in the country, working at the only worthwhile job in wartime; and above all, his own master.

The truth was, Phillip felt ashamed of his own failure, as he sat before the open hearth in the Studio, not daring to begin his
novel-series,
for fear of irruption—and destruction. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow …

It was no longer necessary to keep awake half the night for fear of an hour before darkness each day. Phillip now had a reliable ‘morning alarmer’. The faulty alarm clock was returned with thanks to the owner. Its place—in, not under, his bed—was taken by a copper cylinder holding half a gallon of hot water and covered by a wrap of thick worsted stocking tied at both ends to avoid slip. This ‘bottle’ not only kept Phillip warm in positions varying from lodgment in the small of the back to a clasp against the heart, but told the time according to its temperature. When the moment was reached that the bottle needed to be kept warm, it was time to get up, like a rat leaving a sinking ship, he told Lucy.

At last the thaw came. Patience! Never plough-under
half-frosty
soil! ‘Wait until the ground’s in temper, it’s no use
mucket-ting’
—words remembered from Devon, long ago. Phillip waited. The days passed. At long last the land was fit. He and Boy Billy started on the remaining area of the Nightcraft field. It was a warm but dull day. Phillip felt queer and unbalanced. He went to bed after work, his throat foul. Temperature or no
temperature,
there was no time to be lost: the corn must go in, so he got up again the next day, stimulated by a letter which came that morning with good news from his publisher, together with a cheque for over a hundred pounds. “It’s yours, Lucy, you deserve it!”

What could have happened, that his books were beginning to sell again? Could his ideas about the war be spreading? No; more likely due to the fact that the stocks of many other publishers had been burned in the blitz on London, when warehouses in the neighbourhood of Ludgate Hill, holding millions of volumes in the narrow streets adjoining St. Paul’s, had been gutted by fire!

As soon as the furrows were turned, Phillip and Boy Billy harrowed the back-end ploughed Pewitts’ field. It was a dampish, heavy day, but towards four o’clock the harrow-strokes were
drying. Over the boundary Charles Box had already drilled a hundred acres. Leaving Pewitts’, they started to cultivate the Nightcraft. After four hours Peter came to relieve his brother on the new Fergie. Peter’s eyes were dull. He said he felt unwell, so Phillip sent him home to bed, while continuing with the
spring-tined
cultivator up and down the field. It was mixed soil, and the heavier patches were coming up claggy and dour. A bad sign; but it was late in the season. The moon was rising; he went on, up and down the Nightcraft until the small bluish orb had crossed over the zenith: then, suddenly exhausted, left the tractor on the headland and went home.

The next morning there was trouble with Josiah Harn, the smallholder who through persistence and hard work had become the local Swill King. There was a dour look behind the raised finger as he drove past Phillip’s cottage one morning. He drew up and angrily asked what sort of a man was it who would leave a
neighbour
in the lurch? Apparently he had been expecting Phillip to plough his two acres for some weeks past; and the time for
oat-sowing,
he complained, was nearly gone. How could he feed his cows in the coming winter? Phillip replied that he had sent a message some weeks back, following Mr. Harn’s request that he plough his land for him, that he couldn’t promise, so would Mr. Harn therefore make other arrangements in good time.

“That war’n’t what I wor told,” he growled. “I wor told by Mr. Billy that he’d do the wark for me. I’ve waited six weeks, and no one come.”

The only thing to do was to stop his own work and plough the two acres. Whether Harn believed him or not he didn’t know. Nobody else in the village appeared to keep his word, unless watched and kept up to it. When Phillip, returning after four hours’ work on Harn’s pightle, asked Boy Billy about it Billy shrugged his shoulders; and Phillip said no more.

The two worked together on the land all through the next day. They harrowed the twenty acres of Pewitts’ over-thwart. Then Phillip sent him home and continued cultivating the heavy
headlands
of the Nightcraft until dusk and weariness stopped him at 8 p.m. Night came cold and raw and grey. He had been chilled since morning. He could not get warm in bed. The hot-water bottle scorched but did not warm his feet. To his relief it did not mean a return of the bad throat as he had feared, so work was not interrupted. The following morning they began seeding. It was warm and sunny in the middle hours, but chilly towards the end.
By 7.30 p.m. they had got the barley into Pewitts’. While they had been drilling, Powerful Dick and Steve had the job of digging leaf-mould from among the oaks and sycamores of Bustard Wood and carting it to the yellow soil of Lower Brock Hanger. They had been doing this off and on for the past two weeks. To make digging quicker Phillip ploughed about six rods of the leaf-mould.

Charles Box had told Phillip that no one had ever taken a crop off Lower Brock Hanger since the days of ewe-flocks, adding that if he liked to waste money it was his own look-out. Charles Box said this all in kindness. It was eroded land where the cricket-ball roots had been grown the year before. With leaf-mould added, Phillip thought it would be different. Anyway, he wanted to try.

The following day was so fine and warm that he felt like singing as he ploughed the Steep hollow where sheep had been folded on sugarbeet tops, dunging the ground as they fed. That pightle of land was well-trodden, compact; he felt it was full of potential life. The new-laid hedge was beginning to show an emerald glint of hawthorn buds. Buoyant sunlight lifted his spirit with the lark over the trees of the Bustard Wood. He saw Timid Wat the hare fleeing along the skyline of the Steep, pursuing another hare, and shouted, “Good luck, old boy. That’s the stuff!”

Peter had mumps. Soon Rosamund joined him. Peter had been sleeping in the same bedroom as Boy Billy. Every day he expected Billy, to go down; it was a race, mumps in bed v. seed in bed. Every day the sun was climbing a little higher in its curve.

Boy Billy remained well. The sweet violets were out in the woods. Roz had picked some, put them in a small potted-meat jar in the Studio. The sight—the thought behind the girl’s gift—was heartening. So was another sight, that of the Bustard Yard where fourteen young neat stock were lying down, tongue-marks of contentment stroked upon their coats. Rolled oats and
water-steeped
beet-pulp had comforted them. Boy Billy and Phillip went on to find pleasure in the sight of heaped leaf-mould on the Lower Brock Hanger. Billy worked out the cost to be about
£
18 in labour, or
£
3 an acre. Remembering the Cold Old Land at the seaward end of the Steep which had produced such a wonderful crop of oats without being ploughed, Phillip proposed that they should not plough the Lower Brock, lest it dry out, but cultivate a very shallow tilth and drill oats there, first broadcasting peas lest the oats fail. Then roll with the rib-roll.

“I have a feeling that oats will revel in the moisture-holding
top-soil
of leaf-mould and marl, with phosphate and nitrogen
broad
cast,
two hundredweights to the acre. I’ve got half a ton of
phosphate
stored in the hovel, and we’re allowed a ton of nitrogen, so let’s broadcast the lot on these six acres eroded by tempests. After the war, Billy my dear, we’ll put them down to permanent grass.”

*

The sowing of oats on the composited Lower Brock Hanger was almost a family affair. It came nearer to his idea of happiness in creative work than any other job on the farm so far. Boy Billy on the new and improved tractor, which the inventor had sent them from America for one year’s free use, and Phillip on the original model, ‘the Dicker’, made a shallow cultivation of the top-soil by drawing arrow-headed steel tines of cultivators two inches deep through the yellow crust. While he went up and down the
east-west
slopes of the Brock Hanger, Billy crossed his work, travelling north-south. Thus a light tilth was made. Into this went the
oat-seed,
Billy on the tractor drawing the drill, Phillip walking behind, watching the seed-spouts.

Peter, better after mumps, must not do too much: so Phillip sat him on the Dicker and told him to follow the drill with their auction-bought thirty-bob two-horse roll. To the oak beam of this 1880 implement light zigzag seed-harrows were attached by chains. Thus the small lumps were pulverised, the tilth refined, and seed covered. David and Jonathan sat on the beam to add weight to the rolling.

In advance of the mechanocade, like a drum-major of an invisible band flinging first one arm sideways, then the other, walked Steve broadcasting peas. And—perfect timing—hardly had they finished in the clear sunny air of that Saturday afternoon when Lucy and Rosamund arrived with a basket of tea. Soon the boys had a fire of sticks going and a kettle boiling under the crab-apple tree leaning out of the Hanger Wood—Phillip had left it there when hedging, for decoration. Now they sat under masses of pink and white blossoms.

The field looked smooth and honest, for the thistles cut by the cultivators were everywhere wilting. The compost addition had been of the slightest, a mere scattering, like black pepper from one of the wooden grinders used at table. Nevertheless he felt it would be a success, especially the non-ploughing of that yellow-biscuit soil. Thereby they had conserved all sub-soil moisture. The work was pleasant, it was creative, they were a team, no voice was raised the whole time. There was unity in the work; perhaps that was why
they were not tired. It was the yeoman-family harmony he had dreamed of but never experienced before. Lucy looked happy. And in due course a good crop of rich-looking, golden-brown oats, with peas, came off the Lower Brock Hanger.

*

When all the spring seeds had been sown, he said to Lucy that she deserved a holiday. Why not stay for a week or two with your brother Tim and his wife? He would look after her poultry, and Mrs. Valiant take care of the farmhouse.

So Lucy set off by train to Southampton, with the ‘Revelation’ expanding suit-case which had been her wedding present from her brothers, all those happy years before the coming of the reformator. He had never seen her looking so young and happy. She had been gone four days when Tim wrote to say Phillip would be welcome if he cared to join them, should he be fit enough to travel. Why not, said Mrs. Valiant, I can look after Master Billy, go you to your holiday, sir. Phillip arranged for Bert Close to come evenings to help him repair some of the fold units on the Home Hills. He had bought a dozen, very cheaply, at auction after the start of the war, when poultry keepers, faced with ploughing-up orders of grasslands, had sold off most of their equipment, known as ‘dead stock’. Each unit had cost about
£
5 before the war: Phillip had bought a dozen for
£
13. By folding the hens, Lucy would be able to keep check of any that died, or strayed, and so prevent the dreaded maggots getting at his sheep. He had been told by Matt that Josiah Harn, the man ‘who could smell grease on your hair and come and lick it off’, had been about complaining that his meadows were not only sheep-sick (the grazing sour with excess of dung), but Phillip was doing Hitler’s work by letting the fly get on his sheep every summer. Harn, of course, wanted land; he had tons of swill weekly from all the camps around, and was making a lot of money from over ten score of pigs on his couple of acres.

Bert Close said he would get all the fold units repaired. He would take them in couples on his lorry to Crabbe, and bring them back. He knew an old carpenter who would be glad of the job.

From Bert Close, Phillip heard of an almost new motorcar, a Ford 8, for sale in Crabbe. It was a 1938 saloon model, the original price when new being
£
100. It had seldom been used, the
mileometer
registered 200 miles. Since the outbreak of war it had been kept under a dust-sheet, in the shed next to his own garage. A local trader had bought it for
£
125, and would re-sell it to Phillip
for
£
135. It was the very job for him, now that the blitzed Silver Eagle engine was having a re-bore at Yarwich.

Everything now seemed easy. Phillip’s decision to go to Southampton surprised him. All he had to do was set off! Mrs. Valiant made up a basket of food—some whole-wheat scones, spread with their own butter and honey; a shoulder of bacon; basket of eggs; a packet of boiled-bacon sandwiches, flask of tea—thus provided, he set forth in his new shiny Ford 8, making for Winchester.

He made an early start. The engine ran well at a steady 40. Six hours of daylight lay before him. He was an observer of the art and mystery of farming over the hedges, and far up on the slopes of the downs, as he sped along empty roads to the south, singing at times, and praising sturdy little Ford giving no trouble at all, only pleasure; and in no time, it seemed, he found himself in one of the suburbs of Southampton, and outside Tim’s ground-floor
apartment,
surprised at the neatness and design of lawns and gardens before the building which looked to be about ten years old.

He approached and rang the bell. Almost immediately the door opened and Tim was standing there. A look of delighted surprise came over his face. And Phillip felt warmth rising in him.

“Come in, come in, dear Phil!” he cried. He explained that he had gone to the door expecting to see Brenda his wife; but seeing Phillip instead, he was absolutely delighted. This was the Tim he had known and liked before his marriage to Lucy. He was relieved that he had made good, and so the old worry for him and his brothers was gone. Tim was now, after a period of training, an inspector of repaired fighter aircraft. His marriage had made a fuller man of him, easy and soft-spoken as ever, but with a firmness where before he had been dreamy and callow. His young wife was the fortifying influence, Phillip could see at once when he met her; she had the physique, bearing, and mental freedom for which Australian girls were famous.

“Eggs, by Jove, Brenda! Just look at them! My dear Phil, we’re lucky to get one each a month on our ration books. All we get is dried egg powder. And honey! Jolly decent of you, I must say, Phil!”