Lucifer Before Sunrise (35 page)

*

The crops on the Bad Lands were standing well up. The meadows were chain-harrowed to level the mole hills, and to tear out the old decayed grasses. Then they were rib-rolled. He and Billy
worked all one week-end to get the job done, but in the dusk of Sunday evening Teal Meadow remained to be finished. There was more pressing work during the week that followed, so the meadow lay unswept. Meanwhile, without warning, a series of shattering explosions and the rattle of machine guns followed by vermilion curves of tracers amidst plumes and drifts of white smoke suddenly arose in volume from that boundary meadow. Phillip heard the
claquement
of bullets on the Hanger as they hissed past his head while he walked down to the meadow, where troops were practising an attack with live ammunition.

That would never do! He sought out the Commanding Officer, and suggested that, as he and his men had caused alarm and despondency, they were doing Hitler’s work. In course of an infertile conversation the C.O. said, “I’ve read your book about your early farming experiences, and found it depressing.” That was his only comment. Phillip wondered why this
lieutenant-colonel
had made it. Perhaps he did not connect the depression with the fact that East Anglican farmers had owed over forty million pounds to the banks in 1939.

When the troops were gone, he found all the gates of the meadows left open, despite a particular request to the
lieutenant-colonel
that they should be shut when his men left. The
Aberdeen-Angus
bull took advantage of this slackness of the suburban mind to escape from the unstimulating companionship of the bullocks on the Pasture, and went rampaging among the buds—yearling heifers—on Denchman’s Meadow. What damage was done only time would show.

When harrowing Teal Meadow two days later his chain-harrow dragged along a tank-bursting grenade. He stopped and picked it up. The split-pin had not been split, but was pushed in straight. It was within one-eighth of an inch of dropping out. He pushed the pin back, and bifurcated it; and dropping the grenade in his side-bag, went on with the harrowing.

During supper that evening he set upon the table the vaned object of steel and brass as a warning of what to leave alone, but immediately to report, should one be found on the farm or
anywhere
else. Village children all over England at that time were eagerly collecting such oddments left behind by poor-quality troops. Several had died from explosions.

“You children,” he said, pointing to the red and yellow grenade, “will be the exception.”

Jack the Jackdaw had told him that as he was going up to the
Bustard Yard that day bullets had clipped branches just by his shoulder. Phillip at once telephoned the lieutenant-colonel and half jokingly told him that if he and his fifth-columnists came again without authority and without notice for the purpose of firing
live-ammunition
on his farm he would defend himself with a Winchester .22 repeater rifle, which was lethal up to four hundred yards. The lieutenant-colonel arrived that evening and removed the evidence of his crime, after refusing a drink. Phillip thought, Have I in my time looked at French farmers as he now looks at me? Or had this lieutenant-colonel come without notice in the first place just to show his disregard for one so discredited as himself? In contempt perhaps? Would he have invaded another’s land before the war and its hooligan propaganda?

At that time, at least in East Anglia, if not throughout Britain, farmers were telling one another when they met at market, “The men are on clover nowadays. You can’t say anything to them. If you do, they leave.”

It was reassuring to Phillip to learn that his experiences were by no means exceptional. He saw it as part of the unsettlement of war-time. Although wages had been raised from thirty-four shillings a week to sixty, there was no real improvement in the labourer’s lot. The price of sixpenny beer had gone up to tenpence, a packet of twenty cigarettes to one shilling and twopence. And locally the main cause of unsettlement lay in the high wages being paid by contractors making airfields.

For if farm labourers were on clover, others were on concrete and tarmac. Steve the red-head told Phillip that one man, a
car-knacker
, getting before the war perhaps
£
3 a week, had six old lorries standing on ‘an airfield construction site’. Some were unusable. Each of the six lorries was on the hire-roll of a building firm at 70
s
. a day. He was ‘pulling in’
£
150 a week. Apparently the knacker was but one of innumerable small men. The ‘big men’ had fleets of lorries; and were known in East Anglia as the Forty Thieves. One of the biggest of them was to tell Phillip, a year later, that he owned over a thousand modern lorries, together with a hundred and twenty bulldozers and similar machines. The cost of hiring out a bulldozer was
£
60 a day.

And all construction work was done for the Government on a cost plus ten per cent basis.

“And when I was sixteen my father, a farmer, kicked me out, saying I was no good when I asked him for five bob a week!” the mushroom millionaire told Phillip, indignation behind his eyes. Obviously his money had not entirely compensated him for lack of father-love: and was he like that father, towards his own son, Billy? For recently, when Phillip had been talking to the elder of
the two village blacksmiths, a quiet and sincere man who attended chapel regularly, about the death of a young heifer, the blacksmith had replied, “There’s a saying in the district, ‘If you put an old head on young shoulders, it has to be knocked off’.”

Recently income-tax had come in for all workers earning over
£
2 a week, or
£
3 if married. Many farm-workers declared they wouldn’t work overtime. Others worked only at piece-rates, and when they had earned up to the tax-free limit they went home, usually at midday.

Bert Close, said Steve, was now in a ‘reserved occupation’, and getting
£
17 10
s.
a week for the hire of his small lorry. In addition, as the driver, he was paid two shillings and a halfpenny an hour, with double pay on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. He never came near the farm now. Occasionally Phillip saw him in one or another of the local pubs of an evening, having driven there in a saloon car with some of his fellows likewise in ‘reserved occupation’, the uniform of which appeared to be a blue suit, check cap set at an angle, silk scarf round neck, and light walking shoes of black leather with long thin pointed toes. The word ‘Spiv’ came into the English language about this time, in the spring of 1943.

*

The strueling cold east wind still drove across the fields while the only clouds in the sky were thin brown streamers from fighter aircraft, like glinting gossamer-spiders new-hatched at immense heights in space. The sun shone brightly but as though dead. These polar winds found a man’s bones immediately. Nevertheless it was spring. Soon the swallow would be flying under the broken bridges of the grupps, revisting its old nest on a rotten balk of timber covered with chalk: reminding the farmer, not of spring, but of the self-appointed task of making half a dozen new culverts to replace those ruinous crossing-places.

The bullocks on the home meadows were now settled where the grass was growing greener after the harrowing to spread the
molehills
followed by consolidation with the Cambridge rib-roll. A little black Aberdeen-Angus yearling heifer, one of several on the far Pasture, fell in the dyke by the drinking place. She was set so fast that Phillip had to haul her out with the tractor. After scraping mud from her hair he watched the animal totter weakly to her feet and shamble away. She was the under-beast of the herd, the weakling bullied by the others, who headed her away from drinking.

“She should go back to the yards, Matt.”

The next day, walking there, he found her half-drowned in the
same place. Again the tractor pulled her out. Again he suggested to the stockman that she should go back to the yards. On the morning of the following day Matt found her lying in the same place, dead.

That was at nine o’clock. Matt told Phillip’s eldest son, Billy, at noon as he was crossing the river by the bridge to go home, it being Saturday. Twenty-two hours later Billy passed the
information
on to his father. It was Sunday morning, Phillip was in the Studio entering up the accounts before replying to letters, his. usual Sunday occupation when all was well.

Had the drowned heifer been reported on the Saturday morning, they could have taken the carcase to Crabbe slaughter-house as a casualty, he told Billy, for disposal as either ‘fit for human
consumption
’ or for ‘manufacturing purposes’, whichever the Food Ministry official decided. Now the heifer was carrion, to be buried as such. He was explaining that it was not the loss of money that was worrying, but the feeling of not being able to trust anyone. He was standing there when Josiah Harn appeared at the open door.

“I saw yar young buds running-of the under-bud into the grupp,” he said, threateningly. “Eef you find it too much trouble, why don’t yew give up, and go back where you come from? Tidden justice to sarve a bud like thet, when there be a war on. Others hev seen yar buds running-of thet under-bud, hevn’t urn tho!” and with that he walked away.

“He’s land hungry, Billy. If this sort of thing happens much more, or our ewes get the fly badly from Mother’s dead hens, I may find myself dispossessed of the farm at a week’s notice.”

When he told Lucy about it, she asked if it was Billy’s fault. “You know what Matt is, why didn’t you send someone with the trailer to bring it back to the yards? Anyway, it’s nothing to do with me.”

“Your dead hens are! How the hell can I expect Matt to bury the bodies of rats, killed by his terrier about the premises, if the corpses of your hens are never removed from where they die on the Home Hills? It’s no good being complacent! I know you have always too much to do—so why not send the little boys to do it? Keep a roster—David one week, Jonathan the next. Or send them both together. Only
tell
them!”

“I
have
sent the little boys again and again, and they say they can never find a spade in the place at the end of the hovel.”

“Then why don’t you keep a small spade, specially for the job.
in the wood-shed here? And insist on its return. You’re in charge of the hens! They’re your poultry.”

He felt bitter. The strings of his throat made his voice ragged. This was, as he saw it, the fundamental problem, arising from ideas always in conflict, passively or otherwise. Yet realising the effect of his harsh words upon the lives of others, he could never be consistently certain where the cause of the schism lay. In his attitude of
what
should
be,
shall
be
—or in their complacency? He saw two points of view at the same time. Which was the way leading to defeat—the hard and narrow, or the broad and easy? Lucy’s brother’s words came to mind—
If
I
lived
to
be
one
hundred
years
old,
I
would
never
see
eye
to
eye
with
you.
Was that the voice of the Tortoise, telling the truth to the Hare? Had not Ernest Copleston exclaimed tersely on another occasion,
If
you
expect
me
to
take
all
you
say
literally,
then
I
have
no
more
to
say
on
the
matter.

As Hare saw it, Tortoise had never taken anything literally: and that was why, or how, in the past, the Copleston estate of four thousand acres, acquired by the virility of a forebear, had been allowed to slip out of terrapinic hands: and why once-great Britain had been slipping away between the two wars.

And yet—what had he done with his chance to inherit the twelve hundred acres of Fawley, the land of his Maddison forebears? Hadn’t he let it slip through his fingers, for a mess of type-metal—his ever-frustrated ambition to be a writer?

*

He spoke quietly, conversationally, to Matt about the dead heifer, with the result that Matt seemed inclined to assume an attitude of grievance over the incident, taking the line that, as on many occasions, of which Phillip knew nothing, he had been down to the meadows ‘sarvin’ your interests’, the boss ought not to have minded about that particular heifer. Also, he insisted, there were always losses on a farm.

“It’s nature, master.”

Shortly afterwards Lucy said that Billy had been discussing with her a plan for finding a job elsewhere. This was a shock. Apparently only a few hours were to elapse before Billy was due for interview with an official of the War Agricultural Committee in Cambridge, for a job of tractor driver. Tractor drivers were scarce, and could earn good wages.

“You realise, of course,”—Phillip heard his father’s voice as he spoke these words—“that the farm will collapse if he goes, now that we are already short of men?”

“It’s nothing to do with me,” replied Lucy, adding, “I was afraid something like this might happen.”

The father made another attempt to get straight with the son, by telling him that no problem was ever solved by running away; and though it was difficult, and unpopular, taking into consideration all the present circumstances of the black markets and fortunes being made on airfield construction all around them, to develop a sense of clarity, or truth, was the only solution.

“Whatever the outcome of the war, unless everyone in England faces the fact that honesty is the only policy, the country will gradually go down. Great nations, like families, have gone down in the past. And they seldom rise again.”

“I can’t help it,” the seventeen-year-old boy muttered.

“Can’t you see that the failure to report the heifer’s death might lead to my being reported for breaking the law? You know very well I’ve got enemies here, who would be only too glad to see me turned out of the farm. Those maggots on our ewes
were
reported, you know! I was given a tip by Charles Box, who’s on the local War Agricultural Committee.”

He realised that Billy was unhappy because their small Ferguson tractor was an object of near-ridicule among the village boys who gathered together, after work, down by Horatio Bugg’s place. They were snobs for big crawlers.

“I’ve told you that we couldn’t afford a crawler tractor, even if we could get a permit for one. But I do know how you feel, Billy. One day every farmer will have a Ferguson tractor.”

“That’s what you said before the war, but they haven’t got any round here! You also told me that Hitler would never go to war!”

“War was declared on Hitler, who wanted back the Polish Corridor, which was German soil. Also he wanted to push Russia back. He was utterly dismayed when Britain declared war on him.”

“I don’t know about that, but you said I could join the Air Force, then you applied for my reservation!” the boy cried.

“I can’t manage alone, Billy. If you look to your tractor and your job as though you are the captain of an aircraft, you’ll be doing a job as vital to the country as if you were in the R.A.F.”

“Huh,” Billy muttered, going away.

Phillip knew he was falling back on the
clichés
and platitudes which a generation ago he had derided when heard on the lips of his own father. He had not realised, in those days, that a
clich
é
was often the expression of a tired brain.

The upshot was that Billy went for a holiday at Southampton, with his Uncle Tim. And then—a shock. Matt the stockman said at the Studio door, “I’m tired, master. I harn’t hed a holiday for over five years. I give up, master.”

“Will you go on the arable if I find someone to take over the yards and the sheep?”

Matt nodded.

“You’re a good old fellow, a dear young fellow, Matt.”

“I don’t want to see you go wrong, master.”

Matt had a week’s holiday.

Two weeks later Phillip had a letter from a stranger which began,

After this somewhat unpromising start, the writer declared that he wanted a job on the farm. He claimed to have had some
experience
: he had worked for several other farmers during the past three years but had found them all unsatisfactory. They had no manners, no culture, no other interests than money. They were all hard men, the letter declared.

“I suppose he wants to find a soft one, Lucy. Well, here I am.”

“Oh, not
another
amateur coming here!”

“He says he knows livestock, and—I quote—‘It’s a pressing matter that I should find a cottage for myself, wife, and child’.”

“We haven’t got a spare cottage.”

It seemed that another escapist was trying to find work on a farm in order to avoid being called up for the services. And a writer who called another an ‘ex-legend’, when presumably he meant ‘
emigrant
’, didn’t appear to know what words meant. Phillip replied, in his usual double-minded manner—the farmer contained by the artist—that although someone was required to look after the
livestock
there was no cottage available; moreover he could not recommend the farm as a place for anyone of culture or artistic ambitions; also he was a most unsatisfactory farmer to work for.