Lucifer Before Sunrise (40 page)

From the plateau, in another direction, Phillip looked down on the red roofs of the village. The drabness of the village was not apparent from the hill, nor was the narrow road, enclosed by many broken flint walls. It must have been a lovely place before the motorcar came. Now, the military and airfield-builders’ traffic of four years had just about completed the destruction of what once was beautiful—those so carefully built walls, with their matched pebbles from beach and gravel pit. He dreaded walking along that road. Even upon the hill, thought of it lowered the spirit, although the eyes saw only red-tiled roofs against the fields and the trees; but the reality of decadence was there.

Perhaps the farm of his hopes was the farm of forty years ago, when under the ‘Karnel’, who succeeded Farmer Buck, no man in the village was out of work, and Deepwater farm, not denuded of its best fields as it was now, employed over sixty men. It was said among the older labourers that in the ‘Karnel’s’ day not one dock grew upon any of its fields. Billy the Nelson told Phillip that the Colonel, riding over his estate one day, did indeed espy a dock; and galloping to his steward, made him go dig it up and carry it in his hat to the furnace-house where little potatoes were boiled for pigs. There, watched by his master, the steward thrust the
shocking
thing into the fire.

The ‘Colonel’ had been a dolled-up desk-officer during the 1914–18 war; a civilian promoted to honorary rank while in charge of district recruiting.

After centuries under a responsible landlord, when the place had order and design, the lands passed by mortgage to the ‘Colonel’; thence to a London insurance company, which sold it in the depression upon ‘the land fit for heroes’, and so it fell into the speculators’ market; and to dilapidation. And now, thought Phillip, to my microcosmic effort towards resurgence as damned and doomed as the European macrocosm.

Could any man, small or great, stay the decline of a human culture? History said that what was outgrown did not rise again: and that was the stunning lesson of his life. The bombers were in the air, to complete the lesson elsewhere.

But no more of such vain thinking! Stop! I am only a farmer today. Young Jonathan is coming up the slope, carrying a
side-bag
with tea.

*

“A mark on the earth by the bank: a fresh footmark. Someone has been before us, Jonny! Who can it be? Hush. Let’s follow the footsteps. You go first.”

Silently they climbed over the rusty wire fence, and followed the strange footsteps, which soon were lost in the leaves of oak and beech blown with snow under the bare trees. There were pines, too, as well as elm and holly.

“Those speckled marks on that tree-trunk are made by a
woodpecker
, chipping the bark for grubs boring into the wood.”

Farther on, branches of elderberry and other fallen sticks were piled against the trunk of a pine in the form of a rough wigwam. Straw was pushed between and around the sticks to shut out the wind. Inside were two seats—a wooden box, for father, and a genuine pre-war toffee tin—rare sight nowadays—for son. All talk was whispered.

“But before we settle down, let’s go on quietly through the trees, following these footmarks. See how they reveal an uneven, a stumping gait. There’s plenty of time. Pigeons won’t be flying in to roost yet. You lead the way.”

The habit of stealthiness and of whispering in a wood had been with Phillip from boyhood. Jonny, who wanted to make himself a rabbit-skin cap, felt the same way. He heard tiny tweedle-dee cries overhead and knew they were from a pair of cole-tits, who lived in the wood.

“Dad, come forward, slowly. See anything? There, just in front. Do you hear somebody chuckling?”

“Well now, Jonny, who would think a man was sitting inside
that criss-cross of elderberry sticks set up around the bole of the oak-tree? I wonder who it can be?”

“I know!”

“Don’t tell me, Jonny. Let me guess. Now then. His brown clothes harmonise with the oak leaves on the ground. His cap is brown. The brown pipe in his mouth breaks up the pink area of his face. I can’t guess, you tell me.”

“It’s ‘Scroggy’, Dad!”

“So it is! Well, we mustn’t disturb him, must we?”

Phillip knew all along that it was ‘Scroggy’, the courteous old wooden-leg cavalryman from Le Cateau, his form perfectly camouflaged in the hide. A double-barrelled gun rested across his knees, his cartridge belt hung on a branch. After a few words of greeting and pleasure, father and son returned to their hide.

“Now make yourself at ease on the straw, Jonny. If you hear the beat of wings, don’t look up. A pigeon circles the wood first, scrutinising before he swings in to alight. Let him settle. Others will follow. Then slowly I’ll raise my gun, get a bead on a bird, select another for the second barrel, while being careful to see that no immediate twig is in the way of the shot. That’s the way I shoot them; a real sportsman would bring them down on the wing.”

*

Pigeons were scarce that autumn, where before the war they crossed the sea in hundreds of thousands. Some declared they had been shot in a starving Europe; but Phillip had his doubts of starving Europe, despite the sea-blockade by the Royal Navy and the fact that the economy of Festung Europa was harassed by bombing everywhere. For himself, he didn’t mind whether the pigeons came or not, except that ‘Scroggy’ and Jonny would have been disappointed. He was content to sit there, to lose himself in the feeling of the wood, to see the tiny glittering heads of the first nettle-points rising out of the snow, to listen to the cole-tits in the tree-tops.

While Jonny and he sipped tea from the same cup, and ate jam sandwiches, a bird like a brown leaf flitted into the hide. They had invaded the roosting place of Jenny Wren. With a stitter of alarm, she flitted out again.

“I hope the owl won’t get her, Dad.”

“I’ll tell you what, Jonny. You go and ask ‘Scroggy’ if you may sit—quietly of course—in his hide. I’ve just remembered I’ve got to send something off by the post. From now on, this hide is yours.”

“Thanks, Dad! I’ll call it ‘Wren’s Castle’!”

Often Phillip had regretted that he had allowed himself to be diverted from his original intention on buying the farm: to treat all as virgin land, to make an entirely new beginning, breaking with the past. The entire arable was to be bare-fallowed the first year: the tired turf of the upland grazings to go under the plough, and be re-seeded.

“What, the Home Hills!” said the old fellow with ragged cap, tattered coat, and hands like roots, who was working on the farm when Phillip had taken it in hand. That was his first meeting with Matt, in 1937.

“Yes, even the Home Hills.”

“But no plough could do it, guv’nor!”

“Ah, but wait till I show you a new invention, a light tractor with hydraulically-attached plough!”

At that, the old chap uttered a single word of scepticism, “Patent!”

Soon after that brief dialogue, all British farmers were being induced to plough up grassland by offers of a ministerial grant of two pounds an acre. In 1939 the war came, and immediately
afterwards
farmers were asked to plough up a million acres of grassland. Local committees had powers to enforce this. Later, the ‘target’ (as the current phrase went) was another million acres; and then a third million. Phillip had wanted to tackle the Home Hills, but with all the seasonal work there was not time to attempt the clearing of trees there. Scores of black, ancient thorns had to be thrown and uprooted first. Luke had declared that the soil under the sward was too light, too sandy for cropping; but Phillip hankered to grow roots there, to clean the land of its immemorial thistles and other weeds, before re-seeding with leafy grasses and clovers.

The War Agricultural Committee offered to analyse soils for farmers; so he wrote to them, and one day an official had come to see him.

They talked as they sat on the main plateau of the hills, looking at the distant marshes and the sea. They parted the matted grasses with their fingers, examining the dwarf flowers and the thin plants that made up the sward. The official was doubtful of the land as arable, but said that a crop of rye might be taken off it. As an alternative, since the soil was light, might it not be better to plough early in March and re-seed with grass and clover seeds on the upturned sod? For, he said, the Home Hills were best suited for grazing.

In his enthusiasm, Phillip said he wanted to use the Hills as arable for some years, in order to kill the thistles which otherwise would flourish in any new pasture. “I can’t bear thistles,” he said. “When it is eventually resown with grass, I want to see a clean, fresh sward.”

“Well,” replied the official, with a smile, “our usual difficulty is in persuading a farmer to plough up his old grassland; but if you are keen on taking a crop off it, and think you can do so …”

He was a farmer’s son. Phillip had known his village when he had lived in the West Country. He was keen and alert; his ambition, he told him, was to be a farmer himself, one day. Phillip had heard and read of farmers complaining about
officialdom
of the various County Executive Committees, he said, but speaking only of his own limited experiences, he could only praise the County Committee. The two had parted amiably.

There was an old saying in farming, Break a field and make a man. He wondered if the saying had come about in the Napoleonic blockade of the Baltic, when Britain had to depend on her own wheat for bread. The corn in those days was dibbled—put in by hand into holes nine inches apart, three grains to a hole.

Many of the grass fields ploughed up in Napoleonic times had not been ploughed since those days. Now they were being turned over again in the Hitlerian war. For over a century many of the rich lands of England had been grass, fattening bullocks in spring and summer. What more could man or Government want better than grazing which fattened bullocks into beef, asked the owners of those pastures, when confronted with ploughing-up orders in 1942. During that period there were several letters in
The
Times
about the wisdom, or the foolishness, of such orders. Some declared the advantages of modern grasses, notably those bred by Sir George Stapledon in Wales, saying that they had more leaf and less stalk than the old; that the new mixtures contained strains which grew more quickly than the old, as well as those bred to
mature more slowly—thus providing a bite both early and late in the year.

The protestants declared that their immemorial pastures—
carefully
grazed and preserved almost like lawns—contained herbs which cattle selected for eating as they felt the need for them. They insisted that a layer of the new improved grasses was too strong, causing indigestion, or blowing, with consequent scouring and loss of condition in cattle. To this the new-grass enthusiasts replied that the modern strains required as skilful grazing as the old pastures, though for different reasons. Once the grazing of the new grasses was understood, they stated, the new pastures would be, for their greater leaf growth, superior to the old. Where before two bullocks grew into beef on every two acres, three might now graze and fatten.

Phillip understood the reluctance of good grassland farmers to destroy their established swards by ploughing, for he had come from a country of lush pastures made by warm sunshine and nourished by frequent rains. The east of England, however, was not grazing country. Sixty-four inches of rain fell on average every year in the West for twenty-two in the East. The West Country was famous for its cream and beef; the Eastern Counties for malting barley and sugar-beet—and for pheasants and partridges. The chicks of game birds survived in dry East Anglia because their tiny hind-claws seldom became clubbed with sticky soil, which caused them to fall behind and so be lost and to die of exposure. Owing to the rainfall and the warm Gulf Stream airs over some of the grazing fields of the West, those lush pastures earned in rent in half a year a sum that would have bought outright more than twice their acreage in East Anglian arable land, during the greatest depression in over a century.

South Devon is a warm region. The air is soft, the speech is soft. The rain falls and the sun shines. The grass is green in the West when it is parched in the East.

In the early spring of 1943 there came an opportunity to start work on the Home Hills. First to be cleared was what Jack the
Jackdaw called the great old bull-thorns. These trees, which for many years had worn a mantle of creamy white blossoms in May, had endured the bitter winter winds of a century or more. They were gnarled and black of trunk. Their branches and twigs grew thick and matted. Their limbs were set with long thorns which left a blue mark in the flesh they pierced. Abyssinian doves pleached their raft-like nests among the white blossoms, the June air was
a-throb
with the love-notes of Shakespeare’s gentle turtle.

Phillip had doubts about cutting down those white thorns. Might he not be a vandal to Nature? But the grass must be
renewed
. He decided to leave one here and there, the shapeliest trees, so that when the corn was rising green he might see and smell the creamy blossom of the may, while looking down, from the new farmhouse-to-be on the top of the Hills, upon the
greensward
of his park. The Searchlight Camp had its artesian bore, for water, where he had planned the new home, after the war.

As usual, he was a little trepidant after so prolonged a waiting to begin clearing the thorns on the Home Hills. The job was not an easy one. Sharpening his axe, he went out one morning to throw the thorns. After he had shredded the first fallen tree—it took a long time to do, with its seven intergrown trunks and his muscles unused to throwing an axe-head—he went home, and over a pint of tea thought that what was needed was one of the bull-dozers that were levelling thousands of miles of hedges upon the
circum-adjacent
airfields. But such a luxury—the hiring price was
£
50 a day—was not for small folk like himself, certainly not in war-time; so he thought to telephone Mr. Gladstone Gogney, and ask him if his tackle would come and pull out the trees.

Mr. Gogney on the telephone said he was willing to oblige a man like Captain Maddison.

A few days later the engine arrived. It chuffed and chugged sideways up the grassy northern slope of the Home Hills, and came to rest, panting. To the monster was attached a great steel hook at one end of a cable with a breaking-strain of fifty tons. The cable went round the first great old bull-thorn, and the hook lifted to sneck the loop. Snorting, the engine began to wind-in the cable; the greasy grey length slithered over the turf; the strain was taken; the fly-wheel moved round slowly; the cable tautened.

Almost angrily the engine coughed. There was a shriek, a crack, and the trunk was being hauled forward, splintered salmon-pink above the root. It had started. How pleasant to be a mere spectator!

Lesser trees yielded more easily, coming out of the ground with most of their roots, to be dragged on their sides with two or three tons of soil at their bases. Each left a crater like that made by a small bomb of the kind dropped by Heinkels in those far-off days of 1940.

By the end of the second day sixty-four trees were on their sides. The cable, which had snapped nineteen times, was now irreparable. So the great thorns were left, for the soil on the matt of roots to dry and fall off.

*

There were about ten acres altogether of the Home Hills. The varying slopes lay north, west, and south. The official trowel had prodded and scooped, the official bag had carried away for analysis a light sandy soil deficient in phosphate and considered able to support one crop of rye only. This opinion had been given before the thorns had been wrenched out with arboreal shrieks and groans. It was only when the root-craters were visible that Phillip saw to his delight that below the shallow top-soil of sand lay a brownish-red medium loam similar to that of the Nightcraft field over the eastern hedge. There were pockets of sand in the Hills, for the rabbit burrows were yellow with it; there was also gravel, for on the western slope lay a saucer-like depression which was obviously an old pit covered by grass; but under most of it, not too deep for the plough, lay that lovely brown loam.

It was curious how the soil was sandy among the roots of the congested grasses. As he broke it up in his fingers—a blackish sandy mould—it occurred to him that this ancient colony of grasses had, during the centuries, eaten all the heart out of the soil, leaving only indigestible sand. None of the original clay was left, only small grains of rock called sand amidst the centuries’ wreckage of dead roots. Under that layer or compost a fine medium soil was lying ready to be enlivened by sun and air and rain.