Lucifer Before Sunrise (45 page)

“You got plenty to eat, so what's that to you?”

“Come to that, Mr. Bugg, what's it to you?”

On Monday rain fell. That evening, after the day's work, a wind sprang out of a clear sky, and once again the children and Phillip went down to turn the sodden heaviness of the hay, lest it heat.

However, they worked willingly. ‘Ginger' came to visit them. He gave them all a lift to the Scalt in his Rover. Pressed for
comparisons
, the airman admitted that the work of pulling hay about with an unfamiliar fork was more tiring than all his ops put
together
. Such was the professional understatement of what in R.A.F. slang was called a Type. With his help they got the stuff spread, and sat down in long green clover—the aftermath had grown nine inches since the cutting. But if no more rain fell, the hay would dry out, and be saved.

While they rested, a column of Lucy's ducks began to queep and push through the clover towards them. They had left the river and were on their evening hunt for slugs and insects in the grass. There were ninety ducks, all living in the dykes and feeding themselves, save for a morning scatter of tail-corn to hold them to the premises. It was good to sit and watch them, to share their delight in pushing through the slender green stalks of rye-grass and clover.

Jonny wandered off and came back a few minutes later, saying, “It must have been a very long time ago we cut this hay, for look at the hen partridge whose head was cut off by the cutter as she brooded her chicks.”

He held out a flatness of bones and feathers, a skeleton light and dry, all the flesh gone.

“I found it lying on the side of a haycock.”

The corpse had been swept up by the hay-rake, and lifted on a fork into the haycock. Wind and sun, ants and flies, had made it but a framework of bone and feather. Peering at the little wreath Jonny said that some of the seeds it had been feeding on were still lodged in the crop cavity above the breastbone. “Dad, do you know, I can see goose-grass, clover, and chickweed seeds.” He mused awhile. “I'd bestways carry it home carefully, to bury it in my pets' graveyard, seeds and all. No,” he said, looking
thoughtful
, “for I don't want weeds in my graveyard.” So he carried it to the hedge, and buried it down a rabbit's hole.

The ducks came around them. Idly they watched them pushing through the pale green clover leaves. After awhile, remembering what was awaiting them on the farmhouse table, they put the
hay-forks
in a row under the oak-tree, and went home to a supper of
wheaten bread, butter, home-made cheese and home-cured
sweet-ham
, followed by strawberries and cream.

*

The children had planted the strawberries, the cream had come from Wiverton Sunset, a Jersey cow grazing the grass of the meadow, once a jungle of weeds. The flavour of the strawberries had come from the potash of the open hearth, whereon fires of ‘great old bull-thorns' had burned for five months without going out.

Asked what had happened to the partridge chicks under the dead bird, Jonny told ‘Ginger' that Davie had brought them home, put them in a basket with cotton wool in the hot-cupboard, but ‘the little ones died'. So Davie had handed them over to Jonny for burial. The two boys put flowers on the grave every day.

Soon the nightly torrent of sound would be coming from the sky. It was time for the visitor to depart.

“I've got only six more ops. to do, then I'll be grounded.”

*

The hay was saved. The sun moved from the Crab into the
constellation
of the Lion. Above the harvest fields of Eastern England, as the corn was being cut, American squadrons of Liberators and Fortresses flew east in clear skies, leaving vapour trails to drift and spread tenuous long after they had gone out over the North Sea—to return a few hours later in the afternoon, but rarely in the
formations
in which they were last seen; and often in lower air.

And in the evenings, when the sun was down over the marshes and the sheepwalks of the coast, dark British bombers began to drone in the deepening colour of the sky. They passed singly; but twenty, thirty, forty were to be seen at any moment, and as they disappeared over the sea scores of others were coming up out of the lingering light of the west. Sometimes it was night as they passed overhead, and the children heard the beats of thousands of engines merging into a torrent of sound that filled the parlour where they sat behind black curtains, while the panes of the leaded casements trembled and tittered and at moments all the pantiles of the roof seemed to be moving together. Then the children would look up from the table where they were playing cards or writing or making models; and Phillip would look at David, and he would say quietly, ‘I know', and his ‘I know' would still the others, for ‘Ginger', now with a bar to his D.F.C., was doing his third tour of ‘ops'; and thinking of him, the weight of the world lay momentarily upon them.

Both the U.S.A., and the R.A.F., bombers were suffering heavily at this period of the war. The Germans were producing cheap and specialised fighters to combat the slower, heavier and more expensive four-engined bombers; and they were shooting them down, day after night, and night after day.

To give him experience, Phillip asked Boy Billy to buy two pigs from Josiah Harn, of the village smallholding which was bursting at the seams. Josiah Harn had for long suffered from land-hunger; now he was ravening. He had two sons in the Services while his eldest son looked after the increasing herd of cows. This son was married, and had the village milk-round. The father owned scores of pigs on the two acres. They were looked after by Powerful Dick, who had left Phillip for more money. There was a boiler for the swill; and much grunting and squealing behind fences of
corrugated
iron. Regularly heavy loads of fat pigs went to the Food Ministry Graders. It was now October.

“Now get two good little ‘stores’, Billy. Take the brown trailer and the pig net. And be sure to ask the price before you buy.”

“Okay.”

“Mr. Harn will probably say, ‘Oh, I won’t be nice about the price. I’ll see your father some time.’ But insist on asking the price before you bring the pigs back.”

“O-kay, I heard you the first time.”

When the pigs had been brought to the pen in the stables Phillip enquired the price.

“Harn said he would see you about it. He said he wouldn’t be nice about the price.”

“But I told you he would play that trick. Why didn’t you ask him again?”

“I did ask him, more than once. He wouldn’t say. I
did
try to get him to say, but he wouldn’t. All he said was, ‘We won’t fall out about that!’ I
did
give him your message! I knew you’d be like this, whatever I did! I’m off!”

Yes, Phillip knew it was unfair of him to have matched Billy against a man of exceptional pertinacity, who had watched the local markets of the last fifty years for chances to take a profit, however small, to increase his capital.

Phillip returned to his pages, trying to convince himself that by keeping away from the farm, and becoming inactive in order to write regularly at his desk, he was doing his duty in thus providing the means of a proper education for the younger boys. It was a dull November day. With a certain happiness he became as a broody hen once more, set upon inked paper. For weeks he had been writing, except for sunny breaks when he had forced himself to work in the garden or help on the farm from about nine in the morning until ten at night, while possessed by a feeling that all was now foredoomed to failure. This writing gave the only satisfaction in a phosphoric existence.

At long last the Swill King sent in his bill. The price he had charged was half as much again as that published, at the time of sale, in the local paper for ‘stores’, i.e. pigs before they are specially fatted for the butcher.

Every Tuesday Lucy presided over the Farm Committee. Phillip, as manager, laid down the programme for the following week, weather permitting. Billy, as field-foreman, was supposed to carry out the manager’s orders, which were given after a free discussion. At the end of the week Billy was supposed to report on all work carried out.

“Harn had overcharged for the pigs,” Phillip reported to the Chairman. “That is my fault. I should have gone with the
field-foreman
, knowing Harn’s reputation for low cunning. May I ask the Chairman to enquire how the pigs are getting on. The orders were that they be fed on barley-meal mixed with a little beet-pulp soaked well in advance.”

“How are the pigs doing?” asked Lucy.

“All right,” said Billy.

“Mr. Chairman, they must be ready to go to the butcher by early April, at the latest, so that the hams and flitches can be cured before the blow-fly is about. Otherwise they may get maggots. And even the smoking of hams by the butcher at Wordingham doesn’t always kill the blow-fly’s eggs.”

“They’ll be fat,” said Billy.

“What are you feeding them on?”

“Barley-meal, as you ordered.”

One evening while the three were in Committee, Jonathan came
in and said, “‘Ackers’ wants to see Dad.” Phillip went out and saw the stockman standing by the Studio door with unhappy face. ‘Ackers’ said he didn’t want to go on. He would ask for his cards on Friday. There were tears of frustration in his eyes.

“My pigs can only just stand upright. All they hev to eat is pulp, an’ with all that barley going to waste in the Barn! What would they say in the village, if my pigs were seen like that? Josiah Harn is saying the land ought’r be taken over by the War Committee!”

The minute book, recording an extraordinary meeting, recorded that no barley had been ground for the past two months, that the pigs had never been fed on barley-meal, that they were suffering from rickets, and were little more than skin and bone. If they did not die they would be between two and three months late for the butcher. “The blow-fly will be about then, Mr. Chairman.”

The Chairman ruled that blame for the neglect lay equally between manager and field-foreman. Asked further to enquire why false reports had been made by the field-foreman, the reply was, “That is a question I should, perhaps, ask the manager.”

The manager accepted responsibility.

The field-foreman offered his resignation. He was reminded that because of his indispensability he was reserved from service with the Forces, provided he remained on the land.

Owing to shortage of labour, many farmers were now compelled to use Italian prisoners-of-war. The contrast between Italians,
en
masse,
and the German prisoners, was wide. For one thing, most of the skrimshanking Italians had switched allies, to be on the winning side. They were no longer Collaborators—a word of contempt—with Germany, but Co-operators, a term of
regeneration
. They wore the words
Allied
Italy
embroidered in red on the shoulders of their khaki tunics, and about forty of them arrived on the Bad Lands every morning under a British corporal. These
so-called
Co-operators did little or no co-operation. They lay about under hedges most of the day, talking and carving rings, cigarette cases, and other souvenirs from aluminium picked up and hacked
off crashed American bombers. The objects were skilfully made, and found a ready sale among the civilian population owing to the scarcity of almost every kind of fancy and utility goods in the shops. Others spent their time digging out rabbits, and snaring and trapping small birds—wrens, blackbirds, finches, robins, and thrushes. Hedgehogs, pheasants (if any remained) all went into their cooking pots. It was useless to speak to the British corporal in charge of these Co-operators.

They had come, officially, to spread muck on the Higher Brock Hanger. By the end of each day they had done less work than was done normally by one English labourer. So Billy spent each day by his idle tractor waiting for another half-acre to be spread, while talking to one or another of the Eyeties.