Lucifer Before Sunrise (49 page)

Even so, his body lay as directed upon the sward, and when he returned the new axle had been fitted. Congratulations were
offered and self-deprecatingly accepted, and then the tractor was going slowly up the steep slope again, in bottom gear, the driver peering backwards over his right shoulder for the pleasure of watching the turf rising up and flopping over. Always the hand must be on the hydraulic lever to raise the ploughs should the furrow-wheel begin to ‘scrap’, or race in the furrows when the pull of the turf was greater than the two-thousand-four-
hundred-pound
pull of the draw-bar.

Once the furrow seemed feebly to scream: his heart jumped: but it was only a stone caught between furrow-wheel and scraper. At other times the furrow would smoulder; a dull-red spark glower’d there; smoke fumed out of the damp earth. A flint-and-steel spark had ignited dry roots. Often a strip of turf reared up behind the plough in contortion. Looking back, he saw a green-brown serpentine hesitation which, resisting the pull of gravity, began to unroll like a snake along its length, yard after yard, sometimes as much as fifteen yards, to settle itself as it had lain originally, green side up once again.

And how very obstinate it was! Within its fibrous roots and
rootlets
it held its own deathly soil, sucked out, mummified, without virtue or fertility. Phillip tore at it with his hands in vain. One scared wood-louse hurried back to the tomb. Would such stuff ever rot? It was beyond all disintegration; a thousand heirs were entombed there; a thousand seeds were dead before they had lived. If the turf had power to strike him dead, he would have been as the sand of the Parthenopian desert hours before.

While he was ploughing cautiously up and down the slope, Matt walked slowly up to see him. Matt had been gone sometime now, but the two men had remained friends. Pleased to see his sensitve brown face, Phillip got off, throttled back the tractor, and gave him a cigarette.

Matt might have been the desecrated spirit of the furrowed Hills, a druid of the vanished thorns. Upon his face was a look of something that had swum the seas before the chalk was raised.

For the last time Hare and Tortoise spoke their lines of comedy.

And with these words Matt walked away to his Saturday tea with his family, and later a relaxed evening in the Hero Inn. Obviously he did not approve of Phillip having had the ancient trees pulled out; nor did Phillip entirely, for as he clambered into the sack-covered iron seat again, he thought of W. H. Hudson’s story,
The
Old
Thorn,
and the Wiltshire legend that only harm would come to one who hurt a whitethorn. Had he likened Matt to a tortoise? Matt had been a tree in some ancient phase of evolution.

Phillip ploughed on without faith; he felt suddenly cold. The chill Arctic Circle air that stole in from the sea about five o’clock daily, struck through his clothes. He walked to the sullen furrow, trying to heave it over with his arms, knowing that if it lay like that it would not rot, but live to grow with greater exuberance, stimulated by the cutting of congested roots. Kneeling down, he soon found it was vain to try and heave over the dull resistance of many hundredweights. There the furrow-slice lay, ten inches by seven inches by fifty feet, a strip unbroken, marked by two parallel lines showing where the disc-coulters had cut the turf.

The black-headed gulls which had been following the ploughing, soaring and sweeping down on white narrow wings, their open red mouths screaming for beetle, mouse, or wireworm, now were drifting disconsolately in the upper air. They were finished for the day. Their brethren had already flown away in silent V-formations to their roosts in the sandhills. Phillip felt suddenly hopeless, and knowing this sign of exhaustion, he got back on the tractor and took it downhill to the hovel where it stood during the night. Then he went home, slowly, thinking of the fair-haired young pilot of the Luftwaffe who had lain in the next bed to his in the hospital ward, with broken legs and arm and other bullet wounds, and how he had thrust his knuckles into his mouth to stop any cry in his throat. Having refused a blood transfusion, he had died two days later, with hardly a sound. And every night young men of the R.A.F. were burning in the roar of petrol flames.

He passed Matt in the village street, coming back from the
shop with his weekly ounce of tobacco. He was a faithful old fellow. Phillip remembered how, some years before, when a mine had exploded a mile away on the coast, and a column of smoke had arisen above the woods, Matt had come running to where he was ploughing beyond the skyline, gasping out that he had thought it was the tractor blowing up. Matt felt the land through his whole body, as his forefathers had for a dozen centuries; he did not trust machinery. “What’s it all lead to, guv’nor? Why that!” and he pointed to the four-engined bombers, hundreds of them in the height of the sky, going slowly east over darkening sea to the Rhineland.

*

The following day, making an early start to finish the job, Phillip tried to reverse the stubborn furrows. In vain. The furrow-wheel sank in and churned impotently. Or the slices curled up, reared, doubled, and broke, to choke coulter,
mouldboard,
and frame. Again and again he had to stop and dismount, to shove, kick, heave, and push the contorted furrow-heap apart. Was this work of his ‘complying with the injunction of the War Agricultural Committee to plough in a husbandlike manner’? Well, this husband on occasions had kicked, pushed, and sworn, so perhaps after all he was carrying out the injunction!

Yet on the whole it was not a bad job. He considered that no other tractor, except perhaps a crawler, could have tackled those slopes. Certainly not horses with an ordinary plough, although a special match-plough of the kind used in competitions might have turned a few clean furrows until its share was blunted and wrung.

Some parts of the Hills had to be ploughed along their slopes, sideways instead of up and down. These places were the most difficult. Often the tractor was leaning over at an angle that made him wonder if it would topple and he fall underneath it. It was then that he thought of a Devon one-way plough and a pair of strong horses. He had in the past watched a man with such a team ploughing across the side of a down which rose at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees. The ploughman had begun at the bottom; and at the end of the first furrow he had turned round, thrown over the plough-breast, and gone back beside the furrow, creeping slowly along the side of the hill parallel to the bottom. And so on, all the way up.

Phillip was going slowly round the headland, almost at the end of the job, then the gulls which had been accompanying him
suddenly
flew up. A moment afterwards six small boys appeared on
the skyline. Jonathan, who was the leader, explained that they had been trying to reverse the sullen furrows, and might his gang follow behind the tractor, and push back any furrow-slice before it made up its mind to fall the wrong way? He was nowadays a polite and explicit boy.

“Yes, indeed, and thank you. But you are rather like Blücher at the battle of Waterloo.”

“We didn’t know,” said Jonny, worried.

“I’m only joking. Honestly, your help will mean ever so much.”

They fell on the obstinate turf with the eagerness of starlings, dropping on knees and pushing and heaving with teeth clenched. This was indeed Man wrestling with Brute Nature. After awhile it became too arduous, so they turned it into a game, under Jonny, whose job it was, apparently, to stand above and with a wave of a stick (which was also a tommy-gun) lead his men down to the assault of the backsliding furrows.

It was not long before hands and knees were grubby with soil and faces flushed with exertion, and Jonny came to say they were sorry they could not turn over the furrows properly. Phillip thanked them again, and they departed to the disused hen-house, their headquarters, standing below the Hills. Thereupon the gulls, which had been waiting on impatiently above the small boys, soaring upon the rising currents of air, swept down once more, and the scream and scramble for insects was again audible through the exhaust of the engine.

There were a few more rounds of the headland to be done before the ploughing of the Hills was accomplished. Daylight was fading, the sun was disappearing in the west, small and smoky, when he started on the final round. The engine seemed to be noisier. Doubts came with his fatigue: he put them away. Be calm, be patient: one more round, then leave the tractor by the hedge, waterproof cloth tied over aluminium body. Be calm: think of nothing.
La
balance,
toujours
la
balance.
Consider the probable fate of a Marshal of France! Compared with Pètain, you are the most fortunate of men. At least you are free, your own master, you have a fire to sit by at night, while all over the world homeless men are enduring existence without horizon.

There was a bottle of whisky in the drawer of the tallboy in the parlour. Should he, on returning home, open it and entertain
himself
to a drink? The bottle was six years filled, the only bottle brought into the house during the years of sparseness and economy, while the farm was being restored to the standards of good
husbandry. Or was this restraint due to a puritan complex? A fear of becoming dependent for stimulation on alcohol? After all, whisky was made from barley. Was it unnatural to drink whisky when one was fatigued by the growing of its source? He knew that the puritan complex, driving the body to do things beyond its capacity, was part of the philosophy now obsessing part of Europe, and that it came from early inhibitions, as well as from agonized contemplation of human frustration. And thinking thus, in twilight charged with the thunder of the black bombers passing slowly east in the sky he came towards the end of the last furrow.

In front of him, where a long snake of turf had curled back, something glimmered in the twilight. Stopping the tractor, he got off and walked stiffly forward, to pause above a pair of delicate grey wings spread motionless on the furrows. One of the
black-headed
gulls, alighting and dipping for a worm, had been caught by the back-curling furrow-slice of the penultimate round, and its head was pressed under the earth. With wings outspread it lay still, as though resigned—or crucified: softly it lay, the pearly bloom of its unruffled plumage seeming to float its body immobile on the earth. He had rescued a gull like this some years before; it had soon flown off his hand; but this one surely was suffocated, after lying under the furrow for twenty minutes? He knelt to heave back the strip of turf. It was heavy, almost beyond his strength; but at last he got it free, expecting the head to be limp and crushed. As he held the fragile frame on the palm of one hand, slowly it raised its head, turned to look at him, and a feeble scream came from its red mouth. It rested there quivering for a further space of time, and then as though dreamily, perhaps with lassitude, it elbowed itself lightly into the air, and with slow strokes of slender grey wings flew away into the dusk.

It was that blessed interval for the farmer, the gap between hoeing and haysel. The stock was on the meadows, the hoeing was ‘taken work’, so Phillip left for the West Country.

With a feeling of being restored to his own body he sat alone in a carriage of the 8.5 a.m. train from Crabbe as it rounded a curve and drew away from what had been a flourishing little port a century before. Now he might relax, bag on rack, book in pocket, packet of egg-and-watercress sandwiches open on the seat opposite, and read
The
Times.

The early part of the journey was always an adventure. He moved about from corner to corner, put up his feet; stood to look out over the marshes reclaimed from the sea by a great landowner in the eighteenth century. Some meadows were now in
wheat, but many in grass and thistle. Large black Welsh cattle grazed, others lay and chewed the cud among irregular rows of rusty cast-iron cake-pans. No cake—linseed, decorticated cotton, or crushed sunflower seed—had been put in them for years, unless the farmer had bought to store great slabs before the war, yet the beasts looked to be as big as those he remembered before September, 1939.

As the wheels trundled over the expansion-breaks in the rails the feeling of life was flowing back—or rather of the frustrations of life lifting from the consciousness. With trills of happiness
beginning
to arise in his body, he opened the packet of sandwiches. If he didn’t eat them now, before coming to Bungaloid Junction, he might miss the chance of enjoying breakfast alone.

In due course he arrived at the junction, with its view of hundreds of wooden shacks lying higgledy-piggledy along the verge of the sea. While awaiting the London train there was a feeling of the eyes losing their full absorbent look. He was enclosed within
himself
again. Too many people. There were soldiers; men of the R.A.F.; Poles, English, Norwegian; members of the 8th U.S.
Army Air Force. A civilian in his carriage made the inevitable slogan-joke to a neighbour—‘is your journey really necessary?’ If he had a dog, he would probably call it Monty. His father, and grandfather, would whistle to Bonzo and Rover respectively. Still, it was better to be among the sheep—these kindly, slow-to-anger East Anglians.

Having staked his claim to a corner seat by a deposit of coat and hat (bag hidden underneath) he walked past the barrier to get a newspaper. Safe in his seat, he saw with dismay that the carriage was getting more and more full.

Goodbye to a comfortable journey to London. People were soon standing, politely and stoically, between rows of sitters’ knees. The corridors were full, too. A pretty W.A.A.F. officer looked in; was found room to stand before him. Should he be old-fashioned and offer her his seat? But how could he get on his feet? He was pinned.

Phillip was still wondering what he should do when the train lurched off, and the young woman collapsed with startled apologies into his lap. As the train was still jerky over points, chivalry demanded that he steady her with his arms. When she was able once more to stand upright he felt that the least he could do was to give up his seat to this warm and soft young woman. So with hypocritically-modest eyes averted, he got up and made for the guard’s van, which usually had a solitary vacant seat.

The van was overlaid by recumbent figures in khaki and blue. Among this human clottage a dog on a string looked at him
hopefully.
After a search along the length of the train he found a seat in a third-class carriage, and sat down wondering if he was
committing
a fraud, since he had a first-class ticket.

Everything was topsy-turvy in war-time. His publisher once wrote to say that one of his dreads was to have a best-seller, for his paper ration would not stand it. Even his books were selling. Thereby Rosamund might continue at Lucy’s old school in
Berkshire,
and Peter re-enter Horatio Nelson’s school at North
Walsham.
Here royalties would run out, so David and Jonathan must continue at the village school.

*

As the train ran south, a glance through the window showed that the English countryside, in the fifth year of war, was superficially a happy scene, compared with what it had looked like before. Phillip spent his time staring at fields of arable and grass of unspoiled farmlands: as distinct from those vast level spaces despoiled by dark-green hangars, squatting like great rectangular toad-robots,
claiming the living soil for death; amidst whose runways and perimeter tracks, during their construction, the spirit of true work in the countryside was corrupted. Many millions of pounds had been sunken under their cruciform slabs, and risen off them, too; and black millions had sneaked away by other ways (later to be run to earth by the hounds of H.M.’s United Kingdom Income Tax Inspectorate Hunt).

Regarding farmlands proper, a more pleasing rural landscape was revealed—but only superficially: for the spirit of the men who served the land was neither free nor happy. Those splendid workers, German prisoners, had helped to restore the face of the land to a look of good husbandry. Hedges which once sprawled ten and fifteen feet high, and several yards into weedy fields, were now trim and tidy. Rivers had been cleaned out; dykes, grupps, rhines, and ditches made as original. The same work, where carried on elsewhere in Europe, was what Press, radio, politicians and fireside patriots would call Slave Labour, or Collaboration, a word of detestation. But in Britain it was done by
freedom-lovers
or Co-operators, a decent-fellow word for the re-educated. Among this last lot were Italian prisoners who seemed to typify the virtues of their captors, for they did little or no work while co-
operating.
As for the Germans, most of whom retained their former non-re-educatable minds, they worked with such care and speed and without pay that they had generally won the respect of the farmers for whom they worked.

And thus and thus, while the worn wheels of the train beat out a shaky rhythm on the rails beneath the carriage, while the tune of
Lilli
Marlene
passed through Phillip’s head—that song of the Afrika Korps recently scattered as the sands of the Parthenopian desert, which came to the Eighth Army
via
Radio Belgrade: there was a little beginning of European comradeship …

And thus and thus ran the worn engine of the brain inside the skull of the little old farmer with a first-class ticket sitting in a third-class carriage while wheels rattle over worn steel rails past wide, flat fields, where patches of ominous yellow clay were beginning to show under the lessening black silt of the Fens.

And now the train was passing into the suburban sprawl of the Home Counties, with the suggestion of an industrial cemetery. On to the smoky sky and stricken areas of bricks and mortar which were the Victorian rookeries of East London—jerry-built and
jerry-
bombed
as the saying went—terminating in the funereal soot of Liverpool Street station and its deathliness penetrated by light in spaces shattered in the black glassed roof.

Outside the congestion and shadiness of an unplanned City was relieved a little by the catharsis of high explosive. A taxi-cab took Phillip through vacant areas around St. Paul’s now so surprisingly light and airy that he must stop, pay off the cab, and stand and stare. Wild apple saplings were growing in some of the basement areas. Coltsfoot and mouse-ear and hawk-weed were in flower on broken walls. He was looking at a dandelion with a little face of gold beside a scarlet pimpernel. And, could it be—yes!—a black redstart was perched upon the ruined wall of a bank!

The smarting of the country-eye on coming in peace-time to these once inspissated streets was no more, for the slight whiffs of carbon monoxide were soon blown away in these delightful open spaces. Would they build again in this area purified by fire, where now water gleamed in anti-fire storage tanks and wild ducks paddled? Where that sweet flower of the wilderness, the rose-bay willow-herb, loosened its seeds under parachutes for the blessing of the moving airs? O, for more grass and water and trees and flowers in London, he cried within; while the voice of Money, soon to walk again, whispered with a whiff of diesel oil,
‘Gentlemen,
the
City
will
never
permit it’
;
words used twelve years before to counter Sir Hereward Birkin’s plea that a loan of a hundred million pounds be raised to put three million workless to make new great
motor-roads
in what was once Great Britain.