Lucifer Before Sunrise (7 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Thereafter Hooly came to the open window at dawn, crying and flapping brown mottled wings for food, walking over the blanket
to yell in Phillip’s ear if he didn’t awake. Sometimes he visited other cottage windows. From one, occupied by Jack the Jackdaw, David saw him leaving hurriedly, accompanied by oaths and the slamming of a casement.
Whether or not Jack’s flawed personality was due entirely to his experience as an infantryman on the Somme, where he had been wounded, and at Passchendaele where he had been stricken by mustard gas, he was psychically a damaged man. Sometimes Phillip had seen him, tears of impotence in his eyes and with puny cries of rage, attack inanimate objects, such as a pair of heavy harrows, which on a weedy field constantly needed lifting to be cleaned. He swore at them, he kicked the iron frame, he made a speech of misery and frustration to the wind in the middle of the field, while the horses stood patiently by, awaiting his word to go forward again.
Jack the Jackdaw had become more unapproachable; he would move away when spoken to, he could not listen. Once or twice Phillip was the recipient of his ranting. Usually a dour fellow, when he was upset his arms waved, he yelled all his breath away. Froth on lips, hoarse voice became feeble, he was near to
convulsion
; he collapsed sobbing.
Is this wrecked heart slowly petrifying for lack of its complement, vehicle of healing love and tenderness? Even as, in moments of fatigue coming near to despair, is my own heart, or resistance? I understand Jack the Jackdaw, because I know myself; and I know also what it is to feel one’s resistance to be momentarily overcome. I knew how he felt when the last of his nerve-power was running out in those frenzied monologues, accompanied by waving arms and ragged cap dashed to the earth; I have heard those tones, or overtones, coming from my jittery self; I have heard those tones, though with deeper penetration and cutting power, on the radio, broadcast from the Ostmark whither the black bombers are nightly flying. Is it mere coincidence that all three of us have been, as infantrymen, hit by bullet or shell-fire; and I finally (but temporarily) blinded by mustard gas, in the Great War? I think I understand Jack the Jackdaw and his nervous curses when he had been awakened, not by a dream-wife stroking his hair, but by an apparition of dementia standing on his pillow.
Other people in the village, who had been casually amused by the sight of Hooly in the past taking food on Phillip’s shoulder, began to feed him; or rather, they tried to feed him, offering him pieces of bread or even fragments of wood, or stones, to get him to fly down for their amusement. The singleness of the bird’s mind
towards human beings was in disintegration, and he flew now to anyone and into any open window. David, who was seven, once woke up and found Hooly pulling at his hair. Both David and Jonathan liked Hooly, and welcomed him in their bedroom at any hour of the day or night. Not so their mother, who had to rise at six every morning to give Billy his breakfast. In Lucy’s bedroom Hooly always behaved like a maladjusted human being with a guilt-complex. Seeing himself in a looking-glass, he began to fight his own image. Lucy had to turn the glass round lest the owl hurt itself. His beak-snapping rages kept her awake, and so she was not altogether sorry when Hooly disappeared for the second time.
David said perhaps he had been shot; but no, Hooly returned within a week, flying down unexpectedly one sunset to the weathered oak frame of the draw-well. He screaked down at Phillip’s face, but when he was offered a shoulder, and Phillip went near him, he edged away. Obviously someone else had tried to handle him, instead of letting him perch in freedom on head or shoulder.
One evening when he was perched on the well, three two-engined bombers with dark crosses on their fuselage came in at roof-top height from over the marshes. They had flown wave-chasing across the North Sea to be below the unseen tentacles of radar. With a flick of the stick each had lifted over farm-house and trees and dipped again, to throw up over the wood on the hill-line across the valley. It was all so sudden that I could feel only amazement. Then red points of tracer left them as they banked to shoot up the camp beyond. Children were calling in the village with excited cries. In a moment it was over, the Heinkels were gone, flying into a cloud which hung like a great quarry in the western sky, while Spitfires screamed around, circling like falcons.
Now a most extraordinary coincidence happened as I was standing by. Nine swallows, with ringing cries, began to circle above and around the brick well, on the oak frame of which Hooly was perched. First one then another peeled-off and dived at the figure of the owl, swishing by within an inch or two of his amazed and jerky eyes, to zoom again and join the rotating ring six feet or so above the windlass-frame. One after another they came down, sweeping up again and taking their turn to dive once more. They cut at Hooly from in front and from behind, and Hooly did not like it. He flew away. It was then that I heard from the upper air the terrible grumbling roll of a Spit’s eight-gun squirt—bullets cutting through fabric, metal, flesh and bone like a thunderous circular saw; a second shuddering, rolling roar; and after an interval, more distantly a third. Breathing quickly, and conscious that I was quivering within, I was about to seek a human face with which to share
my emotion, when an owl hooted from the roof, and turning I saw the large owl perching on the chimney rim of my writing-room stack, twenty yards away in the garden.
So that was the secret of the truant! The wild owl was hunting for and feeding the tame bird. It called with sharp
ker-jick,
ker-jick!
and I knew by that it was a male. Then it flew away, followed by Hooly—a young hen bird!
Meanwhile three Spitfires, with superchargers whining, followed by another section at three thousand feet above them, hurtled across the sky. They flew towards the vast gold-lined cumulus cloud towering in the west; up its craggy precipices they seemed to climb almost
perpendicularly
, to open formation like a shamrock and, turning just before stalling point, to rave down again in separate arcs of three great circles, engines full on, to zoom up again as they waited for the
remaining
‘bandit’ to come out of the cloud. After three such wide circles they disappeared; and a moment later I heard again the heart-chilling, sullen roar coming from unseen distance. The bursts were repeated, growing duller and far away—one-second bursts—and then came a long metallic roll which was the end.
To our surprise Hooly came to the well on the following evening, and while the old cock bird perched in a damson tree, she flew down to my shoulder. She came by habit, that was all. She cried to me by habit, for she was not hungry. She came because of what a scientist would call an association of ideas, but what I would call friendship. The male owl had accepted the fact that Hooly had human friends and waited quietly until Hooly was ready to fly off again. I was relieved. It was one thing less to think about.
The summer solstice drew near. It was clear, sunny, Old English summer weather. Phillip and Billy finished cutting the first field of hay at 9.30 p.m. on Tuesday night, the seventeenth of June. The men were still on sugar-beet hoeing, but would be finishing soon.
That night rain soaked the hay in rows. Next day when Phillip thought it had dried out he started to turn the rows with the tedder. In his ignorance he collected behind the long steel fingers of the machine rolls that were too big; and trying to force the fingers clear, not having found out how the ‘patent’ worked, he injured the gears in the box. He was relieved that it was he who had broken the gears: he felt nearer to ordinary life.
The weather had returned with heat and sun. He wanted to get the hay in wind-rows before it was bleached, before its pale green colour and aromatic oils were dried out of it, before it became the sort of third-rate stuff that had usually been stacked before his coming. But it was still damp on the Friday; and on the
Saturday, fearing the hay would be spoiled if not cocked during the weekend, he asked Steve, Dick, Jack, Billy the Nelson, and Luke the steward to come back after dinner to finish hay-cocking. They agreed after consultation. They started again at two o’clock. But after half an hour or so Phillip realized that the hay was still too full of sap to be cocked. The forkfuls they lifted up were too heavy, though not noticeably damp. He looked at the men’s faces as they all paused. They said it was claggy, full of sap. It would go mouldy in the cocks. So after a further talk he ordered the cocks to be thrown open, deciding to wait until the coming Monday; and apologised to them for depriving them of their
half-holiday
due, he said, to his misjudgment. They were kind about it and they went home with extra money.
Lying in bed on the Sunday morning I was thinking that I had nothing to worry me for this day—the longest day of the year, 22nd June, 1941—and turned on the radio, to hear an unusual fanfair music from a German station. Immediately I thought of what I had been told by Francis, my new friend in London, that Hitler was sending the Wehrmacht into Russia. Once again, as on the tenth of May of the previous year, I was confounded. Hitler had done—been impelled to do—the very thing he had once said must never occur. I thought of Napoleon and his fate. And 22nd June, 1812, was the day Napoleon had invaded Russia.
Lying there, I listened to a translation of Hitler’s reasons on the Zeesen short-wave of the Rundfunk. Russia had been deploying her armies across the Vistula, not for defence, but for attack. I knew, from the helplessness of the German attackers, waiting for their Zero hour on the Frezenberg ridge in the autumn of 1917, when our divisions attacked ten minutes before they were due to advance, that the Russians were sitting ducks. I could imagine how Churchill was rejoicing, now that Nazi Germany and Bolshevism were at each other’s throats. Had Hess told his inquisitors of this attack? Had Churchill sent word to Stalin, to warn him? In any case the Russians must have known of the
preparations
of the attack.
I drew the blanket round my head, and tried to sleep, but I could not rest, my thoughts went on despite attempts to still them by deep breathing. Would Hitler get to Iran and the oil wells by way of the Ukraine, and then withdraw behind the West Wall? For the lines of communication in France were vulnerable. And the war was one of material destruction; the side which had the last tin of bully beef or can of petrol, would win the war.
I tried to forget it; but the frustrated mind of the would-be novelist, historian of these times, ran on. Was not Hitler bursting out of an
economic ring because he was forced to, in the pattern of the old Germanic migrations which surely had been caused, centuries ago as this very day, by lack of food? Richard Jefferies in his
Walks
in
the
Wheatfield
had written that the golden berries in the wheat-sack were the real gold for which men in the markets of the world struggled. Germany on a soil largely sandy could never grow enough wheat to support her people. Especially if they were healthy, so that the
population
increased….
While I tried to see it all as in a glass clearly, I heard the familiar slow clumping of boots up the wooden stairs. Boy Billy had come to tell me that the bullocks on the Home Hills had broken into the wheat on the Nightcraft.
“The Searchlight blokes left the gate open, probably on returning from stealing our eggs, Dad.”
After a couple of hours we got the bullocks back again, leaving the field with its corn trodden down in many places.
Just before Midsummer Day the men finished sugar-beet scoring. The plants looked well, though gappy, due partly to wire-worm, partly to indifferent sowing. Jack the Jackdaw had been on the drill. He had merely sat there and enjoyed the view, smoking as he rode on the seed-box behind the tractor—instead of watching, hawk-eyed, the four coulters all of the time to see if the brown seed was dropping regularly. In some places a ringe or line had been missed right across the field: a quarter of a mile, nearly fifteen
hundred
plants, eventually a ton of beet lost. At seventy-five shillings a ton it was a costly three minutes to enjoy the view. Once again the farmer was at fault for not having arranged things better. He said to Billy that he should have sat on the bloody drill himself. It was a fixed price for hoeing, whether full plant or patchy one. So the farmer lost twice.
Hoeing over, the men were now free to pick up the hay. Phillip turned the rows once again and started to make cocks of it in the evening. The teamsman worked with the toppler—a
broken-backed
, second-hand affair that Phillip had not yet had time to repair, nor money to replace.
*
They carried part of the hay four days later. It wasn’t so bad a crop, but the flesh-building clover was thin. They worked from mid-morning, when the moisture was off, until the dew was settling again at dusk—Luke, Boy Billy, Matt, Billy the Nelson, Steve, Jack the Jackdaw, Powerful Dick, and Phillip. The elevator, new twelve months before, and worked off a pulley on the
concrete-mixer
, hoisted up the loads brought down by rubber-tyred
tumbrils
, lorry, and large green trailer drawn by tractor on rubber wheels.
In the evening, when they stopped work, Phillip wanted to sling the new Cuprinol-treated cloth as an awning over the
half-built
stack. It was to hang from a sycamore pole he had lashed
between ladders with stone-weighted feet standing at two ends of the stack. He had felled the pole specially for this job. To the idea of an awning to keep off any rain, both Luke and Matt raised objections, although it was but a minute’s work to push each end of the pole through a ladder stave and then tie ends and staves together.
| Young Tortoise: | “Nobody else in the district covers hay like that.” |
| Hare: | “Nobody else must be a sensible chap. He is always doing the new things I am doing. I would like to meet him. Who is this Nobody Else?” |
| Father Tortoise: | “Well, everybody.” |
| Hare: | “I do not care for everybody.” |
| Y oung Tortoise: | “But if it rains like it sometimes do do the hay will sweat and rot the cloth. Yar’ll see.” |
| Hare : | “Well, everybody tells me that I see what does not happen, so you may both be right. But as a fact, the two-foot air-space under the ridge pole will permit all the gases to escape. And if it rains for days and days as you forecast, the rain will surely rot the hay, to insure against which we are putting up this awning.” |
| Young Tortoise: | “The hay may heat, and catch fire.” |
| Hare: | “Come on, dear boys, give a hand with the cloth, it weighs just about a hundredweight. It won’t take long to fix.” |
| Father Tortoise: | “The wind will blow that cloth away, come a tempest.” |
| Hare: | “Then we will do what we always should do:—run a rope round the waist of the stack, fasten all the cloth-ropes to the main rope, and secure it that way. No more great lumps of threshing coal to each small cloth-rope. Remember what happened to the last one, up on the Hanger? It was blown to ribands, wasn’t it?” |
Matt didn’t like that. He and his son Luke had tied lumps of steam coal—having disregarded Phillip’s orders that each
cloth-rope
be hitched to the holding waist-rope. A tempest had come, half-hundredweight lumps of coal had torn the cloth-ropes from the jute, leaving one hundred and forty square yards of jute to flap like a dirty sea against a harbour wall, and destroy itself.
When Tortoise had left, Hare and leveret secured the ropes of the new stack-cloth, slung over the horizontal pole, to an inch-thick rope round the waist of the stack.
“Thanks for helping, Boy Billy.”
It didn’t rain in the night, and Hare slept well.
*
Leaving the stack in the quarry to settle for a day or two, they started to cut Denchman Meadow. Billy in the early spring had bush-harrowed the pasture here, dragging an entire thorn behind a new model of the hydraulic tractor. This was a Ford-Ferguson, which had been sent to Phillip for a year’s free use by the inventor, an Ulsterman then in America. It came on ‘Lend Lease’. Like its older brother, the new Fergie was painted battleship grey.
Phillip had followed the dragged bush with the heavy rib-roll, drawn by the ‘little old grey dicker’, as Luke called the 1937 model. Dicker, otherwise donkey. It was a good donk, too, with its Coventry-Climax petrol engine.
A few weeks after the bushing and rolling, the new grass on the Denchman had looked so green that the stockman had pleaded to be allowed to turn his buds on it. Like a good herdsman, Matt wanted his young beasts to have the best of everything. Again and again he asked to be allowed to put them on the Denchman, (
shut-up
for hay), declaring that they had not enough feed on either of the four other pastures beside the river. There was plenty of bite on these meadows, Phillip told him, adding that they would have to hold thirty-nine buds and ten cows through the coming winter, as well as fourteen two-year-olds in the yard by the Bustard Wood.
“We’ll need every bit of hay we can save, Matt, my dear. Think of the five long months of winter to be got through! The hay from the late-sown leys will not be enough. And barley-straw, fill-belly stuff anyway, will be short again this year. Look at the poor crop on the Steep!”
Phillip went on to say that the fourteen acres of permanent grass of the Home Hills, which, after being ripped up by the pitch-pole harrow, had been bushed, rolled, and slagged, were waiting to be eaten. And had he not observed how the grass was growing away on Teal Meadow, also on the couple of acres of Scalt Common?
“Grass must be folded, and kept eaten close. The old haphazard ways of pre-war grazing anyhow and any time are over. Eat one meadow close; shut it up; move to the next; eat that close before moving on. That’s the idea, Matt.”
The stockman, always concerned for his beasts, listened; then he said, “But guv’nor, think of all that lovely bite on Denchman Meadow going to waste. ’Twill never make hay!”
“Ah, you have the gentle eyes of a bullock,” Phillip said. “Which is meant for a compliment, Matt. But I’m thinking of your young stock in seven and eight months’ time. Their gentle eyes in the yards will then reward you, Master Herdsman.”
“Then may I put them on the Denchman Meadow, guv’nor?”
Phillip had to pretend to sigh, and say gently, “No, dear man, but you shall have all the hay from the Denchman in the awful winter that’s coming. We’re under siege, Matt. Our ships are going down day and night. We live in the Island Fortress, Matt.”
The meadow took its name from the Danish encampment across the river and the road, a historical mound grown with pines, which was used by the parish council as a trash dump.
They cut all one day—or rather, they wasted four-fifths of one day, trying to make the Albion cutter work in the thick meadow bottom. The next morning they moved back to the upland
hayfield
, and worked until 6 p.m. carrying all but fifteen cocks of the field. It was not really good hay, since it lacked a bottom of dark green clover, but the ryegrass was a good colour, pale grey-green. When you chewed the knot of a stalk, you tasted the sugar in it. Phillip longed to be able to bale it from the wind-row, when it had been a darker green; but expensive balers were not for small farmers like himself, with an overdraft rising to half the mortgage value of the land.
In the morning they returned to the meadow, to finish cutting that fine, thick growth. As before, the Albion cutter constantly jammed behind the little grey dicker driven by Boy Billy. Luke cut steadily, his pair of horses drawing an ancient Samuelson cutter which Phillip had bought at auction for
£
5. Billy and he took the Albion to the blacksmith, who found several faults and adjusted them; they returned down the road to the meadow, over river-bridge, and continued with the cutting, which was awkward owing to the lows, or lesser draining channels, which had long ago been trodden-in by bullocks. Phillip’s function, sitting on the cutter, was to watch for mounds and other obstructions, and to pull the lever in time to raise the knife-bar over them. So progress was slow, for the knife still continued to choke itself. What
could
be wrong with the thing?
It was fine hay, perhaps two tons to the acre. With fifteen tons from the upland acres, another fifteen from the Brock Hanger, and
a further twenty from Denchman, “We ought to have fifty tons for the winter,” he declared. “We won’t suffer as we did in the past winter,” he told Billy, “when our shrunken cattle looked at us in the yards with faces patched with the skin-disease of
malnutrition
.” Then he said to Matt, “How many tons shall we have off here, for your beasts this winter, old hero? Twenty?”
Matt looked at him solemnly, then he replied, “Several.”
*
Sitting in the shade of the trees of the Meadow Wood during tea, which Lucy and Rosamund (home for the day) carried across the causeway between the meadows, Billy the Nelson
remarked
to Phillip, “I’ve never seen the meadows like this since Old Buck’s time, forty years agone.”
Phillip had always found Billy the Nelson, nearly seventy years old and hale, ever ready to do his best. In pre-war days he had looked after the pigs and bullocks, before Matt took over. He wasn’t good with stock, he had no feelings for animals, other than his dog. The first farrow of the Large White gilt Phillip bought had died at night, for the Nelson had not been there to help the young sow. But on other jobs Billy the Nelson always worked with a will.
Occasionally, when Phillip visited him at night as he sat with his dog by his fire, Billy the Nelson told Phillip about life in the village in the days of the energetic ‘Old Buck’, who had farmed there half a century before, when all the district had belonged to a noble family in whose cupboards, according to the Nelson, there was nought but skeletons (which shall be left in place).
There was ‘Old Buck’s’ sale by auction of his Live and Dead Stock, as animals and implements were described immemorially in the bills advertising a sale. ‘Old Buck’ was giving up, having made a fortune, according to Billy. The farm was then a thousand acres, centred around the steep fields known even then as the Bad Lands. Provided to refresh visitors to the sale, a 36-gallon cask of strong ale was set up in the Corn Barn, the afternoon before the sale. At night the men got into the Barn, and drank the barrel dry.
“Old Buck wor a hard, but a just master.”
Hence the admirable meadows, and the secret horkey in the Corn Barn when at last his long rule was relaxed.
“Old Buck sent a tumbril for another barrel. It wern’t justice to tap that, so we left it for the Sale all right.”
“One day I hope to revive the horkey, or harvest supper, with dancing in the Corn Barn by lantern-light.”
“Ah,” said Billy the Nelson, shaking his head, “them days is gone now, sir, I think you’ll find.”
True, Billy the Nelson; true.
*
Again and again during the cutting of the Denchman the Albion cutter failed, despite a second visit to the blacksmith. On the tractor seat, Phillip was all suppressed impatience; while Luke on the cutter seat behind him showed the patience of a monument. A score of times they stopped; Phillip got down, and peered; while Luke poked, tapped, banged, and got on his iron seat once again. He had screw-hammer and shut-knife to aid him, together with his two regular incantations of
We
won
’
t
get
in
no
muddle,
and
Thet
’
s
a
rum
’
un.
His old screw-hammer reminded Phillip of the boy who finding a broken watch in the village trash-dump, took it to be mended at the blacksmith’s in his old Wiltshire village.
Screw-hammer
, however, saved the day, together with Luke’s patience. He discovered the cause—the draw-bar attachment underneath was loose on its nut, so the cutter-bar in motion was trying to work beyond the right-angle, with consequent friction. Screw-hammer secured the bolt. In relief Phillip gave Luke half-a-crown for his discovery. What joy to be able to go forward unimpeded, to hear the serrated sharks-teeth knives rattling steadily, to see the green swathe lying neatly behind!
And what time, or money, had been expended in trying to get that cutter to work properly—hours wasted, wages ticking away like the taximeter of a stationary cab—and all because the diagonal bracing arm, the heavy arm that should have held the cutter bar firm, was loose; thus allowing the cutter to wobble before the grasses, and so to jam itself. Phillip made up some doggerel while the outfit rattled steadily round the meadow.
Never too old to mend,
Never too much to spend,
Forward to haysel’s end,
Cried Hare to Tortoise.
Bump over rush and puddle,
Screw-hammer, theory-jeer,
We’ll be in no muddle
Cried Tortoise to Hare
On the last day of June, towards nine o’clock and the waving of searchlight beams beyond the wooded hill-crest, they finished
Denchman’s Meadow, except for those ‘lows’ which the
scythe-men
could not cover by dusk.
