The Phoenix Generation (39 page)

Lucy was alarmed. Her mother had died of tuberculosis. She telephoned the school and gave notice, saying that the district was known to be infected by tuberculosis.

“What? We happen to have lived here for some years now, Mrs. Maddison, and have never before heard that said!”

“Well, my husband heard it from a doctor last night, I forget his name, but he has just come to practise in the district.”

“You mean that young man who lives at Staithe rectory? Then it may interest you to know that he is the junior partner of the school doctor, who is also Medical Officer of Health for the district. And he has always given us a clean bill of health!”

Unaware of what had been said, Phillip learned of it in a letter from a solicitor. The matter was settled by payment of a small sum, in addition to a term’s fees in lieu of notice. He asked Lucy to write a letter explaining to Mrs. Frobisher that it was not he who had used a private conversation which surely must have involved the young doctor in some trouble with his senior.

“I can imagine him saying, ‘I thought Maddison was a
gentleman
, and would know better than to use a private conversation like that.’”

“Oh, I don’t suppose he will think any more about it, do you?”

Phillip left the farmhouse without eating his breakfast and when he returned it was late afternoon. Something had gone wrong on the farm, he said. Things usually did go wrong with poor Pip, thought Lucy, who had heard his voice shouting from far away. Once again Luke had backed the light green trailer, the brakes had locked, the shackle-bolts holding one spring to the body had been torn off.

“Do you really want me to write that letter?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

*

There was now between Phillip and Penelope a partial
constraint
; a matter of literary importance had to be resolved: a point
which he felt sometimes as the sharp thorn of injustice. It was this: in his reply to her request for permission to walk over his land, there had been, said Penelope, a sentence which had startled her on beholding it in a letter from a stranger.

“We can agree to differ about a matter of personal taste, Phillip, but you must not try to argue me out of what I know to be true.”

The letter he had written to her, she maintained,
had
ended with the phrase,
Of
course
Jefferies
had
an
awful
life:
syphilis.

“But I could not have written such a thing about Richard Jefferies! It is untrue.”

But no: Penelope maintained her sweet calm and repeated that he had written exactly that phrase.

“Might I see the letter, then?”

“I’m afraid you can’t. I threw it in the fire.”

Penelope pressed the bell. Immediately her housekeeper, who must have been waiting outside, he thought, entered with a tray.

“Do help yourself to a peg before you go, Phillip. No, I won’t have anything, thank you, I’ve given it up. I was getting too fat. Give my love to Lucy. Good night.”

*

Penelope lay on her couch, and took up
The
Daily
Telegram
but she did not read it. The problem of Phillip, his isolation from Lucy his wife, was often in her mind. He had undertaken a task too much for him, that was obvious; but he had ability, knowledge of farming, tremendous vitality—how he managed to do all the physical work he did all day, and write at night as well, she did not know. Obviously he was driving himself too hard, and his men were duds. She liked them, having been acquainted with them for three years, but they had been left to themselves all during that time, the former tenant having taken the land for the shooting. Then there had been that friar flapping about the farm—what use could a man like that possibly be? No: she could not be sure how far Phillip was an effect of all the muddle about him, or the cause——

There was his constant frustration. Sometimes his voice came across the river from the Old Manor. At least he never shouted at others; only when alone, and in what he called the Jackdaw Room, where he wrote. Of course he needed help with figures and Lucy had no head for business, but she was a worker. He was kind to his children, but treated them as equals, which was a mistake. Children should be left to develop their own personalities, not be
forced
into patterns against everything of what their father
chose to call the ‘old decadent order’. They were untidy, certainly, but children should be allowed their own untidiness, which was natural.

Penelope could not bear people who shouted. Her husband, whom she had divorced, had shouted; Daddy shouted, alone in his own rooms. Just like Phillip. Daddy had built himself up into something that threatened to destroy him. Mama was partly to blame, of course; and she herself could sympathise over all the difficulties of a marriage gone wrong; but she had seen clearly how the responsibilities of money and position had weighed on Mama, as they did on Daddy—and how social ambition could, and did, spoil human life. Had not Stevenson written,
It
is
better
to
travel
hopefully
than
to
arrive?

Poor Daddy. Where had ambition brought him? She saw his kind face, always so humorous and gentle with her, as she had last seen him: Daddy standing up in the library at home to greet her, his whimsical smile as he went forward with arms outheld to embrace her. The sudden stagger, the recovery, the hand on the table to steady himself, the fixed smile as he tried to show her that he had not been drinking.

For awhile Penelope felt sad. The corners of her mouth drooped. Then she caught a movement outside the window, and her eyes became bright with interest as she watched a nuthatch pecking at the nut kernels strung on a string across the bird-tray. A flicker of wings, a scolding chitter: and a blue-tit had driven the nuthatch away. She watched it pecking with tiny furious power, then it danced aside, raised its blue crest as a robin arrived. The robin stood still and regarded it with wings held down, as though it had a sword ready to draw. Suddenly it stabbed forward, the blue-tit vanished. The robin regarded her with full gaze for a few moments, then flitted away into the dusk beyond the pantiles. He knows me, she thought happily.

Penelope pressed the bell. The housekeeper entered.

“Oh, Mrs. Treasure, might I have the lamp, please? And I won’t be down to dinner, I’ll have a tray. And let the dogs come in now, will you?”

At her words the door, which had been left ajar, was pushed open, and the borzois, each like the half of a hairy hoop, curved into the room to lay their heads side by side on the sofa, to receive the evening blessing of two hands stroking in unison.

“And my spectacles, please, Mrs. Treasure. I think I left them on my dressing table. Thank you, Mrs. Treasure.”

The curtains were drawn, the fire mended, the housekeeper left as quietly as she had come. When she brought in the tray she said, “Mr. Maddison has just left this note for you, m’lady.”

“Is he waiting downstairs, Mrs. Treasure?”

“No, he said that it did not require any answer, and left at once.”

Penelope put it aside until she had eaten her dinner. The
envelope
was still unopened when Mrs. Treasure came to take away the tray. When she was alone again, Penelope opened it.

Penelope stopped reading. Sparta! It was a cruel system, producing only evil. She did not want to read further.

This was the Phillip of the strained look, who girded against so much; and for what ultimate goal? To be harmonious and happy? Of course. What then was stopping him? Hurst, with that abominable swastika badge, had long ago departed. Phillip had complained when Hurst was with him; he had complained when Hurst gave notice. If only Hurst had been this; why wasn’t Hurst that? Phillip had wanted Hurst to be something that Hurst definitely was not.

She hesitated. She sighed; then with resolution let the pages float into the fire, where the coal flames twisted the paper and turned them red. One charred fragment quivered, and remained. For a moment the written words seemed to stand out greyly before the heat took the fragments up the chimney. She leaned forward, and read the calcined words.

Lucy said: “I’ve written the letter to Mrs. Frobisher. Would you like to see it?”

“How very kind of you, Lucy. And you have so much work to do—literally all day and half the night. No, I can’t read it. What a tyrant I am—no, don’t post it. Yours was a perfectly innocent remark to the headmistress. My attitude to you was self-willed and petty.”

*

The work entailed in the making of the New Cut had been easier than anticipated. Phillip kept the details in his Journal.
61 ton-loads of lump chalk picked from the quarry by the premises laid the foundation; 40 tons of gravel spread on the chalk—and there was the causeway across the bottom corner of the Steep.

Reaching the grassy side of the hill, grown with little thorns, they cut a way through the marl and shovelled the marl direct into the two horse-drawn tumbrils, emptying the loads into heaps on the field below, where the soil was sandy, and inclined to be acid. Thus they made two improvements at the same time.

When finished, the New Cut was a fine sight. Lorry and trailer ran up easily; the old back-breaking problem of inaccessibility was solved: and all for a capital expenditure of
£
25. He found
satisfaction
in thinking he earned this money by writing an 1,800-word script for the B.B.C. It meant an hour of writing between eleven o’clock one evening and midnight; and early the following evening a hundred-mile journey to Broadcasting House in London, arriving back in the small hours. He thought he could do that sort of thing for years, so why worry about capital, he told Luke the steward.

Having chalked some of the acid land, why not finish that hollow of nearly four acres? So by the top of the New Cut they opened a small quarry, digging loam for spreading on those areas which had not already been covered. Half the cost of digging the sweet, thick marl was met by a grant from the Land Fertility Commission. It was reassuring to feel himself becoming a regular business man.

One morning he had a surprise—a letter from Ernest, written when he had arrived at Sydney, whither he had sailed in a P. & O. liner, working his passage among the steerage passengers, all emigrants like himself. Ernest wrote that he had spent eighteen hours of every one of the forty-seven-day voyage in washing-up dishes, and concluded,
If I live to be a hundred, I shall never see eye to eye with the chief steward, the purser, and the captain. 

How quickly the time had passed. Could it be a year ago that the New Cut had been made, and then the bare-fallowing of the twenty acres of the Steep? How pleasing to see green, sappy heads of wheat waving in the breeze of early morning, beside the neat design of the New Cut leading up to the skyline.

He sat down to enjoy the sight of a weed-free field, pleased with himself that he was able to get free of worry for a moment. Could this be the same field upon which he had looked with such
despondency
from Pine Tree Camp in his first year of farming, to see what appeared to be a silver-grey mist lying upon a lake in the early morning? But it was not the foggy dew of morning before a day of great heat that he had stared at on that occasion, but twenty acres of seeded thistles which had completely overtopped a dwarfed crop of thin barley stalks: a grey mass of one burst cardoon touching another burst cardoon extending to the distant trees of the Great Bustard Wood. And the yield of barley that season, sown merely to add to the sum to be paid for ingoing covenants—hay, straw, standing crops, etc.—had been about two sacks, and the yield of thistle seed about four sacks, an acre. That was the Steep in the year of his taking over. Luke, and Matt his father, had been the only hands working on the farm.

Phillip had, the winter before, watched Luke ploughing the slippery slopes with two old horses. The single-furrow plough had barely scratched the surface. The horses had been under-fed. At its steepest part the field had a gradient of 1 in 4. And during the subsequent harvest, of almost entirely thistles, he had watched a Fordson tractor drawing an old Albion binder jattering and slewing about behind it, and sometimes rearing up, while the binder in mechanical panic hastily jettisoned a string of unbound sheaves.

“You can't do anything with this land,” the driver had declared to Phillip. “It's a thistly old sod.”

The grass seeds he was supposed to have sown in the young barley the April before, to restore a permanent pasture which had been ploughed up by his master, simply hadn't come up. No wonder, in a seed-bed consisting of dried strips and lumps of sulky clay held together by weeds, and scratched about by harrows.

That was the Bad Lands system of farming before he had taken over.

What a difference today! Sitting at the edge of the wheat he felt a flow of happiness: for he had, by insisting for once on having his own way, changed the surface of the field. Luke had objected to a bare fallow, so he had ploughed the field himself, with reliefs by Brother Laurence. Still, one must be fair: neither Luke nor Matt had seen working the new and unknown make of tractor Phillip had bought without seeing after reading about it in
The
Daily
Trident
by the farming correspondent whose daily
Countryman's
Diary,
under his initials, Phillip had read in his youth. The tractor had an hydraulic attachment by which twin plough-shares could be lifted out of or put into the ground by a lever. Plough and tractor were designed as one. The machine was a very light affair. It could walk up steep hills while ploughing, without digging-in its wheels or overturning, a fault in old types of heavy tractors which merely lugged heavy-framed ploughs.

Phillip ploughed twenty acres of fatty loam, up and down the Steep, in the month of May, happy on the new tractor. The furrows dried out. Then rain fell, and soon through the crumbling furrows arose a green luxuriant crop of thistles.

“Mygor, what hev you done?” asked the steward's father.

“Raised millions of eager thistles, Matt.”

“Harn't yew a-goin' to cultivate them?”

“I'm going to let them grow.”

One June morning he replaced the greased plough-breasts with seven shining cultivator tines fixed on an iron frame. These were the tines designed by Ernest, who had made a mahogany
prototype
, which had been taken to a foundry, and a dozen mild-steel tines pressed out.

Behind Phillip on the tractor seven tines winged like
down-slanting
terns moved eight inches under the furrows. Up and down the slopes the driver went, cutting roots of thistles. Soon their green luxuriance was wilted in the sun. Within the shine of another day they had turned to bronze. By the third day they had lost colour. Within a week all were withered away.

The stirring of the soil, making it friable, pleasant to crumble in the fingers, had stimulated another form of life. All over the Steep little dark green spots were breaking from out the loose soil. Kneeling upon his bare knees—for in the hot sun Phillip wore only shoes and khaki shorts—he stared at the blue-green
kidney-shaped
leaves of the charlock, hundreds of little plants to the square foot, thousands to the square yard, trillions to the acre. Each tiny seedling appeared to be dark-green because of its sharp shadow thrown under the high noon sun. Behind the shining tines of the cultivator the sun burned them to dust, even as it burned Phillip's flesh to the colour of dust. He was happy, he could feel virtue coming back into the soil, and so to himself. No more decadent living, no more cramped hours with the pen, shut away from the sun, living entirely in the imagination, to warp the outlook! How glad he was he had risked all in buying the Bad Lands!

When the thistles came up again the gleaming winged tines once more rustled through the earth, crossing their previous course. Underground they severed stalk from root, leaving behind a mould to feel which he must dismount again and again to hold in the hand, letting it fall through his fingers lightly, a lovely mould, the ‘marther' by which all things came to being. That was Matt's word—he supposed it came from ‘mother'. The Steep was no longer a thistly old sod: it was reborn, it was alive, it was fertile.

And now, in this summer of 1938, it was growing a first-rate crop of Squarehead II wheat.

*

Leaving the wheat on the Steep, he went on to the Great Bustard. This field had not been bare-fallowed. It had been sown down to barley, at Matt's earnest request; and then ‘seeds' had been drilled, for the following year's hay, when the barley plants had three or four leaves.

The Great Bustard field adjoined the wood of that name. In past time those birds, now extinct, used to nest in the wood.

There were twenty acres of hay which looked to be not too bad. True, there were many docks, but these when cut could be collected by the children, and burnt. The hay was from a seeds mixture of cowgrass, alsike, Dutch white clover, and trefoil. Above this green ‘bottom' swayed delicate stalks of rye-grass. Purple bells were hanging on the awns of the Irish rye-grass, but the pollen was not yet come to blow.

It was time to cut, said Phillip.

“I shouldn't cut if 'twas mine,” replied Luke. “I'd wait and cut for bulk.”

“Bulk means woody stalks. The sap is gone from the clover leaves into the flowers.”

“But if we cut now, there'll be little more than a ton an acre to carry,” replied Luke, anxiously.

“We can't expect a good shear while the land is still exhausted after all the corn you and your late master took off it, without putting anything back.”

“But what will father's stock have to eat next winter if we cut now? That's what worrying me and father.”

“Last winter the cows gave poor milk, didn't they, Luke? The hay was little more than fill-belly. There were three reasons for this. In the first place, it was cut too late, and was what you call ‘woody'. Then it was left after cutting until it was bleached, which means it was unpalatable to stock. Thirdly, there was a thin ‘shear' because your small seeds had been sown on a cobbly seed-bed.”

“That was the weather, you can't help the weather.”

“Yes we can, if we do things at the right time.”

“But you put us on all that other wark, guv'nor,” said Matt, who had come up silently on worn-out rubber gum-boots.

“True enough, Matt. But this year we mustn't make the same mistakes. Hay when ‘fit' should not be brown when put into the stack, but a grey-green colour.”

“Then 'twill go mouldy,” objected Luke.

“Not green-sappy when carried,” Phillip insisted, “but
grey-green
in colour. Dry hay—sun-bleached—all the sap gone out of it—all the volatile oils which make the scent of it—what is called chlorophyll, or green colouring matter—without this, hay is really no good.”

“Theory,” exclaimed the stockman.

“I know you distrust theory, Matt, but I wish you would trust what I say. Was that a quail?”

A liquid quipping note, several notes in quick succession, like the Morse code
dash
dot-dot,
dash
dot-dot
repeated, came over the grasses swaying to the breeze in silky waves.

Father and son exchanged glances. They knew that Horatio Bugg had been paid four pounds for a pair by the old gentleman who collected and had rare birds stuffed, and who lived in a neighbouring village.

“Quaquilla the quail,” said Phillip. “That's what the Romans called him—quaquilla—after his liquid note. He flies from the deserts of North Africa, all the way up the Rhône valley.
Wet-
my-
lips,
wet-my-lips
—do you hear it? It will be dreadful if we slash through the nest.”

“That's what I mean,” said Luke, strain in his voice, “if you was to cut now.”

“Perhaps if I found the nest first——”

Phillip felt his mind dissolving. So much to do, so little done. He forced himself to remain calm.

“Hay must be dry, of course. But like a good girl's hair, never bleached. We had a rick on our land in the West Country—a stack as you say here in the East—of dry, greenish hay, which beasts fought to get at when it was put in the racks.”

“You can't beat brown hay that's heated a bit in the stack, guv'nor.”

“Ah yes, I know what you mean, Matt. It heats in the stack and becomes like a kind of silage. In fact, if it is put in sappy and trodden hard when being stacked, so that the air is shut out as it settles, then it wads and heats and becomes almost cake. But if the air gets in, then you get your mouldy hay, Luke. Or perhaps a fire. But the best hay is wind-dried, green and sweet-smelling. Then see how the beasts eat it. All farming books emphasize the value of hay which retains chlorophyll, the essential oils.”

“Theory,” said Matt.

“You can't beat brown hay,” said Luke.

Phillip knew that to be too keen was a fault when that keenness cut across slower minds or natures; but he did not realise what offence he was giving by his insistence.

“What I say are proved facts.”

“Theory,” repeated Matt, with scorn.

“The men what write those theories have never done a proper day's work in their lives, Master. How should they know?” Luke's dark eyes held a hint of pain.

Even so, thought Phillip, there is no hope for the farm unless it is different from the old one. That means altering the minds of those about me. The war of ideas on the farm is like the greater looming continental war of action and reaction.

“Of course I know last year's crop was brittly stuff, but I won't have it about green hay,” repeated Luke. “You can't beat brown hay.”

“You can beat it with grey-green,
sweet
hay.”

“Then 'twill go mouldy, so I harn't a-goin' to do it. What will they say in the village——”

“Is the village running this farm?”

“You're master,” said Luke, quietly. “If you order me to cut, I'll cut.”

Not wanting Luke to continue feeling hurt, and also thinking of the quails, Phillip said, “Well, let's wait a bit shall we?” while knowing that the hay, for the best feeding quality, should be cut now, before the seeds ripened.

*

He felt relief as he left the Great Bustard behind him: at least he would have two or three days clear before haysel, and so he could do some writing. It was nine o'clock. Luke had been horse-hoeing between the sugar-beet ridges when Phillip had asked him to take a look at the hay. The other two men were scoring sugar-beet—the final hoeing of weeds between the plants. It was contract work, they were their own masters, and happy.

He waved to them, and returned by way of the Steep. How time was passing! Only last week, it seemed, the swallow-winged tines were decimating for the third time the growth of thistles underground. Again the sun killed them. Yet once more they arose, yet once again were slain. Thereafter in August nothing had grown on the bare fallow. Hares squatted there, partridges had the dusting baths to themselves.

In the following October Juliana wheat was drilled, ten pecks to the acre; and now the June slopes of the Steep were thick with wheat: the plants had tillered well, each plant had several stalks with thick long ears, every one identical, soon to curve with its own weight, to rustle with its fellows in the sea-breeze of late July and August mornings. It was a sight wonderful to behold. All those corn-heads uniform and close together, brother and sisters in a dream of resurgence: not one thistle or dock or campion or
charlock
plant to divide them. The soil at the base of the tillered stalks showed neither red pimpernel nor blue speedwell, but only the little plants of rye-grass and clover which he and Billy had drilled across the harrowed rows in April.

It was his first wheat. While he was biting a milky head, Matt appeared under the walnut tree by the steep chalk slope. What did he think of it? Matt snatched a couple of heads, rubbed them out, and went through the motions of biting with his brown teeth.

“They're full of milk.” He looked at Phillip. “Yew did a good job up here, guv'nor.”

The honest brown eyes regarded him kindly. It was a generous admission, since both he and his son had declared it to be
impossible
.