He worked by day as a labourer; and by night, before the war, had written articles, and broadcast over the B.B.C. to pay the wages. His children went to the village school, in preparation for the new classless state which was one of the aims of the Imperial Socialist Party, a minority movement led by Sir Hereward Birkin, to which he had belonged until it was banned by the Government in May 1940.
In addition to farming the land, several cottages had been rebuilt, his ’prentice-self being architect, builder, and general labourer. (A thousand tons of flint and gravel had been dug and laid upon the roads.) Chalk, picked from the quarry, spread on some fields at the rate of ten tons the acre. Then there was the mud pulled from the mile or so of grupps—as the dykes between the meadows are called.
When about eight hundred tons of sloppy black mud and thick tenacious white-rooted reeds had been lugged from the grupps—where previously the bittern had been heard making a noise like a bull with paper lungs—the water, dropped a foot on the meadow; and the snipes departed elsewhere. There the heaps of mud and reed lay, behind the banks, drained dry and diminishing, until in February of 1941 many loads were carted on the fifteen acres of the Scalt, that field sloping north to the sea and crowned with tall pines at the crest, where the Great Bustard wood began.
The men did these extra jobs in odd moments, and in frosty weather, when other work was at a standstill. A thousand yards of forest-like hedges had been cut and laid, while sixty or seventy tons of wood were stacked for the circular saw never used so far. And during the night Phillip wrote several hundred thousand words: for an amateur who follows his own ideas has to pay for his experience.
Phillip kept a journal—
Well, there is our farm so far: but much more work has to be done before it can hope to climb up the alphabet. I have found that the hardest task lies in trying to alter the mind-patterns of those about me. It is with approval, therefore, of the Spartan standards of the New Britain that I learn by post that my farm has now progressed to the comparative exaltation of a ‘B’ farm; although the reasons given for this category are somewhat surprising:
1. Inadequate drainage
2. Lack of lime or chalk
3. Indifferent cultivations
4. Inappropriate use of manures
5. Use of inferior seeds
6. Insufficient labour.
In those mornings the white frost made crisp the grass by the river. The farm premises lay low; they were damp; the curve of the winter sun was still below the beech trees atop the chalk quarry. The cattle yards were sunless for weeks in winter; the wooden rails, sodden despite creosote, always were faintly green. Thick pads of moss covered the pantiles of the northern sloping roofs of covered yards and stable.
Flint and brick walls, tunnelled at their bases by rats, contained more than an acre of premises built in Elizabethan times. Some of the walls were cracked. One section of the massive Corn Barn wall was about seven degrees out of the vertical. Thirty tons of mortar, flint and brick—one tenth of the Corn Barn walls, beside the tall tarred wooden doors, threatened to fall.
Four years previously Phillip had started to build a buttress to the eaves, to hold up that mass of masonry. The buttress was still unfinished. Other work had taken nearly every hour of every day since that time.
*
It had been a hard winter in East Anglia, but not so deep-set in the arable as the first winter of the war. What the weather was elsewhere in Britain no one knew, for all forecasts or items of news were banned in newspapers and on the B.B.C. The ground was still bone-hard at the beginning of March; he could not go on the land to cultivate the work ploughed at the back-end of 1940. Like any other arable farmer, he was anxious to start drilling, for in that dry climate a well-rooted barley plant was essential by the end of April—what farmers called established.
One frosty morning in the first week of March, Phillip was waiting at the farm premises for the men to arrive. He had already walked up through the woods to look at the ploughed fields of the Bad Lands. They were so called, traditionally, because of the difficulty of getting up and down them when cultivating; also the level land above had a stiffish soil, much yellow clay—a ‘hungry’ soil needing a lot of muck to keep it in heart.
It was nearly half-past seven o’clock. He stood by the rusty tank used as a horse-trough. Costing seven shillings at auction four years before, the trough collected rain from the gutters of the cowhouse roof. The horses were stamping in the stable. The teamsman had come to feed them an hour previously, and then had gone home to his breakfast. Phillip had passed his footmarks in the frosty grass, to and from the river-bridge to the premises. In the yards the cows were munching long hay in racks. The older stockman had likewise gone back to breakfast, judging by his tracks. These tracks of Matt, the dark-eyed father of the teamsman, wandered somewhat; those of his son Luke, a blue-eyed type, were more direct.
At the half hour precisely Billy the Nelson, the oldest of the men, arrived. He was always punctual and courteous. ‘Lordy’, as he was sometimes called—to differentiate him from Billy the heir (called ‘Boy Billy’ by the men)—was a Lancastrian who had chanced to settle to work in East Anglia. He was a widower. He had two sons now with the Services, and lived alone in a cottage. Sometimes at night, when passing by, Phillip heard him playing the accordian to his dog, after both had had their suppers. He had been the first man to work for Phillip before the war, helping to make up the farm roads.
There was a cold brightness in the air. ‘Lordy’s’ one eye gleamed as he remarked cheerfully, “It are a good drying wind, and soon the land will be fit to go upon, and the sooner the barley’s in the better. A good plant must be established by the scalt May month, master.”
“How right you are. Our land is still claggy.”
“Ah, you must catch it right, sir.”
Billy the Nelson had been on the dole before Phillip came from the West Country. He was always a little anxious lest things be done wrongly on the farm. He didn’t much care for Luke, the steward.
It looked to be a clear day, and as they waited, Phillip heard the jingle of harness in the stable. Luke, the teamsman-steward, had already fed Sheba, Toby and Beatrice. Now the last two were having collars and thill gears put upon them. Luke never worked Sheba.
When the other men, less the young red-headed man who was always twenty minutes late, had arrived, Phillip told them to continue the spreading of the compost heaps upon the northern slopes of the Scalt.
“Box o’ Henthorpe’s a’ready puttin’ in his barley,” remarked Luke.
“Yes, Luke, I’ve been there. They’ve got everything on one field—three tractors, all their horses—cultivating, rolling, drilling, harrowing of it in. But their land is in better heart than ours and so drains better. Ours is still claggy.”
In the ordinary way a farmer left the cultivations to his steward; but Phillip decided when to start the work. Luke, he knew, resented his interference; but all arguments ended with, “You’re master,” and Luke more or less did what he was told. He objected to nearly everything that Phillip thought good: almost invariably there were reasons why this or that should not be done—de-lousing the pigs—clipping the horses’ legs swollen with mites, and rubbing them with mercuric ointment—giving them fresh hay every feed, and not merely stuffing the racks tight, so that the horses returned from work to sniff the same old hay. Luke had demurred at the spreading of rich mud and rotten weeds pulled from the grupps, declaring that they would spread weeds. Then there was the creosoting of the beams and purlins in the barns, to stop the woodworm;—‘Nobody else does it about here,’ seemed to be Luke’s criterion.
Luke had his serious reasons, of course. ‘It’s all pay pay pay, and narthin’ comin’ in. I don’t want to see you go bust.’ Another time it would be, ‘I don’t want to see you do silly things——.’ He was anxious to see the farm in good order; but he had been brought up in the depression to believe that if you spent money you lost money.
T
he two mental patterns did not fit, or ‘cog in’, as they said locally; and so behind Phillip’s back Luke would do things his way, the old way he did them before the new master came, when the arable was sucked out and the meadows swampy and rotten, and his old master went bankrupt. At the same time, Phillip did not know everything, and frequently told him so.
“Time’s gettin’ on,” Luke said. “We ought to put the seed home.”
He must be patient. “After looking at Pewitt’s field, Luke, I went on to the Great Bustard and Lower Brock Hanger, which were ploughed before Christmas. I kicked the frost-fretted furrows, as you showed me once. Also I tried to draw my toe-cap through the soil, to get the feel of it. It’s dry on top, but claggy underneath. It’s too sticky, in my opinion. I think we ought to wait another day at least, to get the frost out.”
“Well, if ’twas mine, I’d cultivate.”
“I think we’ll do better to wait.”
“You’re master,” Luke replied shortly, rolling himself a cigarette of shag. “Come on Toby! Beatrice!” pulling them from the rainwater tank where they were drinking.
Phillip had asked him to water the horses before feeding, never afterwards, to prevent stoppage, or colic. Phillip had been trained in the Army to look after mules and horses, to see that they were always watered before feeding. A stoppage, he told Luke, was caused by water fermenting a mass of rolled oats and hay. However, Luke went his own way, whatever ‘the boss’ might say.
Phillip waited until nearly eight o’clock before the red-headed Steve turned up, and told him where the others were working. Then he went home to breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee, to return after half an hour to plough up the compost-spread area of the Scalt—old, thin and weary grass-land, with gravelly patches—which should have been ploughed at the back-end; but the sugar beet must be lifted first, and winter wheat put in. Then the frosts had come. Phillip had learnt his lesson, about not ploughing half-frozen furrows, the season before. The frost remained at the bottom of the furrow-slice and chilled the corn seedlings.
Late ploughing of sticky land is damnable. The furrows dry out like curb-stones, and no amount of rolling or bashing with a roller, followed by the heaviest harrowing, will improve poor, cobbly seed-beds. The only thing to do is to be patient, as growing time slips away, until, in Luke’s words, ‘Come a little dag o’ rain,’ after which the drying furrows crumble delightfully at the first stroke of the harrow. But time in East Anglia, like rain, is everything; and Luke knows that we can’t afford to wait after the end of March if we are to get a full crop of barley.
I suppose I should have worked longer on the tractor, ploughing in the November moonlight instead of writing at my table. Now we are late, late, late. However, the ploughing of the Scalt can be done. A poor top-soil, fit only for rye. Barley will pay well, and if yields are good, we’ll be out of debt.
After a long day on the tractor in the cold east wind I returned home at dusk, to sit by the fire in overalls covering trousers over pyjamas, leather coat over jacket, sweater, and two shirts: too chilled, and void of self to get up and wash. But an example must be given, if order and regularity are to be kept; so I forced myself to wash and dress in clean shirt, etc; and after supper with the family at the long refectory table I returned to the armchair before the fire, too weary to read, and yet not relaxed. We are late, late, late; and my bones were still cold from the long hours of immobility in the penetrating Siberian wind that is moving in from the marshes and the hard blue line of the North Sea.
There were office details to attend to: the labourer-farmer must be a business man at night. So out with typewriter and account books when the children had gone to bed.
As Phillip was arranging pen, blotter, and books, the telephone bell on the window ledge rang, and the voice of his neighbour Charles Box said, “Oh, about your farm classification, Maddison, an error was made.”
So I am a ‘C’ farmer after all, he thought.
The voice continued. “It should have been ‘A’ category.”
A man of deeds and not words, Major Box rang off.
*
The next morning, in jubilation, Phillip decided to dash up to London in the Silver Eagle and call on the features editor of a London daily paper, with the aim of getting some work. Recently Phillip had published a book about his farm: Pen and Plow, and had good reviews, and his name was perhaps not altogether ‘mud’, as the Chief Constable of the county had told him when he was arrested, during the fall of France, under Regulation 18b. Another reason for London was to see a young woman called Melissa Watt-Wilby, a cousin of Lucy. She was working in St. George’s hospital as a nurse. He had known her before he met Lucy, when Melissa was a small child in her grandfather’s house in Gaultshire, then a hospital for officers during 1918.
When Phillip arrived in London he went at once to Fleet Street and called on his friend, the features editor. Chettwood told him that no articles from outside writers were being taken, owing to the reduction in newsprint. However, he might shortly want something, though nothing about the war. He would let him know.
It was with a clear, happy feeling that Phillip met Melissa at her hospital. They went by tube to a theatre in Hammersmith, to see Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma. He had seen this play before, but she hadn’t. She was entranced, held by the passion for his art of Dubetat the painter. Phillip thought it was not a true portrait, although the playwright covered himself by the phrase which affected him deeply—‘The greatest tragedy in the world is a man of genius who is not also a man of honour.’
The play had begun early, at 6 p.m., owing to the black-out. Afterwards they went by tube to Piccadilly, for supper at a place Phillip remembered from the first war, when his Uncle Hilary had taken both his sisters and himself to dine at what was then called the Elysée. Phillip recalled with shame how he had left half-way through dinner, to meet some friends in the Regiment at the Alhambra, and they were not there; so he had gone back to the Elysée, and found the table empty where they had sat.
Now, nearly a quarter of a century afterwards, he was taking Melissa to dine there. He remembered the stairs down to the dance-floor. There were more stairs leading to the balconies above. The place was said to be a replica of the ballroom of the Titanic, which had struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in the early spring of 1912, an event well-remembered, he told Melissa, because he could still see in his mind the placards at Victoria Station upon returning with his mother, his sister Elizabeth, and Uncle Joe, his mother’s youngest brother, from Belgium, where Elizabeth was at an Ursuline convent school. It was Easter, she was coming home for the holidays.
He ordered. They waited. Then they heard sirens warning that German aircraft were approaching London. Everybody appeared not to notice the banshee wailings, as Churchill called them. The band was playing Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, how you can love. He asked Melissa what she would feel if they were in the Titanic, owing to a revisitation in time, and struck an iceberg. While he waited for a reply he noticed that the wine-waiter was pouring champagne at the next table ——————— BLUE FLASH ———————
Dust in eyes and nose. Darkness. Ears ringing. Unbearable thin wire bisecting head. Staring bright blackness rushing, rushing past silently.
Noises of choking, coughing, retching, screaming. Voice crying O my God. I could not find my hands. Another voice shouting, Shut up that bloody row. No panic! Lights from masked torches moved about feebly. Candles lit. I turned my head, relieved that I could move it. Where was I hit? I was on the floor, covered by plaster and wood dust. A table was on my legs. I turned sideways, moved my legs, first one then the other. I heaved up on elbows, moved my legs again. Tried to speak, mouth dry with dust. An electric light moved. It was a bright naked bulb. I saw dust in one of the champagne glasses on the next table. A hand reached up, I tried to say, ‘Don’t drink that wine, it may be full of powdered glass. My father was covered with it from a Zeppelin bomb in the first war.’ But no words came from my mou
th. I remembered Melissa. I crawled to her, my eyes opened in query asked if she was all right. She nodded her head. With angular life now coming upon me I helped her to her feet, and held her while dust fell from my hair.
Helpers were now amidst the wreckage. Melissa asked me to tear table napkins to make bandages. I saw a man trying to take rings off a dead woman’s fingers. Cap on head, sparrow-eyed, sharp after glints, muffler round throat, stopping over broken chairs, kicking broken glass aside, looking for deep red or burning blue ray of diamonds. Like the looters on a battlefield, carrion-crow-minded, there before the stretcher-bearers. People now staggering about, frocks torn, tattered, dark blood patches. Hair wild. Police and firemen. I saw the looter slipping past them. Then I was outside with Melissa, crowds were pressing in the blackout, faces, faces, faces, I was trembling, tottery. Melissa powder pale, eyes round, Melissa bandaging someone’s arms. My ears were ringing with a high-pitched ray. Bodies were being carried out to lie side by side on pavement, great powdered dolls. Dolls from whom sawdust had spilled, limp, broken. Ambulances. One for St. George’s hospital. Melissa’s voice, calm, saying she must go with it. Her head rested on my shoulder, I saw her eyes close as she kissed me. I went down to the Embankment. A crowd shouting, pressing round a staggering figure, Nazi pilot who had baled out and come down at the edge of the lapsed tide. Covered with mud. Chuck the bastard back! Let the sod drown! I told them the pilot was wanted for questioning; and with another man led him away. The police took him in a black van. I walked back to my club. On the way I saw a child dug out of a bomb ruin, its white face blown whiter by fireman’s breath; face calm, quiet, marmoreal.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 2