In writing, a scene can be cut out: mere words removed, replaced. But when using men, vehicles of ideas themselves, such swift alteration is not practicable: especially when the men are products of an agricultural community which has more or less fallen into ruin during their early and formative years after the Great War.
The new War Agricultural Executive Committees were sponsoring visits to well-run farms, so that ‘little old totty farmers’ (which includes me, thought Phillip) could see how things were done elsewhere. In the district was an estate of several thousand acres run on a great scale by an immigrant North of England farmer. It was open to visitors in the late afternoon of a certain Sunday. Lorries were provided, with benches, to take the guests over the several square miles extending across the property of Mr. Beith.
Phillip asked Matt and Luke to come too, in the car. Father and son looked askance at one another. Trying to persuade them, he said that Mr. Beith was one of the most advanced landlords in the county.
“Ah, ’bor,” said Matt. “An’ his men doan’t like him, master, he warks’m tew hard an’ all.”
Lucy, Boy Billy, and Phillip drove there. Over a hundred farmers were present. The estate consisted of several farms, each under its bailiff. A glance at the fields showed at once that there all was proper. Rows of sugar-beet, without gaps, were a uniform green. Straight drillings of paler barleys; fields of bluish oats; plants of wheat with broadening leaves partly depressed as though gathering strength to tiller—to throw up several stalks, each with its corn-head, when the sap-force was prepared from soil, air, and water. Even the narrow ends of some fields, where the plough could not enter—the acute-angular corners—had been worked by fork and spade, to use every square foot of arable land.
“Hurr!” said Matt, when Phillip told him this later. “Harn’t Squire Beith got enough land a’ready?” As for Steve, he remarked that no man ought to be allowed more than fifty acres. “Beith’s seven thousand acres should be split up into holdings, to give everyone a chance. Aren’t we fighting for a new world, as they say on the wireless?”
The Squire of seven thousand acres did not look to be a happy man. Indeed, at times he looked miserable. During the tour, he seemed to resent the way his stockmen were bringing in a herd of Redpolls. They were pedigree beasts; one shape and colour; square behinds; dual purpose cattle—cows giving ample milk, bullocks growing into profitable beef. The Squire was mounted on one of his hunters. He began to shout when the herd, several hundred head, did not behave in what he seemed anxiously to want: a parade-ground manner. From the hoof-marks in the ground it looked as though this rounding up of cattle, to stand like a square of old-time infantry, had been rehearsed; and the liveliness of the animals, disturbed by the crowd of spectators, was displeasing. Suddenly he yelled, “What the bloody hell are you men doing? Damn it all, keep your beasts in order!”
At the noise of his voice some steers broke away, plunging heads and throwing up hind legs, before setting off at a canter. The Squire spurred his horse and went after them, as at a rodeo, his voice almost out of control.
Phillip heard a farmer telling another that, when the King had been shooting there last fall, a lorry driver with a load of beet had passed between the line of guns, and the beaters in a wood beyond a farm lane. The Squire had galloped down to the lane shouting “Stop, you damned idiot! The birds are about to fly over you! His Majesty the King is shooting!”
“Keep your hair on,” floated the reply from the cab. “He knows there’s a war on, even if you don’t.”
Chapter 3
THE KEATSIAN BIRD
Since coming from the West Country to farm in the East Phillip had spent little on personal living, and what small literary income there was had been paid into the one banking account. He had spent nothing on wine or spirits for some years. His last new suit had been made nine years before. As for costings, or apportionments of capital, he had never worked out any real figures or estimates, but had carried on under a general feeling that, within three or four years, red overdraft figures would give place to the black figures of a credit balance. After all, tall and massive hedges throwing shadows ten or fifteen yards long over fields in the noon-day sun of May must pay for cutting by increased yields of corn, sugar-beet and hay. While the shredding or stripping of lesser branches of thorns—leaving the main trunks and bigger branches for the circular saw—would more than be paid for by the value of the firewood. The only coal he bought was for threshing corn—none for the house.
From his earliest years he had dearly loved a wood fire on an open hearth. Every time he sat before the fireplace of his farmhouse he rejoiced that it now burned clear. During the winter of 1939–40, when even the water in the lavatory pan had frozen solid and the pan had split, it had not been possible to have a fire in that hearth, owing to the smoke. He had tried everything, even to rebuilding the stack above the roof. No good. Then, one day in the following spring, he had laid two courses of bricks on the hearth to raise it, and the trouble was over. Smoke still tended to wander and hesitate, but this had its advantage; it meant that the draught up the chimney was weak; which in turn meant that if the black, tarry, lichen-like deposits which formed in the chimney flue caught fire, there would be less risk of a roaring furnace and the house burning down.
*
As anticipated, the barley of the Steep made poor growth. After the two-horse roll had gone over it, drawn by the tractor, small seeds were broadcast by a fiddle. This fiddle was not something out of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but a dull and voiceless contraption looking, if musical instrumental simile be sought, like a punctured bagpipe being bisected by a violin bow.
Phillip had learned to use it in the ’twenties, when a pupil on his uncle’s estate in the West Country. It was carried slung across the chest. It scattered red, yellow, and black kidney-shaped clover-seeds and pale rye-grass seeds from a spinning tray which, on cotton-reel spindle, was rotated by a raw-hide thong tied to the bow. The seeds in the bag must be replenished every quarter of an hour. Now, while Steve walked up and down the field, and the little seeds hummed upon the air adrift with gossamers, Phillip noted that a partridge-audience was concealed in the hedge, waiting to pick up the notes upon a tractor-enscrolled field.
Improper consolidation, or rolling, was also apparent on the Scalt field adjoining. There, too, oats had been sown on a good seed-bed, spoiled by lack of consolidation under the heavy Cambridge rib-roll which the light tractor could not pull up the slopes. The seed-oats were drilled after only one rolling with the one-horse roll, a light cylinder of thin sheet iron which pressed all the soft lumps on the surface to a fine tilth, but which had no weight for consolidation. So the oats grew loosely; and when Jack the Jackdaw was sent with a horse, drawing the light seed-harrows, to knock out the innumerable green spots of charlock, the small teeth of the harrows also pulled out the oats. When Phillip went to view his work, six acres of the fifteen had already been covered. Yet if the charlock were left it would undoubtedly choke the oats, or a good proportion of them. What to do? He stood in indecision on the headland beside waiting man and horses.
There was a toad spiked on one of the harrow-tines. It was feebly moving its four legs. The jewelled eye bloodshot and dusty. Upon another tine was transfixed an old boot with a wooden sole. Both had travelled up and down the field several times, apparently.
“There’s a lot of them toads about,” remarked Jack the Jackdaw, conversationally. “I keep clearing the beggers away, but there’s a lot of ’em. ’Tis the rain, I’m thinking.” With his shrapnel-shattered arm he heaved up the harrow, pulled the toad off the spike, examined it, remarked, “Thet’s a buck, arter a hen,” and dropped it.
How many of the oat plants were being pulled out? How many were having their roots torn, to wither later on? How many of the charlock weeds were being pushed aside, to wilt in wind and sun? He went down on hands and knees and tried to work out the answer by examining plants of weed and corn within one square yard.<
br />
“Give the horses a rest, Jack. I’ll tell you in five minutes.”
“If ’twas mine, I’d harrow,” said Jack the Jackdaw. “’Tis none of my business, but if ’twas my own, I’d harrow. The plants won’t take no harm, and this field is a beggar for carlick. I mind the time as a boy leading the hosses to harrow in the days of Old Buck.”
Jack the Jackdaw had not seen, apparently, the great number of oat plants already pulled out. The dull eye of the dying toad appeared to be regarding Phillip fixedly, as though it were a reincarnation of a former farmer who had not rolled at the right time. Not Old Buck, surely: for Old Buck had retired with a tidy competence—not from the farm as Phillip knew it, not from the Bad Lands—those hilly fields which were all that was left of the original farm; the hub of a wheel without spoke and rim—of nearly a thousand acres in all. Toad or Buck, both had had it now.
“Very well, Jack, go on harrowing. I think it’s wrong, but there’s a lot of carlick. I should have rolled the seed-bed before the corn came up. It’s my fault, anyway.”
“Ooh, this won’t do no harm,” cried Jack the Jackdaw, relieved that he was not faulted. He walked on slowly behind the horses, while Phillip put the toad in the shade of the hemlocks beginning to grow at the verge of the wood, where it would die the easier.
In regular lines, up and down the Scalt, oats were coming up strong and green. These plants were growing in the parallel wheel-tracks of the tractor, which had compressed the land as it pulled the seed-drill. Phillip had learned something. Consolidate, consolidate!
Jack is a bachelor who lives with his two spinster sisters in a small cottage built of round flints. The women have permanently distraught faces. Their brother is not an easy man to get on with. The other men on the farm do not like working beside him. His presence discomposes them. I wondered if this was due to his shattered arm, for which he drew a pension of sixteen shillings a week: one could only judge by examining the causes of a similar condition in oneself. At times I find Jack unbearable; so do others, of myself. This gives me a fellow-feeling for Jack. In many ways we are alike. Something damaged us when young children. Indeed, this second war is a continuation of 1914–18; a mass exhibitionism of Europeans with damaged personalities; Churchill versus Hitler.
There was a one-winged daw that lived, anxious and un-mated, about the farm premises. It climbed trees with aid of beak, wing and feet. At sometime or other the bird had been struck by shot, its wing had decayed, and withered off. The lone jackdaw picked up some sort of livelihood on the paddock and Denchman’s Meadow, and in the yards of an early morning. Matt the stockman sometimes threw it food. The bird was suspicious and wary. It would not let anyone get within gunshot of it. It squatted in the grass, thin and humped, its beak curved downward, almost like a chough’s in shape, its light blue eyes strained and alert. And Jack, that awkward man, with his beaky nose and dark hair and narrow forehead, looked somewhat like the damaged bird.
Jack the Jackdaw had qualities which were praiseworthy. He was punctual and early-rising, and when things went well for him he was a tolerable fellow; but too often he annoyed the others. Yet Phillip could never bring himself to give Jack notice. If Jack annoyed him; well, he himself also annoyed others. Jack swore at times; but then he swore at times. Phillip knew, too, what giving notice to leave the farm might mean in that cottage where three of a family, broken by decay and death, literally huddled together from a hard world.
“Oh well,” Phillip would say to Lucy, “Jack the Jackdaw’s an awkward chap, but it’s probably my fault, for I always go on the assumption that we are all equal. But the truth is that few men can take it; few want to do things better; few put perfection first; few see the striving for clarity as the only truth of living. Of course the farm labourer has centuries of fear of starvation behind him. He has never known real security. Poor old Jackdaw, he upsets the other men by his presence. I do too, don’t you think?”
“Do you know what I think?” cried Lucy suddenly, her cheeks colouring. “I think that everyone has their difficulties!”
She was, of course, referring to herself, and to Phillip’s frequent criticisms of her, and of her brothers in the past. She relented at once, being a kind and generous woman, entirely unselfish.
“Now come and have your tea, my dear! I have made some of the wheat scones you like, and there is still some honey left over from the year before last.”
Nearly all the work of cooking, washing, and mending for seven people fell on Lucy, as well as care of poultry, garden, and a few straggling bees. She also helped in the Women’s Institute, and was a Red Cross Emergency nurse. She had, indeed, almost too much to do; but Phillip, like many another husband, did not always allow for it.
*
The two maids, who had been with them before the war, were now working, with other local youths and girls, on one of the scores of mile-long airfields being built on level areas in the surrounding countryside. Sections of roads and lanes had been closed to ordinary traffic. New strange machines called bulldozers were levelling centuries-old hedges and cottages, pushing over tall trees. Strange, uncaring men with sharp eyes and thin faces and oil-blacked fingernails filled the little towns. Lorry after lorry loaded with gravel and cement was now passing daily down the narrow coastal road outside the farmhouse wall, sometimes scraping away low tiles, bricks and flints, and once cracking several yards of the new walling of the woodshed, so carefully built by the village mason before the war.
Vast areas of levelled waste-land lay in place of fields of corn and roots and tiled farmhouses. Never had the village known such money, declared Mrs. Valiant, who about this time came to help in the farmhouse for several hours a day. Why, there was Albert Coggin—who could never get work except as a casual day-hand with the threshing tackle, and then only on Chaff and Caulder (a dirty job no man would willingly do)—earning nine pounds a week on the new airfield just wheeling a barrow with a few bricks in it, and with plenty of time for resting and smoking! As for the village girls, too young for calling-up, they were picking up four and five pounds a week, and for what? Just carrying a couple of bricks each in their arms to the bricklayers, who if they laid four hundred bricks a day, straight work, were doing something wonderful!
“Ah, if my boy James wor’ only working on your farm, sir. He’d give you a proper day’s work, that he would.”
James Valiant had joined the Territorials when the war came. Mrs. Valiant’s reference to Albert Coggin reminded him of that sad little family which had lived in one of the darker and damper cottages, condemned long before the war. Then, no one would give Albert, the only child, a job. He lived at home on his parents. He was a little simple, like his father, a short bald labourer with flat feet and expressionless good-little-child eyes. Sometimes Phillip saw him in one of the three beer-houses of the village, sitting before a pint of ale, the cheaper ‘fourpenny’. After the war started, several medal ribbons appeared on his waistcoat, each about twice the normal depth. Among them was the 1914 Star; for he was one of the survivors of the original British Expeditionary Force, that ghostly ‘red little, dead little army’ of long ago, comrades of the eighteen-year-old Private Phillip Maddison.
Ex-Private Coggin sat on the inn bench and seldom spoke. After three pots of beer he was liable to rise upon his awkward feet, uninvited and unannounced, and with ceiling-staring bulbous eyes, start to sing a tremulous song, the words of which were obscure, so throaty and strangled was the delivery. It seemed to be his only means of self-expression, for Phillip never saw him speaking to anyone. He had been blown up by a shell at Gheluvelt on the Menin Road in October 1914, and had been helped, gibbering and slavering, to the Field Ambulance, by a wounded comrade.
The wife in the dark cottage was a different type. She was coherent. Always with a harassed look, this stout body invariably complained with unhappy eyes of her grown-up son who was ‘such a loss’, living at home without work. The son had been sent by her to Phillip for a job when first he arri
ved to take over the farm; the youth had stood one morning about six o’clock just outside the caravan door, motionless for an hour or more, while Phillip lay a-bed wondering on his presence. His silence and immobility—hands in pockets—hanging head and general air of awaiting impulse from someone else—had discomposed Phillip. He felt distress at the thought of having to overcome the inertia of yet another unclear mind about him. So Phillip was impatient with the stranger, who returned down the hill, as he had come, slowly swinging his arms, and with bent head.
During the hard winter of 1939–40 the father lost his job. He had hobbled to work before, painfully on ruined feet. The farm where he worked was to be part of an airfield. He, being one of the slower workers, was given notice. He had worked there nearly twenty years. Without work, he was lost. Then his wife died. One night, after a song in the pub, he had sat down and wiped away a tear before going out and drowning himself in a shallow tidal pool on the marshes. Had he not been so depressed he might have lived, like his son Albert, to earn treble his former wages on the Henthorpe airfield.
He had looked like a child, a fixed simplicity upon his round face: a child who had lost mother, and gone to find her. For months Phillip had felt haunted by the old soldier. He had done nothing to help him.
Mrs. Valiant was not the only one who remarked on the easy money that the war was bringing to many in the countryside. Throughout rural England hundreds of aerodromes were being made on what was called the Cost Plus Basis. This meant that the contractor was paid 110 per cent of his costs of labour and material. As labour was the biggest item of cost, the more labour employed, the bigger the profit to the contractor.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 4