Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  (It was said in The Times, after the war, that of the six hundred airfields in Britain made during the war each cost on an average £2 million.)

  Mrs. Valiant, tidy, methodical, hard-working at kitchen sink and wash tub, said she didn’t know what the country was coming to.

  “There’s Albert Coggin gettin’ nine pounds a week, and where’s my boy, James? He joined the Territorials one day just before the war, on the spur of the moment, and they’ve taken him away, and what will become of his wife and li’t’l children if anything happens to him? He ought to be warkin’ on the land now.” Mrs. Valiant’s son, James, was almost her chief reason for living.

  “Ah, our poor boys, what will happen to them before it’s all over? And all those German boys, where will they be? And who will be the better for it afterwards? Who wor th’ better for the las’ war? Oh, sir, if only some power above would stop it!”

  My young corn is stroked by the gentle south wind, there is a shine upon the fields. The pale green colour of the barley extends from hedge to hedge of the Bad Lands, spaced by emerald lines of sugar-beet growing thicker across the brown earth. This morning as I was returning to breakfast after walking round the farm I met Mrs. Valiant, her thin face alight, hastening by the brick draw-well hidden in the lilac bushes now coming into flower.

  “Oh, have you heard the news on the wireless, sir? They say it may be peace! Oh, I wish it was going to be!”

  She clasped her thin hands, and looked as though a word from me could confirm the hopes behind the shining eyes of her face, with its sensitive straight nose.

  “I haven’t heard the wireless this morning, Mrs. Valiant.”

  “Oh, there’s a man they call Hess—a German he is—who’s flown to England, and give himself up, they say for peace!”

  “What! Rudolf Hess?”

  It was incredible: but no, it was not incredible: it was clear and simple. I knew the springs of that impulse.

  “If only our boys could come home again,” Mrs. Valiant said later, as with brush and pan (she didn’t like the electric vacuum cleaner) she busied herself in the parlour with its open brick hearth, long oak table, and rush mats on wax-polished square paving stones.

  A man dropping unarmed to his enemies, out of the sky on a spring morning: only history, only another generation, of united Europeans, would truly assess that gesture. I had to keep my thoughts to myself, lest one of the younger children hear me, and repeat my words, and cause trouble to themselves from the mob spirit in the local school.

  Two hours later, when she brought me a cup of tea where I was trying to write an article for a London evening newspaper, I heard Mrs. Valiant’s eager voice at the door saying, “Do you think the war will end soon, sir? Oh, I beg your pardon, you’re workin’.”

  “No, no, Mrs. Valiant. Please go on.”

  “If only I could see my boy James warkin’ in the fields once more! Why, he ought to be working for you, as his family lives in one of your cottages. ‘A pity Mr. Maddison hasn’t got a thousand acres’, Mr. Hubert said to me yesterday, after seeing your lovely meadows, all the weeds cut, and the hay waving in the wind on Denchman’s Meadow. He said the land had never looked so well since old Mr. Buck had it, before the last war—there, you see, someone appreciates what you are doing, sir.”

  Phillip’s book, Pen and Plow, had appeared in the past winter. Its critical success had not been followed by sales of more than the first printing of three thousand copies. All publishers were rationed for printing paper; Phillip’s had written to say that his fear, nowadays, was that he might have a best-seller, and not be able to meet the demand of the booksellers. Even so, Phillip felt fortunate; the success of Pen and Plow had led to the commission of a short weekly article in one of the London evening newspapers. He made these articles light-hearted, an antidote to the growing gloom of the war. And early one morning he sat down to write something about the sands of remembered Malandine in South Devon—the wading birds and gulls; the peregrine falcons lording the air above the cliffs. When he had written six hundred words, his plan was to motor to London, deliver the article, and continue on the next day to South Devon. There he would live in his field, which overlooked Malandine sands and the English Channel.

  *

  On that hilltop field in South Devon, Phillip had converted, between the two wars, a linhay—open cattle shed with hay-loft over—into a dug-out. This he called the Gartenfeste, or Garden fort. It was built in the pattern of one of the German ‘pill-boxes’ in the Ypres Salient of old memory. These forts had been made within the shells of brick farmhouses, using the standing walls as shuttering. When completed, the massive reinforced walls and headcover were three feet and more thick. They withstood all but a direct hit from the heavier British howitzer shells.

  There was a loft over the underground room of the Gartenfeste. Here he had stored the furniture and other possessions left by Lucy’s father when he had died. They had remained there to be handed over to the youngest son, Tim Copleston, when he returned to England. Tim had arrived home just before the outbreak of war, and now the loft held only Phillip’s own possessions—camp bed, chest of drawers, table, bookcases, oil-lamp.

  During the windy days of 1940 someone had broken into this building: possibly young soldiers for devilment. Furniture had been wrecked, the bed in the loft used as a latrine. Phillip had cleaned and tidied the place; and now, as he sat, pen in hand, at his desk in East Anglia, he wondered if he would find the place wrecked again when he arrived there.

  He could not begin the article. His thoughts were not on the beauty of the sea-shore of Malandine, the pipings of wading birds, falcons hanging in the cliff uptrends like dark stars—but on a lone flier in peril, a German who had fallen, alone, into the Island Fortress. He sat without movement on one of the tall Windsor chairs at the double-fronted desk, with its two opposed sloping lids, in the little barn he had converted to a studio. Beyond the open door he saw the brick draw-well, with its cranked handle and rusty chain and wooden buckets, which had been built, it was said in the village, in the year of the battle of Trafalgar. Lilac bushes grew around the well, the buds about to break into blossom. And from the bushes suddenly came the startlingly loud note of a nightingale. The flow of feeling from the bird quickened him. The pen moved rapidly. Other song birds had talent, he wrote, but the nightingale had genius. Many people, hearing it for the first time, came away disappointed. The bird’s song was perfection: were it a little less so, it would touch all human hearts at once.

  A small brown bird, arriving after a journey of thousands of miles from North Africa, was pouring out its heart in deep throbbing notes.

  Every year since he had lived in the farmhouse a nightingale had arrived by the well, to sing for a day and a night almost continuously before a silence fell upon it, as though all vitality were used up on the outpouring of its heart.

  Lucy said that perhaps it went inland, away from the bleak east winds which drifted upon the coast: but throughout a night and a day the notes, of a startling force and purity, came from the lilac bushes.

  That was only half of the article. The essay remained incomplete, as he sat at the desk, seeing only the grey-purple blossoms of the lilac bushes, and not knowing how to continue. For he was thinking of Hess, of the dead in the deserts of North Africa.

  The next morning he got out of bed as the dawn spread up the sky, and he could make out the colours of wallflowers, violas, aubretia, and bright green leaves of the fruit bushes beyond.

  He heard the children talking in the farmhouse; the voices did not disturb him, for they were happy cries, happy voices. He must hurry, he was soon to start for London. The essay was abandoned. Could he write about the change in the spirit of the village school: of the new teacher, a young woman who understood children? The old teacher had gone into retirement. She was a spinster in whose heart the nightingale, it seemed, would evoke only bitter memories. She used to bang the heads of small children on the desk, or rap them on the knuckles if
they couldn’t answer her questions: surely signs of her despair at remaining alive.

  No, he couldn’t write that. So he left for London, to arrive at his club shortly before 6 a.m., having averaged 54 m.p.h. over ninety odd miles of empty roads.

  Broken glass, plaster, and other rubble lay in the road before the club building. There had been an air raid the night before. He sat at a table in the marble hall while more rubble was being shovelled into wheelbarrows and wondered how to finish the nightingale article.

  When the debris was removed, a woman cleaner came to sweep, another on knees to swab and scrub.

  A writer has to wait for ideas to flash, as it were, with the imagination. I was hearing in my mind the voice of the Keatsian bird following the star-print in its mind across the sandy deserts of North Africa, where tanks lay shattered and the dead of Eighth Army and Afrika Korps were lying desiccated under a sun torrid upon those ancient cornfields of the Roman Empire, and buildings buried under the sands above the waves of that Parthenopian shore.

  While I was held with this vision, suddenly from high over the main staircase of the club building, where once kings and ambassadors had trodden on their way to the reception rooms above—suddenly, I say, from that stairway came a startlingly beautiful ripple of music. Down the broad stairway it flowed, and through the corridors to where I am trying to write this in one corner of the hall.

  This music was so directly in spirit with the nightingale I was hearing in my mind that I was drawn to go upstairs; and there in the breakfast room, as yet empty but for one figure, sat a man at the piano. I knew that face. I waited for him to stop before asking him what he was playing. He told me that it was by Granados, who went down with the Lusitania during the last war. The piece was called ‘The Lady and the Nightingale’.

  The player was an immigrant Russian Jew, an aloof figure in the club, austere and passionate artist, greatly esteemed by all. Benno Moiseiwitsch told me he had just come down from the North, after a concert. He had stood all night in the corridor of a crowded train; and the first thing he had done on arrival at the club was to practise for his concert in London that evening.

  Here was the theme for my piece in the evening paper! The passion of the nightingale for perfection, matched by that of the devoted artist living for his inborn talent.

  It wrote itself rapidly. I drove to Fleet Street and was in time for the first edition.

  Phillip encountered a different kind of musician later that day. He had known Becket Scrimgeour for some years: a stimulating companion until he became satirical, then cynical. Comparative failure as a composer had corroded his life; a corrosion revealed by his disparaging stories of those composers who had attained the fame which had not come to Becket. He had a wife whose income was, some said, adverse to his musical urge to create; but the truth was that he lacked the strength to maintain a minor inspiration.

  He took Phillip to his house in St. John’s Wood. There he played an organ stolen, he said scoffingly, from a parish where his brother had held a living. The organ was certainly old, it clucked rather than piped most of its notes. Even so, the Bach fugue he played showed Becket’s love of music.

  Afterwards he showed Phillip a small book hidden behind an old edition of the Oxford Dictionary on a shelf beside his study fire-place. Holding up the book, he declared, “One day this will be valuable, my boy! It contains some of the secret history of the war.”

  Becket went on to reveal the source of the secret history. He had a mistress who was one of the private secretaries of someone who held high office in the War Cabinet.

  “I’ve got to be very careful about this book now,” he said. “As you know, I do a bit of journalism, not only for The Musical Times, but for one of the daily papers in Fleet Street. I’ve been feeding the editor news items which my girl supplies me with; she has to prepare them in a bulletin for Churchill to read. The editor’s a member of my club, so it’s a good place to meet. The other day he told me he can’t take any more stuff from me, because M.I.5 has been after him about one news item he printed.”

  Becket went on to explain that M.I.5, to find the leakage to the press, had sent ‘down the pipe’ a fake bit of news about Italian dock-workers at Genoa rolling barrels of petrol for Rommel’s Afrika Korps off the quay into the sea.

  “When two detectives asked where the editor got his news, X threatened to raise the matter in the House of Commons, telling them that he wouldn’t have any interference from a British Gestapo. ‘We’re not a fascist police state, we’re a democracy,’ he told them. Then in the Club he told me it would be unwise to be seen with him again until it had all blown over.”

  Phillip was to remember this incident later on in the war, when Becket Scrimgeour gave him quite another reason why the Fleet Street editor had ended the association.

  There is no point in returning to the farm. I’m better away. And anyway, by now all plants of corn, roots, and small seeds on the Bad Lands have appeared, disappeared, or are about to disappear owing to various forms of life which, beside my own, have an interest in those plants—wireworms, hares, rabbits, several species of beetles, wood pigeons, rats both brown and black—the Scandinavian type and the old English respectively—as well as mice, voles, caterpillars, grubs, aphides and various forms of fungoid growth. I have left it to them; and while the men are contentedly hoeing their plots of sugar-beet at contract prices—they always work well when they are their own masters—I sit here contentedly on this Devon hilltop overlooking the sea, feeling to belong to myself again, intent on a task of making a synopsis for a series of novels, based on the miseries and splendours of our time, which I’ve wanted to write ever since leaving the Army in 1919.

  On his return to London Phillip met by appointment a fellow-author who had written to him about his book, Pen and Plow. He, too, had served in the 1914–18 war, but in Mesopotamia; even so, the phoinix of their restless minds was similar. Francis, as Phillip was invited to call him, was known widely for his autobiography as an Indian cavalryman. To the younger man’s surprise this distinguished soldier had declared, in his letter, that he had found, in Phillip’s book, qualities which Phillip had always thought had been lacking in his nature….

  It may be that a man of ordinary living, when he holds a pen in his hand in some sort of peace may reveal his true personality. So I have ‘courage, and integrity’! I, a weak and often diffident creature….

  I found this field officer, late of the Bengal Lancers, to be sensitive, soft-voiced, truly gentle. We talked freely: a relief after the negative attitude of the village and elsewhere. Francis is a man who fully understands the hidden roots of the war; and since these are not generally known, or at any rate accepted, he suffers the negation of this knowledge as wastage upon his living. He appears to know many of the hierarchy in London. He told me that Hitler is going to attack Russia, that Rudolf Hess flew over in the belief that he could convince the Government that Bolshevism was Europe’s real enemy: that the fratricidal war in the West must end before the otherwise inevitable collapse and ruin of Europe, including Britain and Germany.

  We were together all day. At night Francis and I walked together under the crags and battlements of the blitzed streets of London, from the temporary premises of the Bath Club to the half-burnt Barbarian Club where I was staying; and after supper there, with the thud and flash of guns and bombs all around us, I returned with him, unable to leave so friendly and clear a mind. Too soon I was hastening back through streets empty of all but my own exhilaration. No clocks struck anywhere in the town. Most of those previously hanging out over shops had crashed down, or been stopped by concussion. No cats slunk about the derelict areas—they had been caught and eaten, their furs are now valuable in the black market. The cosh boys were busy, too, in the blackout; so I picked up a piece of stone with which to defend myself, but dropped it again, for it was not physical blows I feared.

  Soon after Phillip’s return to the farm, Lucy went over to the Studio to tell him that
a couple of officers had called at the farmhouse to ask permission to camp with their unit under Meadows Wood. He found them sitting in the parlour, reading newspapers which had been lying folded on the table. The senior officer, a major, stood up when he entered, and indicating the massive shining length of the refectory table, remarked that he had a nice piece of furniture. Phillip had an idea that he had thought of asking the farmer if he would care to sell it, but after the exchange of a few sentences, had changed his mind.

  The major said he wanted to camp under the trees with his mechanised regiment for a couple of weeks, while they were practising on the anti-aircraft range nearby. Phillip’s heart sank; but he showed them Meadows Wood, between the rising arable and the meadows, which apparently they had already inspected; and as an alternative, the drift or narrow margin of land beside the river at the eastern boundary of his land. He knew as they walked down the drift by the riverside wood that the approach was too narrow, that heavy armoured vehicles might break down the bank, and so fall into the river; and said so. The major agreed with Phillip, adding that the Meadows Wood appeared to be the only practical site for his men and their vehicles.

  Phillip appreciated that they should come to ask permission to camp, when perhaps other soldiers would, unknown to the owner, have applied for a requisition order; and the first thing one knew was that they had arrived. But these men were Yeomanry, and understood the land, with a code of behaviour of which some suburban townsmen were not always aware, as an incident that had occurred a week or two previously had shown.

  *

  On that occasion Lucy had been compelled to complain of the behaviour of some of the men from the Searchlight Unit which had their equipment and huts on two acres of the field called Pewitts’. For some months a few of the soldiers regularly had been stealing the eggs of hens in open feed-units on and about the Home Hills. It was to be expected, of course, that this should happen; and it was interesting to contrast the attitude of officers of the Derbyshire Yeomanry with that of the subaltern in command of the anti-aircraft detachment. The filching of eggs had been going on for some time; so Phillip asked Lucy to be firm, and to press her complaints. The search for nests by searchlight soldiers was by now a regular and open thing. So Lucy walked up the gulley, and spoke to the subaltern, who, meeting Phillip later on the Hills, had the air of one who had suffered an injustice.