Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  “After all, my men were only looking for pheasants’ eggs, you know.”

  “But surely you must know that pheasants’ eggs are not public property?”

  “Actually, aren’t they wild pheasants? I mean to say——”

  “They are pheasants descended from a stock probably brought over by the Romans. Also, the Home Hills are outside the boundaries of your camp. Your men were permitted to take a short cut to the village by my permission, which was readily given, if you remember.”

  “Well,” he replied, “I’ll speak to my men again, if it will give you any satisfaction.”

  At this period of the war eggs of any size or kind are fetching a high price in London and other towns. Pheasants’ eggs are a shilling each; those of geese, five shillings. Any kind of bird likewise is in great demand. Rooks, jackdaws, seagulls, and moorhens are being bought by restaurants. Starlings, sparrows, magpies, even owls and hawks have a sale at the most expensive hotels, upon whose tables their cooked remains appear under strange styles and titles. Not only is it the age of the common man; it is also the age of the carrion crow, who in death appears upon the menu of the Carlton with the regalia of the peacock.

  The Yeomanry arrived to bivouac in the wide green coolth of the beeches and chestnuts of Meadows Wood. There were many armoured cars with wireless rods swaying. A long mechanical procession rolled over the new roads and knocked down one new gatepost.

  Today, Friday, while I was drinking a cup of tea after lunch (coffee being scarce) I listened to the German radio announcing that we had lost Crete, with many warships. For over a year, with the exception of Wavell’s 1940 campaign, there has been only continuous bad news: Norway—Dunkirk—France—the Balkans—Greece—now Crete.

  I switched off and walked to the upland fields to see how the sugar-beet plants were looking. The men were scoring their plots—striking out, with eight-inch hoes, weeds that had grown between the plants which some weeks before they had singled. But my mind was elsewhere.

  During the days following, more heavy armoured cars cut up the lower road of the farm which Phillip had made up, with such sweat and slowness, with over two hundred tons of gravel and chalk before the war. The top road had already been badly corrugated by the searchlight encampment. The grass by Meadows Wood—bushed, chain-harrowed and rolled in early spring—was rutted and torn by wheels; but he told himself that it might eventually benefit from the traffic. As he stood there one morning, the son of a village smallholder called Harn drove past, standing up in his little cart made out of an old motor axle and rubber wheels, drawn by a pony. He passed without a word; and later, when Philip saw him returning with two large cans of swill for his pigs, he said ironically, “I do hope my torn up roads won’t be bad for your tyres, so that you will sue me for damages! Had I known you were coming on my land to try and get swill for your pigs, I would have warned you about the potholes.”

  “Oh, no, that’ll be quite all right!” the trespasser replied cheerfully.

  Matt, in charge of twenty-five pigs, remarked sourly of the retreating contraption, “Hur, if you put grease on your hair, Josiah Harn would come to lick it off.”

  A curious simile, Phillip thought; and one that he was to recall as prophetic, with the bitter wisdom of retrospect, some years later.

  *

  Matt’s prophecies, however, were not always borne out by events.

  Before Phillip went to market, drawing the smaller varnished trailer holding ten lambs which he had already taken there five months previously, and brought back, because they had been graded by the officials of the Food Ministry as ‘unthrifty’, Matt declared that they were fat this time. Phillip knew that they were lousy little runts, always scraping and rubbing against the wooden hurdles of the fattening pens. They were thin and wretched, but he was sick of further dissembling words over them.

  A farmer is in the hands of his men at all times; and in war-time, if a man leaves, it will likely leave a gap—and, as Phillip was to find out later on, several men departing will leave a gap which, as in the case of a retreating army, can mean the end of that army as a coherent, active body.

  Once again the lambs were graded as unthrifty, as was obvious when Phillip had lifted them into the trailer; but he wanted to get rid of them at any price; and probably that was Matt’s intention, too. What a pity, he thought, that our minds cannot connect; but centuries of local history remain between us.

  The little runts had cost about seventy shillings each in food and labour; the grader (after consultation with Josiah Harn, a dealer) valued them for the Government at just under the price he sold them for, sixty shillings. When Phillip told this to Matt he scoffed at him being ‘had’ by Josiah Harn.

  “They all spit in one pot, faugh!” he ejaculated, a remark he made invariably when referring to men of the market place.

  Pot calling kettle black? For the worm powders Phillip had given Matt for the unthrifty lambs were still unused, lying in their packets on the ‘Veterinary Table’ of the workshop: a table holding pills, capsules, powders, ointments, unguents, and other medicines for all purposes on the farm. I might as well have kept my money in my pocket, to use the favourite phrase of Matt’s son, the bailiff, said Phillip to himself.

  On Saturday, June the seventh, my friend Piers Tofield came up from Suffolk to visit us. He is a bombardier serving in a battery of anti-aircraft guns. Piers has dropped his title, and asked me to address letters, if I wrote, to Bombardier Tofield.

  Heartened by his presence, I asked Lucy if we might invite some of the officers of the Yeomanry squadron to dinner in the farmhouse that evening. There were wines of sorts left in the granary, including Algerian ‘Burgundy’ bought in 1928. Warmed slowly to 58 degrees Fahrenheit it was a tolerable drink, its roughness having mellowed a little during the years. Wines of any kind are now scarce in Britain.

  With Piers beside me, I felt I could achieve success with the farm. There was a feeling of freedom in the presence of so knowledgeable a companion. I felt myself to be a true host to these soldiers. After dinner we opened a bottle of Lucy’s home-made elderberry wine. The cork came out rather too easily; it appeared to have several old corkscrew breaks in it. The wine had been made and laid down before the war, but (as I learned later that evening) Peter the inquisitive, watched by Rosamund, David and Jonathan, had already drawn the cork to ‘have a ‘taste’; but finding the liquid crude, had pushed cork back and relaid the bottle in my cottage cupboard. So the wine had suffered from tampering. Wine? Our guests were polite about this sweet creosote, as they sipped from their glasses.

  Note added later.

  During the dark days that succeeded their departure, the memory of the courtesy of our soldier guests has been like a candle-gleam in the mind; and it seems normal that their regiment should have done well against the Afrika Korps; for they were the spearhead of the column that reached Tunisia from Alamein for the surrender of von Arnim two years after their most pleasant stay as my guests.

  Chapter 4

  HOOLY

  One evening, a week or two earlier in the year, Phillip had stopped by the kitchen door on his way to wash, to speak to Lucy who was kneading dough made from flour of their own wheat, for the family lived on wholemeal bread. Phillip saw a wicker basket on the kitchen floor, and what appeared to be a small piece of dough lying in it. It seemed to be covered with mildew. Going closer, he saw it was a fledgling owl.

  Jonathan, the youngest, came in at that moment and explained that it was ‘lost’, and had been brought to the door by a ‘little old totty boy’. Apparently this child (aged about five years) had found the object under a brambleberry bush in the lane.

  “His father and mother,” said Jonathan (also five years old) pointing at the object, “lost it—so the little old totty boy brought it to here, because they say you like owls.”

  “But it is warm and comfortably covered with flesh,” Phillip replied, holding the creature in his hands, “so it could not have been lost very long
. I expect its parents knew it was there, and will miss it to-night.”

  “The little boys do so want to keep it, and have a tame owl,” said Lucy.

  “You know, Dad!” said David, brightly, “like your little old totty owl you used to tell us about, when you were a boy.”

  The owlet raised its long thin head and chirruped. It was the hunger noise. Its beak opened and it tried to swallow his finger when he stroked its head.

  There was an air-rifle in the cupboard, and some sparrows on the ridge-tiles of the farmhouse roof. Jonathan and Phillip went out to stalk them. Not long afterwards they returned, and one of the sparrows went, piece by piece, into the owlet’s crop. When they went back for more the sparrows, which had meanwhile re-formed their row on the ridge-tiles, took immediate evasive action into the unseen road below. Thereafter they were never about on their Passchendaele ridge more than half a second after the barrel of the rifle had appeared, although many a small lead-splash was left on the tiles just after legs and tail-feathers had gone from view.

  “Huh, wise guys,” murmured David, having watched several such boss-shots. He waited with a catapult round the gateway, but the small piece of chalk flipped from his feeble engine sped through the air even more harmlessly than Phillip’s air-rifle slugs.

  From the parlour window, beyond the garden and its dominating walnut-tree, there was a view of the Home Hills rising steeply to the skyline. On the hills were many rabbits, which tunnelled their deep buries in the sandy southern slopes. Farmers did not like rabbits; they were vermin; they pared grasses and corn with rodent teeth, their urine poisoned the soil. Whereas sheep will improve a pasture, rabbits will slowly destroy it. So fitting together his light Gallyon twenty-bore shot-gun, he set out to get one of the hopping grey animals which, at evening, were visible in many places on the grassy slopes of the Home Hills.

  It was easy the first night; but on succeeding occasions the rabbits grew warier. Sometimes it was dusk before he returned. He had taken on another job; after working all day he had to force reluctance aside and go shoot a rabbit every night. However, it was something to be greeted by a fluffy little creature with its mad stare, and the enthusiasm of his youngest child, Jonathan.

  Hooly grew rapidly. As the black Wellington bombers began to drone in the twilight sky on their way over the North Sea, Hooly was on the roof ridge, awaiting his return. Creeping round the wall slowly, he might observe, before the owlet saw him, a small monkey-like object walking in silhouette, setting one clawed foot before the other, carefully—until suddenly round dark eyes scrutinised him; feathers, beak and gaiter’d legs slithered down the pantiles: and a maniac was upon his shoulder, flapping and screaming for food.

  By this time Hooly knew the way about most of the lower rooms of the farmhouse. From the first he had slept happily in the hot-cupboard in the kitchen, always in his basket, accepting all he saw, without fear. When tired of playing in the flower-beds outside in the garden he would walk into the kitchen, cross the floor with his monkey-like walk, climb into his basket and, stretching legs out behind his body, lie flat, head bowed and face hidden. If one or other of the children touched the grey feathers of his head, beside the large cavities of the ears, he would not look up, but give a sleepy chirrup, and then go to sleep—a feathered kitten.

  Rapidly his range of travelling extended all over the house. A favourite perching place was among the caps and gloves on the bottom half of the oak tallboy standing in the parlour. He flapped and hauled his way to the top, and there squatted in an attitude of complete relaxation.

  “He reminds me of my old spaniel, Rusty, in Devon, who after a walk through the fields to the sea, used to scratch himself a hole in the Malandine sands, and collapse into it suddenly, shooting out his hind legs with the pads of each foot turned uppermost.”

  Sometimes Hooly played with an old green-and-red glove, relic of skiing on the downs above Rookhurst with Piers Tofield, many years before. He was a feathered kitten, throwing up the glove and catching it with his beak. A nice little fellow. Only once did he try to swallow Phillip’s ear-lobe; but then Phillip was somewhat slow in offering him scrags of rabbit.

  He took to climbing up the vines and creepers of the jasmine to the roof, and after being fed remained beside the chimney stack. By June he had grown into a wild-looking bird, eyes large and dark as grapes with the bloom on them. He accepted all tokens of affection—and poll-scratching—but gave no affection back. Nor did the younger children expect it, being wild in the natural sense themselves. Not wild in the civilised meaning of the word, for they were calm and self-contained: it was never necessary to complain of their behaviour towards others.

  One late afternoon when Hooly was standing on the tallboy among his gloves and hats, a strange tom-cat leapt upon the window sill. It had come to see the two mother-cats, Torty and Eric, apparently. Its leap took it to within six inches of the owl’s face. It stopped, wide-eyed. Yellow-ringed eyes stared into grape-blue eyes; furred mouser face to face with feathered mouser. Sprang the trap of fear: snap of beak and harr of teeth. In the same instant a rushing apart—cat to garden—owl to air.

  *

  Between dusk and darkness of a late spring evening: Phillip standing near the draw-well: a shape passing silently over his head, to brake suddenly, black upon the stars. The apparition startled him, as it startled Hooly on the wash-house roof, for he snapped his beak in alarm. At the same moment the apparition turned its head to take in any movement—the quick retinal stare of a wild creature, whose life is one calculation in motion after another. Phillip kept still. The glance was of a second’s duration before the apparition turned to Hooly, revealing that it carried a sparrow in its beak. With a swift movement the sparrow was transferred to a foot. With sideway striking movement Hooly snatched it, and at once the large darkness flapped up and away.

  This was exhilarating! How he wished young Jonny had been with him! Hooly stood there, the dead sparrow in his foot. He took the best part of half an hour to break it up with pluckings and pullings; first one wing was swallowed, then another, and last of all the skull gulped down.

  After which he flapped and walked to the chimney stack at the other end of the roof-ridge, and settled to rest. The night was silent; a few searchlights moved bleakly across the horizon; the sky was pale points of stars, and Venus shining serenely in the west. Phillip went to his room, drew the black-out curtains, lit the lamp, and heard Hooly walking about on the roof before he fell asleep.

  In the morning he told the children about the strange owl. David, the imaginative, said it might have been Hooly’s mother or father. Then why, asked Phillip, did Hooly snap his beak in sudden fear when he saw the old bird? Perhaps, suggested Rosamund, the mother owl had known all along that her nestling had been in the hot-cupboard, and had waited her chance to get it. Peter added that the old owl had probably heard Hooly chirruping to himself at night in the basket, and had bided her time to take him away.

  “Shall we catch the old owl, and then we’ll have two?” asked Phillip, to see the effect.

  “NO!” cried the children, with one voice.

  The next night Hooly was on the ridge when the big owl came again, this time with a young rat. Hooly thereupon dropped the stale rabbit pelt he was playing with and clumped and scratched his way to the chimney stack with the rat. Soon afterwards the tail of the rat was sticking out of his mouth as he huddled himself to doze among the blackened chimney pots. During the following day he was missing from his accustomed place, but at evening, as the sun was sinking and once again the sky was thundering with the passage of the great nocturnal air-fleets, they heard his chis-sicking cries. Phillip crossed the road to the tall trees behind the wooden Institute hut. Hooly saw him and flew down and sat on his shoulder. Phillip walked with him across the road and fed him as he perched on the windlass-frame above the draw-well. As soon as he was fed, Hooly flew up to the roof, flapping and clawing to his favourite ridge.

  The next evening when Phillip calle
d his name, broad brown wings glided over the iron-sheet Institute roof and wafted air on his face as Hooly pitched on his shoulder. Two soldiers were passing at the time, walking up the village street to find something interesting, but though Phillip was standing still in the road, and they saw him, they took no notice of an owl flying to alight on a man’s shoulder. Perhaps they were townsmen and saw nothing interesting in such a sight; perhaps they were anxious to find the fish-and-chip hut. Even soldiers went hungry at that time.

  Khaki groups from the anti-aircraft practice camp used to stand outside the small one-man baker’s shop, trying to buy bread, for no cakes or buns were available in the village. It was said that the food in the camp was scanty and poor. They used to tear bread and eat it where they stood in the street. When the fish-shop opened, once a week on Friday, which was also pay-day in the farming week, the fried fish and chips were very soon sold out.

  Tall green trees of sycamore and ash, growing out of the disused marlpit under which the village Institute hut stood, became the tame owl’s day-hide and roost. Every evening Phillip went out to call Hooly. After chissicking cries to get Phillip to fly to him, he was forced to glide down to his shoulder, a brown-and-yellow feathered face set with dark orbs looming larger and larger until, with flapping and screaking of open beak, Hooly was clutching the shoulder of his Mackinaw jacket. This happened for several nights; but one evening when Phillip went to call Hooly he was not there.