Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  It was a Friday night. The smell of frying fat was wafted on the western breeze from the middle of the village. Hooly didn’t return the next day. Phillip wondered if the events of two nights previously had affected him, even killed him, or broken his ear-drums; for late on Thursday night—the last night Phillip had seen him—there had been a running fight between British night-fighters and a Heinkel bomber, during which the German pilot had jettisoned the two 2,000-lb. land-mines he carried. Suddenly while Phillip slept a stupendous pale blue flash had seemed to split the universe. Immediately afterwards, another flash and stupendous reverberation, but not so metallic-hard. The first land-mine had fallen on the edge of the chalk-ridge above the village; the second on the clay of the marshes. He thought his cottage (wherein he lay instantly awake, it seemed, as the first blue flash filled the night) was collapsing. Tiles showered into the road. The ceiling of the adjoining empty bedroom came down.

  So far, Hooly had lived through a few air-bumps and shakings of odd bombs falling here and there, and he must have got used to the blue-white stars of incendiaries which sometimes broke out of the darkness on the Home Hills; but would those large and ultra-sensitive ear-drums be broken by the detonations of the mines descending under large green parachutes?

  Well, he thought, at least I won’t have to go shooting wretched rabbits any more; but in this he was mistaken; for on the Sunday morning he was awakened early by a screaming in the bedroom, and there on the window-sill was the little greyish monkey face and body, staring with misery in its eyes, feet dancing as if with rage, or pain. Seeing a grey woollen sock on a chair, Hooly flew to it, and standing on it, made a distracted attempt to swallow it.

  It was five o’clock in the morning; the farmer’s day of rest; but how could I relax while those famished eyes stared with such anguish? Getting out of bed, I went downstairs to get Hooly’s Friday rabbit. But a cat had apparently taken it from where I had hung it on the outer brick casing of the circular draw-well. Meanwhile Hooly was facing me, perching on one of the disused iron-bound buckets which until recently had drawn water for the farmhouse. He flew down from the ricketty bucket and screeched into my face. I went to the larder, but found only some bacon and the remains of a potato pasty. Bacon, ration of two ounces weekly each person, was far too good for him; so I had to consider what to do.

  Sunday, day of rest! No matter, the truant must be fed. Ah, the air-rifle, and perhaps a sparrow on the roof. But the sparrows, which had been chittering their comments in a row a moment before, were now abruptly absent. Perhaps they had organised themselves into an Avian Home Guard; for when I returned round the corner to the wall, there were a dozen or more around Hooly, mobbing him. One old cock was actually pulling a feather from the back of his head. Seeing me, they scattered, to hide chattering in the lilac bushes, while the air-rifle phutted towards one then another in vain.

  So I put on shoes, trousers, and jacket and walked down to the bridge and across the river and came to the cart-shed facing the chalk quarry. Sparrows chirped in their nests under the tiles of the hovel, but I would not take a fledgling sparrow from a nest, even for a starving owlet.

  Fortunately for my peace of mind a starling flew to a branch of an ash, and fell down as the little waisted pellet of led spun through its chest. Starlings, I suspected, were rank-tasting, for the hawks and owls I had kept as a boy never ate them; but Hooly found this more palatable than a woollen sock.

  Thereafter Hooly came to the open window at dawn, crying and flapping brown mottled wings for food, walking over the blanket to yell in Phillip’s ear if he didn’t awake. Sometimes he visited other cottage windows. From one, occupied by Jack the Jackdaw, David saw him leaving hurriedly, accompanied by oaths and the slamming of a casement.

  Whether or not Jack’s flawed personality was due entirely to his experience as an infantryman on the Somme, where he had been wounded, and at Passchendaele where he had been stricken by mustard gas, he was psychically a damaged man. Sometimes Phillip had seen him, tears of impotence in his eyes and with puny cries of rage, attack inanimate objects, such as a pair of heavy harrows, which on a weedy field constantly needed lifting to be cleaned. He swore at them, he kicked the iron frame, he made a speech of misery and frustration to the wind in the middle of the field, while the horses stood patiently by, awaiting his word to go forward again.

  Jack the Jackdaw had become more unapproachable; he would move away when spoken to, he could not listen. Once or twice Phillip was the recipient of his ranting. Usually a dour fellow, when he was upset his arms waved, he yelled all his breath away. Froth on lips, hoarse voice became feeble, he was near to convulsion; he collapsed sobbing.

  Is this wrecked heart slowly petrifying for lack of its complement, vehicle of healing love and tenderness? Even as, in moments of fatigue coming near to despair, is my own heart, or resistance? I understand Jack the Jackdaw, because I know myself; and I know also what it is to feel one’s resistance to be momentarily overcome. I knew how he felt when the last of his nerve-power was running out in those frenzied monologues, accompanied by waving arms and ragged cap dashed to the earth; I have heard those tones, or overtones, coming from my jittery self; I have heard those tones, though with deeper penetration and cutting power, on the radio, broadcast from the Ostmark whither the black bombers are nightly flying. Is it mere coincidence that all three of us have been, as infantrymen, hit by bullet or shell-fire; and I finally (but temporarily) blinded by mustard gas, in the Great War? I think I understand Jack the Jackdaw and his nervous curses when he had been awakened, not by a dream-wife stroking his hair, but by an apparition of dementia standing on his pillow.

  Other people in the village, who had been casually amused by the sight of Hooly in the past taking food on Phillip’s shoulder, began to feed him; or rather, they tried to feed him, offering him pieces of bread or even fragments of wood, or stones, to get him to fly down for their amusement. The singleness of the bird’s mind towards human beings was in disintegration, and he flew now to anyone and into any open window. David, who was seven, once woke up and found Hooly pulling at his hair. Both David and Jonathan liked Hooly, and welcomed him in their bedroom at any hour of the day or night. Not so their mother, who had to rise at six every morning to give Billy his breakfast. In Lucy’s bedroom Hooly always behaved like a maladjusted human being with a guilt-complex. Seeing himself in a looking-glass, he began to fight his own image. Lucy had to turn the glass round lest the owl hurt itself. His beak-snapping rages kept her awake, and so she was not altogether sorry when Hooly disappeared for the second time.

  David said perhaps he had been shot; but no, Hooly returned within a week, flying down unexpectedly one sunset to the weathered oak frame of the draw-well. He screaked down at Phillip’s face, but when he was offered a shoulder, and Phillip went near him, he edged away. Obviously someone else had tried to handle him, instead of letting him perch in freedom on head or shoulder.

  One evening when he was perched on the well, three two-engined bombers with dark crosses on their fuselage came in at roof-top height from over the marshes. They had flown wave-chasing across the North Sea to be below the unseen tentacles of radar. With a flick of the stick each had lifted over farm-house and trees and dipped again, to throw up over the wood on the hill-line across the valley. It was all so sudden that I could feel only amazement. Then red points of tracer left them as they banked to shoot up the camp beyond. Children were calling in the village with excited cries. In a moment it was over, the Heinkels were gone, flying into a cloud which hung like a great quarry in the western sky, while Spitfires screamed around, circling like falcons.

  Now a most extraordinary coincidence happened as I was standing by. Nine swallows, with ringing cries, began to circle above and around the brick well, on the oak frame of which Hooly was perched. First one then another peeled-off and dived at the figure of the owl, swishing by within an inch or two of his amazed and jerky eyes, to zoom again and join the rotating ring six feet or so above
the windlass-frame. One after another they came down, sweeping up again and taking their turn to dive once more. They cut at Hooly from in front and from behind, and Hooly did not like it. He flew away. It was then that I heard from the upper air the terrible grumbling roll of a Spit’s eight-gun squirt—bullets cutting through fabric, metal, flesh and bone like a thunderous circular saw; a second shuddering, rolling roar; and after an interval, more distantly a third. Breathing quickly, and conscious that I was quivering within, I was about to seek a human face with which to share my emotion, when an owl hooted from the roof, and turning I saw the large owl perching on the chimney rim of my writing-room stack, twenty yards away in the garden.

  So that was the secret of the truant! The wild owl was hunting for and feeding the tame bird. It called with sharp ker-jick, ker-jick! and I knew by that it was a male. Then it flew away, followed by Hooly—a young hen bird!

  Meanwhile three Spitfires, with superchargers whining, followed by another section at three thousand feet above them, hurtled across the sky. They flew towards the vast gold-lined cumulus cloud towering in the west; up its craggy precipices they seemed to climb almost perpendicularly, to open formation like a shamrock and, turning just before stalling point, to rave down again in separate arcs of three great circles, engines full on, to zoom up again as they waited for the remaining ‘bandit’ to come out of the cloud. After three such wide circles they disappeared; and a moment later I heard again the heart-chilling, sullen roar coming from unseen distance. The bursts were repeated, growing duller and far away—one-second bursts—and then came a long metallic roll which was the end.

  To our surprise Hooly came to the well on the following evening, and while the old cock bird perched in a damson tree, she flew down to my shoulder. She came by habit, that was all. She cried to me by habit, for she was not hungry. She came because of what a scientist would call an association of ideas, but what I would call friendship. The male owl had accepted the fact that Hooly had human friends and waited quietly until Hooly was ready to fly off again. I was relieved. It was one thing less to think about.

  The summer solstice drew near. It was clear, sunny, Old English summer weather. Phillip and Billy finished cutting the first field of hay at 9.30 p.m. on Tuesday night, the seventeenth of June. The men were still on sugar-beet hoeing, but would be finishing soon.

  That night rain soaked the hay in rows. Next day when Phillip thought it had dried out he started to turn the rows with the tedder. In his ignorance he collected behind the long steel fingers of the machine rolls that were too big; and trying to force the fingers clear, not having found out how the ‘patent’ worked, he injured the gears in the box. He was relieved that it was he who had broken the gears: he felt nearer to ordinary life.

  The weather had returned with heat and sun. He wanted to get the hay in wind-rows before it was bleached, before its pale green colour and aromatic oils were dried out of it, before it became the sort of third-rate stuff that had usually been stacked before his coming. But it was still damp on the Friday; and on the Saturday, fearing the hay would be spoiled if not cocked during the weekend, he asked Steve, Dick, Jack, Billy the Nelson, and Luke the steward to come back after dinner to finish hay-cocking. They agreed after consultation. They started again at two o’clock. But after half an hour or so Phillip realized that the hay was still too full of sap to be cocked. The forkfuls they lifted up were too heavy, though not noticeably damp. He looked at the men’s faces as they all paused. They said it was claggy, full of sap. It would go mouldy in the cocks. So after a further talk he ordered the cocks to be thrown open, deciding to wait until the coming Monday; and apologised to them for depriving them of their half-holiday due, he said, to his misjudgment. They were kind about it and they went home with extra money.

  Lying in bed on the Sunday morning I was thinking that I had nothing to worry me for this day—the longest day of the year, 22nd June, 1941—and turned on the radio, to hear an unusual fanfair music from a German station. Immediately I thought of what I had been told by Francis, my new friend in London, that Hitler was sending the Wehrmacht into Russia. Once again, as on the tenth of May of the previous year, I was confounded. Hitler had done—been impelled to do—the very thing he had once said must never occur. I thought of Napoleon and his fate. And 22nd June, 1812, was the day Napoleon had invaded Russia.

  Lying there, I listened to a translation of Hitler’s reasons on the Zeesen short-wave of the Rundfunk. Russia had been deploying her armies across the Vistula, not for defence, but for attack. I knew, from the helplessness of the German attackers, waiting for their Zero hour on the Frezenberg ridge in the autumn of 1917, when our divisions attacked ten minutes before they were due to advance, that the Russians were sitting ducks. I could imagine how Churchill was rejoicing, now that Nazi Germany and Bolshevism were at each other’s throats. Had Hess told his inquisitors of this attack? Had Churchill sent word to Stalin, to warn him? In any case the Russians must have known of the preparations of the attack.

  I drew the blanket round my head, and tried to sleep, but I could not rest, my thoughts went on despite attempts to still them by deep breathing. Would Hitler get to Iran and the oil wells by way of the Ukraine, and then withdraw behind the West Wall? For the lines of communication in France were vulnerable. And the war was one of material destruction; the side which had the last tin of bully beef or can of petrol, would win the war.

  I tried to forget it; but the frustrated mind of the would-be novelist, historian of these times, ran on. Was not Hitler bursting out of an economic ring because he was forced to, in the pattern of the old Germanic migrations which surely had been caused, centuries ago as this very day, by lack of food? Richard Jefferies in his Walks in the Wheatfield had written that the golden berries in the wheat-sack were the real gold for which men in the markets of the world struggled. Germany on a soil largely sandy could never grow enough wheat to support her people. Especially if they were healthy, so that the population increased….

  While I tried to see it all as in a glass clearly, I heard the familiar slow clumping of boots up the wooden stairs. Boy Billy had come to tell me that the bullocks on the Home Hills had broken into the wheat on the Nightcraft.

  “The Searchlight blokes left the gate open, probably on returning from stealing our eggs, Dad.”

  After a couple of hours we got the bullocks back again, leaving the field with its corn trodden down in many places.

  Chapter 5

  SWEET MEADOW HAY

  Just before Midsummer Day the men finished sugar-beet scoring. The plants looked well, though gappy, due partly to wire-worm, partly to indifferent sowing. Jack the Jackdaw had been on the drill. He had merely sat there and enjoyed the view, smoking as he rode on the seed-box behind the tractor—instead of watching, hawk-eyed, the four coulters all of the time to see if the brown seed was dropping regularly. In some places a ringe or line had been missed right across the field: a quarter of a mile, nearly fifteen hundred plants, eventually a ton of beet lost. At seventy-five shillings a ton it was a costly three minutes to enjoy the view. Once again the farmer was at fault for not having arranged things better. He said to Billy that he should have sat on the bloody drill himself. It was a fixed price for hoeing, whether full plant or patchy one. So the farmer lost twice.

  Hoeing over, the men were now free to pick up the hay. Phillip turned the rows once again and started to make cocks of it in the evening. The teamsman worked with the toppler—a broken-backed, second-hand affair that Phillip had not yet had time to repair, nor money to replace.

  *

  They carried part of the hay four days later. It wasn’t so bad a crop, but the flesh-building clover was thin. They worked from mid-morning, when the moisture was off, until the dew was settling again at dusk—Luke, Boy Billy, Matt, Billy the Nelson, Steve, Jack the Jackdaw, Powerful Dick, and Phillip. The elevator, new twelve months before, and worked off a pulley on the concrete-mixer, hoisted up the loads brought down by rubber-tyre
d tumbrils, lorry, and large green trailer drawn by tractor on rubber wheels.

  In the evening, when they stopped work, Phillip wanted to sling the new Cuprinol-treated cloth as an awning over the half-built stack. It was to hang from a sycamore pole he had lashed between ladders with stone-weighted feet standing at two ends of the stack. He had felled the pole specially for this job. To the idea of an awning to keep off any rain, both Luke and Matt raised objections, although it was but a minute’s work to push each end of the pole through a ladder stave and then tie ends and staves together.

  Young Tortoise: “Nobody else in the district covers hay like that.”

  Hare: “Nobody else must be a sensible chap. He is always doing the new things I am doing. I would like to meet him. Who is this Nobody Else?”

  Father Tortoise: “Well, everybody.”

  Hare: “I do not care for everybody.”

  Young Tortoise: “But if it rains like it sometimes do do the hay will sweat and rot the cloth. Yar’ll see.”

  Hare: “Well, everybody tells me that I see what does not happen, so you may both be right. But as a fact, the two-foot air-space under the ridge pole will permit all the gases to escape. And if it rains for days and days as you forecast, the rain will surely rot the hay, to insure against which we are putting up this awning.”

  Young Tortoise: “The hay may heat, and catch fire.”

  Hare: “Come on, dear boys, give a hand with the cloth, it weighs just about a hundredweight. It won’t take long to fix.”

  Father Tortoise: “The wind will blow that cloth away, come a tempest.”