Once this land was tidal. The channel-scourings of the sea are still apparent under the grass.
After the hay-makers had gone slowly home, sweated-out, I lingered to rest myself on the fine sight of a shorn meadow, the distant half of it crossed by wind-rows of hay. My pleasure was checked, as always when thinking of, or looking down at, the river, the bank being an uneven parapet of mud, called spoil, left by the Catchment Board men on the bank. The engineer has told his men, a year before, to throw this spoil down from the bank when it is dry, but they haven’t done so. Nettles and other weeds grow there luxuriantly and make a bank-side prowl with a fly-rod an irritating and frustrating act. I have fished in the river but once in my four years. The little chalk stream, once ringed upon its surface by rising trout of two and three pounds, has been half-ruined by the village drains which pour all sorts of pollution into it. Villages upstream also foul it. Then there are the mud-pullers of the Catchment Board, who cut and lug out every weed of water-crowsfoot, starwort, celery and even water-cress during the spring and summer months. They dredge the bed of the stream imperfectly with long-handled scoops. After their visit the stream is bare like a canal, or rather an open sewer. Over sixty pipes empty into it between the village and the next little town of Wriothesby All Saints, a place of holy-pilgrimage. All these drains contravene both the Public Health Acts and the Rivers Pollution Act. I have protested in vain to the Rural District Council; nobody cares.
Some of the Rural District Council’s houses were the worst offenders. They had been built without septic tanks, thus breaking the Council’s own by-laws. Phillip could not bear to look into the river; he felt its condition to be symbolic of the System, of the dark pollution of the spirit of Man, of the lack of honour in the body politic. He had another grievance, too, which he tried not to let affect him: the sight of dead hens left until the corpses became maggoty, about the premises, or on the Home Hills. Many times he had asked Lucy to send one of the children to bury all dead hens. Maggots soon pupated, becoming blowflies laying eggs on the sheep grazing there. Maggots ate the living flesh of sheep.
It was the same with rats killed by Spot, the stockman’s terrier: he could never get Matt to bury them in the muck of the yards.
The heat of the meadow has been intense, desiccating, eddyless. When exhausted I am prey to weak thoughts. Is my own failure to live in harmony with those about me—except when working with them as one of a team—a condition from which such thoughts are but as a dream of escape, without human base: an Idea of perfection which the human animal cannot endure—like my idea of chronic tidiness in the cart-shed, and the stockman washing his hands—particularly after paring the feet of a ewe suffering from foot-rot—before he milks his cows?
It is eight o’clock on Saturday evening. The men grumbled at having to work on Saturday afternoon after the late nights all the past week, but Lucy bringing a basket of buttered scones spread with honey, jam sandwiches and cake, with four gallons of tea at five o’clock, relieved the tension.
The half-built stack is now covered by the stack-cloth (which had not taken the slightest harm from its suspension over the other stack) with hurdles on top, in a long inverted V, to keep the ends open. This is not really necessary. I did it to instruct the men; an exercise. The hay is light and feathery, completely dry, unspoilt, fragrant, and of a pleasing natural colour.
On Monday they finished carrying the Denchman, leaving four or five loads for topping-up when the stack had settled down. Again the day was hot. The wind moved as from a glass-furnace, lifting grey-green feathery wisps of aromatic vernal grass from the elevator. The hay must be got in while the fine weather lasted, so in the late afternoon they went up to the Hanger. Phillip had not been this way for a week or more. The Irish ryegrass was spoiled—brittly, as Luke declared. The days of intense heat had turned it yellow. The stiff clay soil of that upper field was devoid of humus, so it soon set hard. It had been sucked by crops of corn after corn ever since the last war, without any muck having been put back. It was barren. The hay was overblown. Most of the clover seeded. Matt had told Phillip, three days before, that the pollen had not yet come to blow; whereas Steve told him quietly that the pollen had dropped off ten days previously.
It was yet another instance that the farmer must rely only on himself. If the farmer worked all day as a labourer, obviously the farm lacked a farmer. It was his own fault that it was spoiled. The seeds of the ryegrass dropped as soon as the cutting knives struck the stems.
With Luke driving his pair of horses drawing the Samuelson cutter, and Boy Billy and Phillip on a tractor with the second cutter, they finished that job at seven o’clock. The Samuelson cutter broke its knife across the back, this had delayed them. Phillip wondered how he could use the seeds that had dropped. Graze the aftermath, using an electric fence, and get the bullocks brought up from the meadows to drop their dung all over the poor land?
One day he hoped to build a culvert over the ditch at the end of the far meadow and put a gate across it. The bullocks would find their way up every afternoon, glad to get away from flat heat to upland air. He wanted to plough all the meadows as well, and re-seed with modern grass mixtures bred by Sir George Stapleton at Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire.
Thanks be, his hay was now safely in stack.
Now he began to feel a little tremulous, because he had planned a journey with Bert Close, and this required the use of a hundred gallons of petrol which had been allocated, by the Fuel Controller at Cambridge, on the understanding that the petrol would be used ‘for agricultural purposes only’.
Part Two
WOODLAND IDYLL
‘They have not laboured in mental searching as we have; they have not wasted their time looking among empty straw for the grain which is not there. They have been in the sunlight. Since the days of ancient Greece the doves have remained in the sunshine; we who have laboured have found nothing. In the sunshine, by the shady verge of woods, by the sweet waters where the wild dove sips, there alone will thought be found.’
—Richard Jefferies, in The Pigeons at the British Museum
Chapter 6
TO THE WEST
The idea was started one day while Phillip was sawing logs with the circular saw, and Bert Close, his lorry-driver friend, had come to visit him. Bert Close had watched awhile; then, during a pause, offered to sharpen the saw’s teeth. “It’s no good like that, guv, wouldn’t cut butter. I’ll show you.”
Phillip watched him stroking the teeth with the file, and realised how he had been doing it wrong before. Then Bert set the teeth. He told Phillip he had worked steam tackle, and sawn up hundreds of tons of logs.
This induced mention that Phillip had the lease of some scrub-oak woodland in South Devon, but had never cut any timber there; and the lease would run out shortly. If only he had his tractor and saw down there, he could clear some of the overgrown scrub. However, it was no use thinking of that.
During haysel Bert Close came over again, to suggest that he and Phillip take the saw, and the tractor on his lorry, and work in the woods. “I’d like to go with you, guv. Only we’ll want someone to cook for us, after working all day. We’d come ’ome tired, and who’d get food ready?”
The next evening he returned with his girl-friend Poppy, and said that she would be willing to do the cooking; and since he had an ‘A’ lorry licence, he could do the transporting of tractor and saw to Devon, if Phillip could supply the petrol. His quarterly allocation was just about used up.
At this time all private motoring was stopped throughout Britain, owing to the petrol shortage; and coupons were given only for ‘work in connexion with the war effort’. Among hauliers, all journeys of over thirty miles were subject to a permit from the local Transport Board, which was made up not of government officials, but of the local hauliers. So he would have to be careful, Bert Close said; for some of the big hauliers were after his ‘A’ licence, to acquire it for their own fleets of lorries; and if the journey were known, there
might be trouble, and he might lose his licence.
“If some of them Nosey Parkers knew where I was goin’, they’d report me, see.”
“Then I should not risk it, if I were you.”
“They can’t touch me.”
Bert Close came the following evening to help with the carting of the hay. Phillip wanted to see the two stacks covered before he left; and had bought some rolls of bitumenized paper which would serve instead of thatch. The idea was to cut lengths of the paper, overlap them and cover the joins with wire-netting hung upon sections of sycamore poles.
“Right, guv, let’s get on with it then.”
They rolled the paper in two equal rolls and let them down from the ridge of the stack; then followed with wire-netting to cover the sheets. Ends of the netting were secured to a rope drawn tight round the waist of the stack, to prevent wind from lifting wire and paper. The stack looked like a half-inflated ballon when it was finished.
The next morning, Matt muttered about the presence of Bert Close.
“What’s he a-doin’ of on our farm, master? He’s only out for what he kin git.”
“But he won’t take any payment for his help.”
“Huh. Yar’ll see,” muttered dark-eyed Brythonic man. “He’s out for the biggest penny.”
The sooner the hay was done, the sooner they could start for Devon. In the afternoon Bert Close came again, and helped to prepare more wire-netting sections and paper for the second stack. The meadow-hay was already topped up. They covered that with bitumenized paper and wire, making a neater job at the second attempt. They tight-waisted it with field-telephone wire, securing the ends to pegs thrust into the sides of the rick. The hay looked to have settled well down, the covering tight as a puff-ball.
Phillip’s respect for Bert Close as a neat and tidy worker (contrasted with the slobbering way so many things were done on the farm) was increased by working with him. He was careful, he attended to the smallest detail, he was quick. He seemed to be valiant, too. A few nights previously he had seen three soldiers breaking into a little shop in one of the narrow staithes, or streets, leading down to the quay of Crabbe. Bert Close asked them what they were doing. They told him to mind his own (unprintable) business, otherwise they would knock his (similar) teeth down his (ditto) throat for his (omitted) supper. Finally, they told him to go and do something to himself which to the non-hermaphrodisiacal Bert Close was the final insult. He snouted one; he snouted two; the third did not await his turn, but ran away.
Zero Hour is in five and a half hours’ time. The expedition has been kept a secret between Lucy, Billy, myself, Bert Close, and Poppy. As Luke has told me more than once during the past two years, there are “several people ready and glad to see you go wrong”. One of these appears to be that land-hungry peasant, Josiah Harn.
To avoid attention, Poppy did not come on the farm during the hay carrying. She stayed with a married friend ten miles away. In four hours’ time I am to fetch her in the Silver Eagle.
After tea, in the quiet of the evening by the chalk quarry and the long cart-shed built below it, Bert Close and I began to load the lorry with tractor on rubber-tyres, circular saw, axes, one hundred gallons of petrol in twenty cans, and other gear required for Devon. Our plan is to drive away from the village at midnight, and to arrive at the field above Malandine at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon.
I am apprehensive about the run of nearly three hundred miles, remembering the tedious journeys in our slow old lorry across England in the years before the war, done often with insufficient food and rest; so when all the machinery, spare parts, fuel, and gear was smoothly loaded, we lashed some heavy ship hatch-boards directly under the wood frame of the hood. This makes a platform upon which to spread blankets and pillows, where I hope to sleep during the twenty hours or so we are on the road.
Every detail of the journey and the month’s stay in South Devon has been discussed. I want no more rows or misunderstandings with sentimental or self-deceiving people as in the past. I am to pay the running expenses of the journey, and £4 a week to Bert Close. For the journey I provide my own food, while Bert Close and Poppy provide theirs.
We finished loading in the starlit dusk between ten and eleven o’clock, and returned to the farmhouse for eggs and bacon, with toast and coffee. Afterwards we drove in the Silver Eagle to a village a dozen miles away to fetch Poppy from her hiding place. When we returned it was nearly midnight: and suddenly, I was too tired to start, and said so; whereupon arose another problem.
We had planned to start in darkness in order to avoid any snooping, and consequent telephone conversations to the police about the movement of a lorry in wartime. Recently there had been a warning of a possible invasion; and though Winston Churchill had declared that there was no fifth-column in the country, Mr. Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, one of the Labour ministers in the Coalition Government, had countered this statement in the House of Commons by referring to ‘the quisling in their midst’. I thought that this remark, made after a Committee of Inquiry had cleared Sir Hereward Birkin (according to Hansard’s record of Parliamentary debate), was about as mean as another deliberate falsification of the truth concerning King Leopold of the Belgians betraying the French and British Army without warning in May 1940. The British Government knew, from Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, chief liaison officer with the Belgian Army, that King Leopold had given several days’ warning that his army was crushed and encircled; the British Cabinet knew that King Leopold of the Belgians must surrender to save the lives of broken men; but for reasons of expediency—to try and cohere a disintegrating French army—the truth had been suppressed, and a statement of expediency announced in its place.
(Francis, my Bengal Lancer friend, told me that Churchill remained quiet over this, at the time, because the French authorities were hoping to spur on the French Army, by contempt of the Belgians. How little they understood the feelings of men exhausted in battle!)
Bert Close had assured me that he was within his rights, as the holder of an ‘A’ licence, in hauling a load to Devon for me; but he was not supposed to take so much petrol on board. And I don’t want to see out the rest of the war in prison—although it would give me the very seclusion I need to fulfil myself as a writer—because, owing to the delicacy and comparative rarity of our hydraulic tractors, if they are broken, the farm might not survive as far as the family are concerned.
Therefore we had planned our get-away at an hour when the energy of even the silliest village spy-hunter might be expected to be low. My energy certainly was low; memories of those strained journeys of other years told me to take it easy; and, suddenly exhausted in the evening twilight, as I have written, I decided to sleep at home that night. So we offered rugs and cushions in the parlour to our guests, and left the loaded lorry in what was called the yard, a gravelled space between farmhouse and cottage—hoping that it would not be visible in the rays of any inspecting shaded torch of A.R.P. duty-man, Fire Watcher, or prying eyes of Horatio Bugg, leader of the local anti-quisling party of black-marketing patriots.
It was a quiet, moonless night; the stars were dull; yet the bulk of the loaded and canvas-wrapped lorry standing in the yard was visible in silhouette from the road. If it were reported, well, it would be; that was all. With these easy thoughts accompanied by the searing necessity for sleep, Phillip pushed aside his journal and got into bed. Fully dressed, and covered by a rug, he slept by the large window, casements open, black-out curtains pulled back, night air cool on face.
Some time later he was instantly awake, aware of a murmur of voices and footfalls hurrying away up the street. As he listened more intently, risen on an elbow, the telephone bell began to ring in the farmhouse. He waited for it to stop, but it went on ringing. He imagined that Bert Close and Poppy, dozing in armchairs, or more probably in one another’s arms on the rush mats of the floor, were too scared to lift the receiver. In the starlight the loaded lorry loomed clearly, standing just below the wide window.<
br />
The subdued but insistent tones of the telephone bell continued.
Would the police soon be arriving to examine a lorry loaded with 100 gallons of petrol for an unknown destination by a local suspect? In a district where only one petrol pump was permitted to serve the needs of a hundred square miles, and all services were constantly on the look-out for sabotage? His release under Regulation 18b was conditional; several of his manuscripts and letters were still held by the police; he suspected that his movements were watched and reported, and telephone conversations monitored. Moreover, the popular newspapers at that time were reporting prominently prosecutions for the misuse of petrol, taking the propaganda line that petrol wasters were helping the drowning of British sailors torpedoed in tankers.
The telephone bell ceased to ring. Or was it still ringing? Was his ear ‘singing’, after all?
He leaned out of the window, in the chill and tenebrous weariness before the first pallor of dawn, and listened. Even owls were silent in the valley.
Suddenly a cock pheasant cried Koch-karr! in the distant pinewood; others answered remotely. A pause—and the deep thuddings of bombs came through the night. Far away was shouting, Action Stations! He recognised the voice from the searchlight camp beyond the pine-wood.
A little while later he heard footfalls and voices about the village street. He heard knocking on a door, and a voice asking for Mrs. Maddison. She was wanted at once at the Red Cross point behind the Old Manor.
*
Unknown to Phillip at that moment, Lucy was already up, in blue trousers and jersey covered by overalls, Red Cross brassard on left arm. While Phillip had been sunk in heavy sleep the night sky with its fixed and dim points of stars had been faintly scored by tracer bullets, then flames had travelled wanly towards the east, and a youth of barely eighteen, remotely conscious of pain and the strangeness of life, had floated down on a parachute into the shadows of earth and crashed into one of the woods. He had been rescued and taken to the Red Gross point in a room of the Old Manor which, having been rebuilt by a rich man retired from business, was now restored to its former condition as a seigneurial dwelling.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 9