I was asleep when Lucy came to my cottage and said it was time to get up, if we were to start at five o’clock, as planned. She said that a German pilot had been shot down in the night, and after first-aid treatment, had been taken to hospital. His legs were broken, she said, but he might live.
“He looked like a little boy. It might have been Billy. Drink your tea, my dear, and I’ll have breakfast ready for you all in a quarter of an hour. Did you hear the telephone bell ringing? Mr. Close said he didn’t like to lift the receiver.”
After sluicing my face in cold water, I went into the parlour, where behind curtains of black Italian cloth electric light revealed a grim face beside one of dark-eyed happiness sitting at table laid for breakfast. We ate silently, then got up to put on our coats, thanking Lucy for all she had done, and went to the lorry. It was 5 a.m., double summertime, 3 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. I was saying goodbye to Lucy when the dark form of Hooly glided through the air, and with loud screaks settled on Bert Close’s cap.
This article, of dark blue cloth and shiny peak, Bert Close declared to have been given him in Hull by the skipper of a trawler, who had acquired it from a German Unterseeboot kapitanleutnant. It looked to me like an ordinary taxi-driver’s cap. Hooly was now doing a little mad dance upon it.
“Crickey, what’s this on me ’ead? Little ole Itler’s luftwaffy? Blimey, it’s ’Ooly. ’Ow are you, ’Ooly cock?”
The owl was frantic for food. Lucy took it away, to quiet it with pieces of rabbit. The lorry, with dimmed lights, drew out into the narrow main road. I climbed up into the back, hauled myself over the iron seat of the tractor, and wriggled into the sleeping-hole among sacks and blankets. A cloth had been drawn over the top, it was tight against my shoulders, not at all as I had imagined. I asked if it might be taken off and folded up.
After an extra tilt of the cap—followed by a grim look—Bert Close did this; and at ten minutes after five o’clock, we set off westwards.
It was nominally a thirty-hundredweight lorry; now it had nearly two and a half tons aboard. The body was down on the springs. Bert Close drove carefully, too carefully, Phillip thought, as they approached the coastal town of Crabbe, now seen in dismaying daylight. At a modest twenty miles an hour they went round the back of the town, and turned into the road to Great Wordingham.
All over Britain the sign-posts had long been removed, and village names on war memorials of 1914–18 obliterated. Phillip lolled on top of the slow and swaying outfit, in his nest of blankets and sacks, leather coat button’d up, warmed by gloves and scarf. When he opened his eyes he saw low and dull clouds, so he closed them again. After what seemed a long time he raised himself on an elbow, and saw that they had hardly gone a mile. It was beginning to drizzle, too. He hid his face upon the leather of an arm, and tried to settle to sleep.
Rain fell. He determined to ignore it, telling himself that it would be a long time before the leather coat was wet; that at any moment the weather might clear up; and the sun shine brightly over summer fields. But rain fell steadily; and when he felt it down his neck he shouted and banged on the cab-roof, to bring the lorry to a stop. Standing up, he began to unfold the hood-cover—a worn-out, crinkled, and dirty bit of canvas, he noticed.
“Here, let me do it, guv. This end goes there. That goes there. Take that over there, please. Take a turn twice round that hoop, please. Christ, let me do it. I’m used to doing it. Sit in the cab, please, and I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
Phillip sat in the cab beside Poppy while the rain ran down the windscreen.
“We don’t seem to be going very fast.”
“Bert’s thinking of the springs. ‘Bert Close always gets there’—that’s his motto.”
The driver returned. His cap-peak was pulled over at a sharper slant. His unshaven chin stuck out, his eyes looked hard, he had a drawn look. How much had he slept?
“Up you go, guv. ’Slong way. Poppy, light me a blinder. Have one, guv?”
“No thanks.” Phillip got out of the cab.
“You’re welcome to sit alongside me and Poppy, you know. There’s room. As you wish. Ta, Poppy.”
Sharply he inhaled the smoke of a Woodbine, while Phillip crawled up under the roof again. The rain fell hard, thwacking the canvas pressed against his face and shoulders. Soon wet was once more seeping down his neck. The cloth was not waterproof. It was rotten. He told himself that it didn’t matter; the rain would stop and the sun would shine. It must do so, it was mid-July. Shortly the day would be warm and delightful. Meanwhile, he must relax, and think of nothing; but he thought of the water trickling down past his shoulder blades.
At last he could bear no more, and banged on the boards. The lorry stopped. He wriggled from under the clinging cloth. It was eight o’clock.
“How about breakfast?”
“I could do with a cupper char,” said Bert Close, lighting himself another fag. “Blinder? Go on, I’ve got plenty. There’s a caff down the road. Let’s go there.”
They stopped outside a wooden shanty near some petrol pumps. Phillip knew the place. It was built on the sandy heath of that tract of country called the Brecklands. They were on the Heath-market road. They sat by a cold grate littered with fag-ends. A youth as unshaven and scruffy as themselves appeared.
“Any breakfast?” snapped Bert Close.
“Char ronely.”
“Hur,” said Bert Close, curtly. “Giss three cuppserchar. Don’t forget the sugar.”
Phillip had brought his wicker picnic-basket into the room. Inside the basket were a cold chicken in sections, some cold bacon in slices, a dozen hard-boiled eggs, bars of chocolate, a cake, cheese, bread, butter and jam. He opened the basket, and put it on the table.
“No guv, you eat, that’s all right, I’m not ’ungry,” said Bert Close, inhaling and exhaling acrid smoke violently. His jaw looked squarer than before. “Cupperchar’s all I want. Honest. I thought this caff served breakfasts. It used to. No, I won’t eat your food.” He sighed smoke and air out of indifferent lungs.
“Do you remember when I swiped some bread and dripping off the plate, when first I came into your house?”
The scowling expression vanished. He showed his even, strong teeth in a laugh. “Blime, guv, fancy you rememberin’ that!” he said, with satisfaction. “That’s when I thought you were all right, straight I did, when that day you come into ours when me and the missus and kids was sittin’ round the table having tea, and you come to arst me about taking your barley to the station, and before I could reply you was onto a bit of the old skid and slipping. Blime guv, you could’ve knocked me down with a tractor engine.”
“Bread and dripping’s my favourite food. One good turn deserves another, so help yourselves.”
“No, really, we are quite all right,” said Poppy, politely.
The tea came and they sipped it. It was char all right; rank and brown. Bert Close tasted and sniffed, then declared that the tea had been salved from a burning London warehouse, dried, and mixed in with good tea. Phillip didn’t mind the taste; at least it didn’t taste of petrol, as on the Somme. He could see that Bert Close was uneasy because he had suggested a dud pull-up for breakfast. He must remember that he was sensitive. Memories of other people and occasions had at least taught him that the only way to avoid clashes with those with whom he worked was through strict attention to business detail. Bert Close had evidently been impressed by this formula; it was something new on him, he wasn’t going to make a false step. He refused the open basket.
“Come on, have a bacon sandwich! Take that leg of chicken! Tear it with your teeth! All the nicest people do it! Emulate an author I know. The first time I saw Martin Beausire was when he was otter-hunting on the road between Barnstaple and Exeter. He was standing on the bonnet of somebody’s car, hatless, a pile of books under one arm, gnawing a chicken’s leg held in the other hand, and talking exuberantly to half a dozen ‘portly pole carriers’, as he called various members of the firm of Dunwiddles Whis
ky from the Crowhurst country. It was the Joint-Week, when the Culmstock and Cheriton otter hounds met to hunt the Taw and Torridge.”
“Go on,” said Bert Close, blankly.
“You don’t say,” said Poppy, wonder in her eyes. “I’ve heard Mr. Beausire broadcasting.”
It seemed that they were both groping for a new day, after the alarums, etc., of the night.
“Look, I’ll make a bargain with you, Bert. I’ve no blinders. You give me blinders, I’ll give you grub.”
Instantly a packet was whipped out of a flapped pocket of the short black thick jacket. Phillip took one. The dark look disappeared from the jaw.
*
Phillip felt somewhat mean about his arrangement about food; but he wanted to remain friends with Bert Close. Dissensions with others in the past, remembrance of some scenes had power to come upon him in the still of the night to twist his consciousness, wring involuntary cries from him. Often he recalled the words of Lucy’s eldest brother, Ernest Copleston, who had helped on the farm in the early days, but had soon given up. If I lived to be a hundred years old‚ I’d never see eye to eye with you. After dear old Ernest had shogged off, his contribution to the farm—scale-model of a traction-engine—under one arm, various other amateurs who had suggested themselves, had come and gone, either they or he having failed to make a go of it. There were some exceptions. He remembered gratefully a blonde land-girl they had called ‘Muffet’, because she sat so quietly on a little stool in the corner of the hearth of an evening. She was the best muck-spreader he had ever come across—she had an eye for regularity, being also an excellent draughtsman and water-colour artist. She left to join the W.A.A.F. Then there was an R.A.F. sergeant, who spent some of his leaves helping them, he having been a pre-war member of Birkin’s party. And that rather delicate young man, draughtsman by profession, who despite ill-health stuck at the work until it became too much for him. He left as his monument the circular saw bench professionally fixed to a concrete bed, on sliding rails (an unnecessary gadget of Phillip’s) to take up the slack of the driving belt.
Most of the others who had come did not want to know the nature of work, or the quality of a word in the sense of a word given was a word to be kept. There were several conscientious objectors, and though they had been understanding, not one had seemed to have his own mainspring.
*
So far, no mishaps. After breakfast they continued west, cheerfully. Phillip sat in front, surprised to find how comfortable it was; although after some hours a dull feeling, like the groundwork of toothache, began to settle at the top of his thigh bones.
They had by now passed through Newmarket and Cambridge; and coming to St. Neots, stopped for more food. Bert Close sniffed out a steamy shack down a side-street where factory workers were sitting at tables. There Phillip was quizzed, surreptitiously, sideways, the quiz usually beginning from his feet upwards, as a dog sniffs when it wants to know more. The quality and quantity of the food surprised him, after the scarcity in village shops and cottages; these were the armament workers, not the lesser ones who worked in fields to produce the food. Farm workers had no extra rations, beyond a little cheese; with extra sugar, tea, and margarine only at corn harvest.
Shut inside one parish for so long, Phillip had assumed that food throughout Britain was both scarce and poor. To his surprise, in this war-workers’ canteen they had eggs, bacon, sausages, and fried potatoes. He cleaned up the fat with his bread, thinking of the need to sustain himself against exhaustion, since they had come only a third of the way; and it was already half-past one; and the last third of the journey through Dorset into Devon would be dark and the roads twisting up and down hills. Too often in the past had he done that journey on insufficient food. How many times had the long white headlights of the Silver Eagle swept westwards from London between sixty and seventy miles an hour, down the road from Andover to Salisbury, and thence to the Shakesbury road and the lanes leading to Rookhurst; or varying the route, to Amesbury and Stonehenge and south-west to the downs and the winding descent to Colham. Or the third route to Malandine by Dorchester, and the hills above the sea to Queensbridge; west of Valhalla with its rocks and crags and wrecked ships in deep waters below, to his field with its southern views to the Channel, northward to the moor and its dark tors.
As we travelled towards the sun during that long day, now cleared of rain clouds, I fell to meditating whether, confined within a village for so long, and having chronically to suppress my true self, I had fallen into the error of judging the whole of Britain from one particular place, and that place from a particular temperament. To consider one detail: there had been no raisins or currants for many months in the village shop, kept by the wife of a man now in the R.A.F., where our ration books were registered; therefore I had assumed that such things were unobtainable throughout Britain. Yet in the St. Neots eating-house for factory workers were to be had large portions of suet pudding with raisins and currants in it. Spotted Dog pudding! I found myself wishing that all the children were with me, to taste such a luxury. Where did the currants come from? Perhaps the Mediterranean was not closed to our shipping as the German radio claimed? Perhaps currants were coming in from Turkey? How so, with the Aegean Isles and Crete occupied by the Luftwaffe? Currants from North Africa perhaps; but were they not going to France, helping to make the United States of Europe with Germany as the industrial dominator?
On a level straight road they travelled at thirty miles an hour; rarely at thirty-two. Seeing Phillip’s glance at the speedometer, the driver said, “Tyres aren’t too good, and Bert Close always gets there, see?”
So they drove on, turning north up Watling Street for a mile and then westwards again through Time’s slow filter of trees and walls and fields until they came to a town with a gilt swan over its civic hall, and were moving through its narrow streets, while he felt himself to be outside the dimensions of his living; an entire world away from himself, and so it was with a slight shock that he realized that they were but fifty-eight miles from London, and hardly halfway to their destination.
How about the driver? Bert Close said he was quite all right, ta very much. He explained that the lorry was rolling on her back tyres, and the tyres weren’t new, the walls weren’t too strong, so he was stopping to let them cool off. Fill this jug from the pump, please. I’ll fill the radiator, I understand ’ow to fit the cap on. Blinder, guv? Puffing, they went down to the Bath road.
*
When a back tyre burst they bumped to a stop. Phillip set himself to be the perfect mechanic, taking orders from the boss, offering no suggestions. Bert Close was not backward in giving orders.
“Loose the nuts with this, please. Don’t remove the nuts. The bleedin’ tyre is ’ot. Bin rubbing a long time.” He got the jack from the box he kept padlocked. The axle was lifted. “Take off the nuts, please. Right, stand back.” He worked off the wheel, passed it to Phillip. Fitted the spare wheel. “I’ve got only one spare left. I did think about fitting double wheels on the back, then she wouldn’t have rolled so much.” He looked sharp-faced. “Well, don’t stand there starin’. ’Anging about here won’t get us there!”
The Black Dog was opposite. Phillip suggested a pint.
“Never drink on a journey.”
Bert Close felt for a fag. He had smoked thirty since the morning. They went on slowly, tediously, in bottom gear. The radiator was boiling before they reached the crest.
“Many hills now, Bert. We go down some formidable ones and up again.”
Bert Close let this useless information pass with, “Poppy, light me a blinder,” and continued to drive with restraint. Other lorries, with six cylinder engines, larger bodies, double rear-wheels, passed them at forty and forty-five miles an hour. The lean jaw and hard eye under shiny black peak ignored them. The speedo. needle seldom moved beyond the 30 mark. “Bert Close gets there, see?”
Not that Phillip wanted to go any faster. He knew that they had enough load on board, by the body’
s sway on the corners. A hundred gallons of petrol on fire—
*
Supper.
Becoming reminiscent, Bert Close told how in the lean years before the war he found himself without money for a road-fund licence. He didn’t like to borrow from his pals, so he took a chance and ran on a road-fund licence when it had expired. Once a copper, a proper nosey parker, spotted the old licence and waited for him to come out of a maltster’s office. So he hung about and waited his chance for the copper to move away to speak to someone else. Then he slipped out, nipped into the cab, started the engine, and drove down to the quay. As he drove, he pulled the paper licence from its holder on the windscreen and chewed it. The copper came down to where the lorry was standing on the tracks of the railway. Bert Close, chewing away, ignored all questions until the licence was swallowed. Then to all questions he gave the same answer, staring straight in front.
“Your licence was expired, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ate it, di’n you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what’ll happen when you drive off, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
He was due to take a load of whelks to Billingsgate on the following Monday. Knowing he was being watched, he went to the fishermen and asked if they would pay for the journey before it was done. They knew that he never let them down, always got their whelks in time to market, so they trusted him with the money. Meanwhile the lorry was standing on the railway tracks, off the King’s Highway. To make up the rest of the quarterly licence Bert Close sold some of his clothes. He bought a money-order with the proceeds and posted his application to the county town. Meanwhile he wanted to take down the back-axle, because there was a slight knocking noise in the crown gear. He had a spare, bought from a car-breaker’s dump for three bob. To do this he required the lorry in his shed. He got a pal who had a garage to tow it from the land owned by the London and North Eastern Railway Company. The lorry bore the red trade-plates of the pal. On the Monday the licence came. He affixed it.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 10