During my absence in Devon the haystack made by the Duck Decoy has been covered with the rags of an old cloth not considered good enough for auction of the former tenant’s effects: a cloth Matt had salvaged and hoarded for use one day. Why had this wretched, porous object been laid over the stack? The hay under it was spoiled. I ordered, just before I went away—and also written it down in the farm diary—that that particular stack was to be thatched as quickly as possible. It stood low down, out of the waft of drying winds, beside the water of the Decoy. But Matt had taken his rotten old relic of rotten Old Buck; and all the while the large green rot-proof canvas was lying idle in the hovel. Too much trouble to take the heavier cloth there? Why had Luke and Matt refused to use it? Its use had been demonstrated, and proved, twice.
Now the stack under its reach-me-down was a depressing sight—sixty pounds’ worth of hay spoiled, in all probability. As I ploughed up and down the field, head bowed to windy slant of rain, I thought that I should have stayed to see that the cloth was over the stack—and open at the top as I had shown them—an awning to prevent gas from causing a sweat and rot of fermentation. Was Bernard Shaw right in his Preface to Saint Joan, about ordinary people being terrified by, and hating, those who showed them up to themselves, thus trying to break, or remove, a former self-conception, or conceit? I am a fool always to have gone on the assumption that people are reasonable, open to reason; with my parents, sisters, Lucy’s brother—everybody except those who have achieved, and thereby, are ‘famous’. How far is this arrogance on my part? How wrong have I been, for two decades now, in thinking that nearly all the human minds about me have been at fault? Perhaps, as Tim Copleston declared, I do not understand men. The trouble is, as I see it, that most men do not understand themselves.
The Great Bustard field was twenty acres: ten were in barley, ten in wheat. When the rain ceased and the corn was dry again they cut the barley, next to the Squarehead 11 wheat standing in stook. The jattering binder stopped a score and more of times, as usual; and once again upon the Bad Lands the annual harvest duologue was audible.
Tortoise: Even if yew had bought this patent new, it would be stopping now and agen, yew’d find.
Hare: Do tell me why.
Tortoise: They always do do.
Hare: But why do they always do?
Tortoise: (producing screw-hammer): Yew can’t help a stoppage.
Hare: Why can’t you help it?
Tortoise: Because they always do do.
Hare (ears falling flat): Oh.
Tortoise No. 2 (intervening earnestly): Yew can’t help a stoppage, guv’nor. ’Tis nature!
Hare (one ear up): I think it is nature when reaping machines breed, and produce little suburban grass-cutters; but no longer nature when they stop. They are then fossils.
Tortoise No. 1 (unperturbed by this nonsense, as he opens what he called his shut-knife): This patent has knocked down the harvest so far, and even yew who are all wire want sometimes to stop, don’t yew? (Pokes dull iron with open shut-knife.)
Hare (both ears up, and grinning): Ah, ’bor!
Tortoise No. 1: Well then, ’tis nature to stop.
Hare: You’ve a got-it, ’bor!
Tortoise No. 2: Yew can’t beat Nature, guv’nor!
Thereupon Tortoise No. 2, wearing rubber nee-boots in the August sunshine (having shot the hare dead by his final bolt) turns about and strides away, leaving Hare metaphorically recumbent with eyes rolling around heaven.
Hare (Musing): Oddly enough, the shut-knife, after a little prod, can overcome Nature, or inertia, and now dear old Albion Reaper-and-Binder is once more clattering around the field, all the thwacks and bangs on its paintless chain-cover apparently forgiven if not forgotten.
But ‘Nature never forgets and never forgives’. Hardly had we moved to the six acres below the searchlight encampment when the binder stopped for three hours despite screw-hammer, incantation, shut-knife and oil from a beer-bottle. When it started again, towards seven o’clock, I thought to leave well alone, and so covering Albion up, we went home.
Rain recurred in the night, and continued all the next day, a Friday, making cutting impossible. The men went to repair the wire fence around Scalt Common, while I went on ploughing the Higher Brock. Saturday was fine, and we worked until 3.30 p.m., when rain stopped us with half of the Bustard barley set in rows of stooks. The men knocked off for the week-end. It rained heavily until 9 p.m., when I was forced to stop ploughing.
A little more than half of our corn harvest now remains to be cut. The rain at least will mellow the barley kernels, making them less steely, less hard and brittle, more floury. They will thus mature to what is called a good malting sample, for quick and uniform germination to the malting-house floor. Rain is good for them, up to a point—the point of chitting, or sprouting. Then they are dud.
I ploughed all through Sunday under heavy showers of rain. On Monday the weather cleared again, and my tension with it.
We started on the Bustard, throwing down, to dry, the stooks—each of six sheaves leaning together—which we had set-up the previous Saturday afternoon. They lay in sunshine upon an excellent clover layer. Thousands of skirted corn dollies, with never a dock or thistle tucked in their girdles, lay prostrate and dumb, but lightly, upon a tall stubble left specially for them to rest upon, so that drying wind might pass through and over their bleaching hair. Their skirts were green with upreaching clover cut with those delicate legs of cornstalk. Their life is over; all play with the wind, whisper and sigh of bowing blond heads, foredone; all, all passes away with Albion’s guillotine. Now the green of those skirts will wilt with the bowed bleached heads. My fancies, my longing for Melissa, give way before the thought that green clover in stack might heat and kill the germ in the barley kernels grown for malt and fine ale.
When it rained again I asked Luke and Boy Billy to horse-hoe between the rows of roots of Lower Brock, which was rather like shoeing a dead horse. But the low overcast showed rifts of blue, the rain belt was passing.
At last, after two days of drying winds, they could start to carry. First, oats from the Scalt. They had been cut about a month. Rain had fallen every day since St. Swithin’s Day. Some of the oat-sheaves had sprouted. Otherwise it was a good yield, estimated at twenty sacks an acre by Tortoise, who invariably over-estimated a crop, maybe to please Hare, maybe in age-long self-justification. Hare said eighteen sacks, but to himself thought sixteen; farmers invariably under-estimate, perhaps as a sort of mental insurance against calamity and loss. One never knew what was coming-in until one’s corn was ‘threshed out, cashed out’.
There was a lot of charlock with the oats. The Island Fortress was having a lean time, and all kinds of weed-seed were now being sold and eagerly bought, for cage-bird feed. Phillip built the oat-stack by the Duck Decoy, Mr. Gladstone Cogney having confirmed his promise to come and thresh in September, before the seasonal October rains made the track under the Meadow Wood impassable for his fifteen-ton steam-engine. They needed the oats to feed, through the winter months, three horses, sixty head of horned stock including ten cows, and fifty ewes due to lamb in January.
*
At the Corn Market the following Saturday, Phillip met his immediate neighbour, Charles Box. He had always envied Charles Box as a real farmer, on account of his equable and solid appearance. Whenever he saw or thought of Charles Box he remembered those several centuries of farming blood in his veins. Was Charles Box not stoical, he himself but an electric hare? Phillip was surprised when Charles Box said to him, “I’ve come here chiefly to get away from the harvest,” for that was the first awareness in his farming career that his own reactions to all that farming entails in suspense and strain were not necessarily those of an incompetent misfit. He replied to Charles Box, with whom he was on terms of a mutually reserved geniality, “What does a farmer do when the steward does not agree with his orders?”
“He does what I do, gives his orders, then turns his back on his steward and
walks away,” replied Charles Box, who thereupon walked away from Phillip and further possible questions about war-time farming.
When Luke and Boy Billy had been asked to cut the thin Steep barley, Phillip had told them specially to avoid the precipitous slope by the walnut tree. He explained to both that they must not damage, with ‘scrapping’ wheels, the clover plants that were not very strongly established on those steep chalky places.
“The barley there should be scythed,” he told both of them together, lest there be further misunderstanding. “Leave the barley around and below on the hump,” he repeated.
The next day, a Sunday, he intended to take a busman’s holiday and graze forty-nine bullocks on the narrow strip of grass between the coastal road and the river. The land was his, he had bought it with the farm. The idea was that stock should eat down the rough stuff, after which he would broadcast clover and lucerne seed to improve the feeding value. Every little pightle or parcel of land was needed to grow food.
Recently he had, with Peter and David, replaced the rotten and fallen posts and rusty wire which enclosed the narrow, steep, and crescent-shaped strip about half-a-mile long. He didn’t have much hope of this keeping people out, but it was as well to enclose what might otherwise, after twenty years, be claimed as common land. What he didn’t foresee was that the top wire of the fence would be sat upon by soldiers from the anti-aircraft camp, until many of the posts were either broken or pulled aslant.
Phillip and the small boys drove the bullocks to the river verges. The stock was happily grazing when he crossed river and meadow to take a look at that part of the Steep which he had asked to be cut with a scythe. He sighed deeply, clenching hands. Tractor wheels had grooved and slewed about, sideways and diagonally down the hump, tearing out and leaving strips of plants of rye-grass, stubble, and clover deracinated from that infirm soil he was trying to build up—the rips of a tiger’s hind-claws on its prey, all down the slopes among the corn-dollies.
Was Luke trying to get himself sacked?
*
By Wednesday, September the tenth, the 1941 corn harvest of the Bad Lands was gathered into six stacks of corn. One twelve-yard stack of Squarehead 11 wheat had been built on the Bustard field, beside the bullock yard in the wood. In line with it, and adjacent, was an eleven-yard barley stack. Just over the hedge a third stack of barley stood. These three corn-stacks were so sited that the straw during threshing would fall from the elevator by the wooden railings, there to be built into stacks acting as wind-shields on two sides of the yard. Thus sheltered, the bullocks would be held from October to April on hay, barley straw, and those roots of the Lower Brock Hanger which had just about doubled their size since the horse-hoeing. Even so, they were a half-crop only.
The third side of the yard was already protected by the haystack. On the fourth side, in the wood, was a shed with gutters collecting, below a roof of corrugated iron sheets, rain to feed the five-hundred-gallon water-tank. Thus the yard would be warm and snug in winter, while bullocks trod successive layers of straw-bedding into good muck, all handy for carting to the adjacent fields.
The fourth stack, oats, stood down below by the Duck Decoy, ready for Gladstone Gogney’s threshing tackle. Its base was two feet above the summer low-level of water flowing sea-ward in the grupp. The fifth and sixth stacks, both of barley, had been built in front of the Corn Barn. These two were to be thatched. The other stacks were already covered by green rot-proof cloths against the promised arrival of the threshing machine which Billy had once christened, with a bottle of what he called ‘cold old tea’, ‘The Antediluvian Flier.’
Two years before, at the end of the 1939 harvest, when the last sheaf had been loaded on the tumbril, Matt had flung his cap into the air. He had not done that since. The war harvests had been too long, there had been too many rain-breaks, the labourer’s rations were not sufficient for hard graft. Thoughts of death; restrictions upon life, liberty, and hope; the prolonged defeats suffered by their country, had subdued them all; yet here and there making a man think, which is what happens when he looks into himself to find the truth.
*
Now Phillip was free to return to ploughing the Higher Brock. The top soil was dry, set hard. To plough twelve inches deep, to cover flag of aftermath, the tractor must be driven in bottom gear. When Luke relieved him one day Phillip asked him, with an assumed apologetic friendliness, on no account to use second gear. At the worst, he said, the engine might knock itself to pieces: at the least, the pistons slap the cylinders oval.
“I’m sorry to be so emphatic about it, Luke, but as I’ve said before, it now takes up to six months to get an engine repaired. So keep in low gear, for I want a furrow twelve inches deep.”
“I wouldn’t do it this way, if ’twas mine. It ain’t necessary.”
“Well, my idea is to break the hard crust, or pan, about eight inches down. When Boy Billy relieves you, please do not forget to tell him to plough—in—bottom—gear!”
“You’re master.”
Phillip left Luke going slowly in bottom gear up and down the field, as he had asked. Later Boy Billy took over and when Phillip went up there to relieve him he saw a grassy fringe, or flag, to all of the furrow-slices. The difference in appearance was due to shallow ploughing. Phillip asked why. Billy replied that to avoid the engine being overloaded in second gear he had eased the plough out of the ground until it was throwing over a shallow furrow.
“Oh my God, didn’t Luke tell you it had to be deep ploughed in bottom gear?”
“I dunno.”
“Weren’t you told, on taking over from Luke, that all the field had to be ploughed in bottom gear?”
Billy shrugged his shoulders.
“Answer my question!”
“I dunno.”
“Go home!”
At the moment it did not occur to Phillip that Billy had kept silent in order to shield Luke.
*
Two days later Higher Brock was finished. The soil had come up easily behind the deep-digger plough, breaking softly as the furrows turned. A stroke of the harrows, and it crumbled. Another stroke across the work, and it settled. A couple of hours to let the ‘cobbles’ dry out, then the heavy rib-roll to press down the soil to fill air-spaces—a further ‘rank’ harrowing—with long-tined harrows, striking deep, to pull any lumps to the surface—and the seed-bed was ready for the once-grown pedigree Squarehead II seed as soon as it was threshed out.
Phillip drove the tractor and harrow-baulks to the Woodland yard, leaving all the lumps on top—a very rough seed-bed indeed. The mould was underneath! There he saw, standing by the yard rails, a familiar brown-eyed, black-haired figure in sagging coat and worn-out gum-boats.
“Yew’ll never be able to work down the lumps, master.”
“I don’t want to work down the lumps, Matt.”
“Why not?”
“Wheat is a sturdy plant. It doesn’t require so fine a seed-bed as barley. And those clods will protect the wheat-plants against frost-winds.”
Matt looked at Phillip straightly. “It’s a good idea,” he said, adding with a childlike smile, “Well, yew do think out good ideas sometimes, I’ll say thet!”
“Oh, it isn’t my idea. I’ve read it over and over again in the farming journals. Also it’s been the custom among arable farmers for some years now. Indeed, an agricultural writer named Virgil wrote about it.”
“Theory,” said Matt, slowly. There was a suggestion of reproach, of distrust, of scepticism in his tone. “If yew don’t catch the Higher Brock right, guv’nor, the cobbles will set hard and the drill won’t enter when yew come to sow in October!”
“Quite right, Matt. I’m going to drill as soon as the seed-wheat is threshed. Next week, that is. And the seed will go home with the loose mould under the cobbles.”
“Drill in September, guv’nor?”
“That’s why I ploughed now, when point and mouldboard can enter the ground soft after all the rain.”
&nbs
p; “I’m not sure yew ain’t right, guv’nor,” he said, musingly. “Get it in early.”
“That’s the ‘theory’.”
“Ah,” he shook his head, “master don’t trust us, do he? We can’t do narthin’ right, can we? Master listens to other voices.” He pretended to a sadness that was not all pretence. He looked up at a flight of Spitfires rushing overhead and out to sea. “All that money being wasted,” he said, before looking Phillip straightly in the eyes and saying, “Go easy with Billy Boy, master. I heer’d you a-mobbin’ of him th’arther day when he wor’ a-tractorin’——”
“Now listen a moment, Matty dear. I’m trying to make this farm into a fine modern farm. Which means that the minds and loyalties of those working on it——”
“Trying, master? Trying? What’s wrong with the farm? Isn’t the earn good? Why, my dear man, it’s as good as any in the district! Ain’t the meadows good? Ain’t my buds a-doin’? Look what yew hev a-done! Why there harn’t another man like yew, not in a hunner’ thousand! Who else’d’v warked the farm up as yew’ve a-done it, in so short a time? Look at the roads, look at the buildings! But yew don’t rest, master. Yar’ll kill yarself. Then who’s ta follow yew? Why, in a year or two, ’twill all be back where it wor’! I seen farmers come, an’ I seen farmers go, I hev. You must go easier, guv’nor. This land won’t run away——”
“Most of the fertility has already, Matt.”
“Look you a-here, master! What use was all them people coming on the farm to yew? Look at ’em, from the start, who was any good? All they wanted was a Convalescent Home. They don’t understand the wark, master. They worry yew, and that upsets the men. They feel they can’t do a’thing right, master! I’ve a-sin my boy Luke sit by th’ fire, and worry hi’self thin. That’s why he give up bein’ steward. Yew’ll see I’m right, guv’nor,” he said significantly. “Yew’ve got to be born to the wark, all these wot comes is only out fur themselves, and narthin’ else. This landgel, Sarah Somp’n, yew got to look after the ’osses since my boy give up being teamsman, what do she knaw about the wark, guv’nor? Yew’ll larn, yew’ll see I’m right!”
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 16