“He thought you was tryin’ to take her away from ’im.”
“He wanted to keep her in the family, so to speak.”
“That’s right, guv. I’ll be at yours first thing tomorrow morning.”
By going to collect the pulp at the factory, as the brakeman, thirty shillings would be saved. It would be a holiday for Phillip too. Also he wanted to see the factory, which hitherto had been but a distant set of concrete, with chimney issuing white smoke, among the level green fields near the old port of Fenton.
It was a cold morning, so he wore two pairs of overalls over his trousers for warmth and an extra thick woollen jersey.
The usual route to Fenton was closed. It passed by a bomber station, so they made the circuitous journey in just under two hours. At the factory entrance were many lorries, most of them ten-tonners, some with great trailers each holding a further ten tons of beet, lined up for their turn at the weighbridge. For the method of the British Sugar Corporation was to weigh the loaded vehicles on arrival. Then the lorries went forward to the washing pits, and while awaiting their turn to unload, a sample of beet was taken from them and weighed. The sample, perhaps half a dozen roots, were then washed and weighed again. These few roots were the basis of judgment upon what was earth, or tare, and what was clean beet. Then the sugar-content of the sample roots was analysed, and this stood for the entire load from which it was taken. The higher the sugar-content of the beet, the higher the cash payment.
Phillip had been told that much of the sugar of a root was stored in the thin tail of its end, so if beet were ploughed out carelessly or shallowly, thus breaking off the pig-like tails, one would lose an appreciable amount of money. Likewise if any of the roots which had bolted—or sent up seed-stalks prematurely—were chosen as samples, these showed a small sugar-content, since the sugar had gone into energy for making the seeds: all natural parents feed their offspring before they feed themselves.
While he waited for the pulp due to him so far this season, Phillip watched the samples being taken from the lorry-loads, and afterwards the loads being swept by powerful jets of water, tumbling amidst streams of liquid mud into the washing pits below; whence the roots were carried in the flumes to the machinery which shredded before the extraction of the sugar. A poor root would have only thirteen or fourteen per cent of sugar; while a good crop, from rich land, might have as much as twenty or even twenty-two per cent. Beet grown on the sticky yellow soils of the Bad Lands made every stage in its production, from seed-bed to ploughing out and knocking to remove the dirt, or tare, a problem of cost almost unknown to farmers on the rich black lands of the Fens—that black soil which was the silt of what once were great meres where eels and other fishes, and immense flocks of wildfowl, thronged. Indeed, the currency of the Fens, in the Middle Ages, was based on eels.
However, despite the richness of these Fen Silts, their farmers had their troubles, for such low land was subject to flooding, which at the worst ruined the fertility for a season or more and partly destroyed their homes.
Bert Close had been to the Fenton factory many times before, so while he went to get a ‘cupper char’ in the workers’ canteen, Phillip wandered about, watching the shredding of the pale yellow roots, peering in at the doors of the refining sheds, gazing at the sugar pouring into hessian bags, at the warm pulp being weighed and sacked-up. Thence to find Bert Close and to drink tea with him among other drivers who stared curiously at his blotched face. He remained aloof in this unaccepting atmosphere; the more so because he knew himself still to be a sort of freak. ‘When one farmer works, ten men look on.’
It was now a commonplace in his life, to find himself being eyed by herded men. As they inspected him from furrow-worn toecaps of nailed boots to bare grey head, he tried to appear unconscious of their regard. They themselves wore caps, chokers round necks, flimsy lounge suits marked by oil and other stains, and light shoes with long pointed toes, some broken, others nearly new. Bert Close had told him that they were earning as much as twelve and fifteen pounds a week for their work—two and three times as much as the bomber pilots of the R.A.F. were getting.
Phillip was glad to get away from the canteen, to be loading warm hessian sacks of pulp, with its faint smell of molasses, in the tall dark shed stacked with thousands of those smooth and distended objects.
They returned the way they had come: and after heaving off and stacking the bags on the asphalt floor of the Corn Barn, Phillip asked Bert to come home with him and have some lunch of brown bread and cheese, with pickled eschalots; honey afterwards, he said, and of course a cupper char.
“No thanks, guv,” said Bert, outside the Corn Barn, explaining that he had to take a load of whelks to London that night, and as Poppy would be ‘going alongside of him’ to work the brake-handle of the trailer, she would not be at work on the farm the next day, if he didn’t mind.
That and payment for the haulage being settled, Bert Close drove away, and Phillip walked over the bridge to the farmhouse.
When he got there a policeman was talking to Lucy in the porch.
“Well,” he said, “if it isn’t Police-Constable Bunnied! Have you come to arrest me for beating up law-abiding citizens outside a pub in Crabbe?”
“Why should I need to do that, sir?” he replied, looking at Phillip curiously.
“These marks on my face were obtained in the recumbent position.”
“Ah,” said P.C. Bunnied. After a pause, “I called to ask a few questions in connexion with a matter appertaining to a message received from Mrs. Maddison over the telephone this morning.”
“Come inside, won’t you? It’s cold out here.”
Removing his helmet he came into the parlour, and with notebook before him on the table, looked at Phillip with what Luke called his grin. Luke had not liked P.C. Bunnied. “He’s a grinner,” he once told Phillip, who, for his part, had always found the constable, in his slight contacts with him, to be an amiable fellow, though with a part-baffling manner. He was fixed in Phillip’s mind for two things: one, that in the past he used to ask, whenever they met, when Phillip was going to write an article mentioning that he, P.C. Bunnied, had heard a cuckoo singing all one night while he was on duty in the early summer of 1937; two, that he claimed never to have forgotten some information Phillip had given him in April 1938 that the crisis in Europe would come in the first week of September 1939. (This, it should be added here, had not been Phillip’s prophecy or forecast: he had merely repeated it from an article by Sir Hereward Birkin in the weekly news-sheet of the Imperial Socialist Party. Birkin had declared that the Money Power which ruled Britain must face the possibility of revolution with three million unemployed in Britain by the winter of 1939–40, or go to war to preserve itself from a rival system of European trading which was based not on gold but on the exchange or barter of goods. The crisis would come after the corn harvest, in the first week of September, 1939, Birkin had written.)
“Now, sir,” began P.C. Bunnied. “As you may already be aware, Mrs. Maddison’s cockerels disappeared last night from their fattening pen inside your yards, and at her request I have come here to make some enquiries.”
“I hadn’t the slightest idea that any had been stolen!”
Lucy said that when Matt had gone to feed the cockerels that morning he had found the wire-netting cage inside one of the yards empty except for three young birds which were not fat. She said that the thief or thieves must have known the place well, for they had found their way past the bullocks in the yards to that inner place; and also, why had they carefully selected only those birds which were about ready? She had promised fat cockerels to various friends and customers for Christmas (which was but a week or so away) and now she didn’t know how she could keep her promise.
P.C. Bunnied, who during Lucy’s account had been looking steadily at Phillip’s face, said he would be interested to hear any observations he might like to make ‘appertaining to the disappearance of the cockerels’.
“I’ve no idea.”
“If it were the soldiers in the searchlight camp they wouldn’t have taken all the birds,” said Lucy.
Phillip wondered if the thief were one of his men. But which of them would do such a thing? Besides, they knew they were giving each of them a fat duck for a Christmas box. Even so: could it be Dick? He was rough with his tongue at times, but he was straight-forward. No, Dick wouldn’t do that. Matt? Unthinkable. Jack the Jackdaw? He would be too scared. Besides, Jack was honest. Billy the Nelson, who, although he had left, lived quite near? No, he’d have nothing to do with anything like that. Poppy? Of course not. Steve? No. Then who could it be?
“Black marketeers,” he said. “Poachers. I hear they go round in cars.”
“Yes, sir?”
“It must have been between the time of Matt shutting and fastening the door last night, and going there in the morning,” said Lucy. “He came to tell me about it soon after you had left to go to Fenton.”
At the mention of Fenton, P.C. Bunnied’s faintly grinning gaze returned to Phillip’s face, while he continued to wait, pencil and notebook on the table before him.
“You seem amused. Why?”
“Perhaps you can answer me that, sir, better than I can tell you?”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I expect that you will be able to tell me more about it than I can tell you. I am here at Mrs. Maddison’s request to investigate the matter of her missing cockerels.”
“Yes, I get that much, but I don’t understand what all this circumlocution is leading to.”
“I say, that’s a good word!” exclaimed P.C. Bunnied, admiringly. “Would you mind saying it again? I haven’t seen it in any of your books, so far as I’ve read. You won’t forget to put it in the next one what I told you, will you, sir, about the cuckoo singing all night?”
“I won’t forget. Now, what about the cockerels?”
“I fancy you’d be glad to see the last of Mrs. Maddison’s poultry on your Home Hills, sir? What with all the maggots on the dead hens supposed to be lying out there in the summer?”
“How did you hear about that?”
“I heard it, sir. Josiah Harn seemed to be concerned about your sheep, sir. Perhaps he thinks he’d do better if he had some of your land.”
“So you think I stole—or removed—the cockerels this morning, as part of my private war against the green Spanish fly, and its fascist collaborator, the blue bottle?”
“Very well, sir, since you have asked me, I suggest that these missing birds—you as a writer of words will note that I say the missing birds—are the property of Mrs. Maddison? Now, Christmas is approaching, the season for gifts to be made, or should I say, exchanged.”
“What is it you’re trying to say?”
“Only that I am called in to make enquiries about the cockerels missing from your premises. I receive a certain telephone message at eight fifteen ack emma. On receipt of the aforementioned telephone message, I inform my sergeant at Crabbe. Certain action was taken. You follow me, sir?”
“Like a will-o’-the-wisp, Mr. Bunnied.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” suggested Lucy.
“Thank you all the same, but not on duty, ma’am. I won’t keep you from yours more than a minute. Referring back to the matter of the missing cockerels—again, you will no doubt have noticed, the phrase I use is the missing cockerels—would you like me to arrest the guilty party, sir?”
“Do you know who the thief is?”
“The sergeant and I have an idea. You will notice that it is only an idea. And now I won’t waste any more of your time, sir,” said P.C. Bunnied, as he put notebook and pencil in a breast-pocket.
Phillip’s head was aching, the zigzagging snake was flashing outside his left eye. He felt suddenly exhausted, but forced himself to say lightly, “Do speak frankly. Off the record, if you like.”
“You would like to know, sir? If you ask me, I will tell you. But remember, only if you really want me to tell you.”
“I do. Do you know who pinched our poultry?”
“I have an idea, sir, as I said just now, who removed Mrs. Maddison’s cockerels.”
“Then who is it?”
“You’ve been to Fenton to-day, haven’t you, sir?”
“So you think I’m in the black market! Headline: Farmer Calls in Police to Investigate Theft. Constable Bunnied Names Farmer Thief. Seriously, do you really think I pinched my own cockerels?”
“Mrs. Maddison’s cockerels, I think they are, sir? And if you will excuse my mentioning it, I think you have some points of difference, shall we say, between you and certain habituees of a local public house? Gould it be over payment, or non-payment, for certain goods not previously delivered?’
“Then you think I deal with those blackguards at the ‘Schooner’?”
“It is outside the scope of my duty to remark on your suggestion, sir. And furthermore, I would remind you that neither have I given any opinion as to who stole the cockerels, if they were stolen. Well, I must be going. Good-day, madam, good-day, sir, I wish you a merry Christmas,” and so saying, P.C. Bunnied got up, straightened his tunic, took up his helmet and went out.
When he had gone Phillip asked Lucy who could have taken the birds. She said, “Anyway, someone who knew the yards well must have taken them.”
*
Some time later, Poppy told Phillip that the gang from Lowestoft that had set on him when he left ‘The Schooner’, were ‘going about saying’ that he had let them have the birds to avoid further ‘trouble’.
Chapter 13
IN THE STABLES
The pale moon of dawn hung in the western sky as he closed his cottage door behind him, and set out to feed the farm horses. It was too dark to see the pine trees on the hill-crest, he was late, he was hurrying.
His footfalls in the rimed grasses were the only sounds in a spectral world. He knew the way by hearing rather than by sight. For many mornings on his way to the farm buildings he had followed the path through the paddock to the bridge below which the river moved so slowly that its star-reflections scarcely quivered.
He opened the north stable door and, having carefully closed it, felt his way over the cobbles, hands extended before him, to the oat-bin. There he groped for the match-box, and with eyes tightly closed against the stab and flare of the match-flame held it to the wick of the candle stump in a tin biscuit box lying on its side. Every morning he dreaded that the match-box, so hard to come by, would be stolen. Every morning a wild feeling of relief came to him that it was still in the tin box. Matches were now almost unobtainable. Lucy was allowed by the village grocer only one box, containing forty matches, every week.
The bottom of the tin box was coagulated with grease, scattered with dead matches. Through clenched eyes he winced away from the stabbing power of the candle flame mounting until the cavernous stable seemed flooded with light, and the shapes of three carthorses loomed hugely near. Each one, as he perceived it, appearing to be partly nebulous in the zigzagging pain of his left eyeball.
The stable roof was old, with uneven pantiles, some glass tiles among them. Hearing the burring drone of an aircraft approaching he ran back and blew out the candle. He listened, while the horses remained part of the ammoniacal darkness.
Was it a Heinkel, or a Hudson of Coastal Command? He judged that the beat of the engines lacked the coarse burring exhaust of Daimler-Benz engines, and relit the candle. Its light was now less unkind. The sooner the work was done the sooner he might lie down in the straw and rest. First, to water the horses, lest they get colic.
He re-opened the south stable door and fastened it back against the brick wall outside. The rusty water-tank was down a short slope grooved in chalk and flint by horses’ feet. It was beside the concrete road built there four years before. Rain fed it from the gutters of the cowhouse.
First Sheba the black mare was untied. Before she was in foal to Palgrave Viking she had sometimes been lively. Occa
sionally she had snapped. Once she had bitten his hand, leaving blue marks in the flesh. At morning stables she had been liable to run away, after prancing and slipping on the concrete, while Luke had stood there, wondering how he could get another job. He was anxious, too, lest she fall down and break a leg, and he would be faulted.
But now, visibly larger, Sheba was no longer what David called tisky.
Left alone, she lumbered out. When she came in for her feed in the manger he untied Beatrice, an aged mare, and Toby an even older gelding. While the two animals were drinking he lifted the sieve off its nail, shook some chaff into it, sifted it to remove the dust, added fifteen pounds of crushed oats scooped in the old aluminium saucepan from the rat-proof bin, threw in three double handfuls of damp sugar-beet pulp from the pail, another of sliced swede, and some withered apples. He tipped the mixture into the wooden feeding bins.
It was nearly half-past six. All British clocks which hadn’t stopped were now an hour in advance of Greenwich time, to gain a further hour of light from darkness. In ninety minutes the men would be arriving to take horses and tumbrils to the sugar-beet field.
When Beatrice lumbered in again he fastened the leather halter around her neck and began to groom her. She munched on, enjoying the strokes of the brush on her chronic-itching legs. The candle had been puffed out for economy, and because darkness was more friendly than light. As he worked he was conscious of the strokes becoming slower, of his arms and body and legs seeming to thicken. He leaned against her barrel for momentary rest.
*
What was the time? Could he have been asleep leaning against Beatrice? Chinks of light in the tiles above were visible.
A cock crowed in the distant High Barn yard.
Fear thrust through his heaviness. Then with relief he remembered that the horses had been fed.
He recognized the cock crowing—it was Hawkeye. The gallant bird had not been killed and eaten because it was supposed to be Billy’s pet. The pet flew at nearly everyone from behind and struck them with its spurs. It lived wild in the High Barn with a score or more of white pigeons. The pigeons had come from a stray pair of homers. They had settled there a year or more before. Cats had taken some. They nested up by the wall plate. Perhaps the original pair had belonged to Coastal Command—deserters from the war.
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