Phillip understood the reluctance of good grassland farmers to destroy their established swards by ploughing, for he had come from a country of lush pastures made by warm sunshine and nourished by frequent rains. The east of England, however, was not grazing country. Sixty-four inches of rain fell on average every year in the West for twenty-two in the East. The West Country was famous for its cream and beef; the Eastern Counties for malting barley and sugar-beet—and for pheasants and partridges. The chicks of game birds survived in dry East Anglia because their tiny hind-claws seldom became clubbed with sticky soil, which caused them to fall behind and so be lost and to die of exposure. Owing to the rainfall and the warm Gulf Stream airs over some of the grazing fields of the West, those lush pastures earned in rent in half a year a sum that would have bought outright more than twice their acreage in East Anglian arable land, during the greatest depression in over a century.
South Devon is a warm region. The air is soft, the speech is soft. The rain falls and the sun shines. The grass is green in the West when it is parched in the East.
Before the war I used to get in the Silver Eagle and cross England from the East Coast to the South Coast in a day. I left the shining North Sea in the morning as the sun was rising beyond Sweden, and came towards evening to Dartmoor with its distant views of the Channel lying under the vast glory of an Atlantic sunset. All day with the sun, running over nearly three hundred miles of England!
The sun rose through the oak and pines of the Home Hills, it drove a stupendous shining furrow across heaven, it sank in glory behind the western sea and Labrador; and hardly were the dull bars of a midsummer sunset quenched before the morning star was glowing in the east, leading up the sun again to shine upon my hilltop above the Channel.
In those days of comparative peace, in the journeys from coast to coast, whenever I stopped I heard the dialects varying with the soils: from the shrill, hard, quick, clipped coastal speech of the East winds and sandy soils, to the slow, burring voices of the rainy soils of Devon. Yet in those days the red soil was discernible only in occasional fields, where roots were being grown to feed the cows in winter; otherwise there was little ploughing in the West Country. Half a million visitors every summer wanted half a million pounds and more of Devonshire cream a week, and who was going to bother about growing oats or barley bringing in a gross return of £5 an acre, costing all but four-fifths of that sum to grow, when an acre of grass by the sea might yield £100 each summer as a caravan site, or £50 in milk and cream? And if you were particularly easy-going, and couldn’t be bothered with milk or visitors, your hundred-acre farm was looked after by one man, whose job it was to attend four score bullocks which would fatten themselves merely by walking about, and then lying down to chew the cud. Agricultural depression in Devon? Noomye! There was no culture of the fields; and a corresponding absence of culture in the villages; for hard work and craftsmanship go together.
Why bother to cut the thistles? Everyone had plenty of money. Missus took in visitors at four or five or even six guineas a week, and the visitors were well-satisfied, returning year after year. The coastal districts were crowded. In the old market towns farmers did business, arriving in pony-traps or motorcars and sitting hours in the taverns. “How’s business?” “Mustn’t grumble! Us gets along, zummow!” The grass grew; that was their farming. There were no complaints. The harrows and the ploughs of the 1914–1918 war had almost rusted away in the corners of fields, hidden by nettles; or were perches for flea-ridden hens in the broken-down linhays and barns.
Thus the period between the two export-or-die trade wars of our times. But now, when the second internecine struggle was on, what a difference in the fields of England! What a change even by 1941, when I had gone to work in the oak-woods. Hundreds, thousands of acres of corn laid flat on the ground: plants of oats and barley, over-fed in rich bullock-dunged turf ploughed under, were unable to stand up on their stalks. During that harvest field upon field of over-fed corn had to be cut with the scythe. The view east from my hilltop had been over thousands of fields of yellow corn, receding into the summer haze of the distant Chase. The radiant heat of the sun reflected from the straw had everywhere given the illusion of old-fashioned times come again. The sickle, the sheaf, and the breast-bone burned black.
In the early spring of 1943 there came an opportunity to start work on the Home Hills. First to be cleared was what Jack the Jackdaw called the great old bull-thorns. These trees, which for many years had worn a mantle of creamy white blossoms in May, had endured the bitter winter winds of a century or more. They were gnarled and black of trunk. Their branches and twigs grew thick and matted. Their limbs were set with long thorns which left a blue mark in the flesh they pierced. Abyssinian doves pleached their raft-like nests among the white blossoms, the June air was a-throb with the love-notes of Shakespeare’s gentle turtle.
Phillip had doubts about cutting down those white thorns. Might he not be a vandal to Nature? But the grass must be renewed. He decided to leave one here and there, the shapeliest trees, so that when the corn was rising green he might see and smell the creamy blossom of the may, while looking down, from the new farmhouse-to-be on the top of the Hills, upon the greensward of his park. The Searchlight Camp had its artesian bore, for water, where he had planned the new home, after the war.
As usual, he was a little trepidant after so prolonged a waiting to begin clearing the thorns on the Home Hills. The job was not an easy one. Sharpening his axe, he went out one morning to throw the thorns. After he had shredded the first fallen tree—it took a long time to do, with its seven intergrown trunks and his muscles unused to throwing an axe-head—he went home, and over a pint of tea thought that what was needed was one of the bull-dozers that were levelling thousands of miles of hedges upon the circum-adjacent airfields. But such a luxury—the hiring price was £50 a day—was not for small folk like himself, certainly not in war-time; so he thought to telephone Mr. Gladstone Gogney, and ask him if his tackle would come and pull out the trees.
Mr. Gogney on the telephone said he was willing to oblige a man like Captain Maddison.
A few days later the engine arrived. It chuffed and chugged sideways up the grassy northern slope of the Home Hills, and came to rest, panting. To the monster was attached a great steel hook at one end of a cable with a breaking-strain of fifty tons. The cable went round the first great old bull-thorn, and the hook lifted to sneck the loop. Snorting, the engine began to wind-in the cable; the greasy grey length slithered over the turf; the strain was taken; the fly-wheel moved round slowly; the cable tautened.
Almost angrily the engine coughed. There was a shriek, a crack, and the trunk was being hauled forward, splintered salmon-pink above the root. It had started. How pleasant to be a mere spectator!
Lesser trees yielded more easily, coming out of the ground with most of their roots, to be dragged on their sides with two or three tons of soil at their bases. Each left a crater like that made by a small bomb of the kind dropped by Heinkels in those far-off days of 1940.
By the end of the second day sixty-four trees were on their sides. The cable, which had snapped nineteen times, was now irreparable. So the great thorns were left, for the soil on the matt of roots to dry and fall off.
*
There were about ten acres altogether of the Home Hills. The varying slopes lay north, west, and south. The official trowel had prodded and scooped, the official bag had carried away for analysis a light sandy soil deficient in phosphate and considered able to support one crop of rye only. This opinion had been given before the thorns had been wrenched out with arboreal shrieks and groans. It was only when the root-craters were visible that Phillip saw to his delight that below the shallow top-soil of sand lay a brownish-red medium loam similar to that of the Nightcraft field over the eastern hedge. There were pockets of sand in the Hills, for the rabbit burrows were yellow with it; there was also gravel, for on the western slope lay a saucer-like depression which was obviously an old pi
t covered by grass; but under most of it, not too deep for the plough, lay that lovely brown loam.
It was curious how the soil was sandy among the roots of the congested grasses. As he broke it up in his fingers—a blackish sandy mould—it occurred to him that this ancient colony of grasses had, during the centuries, eaten all the heart out of the soil, leaving only indigestible sand. None of the original clay was left, only small grains of rock called sand amidst the centuries’ wreckage of dead roots. Under that layer or compost a fine medium soil was lying ready to be enlivened by sun and air and rain.
*
“At least the thorns lying uprooted on the Hills will make a grand beacon if the war ends suddenly. Think of it, children, the greatest bonfire on the East Coast. Sixty-four dry thorns, some with trunks eighteen inches thick. What a blazing beacon we shall have!”
The east winds incessantly swept over the Hills. The wood was drying out. It must not be allowed to become hard for the axe. Tree by tree the main branches were lopped off, the lesser branches piled and burned, the limbs and trunks laid in cords to await carting to the circular saw. For a week Phillip’s friend, the Bengal Lancer, came to help; but the winds were cold, and he was away in his mind while he worked. Indeed, though Phillip did not know it then, he was a dying man. When he went back to London, Phillip worked on alone, sad that the dear man was gone.
Day after day he worked until the Hills were cleared, except for a few trees which the engine-driver, with his ragged lengths of steel-wire cable tied together, had not dared to tackle. Standing on the slope, the fifteen-ton engine might have got out of control, or even turned over.
*
When he came to clear the hedges round the Hills, he found that they had spread in places from the original boundary as much as ten yards into the grazing. In one thicket he found the rusty remains of four barb-wire fences, each several yards from its predecessor. Within the brambles and blackthorns lived scores of rabbits, which had spoiled the grass during the neglectful twenty years between the wars. Gradually the thicket was cleared, but most of the roots were left in the ground.
He spent several days making fires on the root-stubs, to kill them. The fires had to be doused every evening because of the black-out, and relit every day. Even so, the roots remained; and when he took the tractor with the deep-digger plough to rip up the worst area, he was afraid in some places to risk breaking the hydraulic linkage. Elsewhere the furrows were rough, mere tangled heaps of roots of bramble, briar, and lesser thorns. The soil under the turf looked dead and dry, as though neither air nor rain had penetrated there for centuries. A bare-fallow would work wonders. He thought of scorching sun and desiccating air, then mellowing rains to turn that ugly soil to a living tilth.
Where the wheels of military lorries and guns had cut up the turf in the past he cultivated those torn places, leaving a loose soil on which he broadcast a few handfuls of trefoil and rye-grass, then rolled in the seeds and waited to see what happened.
What he saw, after a rainy spell in late April, followed by sun, was exhilarating. Along those irregular bands of new land the trefoil and ryegrass grew luxuriantly. He went there again and again to look at the new plants for the pleasure they gave. This was what he had dreamed of! In his optimism he imagined the park-like slopes of green grass and clover, the walnut trees he would plant, the pedigree redpoll cows grazing happily; while the old thorns he had left for beauty’s sake were mantled with white blossoms in May, awaiting from Abyssinia the happy turtle-dove. In the sight was peace, and rest, and beauty; but even as he looked the sky was being torn by the vapour-trails of bombers flying east in the height of the sky, and filling the valley with deep bourdon.
When the aircraft were gone hope was renewed as his feet pressed upon the old turf. It was springy with rest-harrow and wild thyme and a strange thistle, the leaves of which were low on the grasses in the shape of a star. The flower was a purple-red and grew lower than the grasses. Had a thousand generations of sheep taught the hill-thistle its habit of self-protection? In the old days of free wandering over field and moor in Devon he would have admired it, and been glad that a small unit of life was enduring by its own strength and tenacity; but now he was a farmer dreaming of silk-coated heifers grazing there. He saw the legions of dwarf thistles as obstacles that must be obliterated. There were other thistles, too; the creeper—the carline—the musk—the tall spear. The creeping thistles were in colonies. Even they found it hard to push their roots through the dense and intertwined fibres of that ancient turf.
Thyme grew on the slopes of the Home Hills, with eyebright, bedstraw, and sulphur-yellow cowslips. Where rabbits had scratched the dove’s-foot crane’s-bill could bloom. He was sorry that these wild flowers would cease to be: no more harebells in July, to tremble on their slender stalks, azure as summer sky in the breezes of the uplands. But a farmer had little time or inclination to admire or identify himself with wild flowers, or birds which passed over the hill. He was a man driven by the nature of his calling to desire only the sight of corn growing where it had never grown before.
I enjoy my solitary work. The axe-edge is ground keen; the cords of wood lie neat upon the sward; the fires are made on the thickest nettle patches. I leave the regular work of the farm to Billy, after giving the orders in the morning. I spend contented hours by myself.
This morning I abandoned all thoughts of work and wandered off to a distant part of the farm, to sit under the northern edge of the Great Bustard Wood, among the shadows of the tall pines cast in front of me upon the Scalt barley. There I re-read my first letter from Melissa since she had left England. Near me was the new pressure-creosoted gate, with its posts and rails set across the drive between the hangers of Bustard and Brock.
I felt estrangedly happy, sitting there under my woods, or hangers. Hanger sounded like a Scandinavian word, I mused, as the wind, moving over the barley plants of the Scalt and coming from the sea, stirred the leaves of ash and sycamore above my head, and sang with the old wild dreaminess through the pines. I wondered why the word hanger was so attractive to me, and why it occurred insistently to my mind on this lovely day. No human movement anywhere, no sight of man in any of the fields or marshes or sands lying away to the northern horizon. No boat or ship in the creeks, or on the ocean. No motorcar or truck moving on the road by the distant river.
The air was cold and fresh with the early morning. The only movement was of a wood pigeon flying from the Lower Hanger to the wood down by the meadow. It probably had a nest in one of the tall sycamore poles there. The five-acre wood lay between the new and the old river-beds. It grew on a peninsula, joined to the mainland-meadow by a tongue of land only a few yards wide.
This was one of those rare mornings, which since the war I have known too seldom, when I feel myself to be at one with nature, harmonious with the sweet summer day. For I have nothing to do. The sugar-beet plants have been singled, and now are being scored, which means that the late-growing weeds are being struck out between the plants, which are roughly ten inches apart along the ringes or rows. The hay is rising. The corn is growing (tho’ a bit patchy). The beasts are on the meadows, enjoying the flush of grass. So here sit I, musing on the fascination of the word hanger when into my mind comes a picture of a hammer-pond, and with a pang I am again living with the strange boy who has a hut in the woods, who set night-lines for the tench in the deep, shaded water, who knows the owls and even keeps tame ones, calling them in the twilight. Who is this boy? He is very dear to me, with his rabbit-skin cap and wonderful way of cooking dampers on the embers of his fire. Once upon a time I lived with him and accompanied him everywhere; and how sad when the last page of the book was turned! For he is but a boy in a book, and the book an old-fashioned school-story, and I suppose I read it when I was seven or eight years old. The hammer pond was in a deep Sussex wood, where iron had been mined and smelted for the cannon of ships that fought the Armada. The deep Sussex woods, the noble downs planted with beech rings, the beech hangers
in dark blue or green according to the distance across which they are seen. The blue hill above the wild thyme growing upon ancient sea-chalk.
And now across the near-viewless abysm of time, remote from an innocent age, I am sitting by my own hanger, and I wonder if in the course of time my children will dream, as once the small boy, out of which this thing called ‘I’ has grown away and away, once dreamed. Will they, too, find enchantment in the thought of the hanger growing along the chalky spur rising steeply out of the meadows? Will memory for them be a dream of happy sunshine when in due course they become other worlds, each of his, or her, own? Perhaps to revisit their eldest brother Billy now and again, perhaps in annual reunion upon these fields, beside the woods of childhood where the wild sweet violets grow? Or is it to happen all over again, as it happened to the small boy who after a war flung himself violently away from a home in which all seemed to be strained and discoloured by antagonism and fear?
The wood-pigeon which pitched in the River Wood is reassured. It flies out of the sycamores, rises high, and falls gliding. It flies up again, claps its wings and falls, before beating up into the hanger. There, not far from where I sit, it sends soft notes of joy into the freshness of the morning.
A pair of snipe were nesting, or about to nest, somewhere on Denchman Meadow, which had a rushy depression which could not be drained, since the river-bed was higher than the meadow there.
As a small boy it had been Phillip’s ambition to find a snipe’s nest. He had searched during every spring of his schooldays, but was not successful.
While he was in the workshop one afternoon, there was a sudden burst of small-arms fire, the gruff reports of bursting grenades, and white parabolas of smoke rising above and falling below the trees of the Meadow Wood. The Battle School had once again come upon the farm, without notice or warning, and were using live ammunition. One of the cows, an Ayrshire heifer with her first calf, had been wounded.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 38