Jonny wandered off and came back a few minutes later, saying, “It must have been a very long time ago we cut this hay, for look at the hen partridge whose head was cut off by the cutter as she brooded her chicks.”
He held out a flatness of bones and feathers, a skeleton light and dry, all the flesh gone.
“I found it lying on the side of a haycock.”
The corpse had been swept up by the hay-rake, and lifted on a fork into the haycock. Wind and sun, ants and flies, had made it but a framework of bone and feather. Peering at the little wreath Jonny said that some of the seeds it had been feeding on were still lodged in the crop cavity above the breastbone. “Dad, do you know, I can see goose-grass, clover, and chickweed seeds.” He mused awhile. “I’d bestways carry it home carefully, to bury it in my pets’ graveyard, seeds and all. No,” he said, looking thoughtful, “for I don’t want weeds in my graveyard.” So he carried it to the hedge, and buried it down a rabbit’s hole.
The ducks came around them. Idly they watched them pushing through the pale green clover leaves. After awhile, remembering what was awaiting them on the farmhouse table, they put the hay-forks in a row under the oak-tree, and went home to a supper of wheaten bread, butter, home-made cheese and home-cured sweet-ham, followed by strawberries and cream.
*
The children had planted the strawberries, the cream had come from Wiverton Sunset, a Jersey cow grazing the grass of the meadow, once a jungle of weeds. The flavour of the strawberries had come from the potash of the open hearth, whereon fires of ‘great old bull-thorns’ had burned for five months without going out.
Asked what had happened to the partridge chicks under the dead bird, Jonny told ‘Ginger’ that Davie had brought them home, put them in a basket with cotton wool in the hot-cupboard, but ‘the little ones died’. So Davie had handed them over to Jonny for burial. The two boys put flowers on the grave every day.
Soon the nightly torrent of sound would be coming from the sky. It was time for the visitor to depart.
“I’ve got only six more ops. to do, then I’ll be grounded.”
*
The hay was saved. The sun moved from the Crab into the constellation of the Lion. Above the harvest fields of Eastern England, as the corn was being cut, American squadrons of Liberators and Fortresses flew east in clear skies, leaving vapour trails to drift and spread tenuous long after they had gone out over the North Sea—to return a few hours later in the afternoon, but rarely in the formations in which they were last seen; and often in lower air.
And in the evenings, when the sun was down over the marshes and the sheepwalks of the coast, dark British bombers began to drone in the deepening colour of the sky. They passed singly; but twenty, thirty, forty were to be seen at any moment, and as they disappeared over the sea scores of others were coming up out of the lingering light of the west. Sometimes it was night as they passed overhead, and the children heard the beats of thousands of engines merging into a torrent of sound that filled the parlour where they sat behind black curtains, while the panes of the leaded casements trembled and tittered and at moments all the pantiles of the roof seemed to be moving together. Then the children would look up from the table where they were playing cards or writing or making models; and Phillip would look at David, and he would say quietly, ‘I know’, and his ‘I know’ would still the others, for ‘Ginger’, now with a bar to his D.F.C., was doing his third tour of ‘ops’; and thinking of him, the weight of the world lay momentarily upon them.
Both the U.S.A., and the R.A.F., bombers were suffering heavily at this period of the war. The Germans were producing cheap and specialised fighters to combat the slower, heavier and more expensive four-engined bombers; and they were shooting them down, day after night, and night after day.
The sunflowers are almost ripe in the garden. They all come from a single head of a sunflower found on the tide-line of the marshes; I brought it home and tilled the seeds myself.
The air is filled with bees’ happy humming. A bee lives a full life, it flies about a hundred sorties from the hive before its wing-tips fray and its work of getting honey for the hive is over. With what eagerness does it scramble in its heyday, over the brown, rich head of a sunflower, and take pollen, and honey in the bright air and light of its being.
The honey-bee knows no regrets; it dies as it lives, in the spirit of comradeship; its immortality lies in the truth that the race lives on.
This morning we heard that ‘Ginger’ has gone down with his crew—what they call ‘the chop’.
Chapter 24
THE SWILL KING
To give him experience, Phillip asked Boy Billy to buy two pigs from Josiah Harn, of the village smallholding which was bursting at the seams. Josiah Harn had for long suffered from land-hunger; now he was ravening. He had two sons in the Services while his eldest son looked after the increasing herd of cows. This son was married, and had the village milk-round. The father owned scores of pigs on the two acres. They were looked after by Powerful Dick, who had left Phillip for more money. There was a boiler for the swill; and much grunting and squealing behind fences of corrugated iron. Regularly heavy loads of fat pigs went to the Food Ministry Graders. It was now October.
“Now get two good little ‘stores’, Billy. Take the brown trailer and the pig net. And be sure to ask the price before you buy.”
“Okay.”
“Mr. Harn will probably say, ‘Oh, I won’t be nice about the price. I’ll see your father some time.’ But insist on asking the price before you bring the pigs back.”
“O-kay, I heard you the first time.”
When the pigs had been brought to the pen in the stables Phillip enquired the price.
“Harn said he would see you about it. He said he wouldn’t be nice about the price.”
“But I told you he would play that trick. Why didn’t you ask him again?”
“I did ask him, more than once. He wouldn’t say. I did try to get him to say, but he wouldn’t. All he said was, ‘We won’t fall out about that!’ I did give him your message! I knew you’d be like this, whatever I did! I’m off!”
Yes, Phillip knew it was unfair of him to have matched Billy against a man of exceptional pertinacity, who had watched the local markets of the last fifty years for chances to take a profit, however small, to increase his capital.
Harn has the pale blue eyes of the Denchman—the Danish invader—eyes lacking the generous deeper blue of imaginative Saxon or Celt, eyes the pale blue of the cunning coruidae. That cold resolution broke the Celt in the invasions; it broke it now. Fleeing from another adult male image of selfishness, Billy pedalled swiftly to the local cinema.
“Damn and blast the fellow,” I said to Lucy, quiet witness of the clash. Hearing the rapid clip-clop of hooves coming up the tarmac slope of the road, I sprang from my chair in the Studio, from the pages of manuscripts altered and added-to and deleted in various coloured inks on the table before me, to hear myself saying amiably ‘How d’ye do’ to the tall and upright man nearly seventy years of age, who by constant work and careful living had preserved his vitality.
Seeing me, he pulled up at once. His face was impassive as always, the pale blue eyes only in movement upon it until with raised vertical digit finger of right hand he observed the formal greeting. All the Harns were noticeably polite. I never heard a voice raised, except on that occasion when land-starvation cried its protest of the weedy Hubert. The three sons were invariably cheerful. They had a pleasant, kindly mother. The Harns deserved to get on.
“Good morning, Mr. Harn. About those two store pigs. I asked my son to get the price from you. He said you would tell me.”
“Ooh, we won’t fall out about that, squire.”
I knew by his address that he intended to swindle me. “No, of course not. But I’d like to know now, if you don’t mind.”
“Ooh, I’ll hev to look up what pigs make at Michaelmas market.”
“You’ll let me know soon, without
fail?”
“Ooh, we won’t fall out about that.” Harn drove away. The Celt in me was defeated. A saying in the village—‘Harn by name and Harn by nature’.
Phillip returned to his pages, trying to convince himself that by keeping away from the farm, and becoming inactive in order to write regularly at his desk, he was doing his duty in thus providing the means of a proper education for the younger boys. It was a dull November day. With a certain happiness he became as a broody hen once more, set upon inked paper. For weeks he had been writing, except for sunny breaks when he had forced himself to work in the garden or help on the farm from about nine in the morning until ten at night, while possessed by a feeling that all was now foredoomed to failure. This writing gave the only satisfaction in a phosphoric existence.
Yes, Billy has lacked the true warmth for true growth from me. With this lack he has had to cop on with his work, to become progressively wearier and near to exhaustion, and still have to work on, unrelieved and, finally it must seem to him, without purpose. Billy is, in part, crystallised. The knowledge, at an early age, that Lucy was not his ‘real mother’: the attitude of his father to Lucy, and also to the war: the attitude of the village boys, some driving larger, faster tractors—even magnificent crawlers drawing eight-and ten-furrow ploughs—to the ‘little grey dicker’, so small, slow, and—unusual: the knowledge that his father was different from other boys’ fathers—all this Billy has borne: but when Dad had gone beyond mobbing Mum, and even knocked her down and drawn blood with his fist, Billy’s crystals, whenever he thought of it, were cutting into his brain. Again and again the same picture must come into Billy’s head—of himself going away, right away for ever and ever, farther and farther away, until at last he is utterly alone, in a wild remote place where no one will ever find him; and where, seeking a hole under some rocks, he can crawl, deeper and deeper into darkness, and lie still and slowly die, and his body never be found, for ever and for ever.
I know Boy Billy so well, for he is me.
At long last the Swill King sent in his bill. The price he had charged was half as much again as that published, at the time of sale, in the local paper for ‘stores’, i.e. pigs before they are specially fatted for the butcher.
Every Tuesday Lucy presided over the Farm Committee. Phillip, as manager, laid down the programme for the following week, weather permitting. Billy, as field-foreman, was supposed to carry out the manager’s orders, which were given after a free discussion. At the end of the week Billy was supposed to report on all work carried out.
“Harn had overcharged for the pigs,” Phillip reported to the Chairman. “That is my fault. I should have gone with the field-foreman, knowing Harn’s reputation for low cunning. May I ask the Chairman to enquire how the pigs are getting on. The orders were that they be fed on barley-meal mixed with a little beet-pulp soaked well in advance.”
“How are the pigs doing?” asked Lucy.
“All right,” said Billy.
“Mr. Chairman, they must be ready to go to the butcher by early April, at the latest, so that the hams and flitches can be cured before the blow-fly is about. Otherwise they may get maggots. And even the smoking of hams by the butcher at Wordingham doesn’t always kill the blow-fly’s eggs.”
“They’ll be fat,” said Billy.
“What are you feeding them on?”
“Barley-meal, as you ordered.”
One evening while the three were in Committee, Jonathan came in and said, “‘Ackers’ wants to see Dad.” Phillip went out and saw the stockman standing by the Studio door with unhappy face. ‘Ackers’ said he didn’t want to go on. He would ask for his cards on Friday. There were tears of frustration in his eyes.
“My pigs can only just stand upright. All they hev to eat is pulp, an’ with all that barley going to waste in the Barn! What would they say in the village, if my pigs were seen like that? Josiah Harn is saying the land ought’r be taken over by the War Committee!”
The minute book, recording an extraordinary meeting, recorded that no barley had been ground for the past two months, that the pigs had never been fed on barley-meal, that they were suffering from rickets, and were little more than skin and bone. If they did not die they would be between two and three months late for the butcher. “The blow-fly will be about then, Mr. Chairman.”
The Chairman ruled that blame for the neglect lay equally between manager and field-foreman. Asked further to enquire why false reports had been made by the field-foreman, the reply was, “That is a question I should, perhaps, ask the manager.”
The manager accepted responsibility.
The field-foreman offered his resignation. He was reminded that because of his indispensability he was reserved from service with the Forces, provided he remained on the land.
So Billy feels that his escape-route is blocked. I think he has more of my nature in him than of his mother, that equable, nonpareil young woman now effaced from the world in whose movements I exist. For the dead are faceless—or almost so—in memory. It is so with friends not seen or heard from in years. What of Piers Tofield, once my best friend? Is he alive or dead? He went two years, or worlds, ago to the Far East.
Owing to shortage of labour, many farmers were now compelled to use Italian prisoners-of-war. The contrast between Italians, en masse, and the German prisoners, was wide. For one thing, most of the skrimshanking Italians had switched allies, to be on the winning side. They were no longer Collaborators—a word of contempt—with Germany, but Co-operators, a term of regeneration. They wore the words Allied Italy embroidered in red on the shoulders of their khaki tunics, and about forty of them arrived on the Bad Lands every morning under a British corporal. These so-called Co-operators did little or no co-operation. They lay about under hedges most of the day, talking and carving rings, cigarette cases, and other souvenirs from aluminium picked up and hacked off crashed American bombers. The objects were skilfully made, and found a ready sale among the civilian population owing to the scarcity of almost every kind of fancy and utility goods in the shops. Others spent their time digging out rabbits, and snaring and trapping small birds—wrens, blackbirds, finches, robins, and thrushes. Hedgehogs, pheasants (if any remained) all went into their cooking pots. It was useless to speak to the British corporal in charge of these Co-operators.
They had come, officially, to spread muck on the Higher Brock Hanger. By the end of each day they had done less work than was done normally by one English labourer. So Billy spent each day by his idle tractor waiting for another half-acre to be spread, while talking to one or another of the Eyeties.
One morning, between eleven o’clock and noon, I walked up to the Brock Hanger with my part-time gardener, Joe, who had been wounded on the beaches of Dunkirk. He has offered to be my Steward, saying that after the war he will make it into a first-class farm. “I’ve seen what you’ve done already, and know you’re a man after my own heart.”
“Come and see what it looks like now, Joe.”
When we reached the Higher Brock I saw thirty or so Co-operators lying about in the field, while the remainder were combing the woods for anything alive. Billy stood by the hedge, trying to start the tractor engine. The engine would not fire; it was in poor shape through neglect, which in turn was due to fatigue on the driver’s part. And I am not blameless: indeed we are all, in Europe, victims in kind of the world of attrition and darkness.
The rest of the tractor showed neglect. Recently new roller bearings were fitted to the front-wheel stub-axles. Both wheels were now loose. Earth and oil had made a grinding paste which had worn away both rollers and stub-axles. Each wheel had almost two inches of sideway play. The engine plugs were oiled up. (It’s still my habit to put clean plugs, after sand-blasting at a garage, as weekly replacements every Monday, in the oil-shed.)
While Joe and I were finding several other causes for nonstarting—carburettor float-chamber gauze clogged, whence petrol starvation; distributor points dirty—Billy was lounging in his ragged
overalls on the guard of one wheel.
Joe then looked at the magneto. On it were glinting marks where a spanner had struck it. He opened the dented cover and found the make-and-break rotor-arm was cracked.
The broken rotor-arm could be replaced: there was, or should have been, a spare in the workshop. I hurried down to fetch it. The arm was not there. Most of the other spare parts, which I had laid out on a table, were missing. The workshop itself was chaos like Lucy’s brothers’ Works of nearly twenty years before: hopelessly untidy, the effect of muddle.
I felt my strength running out, and was unable to search further. The rotor-arm had been labelled, with all the other spare parts, for immediate use when required. I stood there, feeling stifled in my own darkness within the shaded room, and again the idea to end my life came upon me. But habit took charge. I returned up the ride through the woods to ask Billy where the spares were.
I spoke to him quietly, while he lounged before me with a sort of sickly-sneering look on his face; and because I, too, had come to a condition of lost self-respect, my resistance broke for the second time since the War.
I remember saying something to him, and hearing his surly reply, as he clenched his fists. I said, “Stand to attention when you speak to me!” and then I was dimly aware of falling to the ground. The large aluminium ring on the third finger of his right hand, made by one of the Italian prisoners, had caught me on the cheekbone. I was down only for a few seconds, while imagining, beyond the red haze before my eyes, my hands holding the long hair of his head and banging his skull on one of the iron spuds of the tractor wheel.
As I got to my feet Joe placed himself between us, saying, “Come on, sir, two blacks never yet made a white,” then he turned to Billy, and told him sharply to get on with his work. Taking me by the arm, he led me away.
When I saw Lucy I explained to her that the tractor wouldn’t start, that while swinging the handle the engine back-fired and the handle was flung anti-clockwise, striking me on the cheekbone. She said I must see the doctor for an anti-tetanus injection. I replied that it was enough to rub in some permanganate of potash. Having done this, I returned with Joe to the Brock Hanger, and told Billy he could have a week’s holiday. I would take over the ploughing for him.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 42