At last, Lucy said, it would only be fair to put the four orphaned kittens down on the farm, and feed them on cow’s milk, hoping that they would learn to catch the numerous mice in the granary. Davie and Jonny carried them there, and up the wooden steps to the loft over the granary, where in olden days damp corn was spread to dry.
Eric seemed to know they were there. The next day Lucy found her purring, lying on some sacks on the wooden floor, while they drew nourishment from her. And twice every day Eric walked down the path through the gardens to the granary three hundred yards away, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, and fed Torty’s kittens. As regularly she returned along the path and fed her own.
How the children acquired Eric, or rather how she acquired them, was typical of her complacent nature. Really she had no right at all to live within the farmhouse. She was a squatter. A year or two previously, a small kitten, with tail erect, had strolled into the kitchen and settled itself on the coconut mat by the door. It was an ugly creature, with thin body, upstanding ears, yellow eyes, and its fur-pattern was a mixture of black and brown and grey—it had patches of fur like a rabbit’s.
The children greeted it with cries of joy, and immediately asked if they might keep it. It’s a tom, Mum, really it is, we’re certain it’s a tom. But didn’t it belong to one of the cottages? Oh no, it had been with other kittens in a neighbouring smallholder’s barn, and its mother had driven it away.
“But do you want such an ugly, lean kitten?” asked Lucy, playfully.
“Oh, it is a lovely kitten,” cried Davie, “and already sleeps on my bed. It catches lots of mice that eat our seed-corn, Dad”—appealing to Phillip, who had suddenly appeared.
“How many mice has it caught, Davie?”
“Well, it will catch a lot anyway, Dad.”
“But our seed-corn is now rising green in the fields.”
“Ah, but by next year its muscles will be huge, to catch lots of mice, Dad. It’s a wonderful ratting cat, I’m sure it is. Oh, do let’s keep it! What shall we call him, Dad? You christen him!”
“Well, I don’t mind it being here. How many cats have we on the farm now, fifteen is it, or sixteen?”
“Yippee!” cried Davie. “What shall we call it, Dad? You say.”
“Call it ‘Eric, or Little by Little’.”
“Why that?” asked Jonny.
“You’ll see, bit by bit, darling,” said Roz, with her sweet smile at Jonny.
*
As the days went on, and it became obvious that the cat-kitten had adopted them, Phillip invented for Davie and Jonny a legend of how Eric got the grey fur on her shoulders and flanks. On the Home Hills, which abounded with rabbits, there lived a fearsome old buck whose main object in life was to hunt and kill poaching cats. This fantastic buck-rabbit, he told them, had learned to knock out even stoats by a terrific kick of its hind legs. It had also become mechanised, using a sort of tank in its war against cats. It propelled itself downhill on a rusty old roller-skate it had found on the village trash dump. With its front paws gripping the roller-skate it proceeded at a prodigious pace down the steep slopes to charge upon its enemies, gathering speed and acceleration by huge thrusts of its horny hind legs. Tom-cats fled in fear of it; and the rabbit-like fur on the back of the new cat was a psychic impression of fear, a sort of protective camouflage imprinted there when its future father was fleeing from that fantastic Hitler-buck on a roller-skate.
The boys greeted this bit of unnatural history with exaggerated facial gestures of scorn and sighful boredom; but sometimes Jonny was to be seen gazing thoughtfully at the grey fur patches upon Eric’s body.
Lean, ugly, liable to whine and hiss, and sometimes to strike with paw or even to bite, Eric proved a great ratter; and little by little became the mother of four kittens, whereupon that tisky nature changed to one soft, pliable, and acquiescent; the growl became a purr; hard eyes became soft. Soft? Well at times. Those times were not when one or another of the numerous tom-cats that roamed the gardens looked in upon kitchen or parlour to see what was cooking. Eric saw them off with spits, growls, and savage curving claw-strokes. A dismal lot were the village toms; ears torn, paws maimed from being in rabbit-gins, and all with hard yellow eyes; a race of cats bred in barn and stable, fed (sometimes) on a little milk. All of them exercised their sadistic instincts among the rabbits of the Home Hills, for of course the mythical prophet and great mechanised coney had not yet appeared.
One of the tom-cats, an old, dingy white, depressed object, was a crooner; he attended all courtships, and seeming too philosophical for action, he kept aloof while telling the moon, above the old apple-trees, of the purity of his emotions. Midnight curses, and sometimes empty cocoa-tins dropped to the paved path below the small boys’ bedroom, with the stifled chuckles of Davy, greeted the music of this unpaid volunteer of ENSA after the crooners of the B.B.G. were off the air. The next day the two boys took it a special bowl of milk, whereupon the old cat departed, apparently at peace, for they heard of him no more.
“Perhaps he has gone to London, for cat-skins are now worth money and their carcases, too,” said Phillip. “Oh, I am serious! Some farmers are shooting gulls following tractors this spring, and at least one keeper is sending even hedgehogs, crows, owls and hawks to the London markets.”
*
Now the little grey—original Ferguson tractor—dicker was back in use, Phillip could continue ploughing the Home Hills. On a bright morning he opened his ‘tops’ along the plateau equidistant between two slopes of the old grazings. Once more above the world! Village seen below, with its trees, flint walls and red-tiled roofs. Afar was the blue line of the North Sea, upon which sailed a convoy of small ships. He felt satisfaction that at last the bright breasts of the ploughs were turning up the turf and casting it over. It was sandy soil just there; it was level; the ploughing was easy. His eyes felt clear, the world had colour again. After coming out of hospital healed of the ‘gunshot-wound’ from the commandos, he had obeyed the order to rest, and the advanced royalties for his literary work done in that period had made it possible for Rosamund, Peter, and David to go to schools which their mother approved.
As he ploughed back and forth along the curves of the crest the mat of wild and ancient grasses suddenly became tough. He was on the gentlest slope of the hill, yet even in bottom-gear the engine needed all the compression of its four cylinders. The fifteen-hundredweight tractor was Gulliver among the Lilliputians: hundreds of strong and fibrous rootlets, intergrown and dry, were protesting and holding against the shear of wheeling coulter, and the lift of share and breast. Sometimes the furrow-wheel with its iron spuds turned thumpingly, as the resistance of an extraordinarily strong clump of roots held the plough shudderingly still. Jumping off, he found they were long, thick, dark roots of rest-harrow. Was this how the wildflower with its pink pea-like blooms, had gotten its name of olden times? Rest-harrow, or stop-horse.
The tractor did not rest. A slight lift of the lever, and the hydraulic oil-pump lifted the twin ploughs; the wheels went forward again. Another touch of the lever set the points deeper once more. All the way progress was held up by the roots of rest-harrow going deep into the loamy subsoil.
He saw that he could not hope to penetrate to the rich brown loam at the first ploughing. It took the engine all of its multiple synthetic horses to cut two furrows each seven inches deep. The furrow-slices, too, were by no means tractable. He longed for mouldboards, or plough-breasts of the old East Anglian ‘olland’ shape, by which the slices would have been ploughed up and screwed over nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, and laid flat. Now the furrow slices often wavered behind the tractor before deciding to sit upright, the grassy edge at right-angles to the earth from which it had been torn. Never mind, he thought, snow and frost will subdue those obstinate ribands of turf, and in the spring the new disc-harrows will chop them to bits and press them down. So on with the task, easy in mind.
It was a warm day. The convoy on t
he sea-horizon proceeded with the rolling bomb-reverberations they were used to; for now the tide of war was running faster in its new direction. Long since beside the far coast of North Africa the German armies had streamed in retreat, passing over a thousand miles of sand which once had been the cornfields of a great Empire long ago gone to ruin: to ruin, some said, because Rome in its urban pride had forgotten that the strength and virtue of a race or nation was based on the fertility of its soil. Rape the earth, and human love eventually is purposeless. There remains only the sigh of the sand.
*
In the days that followed, as he ripped up the tough turf of the Hills, he wondered whether Dr. Samuel Johnson, had he been present, would have discovered for his dictionary an original and ironic meaning in a phrase often used among farmers and labourers to describe a stubborn object which temporarily frustrates their strength and ingenuity. Rest-harrow might, on account of roots like tarred ropes, cause a pair of horses to rest, and the ploughman with them, in sympathy; but as every pioneer upon virgin soil must have experienced, an old sod was liable to do more things than merely arrest the forward movement of a plough.
Toiling up a slope of a one-in-four gradient there was a report like a rifle shot, followed by a grating noise. One of the two steel half-axles of the tractor had broken. Six seasons of arduous work on other steep fields, often gouging twenty-pound flints out of a sea-laid chalky sub-soil never disturbed during the millions of years since the recession of waves, had crystallized the steel—broken its heart—so that it had died and gone back to its ancestral crystals.
But all was not lost. At a time when spare-parts of an uncommon type of tractor were no longer obtainable, he had in the storeroom scores of spare-parts bought before the war: and among them was a half-axle. His dejection was equalled by the confidence of Billy who, in the pride of his R.A.F. uniform, came up the hill with the new Ford-Ferguson on rubbers, drawing a trailer with jack-tool-roll and spares. Phillip left him and Steve to it, and strolled away, feeling himself to be a slacker, yet arguing that as the doctors had ordered him to go easy, he would spend an hour or two as a naturalist. Yet was this fair to Billy on so short a leave? He resisted the idea; and lay on his back and rested, for the sun was warm, the air still. But his brain was not used to idleness: no bird-watching could be permitted by the sentry within the skull.
Even so, his body lay as directed upon the sward, and when he returned the new axle had been fitted. Congratulations were offered and self-deprecatingly accepted, and then the tractor was going slowly up the steep slope again, in bottom gear, the driver peering backwards over his right shoulder for the pleasure of watching the turf rising up and flopping over. Always the hand must be on the hydraulic lever to raise the ploughs should the furrow-wheel begin to ‘scrap’, or race in the furrows when the pull of the turf was greater than the two-thousand-four-hundred-pound pull of the draw-bar.
Once the furrow seemed feebly to scream: his heart jumped: but it was only a stone caught between furrow-wheel and scraper. At other times the furrow would smoulder; a dull-red spark glower’d there; smoke fumed out of the damp earth. A flint-and-steel spark had ignited dry roots. Often a strip of turf reared up behind the plough in contortion. Looking back, he saw a green-brown serpentine hesitation which, resisting the pull of gravity, began to unroll like a snake along its length, yard after yard, sometimes as much as fifteen yards, to settle itself as it had lain originally, green side up once again.
And how very obstinate it was! Within its fibrous roots and rootlets it held its own deathly soil, sucked out, mummified, without virtue or fertility. Phillip tore at it with his hands in vain. One scared wood-louse hurried back to the tomb. Would such stuff ever rot? It was beyond all disintegration; a thousand heirs were entombed there; a thousand seeds were dead before they had lived. If the turf had power to strike him dead, he would have been as the sand of the Parthenopian desert hours before.
While he was ploughing cautiously up and down the slope, Matt walked slowly up to see him. Matt had been gone sometime now, but the two men had remained friends. Pleased to see his sensitve brown face, Phillip got off, throttled back the tractor, and gave him a cigarette.
Matt might have been the desecrated spirit of the furrowed Hills, a druid of the vanished thorns. Upon his face was a look of something that had swum the seas before the chalk was raised.
For the last time Hare and Tortoise spoke their lines of comedy.
Hare: “Well, what do you think of it?”
Tortoise: “Yar’r a-doin’ of it, harn’t yew?”
Hare: “What does that mean?”
Tortoise, puffing at Hare’s cigarette: “Yew bruk its back, di’n yew?”
Hare: “Yes, but that axle was already strained and shocked by the flints on the Steep, years ago.”
Tortoise: “It was an’ all.”
Hare: “Shall we get a crop off the Home Hills, d’you think?”
Tortoise: “Yew might.”
Hare: “I might?”
Tortoise “An’ yew might break your neck, too, I’m thinking, ’bor. Fare you well.
And with these words Matt walked away to his Saturday tea with his family, and later a relaxed evening in the Hero Inn. Obviously he did not approve of Phillip having had the ancient trees pulled out; nor did Phillip entirely, for as he clambered into the sack-covered iron seat again, he thought of W. H. Hudson’s story, The Old Thorn, and the Wiltshire legend that only harm would come to one who hurt a whitethorn. Had he likened Matt to a tortoise? Matt had been a tree in some ancient phase of evolution.
Phillip ploughed on without faith; he felt suddenly cold. The chill Arctic Circle air that stole in from the sea about five o’clock daily, struck through his clothes. He walked to the sullen furrow, trying to heave it over with his arms, knowing that if it lay like that it would not rot, but live to grow with greater exuberance, stimulated by the cutting of congested roots. Kneeling down, he soon found it was vain to try and heave over the dull resistance of many hundredweights. There the furrow-slice lay, ten inches by seven inches by fifty feet, a strip unbroken, marked by two parallel lines showing where the disc-coulters had cut the turf.
The black-headed gulls which had been following the ploughing, soaring and sweeping down on white narrow wings, their open red mouths screaming for beetle, mouse, or wireworm, now were drifting disconsolately in the upper air. They were finished for the day. Their brethren had already flown away in silent V-formations to their roosts in the sandhills. Phillip felt suddenly hopeless, and knowing this sign of exhaustion, he got back on the tractor and took it downhill to the hovel where it stood during the night. Then he went home, slowly, thinking of the fair-haired young pilot of the Luftwaffe who had lain in the next bed to his in the hospital ward, with broken legs and arm and other bullet wounds, and how he had thrust his knuckles into his mouth to stop any cry in his throat. Having refused a blood transfusion, he had died two days later, with hardly a sound. And every night young men of the R.A.F. were burning in the roar of petrol flames.
He passed Matt in the village street, coming back from the shop with his weekly ounce of tobacco. He was a faithful old fellow. Phillip remembered how, some years before, when a mine had exploded a mile away on the coast, and a column of smoke had arisen above the woods, Matt had come running to where he was ploughing beyond the skyline, gasping out that he had thought it was the tractor blowing up. Matt felt the land through his whole body, as his forefathers had for a dozen centuries; he did not trust machinery. “What’s it all lead to, guv’nor? Why that!” and he pointed to the four-engined bombers, hundreds of them in the height of the sky, going slowly east over darkening sea to the Rhineland.
*
The following day, making an early start to finish the job, Phillip tried to reverse the stubborn furrows. In vain. The furrow-wheel sank in and churned impotently. Or the slices curled up, reared, doubled, and broke, to choke coulter, mouldboard, and frame. Again and again he had to stop and dismount, to shov
e, kick, heave, and push the contorted furrow-heap apart. Was this work of his ‘complying with the injunction of the War Agricultural Committee to plough in a husbandlike manner’? Well, this husband on occasions had kicked, pushed, and sworn, so perhaps after all he was carrying out the injunction!
Yet on the whole it was not a bad job. He considered that no other tractor, except perhaps a crawler, could have tackled those slopes. Certainly not horses with an ordinary plough, although a special match-plough of the kind used in competitions might have turned a few clean furrows until its share was blunted and wrung.
Some parts of the Hills had to be ploughed along their slopes, sideways instead of up and down. These places were the most difficult. Often the tractor was leaning over at an angle that made him wonder if it would topple and he fall underneath it. It was then that he thought of a Devon one-way plough and a pair of strong horses. He had in the past watched a man with such a team ploughing across the side of a down which rose at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees. The ploughman had begun at the bottom; and at the end of the first furrow he had turned round, thrown over the plough-breast, and gone back beside the furrow, creeping slowly along the side of the hill parallel to the bottom. And so on, all the way up.
Phillip was going slowly round the headland, almost at the end of the job, then the gulls which had been accompanying him suddenly flew up. A moment afterwards six small boys appeared on the skyline. Jonathan, who was the leader, explained that they had been trying to reverse the sullen furrows, and might his gang follow behind the tractor, and push back any furrow-slice before it made up its mind to fall the wrong way? He was nowadays a polite and explicit boy.
“Yes, indeed, and thank you. But you are rather like Blücher at the battle of Waterloo.”
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 45