Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  “Poor old ‘Boy’.”

  “The Captain used to send away for his special paste from a Soho shop what sold all sorts of exotic foods from India and Iceland. He was partial to the Iceland ideas of what made a man a man. I can tell you now, sir, that when you came over to visit him, and he used to mock you in order to start what he called ‘a party’, well, sir, then I knew he had been partaking of his special paté of rams’ testicles. But for all the good they done him it might as well have been Old Mother Riley’s bloater paste.” Rippingall looked around lest he be overheard. “Stefania Roswitz hated ’im, did you know that, sir? She was very struck on you——”

  “I wish I’d seen her when she danced with Nijinsky.”

  “Well, sir, they say speak no bad of the dead, and they’re all gone now. The Captain was a good master to me. I shall miss him. But not that shark’s meat! He took it for the idea it would make ’im young again. But when he read that those heathen bastards in Iceland used to cut it in long strips and bury it for best part of a year before eating of it, he wouldn’t taste no more. ‘Frig me sideways’, the Captain says, ‘you eat some, Rippingall, go on, but first you’ll need a snifter of this schnapps the Icelanders make out of aniseed, and call the Black Death. Goddamit, Rippingall’ he says, ‘by comparison with this shark meat the ripest Camembert cheese that ever crawled off a plate smells like a wild Irish rose.’ So he chucks the lot out to the seagulls, what never come near Marsh Cottage again.”

  And there, that evening, the ashes of ‘Boy’ Runnymeade were scattered.

  Chapter 28

  STUBBLE TROTTERS

  Once again, after a week of corn-carting—nearly a quarter of a million words written, and rewritten in six months—the pollution of sedentary living was sweated out of the bloodstream, and Phillip felt clear and renewed. Children made a team of eight: Phillip’s five, together with Edward; his sister Doris’s two boys; and a young evacuee from London. It was usually coming on to twilight when they finished a long day’s work—stack clothed up; tea cans and baskets collected; shed corn in tumbrils, trailer and lorry scooped up with that under the elevator, and left sacked-up for Lucy’s hens. Then home, a straggle over bridge and along path to farmhouse.

  The electric pump throbbed continuously to fill the kitchen tank as one cold tub after another was emptied.

  Phillip bathed last, stepping gingerly barefoot among barley kernels and prickly harns all over the blue rubber ‘lino’ on the floor. Bathroom left swabbed and tidy—rule for everyone in the house—and so into parlour for cold supper with the chookies, feeling good.

  Were the children being ‘burned up’, as some local critics declared—one had even gone so far as to threaten a report to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children—during the long hours in sun and air and straw-dust? Phillip asked them while they sat at table, “Are you being overworked and ruined by a cruel farmer, chookies?”

  “NO!”

  “How about a bathe in the sea after supper?”

  “YES!”

  If those who criticised, knowing little but imagining much out of their own inactivities, could have heard the instant, ringing response of the children … for it was not physical work that killed, but the criss-cross of frustration superimposed on young life by clashing parental thought-patterns.

  Phillip tried to persuade Billy, when he arrived unexpectedly on leave one sunlit evening, to accompany them to the sea-shore.

  “Not me!” he cried at first, with self-denying defiance in his voice. Billy had been, even as a small child, a shade offset from the others. Phillip thought it was because he knew that Lucy was not his real mother. Once when Billy was very small he had tumbled downstairs while asleep and when his father had picked him up the child was heard to murmur, Find real mummie, and had fallen asleep again in his father’s arms.

  The children and I walked through a dusk softly settling upon hedge and sugar-beet field. The earth was spectral in the wan shine of the moon. A small fragmentary after-glow of sunset glimmered upon white barley-stubble and shadowed line of sheaves. The air was quiet. The day has been one of those rare ones when all life seems harmonious.

  As we strolled on, the sky of cobalt blue became speckled with faint star-points almost to the rim of the marshes—those wide level stretches of sea-lavender and aster channered by creeks opening before us, suddenly. The young night was still and warm, the last gull flown to its roost. A late bee hung quietly on a bending blossom of lavender, clinging to warmth a few degrees above that of the air.

  The water in the creek was now dark blue like the sky. Stars glimmered in the pool. Then it was as though peace had come; for lights leapt brightly in strings down the coast, and along the distant hills of the farm. These were the perimeter lights of the airfield, to guide Beaufighters home from torpedo-operations against shipping along the Dutch coast.

  While the children splash and play and swim in warm water, specks of red and green begin to move down the sky, as though of fishes in an aquamarine dusk. A Beaufighter’s whistling roar is suddenly overhead, as the pilot circles while awaiting orders to land down the flare-path now luminous behind the silhouette of the Great Bustard Wood.

  Another aircraft comes in, a third, a fourth; then the air is quiet once more, save for the cries of children. Jonny is bobbing under like an otter, David performing his curious dog-paddle splash, Roz and Peter running to leap off the cliff of broken-down clay and so into deep water, holding hands.

  A dim figure approaches. “Hurray!” cry the stubble trotters. “Good for old Billy!”

  I felt relief, and so happy.

  Edward waves, for the two are already great friends, and Billy goes in to splash beside him.

  Then we wander home, slowly, across the fields as harvest workers have walked for hundreds of years. Behind us the tide is stealing forward into sandy shallow and silted pit, where dilly-crabs glide sideways to their feeding. Wading birds overhead are crying musically, duck flighting to the sea-grass.

  Having dutifully written the above in his journal—for he felt he was recording details of the war which one day would be part of history—Phillip lay upon his couch, in balance between waking and sleeping, his mind straying to the past seven years. He regretted only one thing, or condition: those moments, and they were many, when he had fallen from the standards he had set himself, and so failed to achieve what the heart desired. He rejoiced in the driving of sinew and muscle beyond the pettiness of fatigue, when true power came upon one, to lift the spirit clear of the entanglements of fear.

  The night drifted with the turning world, owls cried in the valley. The hours passed, while he rested on the edge of sleep until the stars were quenched in the dawn, and another day had begun.

  *

  Up again in the low eastern sun, to find young Jonny already dressed. He was the rabbit boy. With shorts rolled up thin brown thighs, he moved along the edge of the uncut corn and leapt and jumped, notched hunting stick in hand.

  Twelve hours and more in the open air, in the sun burning sun in Leo, he seemed never to tire. Was it the whole-wheat bread which Lucy baked? Not altogether: they were harvesters in harmony. The setting up of sheaves throughout the livelong day seemed to leave them as easy as when they started. Of course the kids weren’t expected to cop into it, as a full-grown man should—setting up five thousand to six thousand sheaves in an eight-hour day—but they got along.

  It was noticeable how a town-child thought differently from a country child. Jonathan did not chatter like some children whose minds had not been left free to think for themselves. He knew how plants grew, why tiles of a roof were lapped upwards, towards the roof-ridge; how to use a saw, and why you must be tidy, else you get in a muddle and can’t do all the things you want to do at the right time.

  The evacuee from the London doodlebug blitz was the eight-year-old daughter of a Jewish ’bus-driver, who had read an article by Phillip in a London evening newspaper and written to the author for help. S
end her by the next train, Phillip replied. How much will it cost, wrote the ’bus driver. Nothing, Phillip answered on a post-card.

  A pleasant, helpful, and modest child arrived the following day. She helped Lucy in the house, and with the hens.

  The flying-bomb blitz was not only upon London. A few found their way to East Anglia. One night there passed over the farmhouse a flaming night-crow charkling across the sky, a-flutter with ragged lilac tail. It burst inland somewhere, and all the pheasants in the wood crowed before Phillip heard the reverberation through the air.

  Edward, like Billy, was a little off-set from the others. If left undisturbed he read the Georgics of Virgil in the original Latin, all day and part of the night; yet he did not always know why things happened the way they did in the country. His idea of rabbiting when first he came was to swing a Scout’s knife on a lanyard round his head while running after one, ready to hurl his weapon as from a sling. Yet he was willing; and the sun was browning him. Daily he became nimbler and more way-wise, as he began to realize that the Georgics had come from living truth.

  After a week he learned to grab a rabbit as it dashed out of uncut corn, or when it hid under a sheaf. But he asked Phillip, while looking at a straw-stack, “Why do you grow straw?”—never having seen a cornstack threshed. He thought that a bracing-wire attached to a post at the end of a wire-fence was put there to prevent someone blundering into the post at night.

  He was shy of Phillip at first, but after a wrestling match on the parlour floor—all against the ‘Old Man’—he ceased to dodge whenever Phillip tried to stroke his head. Phillip had told the children, before he arrived, that he was their brother, and to treat him always as one of the family.

  The corn is still lying, this September 1944, under those many weeks of rain upon the Bad Lands. My corn dollies, once so buoyant as they popped out of the binder—or were thrown out with a jerk, like trolls pushed out of a puritanical pre-1914 home—have suffered much disillusion since the days of their coming-out, when with rustle of new skirts they were set up together in groups, their blond heads whispering together as strong male hands grasped each one by the waist. But the coming-out party has gone on too long; week after week there was far too much to drink. Youth has become aged, the trim waist swelled, hair lost its lustre, some of it has become green—and oh horror, a number of dollies have suffered a sea-change and grown white whiskers.

  In plain Homburg-hat words of the affluent Corn Exchange, Phillip’s barley chitted; and thereby, much of it was unfit for malting. And while the farmer and his children were still wearily flinging open the stooks, cutting some of the bonds to spread and dry the damp stalks, Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s Big Men, now owning combine-harvesters, for more than a month had been in the clear, enjoying their bridge and poker parties at night, and their shooting on grouse moors of the North.

  Rain—wind—blue sky—rain—wind—week upon week. We have walked a score miles in each field, setting up sheaves into stooks; throwing stooks open again, setting up, throwing down. We started to cart; and it rained. We left off and went home, we came up again and were about to begin carting when more rain fell. For five days a mist stayed, and the prostrate sheaves lay wet. Then a hot sun shone, and we turned them over, lest the corn lying next to the ground sprout. We went up to cart; and it rained. A wind blew, and we set up the sheaves yet once again to dry. But more nimbus condensed, this time rapidly, while the water-slain dollies lay huddled together, wedged by the wet for a week, and in that time many lost their virtue and sprouted. So we all went to the pictures to forget it, except Lucy, who had a lot of ironing, mending and pie-making to do.

  That night a great wind arose, and I lay in bed happier, for it was a drying wind and perhaps after all only a few acres of our hundred acres of corn were ruined. At ten o’clock next morning we took up two tumbrils and large green trailer, but hardly had we started when rain drove across from the south-west. The men went back to pulling mud from the grupps around and across the meadows. Unable to write, I prowled about in the studio, examining catalogues of combine harvesters, wondering if our small farm could stand a drying-plant. In peace-time a year’s harvest would scarcely pay the cost under the best conditions; even so, the thought of erecting one made me wince away from the idea.

  I was wondering if I dare buy a second-hand milking machine to be installed in the cowhouse; for our last annual farm profit was little more than one quarter of a labourer’s annual wage. With a Red Poll milking herd, there would be a fair living for Billy after the war, and for his mother in joint ownership for the younger children. Should I write to the farmer at Robertsbridge in Sussex? I flinched from the idea of extra work; also, and this was the deciding negation, I felt myself weakening when I thought of my sister Elizabeth.

  In the still air of early autumn the hammers beat all day, far in the candent sky, as the squadrons flew into the east. The sky was blue glass, white with flaws, as the earth trundled round the sun.

  The rattle of the old-fashioned Albion reaper-and-binder ended six weeks after the fratchy hum of Charles Box’s combine-harvester had ceased.

  The year was already in decline when the last of the stacks were built. It was now near October. Wasps were occasional—sound plums all picked, hollowed ones hanging darkly withered. Half the number of hams on the beams overhead in their linen bags had been taken down during those six weeks, to feed the harvesters of the Bad Lands.

  How Phillip wished that all the corn could have been ‘combined’—dried in blasts of furnace-heat and cold air in alternation—‘threshed out, cashed out’. And that they were about to hold a Horkey in the Corn Barn, with its roof built of ship’s timbers. For it was the idea, or the dream, of years ago—to revive the harvest supper and dance on the oaken floor, laid to rebound the knock of flails, under lanthorns on the high beams overhead.

  But there was little heart for such a thing. There was a chronic subdued feeling within the Island Fortress—the besieged were now more or less withdrawn, each with his or her own desperate vision of fairness, of justice being maimed upon the earth. The war had worn and broken more in Europe than towns and cities, as upon the Bad Lands.

  In the grupps, reeds were beginning to mass once more from bank to bank, causing the water-level to rise nearly two feet, so that much of the grass was water-slain. Also the rushes were re-forming their clumps on the meadows. On the arable, thistles were creeping under the surface. Another weed was increasing itself, too: the tall wild oat which had adulterated the first barley-seed an acquaintance had bought for Phillip in the Corn Hall of Yarwich two years before the war. This seed came from a new firm of ex-seed-merchant clerks trying to better themselves. By 1942 the partners of that firm were riding about in large and expensive American automobiles—not that the cars were bought out of the profits of the impure seed they sold in 1937 to one small farmer. But there the partners were, each with Bentley or Packard, and there was their wild oat, which shed its seeds before the tame corn was cut, as flourishing upon the arable of the Bad Lands as the new firm was flourishing in the black market.

  *

  On Old Michaelmas Day fifty-two farms were advertised for auction in the local paper, now that all that was left of the Wehrmacht would shortly be over Rhine and Elbe. Was there any future for a small farmer in Britain? It looked as though most of the fifty-two in the district thought not.

  Phillip asked Peter, now nearly sixteen and still at school, what he wanted to be. After hesitation Peter replied that he would like to help on the farm, saying surprisingly and endearingly, “I realize that the main burden of the work falls on you, Dad, and that you also must write.”

  What could Phillip reply? That the farm could be made to pay; but that even with the best modern machinery, it would not pay without a new spirit. For a farm did not hold together long when nearly new ladders were left out to rot: ploughs to rust: irreplaceable roller-bearings of tractor-wheels left unadjusted until earth got in and churned them loose and wobbling. Where
was the spirit to do all these things, and by so doing, teach the young by imitation. It was no longer in himself.

  “Fifty-two farms changing hands this Michaelmas, Peter, advertised in our local paper. Fifty-two counties in England. That means two thousand five hundred farmers getting out before the cold draught sets in by the post-war importation of cheap foreign food. No, I’m wrong, Peter! Great Britain now has little gold! London is not a world-financing centre any more. We in England will have to conserve our soil, or die. This means there will be a home market for British farmers, for at least twenty years, Peter. Do you think you and Billy could carry it on after the war?”

  “You mean if you leave us?”

  “I will make all into a trust, including my copyrights, to benefit your mother, and the family.”

  It was decided that Peter should leave school and work on the land.

  *

  Hardly had the stacks been built, when they were opened for threshing. All the corn-cutting, all the setting-up of sheaves into rows of stooks, all the throwing open of stooks to dry the butts before pitching, the loading on lorry and tumbrils, carting to stack, unpitching from lorry and tumbrils, building of stack and thatching of stack—all had to be undone a week or two later, in the dread that unless the threshing was done early, before the rains came, Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s 20-ton tackle would be too heavy to move up to the Bad Lands. The engine alone consumed seven hundredweight of coal and four thousand gallons of water at every stack. Would the seasonal rain hold off and let them finish quickly, so that they could get on with the lifting of the sugar-beet, the carting and spreading of yard muck, the ploughing and the timely drilling of wheat?

  Phillip got a team of twelve together—most of them casuals demanding more money than was received by the regular men—after much persuasion and bicycling by Peter here and there in the darkness after the day’s work. Five of the team were over seventy years of age—one of them indeed was a hero of eighty-eight.