“Yippee!” cried David, as they got beyond the channel and felt the mud of the cockle-bed squeezing between their toes.
Another minute, and they were safe. It was easy too to get marooned among the channered creeks and wandering guts scoured by the sea, and find oneself cut off by the stealthy and infiltrating tide. All around one grew blue grass, sea blite, sea-holly, and plants of sea-lavender. One heard, near and from afar, the sad piping of wading birds, as though within their feathered bodies were spirits grievous that water found nowhere any rest upon the land it had helped to make. Everywhere from the sky fell the songs of larks. The soil under the mass of low-growing vegetation was clay, stored with the humus of a thousand centuries of dead plants.
Many places along the coast the Maddison children explored with their father during the last year of the war, sometimes biking on top of walls built to keep out the sea. Behind the walls were grazing and arable fields, made from the reclaimed marshes, the wandering guts and channers filled in. Heavy crops of roots and corn were taken from the rich soil.
But on the marshes the land was still elemental, and to wild life. Flat fish—very fat ones—called butts, were plentiful in the creeks. Steve, the beachcomber, was also a fish spearer, and brought to his cottage many a plateful of butts.
The maritime plants lived through gales that would wreck more tender land plants. They endured the surges of the sea, which at times of full moon, and when driven by a north-westerly gale, thundered over the marshes, covering them deeper than a man is tall, and, sometimes, invading the coastal fields, piling up barriers of maritime litter and killing all life with its residual salt.
Farther down the coast tall barriers of steel scaffolding stood, erected during the 1940 threat of invasion. The lower and more rusty tubes were clotted with tidal jetsam; but surely the guts and channers were a natural barrier against tanks?
Another bright idea of ‘Tiny Tinribs’, the G.O.C.-in-C. of those days, was to have road-barriers erected round corners, to surprise an advance motorised invading force. Many an R.A.F. type, motorbiking back to his station, or soldier to camp, was wrecked thereby in the dim nights of ‘War House’ wind-up.
Village children, running to the ‘mashes’ with happy cries, lost themselves in the spirit of the elements which made them. Their mothers and fathers found health and occupation in the cockle beds beyond the marshes, on the rich, slippery, grey mud.
One woman in the village used to go there when she was ninety-three years. She was enclosed within many old skirts to keep out the east wind which moved with its icy lisp across the flats even in bright summer weather. How terrible, a visitor once said, that the poor old woman had to get a living in mud, and at her age! The truth was that Grannie Baker had enjoyed herself since a child on the ‘mashes’, where she was happy as any bird.
During the war village children found the marshes to be a happy hunting-ground for pieces of ‘target’. All day and every day for years red drogues were towed to and fro by airplanes, while gunners practised, filling the sky with little black puffs of smoke. Sometimes a target ceased to crackle through the air; it paused; to sink slowly down from the sky. Then one heard far-off cries, and saw little figures, moving as though slowly in the distance, towards scarlet joy.
Whole targets were recovered and used again; but the pieces were treasure trove in that time of scarcity and clothes rationing. The local fashion for blouses, aprons, and even pyjamas, was red —a fine red cotton cloth, of an unbelievable fineness of texture. Rosamund had a lovely pair of crimson knickers—so warm in winter—made of a torn rag that floated down from the sky as in a fairy tale of a world of long ago, when there were lights at night in the windows of all cottages, farmhouses, and inns, and along the streets of towns.
The elements had not changed. Here were the marshes, with shore larks and pipits fluttering low over the bushes of sea-blite and plants of sea-lavender which in July had turned these thousands of wild acres almost as blue as the sky.
*
All during his years on the Bad Lands Phillip had waited to plough the meadows, which should grow great crops of corn and sugar-beet on that deep, alluvial soil once covered by the sea. After half-a-dozen croppings the land could be re-seeded with new pedigree strains of grasses which would give fine milk yields. For that reason the grupps must not be filled in, but continue to lead fresh drinking water from the river as before.
In Napoleonic times, when the sea-wall along the coast had been raised, the Great Sluice was built by which river water might flow out at low tide, and salt water be barred at high tide. The Sluice consisted of stone facings across which a great beam supported a massive oak door. This door was hinged at the top to open on the seaward side. At low tide, fresh water burbled under its skirt. When the river was high after rain the burble became a gushing tumble, through which in summer sea-trout found their way into the river.
When both river and tide ran high together, the river water piled up behind the tide-shut door, and began to move back the way it had come, eventually flooding the grupps and flowing over the surface of the meadows.
Any attempt to plough the meadows would fail unless this back-flow were checked. And one day, at the very end of his property, Phillip found just the very place where this could be done. For the main grupp passed under a brick culvert at the end of the River Wood. Here he would erect a little sluice, modelled on the Great Sluice in the sea-wall, to stop all back-flow.
What were my qualifications and technical equipment? A slight knowledge of concrete, a gravel pit, some odd boards, three sons conscripted for slave labour and collaboration in shovelling, barrowing, and generally helping to prepare crossing places for Hitler’s tanks; and an old concrete-mixer, bought for me by Ernest Copleston, Lucy’s brother.
A massive affair, with a ‘hoist’. According to Ernest, in 1937, a ‘hoist’ was a kind of automatic shovel which picked up the ingredients of a ‘batch’—hard-core, gravel, cement—and tipped them into the rotating iron belly of the mixer, driven by a water-cooled four-stroke engine. Ernest said he had seen an advertisement of a second-hand ‘mixer with hoist’ in the local newspaper. This paper, since we were then in East Anglia, I took to be the East Anglian Times. So I said, ‘Buy it’. The price was £18.
It cost an extra £5 by railway from Shakesbury, in Dorset. And the ‘hoist’ turned out to be a winch with drum and steel cable, weighing over a cwt., for hoisting iron buckets up to overhead scaffolding. I recall the following dialogue.
Hare: ‘You told me it was advertised in the local paper.’
Tortoise: ‘It was so advertised in the Colham and District Times.’
Hare: ‘But we are in East Anglia. I’ve bought the East Anglian Times every day since we arrived here.’
Tortoise: ‘You said the local. That’s the Colham Times.’
Hare: ‘The hoist, too. What do we want to do with hoisting a batch up into the air?’
Tortoise: ‘I’ve not the slightest idea.’
Hare: ‘Then it’s time you did have slight, slighter, and slightest ideas. You told me a hoist was an automatic shovel.’
Tortoise: ‘If you take everything literally, then I have nothing more to say on the subject.’
Exit Hare, grinding teeth, muttering to itself, cracking fingers, imploring inanimate objects including Ernest to understand in the middle of the night, etc.
One morning during holiday from school Peter, David and Jonathan reported for duty at the bridge by Denchman’s Meadow. They were going to replace the ruinous penstock that led water from the river to the upper grupps. Hearing in the village of something interesting going on, several other boys, evacuees from London, came down to watch, as Phillip and his sons stood behind a coffer dam of boards driven into the river-bed and reinforced by clay; and with scoop, bucket, spade and hand they hauled out the mud.
“Want any ’elp?”
“We may do, later. Thank you, gentlemen.”
At this, one small boy began to comb
his hair. Another ceased to spit into the river.
Phillip, working with the scoop, reached a layer of old port bottles which had been buried there, it seemed, when the brick culvert was made. On some bottles, impressed on molten glass by a seal, was the date—1810. Below the bottles he found a stratum of cockle-and oyster-shells. He had reached the old sea-bed.
The watchers above, who had been given a lecture on archaeology and conchology, were now treated to a story of smuggling. While Phillip was talking, water from the river was beginning to push out the clay between cracks in the boards. Peter had daubed it the outer side of the dam. He blushed guiltily when he saw his father looking at the spirts of water.
“We’ll dig down in the meadow after dinner, Peter, and get some of the heavy brown clay. This stuff I gave you is too loose. Don’t worry about the water getting in, we’ll attend to that after dinner.”
Upon returning in the afternoon, they discovered that a dozen large eels had worked their way up the dyke, attracted by the stir of water, and were trapped in the sump. One was over two pounds in weight. These were given to the gentlemen above, who hurried home, while cries of laughter came from them, as the fish slithered out of their hands and pockets.
The next morning they put in the concrete foundations. In the sump a score and more of eels, dead. The alkaline in the concrete had affected their gill-rakers, by which they drew oxygen from the water, explained Phillip to the gentlemen above.
“Their scales are covered by a kind of mucous from the death-struggle of asphyxiation, gentlemen.” None of them wanted any more eels, so he cut them up and gave them to the ducks which had come up, quacking, to find out what had stained the water of their dyke.
At the end of a week the old brick tunnel had been repaired and reinforced; a new concrete wall fronted the entrance to the dyke; and an Oregon-pine penstock, made from wreckage timber found on the shore, was bolted to it. The village carpenter, working to a plan sketched by the River Engineer of the Catchment Board, had done an excellent job, to last well into the twenty-first century.
The old wall of hand-made red bricks, in front of what Phillip called the Napoleon culvert, now hid the colourless concrete behind its face. Here, at last, the flow could be controlled: with a crowbar the hatch could be raised, or lowered, by means of an iron rack and ratchet. It was a fine sight. Now for the second operation, the River Wood Sluice!
My post-war ideas are:—
(a) Woods and coverts to be replanted.
(b) New plantations to be made.
(c) New farmhouse to be built on site of the now-deserted Searchlight Camp, where the Army has bored an artesian well.
(d) Two acres of meadow land below the Scalt field to be dug by mechanical excavator to a depth of six feet, to make a trout pond, enclosed by willows and fed by water down the grupps from the Napoleon culvert.
(e) Approx. 20,000 cubic yards of rich and heavy alluvial soil from (d) to be spread on the Bad Lands.
(f) Orchard for new farm-house planted.
Peter had left school. The slight, quiet boy had taken the place of Billy being trained as an air-gunner of the R.A.F. Billy was grieved that he had had practically no education, for this lack disqualified him from becoming a pilot-officer.
What, thought Lucy, was Phillip doing? Had he learned nothing from having taken away Billy, so early from school?
Phillip had always felt at ease with his second son; perhaps, he thought, because he had carried Peter about with him when he was a baby. They had shared the important animal-warmth, the physical trust between parent and child.
Billy had missed this with his father, for, following his mother’s death, he had remained with the nurses there for some months in the Cottage Hospital at Queensbridge. And when Phillip had moved to his cousin Willie’s old cottage in North Devon, Billy had been cared for by the postman’s wife and daughter. It was in their house that Lucy had first seen the baby, and felt she must look after what later she described to Phillip as ‘you two poor ones’.
*
The penstock being finished, part two of the plan to drain and plough the meadows was now about to be carried out. Phillip felt a sense of lightness, after years of frustration—the decadence of the Imagination. Every time he had walked over those meadows, or seen them from the road on his way to the cattle market (that dreadful concentration of servile animals rejected from their homelands—cows belving for lost calves—most of them for the glue factory—bullocks for the slaughter-house) he had flinched, and sighed, and thrust back his desires.
One morning in October 1944 he mounted his bicycle, and with haversack on back, pedalled up the narrow road to the church; and continuing past the council houses, free-wheeled down the hill to the gate by the bridge leading to the Denchman Meadow. There he stopped awhile to gaze down at the new penstock. The hatch was raised about ten inches. Water swirled and bubbled below, before flowing under the new concrete culvert built to carry a five-ton lorry. The very place for a trout farm!
To the lower end of the culvert, some time in the future, he hoped to fix an iron grill to prevent the entry of eels, which were devourers of trout fry. The flume of water, from the lower culvert-face downwards, would be covered by close-mesh wire-netting against otters, kingfishers, herons, and other water-birds. The covered nursery would extend for thirty yards or so, to a lower grill, through which the flume water would continue on its way to join the Old River, as the main grupp was called.
He wheeled his bike along the causeway and came to the Old River. Here he planned to have the 2-acre lake. It would be netted around its verges, the wire-netting attached to the ring of willows. Many of the machines, brought over from America and called bulldozers, were then lying idle, after their work of preparing the sites of six hundred-odd airfields in Britain. He imagined the gouging out of twenty thousand cubic yards—twelve thousand tons—of heavy alluvial soil to be scattered over the Bad Lands. In two or three years the yields of wheat and sugar beet would more than pay for the operation!
So far, with the help of half-a-dozen children, he had built five concrete bridges to span the grupps and link the meadows. The job had been done quicker than he had anticipated. He bought a dozen reinforced concrete pipes, used normally for sewers. Each was four feet long and three feet in diameter. A couple in line having been lowered into its grupp, the two ends of the eight-foot pipe were enclosed by wooden shuttering a foot higher than the top of the pipe. Then concrete was poured on top, covering parts of old iron bedsteads, bicycles (including Horatio Bugg’s father’s crenellated penny-farthing bicycle) and other metal scrap. Soon a foot-thick causeway, strong enough when set to take a loaded lorry, was laid. He put a row of white flints at each edge to act as parapets of the little bridge. And suddenly, without effort, it seemed, the job was done; and he had six new permanent bridges over the grupps, connecting meadow to meadow, and meadow to mainland; and all the work paid for in rabbits, honey and hen’s eggs for each of the well-behaved young evacuee gentlemen to take home to their mums.
I asked Peter: Did he think a century of cattle grazing there had raised the level of the meadow? For we had observed that the cockle-shell layers had been eighteen inches under the surface. He suggested that perhaps mud, deposited by tides of a rising coast, had covered the shells before the sea-wall and the Great Sluice was built in 1810. I saw his point; but would not the cockles, which live just under the surface to feed on a rising tide, have risen with the silt deposits of those tides?
“I best-ways don’t know,” he said, with colour rising in his cheeks.
“I don’t know either. Only you were at school last, I thought you might have learned something about it, since Lord Nelson went to your school, and he was a sailor, and knew about tides and cockles.”
“He was gone before I went there,” said Peter, with a slight smile. Good, he can joke with me on equal terms.
Well, that was during the summer holidays—“holidays for all but poor old Peter”, as David said. D
aily I stand and regard the new penstock, glad to hear the ripple of water that meant that the oxygen of life was being absorbed. It is still a fine St. Luke’s Little Summer. The cattle are still out to grass. I rode along the causeway between the two main meadows, coming to the Common and the open gate to the Scalt. Here on a clover aftermath ‘Acker’s’ fifty-two heifers have grazed during the past summer, but now it looks rather bare. Yes, the cowman’s suggestion that they should come into the yards is sound.
Seven years before, the Scalt grew only the poorest grass. There was hardly a bullock bite on it. I have lived to see fifty-two heifers and two-year bullocks grazing almost in line across the field, tearing stalks and young leaves of rye-grass and suckling. Every day in summer they have come up from the meadows, their bellies filled. We have achieved this without ‘artificials’, fertiliser being unobtainable during the war, for my farm anyway. We have brought up, by lorry and horse-drawn tumbril, hundreds more loads of dried spoil—mud, reeds, water-cress and other water-plants—pulled from the grupps. This has nourished the grass which now nourishes our neat stock.
What pleasure it was, to watch them grazing in line on an early summer morning! They tear away their bites with prickly tongues, they drop their meadow-dung. Thus the fertility of the meadows is enriching the thin ‘marther’ (mother) soil of that field.
I walked my bicycle up the slope of the Scalt and so down to Teal Meadow, my destination. Here for the past few days I have been clearing a thicket between field and meadow.
It had been quite a job, clearing that thicket. Some of the wild-rose briars growing upright in its mazy tunnel were fifteen feet long, and set with formidable talons which pierced through Phillip’s thick leather gloves. Even when severed they were awkward things, liable to bend back and snatch at cheek and ear-lobe as they were lifted and swung upon the brush-wood piles. Too late he wished he had saved them, for they made excellent straight walking-sticks, pliable as rhinoceros hide. They were an inch or so thick. Polished, they would have sold well in any Piccadilly shop, during that time of shortages. But heaven forbid, he said to himself, that he try to start a walking-stick factory!
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 52