Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  But the struggle between Light and Darkness, between Heaven and Hell, continued among the constellations and their satellites, as in the souls of men who were artists. Such men were, in Hereward Birkin’s words, the lights of humanity. By the grace of God, only.

  The grace of God is poetry—the spirit of love—the major spirit of Evolution …

  Summer lightning, wan and silent, playing across the black stark sky. Sudden flaring sheets of soundless glowing, which revealed trees leaning all ways like a wood on the Somme battlefield: but with no rolling barrage of thunder: only the lisp of wind through the one pine which remained standing, lonely as a sentinel, in the south-west corner of the field.

  *

  The dark lantern, faithful companion of his father’s youth! He would write by its light! And returning to the shelter he fell asleep before he could light the wick.

  In the morning he climbed the pine tree and listened to the summer breeze singing in the branches, while the crow cursed him from afar. He saw the Channel to the south; the tors of Dartmoor behind him. To the west lay Bodmin moor, with its strange white pyramids of china clay, like the snow peaks of the Alps.

  Beyond Land’s End he saw a faint shining that was the sea horizon dipping to the tide-rips off Newfoundland, where he imagined salmon swimming up ice-cold rivers, and gerfalcons ringing above the rocks of Labrador.

  The old feeling has not gone from me, the old feeling I thought dead arises again as in youth, the elements have renewed my life.

  Yet the thoughts of the penumbra returned; for one morning, while the air of summer England lisped with the tongues of the pine, and whispered in the long grasses below, the same sun shining was affronted by a malevolent glint over Hiroshima in far Japan.

  How strange to feel without body again, to lie with the murmur of distant waves coming from the blue of the sky, to be content with only the wavelet lap upon the sands.

  Around me are many empty acres set with posts upon which the tide is gently advancing.

  Rusty barbed wire lies embedded in the loose deltas under wind-carven dunes where my body receives the plangent sunshine, my eyes closed against the white light of the sky.

  Here is peace: a man alone on the sands with the song of the larks, the cries of gulls flying high overhead, the murmur of sea on the rocks.

  Each wave breaking tranquilly upon this deserted shore ends a pulse from ocean primeval. Convoys, depth-charges, agonies of men in open boats and rubber dinghies, colossal flash and spout of bomb and torpedo—I have drowned with them, I have drooped with them over oars they are too weak to move. I have known both the courage that breaks and the spirit that bears a man beyond the heaviness of air. I have lost honour and betrayed myself, I have felt affection for my enemy and been thoughtless and cruel to my wife, to my dead son—all states of one man who yet knows that such things are but momentary and slight if he be able, at last, to trust to the grace within which is his liaison with the Creator, who is, despite all, Love.

  I pray, but beyond words, through what Keats called the Imagination, that I may arise from my entoiled and entombed self, that I may put all self-willed thought away, that I may be simple with the sun above the mirage-shimmer on the sands when the mist arises and the wavelets are seen to break in thin and fragile lines of white—my life is of these and the friends I have laughed with; of beauty seen in curve of cheek, breast, shoulder, thigh—a smile, a soft voice, a glance innocent and gentle; dark silhouettes of fishermen with their net at night when the moon is full. These and many other visions are of me, of this moment while grains of sand idly trickle through my fingers.

  The waves fall gentle in summer, the sun shines, gulls cry, jackdaws beat above the jetsam line. Over my head fly a pair of ravens—those birds always in company with each other. The cock bird croaks as he looks down on me; he croaks again and half-rolls on extended wings and flicks back again all in one movement. He is happy, he calls reassurance to his mate.

  Two buzzards soar above the ravens. I hear plaintive cries from the blue halls of the wind, and once again my heart lifts with that phrase of Richard Jefferies—I am in the midst of eternity; it is all about me in the sunshine.

  When his friends had gone back to Yorkshire, Phillip walked far every day, striding into sunlight flowing upon cliff and hill and headland. Hour after hour above sheer cliffs, seeing below him heavy Channel waves lipping over the rocks at the base of Valhalla. There the bodies of drowned airmen, soldiers and sailors had drifted during the past five years, to sink into caverns where lobster and King Conger ruled.

  Then the south-west arose, to crash the tides upon those rocks, and hurl up the spray hundreds of feet, so that he felt the taste of salt on his lips. His eyes winced from fragments of schist in scree, for the sea-winds were now whipping and scouring subsoil and rock upon the sheers of Valhalla. He went sideways, sitting down, like a crab down one path, and found shelter from the main blast. There among hummocks of sea-thrift on the green turf he lay and watched the gulls seeming to be flight-broken along that wild and jagged edge of the planet.

  The south-west was blowing, a hundred currents met and clashed, spun and eddied and rebuffeted against stony facets of the precipice. It was a battle, the rocky cliffs assaulted by invisible rocks of air tumbling, cascading, and heaving in the vast and complicated barrage of the winds.

  And as suddenly as it arose, it was all over. Ravens and jackdaws appeared, to play and sport; falling and diving, side-slipping, snooting up vertically, twirling and half-rolling, and letting out joyous croaks while the gulls had only their salt complaints to the sea.

  It is as I knew it in early youth before the sky had turned to iron above that Flanders battlefield in the autumn of 1914.

  It won’t be the same ever again—how many times during the war had one not heard, and echo’d, that remark? Did that not mean, rather, that one felt one would never be the same again? I blamed the change on the cares, anxieties, and frustrations inherent in the so-called civilised world, which, I said, had caused the ageing of the body, and therefore of the mind. I forgot that one has a soul, and that it lies within a man’s choice whether the soul or the little selfish ego rule his mind.

  If the ego rules the mind, then the machine will rule the body. Is that what has happened among men? Mankind mastered by the machine; even in this wild and lonely place the slaves of the machine were ordered to do what no man truly wanted to do. Here they rehearsed invasion tactics, or patterns which were to be laid upon the foreshore of Normandy. In a few seasons sea-thrift and grasses will have filled the craters of shells which exploded here; the dove’s-foot, crane’s-bill and wild thyme will grow in the bullet rips across the turf; nettles spring from slit trenches, salt spray gnaw away iron stakes and barbed wire.

  Within a few seasons the metal will have infiltrated as ferrous oxide and ferric chloride upon the native rock; jute of sandbag, fretted and decayed, nourish the thrift. Man makes mistakes; the earth and the elements are ready, as it were, to forgive. Air, sun, and water; the seals below me are as during all the centuries; a millennium passes, the gulls still sit on their ledges and look no larger than white dew-drops across the vast inverted cathedral of the cliffe.

  Over the Channel, clouds sail in from the Azores. How then is life essentially changed? And where is the ghost of myself, of my lost youth? Am I not the same person as the boy who came here all those years ago, but with this difference: I am less unsteadfast now, because now I know what was then uncertain.

  Sitting among the flowers of the sea-thrift, buoyed in sunshine and salt air of ocean, I know that the simple, the fundamental truths of life are not altered by experience, if a man keep faith with his inner belief, or essence. But I have also learnt this: that the truth of life is not to be sought when a man is tired, or stale.

  For however sophisticated or disillusioned a man may think himself to be, he is, and always will be, an elemental creature: made of the elements, maintained and restored by the elements. At least that
is true for me, and I am an ordinary man, composed of normal flesh, a vehicle of ordinary hopes and fears.

  Phillip made friends with a small boy whom he met on the sands. He might have been a younger Billy. He stared again and again at his blue eyes, the fair hair, the white skin only faintly discoloured by the sun. He was held by the sight of him; at times his feeling rose near to the point of instability.

  This small boy, with his friends, played with Phillip a fast game, wherein Phillip, lying on the soft sand, attempted to catch one or another of the running children, circling him, by the heel. It was a tough and rough game when played with a dozen children who joined them, but soon they learnt to fall softly on sand, to yield themselves in falling, and so all was fun. Skilful, too; a flick of the wrist, and your victim turned half a somersault. You must be gentle of course, as gentle as a loved dog taking food from your ringers.

  The children worked with Phillip in his field, dragging broken trees to a bonfire site in the middle of the field. The boy’s chest stuck out like a four-and-a-half-gallon barrel, his bare feet with splayed toes dug into the soil of the field. He worked with an earnestness which Phillip had to check, for he was only seven.

  The summer hours passed, the wind dried the trunks and branches until it needed only one match to fire the heap.

  And on the night of V-J day the beacon leapt up in flame, one of hundreds burning across England because the war was ended in the East with the surrender of Japan. Eight children and three mothers came to the hilltop, drawn like moths to the flame, while the lighthouse lanterns flashed up and down the Channel like fire-flies.

  *

  That morning Phillip had telephoned the farmhouse in East Anglia to tell them of the bonfire. There had been no reply. Perhaps they were all at the village celebrations? Even so, he felt disquiet. He had telephoned later in the day. No reply. Yes, they must all be at the Banyards high-go-glee.

  There was a barrel of bitumen on the top of his beacon and a lot of old sump-oil had been poured upon the fir branches. One of the three mothers of the eight children brought a bottle of Jamaican rum, which she presented to Phillip. He had one of Lucy’s fruit cakes in the hut, which he divided among the children; but the tots of rum were given to the mothers on a ratio of fifty-fifty; one for you, and one for me, one for you, now one for me, for of course a man must in such circumstances match Demon with Demon. When half the bottle was down his throat they saw the fault in his calculations, and he thought all England must be seeing the bonfire.

  Next morning a few survivors cooked breakfast on the embers at the edge; for the heart of the beacon was still glowing.

  *

  When he went down to the village to collect the post there were two letters awaiting him. One was in Lucy’s handwriting, the other in Tim’s. The envelope addressed by Lucy bore a strange postmark. At first he did not dare to open it, having foreboding of what it might say. When he did at last slit the envelope, carefully lest the contents be cut, he was at first surprised by the opening lines, that she was going to have a baby. She had not told him before, she wrote, because she did not want to worry him. Now she had made up her mind to go away with the children, for she felt she could not carry on any further. She had done her best, and failed; and he must have his freedom. She had not taken this step without long and careful thought. She had not given any address, she wrote, because it would simplify matters if he did not try to dissuade her. If he wanted to get in touch with her, he could write to her solicitors, at an address he would find in Tim’s letter.

  Her brother’s letter declared that he was greatly concerned for Lucy’s health and indeed life, now that she was ‘in a delicate condition’, and so he had taken the step of finding a place for her and the children where she would be free of his influence.

  Tim Copleston went on to say that, furthermore, he had the gravest concern for his sister’s money, but that can be gone into by her solicitors. For on his father’s death, he declared, Phillip had removed all the furniture and family relics to a place of his own, ‘to wit, your field Gartenfeste’; and had he, Tim, not returned when he did, he was pretty sure Phillip intended ‘to purloin the lot’.

  Phillip could not understand how anyone could have believed what Tim had written. Was this a prelude to Tim seeking to have him certified as insane? His thoughts became wild and self-destructive; he thought of going over the Cliffs of Valhalla.

  He recovered his nerve. A prepaid-reply telegram was sent to the farmer at Robertsbridge, who, a year previously, had visited the farm while Phillip and the children were shelling sunflower seeds. The telegram said that if the milking machine was still for sale, he would buy it.

  His idea was to build up a dairy herd. The children would not have to work so hard in their summer holidays; he would need only ten acres or so of oats for the cows, and the rest would be grazing or fodder.

  The reply came, the milking machine was still for sale. At once Phillip set out for Sussex.

  *

  For sixteen years this motorcar and he had been together. Once it was called, in the days between the wars, a sports model. What a phrase out of the dimming past, he thought … when one could ask for, and actually get, merely by tendering money, eggs-and-bacon at a restaurant, petrol at any wayside station; and in the shops were shoes, socks, suits of clothes, chocolate in boxes weighing pounds; and the sky above towns glowed at night in the distance and the bathing beaches were not all wired, mined, set with a forest of poles, and closed.

  Nowadays the Silver Eagle was an odd sight, with the little wooden box on the back behind the bucket seats and the bonnet concealing ninety-five synthetic horses at 4,500 r.p.m.—tax thirteen pounds a year for an agricultural vehicle. The race-horses had been put into a farm cart; but sometimes they kicked up their heels … as on that August day of 1945, when the motorcar ran at over seventy miles an hour along a surprisingly new concrete road built to the coast for the invasion of Festung Europa; which now was dust.

  That speed was perhaps not wise, for the tyres showed the reticulations of age and the cracks of experience in the rubber-and-canvas walls. They might have broken, vehicle and driver with them—as good a climax as any, he thought: but the idea was to save the farm for the family by installing a milking machine.

  At last—Robertsbridge. Up a lane. The farmhouse. The farmer and his sister.

  “How is Elizabeth?”

  “She never replied to my letters.”

  After tea they packed the more delicate parts of the machine in the box body of the car and having arranged for the rest to be dispatched by railway truck, Phillip turned north with his load.

  Now tarnished Eagle and he were moving at a sedate forty, noting how, every few miles, the corn harvest hues varied with soils and latitudes. So they reached the Gravesend ferry across Thames, to continue through Essex on the way north. In Phillip’s head was an echo of the advice of the Ministry of Agriculture official before the war: to build up a dairy farm, to seed down the arable to grass, kale, and other feeding stuffs; and produce milk.

  *

  On his way through an unknown village he stopped to change a plug. There was an old house opposite, with For Sale in one window. Like nearly all other cottages and houses, it looked as though the window frames and doors had not been painted for many years. He knocked, and was asked in. What was the price, he enquired; for all the way back from the West Country he had been thinking that any court action by Lucy would ruin what little was left of his reputation as a writer; to contest the action might mean no money for the education of the children. Another alternative was to sell the farm, make a trust of the money, with the income made over to Lucy.

  Now he looked over Hill House with the least interest, after seeing that it had a deep well above which was an electric pump; large kitchen and larder; outhouses; half an acre of garden; six bedrooms, one with a powder closet, with heavy oak floors; three stairways; a fairly large hall with open hearth; a sitting-room, and two other rooms downstairs. T
here were two lavatories; a bathroom; a courtyard with coach house, and loose box. It seemed cheap at £1,000. And would appreciate in value, for the housing shortage would be acute when the Forces were demobilised. But what mattered was that this was a place where Lucy and the family could go, for it was to be sold with vacant possession.

  “I’ll buy it.”

  He wrote a cheque for one-tenth of the purchase price within half an hour of entering and leaving the main door, which opened on a pavement before a broad highway.

  He was about to leave when the owner said he would like to ask his advice about a bird that he had bought, during the summer, from a man in the village. It was a dove, and it did not seem to like its food. He had paid thirty shillings for it, to please his wife, who was very fond of birds, he said. Bird seed of all kinds was almost impossible to get, he had paid thirty shillings a pound for his mixture.

  Phillip looked at the bird, a wild turtle dove. Its food was a mixture of gromwell, charlock, and dock seed.

  “It is mourning for its mate. Turtle doves are migrant birds, they die if they cannot return to Africa when the time for making the passage comes.”

  “Then I’ve been swindled?”

  He was a Londoner, who had left when the bombing started in 1940, and bought the house for little more than a third of the sum he had sold it for. Phillip asked him if he would sell the dove, saying that he knew where was another such bird, and the two would keep one another company. So he left with dove and wicker cage, and when a mile or so along the road set it free; and drove on.

  At last, with trepidation, he came to the village, and entered a farmhouse vacant of voices, faces, all movement; until Mrs. Valiant, hearing of his return, hurried down from her cottage.

  “Oh sir, missis be gone!” she said, tears running down her face. “Master Peter is still here, carrying on. They’re cutting the wheat on the far meadow.”