“I won’t bother you any more, Lucy. I realise what a dreadful person I have been all these years. If you call off the cruelty case, which anyway I won’t contest, I’ll give you grounds for a divorce on conventional lines. The cruelty plea may ruin what is left of my reputation as a writer.”
Lucy replied, “I knew you would never give up the farm if the decision were left to you. So I had to force your hand. I was at last really afraid of what you might do. I knew you would never surrender while you thought it was your duty to the family to remain. At the same time I realised how it was constantly frustrating your writing. But if you are not to lose the respect of the younger children, you must have your freedom, and I must have mine. I am forty-four years old, and there is the baby to be considered. But now the farm is sold,” she went on, colour returning to her cheeks, “if you like, I’ll come back to help see you out, but you must realise that I shall be in your hands.”
He thought that if she had been firm like that from the beginning the marriage might have been different.
“Thank you, Lucy. I won’t take advantage of your generosity.”
“There now, don’t you look so sad. Have you had any food? None? Really, my dear! Now let me give you some tea, and boil you a couple of eggs. We won’t be disturbed, Aunt Debby is out all day, looking after old people—cooking for them, and cleaning their cottages. Rosamund helps her, she is so good.”
During the laying of table, Jonathan came in. “Hullo, Chooky! Cor, it’s what you call nice up here! I’ve learned to ride a pony. Haven’t I, Mum? Can I have tea with Chooky?”
“Of course, darling.”
So all had not been in vain. Phillip’s good eye was aching with the strain, but voice and face kept composure. He knew what Lucy was thinking when she said, “Oh, by the way, I’ve heard from cousin Melissa. She’s coming home from India soon.”
“Oh, she’ll be glad, I expect.” He could not feel anything for Melissa. He thought of Billy, lying with other members of his crew in a grave in some Swiss village; and of Barley, alone in Malandine churchyard, among the corpses of unidentified sailors which had been washed on the rocks, or found on the sands; some of them German. Hier ruht in Gott ein unbekannt—as in the 1914 Christmas truce in noman’s-land.
“You look tired, my dear,” said Lucy.
“I’ve got a good price for the farm. Treble what I paid for it.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. Now you’ll be able to write all you’ve wanted to, won’t you?”
“David can continue at boarding school, and Rosamund at your old school, if you like.”
When David, who had come from helping to thresh a stack, was told the news by Jonathan, he started to roll across the floor. “I’ll be able to play more football! Cor, I’m what you call happy, chookies!”
After tea, Phillip said he must go. “Oh really, should you? We can easily make up a bed for you. And Aunt Debby wants to meet you.”
“It’s so kind of you, but I think I must get back. Peter is all alone.”
“But it’s such a long way, and at night, too.”
“Only a hundred and forty miles. I’ll drive steadily.”
“I’ll make you some sandwiches. And some hot coffee. I’ll wrap a bottle in an old stocking, no one has seen a vacuum flask for years.”
Phillip decided to sleep until 4 a.m. and then go back over empty roads, with the dawn across the North Sea.
Problems during the drive. Where could he get enough men to bring in the hundred acres of corn? Would Italian Co-operators be available? They had been asked for weeks ago. Would they turn up? And if so, would they shirk as they had done on other jobs in the past? And who would bring them tea? If he had only four or five, and treated them as friends, they would respond and work nobly at the job. It was the mob that was bad, as opposed to the team.
I got back soon after seven o’clock. As I sat at my desk, writing, a shadow fell across the open doorway. An apparition with staring eyes of a sparrowhawk. Could this thin creature be my son Peter? He has always shown, in a quiet selfless way, a steady courage when helping others. He came to tell me that he had made friends with some Italians in the colony behind the shingle ridge, and has arranged for them to help thresh the corn-stacks, if I can provide transport.
Down by the bridge Phillip met Horatio Bugg. That village worthy, who in the days of tortoise-headed Fear had appointed himself to a mission of spy-hunting, now that the danger was apparently over, was affable, even friendly. He said to Phillip, “You’re not the only one who has done well out of the war, you know!” With satisfaction he wriggled a six-inch roll of pound notes from his breast pocket. “I’ve got it here, too, you know!” Stuffing the worn notes back into his pocket, “I collect gold sovereigns,” he explained, with quiet pride. “I find them, and the click I’m in with takes them by air to France. My cut is thirty bob for every sovereign I collect. None of my own capital is risked. The click gets eight pounds for each sovereign in Paris. Yes, they’re flown over from—” and he mentioned the name of the town. “But just now we’re keeping quiet—I expect you’ve read about it in the papers?”
“Yes, I’ve read about it in the papers,” said Phillip. “With other items.”
“What items?” asked Horatio Bugg.
“Oh, they’re of no general interest now. They will be in twenty years’ time.”
Phillip had clipped them from newspapers and pasted them in his journal.
Oslo. Knut Hamsun, the 88-year-old Norwegian author, a former Nobel Prize-winner, was today ordered to pay 425,000 kroner (£ 21,250) indemnity—the greater part of his fortune—to the Norwegian Compensation Court.
The claim against Hamsun was based on the fact that he had been a member of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling Party and had written articles for the Nazis. All members of the party are regarded as responsible for the loss of Norwegian lives and property during the war.
Belgrade. General Mihailovitch, leader of the anti-Communist party, was shot yesterday morning, while one of his children, a Communist, looked on. Grey-bearded, manacled, his last words were, ‘I and my works were caught in the gale of the world’.
There was a letter in which a maxim of Marcus Aurelius was quoted as guidance for the Allies in the treatment of Germany in defeat. ‘The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy.’ There followed an account of German boys, shot after the Armistice, by order of an American Military Court, for alleged spying three months before the war ended.
*
Another extract in Phillip’s book had been clipped from The Daily Crusader, wherein a former journalist, a sports-writer who had become a major of the Royal Tank Corps in the war, with a D.S.O. and an M.C., described how he had run over German boys who threw stones at his column of tanks moving beyond the Reichswald during the last days of the war … this, he wrote, to help obliterate the evil in a race which, he declared, should be exterminated.
*
Horatio Bugg repeated to Phillip, as they stood by his rusty old petrol pump, its head still covered by a rotten sack tied there since 1940, “So you’ve read about us in the papers, have you?”
“How d’you know I shan’t report you?”
“I know you’re not that sort of man,” he replied, which made Phillip smile for his innocence.
“How about your pal Birkin now, eh?”
“He’s been very ill.”
“He went too far. He was a good man before he left the Tories.”
“He was a better man when he was expelled from the Labour Party.”
“Why ever he joined up with the Socialists I can’t think. He was a rich man, why didn’t he keep where the money was, eh?”
Horatio Bugg patted the bulge of notes next to his heart. “I don’t bear no man a grudge,” he went on, “so long as he don’t try to do the dirty on me. That’s me, and always has been. I like you, do you know that? I’d like to do you a good turn. Now tell me, between ourselves—” and Horatio Bugg spat on the dusty road b
eside Phillip’s shoe—“it’s true, isn’t it, that Josiah Harn is taking over your farm come Old Michaelmas Day? And that you’ve got Elias Quaxter to act as your valuer, and look after your interests? Well then, you watch what you’re about.” He went, after adjusting the neckerchief concealing his goitre, “I tell you as a friend, mind, so don’t repeat what I’m going to say. He and Elias Quaxter, the valuer—you know, you bought that old double desk at his father’s auction in Crabbe when you first come here—well, Elias is ‘in’ with Josiah, he’s putting up the money at eight per cent to set him off, so you watch out. Well then, you know the saying here in the village, don’t you, ‘They all spit in one pot’. Although ‘spit’ is Parliamentary Language, if you take my meaning.”
Was it mere coincidence that another man, prominently patriotic in that strange summer of five years ago—“You all ought to be locked up,” he shouted as Phillip and his children had driven past his cottage—should also possess several thick wads of notes from his black-market work during the war? That short, stocky, rufous-haired man looked as though he had recently landed on the coast from a Danish galley, and having thrown away his horny headgear, had started as a small-holder. There were the horns, lying on his little bit of weedy meadow; for Ron Grigson was, like his immigrant forebear, a bit of a butcher. He specialised in old cows which, in the words of his tongue, became heifers. His words were usually of an elevated, even ethical nature, accompanied by a suggestion of grin that never succeeded in becoming a smile; for the eyes of Ron Grigson were small and hard; sly at times; on occasion, expressionless. Upon a heavy face above the broad and solid shoulders of a squat body under a suit greasy and shapeless, a look of cunning was at times fixed by his thoughts, which were nearly always of money, money, money—the ruler of his life.
“You got away with it, d’in’ you?” he said to Phillip.
“You didn’t,” Phillip replied. “During the summer you came to me and asked if you might put a ‘heifer’ on my meadows. Do you remember?”
“Could be.”
“A fortnight later my cowman told me that your ‘heifer’ was a very old cow with mastitis, bought in Wordingham market for £6. He said his cows would be infected. And so it turned out—three of our cows caught the disease. The rest had to be inoculated by the veterinary surgeon.”
The fellow grinned and said, “Aw, in B’ny’ds we call everything a heifer, you know.”
“And what do they call you?”
“Aw, we all hev to get along, ’bor.”
Grigson was what Luke called a grinner. He was the man to go to if you wanted a bottle of whisky—at a price different from that controlled by the Government, of course—and if you were the sort who thought the black market was ‘rather fun’, as someone who does not come into this chronicle, had in the past remarked in Phillip’s presence.
Now we must accompany Phillip and the auctioneer, who with notebook and pencil was to make a list of the cows, bullocks, calves, horses, geese, ducks and hens; their wooden houses, the circular saw and pigs’ troughs, the buried paraffin tank, the unwanted and unused milking machine, the tumbrils, water-carts, harrows, seed-drills, tractors, trailers, cornsacks—all the Live and Dead Stock of Deepwater Farm being sold at the change of the farming year, Old Michaelmas Day.
There would be printed notices and bills by the wayside, and on the day itself lines of cars parked by the hedge—old iron merchants with their trailers, cattle dealers with their floats, farmers in search of useful implements—all gone there, with the exception of the curious, in hope to increase their substance.
*
After the auctioneer had gone, Phillip met by appointment Quaxter the valuer, who was to represent his interests as outgoing farmer. The custom throughout East Anglia was for the outgoing man and the ingoing man each to be represented by a valuer. The two valuers would then assess the value of the crops in the ground; together with that of straw, hay, cultivations if any, the farmyard muck, and the residues of artificial fertilisers in the fields.
Should the two valuers be unable to agree upon the value of each item then, by a law of their profession, they would select a third valuer whose award must be accepted, without question, as final.
It was the custom, also, that farmers, both outgoing and incoming, did not question the monetary award of the valuers. Nor were they shown the figures of separate items. Each must leave all to his valuer; and a farmer had to sign a printed declaration to this effect before his valuer would act for him.
Phillip had signed this declaration for Elias Quaxter. But when he enquired about the absence of Josiah Harn’s valuer, Mr. Harn said, “Oh, it will be quite all right”—a phrase that Phillip had heard before, over the matter of the price of store pigs.
How then was it to be worked? Mr. Quaxter said that Mr. Harn had agreed to accept when he decided.
“That will be quite all right,” Mr. Harn repeated, with serious face, as though he was about to undergo an operation. Or is it I, thought Phillip, who am being given a whiff of the old gas?
The three men walked around the farm together. The valuer wrote in his little book as they moved from stack to stubble, from hay aftermath to root-field. Thus they arrived at the chief item—fourteen acres of sugar-beet. The long pale roots were still in the ground. Not a very good crop. Phillip thought about eight to nine tons to the acre. Mr. Quaxter made a note in his book.
Then Mr. Harn enquired of Mr. Quaxter about getting the beet ploughed out, topped, and lifted.
“Could you do Mr. Harn a good turn and get the beet out of the ground for him?” asked Mr. Quaxter, in a friendly manner of Phillip. “You see, Mr. Harn will have a lot to do, with much on his hands, as no doubt you can readily understand, having been an ingoing man yourself in the past, eh, Captain Maddison? I fancy you’ll find no difficulty in procuring Italian prisoners to lift and top the beet for Mr. Harn, who will of course pay for the labour?”
Before Phillip agreed to this, he said, “When does this beet become the property of Mr. Harn?”
“From this very moment.”
For of course Phillip knew that beet lifted and left lying on the field would shrink and so lose weight every day it was exposed to sun and wind; and that both autumn and early winter in East Anglia were usually dry and warm. “Very well, Mr. Quaxter,” he replied, “I’ll plough out this beet and knock and top on the understanding that I am paid for nine tons an acre of this Nightcraft field, which is fourteen acres in extent, and that the beet is the property of Mr. Harn from this minute.”
“That is so, Captain Maddison.”
And now I find myself almost a figure that is envied, in the estimation of some of those who are my superiors in the local world of farming. For, one said, a man who buys in a slump and sells out on a boom, and so increases his capital, is to be envied, if not admired ‘for courage’. Courage, forsooth! Verily I am Time’s Fool—approved by some of my neighbours ‘for determination in getting out at the right moment, when the future is uncertain, when labour problems are so worrying’. I can understand others thinking like this, but to me it is the shadow, not the substance, of truth.
Into the calm air of St. Martin’s Little Summer the smoke of Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s ancient fifteen-ton traction-engine drifted slowly. So still and golden-hazy was the air, as he sat on the tall yellow chair, that Phillip could hear the faraway chuffs of steam in the funnel. Sometimes a dragging, slower noise followed by the engine racing told that one of the sheaves was going through the drum with the binder twine uncut.
The Italians, with visions of Tyrrhenian skies, sang as they worked. One of them, Antonio, had worked on the farm for almost a year. He still used a pitchfork as though it were a broom. Since he was giving himself extra work, Phillip tried to show him how to use a 2-tined fork. With an unhappy face Antonio cried, pointing all around: He a-show me! Corporal a-show me! Boy a-show me! Everyone a-show me! Now you a-show me! Me a waiter! Me carry dishes! Me no farmer! You a-see? And Antonio continued to us
e his fork like a ladle as he dreamed of spaghetti in a deep bowl.
In their brown uniforms, with equally brown faces, the singing non-co-operators (the Co-operators wore khaki) were energetically forking sheaves to an old man with a knife tied to his wrist, who slashed the binder twine, while below him on the box another man with steel-tips to his fingers fed an endless broken wave of stalks into the roaring drum.
Phillip knew, as he returned to the high chair at the ‘corn-merchant’s desk’, that the man with the knife—the bond-cutter, as he was called—was trying to slash the string of three sheaves every two seconds of time. He was slow because underfed. He missed a sheaf now and then, and the sheaf went around the drum uncut, causing the whirling metal cylinder to slow up. That was when Phillip heard the engine stutter, followed by a grunt from the drum.
He knew it all; he could see it clearly as he sat there on one side of the double-desk where clerks in Dickens’ time had probably shot ink from their quill pens; and later, where Mr. Quaxter Senior sat and roared at him to go to bloody hell. He could see it more clearly than if he were there sweating and lifting sheaves two and three at a time from the pressed mass of the flat corn-stack.
For he had done that, and scores of other farming jobs, with every nerve and sinew and sense of his body; and those nerves and senses were surcharged and, as it were, crying out to express all that had been felt and known and suffered and regretted and forgiven in all the years of his life in the only way by which he could express himself: through the Imagination—the written word.
I have been aware constantly during my farming life, first in the West Country and then in East Anglia, that to be a man of action requires a slow rhythm; and to be a writer or artist needs a quicker, sharper rhythm. One cannot apply the quicker rhythm of the wit to the slower rhythm of the working body. If one is an artist of self-compulsive power one tends to expect others to share feelings which do not go with those of bodily labour. The rhythms clash. And what has happened in little on my land, has happened on a wider scope in Europe.
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