The corn was sold by sample, and sent away by lorry to the railway station. There remained the sugar beet to be ploughed out and topped for Josiah Harn. This was done.
And when Phillip had left the district, the little heaps lay on the field, wilting and losing weight during the weeks, even months, before they were carted off the field and sent by lorry to the railway trucks allocated to the new tenant.
And when Phillip was paid, by Mr. Elias Quaxter’s cheque, in January, 1946, it was not at the rate of nine tons per acre, but two tons, or twenty-eight tons in all, which was the total weight of little withered roots received at the sugar-beet factory at Fen ton.
When Phillip questioned this amount by letter, Mr. Quaxter replied that it was ‘quite fair’, since the value of the beet was as recorded in the returns from the factory. ‘And that cannot be disputed, can it?’
Chapter 36
SURVIEW AND FAREWELL
Phillip need not have worried about the men who were wondering if they would be workless when he had gone. He felt he was forsaking them; but, as it turned out, Josiah Harn wanted them to remain, at least until his three grown sons, two of them soon to come out of the Services, were home. All were keen with ambition to build up a milking herd. That was where the profit was. All four were Viking types; they would be ‘quite all right’.
But there remained Joe, the soldier invalided after Dunkirk, who did Phillip’s garden so well. He came, just before Phillip left, to say, “I’d like to work for you, I love being with you, really I do. I’d get you some good men if you will accept me, sir.”
Joe put the job first, like ‘Ackers’ did. Phillip had always enjoyed working with him.
“I’m sorry, Joe.”
“Don’t you worry, sir. I understand. And I can always get a job elsewhere.”
He told Phillip a surprising thing—it was the first he’d heard of it. During the last winter, after shooting over the marshes, Joe had tripped, his loaded gun went off, and the charge tore part of his neck. It was Lucy who saved Joe’s life by staunching the wound until the doctor came. Lucy had never mentioned it to Phillip, so quietly did she go about her work.
Poor Joe. After Phillip had gone, he took a job of loading and driving a 10-ton beet-lorry, any one of a fleet of large lorries given him. One night as he threw up beets the hand-brake broke and the lorry began to move back. He tried to stop it, instead of moving away to save himself, and was crushed against a wall, and thereafter disabled for life.
*
Many of the scenes of this narrative were written behind blackout curtains, in those nights when thoughts of the regeneration of Western man haunted the mind like the glow of the morning star before dawn upon the fields and meadows of the Bad Lands—in those nights when, striving for equipoise, one held to thoughts of the Bengal Lancer dead, and what he had written of the guru’s teaching in India: breathing slow and deep, after uttering low vibrating notes to induce the wave of harmony. And lying there, the deep bass diaphragm note seemed to be extending from the consciousness, to be shaking one beyond oneself, to be vibrating in the very air of the lungs, in the walls and ceiling, the panes of glass in the wide window—and the heaviness of chaos returned in the breast with the crescendo of reverberation shaking the very sky of dawn as American squadrons ploughed the pale fields of heaven, leaving behind white furrows of vapour until the entire wide blue was a Grecian sapphire ruined by flaws.
Phillip was with me everywhere—in the dark before dawn upon the heights of the Home Hills, while with the glittering light of the morning star, seen through a wind-tear brimming the lower lid of one eye, came a clear insight upon the lie which like a maggot had eaten into the souls of nearly all those known and encountered: the lie with which we all sought to deceive ourselves—known faces stringing out into the colourless memory of the past—falsehood in the body politic slowly sickening us away from a true life, which is to build, to create beauty; and not merely to frustrate.
Meditating a work that would enshrine the agonies and hopes, the ‘tears of things’ in this our time, I lay upon the Hills, sometimes until the morning star was rising out of the sea. In my mind I linked the planet with Hitler, who had shone to millions of his countrymen as the Lightbringer during the ’twenties, those years of degradation and defeat. Lucifer—bearer of light—prince of darkness, or prince in darkness?
Lucy and the children have come back. When the auction is over, she will live in the house I bought on the way up through Suffolk, having for company her brother Tim and his wife; for now that Tim’s wartime job is closing dovyn, they will otherwise be homeless. They can have a wing of the house, as my guests. And I shall live alone on Exmoor, in a shepherd’s cot below the high ground, grown with cotton grass and purple sedge grass, known as The Chains. And all I shall do is write and walk, hope and pray, while I think of my dead grandparent and parents: of the scenes I have known in boy-hood and early youth; and above all, of my friends in camp and mess, trench and dugout, upon the Western Front during the great years of my life.
On the penultimate night, there was a Grand Victory Dance in the Village Institute, and as he stood in the parlour Phillip heard a steady thumping coming through the floor. He went outside, to listen by the flint wall near the Institute door. The Oldstead Brothers Band was playing—a famous local band, all the instrumentalists being the sons of the steward on his neighbour Charles Box’s farm. There was Old England for you—the genial, red-faced steward on his aged cob ‘The Bedstead’, riding over the farm, his sons working for him—keeper, tractor-driver, pig-man, cowman—all married, all with children; and in their spare time members of a band for horkey dancing—thump, thump, thump on the shaking wooden floor—sweaty faces smiling—drum, concertina, piano, flute—wip, pop, tattle, and toot—Roll Out the Barrel in shouted chorus.
*
Along the level brown shingle bank short grey waves of the North Sea were breaking diagonally. It was evening, and Jonny and his father had the beach to themselves. Phillip had asked Lucy to come, too, but she said she must stay and make a blackberry and apple pudding for supper. Once again they were a family, come together to see out the end of the farming venture. Jonny was not going to a private school until after Christmas. Peter had joined the R.A.F. So Jonny and Phillip went together to say goodbye to the sea.
Behind them, on reclaimed land below the sea-wall, stood the hut encampment of the Italian prisoners-of-war. Thither Phillip had brought Antonio and the others who all day had been working on the farm, squaring up the muck in the yards for Valuation. Jonny was their particular friend, as all small boys become the friends of soldiers. They had ridden together, to and from the camp, in the box body of the Silver Eagle, every day except Sunday, for the past few weeks.
Here on the shingle ridge, where in summer tern and dotterall fly, sea joins sky on the horizon. Behind us, in a haze of stillness, lie the barbed wire and the fortifications protecting a new landscape of stubble and plough.
We are alone on the shingle ridge … but stay, as we trudge down to the slanting slash and break of tidal waves on the sand-drawn slope of shore, we see an R.A.F. pilot and his girl, fishing.
We have never seen them before, yet it seems natural that the girl should greet us with a smile as we approach. Or were we smiling, as one reprieved, that the toil and the tears and, yes, the blood, were over? But think no more thus, poor wood-spirit: ‘the soul must uphold itself as the sun’. Think that this is the sea-coast of England: the barbed-wire is being dragged away: the mines have been lifted. Think that the Aeschylean unnumbered smile of ocean is the mood of this happy girl with her lover. For her there are no more fearful thoughts of bomber crews falling in salt, estranging seas.
May we look in the canvas bag? There is a codling, and a flat-fish. So fish are actually caught off this shore!
The little boy and his father had gone to the sea declaring that whatever the weather they would swim from the shingle bank. They carried towels, and cake to eat afterwards. B
ut the waves were cross and in tangle, sucking short at the shingle. The sun was small, wan, bisected by cloud, without heat, almost without light. Such were the sunsets of this coast, rarely flamboyant as in the West Country.
Far away in Devon, where Phillip was soon to go, this sun was flaring out the day in fire which filled the sky and turned the cliffs of Valhalla purple.
“Jonny, every man and woman on this earth sees a different sunset.”
The boy stopped to consider this.
“Yes, Chooky, I know what you mean.”
*
An offshore wind moved over the level top of the shingle bank, eddying invisibly above the wet slope of the receding tide. Above it in the dulling sky a butterfly was fluttering, borne eastwards on the wind which blew aslant the line of the shore and stroked the short white flashes of the waves.
The butterfly, which might have been an Atalanta, strove to fly along the line of the land, but the wind was carrying it out over the sea.
The fluttering dark speck rose higher, and they stood watching it in silence, hoping it would be able to return inland and find a shed or roof where it might fold its wings flat together and sleep during the coming rains and frost.
Could that tiny engine, fuelled by honey stored in its muscles, carry the frayed sails across the sea to Holland, or maybe Denmark, or even Norway, where the great singer, Kirsten Flags tad shared, with others, the Virgilian ‘tears of things’?
A fragment of summer was being blown away, to become again phosphate, carbon, and salt in the sea.
“Is that a sad thought, Jonny?”
The little boy considered, then shook his head. “There will be other butterflies, won’t there, Chooky?”
The sun had faltered and gone. The youthful bomber pilot, with memories of lost friends, but with love by his side, trudged up the shingle to his motor-bicycle standing in the lane. There was to be no campaign star for crews of Bomber Command, only the General Defence Medal, which put them on a par with fire-watchers, elderly members of the Observer Corps, and the Home Guard. Two out of three crew-members had perished; but under a dark star, of which Dresden was only one ray.
It was time to go. Crank up the engine and fill the cylinders with gas. Jonny switched on the ignition, saying, “Contact!” A flick of the wrist started the engine to rumble through the rusted silencer. Nearly sixteen years of faithful running since it left the works at Coventry; its original crank-case burned out in a blitz; but its heart, with that of the Britain we love, despite the apparent contradiction of our mind, never coventrated—to use a word coined by ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ now lying, wounded, in prison, to await trial at the Old Bailey in London as a traitor.
Small children growing up to be young men: season after season of corn turning to summer’s gold: butterflies, birds, trees, faces of friends—all, all, drifting down the stream of Time which some men dread as death.
A short-eared owl wafted down the sea-wall. Partridges had ceased to call on the stubbles. Night had come to the western hemisphere.
1941–1967
Norfolk-Devon
About the Author
Henry Williamson (1895–1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds.
His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, ‘He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.’
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Henry Williamson, 1967
The right of Henry Williamson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–27970–8
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 62