The Power of the Dead

by Henry Williamson

  Phillip felt regret when the moment of departure came. He hadn’t been much of a companion to poor old Nuncle. Hilary saw doubt and anxiety in his nephew’s face, and when Phillip held on to his hand during the final shake, he said, “Don’t worry too much about present difficulties. These depressions are inevitable, they come and go. Why not go out with Haylock sometimes, when he ferrets the rabbits? I’ve got a good little 28-bore you can have, in the gun-room at your Uncle John’s. Ask him to let you have it. I used to shoot with it when I was a boy.”

  “Thanks very much, Uncle.” He didn’t tell him that he had a 12-bore of his own.

  “’Twill help you get your eye in. Haylock will have to do a lot of ferretin’, to keep the rabbits down, for I don’t want village cads to feel that they have the run of the woods, which they will do if he has to ask some of them to do the shootin’. They take enough game with their lurcher dogs already, and also use sweep-nets for the partridges. What you shoot, of course, should be left for Haylock. Keepers feel that rabbits are their perquisites. He tells me he could trap five thousand every winter, if only I’d give him permission. But I’ve told him that this was a first-class partridge shoot in my father’s time, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t become so again. So go out after the rabbits with him. Have you got any friends you’d like to invite?”

  “No, Uncle.”

  “Well, I expect you’ll make friends in due course.”

  He turned to Lucy, and kissed her. “I’ve enjoyed my visit no end, and look forward to my return in the fall. I’ll be bringing down half a dozen guests, but we’ll all put up at the Royal Hotel in Shakesbury.” He said to Phillip, “Try to get the ploughing done by the middle of September, broadcast the mustard, and you’ll be surprised at the number of birds that will fly out when we put in the beaters.”

  “Yes, Uncle Hilary. By the way, I’m going to shave off my beard.”

  *

  That evening Phillip re-entered the world of his inner self by which alone he could transmute the burdens of conscience and memory, a world which had been deserted since his marriage.

  He began writing, at the point left off the previous June, with intense nervousness. First he looked at his notes; to reject them and wander round the dozen square yards of the room; returned to the low mahogany desk which had been his grandfather Turney’s; left to rearrange the fire; returned to glance at the notes. So many pages: where to begin? He was reluctant to read them. They began with Lutra, her tame otter, going down the Maladine stream to the reedy mere, soon after her death … but all he could picture, with sighful despair, was a pale face within a coffin deep in the shaley soil of Malandine churchyard, the oak boards not yet rotted, so that she was waiting, waiting to escape from the cruel, restricting pressures of the earth, when she could forever be of ambient air, clear flowing water from moor and valley; rising again to be with clouds, to fall as rain into the tidal pulses of the sea, sharing the life of fish and shell, of rock and grain of sand. And thus to be with him, her pilgrim still held back from the elements. Lutra’s wanderings were her wanderings, she was with Shelley, with Blake, and all the holy poets who knew that life was a Spirit.

  *

  It was no good: Lutra was too small, its spirit was alien. He must return to the battlefields, and lose himself ‘in the silentness of duty’. Putting aside the bundle of manuscript, he took from a drawer a shilling hard-cover quarto book with ruled lines and began to write in a slow, tremulous hand.

  At sunrise the next morning he was still at the desk; after a couple of hours’ sleep on the couch under an army blanket he awoke with a feeling of happiness never known since waking of a morning beside Barley, and went on with the narrative. Lucy, so impersonal, almost remote, brought up sandwiches and a pot of tea; he clasped her, with streaming eyes, but could not merge into her spirit, she was apart. So on with the scenes in the autumn of 1914, beyond another sunset and into the stars of night wheeling slowly past the window. Towards dawn, at the hour of stand-to, he opened the casement; the slight noise was a shock, lest machine-gun fire open up; but the moment of fear passed; the stars were brighter and clearer than any he had seen before. He felt a strength in the breast, he was living again his true life. Then suddenly weary, his eyes stinging, with the lids pressed hard together he groped a way to the couch and dropped asleep. When he awoke Lucy and Billy were standing in a slant of red light across the uneven oaken planks of the floor.

  “Have I been asleep all day?”

  “Yes, we didn’t like to wake you.”

  “Ni’ ni’ Dad,” said Billy, smiling. “Ni’ ni’ room—ni’ ni’ fire—oyl! oyl!”—this last a shout of glee as one of the white owls, which roosted under the thatched roof, sailed across the yard opposite, past the flint walls glowing with the light of the sinking sun.

  “I’ll get you some food,” Lucy said, after he had sluiced face and arms in the deep bath. “Could you eat a plate of bacon and mushrooms? How’s the work going?”

  “Part One is finished. Hallowe’en, Messines Ridge. Enfer Wood—the burning windmill—the Bavarians’ band playing under the rising moon—the withdrawal to Wulverghem—Menin Road and Sanctuary Wood—Cranmer dead—the battle of Ypres broken off in the November rains—‘Bobs’ death at St. Omer—the Brigade marching back to Bailleul—Grenadiers, Coldstreamers, Camerons, Black Watch, London Highlanders—less than four hundred all told——” He stood on the uneven oak boards of the floor, a man transfixed.

  Chapter 2

  IRON HORSES

  Lobbett’s having been marked out and the tops opened, the horseman then ploughed a furrow, Phillip walking beside the team across the field to the headland. There the horses were turned, to stop with the share in the new furrow. The horseman handed over the stilts with their wooden handles, together with the two lines, one attached to each of the outer ring-bits of the horses, to his pupil. Then without a word he took the bridle of the near-side horse and led it up the field, the off-side horse walking in the furrow.

  Phillip felt himself being drawn along, holding to the stilts for balance; then quickly adjusting his weight he bore down upon them, using the stilts as levers while watching the wave of earth corkscrewing up and dropping over behind the breast of the plough. It was a matter of keeping the unseen point—the share—from dipping too deep. It was exhilarating; he got to the headland across the field as gulls began to arrive, one dropping a splash on his coat sleeve. There stood the bailiff.

  “Be you writin’ your name?” he asked, pointing to the irregular furrow.

  Phillip had watched the headland being marked out all round the field, parallel to the hedge and six paces from it; a boundary within a boundary; but to establish the bailiff’s prestige before the horseman he asked, “Why do you have headlands, Ned?”

  “To close yar work, sir.”

  “I think I begin to see what you mean. When all the up-and-down ploughing’s done, we enclose the ‘work’ by throwing the furrows inwards, right up to the hedge, boxing in the ploughed work?”

  “You’ve a-got it.”

  “What good English you fellows speak. ‘To close your work.’ Then, ‘You’ve a-got it.’ I feel I’ll never be able to learn all there is to be known about farming.”

  “Littles by littles,” said the bailiff, going away. He came back later to see how Phillip was getting on.

  “Yar’ll do,” he said.

  “Shall I take my osses away now, bailie?” asked the horseman.

  “That’s the idea, Jim. I’ll show th’ boss how to harness up Donk and Daisy,” referring to the two aged animals left in the stable. “Come you with me,” he said to Phillip. They walked down the borstal to the premises. “Donk wor in th’ Army,” he said, patting the neck of a long-eared mule.

  “I had light-draught horses in my transport section in the winter of nineteen-sixteen, Ned. Ancre Valley, Fifth Army. Where were you, bailie?”

  “’Appy Valley,” wheezed the bailiff. “Cor, there wor’ some mud t
har, wasn’t ’a, tho’.”

  “Then we went north to Ypres, to the Second Army. Were you at Third Ypres, Ned?”

  “Aye.”

  “Moonrakers?”

  “Aye.”

  The bailiff spoke no more: the war to him had meant an unwanted interval of misery, loneliness, endurance, and finally painful nauseating wounds which had made him feel a half-man ever afterwards, in a world which was gone-in.

  “I’m looking forward to working with a donk again, Ned.”

  “Aye. They’m kind.”

  The bailiff was gentle towards the younger man’s optimism. After a deep breath he made to lift off its peg a horse-collar for Donk. The leather was broken away in places from the stitches. Straw had burst from the torn flannel lining. He was not a tall man; he staggered after stretching up to the rows of pegs along the flint wall.

  “Let me do it, bailie. Sit you down, you were up before I was. I’ll harness Donk and Daisy. Traces—sails—we won’t want the cruppers, will we—bridles, bits—where are the lines?”

  The bailiff looked in a wooden oat bin. Then in the manger. Rats gnawed rope for the oil in it, the grease off a horse’s coat or perhaps the salt of sweating; the carter had hidden his lines somewhere. Perhaps there wasn’t another pair? The bailiff didn’t know.

  Phillip dashed away on the Norton to buy a new pair in Shakesbury. The bailiff was sitting on the same box, his face patient and thoughtful, when he returned.

  “Yar bin quick, guv’nor,” he said, approvingly.

  “I want to get the ploo’n done bailie my dear. Then I want to get on with my writing.”

  “Us’ve only got th’ old lea-breaker ploo, guv’nor.”

  They went into the barn, leaving the untied animals standing side by side in the stall. They were rising twenty years; long since the black beans in their teeth had been worn away. Both Donk and Daisy had known the glutinous grey mud of the winter Somme, one and sometimes nearly two feet in depth along the transport tracks. They had survived the yellow clays of Ypres, which had dragged the guts out of thousands during the exceptionally wet and stormy summer of 1917. They were ‘kind’, in the bailiff’s laconic description: patient, enduring all things, brown-eyed, gentle, gaunt, slow.

  The lea-breaker had seen some years, too. How old was it?

  “Mebbe sixty year, guv’nor—mebbe seventy—perhaps a hun’ed. ’Tes a crab breast,” touching the four-foot length of dark wood, slightly curled like an opening sunflower petal. “Crab—yar know—harn’t yar ivver gathered up a capful o’ crabs when yar was a bwoy? ’Course yar did!” touching Phillip affectionately on the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Is the curve natural, or was it steamed, do you think?”

  “Aw, natural. For stren’th, surely. Tes a master ploo, ’twull bear up the vores (furrows) slowly-like, without crackin’n. Tes what us yurrabout calls a lea-breaker.”

  “I suppose this sort of plough was originally used on the downs?”

  “Could’a.”

  “Why mustn’t the furrows on a lea be cracked?”

  “Flag’ll grow through.” Flag was grass; lea was pasture. Phillip felt more confident.

  The bailiff pulled out an old plough-skid on wheels: a rusty iron trolley. Wobbling and precarious, the lea-breaker was taken up the borstal behind the cranky team, and through the gap by the broken gate into Lobbett’s.

  “I’ll start yar off, guv’nor.”

  The lea-breaker had a long sloping iron share; the slightly curved wooden breast raised the furrow gradually until it curled over on its face. All forward movement was critical; one must stare intently lest the iron share work out of the ground.

  “Mind ’a don’t score.”

  The bailiff was now almost enthusiastic, from a feeling that the young fellow was a good man; yet he was sad under the feeling; for what was Lobbett’s but rubbish, the heart in the land gone? You couldn’t farm this land without a ewe-flock. This was bad land, it would break any farmer.

  Behind the return furrow Phillip felt that he knew what to do: it was a question of an eye for steering straight, of balance to counter the pulls upon the swingle-trees with the pressure of the earth on the share. He was a ploughman! Behind him now were screams as black-headed gulls lit on the new slice to seize worms, beetles, and once a dazed mouse exposed to sudden day.

  The mare began to sweat; he rested his team; and went on, furrow after furrow, not very even or straight furrows, not all the stubble put under—“writing his name” across the field, as the bailiff had declared. When Donk had had enough, he stood still. Nothing would make him go on until he wanted to. One drooped ear was a sign of weariness. Phillip stood by his head, arm on mule’s neck, thinking of how often he had seen, in the mud, an ear go down; and when the donk’s second ear went down it too went down in the mud and died.

  *

  Later in the morning John walked up with Lucy to see how he was getting on. He pointed with his stick at a small and rusty, very narrow iron object which had been turned up by the plough.

  “That looks like the off-side half of a bullock’s shoe, Phillip. We used to plough with bullocks not so long ago. Each beast required eight shoes, for the cloven hoofs. The horn is harder than that of a horse’s foot, and holds the clenched nails.”

  The iron U, oxidised in pale loam, resembled one half of the brown mark on a partridge’s breast. Bullock foot, two sections small and narrow: slow and delicate-stepping neat-stock. He must remember the details.

  “I wonder if French peasants ploughed with oxen on the loam of the Somme uplands before the war, Uncle John?”

  The old man looked at his nephew. The war lives in him, he thought; everything comes back to the war with Phillip.

  “Would it be cheaper to plough with oxen now, Uncle John?”

  “You might like to try. I seem to remember that a pair of ox-bows, by which the wooden beam plough used to be drawn, are still hanging on the wall of the Corn Barn, Phillip. There’s also a ‘drashel’, or flail, with an ox-horn joint to allow for two-way movement, what I think today would be called a universal joint.”

  “Yes, I was looking at it with Ned. It’s a pity that the holly-wood striker is eaten by the death-watch beetle.”

  The round holly-wood stave, white under its grime, was pitted with holes like a battlefield, Phillip thought, as he went on working into the dull afternoon. Then suddenly the plough went mutinous, skittering along the stubble; the iron share had dropped off. The front of the wooden breast was broken. He took his tired team back to the stables, unharnessed and watered them ready for the carter to feed when he came back. It was beginning to rain. He welcomed this decision of the sky, for now he might, without burden of conscience, write the introduction to his war book.

  He began, as always, tremulously.

  The church in the peaceful village where I live has a tower of dressed flint, above which is a belfry. A clock with gilt hands and Roman numerals shines in the southern wall. It was built into the tower seven years ago as a memorial to the men who fell in the Great War. Their names are written in the porch below, on an illuminated scroll protected by glass from the damp winds of this south-western downland country.

  Sometimes, when the ringers go up into the room where hang the ropes with the coloured sallies, I go with them, climbing on up the worn stone steps of the dim spiral stairway, past the ringing chamber, to the bells. The ropes and wheels begin to creak; the bells begin to swing, and the tower trembles. Then with a dinning crash the metal tongues smite the deep bronze mouths, and an immense torrent of sound pours out of the narrow doorway.

  He broke off and wandered about the room. Then sitting down again, while sweat dripped from an arm-pit, he took up the pen.

  The great sound sweeps other thought away into the air, and the earth fades; the powerful wraith of those four years enters into me, and the torrent becomes the light and clangour of massed guns assaulting heaven——

  There was a knock on the door. The nib broke in
to the paper with the shock.

  Lucy came into the room.

  “Uncle John thought you might like to see this,” she said, putting down a copy of The Colham & District Times. Marked with a cross was an advertisement headed in large type JOHNSON’S IRON HORSES. “Am I interrupting you?”

  “No, Lucy,” he replied, getting up.

  “Uncle John says that they are two traction engines which work a six-furrow digger plough by hauling it on a cable across the field. He thought you might like to know that his father used to employ them for deep-ploughing, to help to weather and sweeten the raw soil brought up. Then they spread guano in the early spring. The Iron Horses used to do splendid work then, but he can’t say much about them now, but it’s the same family firm of contractors.”

  “You remember it all pretty well, don’t you?”

  “I wrote it down, as I didn’t want to get anything wrong.”

  “Well done, Lucy. I’ll telephone them at once.”

  He waited for the Colham number and a burring voice said it would ask feyther when the tackle would be available. He waited. After two minutes he said, “Is anyone there?” No reply. “Is anyone there?” he repeated. When there was no response to louder and louder repetitions he yelled in exasperation, “ARE YOU THERE, IRON HORSES?” in a voice that could be heard all over the house.

  “’Ullo ’ullo,” replied the burring voice. “I can ’ear ’ee, no need vor shout like that. You ban’t crow-starvin’, my dear.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought the line might be broken. Is that Mr. Johnson?”

  “Aye. Who be ’ut? Aw aye, I knaws th’ name. Zo you’m varmiing Frank Temperley’s land, be ’ee? Wull wull. Aw, I can’t tell ’ee exactly. Sir Roland’s agent want me vor ploo at his place, sometime, and to thresh a number of carn ricks. When do ’ee want vor ploo?”

  “As soon as possible. When do you think you can make a start, Mr. Johnson? Can you give me a date?”