He took up gloves, cane, hat; and I followed him out.
The Big Chief’s soldier-servant-chauffeur was waiting by an old suburban saloon car, carefully cleaned. I got in after the Chief. We drove to the lower road. The car swayed slowly, splashing through the chain of lagoons. Its springs were set, i.e. tired and flat, and the body took the bumps almost direct. Then we came to the area of dark mud, lying several inches above the disrupted surface, where the turf of the verges had been churned with water and gravel. The driver changed to bottom gear. Thereafter the road rose, and there was no water. Leaving the car by the barn, we got out. I followed the officer up the Gulley. I followed him down again.
‘No, it isn’t so bad as it appears,’ he remarked casually. ‘Now we’ll take these roads in sections. Up the hill here, what do you consider a fair price for removing the mud? There are about 250 yards. A day’s work for a man? Eight bob?’
‘Two days, at least. But we haven’t the labour. We are behind with the sugar-beet.’
‘Everywhere is the problem of labour, my dear sir, thanks to those swine in Hunland.’
‘Can you get the Garrison Engineers to make these roads up?’
The Big Chief shook his red face, twice; and I understood that the matter was dismissed.
‘Very well, we’ll say two days’ labour. Now how many yards for dressing the surface of this stretch. We’ll call it No. 1 stretch. Two yards?’
Two cubic yards of gravel weighed about two and a half tons. I tried to calculate. Two hundred and fifty yards long, multiplied by 3 yards, made 750 square yards. Gravel two inches thick was one-eighteenth of a yard deep. Divide 750 by 18: I worked this out on an envelope and said:
‘It will require forty cubic yards at least to make it as it was before.’
The Big Chief cut the air with his short cane; tapped his long and polished riding-boot; projected his entire personality upon me in a direct stare. I felt that an enormous turkey was leaning down to peck me. ‘Now let me tell you this! The payment is ex gratia; you can accept it or leave it. I happen to be a chartered surveyor, and I say that five yards will restore this road to its pristine condition. Five yards, say at 7s. 6d. a yard. Right.’ He made a note of it.
‘What about these ruts on the grass? One day’s digging by one man should rectify them. Well?’
‘Two days.’
The Chief raised the skin of where his eyebrows had once been. Perhaps I could plough the ruts level. Cultivate the churned waste. The grass anyway was old and tired, it was congested. It would do it good.
‘Very well, two days.’
‘Next item.’
‘Broken wire under that wood.’
I followed the Big Chief there. He did not appear to walk; he stalked there. Pink flesh bulged out of his collar.
‘H’m, pretty rotten wire. Rusted away. How do I know it wasn’t broken before they came?’
I ignored his remark and said, ‘Can’t I claim replacement value?’
‘Very well. Replacement value. I have a roll of rusty wire, and it shall be delivered to you. Next please.’
‘Who’s going to erect it?’
‘You are. We’ve all got to make sacrifices in this war.’ The Big Chief said this while making a note. ‘Next.’
‘The trees in the wood are torn about, some cut down.’
The Big Chief shook his head. ‘Next.’
‘My sand pit is filled in, and is but a trash heap now. Valuable, perhaps, as an item of agenda for the Society of Archaeologists in five centuries time, with its broken crockery and rusty corkscrew pickets; but for me, it spoils the building sand. It was a good pit and was in order before they camped here.’
The Big Chief cocked a glance at me. ‘How often do you take sand?’
‘Whenever we need it.’
‘H’m. Half a crown to dig it out. Next.’ It had taken Norman and myself an entire day to clear it a few months before.
‘This broken gatepost.’
‘It’s rotten at the base. Look – dry-rot. Next.’
‘It was struck by a fifteen-ton lorry.’
The Big Chief shook his head. ‘It’s had its day. Quite rotten. Next.’
‘It should be replaced. My gate was all right before the troops came.’
‘Now we’ll take this road up here.’
‘No, that’s to be done by another unit, on this requisitioned site.’
‘Right. Down the hill.’
We descended.
‘Now for these pot-holes. No. 2 stretch. A dozen yards should fill them. Three days to clear the mud. That’s what I’ll allow you. It’s quite fair.’
‘It won’t restore the road as it was.’
‘What farm road is ever anything but pot-holes and muck?’
‘I wrote a book about this farm, and there are two photographs in it, of Before, and After. I’ll show you when we get back to the cottage. We spent several hundred pounds making this lower road, and the top road.’
‘H’m. Twelve yards, at 7s. 6d. a yard. Thirty bob for scraping mud. It’s quite fair. Next.’
‘Very well, but it won’t be enough. I know what I’m talking about. I made the roads. I did the digging and spreading, and the paying.’
‘And I know what I’m talking about, my dear sir. I’ve made hundreds of roads. And I do the surveying and the costing. Next.’
We went to the granary. The missing door-space was pointed out.
‘How do I know there was a door there?’
‘I really cannot add to what I have said.’
The Big Chief grunted. The landscape looked colourless, drab, untidy, meagre, decadent.
‘I have a witness,’ I said, a little sorry for having snubbed him.
‘H’m. Very well, say five bob?’
‘Very well.’
‘Next.’
‘The road up to the higher fields.’
The Big Chief looked bored. A picture of Windles’ cockerel, Hawkeye, fighting the turkeys two winters before, came into my mind. The Big Chief walked with the deliberation of a turkey; he had the dignity of a turkey as it peers forward, cautiously, quietly, to give a sudden peck at a smaller hen. That was why Hawkeye fought sixty damned gobblers, Hawkeye protecting his hens, attacking against great odds as he ran forward, only to retreat before the invading semi-circle of gobblers, stalking forward, heads ready to strike, heads knowing no mercy. It was always a losing fight for Hawkeye, mongrel smoke-grey and white cockerel, but always Hawkeye fought. The Big Chief looked much like a gobbler, his pendulous cheeks taking on a bluish tinge in the cold damp air by the river.
‘I don’t want to see the road up there,’ he said. ‘How long is it?’
‘Two fifty yards.’
‘Say the same as No. 1 Stretch. Anything more?’
‘Ruts over the clover layer.’
‘Roll them out. Won’t hurt your layer. Next.’
‘Fourteen ewes died in the swamps.’
The Big Chief shook his bluish chaps. ‘No proof, may have had fluke. By the river. Next.’
‘The Home Meadow is badly poached. I don’t mean by poachers. By cattle left on it, owing to troops on the hill grass. We rolled it last spring, and harrowed it.
’ ‘It won’t hurt it to roll it again. No claim for that. Nothing more?’
‘I don’t think so.’ I was numb I didn’t care, it was all part of the condition of war in people’s minds and little selfish egos. Once I saw a partridge chick, no bigger than a bumblebee, run near a turkey which leaned down and struck it dead. Just that; and left it feebly twitching. We walked back to the car. There was a little mud on the Big Chief’s boot-heels. With leisurely indifference he put one foot on the fender of his car, and beckoned his driver. The driver hurried up with a cloth, and wiped off the heel. Then, with the same leisurely indifference, he removed the foot and put up the other foot. That too was cleaned. The Big Chief, giving neither glance nor word to the driver, then removed the foot.
The lofty manner was
very slightly relaxed over a glass of beer in the parlour, while he made out the claims and I signed them. Then I asked him when he thought the war would be over.
He looked at me deliberately with his calculating pale eyes aslant and said distinctly, ‘When we’ve ground those pigs into the mud!’; and taking up gloves, cap, and stick, he called out ‘Good day!’ and returned along the pavored way as he had come.
Perhaps as one concerned with the saving of public money, the Big Chief did his job well, perhaps too well; for I heard later that there were many complaints of how he dealt with farmers’ claims; and later still, that he had been promoted, and sent to another command. I learned also that his job before the war had been the selling of little houses of a Housing Estate on the hire purchase system, with weekly payments extending over a quarter of a century or so. I expect he was a good salesman. It was no doubt a weakness in me that did not allow me to stand up to him with his own manner and attitude, or to see the comic side of the affair; I remember that his remark about pigs being ground into the mud hurt me deeply, perhaps because in my youth I had seen so many dead men, and wounded men not yet dead, lying in mud during and after battles, and also my isolation in a district where I was unpopular, and the weakness caused in part by septic throat made me unduly sensitive: for when he had gone, I recall that I wept, thinking of men drowning in water and burning in the air, or lying in the searing desert sands and the icy steppes of Russia; and such was my illusion, I believed that the ruined condition of the roads and that of the Western world were one and the same thing; and I could not do anything about it any more.
Contribution to The Pleasure Ground: A Miscellany of English Writing, edited by Malcom Elwin
Macdonald, 1947
Indian Summer Notebook
1
My spider, my bee
During the last thirteen years I nearly wrote myself to perdition. By day and by night I sat within my hilltop hut in Devon, anti-social and convoluted, spinning webs of words.
Outside in an alien world the sun curved a little higher in its daily arc, the summer stars shone, the planet Mars glowed dull red above the southern horizon. Then the sun’s curves were descending and Sirius the Dogstar, following Orion the Hunter, was baying his green fires below the glittering constellations of winter.
The grass was frosty, cold winds drove salt-spume on my western window. Somehow it was the spring equinox, and tractors were in the fields harrowing-in barley. Upon my open hearth a beechwood fire had burned for months, years on end, never going out. A copper oil-lamp, table, couch with shepherd’s plaids – my comforters, my security from the flare-haunted nights of First Ypres, green-slanting shadows of trees, crack of sniper’s bullet, brutal downward dronings of Jack Johnsons, the five-nines of the Alleyman.
Dare one open the door in those winter nights come again? Stars hung above the beech spinney, Northern Crown and Great Bear, faithful Polaris. Meteors slid in lines of pale fire, distant roar of waves upon the sands of Croyde and Saunton, beating on the rocks of Baggy headland. The world-rimming lighthouse-flashings of Harty Point and Lundy. Tremendous exhilaration! For thirty years I had waited to write my novels of Ypres, Somme, Seigfried Stellung . . .
The harder I worked – 10, 12, 15 hours on stretch – the greater the feeling of freedom in achievement. When I could see no more I sank, with stinging eyes, fully dressed upon the couch, to awake with a glow both rich and strange, that all was balanced in Time.
‘Does this mean that you will never write again about nature?’ someone asked on a sunny spring morning. ‘What, you haven’t been round Baggy for years? Or crossed the Burrows? Exmoor? Walked by Salar’s river?’
My body was growing old. My spirit growing young again, and fresh. My eyes were lost without spectacles. ‘No time ever again, to stand and stare?’
No time. November gales in the valley of the Ancre. A force-9 wind threw five beech trees in the spinney. When they were sawn I counted 110 rings, each a tree-year. I split and stacked the logs myself and when all had been turned to potash on the hearth the five 1914-18 novels were done. The author lost, vacant, aimless. In T.E. Lawrence’s words about himself, in a letter written just before he died, ‘the mainspring seems broken.’ One must work on, through another war and so to my climax. Fifteen volumes to the end.
It is summer again. Thousands of people on the sands. Transistors, cars glittering. To Baggy headland? By the path along North Side someone had tipped tons of domestic and other rubbish in that quarry where the kestrel used to nest, and blue borage flowers once grew. Turn back. I am old, I am ancien regime. I must clean my salt-crusted, smoke-oily, web-laden windows. A pail of water. Already half-filled. O, a dead bumble bee. Poor innocent honey-spinner, flower-maker. Why did I go to sleep in the grass, leaving the pail half-full? When I have so much work to do.
I poured away the water. The bee lay in the sun. Verdict: Found drowned. Stay, was that a hooky black leg stirring? Run for blotting paper. It lives! In the heat of the sun, upon my palm, crawling feebly.
What of its young in nest down a hole somewhere in the mossy bank, waiting for this faithful Queen Victoria? I had honey in a jar. Run. Old honey, jar almost empty. Fermented. No matter.
Bee back on palm, dry, lancing long black tongue tipped brown, sip, sip, sip, 100 sips to the minute, tiny tiptaps on my skin. Filling itself with fuel. Another drop. Sip, sip. Filling reserve tank before taking off? Wings and head cleaned. Taking off. Oh dear, crash landing after Immelmann turns, half rolls, zoom and stall. Verdict: Drunk in charge of aircraft.
Try again. My bee flew up, she went zig, she went zag, and clung to my hair. I bore her thus to my hut to sleep it off, away from enemy birds, mice, snakes in the grass. I left her on the window sill.
So I come to my spider. A black horror. A junk-shop ghoul. Empress Arachne of Darkness. Frowsty flattish web clotted with wreckage of bluebottles, moths, daddylonglegs, butterflies. Eight spiky legs, battery of eyes, bull’s-horn pincers and the speed of a dragster.
Buzz of entangled wings made her rip out of her tunnel tearing threads, back again dragging prey poisoned by those hollow mandibles. A score of times I had meant to sweep away her charnel house, but I let live.
Back to my bee. She was sleeping it off. Now to clean the windows outside. Pail of water from across the field. When I returned by bee was buzzing in the web. I stood by to help: Nemesis.
Empress Arachne came out of her tunnel. She waited, moved forward. Watched Queen Bumble. Other bee-shucks littered the web. But she didn’t advance. I stood and stared, feeling her hesitancy. She ran back. Had she seen the glistering eye of Nemesis?
No need for force. Queen Bumble crawled along a known finger. Put on silver birch tree outside in the sun. And wandering lost in the tiny apple-orchard called the Lozenge, I scooped a warble fly from a wasp-hollowed apple. Warble was tanglilegs, as they used to say in Devon. On cider. I dislike warble flies, drunk or sober. They blow eggs on bullocks’ legs, maggots bore in, tunnel their way to the spine, and pupate just under the skin. Thence they tunnel out in due season and spread wings to mate and blow more eggs.
So into the web of the Black Widow went Warble the Leather Spoiler, while I justified a return of guilty small-boy torture feelings for the sake of the Boot and Shoe Industry.
Empress Arachne ran forward. Again she stopped about two inches off the intruder. Went back. Why was she hesitant? I put fly after fly into her web, she never touched them, all escaped by way of my finger. The Black Empress seemed to have lost her nature. So gentle, so inoffensive. I put on my spectacles, and all was clear.
In one corner of the web was a burst ball of silk. This was the climax of her life. All lust, all passion spent. What force had transformed this tiger, tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night, into a Blakeian saint? Day after day I stood and stared, as she withered away, face turned to the wall, while from the burst ball of silk tiny spiders were moving to spin out their own lives.
2
Leaves in the grass
I sit in the sun outside my hut, and watch a lizard sunning itself on one of the elmboards, near a knothole, its home. I am lamenting my vanished partridges.
Years ago a pair always nested in this field, season after season. And a white owl quartered the mice-runs in the grasses. Were they gone with the quails which had haunted ventriloquially this nature reserve of neglected pasture now tumbled down to what farmers call rubbish – docks, knapweed, dandelions, hawkweed (those blazing little suns) and delicate pink fumitory?
Wet-my-lips is the haunting sunset and moonlight cry of the quail, small bird of the partridge family which migrates in spring from the burning deserts of North Africa, once littered by the wreckage of 8th Army and Afrika Korps. A cry that haunts . . .
Quail and partridge, white owl drifting moth-like over the mice-runs, where were they? Died out, with so many other birds in this age of science which knows so much, and yet so little?
The diesel fumes of tractor and lorry fill the air about me, overlaying the scents of flowers. At my apple-blossom the bee sucks no more. Ariel, too, is gone, and the lyric girdle of the earth, my world. Money bounces messages off Telstars, and, when the wind is still, a layer of industrial smog from the Midlands lies over Exmoor. Another stratifies over the channel. I have seen it from a glider, level black band between earth and azure. My son John, who sometimes pilots me aloft, says it comes from Paris, and industrial Northern France.
I believe that the purpose of life on this earth is to create beauty. The lyric did not die on the Somme, with many of the Georgian poets, as once I thought. Nor did it die in Russia. There was Pasternak, now there is Paustovsky. So close down waste-land thoughts. Shut up, Williamson, and get on with your story of the beech leaves in the grass. Down there, by your feet. A yard away, to be exact. A small cluster of dry brown leaves, smaller than the outline of a man’s cap.
Indian Summer Notebook Page 9