A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  No wonder Lucy’s eyes were shining and her cheeks flushed with happiness. She was home again after fifteen years in the wilderness.

  *

  Yes, he was homeless, and had been ever since Hallowe’en on the Messines Ridge twenty-five years before. Yes, that was the breaking away point, he thought, as he had his tea alone in the old armchair by the fire, books at his back, fire at his feet, hire-purchase radio by his elbow, shaded electric light flooding the tray by his side, windows framed with black paper over his shoulder. Shoes off, not bothered to find slippers. It was good to sip tea and read a different newspaper and turn on the wireless by his side instead of having to go up into his bedroom to listen to the news—no news, as usual.

  And as he sat there his mind strayed into the past, to the cottage by a moorland stream of pellucid water where the pale green olive duns hatched from the clear running rills at noon, to shed their pellicle-dresses in the afternoon and assume another of tawny hue, to rise and fall in the motion of a spinning shuttle, laying their eggs on the water until the trout took them in the runs.

  How often had he watched them by the bridge at Monachorum. How simple a life that had been; yet it had not satisfied. Why was that—not enough to do? No: no likeness of thought. The mayfly swimming up as a wingless nymph—meditating deliriously as it waited for its pellicle to split, its winged essence to mount the bright heaven of all being—no melancholy, no shadow of itself. To love—to lose oneself in beauty—to be calm, to be happy. Then, and only then, might a man be able to say within himself, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

  Otherwise, man was an object offset from life, mislaid in the flow of time. Was it true that his isolation had begun when he grew apart from his mother, in that hollow-wasted home? The sense of being completely outside time had been strong almost from infancy. This sense had taken care of him sometimes in the war, when all sense of danger or fear had lifted, and he had walked into the hissing flêches of machine-gun bullets, exposed and indifferent, not from bravado, but to be calm, to be free, apart from his body.

  Whatever the cause, this sense of misplacement in time, this sense almost of predestination had brought him to where he was now. He had never really wanted to be a farmer. He had just let it happen to him, driven on as by a sort of doppelganger in opposition to his real self. He was not by nature a man of action, he was a contemplator of action. That was why he always preferred to watch things happen rather than make them happen. He could describe in words, without effort, anything he had observed; it always had given him pleasure, provided there were no ulterior necessity to force on the writing, such as the need for money.

  That was the solution to his self-made impasse: he was not a farmer, but a writer. So all he had to do was to sell the farm, and buy or rent a little house like No. 2, The Glade, not too far from town, on a ’bus route, so that he could shop and meet friends and go to the pictures without trouble or waste of energy; and his problem was solved. No more sleepless mornings, no more lying awake at 3 a.m. and wondering what to order for wet-weather work for three men, should it be raining at 7 a.m. How wonderful not to have to think anything in terms of necessity.

  “Hullo, my dear,” said Lucy, coming into the room with her brother.

  “By Jove, Phil,” said Tim, “it’s good to see you sitting in Pa’s chair again.”

  “It’s good to sit in it, Tim. How about the talkies, when the trailer’s unloaded? Or need we unload tonight?”

  “I’ve got the bags out already,” said Lucy. “Let’s leave the rest till tomorrow. Pictures? Certainly! Tim says a neighbour will come in periodically and listen if the little boys are all right. Pictures, Tim-o?”

  “By Jove, yes, Lulu! I’ve not been for weeks. How jolly nice to ride in a car again. I’m sick of my bicycle, every morning going to work in the dark, and returning every night to an empty house in the same dark. I say, how absolutely splendid it is that you have come!”

  The two boys ran into the room, uttering cries of enjoyment, Jonathan as usual following and imitating David. “Gee whizz, I like Uncle Tim’s house,” cried David. “I’m so glad we’ve left the farm. Hurray.”

  “Hurray,” echoed Jonathan.

  *

  Lying relaxed in bed that night, Phillip wondered how Teddy Pinnegar and Mrs. Carfax were getting on. Mrs. Carfax had spoken of the possibility of her two hunters coming to the farm. What would that mean, ten pounds of crushed oats daily for each hunter? ‘The Bad Lands’ could hardly support its own livestock. Teddy had assured him in a letter that he had very simple tastes: four hundred a year in the country would be sufficient to satisfy those tastes, he had declared; while asking, Would there be that return from two thousand pounds invested in the farming business? Four hundred was a normal return for a working partner from two thousand invested in an ordinary business, he said.

  Phillip had replied that it might be possible with new and improved methods: a pedigree milking herd instead of nine cows rearing three or four nondescript market calves each, in a year; the meadows drained, ploughed, and re-seeded to feed the herd; the arable enriched to grow better hay, beans, for silage; an increased flock of turkeys and perhaps hundreds of hens in fold units to improve the pastures. In a phrase, high farming.

  But was high farming possible in a siege war when submarines began to attack British shipping seriously? The import of feeding stuffs and fertilisers, particularly potash, would be cut down, rationed, and finally unobtainable. There were the several big compost heaps as potash-makers on the farm; but it was a long-term system. As cultivations improved, so would the crops; more straw and better meadows meant more dung because there would be more bullocks to tread the straw in the yards in winter. But £800 a year profit from £4,000 invested in the arable of ‘the Bad Lands’ and 90 acres of indifferent grassland was asking a lot to begin with. He had said all this to Teddy; adding that it depended entirely on the ability, drive, and vision of the partnership.

  *

  During his stay at No. 2, The Glade, he walked in some of the places he had known as a boy, pretending he was farming the fields which he passed, while knowing that those heavy lands had broken many a farmer. His farthest walk was to a spinney where with his cousin Percy Pickering he had found his first chaffinch’s nest, in a low hawthorn hedge of the country lane within bicycling distance of Beau Brickhill. Rooks had cawed against the windy April sky, but neither he nor Percy had dared to climb up. They had stood under the trees, regarding the long upper boughs on the slender tops of which the mysterious nests swayed against white clouds riding high above the blue halls of the wind.

  The boy who had gazed upwards with him had been dead a long time, killed on the Somme; but Phillip could see his rosy face, Eton collar resting on shoulders of Norfolk jacket, hear his voice in the shadows of April leaves speckling the white dusty lane to the gay song of the chaffinch. It was hard to imagine Percy further: for the essence of him, so real once, had gone out of his life. Percy was dead, too far away for any feeling of him to remain under the trees; and the spinney, once so remote and enchanting, was changed also, for just down the tarmac road were great pits of excavated blue-clay with miles of elevated lines and steel trucks slowly moving along them, travelling laden to the furnaces whose tall pale yellow chimneys were visible some miles away. The former meadows and fields, covering several thousands of acres, were now part of an immense brick-works; perhaps half of Greater London was once lying under the song of the chaffinch when Percy and he had bicycled to Brogborough Spinney.

  A queer sight, the trucks trundling above that deeply excavated grey landscape, where not a human being was to be seen: only the steel trucks trundling on their miles of raised causeway, some empty and returning, other awaiting at switch-lines for the more important laden ones to pass in their wide-spaced procession above a hollowed-out countryside whose horizon was set with viaducts, causeways, and tall cranes.

  The queerness, the unreality of this world was heightened by the sight here
and there of a derailed truck which had fallen clear of the track, to lay on its back like a huge robot-louse of Martian industry, on a planet become soilless and worked-out, void and dead—discarded by the invisible power whose direction it had lost. I do not like this voided world, with its whiff of acid air coming from that white vapour straying out of the distant rows of tall chimneys; and so thinking, he hastened away through the flat and colourless fields, his thoughts shut in upon himself, and arrived back at No. 2, The Glade in darkness, feeling himself alien to modern life, and now indeed homeless, as he sat in Pa’s chair, for he had severed himself from these romping children, and the amiable brother and sister who were talking so happily together in the adjoining room. In their soft voices they were talking of the happy things they would now be able to do together. The next day he was going back to the farm.

  With empty trailer behind him, he travelled forward into the sand and pine-tree country at fifty-four miles an hour. The trailer, all that was left of Ernest’s old Crossley car which Phillip had taken in settlement of his brother-in-law’s debts to him, was well balanced; it never rolled or gave any feeling of being there unless wrongly loaded. He had to go fast because soon the light would fail, and though he had a 36-watt bulb in the masked headlight instead of the regulation 18-watt, driving in the black-out was a strain. Knowing himself, he wanted to arrive at the farmhouse unfatigued; otherwise in the reaction he would be null, and perhaps show by his manner that he could not bear to enter the place. After all, he thought, if they do not like it—and how could they like the life—they need not stay beyond the month.

  Lucy was to receive little more than a subsistence allowance for herself and the children; for with the loss of nearly a thousand pounds during the first years of farming, and a small harvest the second, Phillip did not see how he could avoid getting more deeply in debt to the bank. All he had to set against the overdraft was ten acres of barley, fourteen of sugar-beet, sixteen of wheat. There were about forty turkeys, and sixteen pigs nearly fat; but no bullocks would be ready as beef for some time.

  The Silver Eagle was sliding about the road as though he were sailing Scylla in the Channel off the Shingle Bank where the conflict of tides had always made sailing there an adventure. Frost patterns were growing on the windscreen. So far no black ice had formed on the road; the surface had been dry: but hoar frost was crystallising, causing the worn treads of the rear wheels to slip slightly. Even an inch sideways thrust was felt at the wheel. He slowed down to fifty, dreading darkness in a frost-fog which would reduce speed to walking pace.

  It was cold. He stopped to put newspapers under his coat. Towards the coast the fog became thinner. The ruddy-brown afterglow of sunset was over ploughed fields, this made him think he must hurry on with the ploughing before frost set hard about Christmas. Matt wanted to fold the fifty-three ewes on the sugar-beet tops of Pewitts, thus keeping them with food until within a week or two of lambing. He said that the dung of ewes was better for barley than sugar-beet tops ploughed in directly; but Phillip thought that ewes forming their lambs would take from the land much of the value of the wilted leaves and crowns of the beet. Matt said no; but if the bony frames of the lambs were made out of the beet tops, it seemed to Phillip that the barley following in spring would find less phosphate in the soil. Perhaps that was good for a malting sample. After all, it was potash that made the grains good; perhaps dung was more readily absorbed by the plants than decaying beet-leaves.

  Whatever the answer, the ewes must be fed. He tried to make a plan. The real problem was to know the difference between tops converted into lambs, and barley grown from the same tops ploughed in direct. Now how many acres remained to be ploughed? Count. Twenty-two acres of Higher and Lower Brock Hangers; ten of Bustard; fifteen old grassland of Scalt. Forty-seven. One acre per day for a team of horses; four by tractor.

  Say two weeks; call it three.

  It was doubtful if the two Brocks could be ploughed, for the ground was tangled and thick with overgrown mustard, sown in the previous June after a bastard-fallow to kill the thistles. He had not wanted to sow mustard there; the idea had been to kill every thistle and every weed as he had on Steep before sowing the wheat; but Luke had suggested they sow mustard instead and plough it in. ‘Good as half a coat of muck.’ It was good farming practice, and Phillip had sown the mustard, which was ready for ploughing-in in early autumn; but all during that time he had helped to load the three hundred tons of muck and chalk for the Nightcraft. After that the rains had come.

  The Higher and Lower Brocks were in places almost heavy land. As soon as the wheat on Nightcraft had been sown Phillip had gone up there to plough. The mustard was nearly three feet tall. The tough stalks wedged themselves in the disc coulters, causing blockage and stoppage every few yards, with several hundred pounds of earth riding on the plough-breasts which were forced out of the ground. Thereupon Luke had declared they needed a big single-furrow deep-digger plough. He borrowed one from a neighbouring farm and they tried to plough with it, Luke the tortoise holding the stilts, Phillip the hare driving the tractor. But the soil was too wet, too claggy. The rusty breast would not score. The clay clung to it. No furrow was turned. The moving mass had rattled the engine to a stop.

  ‘We bin stopped,’ said Tortoise.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Hare.

  ‘It ain’t go good,’ said Tortoise.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Hare.

  ‘We can’t go on,’ said Tortoise.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Hare.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Tortoise.

  *

  He could see by the glazing of the windscreen and feel by the ice of wind-tears on his cheeks, and the ache in toes and fingers that the frost was hardening. It would be the third season in succession he had failed to plough his land in time. It was a quelling thought, that he could never get forward as he wanted to, because of his own weakness in considering the wishes and feelings of others before his own.

  *

  Through blue dusk, by fields, hedges, dark patches which were woods, the Silver Eagle descended a narrow lane between high banks and entered the village of Banyard.

  Every cottage was dark, the street deserted.

  Part Two

  SISYPHUS & CO.

  ‘The polar night’s huge boulder hath rolled

  This my heart, my Sisyphus, in the abyss.

  —Edith Sitwell.

  Chapter 5

  NEW BROOM

  When he opened the door of the farmhouse, after knocking (for he regarded it no longer as his home) he saw a transformation. Teddy Pinnegar and Mrs. Carfax had obviously been awaiting with some anticipation how his face would show delight at what they had prepared for him. Both were smiling; both said, “Welcome to the New Farm”; both asked him if he had had a good journey, and—after a pause—in one voice, “What do you think of it now?”

  He saw the polished tall-boy and walnut cupboard standing against the wall, and wondered how they had obtained entry into the workshop, which he had left locked.

  “What do you think of it, Phillip?”

  “Well, well, well!” he heard himself exclaiming, with an attempt at Tim-like enthusiasm. He noticed the two workshop oil-stoves burning redly near one wall. There was a smell of tractor vaporiser oil. A drum of it was standing in the shed next to the workshop. T.V.O. gave off carbon-monoxide and was not for stoves. It had a higher flash-point than paraffin. He must mention it later, not now.

  “There is a change indeed,” he said, making as though to warm his frozen fingers over the stove. “Br-r-r! It’s cold in an open car.”

  An electric radiator glowed in another corner of the room. It stood on the damp paviors. He had been warned by the electrician to stand it on wood, lest a short-circuit through the damp floor cause electrocution. Mrs. Carfax was watching his face.

  “You don’t seem altogether pleased,” she said.

  “The engine is still running in my head, ‘Yipps’.”
>
  On the table were flowers. The dark oak surface shone with a high polish. Golf-club bags leaned against the wall. A leopard skin was draped over the sofa. The elephant feet still stood guard beside the unlit hearth. There was his old carved Bible box, kept locked in the workshop ever since leaving Rookhurst, also taken from the workshop. The deeds of Malandine field and Barley’s sand-shoes had been in the box. He opened the lid, and saw within a dozen pairs of delicate evening shoes, in gold, silver, black, white, and green; but no sandshoes, no lace which Barley had broken on the day before her death.

  Had they been thrown away?

  “It seemed a pity to waste all this furniture, so I ordered Luke to bring it up in the cart with the other furniture,” said Mrs. Carfax, with a brilliant smile that did not reach her eyes.

  “It looks jolly nice,” he said, avoiding her face. Almost abruptly she turned away to stuff Lucy’s grey tweed coat under the door.

  “We kept the deeds in the box,” said Teddy, softly, coming close to Phillip. “Also the old pair of sandshoes. Billy, who showed me where the key was, told us they belonged to his mother, so I put them on one side in the workshop, in a biscuit tin.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  When first he had seen Lucy, before she had held baby Billy and blushed after kissing his head, she was wearing that grey tweed coat as she walked beside the river with her father. She had looked so beautiful: dark hair, grey eyes, rich colouring, grey felt hat and lichen-grey coat and skirt. It was Irish tweed—bogs and mountains, white trout and smoke from cabeens—and during that summer when the icicle in his breast had melted before her compassion, she had worn it again and again, having very few clothes, except those she had made herself.