A Solitary War (33 page)

“I took too many.”

“Would you like one, darling?” Lucy asked her brother.

“Would I not, Lulu!”

Soon Tim was knocking a hole in the shell of his egg. Pa had always done that, ‘to let out the devil’. Tim was optimistic. That morning he had had an interview with an Air Ministry official. He had been selected for training as an inspector of aircraft at Bristol.

“I cannot tell you, my dear Phil, how absolutely wonderful it is to feel that I shall spend most of my time away from that horrible conveyor-belt. Unfortunately it will mean giving up this house, as I may have to go absolutely anywhere in the country when I have passed my training. However, Lucy is welcome to stay on for as long as she likes. What’s more, I’ll be able to spend my leaves here!”

“Hurray for Uncle Tim!” cried David, appearing at the open door in pyjamas.

“Hurray for Uncle Tim!” echoed Jonathan, behind David.

“It’s such a
clean
district, the school is so good for the children, after all the obscene words and phrases in the village school,” said Lucy, when the boys had gone back to bed.

The next day Phillip went north with Billy, having telegraphed to Mrs. Hammett.

*

The Silver Eagle ran well, they arrived before their supper at seven o’clock. Afterwards to see Luke. Everything, said the steward, was all right. They had been copping on with the work.

No work was possible on the land. The furrows were claggy said Luke. The meadows were swampy, cattle still in the yards. So all day they worked in the High Barn. Power to the High Barn shafting came from the tractor standing outside the north wall, under
an open shed with corrugated iron roof. The tractor pulley turned a balata belt through a boxed hole in the wall to the main shafting, with its fixed pulleys, within the barn. These fixed pulleys turned lesser belts, one to the chaffing machine, another to the grinding and rolling mill. While the men worked at the chaffing machine, Phillip attended the mill.

The cutter made chaff to be fed, with sliced mangold and swede roots, to the cattle in the yards. The curved knives of the cutter hissed into wads of oat-straw, and then long hay, making what Luke called ‘cut stuff’. It was an economical feed for cows and bullocks standing around the wooden bins. If the fodder was fed unchopped, or ‘long’, the bullocks invariably wasted almost as much as they ate, since they pulled mouthfuls away from the heaps under the walls while treading underfoot much of it. Before the war Phillip had bought wooden hay-racks to be fixed to the walls of the yards, but there had been no time to do this.

The men did not like working in the High Barn. It meant dust in hair, eyes, and nostrils in an atmosphere of semi-darkness. Still they accepted the work. Boss had never ‘stood them off’ in wet weather, like other farmers in the district.

Three men—Luke, Steve, and one-eyed ‘Billy the Nelson’—fed the cutting machine, which frequently broke down. It was driven by an old, much-riveted leather belt from the shafting, relict of the late Victorian age, when the motive power had been a steam engine.

Oats to be rolled, or crushed, were fed to the left side of the mill. Barley to be ground for pig-meal on the right side. The two streams of grain fell from a wooden hopper above, which he had divided into two compartments, each with its separate wooden chute.

The hopper, fixed on one of the main beams of the barn, was a feasting place for rats, which gnawed through the planking and spoiled any grain left there. Phillip had nailed a section of
biscuit-box
tin over the holes, and asked that no corn be left there, either in sack or hopper, after work in the High Barn; but since this order had been disregarded by Luke, he had seen to it himself.

He knew that it was a clumsy, wasteful way of producing crushed oats and barley meal; but what else could they do, until the new farm was created? Every time anything was handled on a farm it cost money. First the grain lying in heaps in the Corn Barn had to be put into sacks; then the sacks loaded into a tumbril and taken round to the High Barn. The sacks were hoisted by chain
and pulley to the platform below the hopper. From there they were lifted up and tipped into the hopper. When the metal stops were pulled out, the grain poured down pipes to the mill below, the barley passing through the grinding plates of one section of the mill, the oats falling between the rollers, before spouting into respective sacks.

Phillip, the miller, looked after the sacking of crushed oats and pig-meal, replacing a sack when it was filled, tying its neck and hauling it away to stand with others in rows. The arrangement was poor because the chaff-cutter had to be stopped every hour for the knives to be sharpened. Each knife-edge was merely rubbed with a file and so given a smaller rounded edge each time. Thus the bluntness increased with every rubbing—the original acute angle of the blade became an arc—and caused frequent jams, some so abruptly that the belt was thrown off the shafting with a jerk. Then more ‘sharpening’, while the machine stood idle.

Owing to the lay-out of the buildings all the sacked stuff had to be taken away again to the rat-proof bins in the stable. This meant that Matt, feeding the beasts, had to walk considerable distances twice a day to collect the cut-stuff in his two-bushel skeps, to heave it into the bins, and return again for more.

Yes, it was all clumsy, crude, and wasteful. He must be patient with these slower minds: one was working for the future of Billy as a yeoman; one must endure.

*

Fortunately the seams of the water-pipes (
devoid
of
their
protecting
straw
ropes
)
had not been split by the frost, so water was not an additional problem. Phillip replaced the broken kick-starter, so the little Villiers two-stroke engine, fixed to a concrete base in the hovel, spluttered and smoked every day, sucking water from the artesian well and pouring it into the tank resting on a beam of the cart-shed.

He had an idea to lead water to the yards by way of the gutters from the overflow of the tank in the roof of the cart-shed. The engine filled the 125-gallon tank in half an hour. Brother Laurence had fitted the pipes in the cowhouse. There was no piping to the yards. The running of more water through the gutters would save the installing of pipes; the bullocks kept there to fatten in winter might not pay for the extra piping.

When the heaps of cut-stuff on the herring-bone narrow bricks of the barn floor were sufficient for a week or more, the men set about creosoting the old beams and purlins of the roofs. They
began at the stables, after sweeping away two decades of black cobwebs. Luke did not like this work. He preferred to go home and sit by the fire, losing a day’s money. Steve, the red-headed young labourer, did not like the work either, as it stained his hands and clothes, but he was always ready to do it. Phillip hoped that the creosote would poison the feeding grounds of the wood-beetles slowly eating the heart out of the timber. While the stable was being done by the men, he tackled the roofs of the bullock yards, and then the hovel—the long cart and implement shed, with its ten wide bays divided by oak posts which held up the tiled roof.

It was still too wet to get on the land, so they tackled the Corn Barn, where were the greatest beams of all; one of them nearly two feet thick at one end, the mast of a schooner grown in some Finnish forest long ago.

Why was there no letter from Arrowsmith?

The cows gave poor milk. One of the stacks had gone mouldy. The previous summer Phillip had asked Luke to save the trefoil hay from being bleached of its chlorophyll—the colour—and sweet oils. After some argument Luke had carted the trefoil, while sappy-green, during the boss’ temporary absence in London to broadcast from the B.B.C. Phillip wondered if Luke had done that deliberately, for surely he knew the difference between light
grey-green
and dry, and dark heavy sappy-green? How could that incident be put on film, to illustrate resurgent farming principles as opposed to decadence and ignorance of feeding values?

On his return from the broadcast Phillip had gone to the stack and pulled, with difficulty, some twisted rope-like stuff from one side of the stack. He had also made notes of the ensuing talk with Luke. These, he now thought, might be useful for the film.

The trefoil stack had gone mouldy, only fit for bedding, called ‘litter’. When Phillip pointed out the mouldiness to Luke, the steward had argued that it was only a little patch. Luke’s ‘little patch’ was the entire eight tons of trefoil.

Again, he had asked that wire-netting be hung over the
gable-ends
of the trefoil stack to prevent high winds from blowing them askew. Instead, balks of wood had been laid on the thatch, in the middle, to press it down. Rain-water had run down the
depressions
made by the balks. The course of the water was marked by a black vertical ‘fault’ reaching to the ground.

He went to the local market to see his four fat bullocks being graded by Government graders. They had been bought two years before, a bunch of yearlings obtained cheaply because they had not been fed properly; they were shrunken. The cattle market was now controlled by the Food Ministry. All beasts had to be
delivered
to the grading centre after twelve days’ notice in writing.

He stood by the pen enclosing the weighing bridge, and watched the weights indicated by the pointer. The best weighed ten hundredweight, and was graded
A
minus
at 59
s
. 6
d.
per live hundredweight. Not bad. Good for Matt. There were nine grades, ranging from A to C minus, with a descending scale of payments. The A grade, the top, was for 58 per cent estimated
dressed-carcase
weight.

He watched the judges first scanning a beast; pinching it slightly on back and rump; glancing again; touching with forefinger and thumb. Then they conferred together before announcing quietly the grade to the clerk. At once dabs of paint, in varying colours, were put on a beast’s back. A hole was punched in its ear. The ear bled. Its eyes were strained. Goodbye, betrayed beast. I am a farmer. What else can I be? A small shrunken farmer. A
hare-farmer
.

The four bullocks fetched
£
104 13s. 11
d
., having cost
£
27 nineteen months previously. Eight of those nineteen months had been spent on the meadows, eating grass. During the other eleven months they had been in one or another of the yards, feeding on chopped straw and hay, sliced swedes, soaked suger-beet pulp and
cotton-seed cake while drinking much water that had been carted by hand in buckets to the tubs.

He tried to work out if he had lost or gained money. Labour and food, say a shilling a day per beast for 330 days, or
£
16 10
s
. each. Add their initial cost of
£
6 15
s
., total so far
£
23 5
s
. Add transport to and from the farm, say another 16
s
., total
£
24 1
s
. Then the eight months on the meadow had cost something, for the dykes had to be kept clear, and Matt went down every day to look at the cattle. But charging only 19
s.
each for the grass, the total cost of the four bullocks was
£
100 and the return
£
104 13
s
. 11
d,
or just over
£
1
gross profit a beast.

Probably they had, in themselves, lost money; but their muck, trodden with the barley straw in the yards, would foster the crops of sugar-beet and corn. That was the profit—the dung. What was called ‘manners for meat’.

*

The farmhouse was still uninhabitable, the lavatory pan lay in two pieces—Jack Frost’s little joke. The hearth in the parlour still smoked. The pipes laid under the floor made no difference whatsoever to the draught.

The only occupier, the pipestrelle bat, still hung upside down on the beam across the ceiling, beside a piece of withered mistletoe fixed there by ‘Yipps’.

When a letter came from Arrowsmith, Phillip suspected what it would say before he opened it and so was not surprised. ‘
Unforeseen
difficulties have arisen’.

Appointment made with Mr. Poluski postponed once more. Meanwhile, Mr. P. asked him to continue evolving ideas. Mr. P. was not, it seemed, evolving money, rolling coins in his direction.

Then a telegram from Arrowsmith. Would he meet the
producer
on Monday, bringing the synopsis of the story with him? Phillip at once telephoned Donald Cannock, the film star, for whom he had a deep feeling of friendship. And the feeling was reciprocated.

Donald Cannock was perhaps the most sympathetic character actor in England. Because he understood himself fully he
understood
others. His face, so gentle and gracious, at times so worn and haggard, mirrored a sensibility that had moved the
English-speaking
world. Phillip had known him for some years, although, by necessity of their work, they had seldom met. The previous week Phillip had written to Donald, suggesting that he was the very man for the part of Squire Wycherley, also of Richard Wycherley and later, of William Wycherley—characters based on his
grandfather
, father, himself.

Donald Cannock’s home was not far from Gaultford. More than once he had written to Phillip, asking him to go and see him.

Phillip telephoned to ask, would Donald be at home on Sunday? Donald would be delighted if he could come and spend the night. Thither, at the actor’s home on the Chilterns, Phillip arrived on Sunday afternoon.

After some hesitation (for Donald Cannock looked tired, and many demands by aspiring playwrights and actors must have been made on his vital energy) Phillip told him the substance of his play, and Donald asked to be allowed to see the synopsis. They were walking in the garden, and passing a gate when Phillip noticed
that the actor had turned pale. Looking beyond the gate to what appeared to be an allotment-holding in the adjoining field beyond the lane he saw two girls digging, or pausing in a pretence of digging. Seeing the film star they giggled, glanced around, whispered, and continued the pretence of cultivation.

Cannock, who was asthmatic, groaned.

“There they are again. They appear every week-end, and stay in the pub down the road, Phillip. They’ve been coming for months now. They’re liable to appear suddenly round a tree. I daren’t go for a walk.”

He was haggard.

“Wissilcrafts,” said Phillip, and told Donald of his visit from the distraught Suffolk girl. “In the past she would have been burned as a witch. Behind her pain is a saint.”

“What a splendid description, Phillip. Did you invent the name?”

“No, it’s a genuine Suffolk name. I’ve been wondering how to dispel her illusions, which are the stronger because blood, or sperm, has not been tasted. That’s the basis of it. Now do forgive me for making a suggestion, Donald. Might it not be better to go up and face the girls, so that they can see the ordinariness of the flesh? Or would you let me see them, to explain how an actor can only project himself successfully on stage by complete relaxation to restore himself at the end of a hard and prolonged working week?”

“Would that make any difference to the frustrated instincts of motherhood?”

“I think I might be able to put over the truth.”

“But wouldn’t they come back all the more, perhaps bringing others to show off their intimate success?”

Seeing the two men looking their way, there was a faint shriek as the girls vanished behind the hedge.

“I doubt if a talk with them would do any good,” said Donald. His face was now creased like a leaf. “I’ve had a certain experience with the type. When I was acting in London some of them would follow in the black-out on bicycles, and as I was going into the flat, they’d touch me. That’s all they wanted, apparently. To boast to their friends. Of course one can’t hurt their feelings, and it’s a great compliment to one’s job of acting, but sometimes I wish——”

To suggest reading the play now would sap the vital energy of this man who, after spending thousands of pounds in Harley
Street on cures for asthma, had got rid of it by turning over two acres of land with a spade.

At once Donald, sensitive to his thoughts, said that he was
looking
forward to hearing about the play. Cosmopolis, his Hollywood producers, were seeking a story for him, he said, and he was under contract to make two more pictures for them.

They sat before his hearth and Phillip read the story. Afterwards he told Donald about Poluski. Lying back on the sofa, Donald put through a telephone call.

“To my agent,” he said to Phillip. “Harry Bacon. As a fact,” he went on, one leg cocked over the other while awaiting a reply, “I’ve already had a letter from Pierre Poluski, asking me to lunch. He’s going to ask me, I think, to consider making a film, probably yours. But I’m under contract to Cosmopolis. Poluski knows that, but he’s trying his luck. Now do be careful. The film industry is a dirty game, and if you’ll let me, I’ll ask Harry Bacon to handle it for you. May I?” He listened at the telephone receiver. “Hullo, Harry. There’s a friend of mine here who is fixing up a screen-play with Pierre Poluski. Will you look after him? He’s seeing Pierre tomorrow, and may I tell him to leave the contract to you? Thanks so much. What was Walton Heath looking like to-day, Harry? That’s fine. Yes, I’ll be in town tomorrow, and will give you a ring. Goodbye.”

*

Once again the Silver Eagle stood outside a block of offices off
Piccadilly
. The lift took the driver, flying helmet stuffed in coat pocket, to the producer’s office. The lampblack-lidded girl told him to walk in. On the thick green carpet Pierre Poluski was pacing, forehead lined, hand in pocket jingling coins, cigarette between lips.

“Have you been working on our play?”

“Here it is.”

“That’s fine. I’ll read it. Now think out ideas for it. Farming is in the news. It’s getting a lot of publicity. Dig for Victory in the Front Line. You read the papers, of course? People are interested. What are you doing this afternoon?”

“Waiting to get
on with the film.”

“That’s fine. I like something about you when I first see you. I feel we could work together. Now keep those ideas to yourself—you know what the film world is, I expect?” He gave Phillip a quick glance which seemed to have nothing behind it. “It’s a dirty game. Now come back at two-thirty, can you? I’ve a lunch date at the Savoy. Say three o’clock. I’ll read this.”

Arrowsmith had asked Phillip to go and see him. He found him as before apparently doing nothing. Arrowsmith said he was waiting to join the Royal Air Force to get away from the racket. A beautified face looked round the door while they were drinking gin, gave a ravishing smile, said goodbye, and vanished.

“They come in all day long,” said Arrowsmith. “After film jobs. How did you get on with Poluski?”

“I’m seeing him at three.”

“That means four. Well, here’s to the farm—and the film.”

“I saw Donald Cannock, and read the story to him.”

“Did he like it?”

“He couldn’t very well say he didn’t.”

“Oh, Don’s quite straight.”

“He told me Poluski had invited him to lunch.”

“They live on hope and other people’s money, these producer birds. If it comes off it’s lovely, but if it doesn’t, well their pals distrain on the properties they’ve probably supplied themselves—on a basis of somebody else’s cash—and share out the pickings. I’m not saying Poluski’s one of that sort. I just know nothing about him. He came over with ten shillings from Germany and now is in the money, I suppose. How’s farming?”

“It’s fine.”

At 4.10 p.m. Phillip was once more taking a cigarette from the jade box, while Pierre Poluski moved, as though aimlessly, about the chromium, leather and veneer furniture of his office room. Phillip was prepared to hear that the story was no good. To his surprise he heard Poluski saying, “Now listen. I like your story, and I’m going to buy it. These are the terms. A payment of fifteen hundred pounds, to be spread over five months. Three hundred and fifty pounds in four weeks’ time, another payment a month later, the third at three months, and the remaining five hundred when we go on the floor. We’ll try to take some of the shots on your farm and pay you thirty pounds a week technical fee for
supervising
while we are taking.”

Phillip felt he might utter a cockatoo shriek. He ordered
himself
to keep cool, calm, and collected. He heard himself uttering to Lucy the expression he had often found unbearable in Tim, as the quintessence of an empty mind—
Well,
well,
well!

“Thank you. I’ll see Mr. Bacon, who’s acting as agent for me.”

“I’ve already seen Harry,” said Mr. Poluski, casually. “Now go and think out ideas while I arrange for a rewrite man to work with you. I’m hoping to get Parrat-Frazing. He’s
finalising another picture for me right now, some retakes. And keep your ideas under your hat. Don’t let any of the vultures steal them.”

Phillip clutched his flying helmet. It had brought him luck. It was an old one, the original helmet used in his brief and hectic career on
Helena,
his 1915 motor-bicycle at Heathmarket.

Fifteen hundred pounds! His earnings from all literary sources during the past six months had been less than a tenth of that sum. Even so, he did not believe Poluski. Such things did not happen to him; the reverse happened. Harry Bacon was the London manager of Pharaoh Finkelstein, Inc. Surely such an agent was a guarantee of reality? Then why the doubt?

He hurried to Harry Bacon’s office.

“The terms are tops,” said Bacon, taking a glucose sweet from a bottle on his desk. “Pierre wants to get Donald for the picture, but Donald’s under contract.”

“Can’t he be bought out?”

“
What
?
For a picture by Pierre Poluski?”

Mr. Bacon got up, glanced at a new American magazine set with coloured photographs of a beautiful tapered girl, and casually slid it into a wastepaper-basket. Dare he ask for it when he left?

“Now listen. I’ll draw up a contract. I’m doing this because Donald asked me to. Go and tell Pierre to see me and say his offer’s accepted. Then leave it to me.”

With a backward glance at the beautiful tapered figure upside down in the basket Phillip left the padded room feeling himself to be a shuttle as he strode round to tell Pierre Poluski the good news that he had bought the story.

“Yes, Harry told me,” said Poluski, casually. “Now go away and think out ideas. We’ll have a conference a week from today, at two-thirty p.m. here in my office. I’ll have Parratt-Frazing here, and the others. It’s got to be a great picture, but your end wants broadening. You’ll find Frazing easy to work with. He’ll tell you what to do. You’ll be thinking out ideas, won’t you?”

“I’ve already got a broadening ending. Briefly, it’s——”

“I’ll write to you,” said Poluski, taking the telephone. “You go back to your farm and tell no one, not even the old rooster, that you’re going to do a farm story, see? There are vultures about, and we want to be the first. And don’t forget to be working on it. Speed is everything. Get cracking.”

“You’ll see Bacon and fix that up?”

“Leave it all to me. Now you go back to your farm——”

Phillip thought that it was a queer way to do business. “May I have back the newspaper articles I sent you?”

“Sure, now where are they?” Poluski picked up a handful of clippings from the desk and dropped them again.
Absentmindedly
he kicked the wastepaper-basket with a pointed shoe. “Haven’t you got copies? Well, I’ll mail them to you. In a week’s time, then. The typescript of your book? Haven’t you got it? It’s in the office. Ask Miss—Miss—the receptionist. I’ll see you after Easter. Okay. Operator, get me Mayfair——”

Phillip took his typescript from the lampblack-lidded girl and went to see his publisher. From there he went to the Army and Navy Stores and bought various things for the farmhouse, at a total cost of
£
175 10
s
. 4
d
.

That night he wrote to Lucy, telling her that now he was able to afford to send Rosamund back to Mrs. Richard Cheffe’s school, and David with her; and would she write at once to Mrs. Cheffe?

*

War or no war, season early or season late, Luke was not going to work on either Easter Sunday or Bank Holiday Monday. He had never worked on those days and wasn’t going to begin now.

“Why, what would the village say? They would say that the men under me as steward work so slow that we have to work seven days a week to make up. Also, some would say to me, jeering like, ‘What, do you
need
to work on holidays?’.”

“Tell them Yes we do. A siege war is on and submarines are being built day and night because our financial masters have decided to break Germany.”

“Blast, I dursn’t tell them that, they’d mob me.”

Phillip realised that work in the fields around the village had been going on for thousands of winters, springs, summers, and autumns; and like the serfs of olden time, the labouring man of 1940 had no interest in the war. He was ‘only a man harrowing clods’ as in Hardy’s
Dynasts
of the Napoleonic wars. The rights and wrongs of it were outside Hodge’s scope. He knew only that in war he got more money, that his sons or brothers were taken away and some never came back, and after the war he would probably be out of a job once more, barley dropping to fifteen bob a sack and, if kept on, his wage to thirty bob. It had happened after the last war, and it would happen after this war.

“Nobody cares for a labouring bloke, if he don’t look out for
himself
,” said Luke. “And what difference will a couple of days make?
Besides, the men reckon to use Easter Monday to get their gardens and allotments ready.”

Luke had neither garden nor allotment, but what he said was true.

“You don’t need to worry. Worry gets a man nowhere. Why, what did that man Hore-Bolloka or someone that you told me of say, ‘We’re winning the war comfortably’? Then what’s the hurry, I can’t see it.”