Lucifer Before Sunrise (3 page)

The play had begun early, at 6 p.m., owing to the black-out. Afterwards they went by tube to Piccadilly, for supper at a place Phillip remembered from the first war, when his Uncle Hilary had taken both his sisters and himself to dine at what was then called the Elysée. Phillip recalled with shame how he had left half-way through dinner, to meet some friends in the Regiment at the Alhambra, and they were not there; so he had gone back to the Elysée, and found the table empty where they had sat.

Now, nearly a quarter of a century afterwards, he was taking Melissa to dine there. He remembered the stairs down to the dance-floor. There were more stairs leading to the balconies above. The place was said to be a replica of the ballroom of the
Titanic
, which had struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in the early spring of 1912, an event well-remembered, he told Melissa, because he could still see in his mind the placards at Victoria Station upon returning with his mother, his sister Elizabeth, and Uncle Joe, his mother’s youngest brother, from Belgium, where Elizabeth was at an Ursuline convent school. It was Easter, she was coming home for the holidays.

He ordered. They waited. Then they heard sirens warning that German aircraft were approaching London. Everybody appeared not to notice the banshee wailings, as Churchill called them. The band was playing
Oh
Johnny,
Oh
Johnny,
how
you
can
love.
He asked Melissa what she would feel if they were in the Titanic, owing to a revisitation in time, and struck an iceberg. While he waited for a reply he noticed that the wine-waiter was pouring champagne at the next table ——————— BLUE FLASH ———————

On hundreds of thousands of acres in East Anglia, the granary of England, men had waited for shining sun and drying winds. All the ploughings of mild mornings of October:
longeurs
on tractors throughout the dull and sombre days of November; endurances of cold December afternoons when hoar-frost rimed hollow places filled by long shadows of the faltered sun—all the monotone of engine-exhaust, trundling wheel, backward glance on rearing furrow—screaming black-headed gulls just behind one’s self-set monotony, enwrapped aloneness upon wide brown landscapes—all this leads to the moment of seeding.

For each man springtime is renewal, another chance in life.

The farmer takes on the character of his fields, even as his fields are part of an expression of his spirit. To farm land is to plan and to sustain a war. Its strains (which only farmers know) continue by night and by day in the master’s mind. Should the land be difficult to work, because too hilly or too sticky or too dry; should other matters become too heavy against his resistance, then his farm induces a strain too hard to be borne; and the farmer loses his war.

He does not lose it suddenly, he loses it slowly. He becomes slow in the losing of it; hesitant and afraid like a man too much beaten or hurt about the mind or body. He suffers the decadence of courage, like a soldier who has been in too many battles, who has been asked to do too much, who has become afraid of fear.

Sometimes with his land the farmer loses his life, or the best part of it, in the struggle which from one moment to another never lets up.

*

Phillip’s own seed-barley in the Corn Barn had been dressed during the rainy days of the past winter. Billy the Nelson turned the handle of the wooden machine which sifted the seed-corn from
one sieve to another, while a wooden fan winnowed the
thistle-heads
and other large seeds which had not been sifted by the threshing box. Thus they put the barley through the little old dressing machine, rocking and shaking it over the various wire sieves, so that dwarf and shrivelled kernels might drop through the meshes, together with other impurities. Small corn grew small corn; it was a false economy to use poor seed.

Billy the Nelson turned the handle of the creaking machine, Luke poured bushel measures of barley into the top of the dresser; Steve shovelled the good seed which slid out of the end of the machine into a bushel measure.

It had been made about 1895, that dresser. Phillip had bought it at auction before the war for twelve shillings, brought it home in the lorry, and repaired it.
Whoo
hoo,
clockety
clock
, it cried in action, while the sweat stood on Billy the Nelson’s brow. Out came the good seed, to be tipped into an old butter churn—another of what Luke called Phillip’s ‘patents’—with a two-ounce measure of red mercuric compound. This was poison, and must be handled carefully.

A baffle of crossed pieces of wood fitted in the churn threw the seed about when the lid was clamped on and the handle turned. The idea of the ‘patent’ was to impregnate the skin of each grain with the powder, to kill the spores of any fungus lodging on the skin.

In boyhood Phillip had often seen ears of wheat in July decayed to a smutty brown powder. Farmers had different names for the fungus—rust, bunt, blackhead, blight. Once upon a time
progressive
farmers used to steep their seed-corn in a solution of copper sulphate. That must have been a slow business. The modern mercuric powders did the job of sterilisation quickly. Luke
declared
that it was a waste of money; while Matt didn’t believe Phillip when he told him that a million spores of fungus might be lodging on one single grain of corn.

“Hev yew counted ’um, ’bor?”

“Well, Matt, no. You see, I got tired of counting after the first hundred thousand.”

“You would, an’ all,” said Matt, significantly. “I reckon thet’s how some folks get money in the bank.”

Billy the Nelson turned the old churn slowly, to throw the seed about, and allow the vermilion powder to slither over and
impregnate
each grain. Phillip said it was advisable to wash the hands before eating dinner, but no one bothered to do this.

Four bushels of seed-corn—two hundredweight—were poured into a sack, which was tied round the neck and set up with others in the middle of the barn. The window was left open for the white owl to fly in at night, to take small rats and mice which might gnaw the sacks. Good jute, those sacks, costing half-a-crown each. It had been a struggle to get them looked after properly. The men threw them down, after use, anywhere in cart-shed or barn. Cop off the bloody things and let’s get home to tea, that was the spirit on the farm. When the men had gone, Phillip and Boy Billy went into the Corn Barn and swept the asphalt floor. They shook out the sacks and hung them away from rats on the pole suspended by wires from the high roof, where loomed in cavernous space the great mast of a schooner, now the main beam holding the walls from spreading.

Fortunately few of the sacks thrown on the floor were gnawed because there were not many rats about the premises. Once every six weeks the rat-man arrived in a motorcar containing loaves, a pile of newspapers, and a pot of paste, to give a party for the rats. Upon the wooden bench in the tractor house he cut up the loaves into small slices, spread the paste, and wrapped them in paper. The small packages were dropped beside rat-holes leading into the bases of the Elizabethan flint walls, and by the river-bank. The rats would avoid bread left so conveniently for them; but they felt safe by having to bite through paper.

Each party was so successful that the guests went to sleep after it, and never woke up. According to the rat-man, no hen, dog, or cat, who joined the party, would be affected by the food provided; but the cats, Phillip noticed, began to look very thin and miserable, after feeding on the rats.

*

Through the boundary hedge Phillip looked at Charles Box’s seed-beds. They were cobbly, but the corn was safely in mould lying under the hard lumps. The next morning Luke said that Charles Box had already drilled fifty acres.

“Our land is still claggy, Luke.”

“Blast, if ’twas mine——!”

All sets of harrows had been reset and resharpened by the village blacksmith. They stood ready against the wall of the cartshed. When Phillip walked over the autumn-ploughed furrows of the Great Bustard next morning, a Saturday, he saw with satisfaction how stiff clay had been reduced to a friable tilth by the frost (which had expanded the water-particles in the clay as it froze
them into ice) leaving in the thaw a spongy mass which now had almost dried out in the winds. The field was ‘fit’—so up they went —horses and tractor, and behind harrows and cultivator the fretted furrows had the appearance of an almost light soil as iron spike and ‘ducks’-foot’ drew their strokes athwart and through them.

And then it was noon—time to knock off. The men didn’t like working on Saturday afternoons (and to ask them to work on Sundays was to ask the unthinkable), so Phillip and Boy Billy worked all Saturday and Sunday.

War or no war, it made no difference to the labourer; and Phillip understood this feeling. Hodge felt he had never yet had a square deal, that he was but a labouring unit, always to be bossed, used, and stood-off the moment times were bad. Phillip had heard a labouring man ask another man, in the nearby town, ‘D’you reckon the warking man’d be any better off if Hitler come?’ He was without political bias; he was a labouring unit, neither good nor bad. ‘We’d have to wark just as we do now, wouldn’t we,’ he said, adding that the only difference would be to the rich man, ‘who never gived thought to the warkin’ man.’

Until the new airfields—which took hundreds of thousands of level lands from the farmers—offered work to local unemployables and others at four shillings an hour on the Sabbath, Sunday work did not appeal to the labouring man. Submarines might be sinking wheat-ships; Heinkels flying overhead to lay waste areas of Midland towns; English youths dying in the desert of North Africa; corpses of sailors being washed up upon the shores of the Island Fortress; but the spirit of the farm-worker remained as before the war. And, in very truth, thought Phillip, it was not Hodge’s war.

*

By working sixty hours a week with the tractor a fine tilth of soil was made: a tilth through which a bootcap could, traditionally, be drawn almost as through loose sand.

Indeed, on one field it was too loose; the tilth seven or eight inches deep. Phillip had made a mistake: he had ploughed too deep on the Steep, once Luke’s ‘thistly old sod’. The field was too steep in the slope for the consolidating, twenty-five hundredweight rib-roll to be drawn by the light tractor. So he asked Luke when he went there with his horses and the McCormick Sowall drill to see that the barley was drilled one inch and three-quarters deep. There was an adjustment on the drill which regulated the depth to which the iron shoes and seed-spouts would penetrate. The seed must not be sown too deep, he repeated.

Luke had a fixed idea that barley could not be drilled too deep. This idea arose from the belief, which he often expressed, that it was ‘best to cover the seed properly’. To Luke this meant as deep as possible. The idea had its origin, it seemed to Phillip, from the days of bullocks and horses working the land. Under those slow conditions the best a man could hope for was to get his seed covered: and since cultivations were shallow, with a hard pan of rank earth under the five inches of cultivated soil, the deeper the seed was covered, the better for the chances of a good plant.

“With our hydraulic tractor, capable of deeper ploughings up steep slopes, conditions are altered, Luke. We need never again know a cobbly seed-bed on the farm. We can always have our seed covered. The best depth for barley is an inch and a half to two inches under the surface.”

“What do yew think they would say in the village if the bards ate up all your seed-corn?” said Matt, later, when he found Phillip on his knees, about to dig with his hands to find the seed. “What do yew suppose they would say to my boy? ‘What’, they’d say, ‘don’t yew know how to drill barley yet, ‘bor?’ Blast, they’d say that, they would, guv’nor!”

“Then is Village Opinion running this farm?”

That was tactless. It was taking an extraneous aspect of the matter, making a personal point of it. Besides, he knew that both father and son were concerned ‘not to see the guv’nor go wrong’. Luke’s next words confirmed this. “I know my job,” he said, bleakly; and crying, “Coop yer hold, Toby!”, for the chestnut Suffolk to turn to the left, and “Goo on, Beatrice!” he returned along the field with the pair drawing the light seed-harrows, leaving Phillip to watch his retreating back and feel his ideas to be smothered as the barley-seed buried so far from the light.

When Matt had gone to milk the cows and feed his calves and young heifers in the yards, Phillip continued to dig with his hands to find the grain. It was five to six inches deep in mould loose enough for potatoes. How could barley seed send up a stalk through such a weight of soil? Even Timid Wat the hare, passing over the field higher up, appeared to be stumbling as he crossed the loose seed-bed.

Phillip knew that seed-bed should be rolled: but the two-horse roll behind the tractor has insufficient consolidating weight. He knew the seed was too deep. He could feel the pale green stems exhausting themselves trying to find the sun. Also, he had planned to drill ‘small-seeds’ of clover and rye-grass immediately after the
barley, to be sure of a good take of the plants for next year’s hay on that dry field. The ‘small-seeds’ were out of rotation; for he dared not try and grow roots there. Really he would have liked to sow the field down to a permanent pasture to be grazed and dunged by sheep and cattle, but that was forbidden in war-time. So he compromised with an idea of grass-seeds for the following year—a one-year ley, it was called.

Billy the Nelson had told Phillip that ‘in the days of Old Buck’, for whom he had worked in his youth, he had seen the Steep black with dung.

“Forty score ewes from grazing the marshes were folded there b’night. Blast, the straw of the barley wor so grown out that it flopped, and the whole field had to be cut by scythes. Three twelve-yard stacks off Steep, there wor, in Old Buck’s time!”

Contrast with the first corn harvest Phillip had seen on this field, before he had taken the farm in hand. The miserably small barley stalks had been so infested with flossy thistle-seed that the stubble was all grey silk, and the diminutive straw stack had to be burned.

“My dear man,” said Matt, unhappiness in his eyes, as Phillip looked in to see his calves in the yards later, “don’t yew go and drill no small-seeds on the top of the barley! That Steep be bad for carlick! Wait yew for the barley plants to set well, then harrow the carlicks, else yer carn will be swamped with that great ole yellow carlick-weed. Yew’ll see! Don’t yew do that, master, for God’s sake!”

But Phillip had learned that, in such a dry climate, hay-seeds for next year’s crop should be drilled as shallow as possible, and as soon as possible, after the barley. Otherwise the tender seedlings died in the dry weather. What was he to do? It was his fault, for having ploughed the field too deep.

Ten days later, when the first green needles of barley were through, it was too late to roll; wheels of the tractor would have dug themselves in upon the steep slopes, and destroyed the
seedlings
. Hesitation; doubt; divided counsel—Hare ran mentally all over the place, while Tortoise plodded on somehow.

*

Pale attenuated stalks, each one looking like a thin blade of grass, hung over the grey loamy soil, exhausted after long struggle to the light. Day after day the field looked to be covered with thin green hairs, each single blade slowly increasing in length. They
drooped in the wind blowing dryly from the pale eastern sky. Their rootlets hung in the loose soil. Suddenly one noon-day the dreaded charlock began thickly to spot the field with tiny
two-leaved
plants. A stroke of the harrows would strew them; but Phillip dared not order harrowing, lest emaciated barley stems be torn up and crushed by the feet of horses. How firmly were they rooted? By the yellowing tips of the stalks, the hair-like rootlets were getting no moisture. He scooped loose soil with his fingers, uncovering three inches and more of yellow stalk.