Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Lucifer Before Sunrise (41 page)
*
“At least the thorns lying uprooted on the Hills will make a grand beacon if the war ends suddenly. Think of it, children, the greatest bonfire on the East Coast. Sixty-four dry thorns, some with trunks eighteen inches thick. What a blazing beacon we shall have!”
The east winds incessantly swept over the Hills. The wood was drying out. It must not be allowed to become hard for the axe. Tree by tree the main branches were lopped off, the lesser branches piled and burned, the limbs and trunks laid in cords to await
cart
ing
to the circular saw. For a week Phillip’s friend, the Bengal Lancer, came to help; but the winds were cold, and he was away in his mind while he worked. Indeed, though Phillip did not know it then, he was a dying man. When he went back to London, Phillip worked on alone, sad that the dear man was gone.
Day after day he worked until the Hills were cleared, except for a few trees which the engine-driver, with his ragged lengths of steel-wire cable tied together, had not dared to tackle. Standing on the slope, the fifteen-ton engine might have got out of control, or even turned over.
*
When he came to clear the hedges round the Hills, he found that they had spread in places from the original boundary as much as ten yards into the grazing. In one thicket he found the rusty remains of four barb-wire fences, each several yards from its predecessor. Within the brambles and blackthorns lived scores of rabbits, which had spoiled the grass during the neglectful twenty years between the wars. Gradually the thicket was cleared, but most of the roots were left in the ground.
He spent several days making fires on the root-stubs, to kill them. The fires had to be doused every evening because of the black-out, and relit every day. Even so, the roots remained; and when he took the tractor with the deep-digger plough to rip up the worst area, he was afraid in some places to risk breaking the hydraulic linkage. Elsewhere the furrows were rough, mere tangled heaps of roots of bramble, briar, and lesser thorns. The soil under the turf looked dead and dry, as though neither air nor rain had penetrated there for centuries. A bare-fallow would work wonders. He thought of scorching sun and desiccating air, then mellowing rains to turn that ugly soil to a living tilth.
Where the wheels of military lorries and guns had cut up the turf in the past he cultivated those torn places, leaving a loose soil on which he broadcast a few handfuls of trefoil and rye-grass, then rolled in the seeds and waited to see what happened.
What he saw, after a rainy spell in late April, followed by sun, was exhilarating. Along those irregular bands of new land the trefoil and ryegrass grew luxuriantly. He went there again and again to look at the new plants for the pleasure they gave. This was what he had dreamed of! In his optimism he imagined the park-like slopes of green grass and clover, the walnut trees he would plant, the pedigree redpoll cows grazing happily; while the old thorns he had left for beauty’s sake were mantled with white
blossoms in May, awaiting from Abyssinia the happy turtle-dove. In the sight was peace, and rest, and beauty; but even as he looked the sky was being torn by the vapour-trails of bombers flying east in the height of the sky, and filling the valley with deep bourdon.
When the aircraft were gone hope was renewed as his feet pressed upon the old turf. It was springy with rest-harrow and wild thyme and a strange thistle, the leaves of which were low on the grasses in the shape of a star. The flower was a purple-red and grew lower than the grasses. Had a thousand generations of sheep taught the hill-thistle its habit of self-protection? In the old days of free wandering over field and moor in Devon he would have admired it, and been glad that a small unit of life was enduring by its own strength and tenacity; but now he was a farmer dreaming of silk-coated heifers grazing there. He saw the legions of dwarf thistles as obstacles that must be obliterated. There were other thistles, too; the creeper—the carline—the musk—the tall spear. The creeping thistles were in colonies. Even they found it hard to push their roots through the dense and intertwined fibres of that ancient turf.
Thyme grew on the slopes of the Home Hills, with eyebright, bedstraw, and sulphur-yellow cowslips. Where rabbits had scratched the dove’s-foot crane’s-bill could bloom. He was sorry that these wild flowers would cease to be: no more harebells in July, to tremble on their slender stalks, azure as summer sky in the breezes of the uplands. But a farmer had little time or inclination to admire or identify himself with wild flowers, or birds which passed over the hill. He was a man driven by the nature of his calling to desire only the sight of corn growing where it had never grown before.
I enjoy my solitary work. The axe-edge is ground keen; the cords of wood lie neat upon the sward; the fires are made on the thickest nettle patches. I leave the regular work of the farm to Billy, after giving the orders in the morning. I spend contented hours by myself.
This morning I abandoned all thoughts of work and wandered off to a distant part of the farm, to sit under the northern edge of the Great Bustard Wood, among the shadows of the tall pines cast in front of me upon the Scalt barley. There I re-read my first letter from Melissa since she had left England. Near me was the new pressure-creosoted gate, with its posts and rails set across the drive between the hangers of Bustard and Brock.
I felt estrangedly happy, sitting there under my woods, or hangers.
Hanger
sounded like a Scandinavian word, I mused, as the wind, moving over the barley plants of the Scalt and coming from the sea, stirred the leaves of ash and sycamore above my head, and sang with the old wild dreaminess through the pines. I wondered why the word
hanger
was so attractive to me, and why it occurred insistently to my mind on this lovely day. No human movement anywhere, no sight of man in any of the fields or marshes or sands lying away to the northern horizon. No boat or ship in the creeks, or on the ocean. No motorcar or truck moving on the road by the distant river.
The air was cold and fresh with the early morning. The only
movement
was of a wood pigeon flying from the Lower Hanger to the wood down by the meadow. It probably had a nest in one of the tall sycamore poles there. The five-acre wood lay between the new and the old river-beds. It grew on a peninsula, joined to the mainland-meadow by a tongue of land only a few yards wide.
This was one of those rare mornings, which since the war I have known too seldom, when I feel myself to be at one with nature,
harmonious
with the sweet summer day. For I have nothing to do. The sugar-beet plants have been singled, and now are being scored, which means that the late-growing weeds are being struck out between the plants, which are roughly ten inches apart along the ringes or rows. The hay is rising. The corn is growing (tho’ a bit patchy). The beasts are on the meadows, enjoying the flush of grass. So here sit I, musing on the fascination of the word
hanger
when into my mind comes a picture of a hammer-pond, and with a pang I am again living with the strange boy who has a hut in the woods, who set night-lines for the tench in the deep, shaded water, who knows the owls and even keeps tame ones, calling them in the twilight. Who is this boy? He is very dear to me, with his rabbit-skin cap and wonderful way of cooking dampers on the embers of his fire. Once upon a time I lived with him and accompanied him everywhere; and how sad when the last page of the book was turned! For he is but a boy in a book, and the book an old-fashioned
school-story
, and I suppose I read it when I was seven or eight years old. The hammer pond was in a deep Sussex wood, where iron had been mined and smelted for the cannon of ships that fought the Armada. The deep Sussex woods, the noble downs planted with beech rings, the beech
hangers
in dark blue or green according to the distance across which they are seen. The blue hill above the wild thyme growing upon ancient sea-chalk.
And now across the near-viewless abysm of time, remote from an innocent age, I am sitting by my own hanger, and I wonder if in the course of time my children will dream, as once the small boy, out of which this thing called ‘I’ has grown away and away, once dreamed. Will they, too, find enchantment in the thought of the hanger growing along the chalky spur rising steeply out of the meadows? Will memory for them be a dream of happy sunshine when in due course they become
other worlds, each of his, or her, own? Perhaps to revisit their eldest brother Billy now and again, perhaps in annual reunion upon these fields, beside the woods of childhood where the wild sweet violets grow? Or is it to happen all over again, as it happened to the small boy who after a war flung himself violently away from a home in which all seemed to be strained and discoloured by antagonism and fear?
The wood-pigeon which pitched in the River Wood is reassured. It flies out of the sycamores, rises high, and falls gliding. It flies up again, claps its wings and falls, before beating up into the hanger. There, not far from where I sit, it sends soft notes of joy into the freshness of the morning.
A pair of snipe were nesting, or about to nest, somewhere on Denchman Meadow, which had a rushy depression which could not be drained, since the river-bed was higher than the meadow there.
As a small boy it had been Phillip’s ambition to find a snipe’s nest. He had searched during every spring of his schooldays, but was not successful.
While he was in the workshop one afternoon, there was a sudden burst of small-arms fire, the gruff reports of bursting grenades, and white parabolas of smoke rising above and falling below the trees of the Meadow Wood. The Battle School had once again come upon the farm, without notice or warning, and were using live ammunition. One of the cows, an Ayrshire heifer with her first calf, had been wounded.
‘Ackers’, the seventeen-year-old cowman, looked as though he had been wounded too. The Ayrshire heifer, such a gentle creature, so docile and shapely, reared from a calf costing only seven shillings at market, and giving four gallons of rich milk a day, had been hit through the udder-bag.
“Go to the farmhouse and telephone for the vet!” shouted Phillip, as he ran towards the firing beyond Denchman Meadow. “Tell Billy from me, to wait here for the vet! I’ll stop those bastards!”
*
When the veterinary surgeon arrived the heifer was led to the grassy area by the workshop door and there roped and thrown, to be given an anaesthetic before probing for the bullet began.
It was a bad wound. A ricochet had spun into and through the milk bag. The veterinary surgeon said the heifer was done for. So Boy Billy went home and telephoned for the heifer to be taken away to the slaughter-house.
Both Jonathan and Phillip were missing at supper that evening. Lucy thought little about it, for in the spring the boy wandered far and wide by himself, seeking the nesting places of the birds which entranced him. And Phillip would turn up sometime. Probably he had gone to see the Battle School authorities because once again they had failed to let him know when they had been coming.
After supper an officer called and asked to see Phillip. Lucy said, “I thought perhaps he had gone to see you. He isn’t here.”
“I can assure you, madam, that compensation for the cow will be paid.”
When the Claims Officer had gone, Jonathan left the children’s room next door and went into the farmhouse.
“Mum,” he said, “is Dad busy in the Studio? I don’t want to interrupt him if he is writing.”
“He wasn’t there when I looked in five minutes ago, darling.”
Jonathan was, in his way, an artist. He drew with pencil and crayons on paper—and his concentration while he drew, sometimes for two hours and more at a time, was such that his father would never think of interrupting him while this ‘first-class infant’, as he was rated at the village school, was at work. So Jonny knew what Dad would feel like if he upset Dad’s writing.
“Mum,” he said, slowly (and by that Lucy knew he was most excited), “do you think I should look through the Studio window and see if Dad is there?” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve got
something
to show him.” He held out a closed hand.
“We know,” said Billy. “You’ve found a bullet.”
“Yes, I did find a bullet,” Jonny replied, “but it’s ever so much more important than that.”
“You’ve seen the heifer being taken away in a lorry.”
“Yes, I did see the poor heifer taken away, but it’s
ever
so much more important than that.”
Lucy waited, while looking at the face of her youngest child: this strange small solitary creature who wandered off alone, for hours, filling his dark eyes with the mysterious life all about him.
“Hur!” said Billy. “What is it that’s so very important, little oaf?”
“Boy Billy, I have found a snipe’s nest!”
He held out a brown, mottled egg in his hand. From beyond the open window Lucy heard the clear call of a cuckoo, and swallows twittering as they dived under the porch to the rafters
where they nested every year. She saw the spring in the face of her youngest child.
“Shall I show Dad?”
“Well, go quietly, darling, and tell him that supper’s ready.”
Jonathan went to the Studio, and looked through the window. He returned to the farmhouse parlour and told his mother that no one was there.
“Oh, I expect he’s busy somewhere,” said Lucy.
Jonathan had finished his supper, and he and David were about to go to bed when ‘Ackers’ came to the farmhouse door. He was breathless from running.
“Master’s lying on the path under Meadow Wood, ma’m! The soldiers have shot him!”
*
The fire-circles left by the burning of the uprooted thorns on the Home Hills remained bare during the early summer of that year. And those headlands by the hedges which had been roughly cleared of roots of brambles and black-thorns, and then ploughed, lay in sullen uneven furrows.
The Hills were left to the winds and the flowers, to the kestrel that hovered over the plateau for mice and beetles, to the village cats which prowled on the slopes for rabbits; and to the meaner men of the village who were poachers for the black market.
