Lucifer Before Sunrise (55 page)

“What about Horatio Bugg?” asked Steve.

“Oh, he's not sly! He may deceive himself all of the time and others some of the time, but by and large, I cannot really dislike anyone I have met in the last eight years.”

“Not even Josiah Harn?”

“That Denchman, that grey hoodie crow of a man? No, Steve. I think I understand him. After all, I'm mainly that freakish thing in England, a writer.”

Phillip and the children got on their bicycles and with
grass-twangling
wheels sped round and about the sheep paths among the shore-bound furze bushes. He showed them how to play
clay-bullets
, with which, he said, as a very naughty boy, he had fired at ‘circumadjacent greenhouses' from his garden. “You children are much better brought up, not by me, but by your mother.”

“Why do you always run yourself down, Dad?” said Rosamund.

Each child had a stick of briar which he had saved when cutting the overgrown hedge between the Scalt and Teal Meadow. The briars were up to an inch in thickness, tough and whippy. The clay on the marshes was just right: a kind of blue gault tempered with drowned and long-rooted turf and marine vegetation.
Plum-shaped
bullets bound to the top of the sticks rose high and far when whipped into the air, and fell up to two hundred yards away. They took sides, and separated by a hundred or so yards across guts and channels, bombarded one another at intervals.

Tiring of this, they walked over the flats to get cockles, the famous ‘blues'; and going farther towards the sea, reached the Great Barrier Sand, and bathed; while Phillip was mindful of the swift tides that swept in there when the moon was full. It was a serene and azure day. Wading birds were piping in the creeks,
crook-winged
terns from the Point, soon to migrate, screaming white and faintly afar off.

They crossed the cockle-beds and came to the long yellow-brown hump of sand known as the Great Barrier. There they wandered about in their bathing dresses, the little boys in slips … until David cried, “The tide! The tide is racing in, look, over there, where we've come from!”

A startling moment! They hurried back along the tracks of their feet, they must not yield to panic. The tide was moving in at three knots. It swirled against their knees, Phillip had to carry Jonny, holding him in one arm and the hand of David with the other hand. “Steady, children.” The water was up to David's waist. “We'll get there, take your time. Well done, David, you have saved our lives.”

“Yippee!” cried David, as they got beyond the channel and felt the mud of the cockle-bed squeezing between their toes.

Another minute, and they were safe. It was easy too to get marooned among the channered creeks and wandering guts scoured by the sea, and find oneself cut off by the stealthy and infiltrating tide. All around one grew blue grass, sea blite,
sea-holly
, and plants of sea-lavender. One heard, near and from afar,
the sad piping of wading birds, as though within their feathered bodies were spirits grievous that water found nowhere any rest upon the land it had helped to make. Everywhere from the sky fell the songs of larks. The soil under the mass of low-growing vegetation was clay, stored with the humus of a thousand centuries of dead plants.

Many places along the coast the Maddison children explored with their father during the last year of the war, sometimes biking on top of walls built to keep out the sea. Behind the walls were grazing and arable fields, made from the reclaimed marshes, the wandering guts and channers filled in. Heavy crops of roots and corn were taken from the rich soil.

But on the marshes the land was still elemental, and to wild life. Flat fish—very fat ones—called butts, were plentiful in the creeks. Steve, the beachcomber, was also a fish spearer, and brought to his cottage many a plateful of butts.

The maritime plants lived through gales that would wreck more tender land plants. They endured the surges of the sea, which at times of full moon, and when driven by a north-westerly gale, thundered over the marshes, covering them deeper than a man is tall, and, sometimes, invading the coastal fields, piling up barriers of maritime litter and killing all life with its residual salt.

Farther down the coast tall barriers of steel scaffolding stood, erected during the 1940 threat of invasion. The lower and more rusty tubes were clotted with tidal jetsam; but surely the guts and channers were a natural barrier against tanks?

Another bright idea of ‘Tiny Tinribs', the G.O.C.-in-C. of those days, was to have road-barriers erected round corners, to surprise an advance motorised invading force. Many an R.A.F. type,
motorbiking
back to his station, or soldier to camp, was wrecked thereby in the dim nights of ‘War House' wind-up.

Village children, running to the ‘mashes' with happy cries, lost themselves in the spirit of the elements which made them. Their mothers and fathers found health and occupation in the cockle beds beyond the marshes, on the rich, slippery, grey mud.

One woman in the village used to go there when she was
ninety-three
years. She was enclosed within many old skirts to keep out the east wind which moved with its icy lisp across the flats even in bright summer weather. How terrible, a visitor once said, that the poor old woman had to get a living in mud, and at her age! The truth was that Grannie Baker had enjoyed herself since a child on the ‘mashes', where she was happy as any bird. 

During the war village children found the marshes to be a happy hunting-ground for pieces of ‘target'. All day and every day for years red drogues were towed to and fro by airplanes, while gunners practised, filling the sky with little black puffs of smoke. Sometimes a target ceased to crackle through the air; it paused; to sink slowly down from the sky. Then one heard far-off cries, and saw little figures, moving as though slowly in the distance, towards scarlet joy.

Whole targets were recovered and used again; but the pieces were treasure trove in that time of scarcity and clothes rationing. The local fashion for blouses, aprons, and even pyjamas, was red —a fine red cotton cloth, of an unbelievable fineness of texture. Rosamund had a lovely pair of crimson knickers—so warm in winter—made of a torn rag that floated down from the sky as in a fairy tale of a world of long ago, when there were lights at night in the windows of all cottages, farmhouses, and inns, and along the streets of towns.

The elements had not changed. Here were the marshes, with shore larks and pipits fluttering low over the bushes of sea-blite and plants of sea-lavender which in July had turned these thousands of wild acres almost as blue as the sky.

*

All during his years on the Bad Lands Phillip had waited to plough the meadows, which should grow great crops of corn and sugar-beet on that deep, alluvial soil once covered by the sea. After half-a-dozen croppings the land could be re-seeded with new pedigree strains of grasses which would give fine milk yields. For that reason the grupps must not be filled in, but continue to lead fresh drinking water from the river as before.

In Napoleonic times, when the sea-wall along the coast had been raised, the Great Sluice was built by which river water might flow out at low tide, and salt water be barred at high tide. The Sluice consisted of stone facings across which a great beam
supported
a massive oak door. This door was hinged at the top to open on the seaward side. At low tide, fresh water burbled under its skirt. When the river was high after rain the burble became a gushing tumble, through which in summer sea-trout found their way into the river.

When both river and tide ran high together, the river water piled up behind the tide-shut door, and began to move back the way it had come, eventually flooding the grupps and flowing over the surface of the meadows.

Any attempt to plough the meadows would fail unless this back-flow were checked. And one day, at the very end of his property, Phillip found just the very place where this could be done. For the main grupp passed under a brick culvert at the end of the River Wood. Here he would erect a little sluice, modelled on the Great Sluice in the sea-wall, to stop all back-flow.

One morning during holiday from school Peter, David and Jonathan reported for duty at the bridge by Denchman's Meadow. They were going to replace the ruinous penstock that led water from the river to the upper grupps. Hearing in the village of
something
interesting going on, several other boys, evacuees from
London, came down to watch, as Phillip and his sons stood behind a coffer dam of boards driven into the river-bed and reinforced by clay; and with scoop, bucket, spade and hand they hauled out the mud.

“Want any 'elp?”

“We may do, later. Thank you, gentlemen.”

At this, one small boy began to comb his hair. Another ceased to spit into the river.

Phillip, working with the scoop, reached a layer of old port bottles which had been buried there, it seemed, when the brick culvert was made. On some bottles, impressed on molten glass by a seal, was the date—1810. Below the bottles he found a stratum of cockle-and oyster-shells. He had reached the old sea-bed.

The watchers above, who had been given a lecture on
archaeology
and conchology, were now treated to a story of smuggling. While Phillip was talking, water from the river was beginning to push out the clay between cracks in the boards. Peter had daubed it the outer side of the dam. He blushed guiltily when he saw his father looking at the spirts of water.

“We'll dig down in the meadow after dinner, Peter, and get some of the heavy brown clay. This stuff I gave you is too loose. Don't worry about the water getting in, we'll attend to that after dinner.”

Upon returning in the afternoon, they discovered that a dozen large eels had worked their way up the dyke, attracted by the stir of water, and were trapped in the sump. One was over two pounds in weight. These were given to the gentlemen above, who hurried home, while cries of laughter came from them, as the fish slithered out of their hands and pockets.

The next morning they put in the concrete foundations. In the sump a score and more of eels, dead. The alkaline in the concrete had affected their gill-rakers, by which they drew oxygen from the water, explained Phillip to the gentlemen above.

“Their scales are covered by a kind of mucous from the
death-struggle
of asphyxiation, gentlemen.” None of them wanted any more eels, so he cut them up and gave them to the ducks which had come up, quacking, to find out what had stained the water of their dyke.

At the end of a week the old brick tunnel had been repaired and reinforced; a new concrete wall fronted the entrance to the dyke; and an Oregon-pine penstock, made from wreckage timber found on the shore, was bolted to it. The village carpenter, working to a
plan sketched by the River Engineer of the Catchment Board, had done an excellent job, to last well into the twenty-first century.

The old wall of hand-made red bricks, in front of what Phillip called the Napoleon culvert, now hid the colourless concrete
behind
its face. Here, at last, the flow could be controlled: with a crowbar the hatch could be raised, or lowered, by means of an iron rack and ratchet. It was a fine sight. Now for the second operation, the River Wood Sluice!