Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Lucifer Before Sunrise (8 page)
Today, the first of July was like that other First of July, twenty five years ago, in Picardy: hot, oppressive, still. A radiant and oppressive light beat upon the low ground of the meadows. The scythers went round the drains and the lows, sweating. In the afternoon I took the mare Beatrice with the iron tedder and turned most of the hay. Its thickness rejoiced me. I had optimistic thoughts of two and a half tons an acre. Powerful Dick, swinging scythe and game leg together, said he knew these meadows, and that drying the hay would be a difficulty. Damp arose from the river at night. However, we are getting on. So is Hitler, if the fanfares and reports on the Rundfunk are to be believed. I have cut out both Hitler’s and Stalin’s Manifestos from
The
Times
, and kept them both, in the tenuous and by now ancient hope that one day I shall be able to write the microcosmic–macrocosmic events of my time and age.
Since working all day in fine weather my body has become lean and taut and agile, and I have been less mentally disturbed by the war. The sun on bare chest, back, arms, legs, the sweat of forking and pitching hay, are good and clarifying. Yes, we are getting on. Even Lucy’s garden is beginning to look well. Hammett, the old-age pensioner, with arms and legs swelled to near-immobility, works a few slow hours every day there. But my cottage garden, adjoining, with its weed-grown dumps of past tenants, is a reproach with every glance of my eyes.
About this time the newspapers began to take the line that Great Britain was fighting the war in order to abolish slums, to establish their New Order, to make agriculture an honoured national
industry
after the war. Leading articles declared, in effect, that the nation was fighting Hitler’s New Order so that England could achieve after the war what was considered impracticable before they fought Hitler. Phillip wondered if the writers of those articles and leaders believed them. The labourers and other
working
men he met didn’t.
Advertisements in papers, talks on the B.B.C., films of the Ministry of Information in the cinema, all exhorted people to practise economy and to avoid waste. Was the country adopting the very system that the City of London was determined to destroy? By law in Britain now nearly everyone not aged had to work. All had been numbered, classified, regulated, and given Identity Cards. No export of money abroad was allowed. Food and clothes were rationed. Even hedgerow fruits were collected and made into cordials, to be given to mothers of small children. Lucy distributed
Rose Hip Syrup for babies in the village. Visitors were forbidden to enter coastal districts. Private motoring had long been stopped. Phillip heard seldom, if ever, from his old friends.
Rural England, outside the desolate areas of airfields under
construction
, was becoming arable England again. Grass fields were ploughed up by orders of Agricultural Committees. Bad farmers—the obdurate ‘C’ men—were dispossessed at fourteen days’ notice. Businesses were closed down if they were considered ‘unnecessary to the war effort’. The Government at last controlled Money. A British subject who had money in America and failed to sell his dollars to the British Government was liable to a fine of thrice the value of the dollars and the original sum confiscated.
Young men in the Forces looked well and fit, searchlight-soldiers excepted. They were B2 grade. Village boys no longer had
factory-made
trash toys. They were beginning to carve and model their own—generally aircraft—out of odd bits of wood. After the knuckle-head-rapping elderly spinster in charge of the village school had gone, and a young intelligent woman taken her place, the change of the school’s tone was remarkable. The swear-words, the precociously sexual overtones, the jeers and narky scuffles of the boys coming down Church Street were no more.
A gramophone played as the children went into morning school. Phillip and Lucy went to a concert given by the new
schoolmistress
and her pupils. They heard simple lyrics by de la Mare, Hardy, and Masefield recited. The children enjoyed themselves in dancing and singing, in acting little sketches. Their costumes were made ingeniously; red cloth of the drogues for anti-aircraft practice-targets, which fell usually on the marshes when shot down, predominated. Such cloth was much sought after. Its like could no longer be bought in shops. Clothes of every category were rationed. The children looked bright and neat, not nervous or shy as Phillip had thought to see. They did what they were doing with zest, the parents were happy.
Phillip recalled what ‘Spectre’ West, his dead comrade-in-arms, had said to him when they had walked up to Passchendaele. ‘The slums have died in Flanders.’ Evacuee boys from London who at first had given trouble in the school, and helped in the spreading of obscene words and attitudes among the children, were changing. ‘Spectre’s’ prophecy, made in October 1917, was coming true, at last. Some helped on Denchman’s Meadow. It was pathetic to observe how, after a few words of praise—as it were in confidence to equals—a ‘bad’ boy would become alert and eager, anxious to
be of use. The aimless kick-about-in-the-streets expression went from their faces. Phillip, after a few days, could almost see them reverting to type: the type of their rosy-faced forefathers, before the industrial revolution drew so many from the fields to the pallor of sweat-shops and factories. These things were only indications of the incipient community spirit; but all of them were due to the precipitating agency, to use a term in chemistry, of the modern Lucifer.
There was a particular evacuee boy whom Phillip called ‘Ferret Eyes’. The lad explained cheerfully that he had been born blind, but at three months old had ‘managed to recover his sight’. How he managed it, he did not say. His eyes were sunken in his head, and when he smiled they almost disappeared. Perhaps as a baby, after feeding, he had slept for the first three months of his life, and thereby had given the impression of being blind? For a joke, at the beginning of their acquaintanceship, Phillip had, on learning his name, said, “Ah, you come of the family of Fighting Smiths!” Modestly the lad had admitted to this distinction; and thereafter, whenever their eyes met, Phillip observed that his jaw set itself into an appropriate fighting attitude. ‘Ferret Eyes’ was always striving to live up to the reputation of the Fighting Smiths; but being a peaceable child, he showed his toughness with the hay-fork. He ran down to join them on the Denchman the moment he was let out of school, followed by his companions; and it was happiness to Phillip to have them with him.
When first we started to carry the hay it was found to be not dry. I had made the mistake of putting it in rows too soon. And, as Powerful Dick declared, the river vapour kept it damp at night. It needs a lot of tossing or tedding to get it right; but if it is not to dampen again the next night all must be carried during this torrid afternoon. So I got permission for Ferret Eyes & Co. to be absent from school for a day, as I had available a dozen spare hay forks—bought at an auction before the war for twenty shillings the lot. So after noon of that day we all begin to turn and toss it with forks: six men, together with Boy Billy, Peter, David, Jonathan and the four London evacuee boys led by Ferret Eyes. We would feed and pay them, of course.
It was a fine sight, all the workers in line across the meadow under the pale blue sky of East Anglia. Work had a Constable peacefulness: the timelessness of the hot, still summer weather, the colours
remembered
from boyhood.
We began to load the feathery grey-green stuff into our tumbrils as a dry hot wind began to pour as from the eyescrewing heat of the sun. The sky was pale grey, there seemed to be no oxygen in the valley. We
were encompassed within the white heat of a Florida spring. The light hurt the eyes. Sweating was no relief. The men’s faces were red. Grimly they pitched and loaded, unloaded and pitched again at the stack. Nine steel fingers of the tedding machine snapped off that afternoon against the cut rush-clumps.
As I helped build the stack on the causeway, between Home and Denchman Meadows, on the highest part above possible
winter-flooding
, I thought how we might roll the meadow two or three times every spring, and so gradually level off the old humps.
Once this land was tidal. The channel-scourings of the sea are still apparent under the grass.
After the hay-makers had gone slowly home, sweated-out, I lingered to rest myself on the fine sight of a shorn meadow, the distant half of it crossed by wind-rows of hay. My pleasure was checked, as always when thinking of, or looking down at, the river, the bank being an
uneven
parapet of mud, called spoil, left by the Catchment Board men on the bank. The engineer has told his men, a year before, to throw this spoil down from the bank when it is dry, but they haven’t done so. Nettles and other weeds grow there luxuriantly and make a bank-side prowl with a fly-rod an irritating and frustrating act. I have fished in the river but once in my four years. The little chalk stream, once ringed upon its surface by rising trout of two and three pounds, has been half-ruined by the village drains which pour all sorts of pollution into it. Villages
upstream
also foul it. Then there are the mud-pullers of the Catchment Board, who cut and lug out every weed of water-crowsfoot, starwort, celery and even water-cress during the spring and summer months. They dredge the bed of the stream imperfectly with long-handled scoops. After their visit the stream is bare like a canal, or rather an open sewer. Over sixty pipes empty into it between the village and the next little town of Wriothesby All Saints, a place of holy-pilgrimage. All these drains contravene both the Public Health Acts and the Rivers Pollution Act. I have protested in vain to the Rural District Council; nobody cares.
Some of the Rural District Council’s houses were the worst offenders. They had been built without septic tanks, thus breaking the Council’s own by-laws. Phillip could not bear to look into the river; he felt its condition to be symbolic of the System, of the dark pollution of the spirit of Man, of the lack of honour in the body politic. He had another grievance, too, which he tried not to let affect him: the sight of dead hens left until the corpses became maggoty, about the premises, or on the Home Hills. Many times he had asked Lucy to send one of the children to bury all dead hens. Maggots soon pupated, becoming blowflies laying eggs on the sheep grazing there. Maggots ate the living flesh of sheep.
It was the same with rats killed by Spot, the stockman’s terrier: he could never get Matt to bury them in the muck of the yards.
The heat of the meadow has been intense, desiccating, eddyless. When exhausted I am prey to weak thoughts. Is my own failure to live in harmony with those about me—except when working with them as one of a team—a condition from which such thoughts are but as a dream of escape, without human base: an Idea of perfection which the human animal cannot endure—like my idea of chronic tidiness in the
cart-shed
, and the stockman washing his hands—particularly after paring the feet of a ewe suffering from foot-rot—before he milks his cows?
It is eight o’clock on Saturday evening. The men grumbled at having to work on Saturday afternoon after the late nights all the past week, but Lucy bringing a basket of buttered scones spread with honey, jam sandwiches and cake, with four gallons of tea at five o’clock, relieved the tension.
The half-built stack is now covered by the stack-cloth (which had not taken the slightest harm from its suspension over the other stack) with hurdles on top, in a long inverted V, to keep the ends open. This is not really necessary. I did it to instruct the men; an exercise. The hay is light and feathery, completely dry, unspoilt, fragrant, and of a pleasing natural colour.
On Monday they finished carrying the Denchman, leaving four or five loads for topping-up when the stack had settled down. Again the day was hot. The wind moved as from a glass-furnace, lifting grey-green feathery wisps of aromatic vernal grass from the elevator. The hay must be got in while the fine weather lasted, so in the late afternoon they went up to the Hanger. Phillip had not been this way for a week or more. The Irish ryegrass was spoiled—brittly, as Luke declared. The days of intense heat had turned it yellow. The stiff clay soil of that upper field was devoid of humus, so it soon set hard. It had been sucked by crops of corn after corn ever since the last war, without any muck having been put back. It was barren. The hay was overblown. Most of the clover seeded. Matt had told Phillip, three days before, that the pollen had not yet come to blow; whereas Steve told him quietly that the pollen had dropped off ten days previously.
It was yet another instance that the farmer must rely only on himself. If the farmer worked all day as a labourer, obviously the farm lacked a farmer. It was his own fault that it was spoiled. The seeds of the ryegrass dropped as soon as the cutting knives struck the stems.
With Luke driving his pair of horses drawing the Samuelson
cutter, and Boy Billy and Phillip on a tractor with the second cutter, they finished that job at seven o’clock. The Samuelson cutter broke its knife across the back, this had delayed them. Phillip wondered how he could use the seeds that had dropped. Graze the
aftermath
, using an electric fence, and get the bullocks brought up from the meadows to drop their dung all over the poor land?
One day he hoped to build a culvert over the ditch at the end of the far meadow and put a gate across it. The bullocks would find their way up every afternoon, glad to get away from flat heat to upland air. He wanted to plough all the meadows as well, and
re-seed
with modern grass mixtures bred by Sir George Stapleton at Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire.
Thanks be, his hay was now safely in stack.
Now he began to feel a little tremulous, because he had planned a journey with Bert Close, and this required the use of a hundred gallons of petrol which had been allocated, by the Fuel Controller at Cambridge, on the understanding that the petrol would be used ‘for agricultural purposes only’.
