Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Lucifer Before Sunrise (9 page)
‘They have not laboured in mental searching as we have; they have not wasted their time looking among empty straw for the grain which is not there. They have been in the sunlight. Since the days of ancient Greece the doves have remained in the sunshine; we who have laboured have found nothing. In the
sunshine
, by the shady verge of woods, by the sweet waters where the wild dove sips, there alone will thought be found.’
—
Richard
Jefferies,
in
The
Pigeons
at
the
British
Museum
The idea was started one day while Phillip was sawing logs with the circular saw, and Bert Close, his lorry-driver friend, had come to visit him. Bert Close had watched awhile; then, during a pause, offered to sharpen the saw’s teeth. “It’s no good like that, guv, wouldn’t cut butter. I’ll show you.”
Phillip watched him stroking the teeth with the file, and realised how he had been doing it wrong before. Then Bert set the teeth. He told Phillip he had worked steam tackle, and sawn up hundreds of tons of logs.
This induced mention that Phillip had the lease of some
scrub-oak
woodland in South Devon, but had never cut any timber there; and the lease would run out shortly. If only he had his tractor and saw down there, he could clear some of the overgrown scrub. However, it was no use thinking of that.
During haysel Bert Close came over again, to suggest that he and Phillip take the saw, and the tractor on his lorry, and work in the woods. “I’d like to go with you, guv. Only we’ll want someone to cook for us, after working all day. We’d come ’ome tired, and who’d get food ready?”
The next evening he returned with his girl-friend Poppy, and said that she would be willing to do the cooking; and since he had an ‘A’ lorry licence, he could do the transporting of tractor and saw to Devon, if Phillip could supply the petrol. His quarterly
allocation
was just about used up.
At this time all private motoring was stopped throughout Britain, owing to the petrol shortage; and coupons were given only for ‘work in connexion with the war effort’. Among hauliers, all journeys of over thirty miles were subject to a permit from the local Transport Board, which was made up not of government officials, but of the local hauliers. So he would have to be careful, Bert Close said; for some of the big hauliers were after his ‘A’ licence, to acquire it for their own fleets of lorries; and if the
journey were known, there might be trouble, and he might lose his licence.
“If some of them Nosey Parkers knew where I was goin’, they’d report me, see.”
“Then I should not risk it, if I were you.”
“They can’t touch me.”
Bert Close came the following evening to help with the carting of the hay. Phillip wanted to see the two stacks covered before he left; and had bought some rolls of bitumenized paper which would serve instead of thatch. The idea was to cut lengths of the paper, overlap them and cover the joins with wire-netting hung upon sections of sycamore poles.
“Right, guv, let’s get on with it then.”
They rolled the paper in two equal rolls and let them down from the ridge of the stack; then followed with wire-netting to cover the sheets. Ends of the netting were secured to a rope drawn tight round the waist of the stack, to prevent wind from lifting wire and paper. The stack looked like a half-inflated ballon when it was finished.
The next morning, Matt muttered about the presence of Bert Close.
“What’s he a-doin’ of on our farm, master? He’s only out for what he kin git.”
“But he won’t take any payment for his help.”
“Huh. Yar’ll see,” muttered dark-eyed Brythonic man. “He’s out for the biggest penny.”
The sooner the hay was done, the sooner they could start for Devon. In the afternoon Bert Close came again, and helped to prepare more wire-netting sections and paper for the second stack. The meadow-hay was already topped up. They covered that with bitumenized paper and wire, making a neater job at the second attempt. They tight-waisted it with field-telephone wire, securing the ends to pegs thrust into the sides of the rick. The hay looked to have settled well down, the covering tight as a puff-ball.
Phillip’s respect for Bert Close as a neat and tidy worker (
contrasted
with the slobbering way so many things were done on the farm) was increased by working with him. He was careful, he attended to the smallest detail, he was quick. He seemed to be valiant, too. A few nights previously he had seen three soldiers breaking into a little shop in one of the narrow staithes, or streets, leading down to the quay of Crabbe. Bert Close asked them what they were doing. They told him to mind his own (unprintable)
business, otherwise they would knock his (similar) teeth down his (ditto) throat for his (omitted) supper. Finally, they told him to go and do something to himself which to the non-hermaphrodisiacal Bert Close was the final insult. He snouted one; he snouted two; the third did not await his turn, but ran away.
Zero Hour is in five and a half hours’ time. The expedition has been kept a secret between Lucy, Billy, myself, Bert Close, and Poppy. As Luke has told me more than once during the past two years, there are “several people ready and glad to see you go wrong”. One of these appears to be that land-hungry peasant, Josiah Harn.
To avoid attention, Poppy did not come on the farm during the hay carrying. She stayed with a married friend ten miles away. In four hours’ time I am to fetch her in the Silver Eagle.
After tea, in the quiet of the evening by the chalk quarry and the long cart-shed built below it, Bert Close and I began to load the lorry with tractor on rubber-tyres, circular saw, axes, one hundred gallons of petrol in twenty cans, and other gear required for Devon. Our plan is to drive away from the village at midnight, and to arrive at the field above Malandine at five o’clock tomorrow afternoon.
I am apprehensive about the run of nearly three hundred miles, remembering the tedious journeys in our slow old lorry across England in the years before the war, done often with insufficient food and rest; so when all the machinery, spare parts, fuel, and gear was smoothly loaded, we lashed some heavy ship hatch-boards directly under the wood frame of the hood. This makes a platform upon which to spread blankets and pillows, where I hope to sleep during the twenty hours or so we are on the road.
Every detail of the journey and the month’s stay in South Devon has been discussed. I want no more rows or misunderstandings with sentimental or self-deceiving people as in the past. I am to pay the running expenses of the journey, and
£
4 a week to Bert Close. For the journey I provide my own food, while Bert Close and Poppy provide theirs.
We finished loading in the starlit dusk between ten and eleven o’clock, and returned to the farmhouse for eggs and bacon, with toast and coffee. Afterwards we drove in the Silver Eagle to a village a dozen miles away to fetch Poppy from her hiding place. When we returned it was nearly midnight: and suddenly, I was too tired to start, and said so; whereupon arose another problem.
We had planned to start in darkness in order to avoid any snooping, and consequent telephone conversations to the police about the
movement
of a lorry in wartime. Recently there had been a warning of a possible invasion; and though Winston Churchill had declared that there was no fifth-column in the country, Mr. Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, one of the Labour ministers in the Coalition
Govern
ment
, had countered this statement in the House of Commons by referring to ‘the quisling in their midst’. I thought that this remark, made after a Committee of Inquiry had cleared Sir Hereward Birkin (according to Hansard’s record of Parliamentary debate), was about as mean as another deliberate falsification of the truth concerning King Leopold of the Belgians betraying the French and British Army
without
warning in May 1940. The British Government knew, from Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, chief liaison officer with the Belgian Army, that King Leopold had given several days’ warning that his army was crushed and
encircled
; the British Cabinet knew that King Leopold of the Belgians must surrender to save the lives of broken men; but for reasons of
expediency
—to try and cohere a disintegrating French army—the truth had been suppressed, and a statement of expediency announced in its place.
(Francis, my Bengal Lancer friend, told me that Churchill remained quiet over this, at the time, because the French authorities were hoping to spur on the French Army, by contempt of the Belgians. How little they understood the feelings of men exhausted in battle!)
Bert Close had assured me that he was within his rights, as the holder of an ‘A’ licence, in hauling a load to Devon for me; but he was not supposed to take so much petrol on board. And I don’t want to see out the rest of the war in prison—although it would give me the very seclusion I need to fulfil myself as a writer—because, owing to the delicacy and comparative rarity of our hydraulic tractors, if they are broken, the farm might not survive as far as the family are concerned.
Therefore we had planned our get-away at an hour when the energy of even the silliest village spy-hunter might be expected to be low. My energy certainly was low; memories of those strained journeys of other years told me to take it easy; and, suddenly exhausted in the evening twilight, as I have written, I decided to sleep at home that night. So we offered rugs and cushions in the parlour to our guests, and left the loaded lorry in what was called the yard, a gravelled space between farmhouse and cottage—hoping that it would not be visible in the rays of any inspecting shaded torch of A.R.P. duty-man, Fire Watcher, or prying eyes of Horatio Bugg, leader of the local anti-quisling party of
black-marketing
patriots.
It was a quiet, moonless night; the stars were dull; yet the bulk of the loaded and canvas-wrapped lorry standing in the yard was visible in silhouette from the road. If it were reported, well, it would be; that was all. With these easy thoughts accompanied by the
searing
necessity for sleep, Phillip pushed aside his journal and got into bed. Fully dressed, and covered by a rug, he slept by the large window, casements open, black-out curtains pulled back, night air cool on face.
Some time later he was instantly awake, aware of a murmur of voices and footfalls hurrying away up the street. As he listened more intently, risen on an elbow, the telephone bell began to ring in the farmhouse. He waited for it to stop, but it went on ringing. He imagined that Bert Close and Poppy, dozing in armchairs, or more probably in one another’s arms on the rush mats of the floor, were too scared to lift the receiver. In the starlight the loaded lorry loomed clearly, standing just below the wide window.
The subdued but insistent tones of the telephone bell continued.
Would the police soon be arriving to examine a lorry loaded with 100 gallons of petrol for an unknown destination by a local suspect? In a district where only one petrol pump was permitted to serve the needs of a hundred square miles, and all services were
constantly
on the look-out for sabotage? His release under Regulation 18b was conditional; several of his manuscripts and letters were still held by the police; he suspected that his movements were watched and reported, and telephone conversations monitored. Moreover, the popular newspapers at that time were reporting prominently prosecutions for the misuse of petrol, taking the propaganda line that petrol wasters were helping the drowning of British sailors torpedoed in tankers.
The telephone bell ceased to ring. Or was it still ringing? Was his ear ‘singing’, after all?
He leaned out of the window, in the chill and tenebrous
weariness
before the first pallor of dawn, and listened. Even owls were silent in the valley.
Suddenly a cock pheasant cried
Koch-karr!
in the distant
pinewood
; others answered remotely. A pause—and the deep
thuddings
of bombs came through the night. Far away was shouting,
Action
Stations!
He recognised the voice from the searchlight camp beyond the pine-wood.
A little while later he heard footfalls and voices about the village street. He heard knocking on a door, and a voice asking for Mrs. Maddison. She was wanted at once at the Red Cross point behind the Old Manor.
*
Unknown to Phillip at that moment, Lucy was already up, in blue trousers and jersey covered by overalls, Red Cross brassard on left arm. While Phillip had been sunk in heavy sleep the night sky with its fixed and dim points of stars had been faintly scored by tracer bullets, then flames had travelled wanly towards the east, and a youth of barely eighteen, remotely conscious of pain and the
strangeness of life, had floated down on a parachute into the shadows of earth and crashed into one of the woods. He had been rescued and taken to the Red Gross point in a room of the Old Manor which, having been rebuilt by a rich man retired from business, was now restored to its former condition as a seigneurial dwelling.
I was asleep when Lucy came to my cottage and said it was time to get up, if we were to start at five o’clock, as planned. She said that a German pilot had been shot down in the night, and after first-aid treatment, had been taken to hospital. His legs were broken, she said, but he might live.
“He looked like a little boy. It might have been Billy. Drink your tea, my dear, and I’ll have breakfast ready for you all in a quarter of an hour. Did you hear the telephone bell ringing? Mr. Close said he didn’t like to lift the receiver.”
After sluicing my face in cold water, I went into the parlour, where behind curtains of black Italian cloth electric light revealed a grim face beside one of dark-eyed happiness sitting at table laid for breakfast. We ate silently, then got up to put on our coats, thanking Lucy for all she had done, and went to the lorry. It was 5 a.m., double
summertime
, 3 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. I was saying goodbye to Lucy when the dark form of Hooly glided through the air, and with loud screaks settled on Bert Close’s cap.
This article, of dark blue cloth and shiny peak, Bert Close declared to have been given him in Hull by the skipper of a trawler, who had acquired it from a German
Unterseeboot
kapitanleutnant.
It looked to me like an ordinary taxi-driver’s cap. Hooly was now doing a little mad dance upon it.
“Crickey, what’s this on me ’ead? Little ole Itler’s luftwaffy? Blimey, it’s ’Ooly. ’Ow are you, ’Ooly cock?”
The owl was frantic for food. Lucy took it away, to quiet it with pieces of rabbit. The lorry, with dimmed lights, drew out into the narrow main road. I climbed up into the back, hauled myself over the iron seat of the tractor, and wriggled into the sleeping-hole among sacks and blankets. A cloth had been drawn over the top, it was tight against my shoulders, not at all as I had imagined. I asked if it might be taken off and folded up.
After an extra tilt of the cap—followed by a grim look—Bert Close did this; and at ten minutes after five o’clock, we set off westwards.
