Lucifer Before Sunrise (15 page)

Then to the farm premises, hoping against hope that he would find the cart-shed neat and tidy. He had had an obsession all the way back in the lorry that if he did not find it tidy, the future of the farm was doomed to failure. He had just crossed over the
river-bridge
when he saw a brown owl perching on a willow branch by the duckpond. He approached slowly, calling ‘Hooly—Hooly’. To his relief the bird did not fly away, but remained perching there, looking at him. Hooly allowed him to stroke her head, while closing her eyes with pleasure. She liked being scratched about the ears. How handsome she was, in her new browns and blacks and whites. The eyes had that full authentic keenness of perfect natural form. “Hooly” he whispered, for her ears were very sensitive, “Hooly”. She gave him a long stare; a baby chirrup came from the scarce-open beak; then, without a cry, Hooly flew into the twilight, following a dark and silent winged form; while Phillip thought, “I shall make the farm a success”.

*

He did not go on to the hovel. He returned to his cottage. There he opened Tim’s letter, with some reluctance, for he sensed what it would contain. Tim wrote that during his journey by motor from Hampshire he had had the opportunity to compare the quality of crops in the fields he passed with those on Phillip’s farm. He realised what a great improvement had been made during the past four years, for the crops were as good as any he had seen. Now was the time to sell, he declared: why not give up at
the coming Michaelmas quarter? The work was too much for him: and only his regard for his sister, he said, who was looking very tired, and the children, had prompted him to write the letter.

“I shall never surrender,” said Phillip, to the image of Melissa.  

On the morning of Thursday, August the fourteenth, 1941, it began to rain as the full moon arose out of the east a few minutes after half-past five. Phillip awakened and was immediately aware of a dull feeling, which deepened with the noise of rain. Then he turned over and tried to go to sleep again, to dream that the rain had stopped; and waking, found it was seven o'clock, and that the rain had stopped. He dressed hurriedly and hastened to the farm premises. Within a few minutes the men arrived, less Steve, the youngest labourer, who had been habitually fifteen to twenty minutes late during the past year. Phillip could imagine him at that moment pulling on his trousers, fag in mouth, to face another day. Phillip had long ceased to ask him to try to be punctual.

“You don't have to worry,” said Luke, after they had exchanged greetings. “The rain will take the steel out of the barley. We're at the oats on the top end of the Steep, a lovely crop they are, on the Cold Old Land. Father and me reckon eighteen sacks to the acre.”

“It wor my sheep what done it, master,” put in Matt. “Twice they wor folded on mustard on the Cold Old Land. The oats hev felt the benefit of my sheep, that they hev!”

“Yes, your sheep did some good, Matt.”

“They did, an' all.”

But was it Matt's sheep that had done the trick—of growing corn on the Cold Old Land which never before, said the village, had yielded a crop? Phillip had an idea it was more than that. It was now raining again. What could the men do?

“There's the muck to be got out of the yards,” said Luke.

“But the muck is going on the Scalt when the oats are off, for sugar-beet next season. And it must go by lorry, it's a long way. The ground is too slippery for the lorry at present.”

“There's the barn to tidy, and the hovel.”

Phillip felt he could not usefully say anything more about that. They must have tidied both places two score times in the past four
years—with inevitable disorder following. “How about the roots on the Lower Brock Hanger? Have they been scored?”

“They was before you went away, if you remember.”

“Have they been horse-hoed?”

“I got no orders about that.”

Before leaving for the West, Phillip had written items in the farm diary, for Lucy and Boy Billy to read daily: underlining the necessity for horse-hoeing, as soon as weather made it possible, the Brock Hanger roots. A letter confirming the necessity, and a
telephone
talk, had emphasised the need to create a tilth on that biscuit-yellow soil liable to crack when dry, unless the evaporation of sub-soil moisture were stopped by surface layers of loose earth.

“But we depend on those roots to hold the bullocks in the Bustard Yard.”

“I got no orders about that,” repeated Luke. Then with
expressionless
face he said, “I give up being steward. I'll look after the hosses, and no more.”

*

Boy Billy in his seventeenth year was beginning to outgrow the child Phillip had always thought he had known. A faint smudge was now apparent on his upper lip. In colouring and nature he took after his mother's side. He was fair, like his dead mother; Phillip was dark, or was before his hair turned grey. Were the patterns of their minds, after all, different? He was beginning to find it increasingly hard to talk with Billy. Too often a ‘talk' became a monologue or lecture on Phillip's part, and a kind of stoical silence on Billy's: a condition which Phillip tried to check in himself, without result. He knew now that he had done wrong in taking him away from school at the beginning of the war. What standards could Billy acquire from village contacts? He had believed that he could train him to be a farmer, so that at the earliest opportunity Billy would be able to farm the land for the family, and later for himself.

Phillip had been much worried, because the ‘training' seemed to have produced results opposite to those he had imagined. There was the occasion when, arriving at Lower Brock Hanger—the steepest field where they were to grow roots that season—Phillip had smelled an over-hot engine, and telling Billy to stop, asked him if he had checked the oil level of the sump that morning.

Luke, who was present, said, “Thet's right. Boy Billy and me checked the oil this mornin', didn't us, Boy Billy?”

“Was it topped up?” asked Phillip.

“Thet's right, I saw it myself.”

“Well, something's wrong.”

Phillip cleaned the dipstick, dropped it back, and lifting it once more saw that its end just touched a black, tar-like liquid.

“If you had gone on, Billy, the big-ends and the main-bearings would have run, and the engine been shattered. And as you know, it now takes anything up to six months to have an engine repaired, while new engines are unobtainable. A full oil sump is absolutely necessary, especially up this steep slope of one-in-five.”

“'Twas full this morning,” said Luke.

Phillip went away and returned with the draining bowl and a can of new oil. The old oil, black and thick with long use, drained from the sump was less than a pint; the sump held five pints. There was no leakage from cylinder head or crankcase; the cylinder bores were not worn. Obviously the dipstick had not been looked at for weeks.

“Are you sure you checked the dipstick level this morning, Luke?”

“Not me. I saw Billy check it. Didn't I, Boy Billy?”

The youth looked embarrassed, and muttering, “I dunno,” shrugged his shoulders and turned away. Phillip refilled the sump, and ploughed the remaining two acres of the Lower Brock; and at the end of the day the oil in the sump was at the top-mark of the dipstick, and only slightly discoloured: so no damage had been done to the engine.

*

That had been in March, when Luke was still the steward; now it was August: the men stood around, waiting. What could he put them to? Oh, why hadn't the roots on the Lower Brock been horse-hoed? They could not grow in that soil unless they had the moisture conserved under a surface of loose tilth. What would the bullocks in the winter have to feed on? The Island Fortress was almost on starvation rations—one egg a month, two ounces of butter a week, a very little tea and sugar, for town dwellers.

It was no good thinking of the past. The immediate problem was wet weather work. Weakly he heard himself saying with assumed amiability to Luke, “Well, will you tidy up the Corn Barn? Pick up all the corn sacks, and sort out the rat-gnawn ones from the others. I'll take them to the factory again to be repaired. Pile the gnawn ones neatly, I'll take them to town when I go next. Hang the good ones on the pole, out of the way of rats.”

“Right you are,” said Luke and went off to the Barn. At 7.20 a.m. Steve turned up and said, “What shall I do?”

Phillip asked him if he would continue creosoting the beams of the Corn Barn, where he had left off. “You used the pail and brushes last, so you'll know where they are. I couldn't find them just now in the oil-house. And Billy the Nelson, will you look out all the thatching brooches? They
should
be in the left hand corner of the cart-shed. Have the haystacks been all right, Matt?”

“Your paper patent that you and that man put on blew off,” said the stockman, gazing at the sky. He could not resist adding, “I told you so.”

“Is the meadow hay spoiled?”

“No-o. Only wants thatchin'.”

“What do you want me to do?” said Dick.

Powerful Dick, the massive labourer of Norman name and origin, had been engaged originally to pull mud from the grupps. Labour was scarce; and when Phillip had asked him to stay after the draining had been done, Dick had demanded, and got, a higher rate of pay. This had caused jealousy among the other men. There had been a slight altercation over his insurance stamp, too. Dick stuck this every week on his card himself, which meant that Phillip was breaking the law by not doing it as his employer. It was a higher category stamp than that of agricultural labourer; for he had originally come on contract work, naming his own price, eight shillings a chain of twenty-two yards; but after the first week he had complained that there was nothing in it. So Phillip had let him continue pulling mud on his time, giving him an extra shilling a day, on Luke's recommendation, who said the work was hard graft.

Dick had made a good job of the dykes; and later, of
hedge-laying
when the dykes were finished. He had a hard head, he was a powerful man' despite his limp. He was rough with his tongue at times. Once, when Phillip stopped sixpence off his wages for being half an hour late, he got angry, and with neck flushing, threw down his billhook (or rather Phillip's billhook, for he would not supply his own tools, except a pitching fork) and shouted, “I tell you straight, I'll be glad to leave this bloody muck-up!”

It was an arresting description of the Bad Lands, and probably derived, Phillip thought, from the word muck-heap. As that was what, more or less, he thought of it himself, Dick's description did not disturb him at all. Indeed, he felt it to be something they could share in common. Dick with his war-wound was known to be short-tempered, and this outburst on that occasion was natural.

“Stopping me sixpence, as though I wor' some bit of a bloody boy!”

Thus the Nordic invader in the last decades of the eleventh century had glared at Saxon and Celt, ready to cut down both. Nearly nine hundred years later tools were flung down by the Old River, and Dick prepared to stump off home. Phillip
compromised
by
giving
him the price of a gallon of beer to compensate for the sixpence.

“What do you want me to do?” Powerful Dick repeated, standing out of the rain by one of the square oak posts between the bays of the hovel.

“Help with the hovel, will you? Make it look nice and orderly, like the Domesday Book of your ancestors. Come on, Billy, let's have a look round.”

In his father's absence Boy Billy had been taking the orders to the men, Lucy being deputy manager. At least, that is how it had been arranged in words. Phillip did not realize, at the time, that neither mother nor son had wanted such responsibility thrust upon them—particularly Billy, who as a smaller boy had been patronised by the men; and for that reason had found it impossible to resist their objections, should the order be, in the ex-steward's word, ‘silly'.

“I think you'll be surprised at the oats on the Cold Old Land, Dad,” said Billy almost cheerfully, now they were clear of the premises.

These oats grew on the narrow north end of the Steep. The stalks were a rich yellow-brown from which arose thick
golden-greasy
sprays, heavy with grain, lying over the sheaf-heads. The sheaves, lying on the ground, needed to be set up in stooks, for the wind to dry. Each sheaf was weighty. The heads might have been of lacquered brass.

How had it happened? Was it Matt's sheep—those walking dung-carts? Not entirely. The secret of how to cultivate those three acres of so-called barren land lying between the woods had been discovered by accident.

Over the past three years Phillip had chalked the Cold Old Land; scattered basic-slag on it; covered it with mud from the dykes; bare-fallowed it. It had grown a crop of mustard well, for the sheep to eat; but two succeeding corn crops had failed: the first, winter wheat, the second, winter oats and tares. The plants had simply died away. It was an ugly-looking area of land. The soil felt to be grumpy, irreconcilable.

Father and son, returning one Sunday afternoon of the previous March from drilling the Scalt with oats, happened to have some seed left in the box of the drill. Phillip wanted to get rid of it, for the next drilling was to be barley. So they went up and down the Cold Old Land which was as good a place as any on which to empty the unwanted seed. The iron coulters left lines about an inch deep in the soil, and the seed lay unburied in those lines. The oats could not be used for hens because they were pink with mercuric powder, to kill spores of fungus

.“We simply left the seed exposed, didn't we, Billy?”

“Yes. On the frost-slain vetches and winter oats.”

“No ploughing, no cultivations, just seed running out of the drill. Do you remember the two cock pheasants that came out of the Bustard covert and started to pick it up as we left?”

“But I rolled-in the remaining seed with the heavy rib-roller next day, if you remember, Dad.”

“So you did—it was an excellent idea of yours. I wonder if ploughing is wrong for some kinds of land? If we had ploughed this bit the moisture would have gone out of it, and the oats been no better than those on the Scalt.”

They were standing on the ridge between the two fields. From here could be seen distant marshes and the North Sea. It was a beautiful view, for anyone with an unencumbered mind; but with the chronic feelings of things never being right—the everlasting difference in ideas between himself and his fellow men—Phillip could seldom enjoy the view. He did feel happiness at seeing it now, however: for the Cold Old Land oats were a wonderful sight. Perhaps it was Matt's ewes, after all: for, as they walked along the ride leading to Brock Hanger, he said to Billy that the Lower Hanger soil, biscuit-dry and biscuit-coloured, was not really different from that of the Cold Old Land.

They crossed the olland, or aftermath, of the brittly hay of Higher Brock. What a failure that hay had been! All the seeds of rye-grass gone to waste. But was it a failure? Billy pointed out that the seeds of clover and rye-grass which had dropped there during the over-late haysel had sprouted. The rain which had fallen while Phillip was in the West Country had made them chit. And the seedlings had taken root, rising among thickening clover aftermath.

“You're right, Billy!”

“Will you make silage of this, Dad?”

“I think it'd better be let grow awhile—no! Wheat must go in
here, we're ordered to grow it by the War Committee. Billy! Why not plough the Higher Brock
now
, while the stiff ground is damp? Then we shall have the seed-bed ready! We'll leave the headland here unploughed, for the Flying Column to come up and down. We'll thresh the twenty acres of pedigree Squarehead wheat on the Bustard early, if I can get the engine and box from Gladstone Gogney. We must sell the wheat for once-grown pedigree seed, else we shan't be able to make the extra price. We'll keep back some seed for ourselves.”