Lucifer Before Sunrise (21 page)

Boy Billy had to listen to much disordered utterance from his father as he stood silent at the foot of the bed, to receive orders in the morning, to make his report at night. Upon his slight frame, clad in near-ragged overalls, the burden of the farm was now fallen. Phillip told him that it did not matter what he did, or what went wrong, so long as he reported always straitly any accident or error: the truth, the facts. But too many words from Phillip had already beset Billy: words beyond his world: words insisting, insisting, insisting that it was a rare thing among men first to be able to see the truth, and then to learn how to tell it.

Phillip knew, of course, that his ranting monologues came from a sense of guilt because he, a failure, had landed the family in this mess. In vain, during long hours of temperature hovering between 100 and 103, he was haunted by thoughts of his own lack of courage to act as the author of
Walks
and
Talks
Abroad
had acted, when confronted by critics who had never been soldiers, in the House of Commons. Lt-Col. Sir Arnold Wilson, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.P., had striven, before the war, for clarity between Germany and Britain and Italy, and thereby had been disesteemed by those who had never been tested in the flame of battle. At the outbreak of war this trained soldier had joined the R.A.F., qualified as a
rear-gunner
in a bomber, and fallen in flames in the summer of 1940, aged fifty-six.

*

On Saturday Phillip got up and went to Yarwich market. There he learned that barley—the one cereal that was not controlled—had risen to eighty-four shillings a coomb for fine; seventy-five shillings for medium; seventy shillings for common or tail. He had already bought his next year's seed at the end of October, for
seventy shillings a coomb—once-grown pedigree Archer-Spratt from the Cambridge Experimental Station—and wondered
immediately
afterwards if he had been unwise, for his hunch had been that the price would go up. A few moments after the purchase he had spoken to a merchant acquaintance and asked him if it were unwise to buy seed then. The merchant had replied that
he
wouldn't; the top price of seventy shillings then ruling would not hold when more barley came into the market, he declared.
Perhaps
it was policy to say this, lest farmers held back their grain for the price to harden: as it had indeed. (In a few months the price had risen to 110
S
.
a coomb).

He drove back in the Silver Eagle. Despite heavy leather coat and flying helmet, he was deathly cold. Once in the parlour,
however
, sitting by his hearth, Lucy bringing tea and herself to sit beside him, it seemed a marvellously pleasant room, enclosed within white-washed walls supporting chestnut beam over his head whereon horse brasses and pewter mugs hung. All was
harmonious
: the walnut cupboard and gate-leg table, armchairs and
rush-mats
on the red tiled floor; Lucy's silver tray on the polished refectory table. Before his slippered feet arose flames from
three-foot
long bull-thorns laid across the open hearth. The children came in to greet him, Lucy so gentle and ready to smile. He had had two large whiskies to drink, and felt a strange elation. His mind was floating free: he understood every point of view, especially those directly opposed to his own. If only he were free to write his novels, he would bring clarity to occluded minds—he sat still for so long that Lucy was alarmed.

“You go to bed, my dear,” her quiet voice said over his shoulder, “and I'll bring you up David's hot-water bottle.”

“I don't need one, really. You mustn't deprive the children.”

“I'm amply hot at night, Dad, I mean chooky!”

“It's the only one that doesn't leak. I've tried to get one for you at several places, but they say there aren't any to be bought just now. However, we'll manage somehow. Don't you worry. There now—” she saw tears in his eyes—tears for David's generosity; and grace.

*

There was no rest in bed: he was a failure, part of the European failure, a continent self-disgraced—his body the deteriorating body of England which could but find truth through himself, now that Hereward Birkin was in prison.

Down, down to blackness spreading into the very springs of life:
and to escape from this pollution, it seemed that to be dead was the only honourable state. No, that was not the truth! His own
condition
was but the inevitable dead-end of egotism and selfishness!

*

At times the room swayed one way; and then not so; but it swayed again. The two sides of his mind regarded one another with mutual condemnation. Was this the beginning of
schizophrenia
? What could he do to be saved? How could he renounce the resurgent ideas, the
phoinix
ideas, which had become part of his true life ever since the Great War? Had cousin Willie ‘possessed' him on that day, years ago, when he had walked upon the Burrows by the estuary of the Two Rivers with Lucy, then a shy and
virginal
girl? Had he begun to go wrong then?

Again if he had been the selfish egoist some people said he was, surely he would have devoted all his energies for himself, and so made a satisfying career? No, that was not true; conceit had
distorted
his true power. But was it only conceit which had driven him to set out upon the narrow way, to be a writer of the truth? Yet was not all truth relative? To believe a personal truth to be universal, was not that arrogance, self-conceit?

What could he do to be saved? Cease to care what happened? His anguish gave way to despair, that the blind were ruining England, as they were ruining his farm; that he must persist in demanding what was right and just, while he lived.

There was a letter from the District Claims Officer which Phillip read as he swallowed a cheese
soufflé.

Formal requisition! So the enquiry might result in the farm being taken over as a permanent practice area. That would solve his problem. He could become a writer again. But how would the family live?

To other eyes the arrival of hundreds of soldiers on the farm provided an opportunity for advancement awaited for more than fifty years. Josiah Harn, the smallholder, having secured the swill for himself and sons, had put up a shed made of beaten sheets of empty bitumen drums on his 2-acre holding. Within this building pigs were being fattened.

Harn was a man of inflexible purpose. Tall and upright in his sixty-odd years, blue-eyed and lean with austere living and strict attention to business, he was to be seen driving every week to market in his gig, hammer-cloth over knees in cold weather. At other times his son drove the same pony, harnessed to a
motor-tyred
cart containing swill tins, from camp to camp. Always polite, always with raised fore-finger to cap on passing Phillip, these two were building up on pigs as well as cows-in-milk.

The invalid, still weak and a little tremulous, went for a walk above the river. Near the eastern boundary he saw Josiah Harn by the hedge of his small-holding, staring at the neighbouring field, where thistles struggled with foul grass, and shepherd's purse weed denoted lack of lime.

“Look yew at it!” Phillip heard him yelling, as he shook his fist like a prophet of the Old Testament. “Look yew at Hubert's dirty land! What do Hubert want all this land for? Harn't he got enough already, with a thousand acres on his own farm? What do he want these fields for? Look how he tills them! And I hev only two acres! It oughtn't to be allowed!”

Pretending not to have seen him, Phillip returned the way he had come. He met the Rector, who got off his bicycle to ask how he was. To cheer Phillip, he told him he had seen what he believed
to be a rare crested lark on his meadows. But Phillip could hardly bear to hear what he had to say, and with an excuse hurried on.

*

Before the visit of the Claims Officer he went round with a
notebook
to write down details of damage. The water in the lower road still reflected the sky. The granary door used by soldiers as a pier for drawing buckets of water, had floated off down the river. Of the ewes, denied the dry Home Hills, only four remained. Seven gate-posts were smashed. The gulley road up to the arable was impassable, being a foot deep in mud. The pit, whence the best sand in the district for building was sometimes taken, was filled to the top with broken bottles, tins, garbage, and the carcasses of skinned sheep. The undergrowth in the woods was trodden. Branches of trees torn and chopped off for firewood. Apparently soldiers still preferred privacy to the use of latrines as much as they did in the old war, when every little crater of the pitted surface of a battlefield in summer had its relic of meditation, a place where one might, for a few moments, avoid the war.

Or had the Commanding Officer forgotten to order the digging of latrines? From Phillip's point of view the woods were foul to walk in. Wire fences were trodden down. Hen houses smashed for firing. Hens disappeared. Scores of small iron screw-pickets, used for tents, remained in the grass at the woods' edge. Obviously no officer had been detailed to look round before departure. Billy said he had seen soldiers in the workshop, scrounging. All the remaining bottles of wine were gone. Bits of paper and empty tins lay about the Home Hills. Sacks taken, and straw. Phillip said bitterly that the Commanding Officer of this rabble had left with his illusions unshattered—there had been no complaints. What a bloody mob!

*

A subaltern of the Claims Department came out from Norwich to look around with Phillip. In the back of the camouflaged military-car lay a .410 gun. He asked Phillip who had the shooting.

“I have the shooting in hand.”

With a laugh the lieutenant left the gun in the back of the car.

“This is too much for me to deal with,” he said, when they had gone round. “I think I'll tell ‘Big Chief'.”

This individual arrived three days later by appointment. Phillip's throat was bad again, he was feverish. He got out of bed with deep reluctance ten minutes before ‘Big Chief' was due to arrive.

As he walked in a stately manner up the paved path Phillip saw through the lattice window that ‘Big Chief' was tall, with red face and jowl, supercilious expression, cold pale eyes, long nose. He opened the door for him, said “How do you do.” The visitor came in, bending under the arch, and without any reply put hat and leather-covered cane on the table.

His highly-polished field-boots, his cane and uniform, together with the Victory Medal of 1918, were from the first war. Slowly he removed doeskin gloves, tossed them negligently into the hat on the table. Then turning abruptly to Phillip said, “Now for your case. Have you a claim made out?”

“No.”

“Then you make no claim?”

“Yes, I do.”

“For what amount?”

“I hardly know.”

“I've looked round the roads. The material, I cannot call it metalling, appears to be unsuitable for traffic, your own included.”

“It was the best we could get in nineteen thirty-seven, when we made up the roads, which are now ruined.”

‘Big Chief' looked round to assure himself that they were alone, then continued in hectoring voice, “You talk of ruined roads, but let me tell you this! If Hitler's tanks came, wouldn't they do a great deal more damage, and what sort of claim would he consider from you? And after all, these fellows are defending your life for you! And here's another point. Under Defence Regulation Fifty-Two, the Competent Military Authority—any troops, that is—can enter any land or building at any time, and you have no power to stop them. Therefore your point about the absence of a requisition order, made in your letter to my office, does not arise. Have you anything to say? You haven't. Very well. Now we'll look round together,” he went on, a trace of friendliness in his voice. “Of course it looks worse than it really is. When the dry weather comes, you'll hardly notice the mud. It will turn to dust, and blow away! However, we will certainly allow you something for the pot-holes.”

He took up gloves, cane, hat; and feeling the unreality of his own movements Phillip followed him out.

A soldier-servant-chauffeur was waiting by an old saloon car. The car had been carefully cleaned. Phillip got in by invitation after ‘Big Chief' had got in himself. They were driven to the lower road. The car swayed slowly, splashing through the chain of
lagoons. Phillip realized that its springs were set, i.e. tired and flat, and the body took the bumps almost direct through the
shackle-bolts
. When they came to the area of dark mud lying several inches above the disrupted surface, where the turf of the verges had been churned with water and gravel, the driver changed to bottom gear. Thereafter the gradient rose and there was no water.