Lucifer Before Sunrise (38 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
“He wonders what you’re going to call it.”
“Why, it can surely have only one name—Palgrave Mushroom!”
Steve, the only man of our original team left, came to me this afternoon to say that he might be able to get someone to take on the livestock. Recently Steve had been milking cows, and doing other yard work, and he disliked it. I said, “Good, send him along.” Meanwhile Poppy was willing to continue looking after the calves in the boxes. She was punctual as ever, and tender with them. One morning I heard her weeping. “I think I would go mad if I didn’t have the calves to look after,” she said. Apparently she and her boy-friend, Bert Close, had parted. He did not trust her, she said. There had been accusations, and he had ‘cast her off’. She was pale and distraught. The other day I saw Jack the Jackdaw taking her a capful of hen’s eggs. When she shook her head, he began to cry. He went down on his knees to her in the yard. He, too, is almost destroyed by lack of love. The whole world for so many is loveless.
Billy, now in the Air Training Corps, is looking forward keenly to joining the R.A.F. I dare not think of the future. But perhaps the war will be over before he ‘becomes operational’. Lately we have all been relieved by the victory of General Alexander’s forces which are pursuing the Afrika Korps along the coast of the old, eroded Parthenopean wheat-fields of what once was the Roman Empire.
The great spring-tide of human movement that was Adolf Hitler’s heart and brain striving to create unity in a fragmentated continent seemed at last to have lapped itself to stillness: the moment when a scarce perceptive tremor passes through the
immense
sheet of water that is a tidal flow; when silently, almost stealthily, it begins to lapse.
The tide is flowing: there is a momentary pause: the tide is lapsing. And that which was thrown up in the tempest remains behind, the wreckage of the tidal movement—Stalingrad, and the Army of von Paulus.
A great spring-tide of elemental movement beat on the shores of the East Anglian coast in November 1942, breaking banks and flooding meadows and marshes, casting old boats and balks of wood and all the litter of the sea upon the tubular steel fences of
tank-obstacles and barb-wire erected for miles beside the road, as Phillip saw when he bicycled along the coast. Salt water and waves had flooded and beat on inland marginal fields, drowning the barley and oats and leaving faded obstacles of jetsam at the edge of its invasion. Thorn hedges were dying, the roots penetrated by salt. No small bird flitted there. Elizabethan flint walls had fallen down, cottage windows blown in.
A day or two later all was calm again: blue air without wind, sea without surf. When he returned there, no motorcar passed him: no grazing bullock was visible. He was alone upon the winding surface, feeling the curious emptiness of sky and earth, the low distances to the grey north sea alien and unfriendly after the green Atlantic combers rolling in upon the shores of the West Country; and when he came back he went to his room, and sat there, until Lucy found him to tell him that the new cowman had come.
I knew him by sight: a village lad whose passion was cows and calves. The children called him ‘Ackers’, his nickname at school. As a boy, ‘Ackers’ had gone down to help Mr. Oldman, the overworked
neighbouring
small farmer, in his cow-house. Now ‘Ackers’ was seventeen years old. The smiling quiet youth said he had been looking after Hubert’s pedigree black pigs. He said he didn’t want pigs, he wanted cows. I told him he must tell his employer that he had come to me for a job, for I didn’t want any further misunderstandings in my life. ‘Ackers’ said he would do this. He came back to me and reported. “Hubert said it is all right.”
Hubert was a yeoman who farmed two thousand acres. He was a pleasant, kind man. He always addressed me as ‘Squire’, a term which I did not merit.
I knew ‘Ackers’s’ father slightly. He said to me, “Let him get on with it, he won’t let you down.” I spoke to ‘Ackers’ about how I liked a clean cow-house, but had never had one. ‘Ackers’ nodded, and said, “Yes’m.”
The last man who had said “Yes’m” to me had been a groom in the country of the local hunt around Queensbridge in South Devon: a sure and reliable man who could not be unreliable because his entire mind was in harmony with his body. I liked that reminiscent “Yes’m” of ‘Ackers’; and I could hardly believe my eyes when next I saw the
cowhouse
. It was a disturbing sight, I recalled the story of the old prisoner, released by the French Revolution from the Bastille, who felt lost in the sunlight after so many years in the shades of the prison house.
‘Ackers’ had fixed a hose-pipe to one of the water-pipes put in by Ernest, Lucy’s eldest brother, before the war. ‘Ackers’ had soaked the dung-caked floor then used a shovel. This act, almost of archeological excavation, had brought to light a fine floor with a dung passage.
Several years before I had bought a lime-wash pump and pail. It was standing in the workshop. ‘Ackers’ had borrowed it from Billy and bought on his own initiative two bags of lime-putty from the village bricklayer. When I looked in the cow-house my eyes met a startling white. As for Cherry, the consumptive according to the inquiline, she was improving so rapidly that before long she was giving four gallons a day.
The cows’ tails were combed, their bodies washed; pails were scoured and set in a row; black rubber hose pipe was coiled after use, a padlock on the oat-bin, and Matt’s legacy of old bones, bottles, rags, and
whatnot
, was buried deep in the paddock. It was a disturbing sight, and bewildering, for I could hardly believe that it existed. After praising Ackers I went away, feeling within myself a quietness almost of sadness.
The tide has turned; it is now the ebb.
About once a fortnight in the early winter Phillip went to
Henthorpe
to shoot. Charles Box and his friends shot what was left of the Henthorpe coverts, and Phillip’s, about eight times in the season. Phillip’s acreage was nearly three hundred, of which forty were woodland; Henthorpe was six hundred acres before the
airfield
had taken about a third of the land. The arrangement was that Charles should provide the keepering and arrange the stands and drives; while Phillip had two of the eight guns, and one quarter of the game sold after the usual couple of pheasants, or brace and a half of partridges, had been presented to each guest following a day’s shooting.
This bargain relieved Phillip of worry. Hitherto the idea of shooting had been one more thing that required energy to organise, so it had not been much fun. Before he handed over to Charles Box, he used to resent the thought of preparation; which entailed washing and polishing one of the tumbrils, and spreading its wide chestnut floor with clean wheaten straw for the game; clearing the granary-workshop for luncheon; marking out the stands, hiring extra men as beaters, inviting guests. He had lost touch with most of his old friends. But now he had the chance to meet other farmers.
Charles Box’s keeper was one of the Oldstead brothers, all of whom had been raised upon Henthorpe manor. There was a swarm of young children, in addition to the several adult Oldsteads working for Charles Box, all sons of his steward, a jovial character daily visible as he rode over the Henthorpe fields mounted on a cob, from the back of which his rubicund Saxon personality confronted and beamed upon all situations with the appearance of near-merriment: a condition due to constant anxious movements of his false teeth. During a shoot, far away in front of the line of
guns, the stocky equestrian figure would be seen, moving slowly in response to the signal of advance given by Charles Box—a
long-drawn
note on a copper reed-horn. Among the line of beaters—their legs covered with hessian sugar-beet-pulp sacking, as stick in hand they struck at the yellow-green leaves streaked and a-roll with dew globules—walked two guns, to take any birds breaking back in flight.
Bang!
Bang!
distantly in front, as the remaining six guns, spaced out to sixty yards or so, awaited behind a
quick-thorn
hedge for the first coveys, usually to be followed by rocketing wings and rippling long tails.
Bang!
Bang!
—Strong-flying cocks collapsing in the sky, feathers drifting away in the sky as
barley-heavy
bodies crashed into the beet, or fell with bouncing thumps upon the stubbles behind the guns.
Usually on a morning of a shoot Phillip felt reluctance to go. It was an effort to put on Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, nailed boots and leather anklets, to fill the leather cartridge bag; and with old-time shooting stick of bamboo with nickel-silver fittings, and packet of sandwiches in pocket, to set forth to the manor house. But once he had started, he was glad. Sometimes in cold weather he walked to Charles Box’s house, up the gulley of the Home Hills to the higher drift or drive, past the Searchlight Camp where he had imagined his new farmhouse to stand when building was renewed after the war.
*
Farmers were given petrol coupons for their motorcars; and a small additional allowance could be obtained for shooting. Phillip did not bother to apply; his tractor had a petrol engine, so he never went short. Indeed, often at the end of a two-month period he had a score or more of gallon-coupons left over. These were supposed to be returned to the Fuel Officer at Cambridge, but he did not do so, lest he be given that amount the less next time. Nor did he sell them—the black market price was two shillings a gallon coupon. He destroyed them. When he told this to a fellow who kept the only pump in Crabbe he was asked why. The fellow seemed to be upset that his offer to buy them was not accepted.
This man was one whose manner, simple and commonplace, was usually a little antagonistic. Once he accused Phillip of being ‘against the country in the war’. He used to ask sudden questions about the army of 1914–18, in which he had served: questions put with abrupt sideway glance, in the manner of the heroes of crime and detective fiction which he read. What was the mark of the infantry rifle in 1916? How many rounds a minute could the
Vickers machine-gun fire? Which way did the sun rise in the trenches? Was it ever in his eyes at sunset? Who was Bairnsfather? His suspicious attitude had quieted down by the time of the victory in North Africa, but the puzzle of spare petrol coupons being
destroyed
, remained. It was unpatriotic, he declared: why didn’t Phillip muck in with the others? He considered Phillip to be a bit stupid. He asked him if he had any shot-gun cartridges to sell. Had he got any to spare? Why hadn’t he? He had a good
allowance
, didn’t he? What for?
*
One morning when Phillip arrived at Henthorpe Manor Charles Box was offering the numbered ivory counters from his set, which gave each gun his position at the first stand. The numbers were 1 to 8; and at each following stand, a gun advanced two numbers up the line. Thus change and change about.
Mr. Gladstone Gogney was Phillip’s guest for this occasion. He arrived by motor a minute or so after Phillip. On seeing who was approaching, Charles Box turned to a group of friends and Phillip heard him say, “Only one man in this district would think of bringing that two-faced chump Gladstone Gogney to shoot!” Phillip pretended not to have heard this remark, and turned to greet his guest.
Gladstone Gogney was unique, in that his mind appeared to have been preserved since an Edwardian youth. He was the only child of an upright and bearded father called Walpole Gogney. Sometimes this Victorian worthy was to be seen in the market town, wearing Norfolk jacket, starched linen wide-winged collar, cravat, knickerbockers with fawn cloth bottoms fastened above his calves with a buttonhook (for there were several pearl buttons to be done up) and below thin calves, dark worsted stockings and tall brown boots.
It was obvious from the punctilious manner of Mr. Walpole Gogney that the boy Gladstone had been reared in an atmosphere of respectability untainted by any excess. He had grown up in the solid atmosphere of an established yeoman family: church on Sunday twice a day; awareness of superiority of the ‘big house’; port laid down in the cellar—not many dozen perhaps, but port to be decanted on special occasions like birthdays, weddings and coming-of-age parties. The copyhold of Gogney Hall, its
hereditaments
and lands, had been in the family for a couple of centuries or more. There was the flint-built farmhouse, or Hall, with its tiled roof, mansard windows and tall red chimney stacks; behind
were the farmyard and outbuildings—old gig in a bay of the hovel covered with a moth-eaten horserug, beside that odd-wheeled vehicle called a hermaphrodite; the disused cider press; the office with the business books in the locked desk of the ante-room adjoining the parlour with its armchairs upholstered in black
horsehair
. In this ante-room stood a quarter-sized billiard table (‘Keep your boys at home’, said the old advertisements) and the black iron safe with brass handle against the wall under the Almanack of the same Seed Merchant, sent every Christmas. Gladstone was his mother’s boy, of course; he was not at home anywhere else but at home. Then came the war of 1914–18.
From what Phillip heard at Henthorpe, he gathered that life in the yeomanry during that disjointing August of 1914 under canvas, twelve to a tent, was misery for the shut-in youth; for Gladstone had left and gone home after two or three exhausting days and sleepless nights, probably embarrassed by the crude remarks of his less inhibited comrades. Anyway, that was the extent of his
wandering
from the family circle, the assured life that to him was England—the stability of wall and stack and bullocks ‘doing’ in the yards adjoining, and of course the splendid Invicta threshing engine, with its prancing horse in brass on the front of the boiler.
Ordinary codes of those accustomed to other atmospheres often seem unsympathetic, even hateful, to such carefully brought-up young men. Gladstone used to play football. Phillip could imagine how he became a butt of less sensitive youths. One day during a match he achieved fame suddenly by introducing a Queensberry rule, whereby a method of balking an opponent was by punching him on the nose. Ordered off the field, Gladstone returned home to the safe, familiar scene, never again to punch nose or kick ball. The district being comparatively sparsely populated, the fame of the use of fist to replace the lack of skill with foot spread over several square miles; such was the continuity of the farming world in that corner of Old England, that the fame had endured ever since.