Lucifer Before Sunrise (46 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Glancing over a shoulder at the swirl and scream of
black-headed
gulls following the tractor, the first impression was of birds flying behind the up-screwing furrows in a series of whorls or spirals.
Looking more particularly, it could be seen how each bird made its approach to the new-turned earth. Each gull as it alighted, with red mouth open in screaming excitement, ran along the furrow, jostling with others to pull at worm or grub. The successful bird gulped rapidly, arose, flew to left or right of the line of the
ploughing
, gathering speed to turn and sweep down again: to hang a moment, fluttering and screaming, a few inches from the breaking earth.
Wild birds had no fear of a tractor crossing a field. Phillip sat
on the iron seat and watched wood-pigeons from Scandinavia, the shyest of birds, walking a few feet away from the trundling
furrow-wheel
, while smaller wagtails and larks disregarded the
machine-man
. But if he so much as raised a hand to his old gull-spashed felt hat, or uttered a few notes of song, the mixed flock immediately flew away.
One morning he passed a hare, crouching in its form, so near that he could have touched it with a stick. The hare did not have the shape seen in conventional pictures, or within a garden hutch. It was an uneven angularity or tensity of wire-like sinews, a crouching polygon of fear, long black-tipped ears pressed back, large pale yellow eyes set with staring black pupils ready to release into the blood-stream a glandular fluid that would enable it to spring away with an acceleration abrupt and great—an animal fleeing as the very spirit of fear, that protective instinct of the gentler mammals. Deprive a wild animal of fear, and what did it become? A lost thing behind a wire cage.
The awful monotony of life on a tractor, even on a spring day. And spring-time, what was it but battle-time? The battlefield seemed so huge, beyond all reckoning; the area to be ploughed seemed so big, the machine so slow. The mind complained of inaction, but the body must remain inert in the glaring light of horrid day, behind whose brassy clangour was fixed a shadow: this was the twilight of the gods, who were falling, mankind with them.
Overwork on a tractor is a kind of mental torture for an active mind. The red sun of dawn becomes the purpurate sun of evening; there is no end to the acreage one must go up and down, up and down. Clothes and hands smell of paraffin; feet and legs ache with cold. Poor Billy! I heard of two youths who had to give up tractoring because of
tuberculosis
; and there is Billy who, after nearly five years, has come to dread the work, which he began too young. All the casualties of war are not on the battlefield.
Once I hoped to be able to make a division of work that would get rid of monotony. The idea was for the tractor driver of the morning to work with his body at another job in the afternoon. But without technical knowledge the relief-driver was likely to damage the tractor. Men who do not know, do not care. The idea caused jealousy, too; the tractor driver considered his job superior to that of the foot-labourer.
The spirit of co-operation was not there. It was like the gulls, each for the biggest worm, scrambling and clashing behind the tail-wheel of the plough. In my imperfect way I have struggled against that lack of spirit, in its varying forms, for seven years now, hoping against hope that what was dreaded all the while would not come about.
November
1943.
Hereward Birkin has been released from Brixton prison, together with his brave wife. He is so wasted and thin that his life is in danger. There is ‘anger’ at his release. A procession with banners, demanding his return to prison, dragged its way to 10, Downing Street. Mounted policemen in Whitehall were pulled off their horses. No doubt the mob would have hanged Birkin from a lamp-post if they could have got their hands on him.
Birkin is under house-arrest somewhere in the country, guarded by police, against assassination. For months slogans have been painted on walls and elsewhere in London, OPEN THE SECOND FRONT, ‘to relieve the pressure on Russia’.
Pressure? By the failure of the great German tank thrust at Kursk in Russia, during the summer, the war was lost for Hitler. And, before that, the shocking results of the raid on Dieppe showed that the British forces were not yet ready. Why then a premature second front, inspired by Stalin’s agents? To shatter Britain; to bring the Russians to the Channel?
The last Farm Committee Meeting was held one late autumn afternoon. The Chairman (Lucy) Manager (Phillip) Field Foreman (Billy) were sitting at the long oak table which stood against the southern latticed windows, to get what sunshine there was, when Jonny’s head appeared outside, and his fingers tittered on the leaded panes.
“Quick Dad! There’s a great fire burning on the Bad Lands!”
Phillip and Billy ran outside, leaving Lucy sitting in the
chairman’s
seat. Could someone have set fire to a hay stack? Crackling noises came from thick rising flame and black smoke. Then Phillip saw white lights streaking into the sky.
“An aircraft has crashed on the Great Bustard Field!”
Immediately all other thoughts left their minds. They ran to the Silver Eagle standing in the yard by the Studio. While Jonny clambered in, Davie stood against the flint wall opposite the white gate, ready to signal that the road was clear. The exit was a blind turning into the main road. Billy on his bicycle had already sped up the street and down the path worn through the orchard of the Old Manor, and so to the bridge over the river.
The Silver Eagle engine started at once. At the all-clear signal the car’s wheels scurried out of the yard into the road, and with Davie on the running board turned the corner by Horatio Bugg’s yard and so to the lower entrance of the farm, wheels scattering gravel recently relaid on part of the road. By the Corn Barn stood Billy standing by the open gate—how relieved Phillip was to see
him—ready to leap into the back of the car. In second gear at 4,000 r.p.m. they turned in a four-wheel skid the corner to the long hovel or cartshed, and on up the bumpy road between Pine Wood and the hedge of Steep. Another gate to open, and they were on the New Cut up the side of the hill, and so to the Bustard where the sugar-beet, after nearly one thousand five hundred man-hours spent upon it, was growing nicely.
Phillip stopped before the field, not wanting to damage any plants, while a vast billowing of flame and smoke rose on the left. Out of it came the crackling and popping of cannon shells. He ran forward with ideas of bracing himself to pull unconscious men from the cockpit; but when he got over the brow of the hill, he saw the foam-bowser from the airfield by the crashed aircraft. From a nozzle at the end of a hose yellow-white foam was being poured on the wreckage, while pilot and gunner stood dazedly near a young wing-commander and other officers in R.A.F. uniform.
The Beaufighter on taking off had cut an engine. Unable to rise, it had flown low over the adjoining field belonging to Charles Box, crashed through the hedge, lost a radial engine which had bounded through the green rows of the beet, and come to a
standstill
at the hedge between Bustard and Steep. The hedge there was thin. The ground fell away abruptly before the descent to Lower Wood. The flaming aircraft had plunged itself to a standstill just in time. Had it gone another six feet, it would have turned over on its nose, the tanks in its wings might have split and its crew been burned to death. Fortunately no one was hurt beyond bruises. After further talk with the wing-commander, pilot and gunner were taken away in a van painted with the Red Cross, which had followed the foam-bowser.
*
During the war a farmer was responsible for the crops in his land, which were grown for the government, at the government’s direction, the details being left to the farmer. Trespass by
unauthorised
persons on farm-lands was subject under the Defence Regulations to a fine of fifty pounds. Little damage had been done to the beet so far; but when Phillip saw many people crossing the bridge over the river half a mile away and below, and streams of children and others hurrying up the road to the Bustard he began to wonder what he should do to prevent them from over-running the beet and bruising the plants. The aircraft was still burning, popping noises came from it and white and red lights were fanning upwards.
Explosive and armour-piercing shells thudded into the ground or arose whizzing into the air, some to fall on the meadows below the woods.
Soon a hundred children and youths were running over the Bustard searching for souvenirs, or standing in groups to watch the exciting spectacle. The R.A.F. officers had driven away. A sergeant in charge of the bowser called out,
All
civilians
to
leave,
please,
but nobody took any notice. Among the spectators, inevitably, was Horatio Bugg.
As Phillip stood there, wondering how best to get the sightseers and souvenir-hunters away, he noticed two vehicles of the Auxiliary Fire Service station driving on the road under Pine Wood. A trailer was attached to one of the trucks, carrying a pump of the type that was fitted with one hundred yards of canvas hose. As the nearest water was four hundred yards away down the hill, and since the aircraft was now smouldering fitfully and covered by a yellowish-white froth still being splashed upon it from the bowser, he went to the top of the New Cut and suggested to the captain, a fat and pale young man dressed in Auxiliary Fire Service uniform, that since the fire was out and the wreckage was being taken care of by the R.A.F., would it be possible for him to keep his vehicles off the sugar-beet, to avoid further damage, at least until he had viewed the aircraft?
Without looking at Phillip he replied, “Don’t you worry! You’ll get your compensation!” Then to the driver, “Drive on.”
The vehicles thereupon drove upon the field, wheels crushing growing beet. Phillip followed on foot, and when he got up to him, he said, “You see, it’s the job of a farmer to protect his crops, and the more traffic there is here, the more beet will be broken.”
In a loud voice, still avoiding to look at Phillip, the captain cried, “We all know who you are! Where would your sort be if it wasn’t for the protection we give you, eh?” Then another voice said loudly, “Why don’t you do something to help your country, can you answer that? We’re out of our beds night after night to save your sort! Come on, boys, don’t take any notice of him, we all know what he is! By rights he ought to be put back in clink with his pal Birkin!”
The feeling of many being against one is not pleasant; but Phillip persisted. “Will you please help get the children off the field?” he asked this uniformed nonentity, who replied “I don’t talk to traitors,” and turned his back on Phillip.
Poppy had told Phillip that most of the local A.F.S. team,
ranging in years from youths to men in the middle thirties, were exempt from the combatant services because they were ‘engaged on essential work’ such as jobs on airfield construction for rates of pay double, treble, and even quadruple the pay of fighter-pilots and air-crew. While many of the industrial towns’ teams were often in action, calls upon the local station were rare. Apparently the tedium of waiting for calls was filled in by hands of solo-whist and other card games.
While they stood there talking and smoking, the last flickering flames about the rubber tyres of the Beau’s retracted
undercarriage
went out.
“All civilians off the field, please,” again said the voice of the R.A.F. sergeant. Again nobody took any notice.
“Come on,” Phillip said, looking towards Billy, who stood among a group of village youths. “Help me get the field clear, will you?”
“Not me!” cried Billy, at which some of the A.F.S. men laughed.
Of course I realised that I had put myself in a humiliating position, and embarrassed Billy by not going to him to ask for help quietly. However, I was not entirely alone. Horatio Bugg, who I suppose some might consider as my ‘old enemy’, came to me and said, not unkindly, “You see I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said. “You very nearly caught me spying in nineteen forty, didn’t you?”
“Well,” said he, modestly, as he rearranged the scarf to conceal the goitre on his neck (he must have suffered because of that, poor chap)—“Well, it would have been different if I hadn’t hinted what was coming, and so given you time to burn all your papers, wouldn’t it? And I was right about Hitler, wasn’t I? I knew we’d get his pal Mussolini down, and we’ll get him next. What say?”
“Ah.”
“Well,” he went on, as he rearranged his neckerchief, “I won’t say I wasn’t in a position to know more than the man in the street.” He added, coming nearer, “What did Bunnied say to you about those cockerels you lost?”
“He suspected me of the theft.”
“I did hear you’d sold them to those foreigners in the ‘Schooner’ at Crabbe,” he said, cupping hand to hear my reply, which was again, “Ah.”
Jonny was saying to David, “Come on, Chooky. We mustn’t tread down the sugar-beet, so walk you by the headland, ’bor!”
Davie laughed and said, “Okay okay okay. Don’t be so tisky.”
“Fool,” said Jonny. “I saw you tread on a leaf!”
Whereupon David the clown went niminy-piminy between the roots, flapping his arms and saying, “I’m what-you-call a frit fly, ’bor.”
The next morning I told Billy I was sorry for the embarrassment I had caused him, and he apologised before he left to join the R.A.F. Training Centre.
“I did know better, Billy.”
“I did, too, Daddy.”
What was to be the future?
Ribbentrop, according to the Rundfunk, had declared during the past winter that the Russian armies were in disintegration: that when the campaigns in the East were concluded with the great artery of the Volga cut, Germany would turn West and deal once and for all with Britain, ‘that aircraft-carrier lying off the coast of Europe’—which was as good a description for those times as the Elizabethan vision of Shakespeare’s ‘blessed plot, this realm, this England, this precious stone set in a silver sea’.