Lucifer Before Sunrise (47 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
And then, said Ribbentrop, there would be a thousand years of peace.
*
Spring had passed, summer gone, autumn was dying; while by night and by day the air over Britain thundered; around the coast corpses of drowned sailors floated in the tarnished tide-wash. To seek wreckage upon the sea-shore was again a profitable pursuit, since many cargoes were being set adrift by torpedo blasts. Steve came upon a case of hair-brushes, a gross of them. He found a ready sale in the villages at half-a-crown a piece. This was a modest price, for there was now next to nothing to be bought in shops. Affluent workers on airfield construction were ready to pay half-a-crown even for one twelve-bore shot-gun cartridge—
unobtainable
in shops—in order to shoot a cock-pheasant roosting on a roadside bough. The pheasant was readily bartered for a bottle of whisky, which in the black market fetched three pounds from the airmen of the multiplying squadrons of the Eighth United States Army Air Force.
*
Horatio Bugg watched the motorcar with the guidon above the radiator cap draw up beside his rusty petrol-pump. He went importantly to the beckoning soldier-chauffeur. He saw, as he went nearer, two red-banded gold-leafed service caps in the back. One with double row of golden oak-leaves, a large white moustache. The other, younger officer said,
“Can you tell me where Captain Maddison lives, please?” Horatio Bugg directed the car up the street. He watched from
the corner and saw a staff-officer get out, and then the General. They disappeared in the yard by the Studio.
He saw them come out, with Phillip. They all got into the car, which drove round the top of the street by the elms, and came back again, passing the petrol pump and turning into the lower farm entrance.
The General said, “Major Lord Cloudesley brought me your soldierly message in the summer. I’d like you to show us round your farm, Maddison, with a view to siting a strong point, or redoubt, to hold against any possible sea or air-borne raid in strength to divert our attention from elsewhere. You will know the lie of the land better than I do. I think you were with Goughie’s Fifth Army, and so will know the layout of the Battle Zones built to contain the Boche attack from the St. Quentin line. I see you don’t recognise me in this disguise. We played bridge together on Y/Z night, if you remember, with your battalion commander ‘Spectre’ West, and your Brigadier. I was the gunner whose batteries covered the right flank of the Bird Cage.”
Phillip was shaken. He remembered the gunner Colonel, as he was then. He saw a slim and black-haired figure, slight black moustache, by candlelight in the cavern tunnelled in the chalk quarry: the signal marked URGENT brought in by the orderly room clerk on duty, to himself, adjutant to ‘Spectre’ West. RAINBOW. Code word for
Prepare
for
Attack.
Forty fresh German divisions coming into the line opposite the Fifth Army, with 6,000 guns trained on its twelve tired divisions. He waited until the hand was finished. The guests departed. Later, BUSTLE—
Attack
imminent
—the sky leaping alight at 4.20 a.m., zero hour….
They were standing by the Corn Barn, with its open doors by which Steve and ‘Ackers’ were sitting, eating their ten o’clock ‘lunch’. The General took Phillip’s arm. “Your experience will be most useful advising us how to sight fields of fire from your high ground, to cover any possible diversionary attack on
Henthorpe
station, Maddison, by sea or air, possibly both.”
The General and his A.D.C. walked with Phillip round the Bad Lands. Nothing more was said about the siting of trenches.
The General said, “We had a mutual friend, I think, in Francis, ‘the Bengal Lancer’. Oh, didn’t you know? He died last week, poor chap. He always spoke warmly of you, Maddison.”
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember’d how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that you are lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
—
Catullus,
translated
by
William
Cory.
When they had gone, Phillip bicycled along the coast, like one seeking a half-forgotten solitude; or sorrow. Francis had asked to come on the farm. Now it was too late, he mourned, as he followed the road winding beside reedy dykes which drained the marshes extending to the distant sea.
He passed through a village of pantiled roofs and crumbling flint walls, all broken at the bends and corners of the winding road by heavy army traffic. Post-and-rails of cattle-yards were patched, black double-doors of corn barns askew. There was a ruinous windmill on a hillock above the gently rolling fields tremulously pale green with barley. The gradient rose, giving a view across the marshes of a low ragged line of sandhills. Everything was clear and distinct, revealed by a sky whose light filtered through airs of a clarity unsurpassed in any other English coastline.
In peace-time the narrow coastal road, winding beside the dykes and up gravelly slopes and through tranquil villages, had been worn smooth and dark in summer holidays with oil droppings and the continuous whirr and roll of rubber wheels. But now, when all private motoring had ceased for nearly four years, Phillip had the road to himself. In the stillness of air and earth an illusion of peace floated with the gossamer legions of minute migrating spiders. The sun shone upon a broad and shimmering silence that took him, in a thought of time, back to the summer of his boyhood.
I sat on the grassy verge of the road beside a cluster of wild sweet violets; I dreamed back into a time when summer was a broad and endless glide of golden light, despite the classroom and the hours spent away from the sky. Was it the same sunshine? Was it different because the illusion of youth has gone? Has it gone? Why should people change, provided their bodies are healthy? I tried to think what it was, and then it came to me suddenly: the old-time heat and glare of a dusty road, the whitish powder on grassy verge, roadside bramble and hedge, was missing: the glints in the white dust, the finches and the thrushes
turning and fluttering in their loose dust-bowls, the light and heat reflected from the powdered flints that were that dust; the very thirst given by the dust, as I rested, bicycle lying beside me on the grass verge, in the quietness, the sleepiness of the broad summer day of sun and shade and slow drifting cloud.
A grey Percheron horse appeared over the brow of the hill on my right, drawing a hoe down a ‘ringe’ or line of pale green sugar-
beet-leaves.
Many sounds were distinct—the scrape of hoes through the soil, the clip of iron shoes on flints. Man and horse disappeared over the line of the hill. Then I heard the clip-clop of a trotting pony, and sitting up, saw coming down the road a dog-cart with flashing red wheels, black body, and two polished candle-lamps with fronts shaped like silver horse-shoes. Yes, it might have been a scene of thirty and more years ago, except that the stubbles were not so sturdy as then, the ewe flocks less frequent, no longer common sights; and most of all—the road now was dark and muffled by bitumen.
And then it began to seem that the benison of floating sun-silence, threaded only by the distant cuckett of a cock pheasant and the receding noise of the pony’s hooves, was being withdrawn from the earth, to be bound by an invisible power and turned into massive celestial movement. The very air within my lungs was vibrating; and looking up, I saw in the height of the sky a host of tiny white-winged insects scarcely moving across the blue. The entire arc of the sky was nicked by squadrons of bomber aircraft flying into the south-east. After them came fighters in line of sections, so fast that the azure air seemed to be a liquid streaming from the tips of their wings.
The illusion of peace was gone. I pedalled on, and came to a river where reeds rustled in the breeze, and after staring for fish, continued on and up a steep hill to another village, where stood a grey church tower and a smaller tower, like a child beside its parent. Should I go down to the quay? Once an old Maltings, here was the machine shop for racing Le Mans Bentley motor-cars. What was there to see now but buildings occupied by bored soldiers? The sailing boats were stored until happier days, and the terns on the Point would be flying
undisturbed,
except for gulls marauding along the sea-verges of their own wild world. Men seldom watch birds on the shores of England; they watch, beside concrete forts, for other wings.
I turned back, and came again in sight of the valley which I try to think of as home, with its view of meadows and woods and fields of corn, and the small river moving sluggishly below the road.
And once again the sight of the stream depressed me. I no longer want to throw a fly for trout, I prefer to peer for fish and water-flies and plants, to see pure water and know that it is alive. Alas, I can hardly bear to look into the Banyard brook; it is polluted, and every sight of it withers life a little; as it has been withering since the summer of 1914.
However, not all the trout, which in the days of its clean gravel bed had flourished and grown to several pounds in weight, were gone. The best part of the river, where it was least sluggish, was down by the River Wood at the boundary of the farm. There it became a brook again, running in the shadow of ash-trees and alders dividing it from the meadow, where Phillip’s cattle were grazing in warm April sunshine.
He could see the red and white bullocks through the wood, for the leaves of the ash were not yet broken away from new buds. How long ago had he looked at the buds of an ash tree, as though for the first time? To discover that each bud was dark brown, and in the shape of a bullock’s cloven hoof.
At the peak or lower end of River Wood the brook moved away from the trees. Below was a bridge. It stood at the farthest point from the farm premises. Here he would come, while the weather lasted, and sit by the water, and let the stream fill his being with hope.
The River Wood was narrow. The trees grew along the farther bank for nearly a quarter of a mile. Upstream the river moved round a curve. The road was above the steep bank. Beyond the curve the water flowed sluggish; below, it became a rillet over a stony bed, for some hundreds of yards. Then the lower bend, just above the bridge, there grew an alder. Its roots were partly washed out. The roots gave cover from view for trout and sea-trout lying there. Cover from lancing beak of the heron perhaps; but not from net of poacher. At that period of the war everyone was after food, of any kind.
*
The bicycle ride was the beginning of a new phase of living. During the week following, Phillip made a small dam of concrete blocks diagonally across the river, about forty yards above the Alder pool. This sharpened the run, and made a watery music which reminded him of the swift moorland streams of Dartmoor. How strange it was to feel almost happy again.
It was the river he once had lived beside, a chalk stream called the Flumen, in Dorset, that he missed so much. The Flumen, being spring-fed, was always glassie clear. But here poor Banyard brook was a drain where villagers threw their trash and rubbish, and every soil-pipe from those cottages with water closets emptied sewage into it.
Home-sick for the bright sparkle and dash of the Dartmoor brooks, and the steady wimpling glide of the broader chalk
stream at Monachorum, where his children learned to walk and talk, Phillip set himself to make a second dam where, in the shadow of an overhanging ash tree, he could sit and watch the water breaking over the sill, tumbling back on itself by the further bank, making bubbles which rode away under the washed-out roots.
Just under his feet, where he sat on the bank, the water sluiced away swiftly, gabbling over the big flints he had placed below. The bubbling of the broken water helped to bring oxygen needed to replace that absorbed by the rooting silt from the road drains and soil-pipes in the village.
In the opposite bank, in the shade of trees, was an otter’s holt. If he sat still, he might get a view of the brown water beast, which might clear out every trout in the Alder pool. But no, Lutra would go after eels, and coarse fish first; for there were shoals of roach in the river.
Phillip had discovered the entrance to the holt while wading in the river one day. He had come down to put in potatoes in a
nettle-patch
ploughed up by Peter, but lured by the clear running water, he decided to cut the brambles trailing from the bank. He was in the act of flicking off, with a billhook, a long bramble when he heard, just by his water-lapped knee, a heavy plop. Standing still, he saw a chain of bubbles rising to the surface as it drew out
downstream.
Peering into the brambles, he found a hole about seven inches in diameter, worn smooth by claw and fur, obviously the upper exit of the holt.
Two hours later, returning a-wheel, he again saw the chain of bubbles drawing out downstream. This time the otter had left by an under-water route.
He sat still, a little away from the bank. In ten minutes or so he saw the bubbles drawing a line upstream. Perhaps the beast was a female, with cubs; otherwise she would not have returned so soon after being disturbed. For the brown water-weasel was a shy creature, and no wonder, for nearly every man’s hand was against it, in that seaboard country of ‘shoot and stuff’.
Kingfishers haunted the brook. Were they nesting there, after digging a tunnel in the bank? He remembered how, when a boy, he had dug out a nest and found at the end of a tunnel, about two feet long, a round chamber about as big as a large coconut. In this had lain seven pinkish-white oval eggs upon a mess of small
fishbones.
The great excitement of finding such a nest! The regret that he and his friend Desmond had spoiled it!
The bird’s whistle was keen and sharp as its flight; a turquoise and green line drawn over the water, following the curves of the stream. It had its regular perching places along and under the banks, whence it looked down, peering for small roach or minnow; then, plunging in, seized a fish in its large beak, to return to knock out the life on its perching place, before swallowing it.
He sat so still that magpies chatted in the wood. They had increased since the war—stealthy, brainy birds, long-tailed
white-and
-black cousins of rook and crow. Where Honest John, the rook, cawed a warning and then got shot for stealing corn, magpie flipped, glided, and—vanished.
Here he was, staring at water, a forked figure idle in the
west-slanting
sunshine. And all those nettle-clumps over against the hedge to be lifted, shaken out, and Majestic seed-potatoes set in the rich leaf-mould.
A farmer’s holiday, indeed, putting in potatoes by hand! He decided to leave the furrows to dry out a bit longer, and returning to the river, sat down again, and let the dreamy water-dazzle into his eyes, and so to refresh the spirit. Doves cooed among leafy trees, water-music rilled and bobbled below. Should he bring his rod there, unused since the days of Flumen Monachorum?
And then he heard a nightingale singing in the River Wood. This was the link, suddenly bright—the nightingale singing in the Kentish woods of his boyhood … in the coppices of Picardy … and the downs above the Fawley brook…
*
An enthusiastic Boy Billy, on forty-eight hours’ leave, talking to Lucy.
“Don’t worry about me, Mum, the Yanks have got long-range fighters to save the wastage of four-engined bombers, ours and theirs. They’re Mustangs, and they’ve been modified. They used to fly three hundred and sixty-six miles an hour at fifteen thousand feet, now they’ve got a ceiling at thirty thousand feet, flying speed four hundred and fifty-five m.p.h.! It’s due to the Rolls-Royce engines we’ve sold to the U.S.A.!”
*
Phillip in the Studio writing in his journal.
Black British bombers by night, without cessation; silver American bombers by day unendingly. While metal wings and thundering steel hearts are passing overhead in the summer sky, with great swift shadows flicking over the earth, let us pause a moment and regard this little
thing on the garden path, which also has wings and a heart; but whose shadow is small and hesitant. From the vast power of the luminous
day-bombers
roaring through the sky, turn to the humble little chick which is about to crouch beside the hot stone and drop its wings to shelter six small objects which run to it, with feeble cheeping cries. And while others write the story of the ‘beautiful bombs’ (a term invented by a Press lord with evangelic streak) I must, one day, write the story of Cheepy and the guinea-fowl chicks, and of Torty, and the ugly cat called Eric.
It began one morning, while Lucy and David were looking for hens’ nests, and David saw, at the edge of a nettlepatch near the farm buildings, a lone chick, not more than a day old. Whence it came, or how it got there, neither knew. Perhaps it was one of a brood hatched by a hen which had laid away from the premises, said Lucy, but the mystery was, where is the hen and the other chicks, if this was so? David suggested the hen had been taken by one of the soldiers in the searchlight camp. Anyway, the solitary chick, found shivering by the nettles, was picked up, carried home, and put in a basket with bits of flannel in the kitchen hot-cupboard. The children peeped at it, breathed tenderly upon it to warm it, and watched with delight as its eyes closed sleeping, and it uttered faint sounds of happiness. So it was called Cheepy.
After a couple of days Cheepy was running about the kitchen floor, and by the fourth day it had found its way into the parlour, where it used to sit on one or other of the small boys’ laps. There were kittens on the floor, too, but Cheepy showed no fear, and why, indeed, should it, for they were all friends together. Even Eric the mother cat did not object when Cheepy perched on her head one day and went to sleep.
When Cheepy was ten days old, and its feathers were beginning to sprout from soft grey quills, five guinea-fowl eggs hatched in the incubator, and soon five small chicks like clustered bumblebees were in the hot-cupboard. They fed with Cheepy, and to Lucy’s astonishment the chick was to be seen leading them on the garden bed by the patch outside the farmhouse door, and even scratching for them, and when they ran to her for shelter she dropped her minute wing-stubs and was immediately a little hen. Cheepy had adopted them.