Lucifer Before Sunrise (48 page)

She led them into the kitchen at evening time, and they all got into the basket. Down below, in the basement, so to speak, two other families lived, each occupying its own basket. In one were four kittens, sons and daughters of Torty the tortoise-shell cat;
in the other, another quartet of kittens, belonging to Eric, a rough and brindled rat-eating creature that they had thought to be a tom, until one day Eric was seen to be in kit; and when the kittens arrived, Eric, who had been almost untouchable before—liable to bite if stroked anywhere below the pate—became soft, pliable, and acquiescent. Torty, as a tiny kitten, nearly drowned, had been rescued from the river by David, who had brought it home to his mother.

Every day Eric looked in at the other basket to see how Torty’s little lot were getting on. Torty’s litter was smaller than her own, having been born two weeks later. Once one of Eric’s kittens was put in Torty’s basket; after sniffing and hesitating, Eric lifted it back to its own basket.

The days went on, the chicks grew in size and speed, the kittens learned to climb out of their baskets and to explore the cupboard and the paved floor of the kitchen, while their mothers learned to appreciate the blessings of tranquillity a few yards away from their offspring, from the unscalable higher level of chair or window-sill. Cheepy used to wait for the children’s return from the hayfield, to jump on heads as they sat taking off boots and pick seeds of clover and rye-grass out of their hair.

The back, blank, flint wall of the farmhouse was against the narrow coastal road, and often within the room would resound the rolling trundle of steel tracks and the deeper hum of rubber tyres; a dangerous place that road outside, with its blind curve just below the farmhouse.

One afternoon Cheepy and her adopted family were dusting themselves in the path worn by many boots leaving the farmhouse door, where was fine dust, glinting in the sun. The tortoise-shell cat sat near, waiting for her especial friend, the boy who was her owner—ownership in this case meaning a lavishment of affection in terms of crooning talk and much smoothing of soft hair. Soon would be time of coming home from school, and the cat was usually there to greet her friend.

A rough old shaggy dog looked round the gateway in the wall by the wood-shed, stared at the chicks, and trotted forward to satisfy its curiosity. Dogs are always on the look-out for something interesting. Perhaps it found the sight of so small a hen, only partly covered with feathers, a matter for investigation, without the least intention of interfering, of course. Just a slight and momentary curiosity. But Torty thought he meant harm, for she ran forward and swore softly in the face of the inquisitive dog. With a stifled
cry, more of injured innocence than pain, the shaggy dog turned tail and trotted away. Torty sat at the edge of the road, flicking her tail.

She watched Cheepy and her brood crossing the road, which lay narrowly between two flint walls, where the heavy rubber wheels and the steel tracks rolled. Suddenly round the curve appeared a great dark green object; there was a squeal of brakes, and heavy wheels slowing down, Torty running forward to the scattered chicks; and when the convoy had passed, on the way to Southern England and the invasion of Festung Europa, there she lay, with teeth showing, and glazed eyes, beside the feebly kicking Cheepy.

David was inconsolable. At the supper table he sat unmoving, with red eyes and pale face. Jonathan, more practical, buried Torty and Cheepy side by side in the garden, and set up a small cross of willow. Later he removed the willow, and planted two runner beans in its place.

Eric seemed to know what had happened. That evening she was found in the other basket, feeding her dead friend’s kittens. She stepped out of the basket delicately, and after some reflection hopped over the rim of her own basket and settled down to feed her own kittens. For some weeks she fed the two litters, growing very thin, a very malkin of a cat. When Lucy put the kittens
together,
she separated them again, each to its basket.

At last, Lucy said, it would only be fair to put the four orphaned kittens down on the farm, and feed them on cow’s milk, hoping that they would learn to catch the numerous mice in the granary. Davie and Jonny carried them there, and up the wooden steps to the loft over the granary, where in olden days damp corn was spread to dry.

Eric seemed to know they were there. The next day Lucy found her purring, lying on some sacks on the wooden floor, while they drew nourishment from her. And twice every day Eric walked down the path through the gardens to the granary three hundred yards away, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, and fed Torty’s kittens. As regularly she returned along the path and fed her own.

How the children acquired Eric, or rather how she acquired them, was typical of her complacent nature. Really she had no right at all to live within the farmhouse. She was a squatter. A year or two previously, a small kitten, with tail erect, had strolled into the kitchen and settled itself on the coconut mat by the door.
It was an ugly creature, with thin body, upstanding ears, yellow eyes, and its fur-pattern was a mixture of black and brown and grey—it had patches of fur like a rabbit’s.

The children greeted it with cries of joy, and immediately asked if they might keep it. It’s a tom, Mum, really it is, we’re certain it’s a tom. But didn’t it belong to one of the cottages? Oh no, it had been with other kittens in a neighbouring smallholder’s barn, and its mother had driven it away.

“But do you want such an ugly, lean kitten?” asked Lucy, playfully.

“Oh, it is a
lovely
kitten,” cried Davie, “and already sleeps on my bed. It catches lots of mice that eat our seed-corn, Dad”—appealing to Phillip, who had suddenly appeared.

“How many mice has it caught, Davie?”

“Well, it will catch a lot anyway, Dad.”

“But our seed-corn is now rising green in the fields.”

“Ah, but by next year its muscles will be huge, to catch lots of mice, Dad. It’s a wonderful ratting cat, I’m sure it is. Oh, do let’s keep it! What shall we call him, Dad? You christen him!”

“Well, I don’t mind it being here. How many cats have we on the farm now, fifteen is it, or sixteen?”

“Yippee!” cried Davie. “What shall we call it, Dad? You say.”

“Call it ‘Eric, or Little by Little’.”

“Why that?” asked Jonny.

“You’ll see, bit by bit, darling,” said Roz, with her sweet smile at Jonny.

*

As the days went on, and it became obvious that the cat-kitten had adopted them, Phillip invented for Davie and Jonny a legend of how Eric got the grey fur on her shoulders and flanks. On the Home Hills, which abounded with rabbits, there lived a fearsome old buck whose main object in life was to hunt and kill poaching cats. This fantastic buck-rabbit, he told them, had learned to knock out even stoats by a terrific kick of its hind legs. It had also become mechanised, using a sort of tank in its war against cats. It propelled itself downhill on a rusty old roller-skate it had found on the village trash dump. With its front paws gripping the
roller-skate
it proceeded at a prodigious pace down the steep slopes to charge upon its enemies, gathering speed and acceleration by huge thrusts of its horny hind legs. Tom-cats fled in fear of it; and the rabbit-like fur on the back of the new cat was a psychic impression of fear, a sort of protective camouflage imprinted there
when its future father was fleeing from that fantastic Hitler-buck on a roller-skate.

The boys greeted this bit of unnatural history with exaggerated facial gestures of scorn and sighful boredom; but sometimes Jonny was to be seen gazing thoughtfully at the grey fur patches upon Eric’s body.

Lean, ugly, liable to whine and hiss, and sometimes to strike with paw or even to bite, Eric proved a great ratter; and little by little became the mother of four kittens, whereupon that tisky nature changed to one soft, pliable, and acquiescent; the growl became a purr; hard eyes became soft. Soft? Well at times. Those times were not when one or another of the numerous tom-cats that roamed the gardens looked in upon kitchen or parlour to see what was cooking. Eric saw them off with spits, growls, and savage curving claw-strokes. A dismal lot were the village toms; ears torn, paws maimed from being in rabbit-gins, and all with hard yellow eyes; a race of cats bred in barn and stable, fed (sometimes) on a little milk. All of them exercised their sadistic instincts among the rabbits of the Home Hills, for of course the mythical prophet and great mechanised coney had not yet appeared.

One of the tom-cats, an old, dingy white, depressed object, was a crooner; he attended all courtships, and seeming too philosophical for action, he kept aloof while telling the moon, above the old
apple-trees,
of the purity of his emotions. Midnight curses, and
sometimes
empty cocoa-tins dropped to the paved path below the small boys’ bedroom, with the stifled chuckles of Davy, greeted the music of this unpaid volunteer of ENSA after the crooners of the B.B.G. were off the air. The next day the two boys took it a special bowl of milk, whereupon the old cat departed, apparently at peace, for they heard of him no more.

“Perhaps he has gone to London, for cat-skins are now worth money and their carcases, too,” said Phillip. “Oh, I am serious! Some farmers are shooting gulls following tractors this spring, and at least one keeper is sending even hedgehogs, crows, owls and hawks to the London markets.”

*

Now the little grey—original Ferguson tractor—dicker was back in use, Phillip could continue ploughing the Home Hills. On a bright morning he opened his ‘tops’ along the plateau equidistant between two slopes of the old grazings. Once more above the world! Village seen below, with its trees, flint walls and red-tiled roofs. Afar was the blue line of the North Sea, upon which sailed a
convoy of small ships. He felt satisfaction that at last the bright breasts of the ploughs were turning up the turf and casting it over. It was sandy soil just there; it was level; the ploughing was easy. His eyes felt clear, the world had colour again. After coming out of hospital healed of the ‘gunshot-wound’ from the commandos, he had obeyed the order to rest, and the advanced royalties for his literary work done in that period had made it possible for Rosamund, Peter, and David to go to schools which their mother approved.

As he ploughed back and forth along the curves of the crest the mat of wild and ancient grasses suddenly became tough. He was on the gentlest slope of the hill, yet even in bottom-gear the engine needed all the compression of its four cylinders. The fifteen-hundredweight tractor was Gulliver among the
Lilliputians:
hundreds of strong and fibrous rootlets, intergrown and dry, were protesting and holding against the shear of wheeling coulter, and the lift of share and breast. Sometimes the
furrow-wheel
with its iron spuds turned thumpingly, as the resistance of an extraordinarily strong clump of roots held the plough
shudderingly
still. Jumping off, he found they were long, thick, dark roots of rest-harrow. Was this how the wildflower with its pink pea-like blooms, had gotten its name of olden times? Rest-harrow, or
stop-horse.

The tractor did not rest. A slight lift of the lever, and the hydraulic oil-pump lifted the twin ploughs; the wheels went
forward
again. Another touch of the lever set the points deeper once more. All the way progress was held up by the roots of rest-harrow going deep into the loamy subsoil.

He saw that he could not hope to penetrate to the rich brown loam at the first ploughing. It took the engine all of its multiple synthetic horses to cut two furrows each seven inches deep. The furrow-slices, too, were by no means tractable. He longed for mouldboards, or plough-breasts of the old East Anglian ‘olland’ shape, by which the slices would have been ploughed up and screwed over nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, and laid flat. Now the furrow slices often wavered behind the tractor before deciding to sit upright, the grassy edge at right-angles to the earth from which it had been torn. Never mind, he thought, snow and frost will subdue those obstinate ribands of turf, and in the spring the new disc-harrows will chop them to bits and press them down. So on with the task, easy in mind.

It was a warm day. The convoy on the sea-horizon proceeded with the rolling bomb-reverberations they were used to; for now
the tide of war was running faster in its new direction. Long since beside the far coast of North Africa the German armies had streamed in retreat, passing over a thousand miles of sand which once had been the cornfields of a great Empire long ago gone to ruin: to ruin, some said, because Rome in its urban pride had forgotten that the strength and virtue of a race or nation was based on the fertility of its soil. Rape the earth, and human love eventually is purposeless. There remains only the sigh of the sand.

*

In the days that followed, as he ripped up the tough turf of the Hills, he wondered whether Dr. Samuel Johnson, had he been present, would have discovered for his dictionary an original and ironic meaning in a phrase often used among farmers and labourers to describe a stubborn object which temporarily frustrates their strength and ingenuity. Rest-harrow might, on account of roots like tarred ropes, cause a pair of horses to rest, and the ploughman with them, in sympathy; but as every pioneer upon virgin soil must have experienced, an old sod was liable to do more things than merely arrest the forward movement of a plough.

Toiling up a slope of a one-in-four gradient there was a report like a rifle shot, followed by a grating noise. One of the two steel half-axles of the tractor had broken. Six seasons of arduous work on other steep fields, often gouging twenty-pound flints out of a sea-laid chalky sub-soil never disturbed during the millions of years since the recession of waves, had crystallized the steel—broken its heart—so that it had died and gone back to its ancestral crystals.

But all was not lost. At a time when spare-parts of an uncommon type of tractor were no longer obtainable, he had in the
storeroom
scores of spare-parts bought before the war: and among them was a half-axle. His dejection was equalled by the confidence of Billy who, in the pride of his R.A.F. uniform, came up the hill with the new Ford-Ferguson on rubbers, drawing a trailer with
jack-tool
-roll and spares. Phillip left him and Steve to it, and strolled away, feeling himself to be a slacker, yet arguing that as the doctors had ordered him to go easy, he would spend an hour or two as a naturalist. Yet was this fair to Billy on so short a leave? He resisted the idea; and lay on his back and rested, for the sun was warm, the air still. But his brain was not used to idleness: no
bird-watching
could be permitted by the sentry within the skull.