Lucifer Before Sunrise (51 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
He went into the Ring of Bells, which was just outside the
forbidden
area, and had a pint of beer. There was a new landlord, who told him that the soldiers had gone. Phillip asked no questions, but mentioned that he was the owner of a field on the hill-line,
below
a spinney of beech-trees.
“The one with the German strong-point in it?” he was asked.
“Well, I called it that. It’s a converted cattle-shed, really.”
“Is? Don’t you mean, was?”
“Why, what’s happened?”
“Better see for yourself.”
Phillip left soon afterwards, and walked up the lane to a ragged sky-line where the spinney had stood. When he reached the field, he saw that of the trees he had planted fourteen years before only one solitary pine remained, with a wildling thorn bush, below the burst and scattered remains of the Gartenfeste.
I was glad that only the crows of the wilderness heard my impotent shouting. With my usual conceit I had assumed that the notice to remove household goods, personal belongings, etc., was similar to the
order D. H. Lawrence had received in Cornwall during the Great War to quit the Duchy, since those idiots down there thought he was a spy, his wife being Freida von Richthofen, a cousin of the famous German ‘ace’. Now, not only was everything destroyed, but this everything included all the notes and synopses I have made for my novel series since 1919. Some were whole chapters of battle scenes, and especially one of the night of Hallowe’en of 1914, when I first went into action on Messines Hill and was shocked into another dimension of the mind.
Now all is lost—over a hundred thousand words—my true life—not this shambles of an alien body which has walked against the grain of ‘civilised’ living for so long. I struck my head again and again, for having been so utterly stupid as to leave them there.
While he had been dashing off this entry, a crow had been watching him from the one remaining pine left standing, at the south-western corner of the field. “La balance, toujour la balance!” Phillip shouted at the bird, which dived away from its look-out, uttering the rapid treble-croak of alarm to its mate. “Et tu, Brute?” Phillip yelled, “what are you, a disguised desk clot from M.I.5?”
He began to search in the ruins of the Gartenfeste. The
note-books
—over twenty volumes, one for every year since 1919—had been kept in an old oak chest, together with all the papers left by cousin Willie. He found part of the lid of the box, and began to dig frantically with his hands. At last the box! Within were the volumes, sodden and swelled, but all were there! The ink was smudged in places, but the text was decipherable. Among his own volumes were the note-books of cousin Willie. He opened one and saw the date, 1923, the place
München.
‘The victorious Allies insisted on the Germans paying 50 million pounds in gold. The Germans had not this gold, so they sent an envoy called Dr. Fritz Mannheimer, of Mendelssohn’s bank, to London to borrow the money. The loan was for three months, when the German mark was 200 to the
£
.
(It was 20 before 1914). The loan was repaid by selling marks down until it was 1,000 to the
£.
Then the French seized the Rhineland. Black Colonial troops were in occupation, there were constant affrays with German youths, a few of them National Socialists, over the rape of German girls, some of them six and seven years old. Among a starving population, greatly upset (among other things because of the shortage of soap, which became currency for children among the black French troops, themselves uprooted and enslaved to the colonial system) the mark fell this winter to 20 million to the
£.
Farm labourers use wheel-barrows to bring their wages home, heavy wads of printed
paper, almost the only value of which is for burning on hearths, to keep, warm.
This inflation has ruined all classes in Germany. Jews arrive daily from the ghettoes of Poland with a few roubles and become property owners of houses, streets of houses, small businesses and firms, almost overnight. The
morale
of a nation, depressed by defeat, is temporarily destroyed. A phrase used by Sir Eric Geddes, who at the outbreak of war was a railway manager in England and ended a Cabinet Minister, is often repeated in my hearing. ‘Germany is a lemon to be squeezed until the pips squeak.’
The pips are more than squeaking. They are shrieking. They shriek through one man’s voice. He has the truest eyes I have ever seen in a man’s face, he is an ex-corporal of the Linz Regiment, which opposed my regiment under Messines hill on Christmas Day, 1914. We made a truce then, which must never be broken.
He sat down and dashed off a letter to the image of his dead cousin. It would be a record for his novels one day.
Dearest Cousin Willie,
In the spring of 1923 you were walking alone through Germany. In the autumn of that year you were drowned in the estuary of the Two. Rivers in Devon. Have you found peace, now that the shells and bombs. in Europe are shrieking again; bomber crews shrieking as they burn; German workers and their children in the suburbs of their industrial town after industrial town shrieking, phosphorus-spattered; little Jewish children thrust head-first into coke-ovens shrieking into ash—perchance to arise again in the bearded wheat,
Dinkelweizen,
to dream upon some German field far from the waters of Jordan? For I have felt all this shrieking within myself, night after day and day after night, and others, have sometimes heard my voice, but I was not shrieking only for myself, I was shrieking for England, for Europe, for all the world.
The major shrieking in Europe will soon be over, but the minor shrieking will go on across the world, blood calling for blood. Men hanged on rope will shriek within the airless vacua of their lapsing lives; their ghosts call for justice, that twin-brother of revenge.
The light of a poet was in-born to you, cousin Willie. The light will never go out, it is the light of Kristos. The true poet will burn at the stake of his own unquenchable heart, though he himself light the fire.
“Ah ha, old crow, I can build a nest, too!”
“Cor!” replied the crow, flying over the field, as it watched Phillip making a lean-to of fir branches, with a steep pitch to be pleached with vertical lengths of twigs so that any rain falling would run down to the trench he had dug along both sides of the shelter. Having done that, he lit a fire before the opening, using
kettle and enamelled mug which he had salvaged from the ruins. Having made some tea, using rain water from the old trough, crudely hollowed out of a lump of rock centuries since, which lay under the thorn bush where he had put it when he had bought the field.
It had been put there for a bird bath. While he was eating breakfast he heard noises of splashing among the tall cock’s foot grasses surrounding the trough. Then a blackbird flew up, and shook its feathers, standing on a slanting bole of fir. While he watched it a whitethroat began to churr an alarm. Surely not because of him? He had found the empty nest, woven of dead grasses, low down in a black currant bush: the young had flown: why then the alarm?
A moment later he saw a hawk-like bird gliding over the
shell-cratered
field. It was a cuckoo. The bird perched on the standing pine and uttered the scolding gabble of the male between
call-notes.
From afar came other calls. Larks were singing—the entire battle-practice area was a Nature Reserve! With that thought, Phillip uttered a few notes of
Danny
Boy
as he walked across the field.
*
The wild grasses hung curved with seed awn and spray. The pollen had come to blow. Wildflowers in bloom—crane’s bill, bird’s-foot trefoil, red campion, buttercup, daisy. Here was silence beyond the noises of men, here was calm, here was—emptiness. The white wings of a gull flying slowly through the sky was the only movement. How strangely still was the early June morning, not one aircraft in the sky.
And yet—and yet—was it imagination, or was there a shimmering of sound beyond the horizon? Even with closed eyes, open mouth and stopped breath he could not be sure. Was there a faint continuous quivering, seemingly of earth, air, and sky? He climbed to the top of the pine, and looked out over the Channel, towards the unseen coast of Brittany.
Yes! That rolling bourdon of sound was gunfire. The invasion of Europe must have started!
*
The summer air strayed through the bright green leaves of the maimed beeches, the cold dewy air of morning was already lifting to an open summer sky. It looked to be a day of great heat, like July the First, of time remembered. Spider-webs were already spun. The puffs of the steam-train in the valley miles away were distinct in the milky air.
At one place in the field docks and wild potatoes grew side by side. An ancient iron scuffler stood by the hedge, awaiting the return of the smallholder who had hired the field in 1940.
Phillip wandered about the field, sometimes sitting down and watching spiders in the grass, scarlet flies at the stalk heads, an occasional lizard livening up to the sun. The air shivered with heavy cannonade. Did people on the South Coast listen to the final Somme bombardment before the battle opened, as he was listening now? Did their eyes, too, drop tribute salt?
How could they, lying abed in England?
There are no dreams, no subconscious hauntings in sleep as I lie under my shelter at night. Long ago the sub-conscious mind came to the fore of my living. Thereby its microcosmic thoughts were untimely: even as the macrocosm, now being shattered in blood and pain across the Channel, was untimely. For if the spirit tries to create beyond the selfish limits of the flesh, it outstrips the rhythm of life: and kindliness, or charity, is lost as the robot arises to dispossess a man of his true spirit.
D-day
plus
4
On a cold, wet day of driving south-west gale all sensible mammals stay in what warmth they have. Rabbits get in their holes out of the rain; foxes curl up in the bracken; otters lie in hollow trees above the river, snug on dry leaves and wood-dust; red deer keep to the wooded coombe-sides; hares scratch shallow forms in the weedy furrows of forsaken ploughlands, crouching out of the wind.
I lie by the fire in my shelter. My kettle stands on three pieces of broken concrete. I am warm, having just returned from a walk in the winds raving over Valhalla’s cliffs, seeing below me the Channel grey and troubled with the night’s storm.
The south-west wind roared in my ears, and staggered my steps forward. It tried to lift me up and throw me on my face. When the dark grey rains lashed down the only shelter was against a stone-
and-earth
wall, built half a century ago to protect the crops in a field reclaimed from heather and furze. The wall was tumbled and broken everywhere by gun-fire; rabbits had re-tunnelled under and through it, their droppings lay in every shell-crater. Therein they had found shelter from the wind.
I crouched behind a length of wall which has remained untouched, while grey lashing rain changed to a stinging whiteness of jumping hailstones. Cold air from a rabbit hole in the bank pained my left cheek. I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and let it beat upon me; for it would pass. I crouched lower against the lichened wall, while icy splinters of air tore at my ears and seemed to be charring my fingertips.
As suddenly as it had lashed down the hail passed, and I was in the
midst of a coloured world steaming in the sunshine. I was about to get up, when a movement in the rabbit hole made me remain still. A brown liquid eye was regarding me. I stared back at the eye. There was a bumping noise inside the wall, and sounds of a scuffle. The eye
disappeared
. Then the entire head of the squealing rabbit appeared, its front paws out of the hole as it tried to drag itself towards me.
I grasped its ears and pulled it out, together with a lean brown animal with a small flat head, its teeth in the thigh of the rabbit, its claws filled with fur. It was a stoat. It began to chatter and swear at me as I tried to shake it off the rabbit.
It dropped off, and instead of running away, arched back and open chakkering mouth came rippling towards me. Two other stoats poked heads out of the wall. Evidently a family hunting party. The rabbit’s feeling was now upon me, and I began to walk away, while the rabbit struggled out of my hands and dropped to the ground, to run into a patch of thistles, whence its squeals came through the noises of the wind as the stoat, nose to ground, began to cross and recross its scent.
I think of the poet imprisoned by the Americans in Italy—he whose voice over Radio Roma I once listened to—a soft, gentle voice talking didactically about Usury, and the poet’s hope for a clearer humanity.
This same wind which chills me is blowing upon fear and nausea along the coast of Normandy. If they are wrecked and drowned, others will have hope. If they hold, and advance, others will despair. I have done nothing to help resolve this deadlock, my failure is complete.
There remains what my old schoolfellow, Tom Cundall, called the iron god of truth. And for the truth of these times, a man with clear sight need not look beyond the spectrum of himself. For within himself, be he clairvoyant and articulate, he will find latent the divisions of the mind of European man, and their opposing impulses.
I am too old, and too tired, to camp alone. I have felt too many wet nights in my youth. I am too worn, and too disgraced, for love.
The house where Melissa used to stay, with her aunt, is a ruin. It had been mortared from the beach, after bombardment from the sea. I have heard nothing of Melissa for over a year now.
Thus the entries in Phillip’s journal of that time. Early next morning he left for East Anglia. The weather had cleared, the sun shone. He was glad to sleep in his own bed again, out of the rain.
Below his lighthouse window was a pleasant sight—for the second time the garden was proud with sunflowers. This year there were over a thousand tall plants, all sprung from that single head found at the tide-line on the shingle beach. Only yesterday, it seemed, he was hoeing between the two-leaved plants and down the rows, with the thought that never again must weeds be allowed to seed upon that deep, alluvial soil.
While he had been away, the green stems had risen to six and seven feet in height, and were two inches thick at the bases. The yellow petals of each heavy hanging head curled like flames from the rim of a little sultry sun. The bees had found the pollen, and the air was filled with their happy humming.
The blue upper air of summer was humming, too. The
humming
grew to a hard continuous thundering. The course of
four-engined
aircraft was no longer east over the sea, but south down the coast. Every day the sky was scored white in a thousand ragged lines behind glinting specks of day-bombers; a sapphire ground away in the trituration of vapour trails. A thousand silver bombers daily flew over the farm. When evening came the thunder swelled again within the farmhouse parlour. It seemed that the black curtains, the walls and ceiling, even the filaments of the electric-light bulbs and the very air of their lungs were in vibration together.
*
And so June became July, and August came in, while afar the Normandy battle roared and flashed and shattered day after night and night after day.
On the Bad Lands the corn harvest was imminent. Early morning sea-mists damped the down-hanging heads of barley, mellowing the grain for a fine-ale sample. While waiting for the kernels to become fully mellow, Phillip wrote at his desk, surrounded by eight children sitting around three-ply tea-chests, in two teams of four, knocking out sunflower seeds.
The day was dull, with a morning drizzle. There was laughter as the children banged the flower-heads and picked out the seeds. While they were working, a stranger appeared in the open
doorway.
Behind him hovered a woman. Both were dark, with
sun-browned
faces. Phillip got up to greet them. They said they were brother and sister, and had motored up from Sussex to call on him. He noticed that the woman, who was, like her brother, in the early forties, seemed puzzled as she looked at him.
“I am trying to see any resemblance to your sister Elizabeth,” she explained. “She used to come at week-ends to stay at our farm near Robertsbridge.” Then the brother said, “We thought we’d take the day off, since our corn isn’t yet fit, and come and
introduce
ourselves to you.
“Yes,” went on the man, “we’ve heard a lot about you, and we read all your books.”
“So you see, we know you,” concluded the sister.
Phillip invited them to sit down, while he explained that he had grown the sunflowers for parrot food. “We have to cut them
before
they are ripe, because the greenfinches and tomtits are striking at the drooping heads.”
“They are fine heads,” said the man.
“Some weigh as much as five pounds. For every seed a bird manages to split and eat, a score are scattered on the ground, and lost.” Phillip went on to explain that he had cut while they were heavy with sap, and laid them on his bedroom floor, leaving the windows open for the air to pass over them.
“Some farmers in our district grow them, too. They put the heads over an air-blast dryer, used for corn-drying, and then put them through the threshing drum.”
“All I can do is to persuade my slave-labour to sit round a
tea-chest
and knock the dam’ things out, on a profit-sharing basis.”
David, full of his share of the profit, told the guests that he was going next term to school with his brother Edward, and the seeds he was putting into the box would pay for their first term. “So knock ’em out properly, chookies!”
“I am!” cried Jonathan, who had been more industrious than David. “Anyway, you aren’t having all the money from ’em, ’bor! Dad promised me a new wheel to my bike.”
“Don’t quarrel,” said Rosamund, sweetly. “Your turn, brother Edward.”
Edward was Phillip’s natural son by Felicity Ancroft, a girl he had known a dozen years before. She was now married, and
Edward remained her only child. He and Rosamund were playing a game of draughts as they knocked. Bang, bang, bang! on the side of their box. “I huff you for not taking me!”
“You oughtn’t to play while you work,” warned David. “Get on with it, girl!”
“Get on with it yourself,” said Rosamund, with a smile.
David’s reply was to beat a tattoo on the box with his
flower-head
. “I’m a Liberator, and Jonnie is a jet-propelled Focke-Wulf coming down. He is weaving, but too late.
Bang,
bang,
bang!
Cor, I what-you-call blew you up, chooky!”
“I’m not a jerry!” cried Jonny. “And you’re wasting time. We must get these heads hulled out quick, for we may soon have to go out and set up the shuffs (sheaves) see? Go on, ’bor, I tell you!”
Would Jonny be the one to succeed him on the farm? Phillip was thinking of those books still behind his eyes.
He got up and said to the visitors, “Let me show you the garden,” for evidently they wished to talk privately with him. The man said he would walk up the village street and look at the church, while his sister spoke for him.
*
“My brother is very fond of Elizabeth, and is worried because she has not replied to his letters or come to see us since Easter. He had hoped to marry her. Then, for no reason we can discover, her visits abruptly ceased, and, as I said, we heard no more of her. Would you tell me if she is ill?”
“I’m afraid I don’t altogether know. My sister is highly strung, she has an artistic nature, but I rather suspect that things went wrong for her when she was a child. She suffered a lot owing to her father’s attitude towards her mother. Or it maybe she was drawn to her mother, owing to my father’s loveless attitude towards all his family. He, too, had an unhappy childhood, in some ways.” He felt he was talking too much, revealing his own weakness. “I suppose most families have their troubles,” he ended lamely. “I’m a rather poor father myself. I suppose age slowly turns us all to stone.”
They were walking down the path through the garden to the river. Titmice chizzled as they fluttered about the headless stalks of the sunflowers. The wistful cry of a greenfinch, as though the bird were mourning for lost young, came from the lilac bush. On the path was a scatter of breast feathers. He picked one up, it had belonged to a young greenfinch.
“Only death is love’s end in the natural world.”
“Then
you
are not really happy?” she said, as they turned back. “Is anyone happy, do you think?”
“The state of European man before the war,
is
the war.”
When the brother returned, Phillip showed them round the farm premises. Seeing the meadows extending beside the river the man said, “Have you thought of going in for milk? That would pay well, I think. Your cowhouse is modernised, you have an artesian well, and with a good cowman you could use a milking machine, and leave him in charge of his herd. A good cowman,” he went on, diffidently, as though not wanting to appear too forward in his advice, “as you know, regards the herd as his own.”
“I’ve thought of a milking machine, but they aren’t obtainable in wartime—so I’m told.”
“Well, I may be able to help you there. If ever you find yourself near Robertsbridge, do look us up—we can always give you a bed —and I’ll show you our layout for milk. As a matter of fact”—again the diffidence—“we shall shortly be installing a larger machine, and will have a Gascoigne at our disposal. It’s in good order, and can take all your milkers.”
Phillip felt himself dulling, it was the fear of more work to do; but he thanked him, and they parted warmly.
*
When he was seated again in the studio a great-tit, familiar bird, flew in at the open door, scolding as it peered down at the children from one of the creosoted purlins. The bird had come to claim its rights, as it saw it. Eric, the brindled cat, also had her rights. Composed in apparent slumber on a heap of corn sacks, suddenly she leapt up and nearly clawed the bird as it flew over. Did that great-tit fly in alarm out of the window and away to the cornfields? Not he! He stood on the beam above, chattering and swearing at the cat, whose tail was flicking with frustration.
Eric crouched there, yellow eyes filled with the will to slash the bird if it came nearer. The tit perked and twitted above, stimulated by shock to defy the cat.
“Blast, he’s what-you-call tisky,” cried Jonny in admiration. He stroked Eric’s back, which twitched as the cat opened her mouth to mew inaudibly, with appeal and shame at her failure; while, spruce and trim on the beam above, the great-tit looked down at her, chattering.
“Go away, you’re worrying Eric, bad little bird,” said Rosamund quietly, and the tomtit flipped out of the window. This was
probably
a coincidence, but it caused laughter.
They went on with the seeding. It was a dirty job and not easy. The seeds had to be squeezed and nicked out by fingers already stained dark purple. A small square of ration chocolate for each child helped. Steadily the wicker skeps were filled with empty heads. The heads were for the compost heap, for next year’s vegetables and flowers. Before David and Roz stood up to take away another bushel skep, Jonny carefully swept the floor clear of loose seeds, lest any be crushed.
Outside the weather was clearing, the blue of the sky was seen. Phillip dashed off to collect the men, while the children made their way to the upland oat-field; but it rained, and they returned home.
Back in the studio, Phillip began a letter to his sister Elizabeth. It was one of many he had written to her, but never sent. The barrier between them seemed to be—on his part—too broad and deep.
Dear Elizabeth
How are you? I have thought of you, and your problems, ever since last June. Dare I—may I—write frankly? You love the country, and wilt in a town. Who was it who wrote ‘God made the country, the Devil made the town’. If you have a chance to live in the pure air of calm days (I
don’t
mean with us here, where all seems to be tension, due to my well-known defects) would you take it?
Don’t spoil your life for money, or rather, don’t think of it only as a barrier against fear, the fear of loneliness. Today I had a visit from your farming friends (Robertsbridge) and at once took to them. They are both very fond of you, they are good people, and are worried by your silence.
Thomas Hardy once wrote a book of short stones called
Life’s
Little
Ironies.
In Victorian times a writer had to stress his beliefs; his true or natural vision was not acceptable to the massive complacency of the times; so he was often forced, out of his very loneliness, from his agonised vision of truth, to over-state.
Writers of an age succeeding Hardy’s found much of this irony to be unacceptable. One of them, a devout Catholic, wrote that Hardy’s work reminded him of ‘the village atheist brooding over the village idiot’. This in a sense was true; but G. K. Chesterton’s remark extended from an age of social carelessness wherein village idiots were accepted as merely erratic human phenomena, perhaps a little amusing. Only a poet of deeper divination like Hardy would realise a mother’s pride and love and grief in her child, and how congenital syphilis can ruin, before birth, a baby’s mind and body; and how the fair flower of love can be assoiled in human conditions causing despair; and so a poor ‘village idiot’ comes to being.
You may say, What is all this leading to? It leads directly to our own condition of fear. I am, in a sense, a victim of my/our upbringing. The Victorian puritanism had its fear of sex—which included love—because of syphilis. You will remember Mother’s brother, Hugh Turney, and his awful fate. As you know, he lived next door, and this caused our father to be almost permanently distressed. He was afraid that I, his son, might be affected, because he knew I was often in Uncle Hugh’s room.
How noble was our grandfather, Thomas Turney, to look after his son: contrast this with another uncle of ours, by marriage, George Lemon of Epsom. When he showed signs of tertiary syphilis, what did Father’s sister, Victoria—‘Vicky’—do, with the help of Father’s younger brother, Hilary? They shipped him off, in disgrace, to Australia, to die alone.
Well, Elizabeth, you will again be saying, what is all this rigmarole leading to? D. H. Lawrence wrote, with penetrating vision, that love was joyous in Chaucer’s time—sex was a rumbustious joke (apart from true love)—because syphilis was unknown in those early times in Merrie England: but after the Crusades, and the introduction from the East of the ‘great pox’, love became a fearful thing.
So, my dear sister, do not turn away from a chance to be truly loved by a good man, a sound countryman. I am sure that no one, in this connection, was ‘after your money’, as you confided to me when I saw you last.
Farming is on the up-grade, and will remain a good investment for some years after the war. The post-war world will change, it must change: even the traditional role of Britain, ruling by Money, and going to war with any nation in Europe who looks like creating a United States of Europe, as Britain has done for the last four hundred years, must change. ‘There are no more islands’, Hitler has said; and it is true.
If you think of investing money in a friend’s farm, do so through a solicitor, on a mortgage basis, with proper security. You cannot lose, that way.
Regarding our Father’s estate, as no doubt you will have heard from our sister Doris, I propose, in due course, to give you, and Doris, as a free gift, one-third each of the probate value of that estate. I have promised her this, and now I repeat the promise to you. So please do not fear any further about being destitute when eventually age overtakes us all.
I must end now: we are in the midst of a swampy harvest: I see blue sky among the clouds, and must go out to see if any of our corn is fit to carry.
With every good wish, I remain
Yours affectionately,
Phillip.