Lucifer Before Sunrise (52 page)
Read Lucifer Before Sunrise Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
Day after day, while his cornfields remained sodden, Phillip wrote scenes for his long-delayed series of novels, while seated at his desk in the empty Studio, against the time when the Bad Lands would dry out, and they could carry. His journal recorded that barley, now controlled in price, was 35/-a cwt. for the best malting sample. That would mean, if the corn were harvested in good condition,
£
35 per acre. Weed-seed—dock and carlick (wild mustard)—had risen well above
£
110 a ton. Had he gone easily, which certainly would have meant a better life for all concerned, he wrote, his fields would now be yielding more, in money, from weeds than they did from grain.
So in eliminating weeds, I appear to have eliminated myself! Such (from a money point-of-view) was my ill reasoning. Bird-seed, otherwise weed-seed, is thrice the price of the best corn; and I, about one-third of the man I might have been.
Later
:
I had put down my pen, when a small cylindrical object fell and rolled beside it. It was brown, about half an inch long and
three-sixteenths
of an inch thick. It bent itself slightly. While I watched, another fell, then several more, rolling down the sloping desk. Eight hams hung from the purlins above my head, all wrapped in
greaseproof
paper and then brown paper secured tightly by string.
Within a few moments dozens, scores were falling. They were chrysalides of blowflies, and they had worked their way out of the hams, which, presumably, had fed them as maggots. The number dropping was increasing; sticks of miniature bombs dropped on my head, jacket, even in the inkwells. Then the tomtit flew in, and I welcomed him. Where was the rest of his family? I had not long to wait for an answer. They arrived, and began to peck the brown shells. While I wondered: how had the blowflies managed to lay eggs inside the coverings of the hams? Surely not while the hams had been in the pickle tubs. Ah! While they were being smoked at the butchers. The shed was one knocked up behind his shop, of corrugated iron, with gaps between some of the sheets holding in the smoke of oak sawdust fuming away in the ‘floor’ of bare ground. The hams were from the pigs which had matured late, owing to lack of proper food.
Well, bombs fell on the macrocosm; small bomb-like objects drop on the microcosm. The microcosm survives, protected within the Island Fortress; maggots never consumed me, praise be.
The next morning, as he was setting out for the New Cut leading up to the cornfields, Phillip had a surprise visit from Rippingall‚ once his house-parlourman, as Rippingall described himself, when Phillip lived at Flumen Monachorum. Some time before this,
Rippingall had worked for Captain ‘Boy’ Runnymeade; and to that rich and eccentric master, he, in due course, returned.
Rippingall was now wearing, with a black bowler hat, a crepe band on the sleeve of his jacket. He appeared to have been
drinking;
he spoke slowly, articulating his words, which were that ‘the Captain’ had died that morning in Fenton Hospital.
This was a minor shock for Phillip. He was used to the idea of the young dying in war, but not the old—as he had always thought of ‘Boy’, who was, he realised on reflection, only ten years his senior.
“I’d no idea he was ill, old soldier.”
Rippingall was silent. After awhile, this old soldier-servant of the pre-1914 cavalry captain said slowly, “Sir, I think perhaps that something must have gone wrong with liaison. With all respect sir, Madam took the Captain’s message of a week ago, transmitted by me, sir, before he went into ’ospital.”
Messages were supposed to be written in a book which lay at one end of the long table, pencil attached by string, near the telephone. Date, name, address or telephone number, time of message. This had not always been done in the past; nor received messages given verbally.
“The Captain went for a week’s rest in a convalescent home, sir, and for a check-up. They decided to operate, and found ’is liver gone, sir, cancer on top of cirrhosis.” His voice broke, together with his manner of speaking. “‘Opeless case, sir. The Captain never knew no thin’, drugged up to the eyebrows, sir.”
Phillip thought to enquire about Captain Runnymeade’s ‘great good friend’, as the pre-war column gossips usually had described her: “Was Madame Stefania Rozwitz with him, Rippingall?”
“Sir, Madame was killed during the blitz on London.”
“Oh, I am sorry.” He drew a deep breath. Would it be fatal to ask Rippingall to come back into his service? There was his wife, too. “How are you placed, old soldier? I mean, will you be all right?”
“Thank you sir, yes. The Captain has been most generous to us, sir. I understand that the cottage will be available for our
continued
occupation. With a pension, so we shall be comfortable, thank you, sir. I trust Madam is well, and all the family?”
“Thank you, I’ll tell my wife you have most kindly asked after us.” He breathed with relief. “And thank you for telling me about the Captain, old soldier. I’m sorry I didn’t get his message to me. These are difficult days for everyone.”
“Yes, sir, I fully understand. No funeral, sir. The Captain’s wish was to be cremated, and his ashes scattered on the marsh. I was wondering, sir, if you would perform this last service for him.”
“Yes, of course, my dear old soldier! Now come with me and see if the corn is fit to carry.”
It was a drying wind from the south-west. All who were free in farmhouse, field and yard assembled on Pewitts, with lorry, tractors, green trailer and two tumbrils on rubber tyres. A soldier from the searchlight camp came to help: a good man, in age approaching forty, who had been a furniture remover in civvy life. Rippingall voluntered to stay and help. He worked as a loader, standing up in a tumbril and taking the sheaves pitched to him, and putting them in place like dates in a box. He had obviously done the job before. First he consolidated a firm base of sheaves level with the sides of the tumbril, and then extended the base over the sides and upon the lades—the extra wooden platforms which fitted into slots on the body and gave the tumbril the length of a true harvest wain. The sheaves leaned slightly to the centre of the load, stubs outwards, pressing upon the sheaf below it. Thus he built a ton or more of sheaves inclining to the centre of the cart, which towered like a brown loaf—solid, unshakable, compact. “I shall not need a rope to hold these sheaves, sir. Centrifugal forces will bind them together.”
“Rippingall, you’re a treasure!”
Rippingall lifted his bowler hat. He had worked in his
shirtsleeves,
while retaining his black waistcoat.
*
In the shafts, for the first time in the harvest field, stood Palgrave Mushroom. Tom Valiant, the teamsman, had suggested that the colt needed ‘wark’, and since Tom claimed to have broken-in the foal to thill gears, Phillip said, “Well, you’re the ring master, Tom, so go ahead!”
*
The breaking-in of Palgrave Mushroom had taken some time. In the preceding months of that year, Phillip had observed the slow figure of Tom Valiant moving behind the colt on Denchman’s Meadow. Apparently the colt was hitched, by collar and long chains, to a length of ship’s timber. Up and down, over and back went the little procession, funeral-march pace, but—Phillip said to Lucy—where the ship’s timber was to be buried, Tom seemed
undecided.
Week after week, month following month, the schooling of the Mushroom went on. Snowdrops in the woods appeared, and gave way to dog-violets. The cuckoo was hailed as a harbinger, to be dismissed when its voice broke. Young pheasants which had been hardly more than late-autumn squeakers grew into hen-birds with well-grown summer broods.
Phillip said to Lucy, “I wonder which will end first, the journey into the unknown of those two amiable mates, or the war? Tom and Mushroom have ambled together several hundreds of miles with that length of teak.”
And then, suddenly, promotion to thill-gears! The collar—a broken, straw-stuffed affair covered by scraps of decayed leather, which went over the Mushroom’s head and was held there by two lengths of curved wood (last painted in 1904) and tied together by thongs—was supplemented by breechings and short chains covered by more leather. The animal was about to be put between shafts. Tom was very anxious that Mushroom didn’t ‘slap into’ the
tumbril,
Phillip told Lucy.
“Not a bit of it! The colt’s as gentle as his name. And as soon as the weather improves, Tom wants to lead Mushroom in the harvest field. He doesn’t want to load, and we’re one man short for loading. Tom’s too old. Steve demurs at doing the job—it’s hard continuous work, for as soon as one tumbril is loaded and led away, the other is waiting. Steve will cop into the pitching, he’s strong and the only one really capable of using the long-handled fork for high loading. The children can chuck sheaves into the lorry and green trailer, which take half-loads only, and goes down fast to fill the intervals between the ton-loads of the tumbrils.”
*
And now, Tom, who had been apprehensive of being asked to load—for he was nearing seventy and not exactly sprightly—was huffing a little to himself, as he smiled, because Mr. Rippingall, every inch a gentleman’s gentleman (as Mrs. Valiant declared) was going to load Mushroom’s tumbril and he, Tom Valiant, had only to lead the horse down the row of stooks, and then to the stack and back. Werry nice weather it wor’ and he’d see the childer all day —Miss Roz, Master Peter, David, Jonathan, and the other young lads and lassies. It almost druv’ away dull care, Tom told his wife, to see the children. For most of his working hours were aching hours; hardly a minute passed without the image of his son James, prisoner-of-war of the Japs, passing through his mind. The old fellow was set to endure—and had often lost the sense of time, with
the colt on Denchman’s. Phillip knew this: and had allowed him to remain as long as he liked on the meadow.
Palgrave Mushroom was a Percheron, taking after his sire. He had behaved well in thill gears, drawing the rubber-tyred tumbril; first empty, then with a load of a few flints, then a couple of small hen arks to get him used to rattle. So Tom Valiant declared Mushroom was ‘kind’—ready for field-work.
But as Rippingall was about to descend from the top of the load, by the southern boundary land of Charles Box, Mushroom was unkind. For without warning Mushroom threw up his head, gave a shrill neigh, and made off at a canter for a gap in the boundary hedge, following his nose and into the wind. Two fields away some horses were grazing. Trumpeting loudly Mushroom broke into a gallop. The load remained firm; Rippingall didn’t even lose his hat. He crouched amongst the sheaves, and when
Mushroom
slowed down with a joyous trumpet-note, he stood upright and raised his bowler and bowed to Charles Box, just as Mushroom still in shafts, tried to mount a Henthorp mare.
“My dear soul!” said Tom Valiant, to Phillip. “I reckon my hoss be a rig!”
Phillip understood that a rig was the result of imperfect
castration
. A ‘string’ sometimes remained, leaving the animal neither dull gelding nor fiery stallion. It had all the feelings of a ‘horse’, but none of its fertility. It was, in Charles Box’s words, ‘a bloody nuisance.’
Mushroom was led back to Denchman’s Meadow, to find some sort of solace among Ackers’ cows. And that afternoon, a wet one, the veterinary surgeon arrived at the farm premises.
“That’s an odd name—Palgrave Mushroom,” he said.
“Our old stockman always swore that mushrooms came from a stallion’s spawn,” Phillip told him. “When I asked him if he thought the father of a mushroom was a horse, he couldn’t see any connexion. So I said we’d name the colt after his two
joint-grandfathers
. That must have been before you came to see to him, a couple of years ago.”
I wish I hadn’t watched the operation on the triangle of grass before the Corn Barn. I had to sit on the young horse’s head while the vet. chloroformed him, but that was not the worst of it. The vet’s aged terrior bitch was watching the operation with interest, the while my own face was turned from its hindquarters. Then over my head the rogue testicle was flung, the small white bitch leapt to snap it in mid-air, then chewed and chewed sideways while gasping noises of greed came
from her. Rippingall looked away, a pessimistic expression on his face. It was the humiliation of seeing the yellow teeth of this aged female that affected me.
The sewing up did not take long, and soon the chastened gelding was being led back to Denchman’s Meadow, where he appeared to be grazing peacefully.
“I remember the Captain telling me,” said Rippingall,
reflectively,
as they walked to the village pub, “that something went wrong after the rib incident in the Garden of Eden. Biologists, said the Captain, proved it was the other way about. The rib came out of Eve originally, the male then being co-habited in the same body with her. Anyhow the male escaped, and a dropped apple was a trick to get ’im back inside of her. And man, said the Captain, ’as been as good as doped ever since, here on this earth. In some species such as spiders, according to the Captain, the female gets her own back on the honeymoon. She eats him.” Rippingall paused to sneeze. “Filthy bitch was the Captain’s term. He was never a one for mincin’ matters when we were alone.” Rippingall rerolled the waxicles of his moustaches. “All that for a
blow-through,”
he said. “What use is it when you’ve had it?”
Rippingall, who appeared to have reverted in part to his old soldier pre-1914 ‘character’, laughed hollowly. “I reckon I may fairly claim, sir, that the Captain was right.”
They reached The Hero. “I suppose,” said Phillip, “that ‘Boy’ Runnymeade’s attitude to women was conditioned by his having been a dreadfully neglected child.”
“He told me ’is mother never came near him at school, nor his father either. Too much taken up with Society, ’is mother, and his father was either huntin’, fishin’, and shootin’ when ’e wasn’t running after women.”
“Poor old ‘Boy’.”
“The Captain used to send away for his special paste from a Soho shop what sold all sorts of exotic foods from India and
Iceland
. He was partial to the Iceland ideas of what made a man a man. I can tell you now, sir, that when you came over to visit him, and he used to mock you in order to start what he called ‘a party’, well, sir, then I knew he had been partaking of his special paté of rams’ testicles. But for all the good they done him it might as well have been Old Mother Riley’s bloater paste.” Rippingall looked around lest he be overheard. “Stefania Roswitz hated ’im, did you know that, sir? She was very struck on you——”