Lucifer Before Sunrise (56 page)

Peter had left school. The slight, quiet boy had taken the place of Billy being trained as an air-gunner of the R.A.F. Billy was grieved that he had had practically no education, for this lack disqualified him from becoming a pilot-officer.

What, thought Lucy, was Phillip doing? Had he learned nothing from having taken away Billy, so early from school?

Phillip had always felt at ease with his second son; perhaps, he thought, because he had carried Peter about with him when he was a baby. They had shared the important animal-warmth, the physical trust between parent and child.

Billy had missed this with his father, for, following his mother's death, he had remained with the nurses there for some months in the Cottage Hospital at Queensbridge. And when Phillip had moved to his cousin Willie's old cottage in North Devon, Billy had been cared for by the postman's wife and daughter. It was in their house that Lucy had first seen the baby, and felt she must look after what later she described to Phillip as ‘you two poor ones'.

*

The penstock being finished, part two of the plan to drain and plough the meadows was now about to be carried out. Phillip felt a sense of lightness, after years of frustration—the decadence
of the Imagination. Every time he had walked over those meadows, or seen them from the road on his way to the cattle market (that dreadful concentration of servile animals rejected from their homelands—cows belving for lost calves—most of them for the glue factory—bullocks for the slaughter-house) he had flinched, and sighed, and thrust back his desires.

One morning in October 1944 he mounted his bicycle, and with haversack on back, pedalled up the narrow road to the church; and continuing past the council houses, free-wheeled down the hill to the gate by the bridge leading to the Denchman Meadow. There he stopped awhile to gaze down at the new penstock. The hatch was raised about ten inches. Water swirled and bubbled below, before flowing under the new concrete culvert built to carry a five-ton lorry. The very place for a trout farm!

To the lower end of the culvert, some time in the future, he hoped to fix an iron grill to prevent the entry of eels, which were devourers of trout fry. The flume of water, from the lower
culvert-face
downwards, would be covered by close-mesh wire-netting against otters, kingfishers, herons, and other water-birds. The covered nursery would extend for thirty yards or so, to a lower grill, through which the flume water would continue on its way to join the Old River, as the main grupp was called.

He wheeled his bike along the causeway and came to the Old River. Here he planned to have the 2-acre lake. It would be netted around its verges, the wire-netting attached to the ring of willows. Many of the machines, brought over from America and called bulldozers, were then lying idle, after their work of preparing the sites of six hundred-odd airfields in Britain. He imagined the gouging out of twenty thousand cubic yards—twelve thousand tons—of heavy alluvial soil to be scattered over the Bad Lands. In two or three years the yields of wheat and sugar beet would more than pay for the operation!

So far, with the help of half-a-dozen children, he had built five concrete bridges to span the grupps and link the meadows. The job had been done quicker than he had anticipated. He bought a dozen reinforced concrete pipes, used normally for sewers. Each was four feet long and three feet in diameter. A couple in line having been lowered into its grupp, the two ends of the eight-foot pipe were enclosed by wooden shuttering a foot higher than the top of the pipe. Then concrete was poured on top, covering parts of old iron bedsteads, bicycles (including Horatio Bugg's father's
crenellated
penny-farthing bicycle) and other metal scrap. Soon a
foot-thick causeway, strong enough when set to take a loaded lorry, was laid. He put a row of white flints at each edge to act as parapets of the little bridge. And suddenly, without effort, it seemed, the job was done; and he had six new permanent bridges over the grupps, connecting meadow to meadow, and meadow to mainland; and all the work paid for in rabbits, honey and hen's eggs for each of the well-behaved young evacuee gentlemen to take home to their mums.

It had been quite a job, clearing that thicket. Some of the
wild-rose
briars growing upright in its mazy tunnel were fifteen feet long, and set with formidable talons which pierced through Phillip's thick leather gloves. Even when severed they were awkward things, liable to bend back and snatch at cheek and ear-lobe as they were lifted and swung upon the brush-wood piles. Too late he wished he had saved them, for they made excellent straight walking-sticks, pliable as rhinoceros hide. They were an inch or so thick. Polished, they would have sold well in any Piccadilly shop, during that time of shortages. But heaven forbid, he said to himself, that he try to start a walking-stick factory!

Another job Phillip did by himself was to cut the Willow Plot in Denchman Meadow, and tie in bundles two tons of osiers. He took a sample to the county town and sold them for half-a-crown a bundle to an old man with a sharp red nose and sodden-looking bowler hat who owned a basket factory. He told Phillip he used to buy osiers from Old Buck who farmed Deepwater forty years since. Feeling himself to be a traditionalist, Phillip, on his return home, loaded them on the green trailer and the next moonlit night set out to haul them to the county town, distant by thirty miles. As the top speed of the tractor was three miles an hour, he arrived there in the early afternoon.

The basket-maker looked at the load and said, “I'll gie you eighteen pence a bundle, 'bor.”

“You bought them at half-a-crown on site! I've transported them free to your place. The double journey will take me twenty hours, and I've done it free, gratis, and for nothing to help your war effort!”

“You bin on the cider, 'bor? Christmas ain't come yet, you know.”

“No, I haven't been on the cider, I've been on this bloody outfit! You bought these osiers at half-a-crown the bundle, on sample! They're up to sample! Now you pay up like a true-blue Norfolk dumpling saint!”

“I'll pay eighteenpence or narthin'.”

“Right, 'bor, narthin'!” and Phillip began to throw off the load outside the shop on the pavement.

The red-nosed bowler-hatted man watched him doing this until
the trailer was empty. Then he said, “Do you now reload them osiers and take 'm to my factory down by the river, 'bor!”

“I give you them as a Christmas box.”

“They tell me yar one of them facinests,” he replied.

“Ah, 'bor! And here's a barricade when the street fighting starts!”

He arrived back at dawn along the coastal road, and avoiding the farmhouse, went down to the meadow to set fire to the heaps of briar, bramble, and thorn left from the cutting of twenty years' overgrowth on Teal Meadow. Five tall piles of brush-wood were already made; work of the past week. Near them, concealed in a hollow ash, was a drum of old tractor oil, a pitch-fork, a slasher to sever lesser branches, an axe and leather hedging-gloves. In his haversack was a flagon of sweet milky tea, which he had bought at a shop before his all-night journey on the tractor under the moon. His particular resting place was a tree trunk, growing horizontally. There he sat down, taking out pipe and tobacco. He had
telephoned
Jonny at seven o'clock, asking him to bring down another flagon of tea.

How pleasing was the sight before his eyes! Fallen
crossing-places
between meadows replaced by durable bridges or culverts; great sprawling hedge between Scalt and Teal Meadow laid low and trimmed. Early morning sunlight now entering places which had been dank and shady. The white flints of the little bridges overlaid by concrete slabs, how good they looked in the low rays of the sun!

The trimmed and shredded limbs and boles for the circular saw were stacked in cords. Brush-wood heaps awaited stabbing yellow flames which would reduce them to grey potash. Now to start!

After two hours all five fires were burning out in white feathery circles, ruby underneath. The flagon was empty. He had gone hard and fast, and now was sitting once more on the horizontal branch, filling a pipe. The sunbeams were lost behind dark clouds climbing the sky. A few spots of rain fell. Looking to the
north-west
he saw a crooked bright flash above a dark and tattered
cloud-curtain
moving in turmoil about a mile away. The meadow lay beyond the edge of this local tempest. Even so, embers were already hissing at the first hail stones, so he made up the fires with his pitchfork before going to shelter in the hollow tree.

This semi-ruin of the
ancien
régime
had been left when he cut the hedge. Arriving before the trunk's open hollow as white pellets of ice bounded on the ground about him, he prepared to insinuate himself inside, while wondering if his movements would disturb
an owl in one of the dark cavities above. To his surprise a voice said,
Ah,
that's
good,
Chooky.
The words came as a shock, for he had been mentally prepared for brown wings flapping past him.

Jonny had been perched up there some time, he told his father, “with his friend the old tree”. The two remained there while the storm rumbled and tore about, and the flames of the fires struck like snakes at their natural enemy, water. Afterwards they worked together until dusk, leaving the fires to burn themselves out, regardless of black-out regulations. 

*

The four acres of Teal Meadow had been left, after being ploughed up during the summer, for the furrows to dry out. It was a sullen piece of land. Now Phillip set about ploughing the headlands, including the margin where his fires had burned the day before. Towards evening the work was finished. He had ploughed to the new gate erected across the grupp to the Common. There he left the tractor covered up, while mist, arising from the grupps, was beginning to spread over the ploughed work. It was getting late, he had eaten nothing since returning with the tractor the day before. The children would be sitting on the bench beside the oak table in the parlour, waiting for him to come before they had supper. The fire would be blazing in the hearth, the wireless playing, three electric lamps with their parchment shades casting a yellow glow on white-washed walls. It was a particular evening, being Peter's birthday supper, and David's half-term holiday from boarding school. Rosamund was away in Berkshire. Billy was training somewhere in the West Country.

*

The ploughing of the old sod of the Home Hills had been simple compared with the tearing up of the old matted-grass of Teal Meadow. The ten-inch double-furrow plough was useless.
Coulters
and breasts got choked at once. Only the sixteen-inch
deep-digger
could burst up the tenacious, tangled roots of
persicaria,
agrostes,
silver weed, water poa-grass, and common rush,
junta
acuta.
The turf had never been ripped by coulter or turned on breast of plough during the century and more since the land had been reclaimed from tidal marsh. Probably it had never been ploughed; it had known only sea and air since long before the days of raven-pennant'd prows of Viking galleys—one of which lay buried in a corner of the meadow, after sailing up on the tide a thousand years before.