Lucifer Before Sunrise (57 page)

Ploughing in bottom gear had been a very slow process. The
ragged turf reared up tough as cocoa-nut-fibre matting. Furrows with undersides of peat twisted about in uneven strips until finally they flopped over, irregularly. Share and moldboard scraped and rustled among beds of cockle-shells, fossils, fragments of old black ships-timbers. Once the breast turned up a thin silver coin with a Roman Emperor's head on it. Gulls came in hundreds to take long worms and grubs. The soil under the horrible turf was a deep rich brown—age-long compost of sea-plant and bullocks' droppings during a century of summer grazings behind the sea-wall. What a yield of wheat he would see next summer, he thought; rustle of long heads of Squarehead wheat in the sea-breezes of August. If the wheat-plants were not flooded in winter…

*

For there had been doubt about the ploughing of those two meadows at the end of Phillip's farm. During every winter
water-plashes
had filled the ‘lows' of one third of the area. For several years he had tried to get rid of the water lying in those ‘lows' by opening old drains and ditches which wandered across the meadows. Yet this drainage work had seemed to be the cause of more water lying there.

He watched, and found the cause.

By digging out those ditches, the penned-up river-water had flowed back the more easily, and spread wider in the ‘lows' of the meadows. This was good for duck-shooting, but not for plants of winter wheat.

Phillip had reckoned that in the old days those ditches and drains had been kept clean: that for years they had been trodden-in by cattle, and neglected. But he had more to learn. One day, looking down from the edge of the Great Bustard Wood, well above the Scalt, he saw that the so-called drains were not drains. They were the remains of age-long channers in the marsh before the sea-wall was built. In those pre-wall days the sea had covered the land entirely at high spring tides. The channers wandered about like eels, or water. No drainage-master would have dug them that way. They were the remains of tidal guts in what had been estuarial saltings.

Having found the answer, Phillip sought the Drainage Officer of the Catchment Board and got approval for a sluice by the River Wood end. The village carpenter made this door, which he fastened by bolts grouted into the walls of the brick arch.

When the frame of the sluice was fixed into position, Jonny and he waited to watch the back-flow come up the Old River. They wanted to see if the door would be held closed by the weight of
water piling against its lower side. It worked! The down-grupp water-level rose two feet above the water-level behind the door. Taking a chance, Phillip had already ploughed up what he called the wandering ‘drains' of the meadows, and when they came back the tidal back-press had dropped right down, and the grupp water was flowing under the door.

When such land south of the farm had, in a past century, been reclaimed from the sea, he told Jonny as they went happily home, swede turnips from Flanders had been grown to the size, according to Luke's grandfather, of a bull's head. The old man had told Phillip that when he was a boy he had helped to cart a crop of nearly one hundred tons an acre.

Now it was time to make a seed-bed for wheat on the ploughed work of the Teal Meadow. The wheat must go in before seasonal rains were followed by November frosts. Phillip worked all day and on into twilight, when Jonathan came with a basket of scones and honey.

The wind was chilly. Dwarf owls were yowling down by the river. Cock pheasants roosting in the pine trees at the edge of the Bustard Wood had ceased to cuckett. He put Jonny on the tractor while he had his tea.

“Are you afraid, Jonny?”

“Not likely, ’bor!”

So while twenty-four synthetic horses droned up and down the meadow, the tiny figure on the tractor was almost obliterated in the dusk.

What would a critic—and Phillip had many nowadays—have thought? That this was child slavery? Whatever was the farmer doing to let a nine-year-old drive up and down the meadow at that hour? And with a river at the far end of the meadow? Where was the farmer, anyway? Was that he—that still figure crouching before a fire of dry twigs, over which a kettle was hung? Some poor white, a cracker in the swamps of Georgia and Florida? The figure continued to crouch in the ditch, watching his fire, while with two hands he crammed food into his mouth. His felt hat, washed and rewashed after innumerable seagull-spottings, was almost in shreds. He wore a mackinaw, or lumberjack’s coat, tied around his body with binder twine.

As for his trousers, they were of corduroy of the mode or fashion then current in Great Britain called Utility: short in the leg and low in the waist, and like the hat, shapeless with many washings in river, rain and soap-suds. He needed a hair cut. His grey hair almost covered his ears. It hung in an untidy fringe over his collar. He had not shaved for over a week. His eyes stared like those of
a wild animal. His grey moustache bristled like that of an otter as he peered up at the sight of duck flighting over the meadow, glad that he hadn’t got his twelve-bore with him. Live and let live was now the principle of this odd-man-out existing in a world so different from that of current thought that his mind had retired into a world of fantasy.

*

The last pale bar of light under black clouds in the west faded out. Night hovered over the earth. And suddenly the cock pheasants in the woods towering above one side of the meadow crowed urgently. Before they had ceased the earth trembled and a dull reverberation shivered through the air. A familiar sound at that time—either a V1 from the back of a Heinkel over the North Sea, a V2 rocket from Holland, or an R.A.F. four-engined bomber loaded with block-busters blowing up as it took off from one or another of the two hundred airfields bordering the North Sea.

The child driving the tractor was now lost in penumbral dusk, in an unseen existence of engine-noise growing fainter, then
gradually
louder again as boy and tractor reappeared dimly.

A searchlight playing on the meadow would have revealed the fact that the tractor was drawing a five-barred gate slung on chains from the towing bar. Not only the gate, but one gatepost was being drawn over the soil. What in heck was all this about? Up and down the meadow the little boy went, drawing the strange load ordered by his father. The soil reared up in an ever-travelling heap before the gate. Sometimes the earth-wave was so large that the engine of the tractor could be heard knocking; then the gear was changed, and the procession went on again, most of the heap having shaken itself free of the five bars and bracing lengths of the gate.

Putting tea in the kettle, which was now boiling, the cracker in the ditch waited for the leaves to settle, then poured himself a mug, blew on it to cool it, the while combing with his fingers the matted hairs on his skull. Having emptied the cup, he arose and walked towards the machine. The child, who was cultivating for a contract price—‘taken work’—stood on the clutch, closed the throttle, put the engine out of gear, and sat back. He was wrapped in a
sheepskin
tied round his middle.

“Thet’s the baist implement we’ve got on the farm, ’bor,” said the cracker, pointing to the gate-and-post, while addressing an imaginary American visitor who was collecting data for a thesis on
Backward
Cultivations
and
Myths
attending
Fertility
Rites
in
the
Island
Fortress.
“Yew hev done some good thar, ma son. Yar’ll feel the benefit of that, won’ yew tho’!”

“Ah, ’bor.”

“Are you cold, Jonny?”

“No, Chooky.”

“Anyway, I’ll finish the job. You take my sidebag home and tell Mrs. Valiant I’ll pick up the half-loaf, butter, cheese, and pickled shallots at half past eight.”

“Okay, Chooky.”

The small figure was dissolving in darkness when the cracker called out, “Are you scared of walking home alone in the dark?”

“No, Chooky,” same the answer under the rising moon.

*

Why the gate,
and
the gate-post?

After the meadow had been ploughed, the writhen
furrow-slices
were pressed down by the Killer, as the 30-cwt. rib or
Cambridge
roll was called. Then disc-harrows had chopped and re-chopped the furrows, making a tilth into which Squarehead II wheat was to be drilled. Even so, the field of virgin arable was uneven. There were holes where lengths of stubborn
furrow-slices
, burst up by the deep-digger plough, had fallen the wrong way. How to get those holes filled in, together with the old useless guts and channers? What implement would ‘slade’ the loose soil into the ‘lows’?

How about the gate, which lay to hand, drawn by chains? The lorry, driven there by Boy Billy in the past, had broken off the post, which had been new seven years before. Both post and gate lay on the clover aftermath of the Scalt. So there, to hand, lay an excellent implement to level the plenteous brown tilth left by the disc-harrow. Gate and post were hitched to the towing bar of the tractor, and after it had gone over the meadow twice, criss-cross, a seed-bed was left nearly as smooth as a lawn.

Well, almost. More or less. Chiefly less. Anyway, it was Old Michaelmas Day, the dead-line for sowing wheat, which should be well-rooted before the starlings freckled the sky as they flew in from over the North Sea, preceding the frost-winds of the Polar Circle. Starlings were daddies for milky wheat seed, as they used to say in the West Country.

*

When the seed-corn was in and covered, Phillip drove the tractor up to the new shed beside the bullock yard in the wood. There he remained, after the cover had been tied down, within the silence of
trees, drawing simplicity from the animals lying on their clean straw. He could sense their gentleness and innocence, he drew comfort from being among them. When he got up and climbed the wooden rails, he saw, far away across the tree-tops of Brock Hanger, a light shining. It was the first of its kind he had seen in more than five years. The light came from the window of the distant marsh-man’s cottage, where lived ‘Ackers’, the cowman. It was a brave light, a lonely light, and it meant that the war was at last coming to an end.

It was Old Michaelmas Day, the eleventh of October—the traditional day by which, in the Granary of England, wheat should be in.

The meadow had been ploughed, the seed-bed made, and the corn drilled, to time; he had done what he had set out to do. He would go home, he was happy. And the sprawl that night before the fire of thorn-logs, while Jonny sat at table and drew pictures of the scene, was reward enough.

*

One Sunday morning Jonny, Peter and Phillip walked down to look at the Squarehead wheat on what had been meadow pasture. During the night it had rained heavily, and the river had risen. Would the new corn-land be shining with water-plashes in the lows?

The sun was in the south-east, facing them as they walked forward on the black soil covered by a haze of pale green. When they turned their backs to the sun they saw their long shadows thrown upon a myriad emerald needles each with its sharp thin shadow amidst fragments of broken turf.

The sponginess of that black soil was not exactly reassuring. However high cirrus after nimbus lifted the heart as they walked beside the dyke which once had been the Old River. Across the narrow water were willows and alders of a wild wood. Jonny wanted to be shown where the otter sometimes slept in the thick willow undergrowth at the north end.

“I think I’d best go back and grind some barley,” said Peter.

Across a plank spanning the dyke Jonny and his father entered the narrow strip of woodland. Immediately the quality of the light and shade among the trees made them stand still, listening to the silence. The air was now warm and buoyant. Sunlight glanced from wet boles of ash and sycamore. Blue sky gleamed through their tops.

“I hope we see your otter, Chooky,” said Jonny.

“Ah, ’bor!” 

As they crept quietly forward a slight whispering sound came to their ears. A family of small birds was flitting through the branches, hanging upside down as they peered for insects, and talking to each other. They were long-tailed titmice—mother, father and nine or ten young, aerial gipsies who would remain together until the spring. They seemed to make a gossamer chain, linked by faint chinking cries as they flitted, one behind the other, away into the wood.

The two followed them, unspeaking, their boots occasionally cracking a twig fallen across the path. Phillip knew the scene well, but to the boy it was mysterious and thrilling. At other times, Phillip reflected, when he had walked there, an over-occupied farmer had been hurrying through, perhaps after bullocks which had broken out of the meadow; or with mind pre-occupied with details of electric fences to keep the stock from roaming over the airfield; of sheep beset by green Spanish fly. Then there was the poacher who came early on Sunday mornings from Durston a mile or so along the coast road—a young man ‘in reserved employment’ who declared his intention of drowning any Luftwaffe pilot he found upon the shore near any rubber dinghy—and poached Phillip’s pheasants for the black market.

No doubt the excuse would have been, if he were caught, that his act was a protest against the ‘facinist’.

Would he ever feel again as this small boy now was feeling? To Jonny a long-legged spider with a pink body walking under a gossamer from one branch to another was a sight both mysterious and wonderful. Then he was standing on the river bank under an old ash-tree, watching a school of roach making waves as they swam upstream. “Do you think we shall see your otter, Chooky?”

He had to tell Jonny that the old dog-otter wasn’t there any longer. One of the villagers given permission to shoot pigeons in this wood had, during the past week, seen the otter suddenly in front of him and raised his gun and shot it. Phillip’s guest had taken it back to an outhouse, and flung it down there, to skin later on; and only by the merest chance had Phillip known of the incident. Otter skins were fetching
£
4 each at that time. The villager had looked at him with surprise when Phillip had asked him to shoot only pigeons when he went there again. “But what use is an artter?” he said, a puzzled look on his face.

*

Rain fell all the next week. Anxiously he watched the rising
level of the river. Everywhere water was running down the valley: from the furrows of brown ploughlands, in tracks of rubber-tyred tumbrils coming off sugar-beet fields. Lanes were little
water-bournes
, so were the sides of roads. Black-mossed pantiles were musical with drippings.

All drained into the little Banyard chalk stream until it was swilling bank-high above the level of the meadows. Its surface was whorled with kaleidoscopic colours of oil and crude carbolic acid poured into the grills of village road-drains meant to carry only rainwater, but which the cottagers used as cess-pits. Deadly effluents from the airfields—including photographic chemicals—were killing the life of the stream already polluted by hundreds of drains in a town through which it flowed.

As Jonny and Phillip slithered upon the river bank, waves rolled by the wind lapped almost to the welts of their shoes. Below the bank stretched the new wheatlands with plants which had scarcely grown during the past fortnight. Would the river rise higher and pour over the bank and drown them?

An official of the War Agricultural Executive Committee had been dubious about the tide-sluice solving the problem of those meadow-lands becoming waterlogged. Certainly it would keep back some of the water returning up the dyke when the sea-doors were closed below; but what about water draining there from the higher lands? The fairly dry condition of the meadows in the last two winters had been due to little rain having fallen. Village wells and springs had been low in consequence. The river had remained at summer level all the previous winter, and the meadows hardly got wet. But in 1944 all of Europe, as in
Götterdämmerung,
seemed to be drowning.

Yet Phillip was not worrying unduly about the delicate green points rising out of the spongy unevenness of the black soil before him. One of the lessons he had learned was to put those things out of mind which could not be helped. While this habit—it seemed to him to be sloth—was developing in him, he used to feel, at odd moments, a sense of guilt, and then of defeat akin to death. But in truth, it was progress.

*

“If the river comes over the bank hundreds of thousands of gallons a minute may spread over all the meadow, Jonny.
However
, the ducks will enjoy it. There are thousands of wildfowl in the bay. Our meadows shall be their sanctuary, won’t they? I really don’t want to shoot any.”

The boy looked disappointed.

“The theory among wildfowlers in the village is that decoys and traps of Holland have been out of action owing to the breaches in the dykes caused by the R.A.F. bombing. So the wildfowl are coming to our East Coast in thousands where in other years they have come in hundreds.”

“I wish I could shoot one,” said Jonny.