Lucifer Before Sunrise (59 page)

On Christmas Day, to give ‘poor little Peter’ (as David called him) a spell, Phillip fed the stock in the Woodland Yard. Then he walked down to the Studio, and re-read Birkin’s letter.

From where he sat the evening star was shining over the hill. A wood fire burned before him. Among the logs a length of elm was singing a wavering high song in the flames. He had, on coming in, switched on the radio, with its news of what was probably the last planned German attack of the war, in the snows and the frozen fogs of the Ardennes.

Outside in the valley a mist made the shapes of trees as though drowned in time. Everything was quiet; people indoors by their firesides in the old and deep countryside.

When Phillip was making seed-beds in March, Billy was about to go on his first operational flight. As the tractor moved
monotonously
slowly over the land, the thought came again and again—should he offer to Billy the talisman locked in his desk …

Nearly nineteen years had gone by since that morning in the cottage at Malandine when Billy’s mother had broken one of the laces of her sand-shoes at the moment her labour pains overcame her.

Doubt weakened him. The half-lace lay within a gold locket. Such an object might embarrass Billy among the young and
untried
members of his crew. But no
experienced
pilot, navigator, wireless operator or tail-gunner would remark on it: prolonged strain made a man superstitious the more his courage had been leached away by the detonations of battle.

And yet …

Billy’s attitude to him, his resistance, was caused by his manner towards Lucy; and anything about his unknown mother might be resented. No: he must not ask Billy again.

So Phillip followed the shadow of fear instead of the bright ray of his true self. For he believed that inanimate objects had within their forms an essence of personality, or love, of those who had cared for them. Men and women with a high degree of sensibility felt this, although it had not yet been proved on the laboratory bench.

He spoke to the wind. “The base of such feelings is love, even if that love has been so damaged or disprized as to become hate! Barley was all love behind an unsentimental manner which was guard to her personality. And the essence of the dead remain in the psychic envelope of this planet. Then surely Barley, in spirit, will be near Billy, to protect him, by means of those sad relics which in my weakness I dare not reveal to him?”

He began to shout against himself, “Coward! Fool! Weakling!” The wind carried his voice over the meadows to where Josiah Harn was unloading 40-gallon drums of swill beside his pig-styes, for Powerful Dick to boil before feeding.

“He won’t last long!” said Josiah Harn, with satisfaction. Powerful Dick grunted. He didn’t like Harn.

*

Billy came back from his first op. and told Lucy—he could not speak easily with his father—details of the raid. It had been a long flight to East Germany, taking ten hours to fly there and back. The crew members had been issued with civvy suits to take with them if they had to bail out, to put on after burying their uniforms and to try to make their way back as displaced persons before the advancing Russians.

Billy said that the target had been Dresden and most of the bombs dropped had been phosphorus and incendiaries. The German radio, to which Phillip had listened, claimed that over two hundred thousand civilians, many old people and children coming from East Prussia, had been burned alive in that raid which served no military purpose, since there were no war
installations
or dumps or marshalling yards there. Nor were there any anti-aircraft batteries or searchlights. It was very cold weather, below zero, and Billy’s chilblains broke raw, despite gloves. There were two waves of bombers, preceded by Mosquitos dropping green markers, followed by red flares upon the city, the chief target of which was the Central Station, beside which was a large hospital full of wounded.

“We also dropped a lot of bull, Mum, propaganda leaflets saying the Nazi Party Leaders had deserted Dresden.” Lucy showed Phillip a copy Billy had kept for a souvenir, it was in German,
Nachrichten
für
die
Truppen.
It was dated February 13, 1945. Billy said the weight of bombs dropped was four thousand tons, and three quarters of a million incendiaries.

“Sir Stafford Cripps gave us a lecture the day before we took off, on ‘God is my co-pilot’, Mum. The boys didn’t care for that, saying it was worse than flannel. Then at briefing there wasn’t any target map, which no-one liked, because it meant a free for all. The first raid was incendiary, and when the fires were put out, the second raid, which was ours, was to catch the rescue squads. When we got over the target we had to go down from twenty thousand feet to get under the cloud-base at two thousand. We made our run-in at 1.30 hours, when the city was well alight.
The next morning at 10.30 hours there was a third raid by the U.S.A. Army Air Force, and Mustangs flew in low and
machine-gunned
lorries, Red Cross vans, and crowds of civilians on the banks of the Elbe. The idea was to cause confusion among the Jerry refugees.”

*

Lucy did not tell Phillip this until some time after Billy had gone back to his station. He had, by then, heard from another R.A.F. man that all the animals and birds of the Dresden Zoo had escaped, and lions were feeding on corpses, so were vultures. There were monkeys, too, among the ruins.

It was Hitler who used to say, during the struggle for power against the Communists in Germany, that his S.S. men and S.A. followers would meet terror with terror; now it seemed that was the Allies’ plan—to destroy the German working-class districts of all the large towns in Germany, and the workers in their homes: the adopted plan of a man of British genius who was ruthless and steadfast enough to frustrate Hitler’s ideas of ‘peace in Europe for a thousand years’.

It was beyond Phillip. He felt the war of the cousin-nations, England and Germany, to be the macrocosm, while the Bad Lands were the microcosm, of the sickness of a dying Western World. There was talk of ‘justice’ in bringing the leaders of Germany—in all spheres of command, from banking to building—the army, the navy, the air-force—to trial as ‘war criminals’. It seemed that, among the Allies, there were no war criminals. That would be left to history to decide. The Allies were saved by their scapegoats, the German nation.

Billy came over one afternoon, and finding Phillip in the Studio, went to him and hid his face on his father’s shoulder, seeking refuge. Phillip clasped him, kissed the fair hair, stroked the imaginative ‘bump’ at the back of the skull, while his eyes purged away all false pride—or suffering—and self-rectitude. It was as though Barley had come to him, and he to her, in this their child of love. The Billy was gone, and for awhile, Phillip felt all of himself to be clear, and redeemed. He was not able to face the others for some hours after Billy had driven away in the 1928 Morris he had bought for
£
5.

*

The corn was pricking through the cobbly seed-beds. The willows by the river were in leaf. On the home meadows the grass was growing with the shine of the wind. The wild duck led her
young from the nest in the clump of reeds in the dyke. Phillip watched her swimming beside the aged blackthorn hanging over the water of the Old River, its lower branches hung with wisps caught in last winter’s floods.

To the church the children took willow branches from the Osier Carr. At night the red tiles of cottage roofs glowed mysteriously under the full moon. It was a tradition that on Easter Sunday men of the village walked on the road above the New River with their wives and grandchildren, to look across the meadows to the woods coming into bud and leaf. Phillip opened the gate, and bade them welcome to all parts of the farm.

In the market-place, farmers said they had drilled the last of the war-time sowings. And they asked one another: What is to happen now?

It seemed a long time since the thousands, the tens of thousands of wheels had rumbled through the village street on the way to the south coast. Now the Allies were over the Rhine and deployed for final victory. And yet, though the sun shone, behind all the transient beauty of the earth, was shadow. Every man and woman in the village knew what this shadow was: a subconscious fear that never again would life be lived in contentment. They did not know why; superficially it was unreasonable, for Britain and her Allies had nearly won the war.

Down by the Old River, where the wild duck watched her young near the nest in the reed-clump, the twisted blackthorn hung down its branches, some to drag in the water moving so slowly below the wood. The Old River drained the meadows, where soon the young Red Poll heifers would be put out to graze.

The blackthorn was what is called self-sown. The seed was perhaps dropped by a bird, or maybe it was cast there originally by a boyish hand, for do birds eat those small acrid wild plums, or sloes, which are the fruit of the blackthorn? All country boys taste, at least once in their lives, the blue fruit with the deceptive
grape-like
bloom; but one bite is enough before, with wry face, the wild plum is hurled away. Was that how the blackthorn started its life?

For Phillip had come to feel self-identification with the black and spindly object growing there. There were the marks of its suffering visible to the eye. The trunk was writhen and bent back upon the earth from which it sprung. Its shape was part of its experience. Tall sycamores and ash trees grew in the wood above it, taking light from lesser saplings and bushes which strove to
grow under them. Many of these saplings had died after a few years of vain struggle for the sun they could not find.

Every spring when the time came to pull reeds and other water vegetation from the Old River Phillip had looked at the writhen blackthorn and said to himself that it ought to be cut down, for it spoiled the look of the otherwise clear dyke.

But somehow it was not cut down. He knew how it had striven to grow out of the shade of the wood to find the sun, he felt its struggle to live under the greater trees. And of a sudden, about the time of the spring solstice, there burst upon its blackness a fragility of white blossoms, breaking out of the dark-spined branches while yet the winds of March held back colour from the earth. Blossom glowed beside savage spines and on contorted branches, so startling and tender a sight confronting human thoughts which for so long, within the interior heart, had almost lost hope.

*

How could he bring back life to the Banyard brook? When he peered into the water, from the upper meadows, he saw that in the heat of the sun bubbles of carbon-dioxide were arising from the sludge of pollution.

Although it was chalk country this was never a pure
chalk-stream
; yet not so long ago it had, as Josiah Harn told Phillip—“I carried the net for the squire of the Old Manor when I wor a boy”—a firm bottom of sand on clay. That bed was overlaid by a foot and more of black and deadly filth. The sludge was from road culverts, drains of houses and cottages, and ‘lactoria’
standing
on or near the banks.

Lactorium
was a new-world term for cow-house. Twice daily the floor of the lactorium above the village bridge was sluiced down with disinfectant of a chlorine base. The effluent drained direct into the river. It was as deadly to the delicate underwater life within the stream as airborne chlorine gas drifting over
No-man’s-land
in the Salient in 1915.

“Sewage will kill a stream slowly,” he said to Josiah Harn. “It takes the oxygen by which all underwater life breathes. And chlorine-based chemicals from cow-houses are fatal, even diluted to one in a million. Add to them effluents containing photographic chemicals from the sewage tanks, and drains from airfields on higher ground near the source, and there is my stricken brook. Will the Rhine, cleansed by Hitler a decade ago, die back. again?”

“Yar right there, sir,” said Josiah Ham. “Yar can’t do without money.” He thought Phillip meant
rhino.

When the waters moved past cloudy-dark he knew the
Catchment
Board men were above, pulling weed as they called the dark green skeins of algae which grew from the sludge-shoals on the bottom. The mud-pullers worked with rake and down-turned shovel, each tool clamped on a long handle of willow. With these they hauled forth and lifted out upon the bank the stuff called spoil, while below them the soiled water moved slowly down with bubbles of carbon-dioxide fizzling on the surface.

A polluted river, as distinct from a river chemically poisoned, dies slowly. Once upon a time the Banyard brook was beautiful with mayfly and trout-ring and leaping dace, with dance of sedge-fly and silver-horns at evening. In the noon of a buoyant day clouds of the Pale Watery had swayed like etherial fountains over the water-cress clumps under the banks. Now it was the daylight bomber aircraft which gleamed palely in the height of the sky.

Eight years before, Phillip had vowed to restore the pristine life of the little Banyard brook by both word of mouth, and by writing articles for
The
Daily
Crusader,
and when this was done, action—to the river bank!! Shade must be made from the
deoxygenising
glare of the summer sun. He planted willow slips on the south bank—it was legally his land bordering the meadows—to grow into trees which would give shade to the water, and also provide osiers for basket-making and beauty to the valley. For in its quiet way it was a pleasant little valley, and with proper care and renewal of things past it could indeed be beautiful once more. That was his ambition when first he had seen the farm: to work to make a small parcel of English land and water harmonious again, for its own sake.