Hare: “Then we will do what we always should do:—run a rope round the waist of the stack, fasten all the cloth-ropes to the main rope, and secure it that way. No more great lumps of threshing coal to each small cloth-rope. Remember what happened to the last one, up on the Hanger? It was blown to ribands, wasn’t it?”
Matt didn’t like that. He and his son Luke had tied lumps of steam coal—having disregarded Phillip’s orders that each cloth-rope be hitched to the holding waist-rope. A tempest had come, half-hundredweight lumps of coal had torn the cloth-ropes from the jute, leaving one hundred and forty square yards of jute to flap like a dirty sea against a harbour wall, and destroy itself.
When Tortoise had left, Hare and leveret secured the ropes of the new stack-cloth, slung over the horizontal pole, to an inch-thick rope round the waist of the stack.
“Thanks for helping, Boy Billy.”
It didn’t rain in the night, and Hare slept well.
*
Leaving the stack in the quarry to settle for a day or two, they started to cut Denchman Meadow. Billy in the early spring had bush-harrowed the pasture here, dragging an entire thorn behind a new model of the hydraulic tractor. This was a Ford-Ferguson, which had been sent to Phillip for a year’s free use by the inventor, an Ulsterman then in America. It came on ‘Lend Lease’. Like its older brother, the new Fergie was painted battleship grey.
Phillip had followed the dragged bush with the heavy rib-roll, drawn by the ‘little old grey dicker’, as Luke called the 1937 model. Dicker, otherwise donkey. It was a good donk, too, with its Coventry-Climax petrol engine.
A few weeks after the bushing and rolling, the new grass on the Denchman had looked so green that the stockman had pleaded to be allowed to turn his buds on it. Like a good herdsman, Matt wanted his young beasts to have the best of everything. Again and again he asked to be allowed to put them on the Denchman, (shut-up for hay), declaring that they had not enough feed on either of the four other pastures beside the river. There was plenty of bite on these meadows, Phillip told him, adding that they would have to hold thirty-nine buds and ten cows through the coming winter, as well as fourteen two-year-olds in the yard by the Bustard Wood.
“We’ll need every bit of hay we can save, Matt, my dear. Think of the five long months of winter to be got through! The hay from the late-sown leys will not be enough. And barley-straw, fill-belly stuff anyway, will be short again this year. Look at the poor crop on the Steep!”
Phillip went on to say that the fourteen acres of permanent grass of the Home Hills, which, after being ripped up by the pitch-pole harrow, had been bushed, rolled, and slagged, were waiting to be eaten. And had he not observed how the grass was growing away on Teal Meadow, also on the couple of acres of Scalt Common?
“Grass must be folded, and kept eaten close. The old haphazard ways of pre-war grazing anyhow and any time are over. Eat one meadow close; shut it up; move to the next; eat that close before moving on. That’s the idea, Matt.”
The stockman, always concerned for his beasts, listened; then he said, “But guv’nor, think of all that lovely bite on Denchman Meadow going to waste. ’Twill never make hay!”
“Ah, you have the gentle eyes of a bullock,” Phillip said. “Which is meant for a compliment, Matt. But I’m thinking of your young stock in seven and eight months’ time. Their gentle eyes in the yards will then reward you, Master Herdsman.”
“Then may I put them on the Denchman Meadow, guv’nor?”
Phillip had to pretend to sigh, and say gently, “No, dear man, but you shall have all the hay from the Denchman in the awful winter that’s coming. We’re under siege, Matt. Our ships are going down day and night. We live in the Island Fortress, Matt.”
The meadow took its name from the Danish encampment across the river and the road, a historical mound grown with pines, which was used by the parish council as a trash dump.
They cut all one day—or rather, they wasted four-fifths of one day, trying to make the Albion cutter work in the thick meadow bottom. The next morning they moved back to the upland hayfield, and worked until 6 p.m. carrying all but fifteen cocks of the field. It was not really good hay, since it lacked a bottom of dark green clover, but the ryegrass was a good colour, pale grey-green. When you chewed the knot of a stalk, you tasted the sugar in it. Phillip longed to be able to bale it from the wind-row, when it had been a darker green; but expensive balers were not for small farmers like himself, with an overdraft rising to half the mortgage value of the land.
In the morning they returned to the meadow, to finish cutting that fine, thick growth. As before, the Albion cutter constantly jammed behind the little grey dicker driven by Boy Billy. Luke cut steadily, his pair of horses drawing an ancient Samuelson cutter which Phillip had bought at auction for £5. Billy and he took the Albion to the blacksmith, who found several faults and adjusted them; they returned down the road to the meadow, over river-bridge, and continued with the cutting, which was awkward owing to the lows, or lesser draining channels, which had long ago been trodden-in by bullocks. Phillip’s function, sitting on the cutter, was to watch for mounds and other obstructions, and to pull the lever in time to raise the knife-bar over them. So progress was slow, for the knife still continued to choke itself. What could be wrong with the thing?
It was fine hay, perhaps two tons to the acre. With fifteen tons from the upland acres, another fifteen from the Brock Hanger, and a further twenty from Denchman, “We ought to have fifty tons for the winter,” he declared. “We won’t suffer as we did in the past winter,” he told Billy, “when our shrunken cattle looked at us in the yards with faces patched with the skin-disease of malnutrition.” Then he said to Matt, “How many tons shall we have off here, for your beasts this winter, old hero? Twenty?”
Matt looked at him solemnly, then he replied, “Several.”
*
Sitting in the shade of the trees of the Meadow Wood during tea, which Lucy and Rosamund (home for the day) carried across the causeway between the meadows, Billy the Nelson remarked to Phillip, “I’ve never seen the meadows like this since Old Buck’s time, forty years agone.”
Phillip had always found Billy the Nelson, nearly seventy years old and hale, ever ready to do his best. In pre-war days he had looked after the pigs and bullocks, before Matt took over. He wasn’t good with stock, he had no feelings for animals, other than his dog. The first farrow of the Large White gilt Phillip bought had died at night, for the Nelson had not been there to help the young sow. But on other jobs Billy the Nelson always worked with a will.
Occasionally, when Phillip visited him at night as he sat with his dog by his fire, Billy the Nelson told Phillip about life in the village in the days of the energetic ‘Old Buck’, who had farmed there half a century before, when all the district had belonged to a noble family in whose cupboards, according to the Nelson, there was nought but skeletons (which shall be left in place).
There was ‘Old Buck’s’ sale by auction of his Live and Dead Stock, as animals and implements were described immemorially in the bills advertising a sale. ‘Old Buck’ was giving up, having made a fortune, according to Billy. The farm was then a thousand acres, centred around the steep fields known even then as the Bad Lands. Provided to refresh visitors to the sale, a 36-gallon cask of strong ale was set up in the Corn Barn, the afternoon before the sale. At night the men got into the Barn, and drank the barrel dry.
“Old Buck wor a hard, but a just master.”
Hence the admirable meadows, and the secret horkey in the Corn Barn when at last his long rule was relaxed.
“Old Buck sent a tumbril for another barrel. It wern’t justice to tap that, so we left it for the Sale all right.”
“One day I hope to revive the horkey, or harvest supper, with dancing in the Corn Barn by lantern-light.”
“Ah,” said Billy the Nelson, shaking his head, “them days is gone now, sir, I think you’ll find.”
True, Billy the Nelson; true.
&n
bsp; *
Again and again during the cutting of the Denchman the Albion cutter failed, despite a second visit to the blacksmith. On the tractor seat, Phillip was all suppressed impatience; while Luke on the cutter seat behind him showed the patience of a monument. A score of times they stopped; Phillip got down, and peered; while Luke poked, tapped, banged, and got on his iron seat once again. He had screw-hammer and shut-knife to aid him, together with his two regular incantations of We won’t get in no muddle, and Thet’s a rum ’un. His old screw-hammer reminded Phillip of the boy who finding a broken watch in the village trash-dump, took it to be mended at the blacksmith’s in his old Wiltshire village. Screw-hammer, however, saved the day, together with Luke’s patience. He discovered the cause—the draw-bar attachment underneath was loose on its nut, so the cutter-bar in motion was trying to work beyond the right-angle, with consequent friction. Screw-hammer secured the bolt. In relief Phillip gave Luke half-a-crown for his discovery. What joy to be able to go forward unimpeded, to hear the serrated sharks-teeth knives rattling steadily, to see the green swathe lying neatly behind!
And what time, or money, had been expended in trying to get that cutter to work properly—hours wasted, wages ticking away like the taximeter of a stationary cab—and all because the diagonal bracing arm, the heavy arm that should have held the cutter bar firm, was loose; thus allowing the cutter to wobble before the grasses, and so to jam itself. Phillip made up some doggerel while the outfit rattled steadily round the meadow.
Never too old to mend,
Never too much to spend,
Forward to haysel’s end,
Cried Hare to Tortoise.
Bump over rush and puddle,
Screw-hammer, theory-jeer,
We’ll be in no muddle
Cried Tortoise to Hare
On the last day of June, towards nine o’clock and the waving of searchlight beams beyond the wooded hill-crest, they finished Denchman’s Meadow, except for those ‘lows’ which the scythe-men could not cover by dusk.
Today, the first of July was like that other First of July, twenty five years ago, in Picardy: hot, oppressive, still. A radiant and oppressive light beat upon the low ground of the meadows. The scythers went round the drains and the lows, sweating. In the afternoon I took the mare Beatrice with the iron tedder and turned most of the hay. Its thickness rejoiced me. I had optimistic thoughts of two and a half tons an acre. Powerful Dick, swinging scythe and game leg together, said he knew these meadows, and that drying the hay would be a difficulty. Damp arose from the river at night. However, we are getting on. So is Hitler, if the fanfares and reports on the Rundfunk are to be believed. I have cut out both Hitler’s and Stalin’s Manifestos from The Times, and kept them both, in the tenuous and by now ancient hope that one day I shall be able to write the microcosmic–macrocosmic events of my time and age.
Since working all day in fine weather my body has become lean and taut and agile, and I have been less mentally disturbed by the war. The sun on bare chest, back, arms, legs, the sweat of forking and pitching hay, are good and clarifying. Yes, we are getting on. Even Lucy’s garden is beginning to look well. Hammett, the old-age pensioner, with arms and legs swelled to near-immobility, works a few slow hours every day there. But my cottage garden, adjoining, with its weed-grown dumps of past tenants, is a reproach with every glance of my eyes.
About this time the newspapers began to take the line that Great Britain was fighting the war in order to abolish slums, to establish their New Order, to make agriculture an honoured national industry after the war. Leading articles declared, in effect, that the nation was fighting Hitler’s New Order so that England could achieve after the war what was considered impracticable before they fought Hitler. Phillip wondered if the writers of those articles and leaders believed them. The labourers and other working men he met didn’t.
Advertisements in papers, talks on the B.B.C., films of the Ministry of Information in the cinema, all exhorted people to practise economy and to avoid waste. Was the country adopting the very system that the City of London was determined to destroy? By law in Britain now nearly everyone not aged had to work. All had been numbered, classified, regulated, and given Identity Cards. No export of money abroad was allowed. Food and clothes were rationed. Even hedgerow fruits were collected and made into cordials, to be given to mothers of small children. Lucy distributed Rose Hip Syrup for babies in the village. Visitors were forbidden to enter coastal districts. Private motoring had long been stopped. Phillip heard seldom, if ever, from his old friends.
Rural England, outside the desolate areas of airfields under construction, was becoming arable England again. Grass fields were ploughed up by orders of Agricultural Committees. Bad farmers—the obdurate ‘C’ men—were dispossessed at fourteen days’ notice. Businesses were closed down if they were considered ‘unnecessary to the war effort’. The Government at last controlled Money. A British subject who had money in America and failed to sell his dollars to the British Government was liable to a fine of thrice the value of the dollars and the original sum confiscated.
Young men in the Forces looked well and fit, searchlight-soldiers excepted. They were B2 grade. Village boys no longer had factory-made trash toys. They were beginning to carve and model their own—generally aircraft—out of odd bits of wood. After the knuckle-head-rapping elderly spinster in charge of the village school had gone, and a young intelligent woman taken her place, the change of the school’s tone was remarkable. The swear-words, the precociously sexual overtones, the jeers and narky scuffles of the boys coming down Church Street were no more.
A gramophone played as the children went into morning school. Phillip and Lucy went to a concert given by the new schoolmistress and her pupils. They heard simple lyrics by de la Mare, Hardy, and Masefield recited. The children enjoyed themselves in dancing and singing, in acting little sketches. Their costumes were made ingeniously; red cloth of the drogues for anti-aircraft practice-targets, which fell usually on the marshes when shot down, predominated. Such cloth was much sought after. Its like could no longer be bought in shops. Clothes of every category were rationed. The children looked bright and neat, not nervous or shy as Phillip had thought to see. They did what they were doing with zest, the parents were happy.
Phillip recalled what ‘Spectre’ West, his dead comrade-in-arms, had said to him when they had walked up to Passchendaele. ‘The slums have died in Flanders.’ Evacuee boys from London who at first had given trouble in the school, and helped in the spreading of obscene words and attitudes among the children, were changing. ‘Spectre’s’ prophecy, made in October 1917, was coming true, at last. Some helped on Denchman’s Meadow. It was pathetic to observe how, after a few words of praise—as it were in confidence to equals—a ‘bad’ boy would become alert and eager, anxious to be of use. The aimless kick-about-in-the-streets expression went from their faces. Phillip, after a few days, could almost see them reverting to type: the type of their rosy-faced forefathers, before the industrial revolution drew so many from the fields to the pallor of sweat-shops and factories. These things were only indications of the incipient community spirit; but all of them were due to the precipitating agency, to use a term in chemistry, of the modern Lucifer.
There was a particular evacuee boy whom Phillip called ‘Ferret Eyes’. The lad explained cheerfully that he had been born blind, but at three months old had ‘managed to recover his sight’. How he managed it, he did not say. His eyes were sunken in his head, and when he smiled they almost disappeared. Perhaps as a baby, after feeding, he had slept for the first three months of his life, and thereby had given the impression of being blind? For a joke, at the beginning of their acquaintanceship, Phillip had, on learning his name, said, “Ah, you come of the family of Fighting Smiths!” Modestly the lad had admitted to this distinction; and thereafter, whenever their eyes met, Phillip observed that his jaw set itself into an appropriate fighting attitude. ‘Ferret Eyes’ was always striving to live up to t
he reputation of the Fighting Smiths; but being a peaceable child, he showed his toughness with the hay-fork. He ran down to join them on the Denchman the moment he was let out of school, followed by his companions; and it was happiness to Phillip to have them with him.
When first we started to carry the hay it was found to be not dry. I had made the mistake of putting it in rows too soon. And, as Powerful Dick declared, the river vapour kept it damp at night. It needs a lot of tossing or tedding to get it right; but if it is not to dampen again the next night all must be carried during this torrid afternoon. So I got permission for Ferret Eyes & Co. to be absent from school for a day, as I had available a dozen spare hay forks—bought at an auction before the war for twenty shillings the lot. So after noon of that day we all begin to turn and toss it with forks: six men, together with Boy Billy, Peter, David, Jonathan and the four London evacuee boys led by Ferret Eyes. We would feed and pay them, of course.
It was a fine sight, all the workers in line across the meadow under the pale blue sky of East Anglia. Work had a Constable peacefulness: the timelessness of the hot, still summer weather, the colours remembered from boyhood.
We began to load the feathery grey-green stuff into our tumbrils as a dry hot wind began to pour as from the eyescrewing heat of the sun. The sky was pale grey, there seemed to be no oxygen in the valley. We were encompassed within the white heat of a Florida spring. The light hurt the eyes. Sweating was no relief. The men’s faces were red. Grimly they pitched and loaded, unloaded and pitched again at the stack. Nine steel fingers of the tedding machine snapped off that afternoon against the cut rush-clumps.
As I helped build the stack on the causeway, between Home and Denchman Meadows, on the highest part above possible winter-flooding, I thought how we might roll the meadow two or three times every spring, and so gradually level off the old humps.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 8
