“I can’t bear to think of going back,” said Poppy.
They saw Kitty Foyle, from the novel by Christopher Morley, acted by Ginger Rogers. “She is a darling,” Phillip whispered to Melissa beside him. Their cheek bones touched, she knew who was the darling. They were so happy afterwards in a pub, drinking beer. Bert Close played the mouth organ and Poppy sang as they went home through dimmit light. Melissa was standing beside Phillip in the open body, his arm protecting her from jolts. He moved round to see the sunset-bars over the Channel, the only light visible upon land or sea. Hand in hand he walked with her to her aunt’s house, having arranged to meet on the sands in the first light of dawn, and swim in the sea. The sands were set thickly with high poles, against aircraft or gliders landing there.
“We’ll have a petrified forest between us and the world!” she said, kissing him.
“Do you remember our midnight bathe on the Norfolk coast, just before the war? All that phosphorescence, and leaping sea-trout turned to silver?”
“It was so dark I could see you only sometimes, as a silvery streak. A merman.”
“You were Anadyomene.” They lingered in the lane, looking up at the stars.
“Aunt Jan did my horoscope,” she said.
“What was it?”
“Oh, something about my star-group, in conjunction with the planets at my birth. You are Aries, aren’t you? I’m Fire, too.”
“Lucy is Aquarius,” he said.
Melissa did not reply, knowing that Fire and Water were in opposition. He wished he hadn’t said that. They walked on in silence; and when they came to the gate through which she must vanish, kissed spontaneously, whispered good-night, and were dissolved in summer twilight.
All that night he lay beside the pine sapling, buoyant and light of heart, between sleeping and waking. He awakened with the morning star, to lie still, with the thought that he would soon be seeing her. She was coming up the lane, they were walking down to the sands. They were lying side by side in the small waves of a windless morning. She was a white and pink blur seen from underwater, close to the ribbed sand. He drifted back with a spent wave and kissed her feet.
“You’re a darling angel of light,” she said dreamily, as he shook salt from his eyes and looked into her face, before she took his head and held it on her bosom.
Flesh—sea—air—sun—wave—peering gull. No we are not drowned, curious bird of the sea!
Wrapped in towels they walked through shell-crusted poles to the higher sands. The sun was blinding the line of the hill beyond the reedy lake. They sat against the rock where once sat Barley in that summer that had become dream.
“What has become of Felicity?” she said, presently; and he knew what she was thinking.
He told her that Felicity had gone back to live with her mother, after her father had been killed at Dunkirk. “Brother Laurence was with the Red Cross. He was hit by a bomb splinter while looking after the wounded. He worked on until he dropped.”
“A strange man.” After a while she said, “I think Felicity was never truly right for you.”
“She was obsessed by an idea of me—which came between us.”
“I haven’t liked to ask how the farm’s going.”
“I’m putting it in order for the family, after the war. Then I shall make the land and business over to Billy, and be only a writer.”
She said, in a matter-of-fact voice, “After the war I’ll come and look after you, if you like.”
All he could say was, “Oh, thank you.”
“Dear Billy. Is he much like Barley?”
He nodded. She kissed him lightly on the forehead. “Perhaps I should not come between you and Lucy.”
“I have thought I must never come between you and your family.”
“Well, yes—what the family would think has, at times, rather over-awed me. We’re a racketty lot, all the same.”
“I sometimes imagine they think that of me.”
“They do!” she said, looking at him with wide-open eyes. She laughed. “I like you being racketty!”
“I’m not, really. I’m cursed with a puritanical streak.”
She put her arms round him, hid her face on his collar bone. Was she, too, seeking refuge from the world? Her parents—divorced—a rather unpredictable father?
He longed to take care of her; kissed the gentle head, holding it tenderly, a child’s head; feeling its warmth; and its pride. This kind of love was of his true self. He felt commingling warmth from possession of the tender head. Now he could cherish this no-longer proud girl. He sought the tenderness of her breasts, resting his shut eyes against their softness, sighing himself into a sort of levitation with her, bodiless except for the rising life of his blood.
“I’m no longer afraid of you, Melissa!”, he said, stroking her eyebrow with a finger.
“When I was a child I knew I belonged to you, and you to me.” But I must not hurt Lucy, she was thinking.
Small waves were beginning to reflect gleams of the sun now burning above the line of the hill behind them. More gulls lit upon the sands, uttering wild cries to their kin standing by the verge of the sea. They saw a salmon jump and fall back with a splash, as it tried to knock off the sea-lice around its vent. The gulls yakkered, yellow eyes upon the creamy circle where the fish had disappeared. Phillip thought of the noble fish moving, with others of its kind, through salt, estranging sea to the river of their genesis, awaiting the climax of life to break into their blood.
They put on their clothes, naturally as though their bodies had known one another all their lives, and walked over the sand-hills to the lane, where she said, “Oh, before I forget, have you a job in your stables for a land girl? Sarah knows horses.”
“We do need someone for our old clodhoppers—Sheba, Beatrice, and Toby.”
Now they were at the gate.
“Goodbye, Phillip,” she said, smiling uncertainly.
“All farewells shall be swift,” he said, hiding his growing sadness that she would be leaving England, that he might never see her again.
“I hope Sarah turns out well,” she said, and then he was opening the gate, closing it gently—taking her hand and kissing it before going on alone up the lane. She watched him until he came to the bend, where he turned and waved. She waved back, and when he was gone she wept and wept.
*
All the following week, while he worked in the wood, Phillip could feel her presence, with a kind of calm wonder, as though her thoughts on the troopship taking her to the Far East were coming to him through the air. He could feel this presence at times strongly, when he sat at midday, apart from the others, against the trunk of a straight oak he had left as a standard. There, too, she had rested.
His body was now in trim. Hour after hour he threw the axe, or stood at the saw-bench pushing forward the end of a pole held at the other end by Bert Close. This sawing was a delicate affair. The saw-cut must run true; for the least deflection would create resistance for the teeth; a jam might occur, and if part of the blade were crystallised, the 24-inch steel circle might fly to pieces, fragments whizz away with the power almost of shell-fragments.
One afternoon, as he was pushing the stub end of a particularly heavy pole against the screaming teeth, easing it forward evenly—the entire pole weighed about three hundredweight—he felt a blow on his shoulder, and reacting with shock, turned round to see the face of Sarah standing behind him with two young friends, ready, it seemed, to enjoy the delight of surprise on his face.
“O, hullo,” he said, bleakly, thinking, this dark, heavy girl is not sensitive to the feelings of others, and I’ve agreed to take her back to the farm. He switched off the engine of the tractor, they chatted awhile and then they left, he having told Sarah the time and date of departure.
Bert Close told him that he had seen the danger, and was prepared to roll back the pole, away from the saw. “Your nerves must be good, guv’, I was wonderin’ what you’d do. She don’t know these saws,” he
said, while Phillip’s disquiet deepened.
*
In the post which he collected every afternoon on the way up from the woods was a letter from Lucy which showed an endearing consideration. She wrote that the oats on the Scalt had been cut, and enclosed in her letter a spray of Squarehead pedigree wheat which Jonathan had picked on the Bustard field. Ah, little Jonny, he was a good boy, perhaps because he was the youngest. He spoke true, he was reliable! That night Phillip took the ears of corn to show them in the Cutty Sark Inn; and when they praised the heavy, long, red heads, he felt optimistic about his return in a day or two.
On the morning of the last day, Sunday, he bicycled down the winding valley lane and so to the wood, to take a last look at the happy place. The area of their cutting, and the pile of strippings, looked orderly and pleasing, below where he sat, in the midst of the stillness of the green forest. Through tall and crooked trunks of oak saplings came the cries of small woodland birds. From high above the translucent canopy of leaves there fell the whistle of the great brown rabbit hawk soaring over his eyrie. A noise, strangely loud, like a dog scratching in the dead leaves, was made by a blackbird searching for food a score of yards from the path where he sat.
A tray with a dozen small flower-pots had been concealed in the wood, and now he dug up holly seedlings and potted them in leaf-mould, to plant out in the maimed woods of the Bad Lands, in memory of this summer.
So the adventure came to its end. They left at ten o’clock in the morning, taking Sarah with them, and went by way of Flumen Monachorum to see the house Phillip had left to go to East Anglia. A fat man from Singapore was now the tenant. He had been a rubber planter, and looked to have had too many rich meals at Raffles’ hotel. Phillip left the bridge as he came out of the gate, to see who was staring at his river…
They arrived through the dusk at Oxford, where Phillip had arranged to break the journey with old friends. He called at their house in St. Aldates. The welcome given by Martin and Fifi Beausire was warm, as always. Martin gave him a glass of whisky and soda to drink as soon as he walked in the door. He gave them food. Sarah had a bedroom, Phillip slept on the sofa in the sitting-room. Martin was now an usher—he taught English Literature at the Fafnir school, there being no journalism in the war for him.
Before leaving the next day—Bert and Poppy had kipped in the lorry on a parking place—Sarah, Fifi, and Phillip looked round the city of Oxford. The windows of one shop were, to his surprise (at that time of dearth) filled almost to the roof with chocolate! Fifi said it was recently opened by someone from the East End of London. In the windows of that shop were stacked bars of chocolate three inches thick, three inches wide, and two feet long—many hundredweights of it. And chocolate unobtainable elsewhere in rationed Britain! The price was five shillings a pound. Congratulating himself on his luck that there was no queue, Phillip hurried in and bought four pounds of it. The dark-eyed girl who sold it asked if he would care to leave his address, in case he would like some more posted on—any quantity, she said, even a hundred-weight, if he liked. Would he tell other people about it?
When he got home he gave some of the chocolate to the children. They tasted it, and said, “No thanks,” to an offer of more. When he tasted, he discovered the reason. It was chocolate-flavoured coconut-shell ground to a powder. He had four tons of the stuff, in the form of cattle cake, in the barn. He had bought it a year before. The cows wouldn’t eat it. He had paid £4 a ton for it. And now, coloured and flavoured as chocolate, it was being sold in Oxford for £560 a ton.
During his absence, said Lucy, two visitors had come to the farmhouse, and could he guess who they were? They were her brother Tim, and his wife. Tim, she went on, had an apartment outside Southampton, where he was repairing Spitfire aircraft, while his wife was secretary in the same factory. They seemed so happy, she said. “Tim is going to write to you, I think.”
Lucy looked weary. She said if she’d known of his coming back, she would have had the parlour tidied up. Phillip had telegraphed from Queensbridge the day before, saying when he would be arriving with Sarah; but apparently owing to war-time delay the telegram had not arrived. Soon she had boiled eggs and a pot of tea for them, then she went upstairs to prepare a room for Sarah. Afterwards she asked if they would mind if she went to bed early, she was rather tired.
When Sarah was in her room he tapped on Lucy’s door. She was in bed, Jonathan beside her, and David on the floor. Both boys were asleep.
“I didn’t tell you in my letter, for I didn’t want to upset you, but I am afraid something may have happened to Hooly,” Lucy whispered. Mrs. Valiant heard that an owl had been attacking soldiers in the searchlight camp, and someone had shot it.”
Quietly he went down the stairs, and sat in his chair, saddened by Hooly’s fate Had this innocent bird been shot because of him? Or, more likely, shot for the black market—‘a wildfowl’?
In his diary he wrote down the items of The Woodland Venture, Devon, 1941.
£ £
Sold locally, 7 tons = = 16 Labour, 4 weeks = = 16
In field, 20 tons stored = 45 Fuel = = = = = 10
Oddments = = = 4
Present for Poppy (dress). 3
Rent for wood, say = 3
£ 61 £ 36
Then to the farm premises, hoping against hope that he would find the cart-shed neat and tidy. He had had an obsession all the way back in the lorry that if he did not find it tidy, the future of the farm was doomed to failure. He had just crossed over the river-bridge when he saw a brown owl perching on a willow branch by the duckpond. He approached slowly, calling ‘Hooly—Hooly’. To his relief the bird did not fly away, but remained perching there, looking at him. Hooly allowed him to stroke her head, while closing her eyes with pleasure. She liked being scratched about the ears. How handsome she was, in her new browns and blacks and whites. The eyes had that full authentic keenness of perfect natural form. “Hooly” he whispered, for her ears were very sensitive, “Hooly”. She gave him a long stare; a baby chirrup came from the scarce-open beak; then, without a cry, Hooly flew into the twilight, following a dark and silent winged form; while Phillip thought, “I shall make the farm a success”.
*
He did not go on to the hovel. He returned to his cottage. There he opened Tim’s letter, with some reluctance, for he sensed what it would contain. Tim wrote that during his journey by motor from Hampshire he had had the opportunity to compare the quality of crops in the fields he passed with those on Phillip’s farm. He realised what a great improvement had been made during the past four years, for the crops were as good as any he had seen. Now was the time to sell, he declared: why not give up at the coming Michaelmas quarter? The work was too much for him: and only his regard for his sister, he said, who was looking very tired, and the children, had prompted him to write the letter.
“I shall never surrender,” said Phillip, to the image of Melissa.
Part Three
THE DARK AND ABYSM OF TIME
‘The most awful calamity in history has overtaken Europe. Do not ask me who is the enemy—I do not know. It may be ourselves. We do not know what is going to breed out of this war. Forces that have been kept under by civilisation are now unchained. The world will be alive with danger.’
—Field-Marshal Jan Smuts
‘You can only help to find a lasting solution if you have learned to see the other objectively, but, at the same time, to experience his difficulties subjectively.’
—Dag Hammerskjöld
Chapter 9
MATT’S WARNING
On the morning of Thursday, August the fourteenth, 1941, it began to rain as the full moon arose out of the east a few minutes after half-past five. Phillip awakened and was immediately aware of a dull feeling, which deepened with the noise of rain. Then he turned over and tried to go to sleep again, to dream that the rain had stopped; and waking, found it was seven o’clock, and that the rain had stopped. He dressed hurriedly and hastened to the farm pre
mises. Within a few minutes the men arrived, less Steve, the youngest labourer, who had been habitually fifteen to twenty minutes late during the past year. Phillip could imagine him at that moment pulling on his trousers, fag in mouth, to face another day. Phillip had long ceased to ask him to try to be punctual.
“You don’t have to worry,” said Luke, after they had exchanged greetings. “The rain will take the steel out of the barley. We’re at the oats on the top end of the Steep, a lovely crop they are, on the Cold Old Land. Father and me reckon eighteen sacks to the acre.”
“It wor my sheep what done it, master,” put in Matt. “Twice they wor folded on mustard on the Cold Old Land. The oats hev felt the benefit of my sheep, that they hev!”
“Yes, your sheep did some good, Matt.”
“They did, an’ all.”
But was it Matt’s sheep that had done the trick—of growing corn on the Cold Old Land which never before, said the village, had yielded a crop? Phillip had an idea it was more than that. It was now raining again. What could the men do?
“There’s the muck to be got out of the yards,” said Luke.
“But the muck is going on the Scalt when the oats are off, for sugar-beet next season. And it must go by lorry, it’s a long way. The ground is too slippery for the lorry at present.”
“There’s the barn to tidy, and the hovel.”
Phillip felt he could not usefully say anything more about that. They must have tidied both places two score times in the past four years—with inevitable disorder following. “How about the roots on the Lower Brock Hanger? Have they been scored?”
“They was before you went away, if you remember.”
“Have they been horse-hoed?”
“I got no orders about that.”
Before leaving for the West, Phillip had written items in the farm diary, for Lucy and Boy Billy to read daily: underlining the necessity for horse-hoeing, as soon as weather made it possible, the Brock Hanger roots. A letter confirming the necessity, and a telephone talk, had emphasised the need to create a tilth on that biscuit-yellow soil liable to crack when dry, unless the evaporation of sub-soil moisture were stopped by surface layers of loose earth.
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