Rain fell every day. Soon the roads were worse than they had been in the winter of 1936/7, when Phillip had first viewed the dereliction of the Bad Lands.
He asked for an order limiting speed of the monsters to 5 m.p.h. They roared to and fro as before. The loamy gravel Phillip and his team had dug and spread four years previously—nearly a thousand tons of it in under two months—was scattered; grass churned to blackness; branches of trees everywhere torn down; doors lifted off iron hooks from stable and granary, for use as washing perches beside the river; tool kit of the Silver Eagle—which stood, with a ‘new’ (made out of bits and pieces from knackers’ yards) engine in a bay of the hovel—stolen. Also—minor disaster now that he had to rise early to feed the horses—someone had pinched a new alarum clock for which he had waited during ten months. Why had he left it in the back of the car? Lucy’s clock (borrowed by Phillip) was faulty; more alarmed than alarming, in the sense that it was liable to panic and go off at any time, irrespective of setting. Several times Phillip was awakened before midnight, imagining it was time to get up.
Matt said the ewes would take fright easily and slip their lambs if something was not done. He had to keep them on the paddock, which was a swamp. It was a Passchendaele autumn—rain, rain, rain. Several ewes were limping. Matt pared their feet, treated the rot with ointment, but the wet got them down. More were feeding on knees than on feet.
The Aberdeen-Angus bull and his cows had to remain on Denchman Meadow, which was under water. What had been a green and level sward was now a mess of hoof-holes—an aerial photograph of the Salient in 1917.
No requisition order had been served.
On the last day of October Phillip helped to sack up, in the Corn Barn, one hundred and six coomb of Steep barley, and then to lift the two-hundredweight sacks on to the lorry taking the load to the railway station.
It was only a ten and a half ton load but for my part I felt bleak with weariness afterwards, while in my throat sharp fragments of barley-harns were lodged. In the 5 a.m. darkness of the morning I could hardly make myself get up to tend the horses. After feeding them, instead of the usual doze in the straw until the day’s work began, I went back to bed, leaving a note for Boy Billy to sack up the other heap of sold barley if the weather were too wet for sugar-beet. Billy came into my room soon after daylight and said that there were no sacks. They must be collected at the railway station. Should he fetch them with the trailer and tractor, while the men tidied up the cart-shed?
The tractor’s top speed was only five miles an hour. The station was four miles away. I could not ask Lucy to drive the Silver Eagle because she was overworked, it being washing-day. I got up and collected three hundred-weight of corn-sacks, afterwards returning to the farmhouse to doze without rest in my armchair before the fire, until noon, when I went to bed again. Some infection in the throat has turned septic, and I have a temperature.
The early November days are dark, chill, murky. Boy Billy feeds the horses for me.
Later:
After thirty-six hours of fretting in bed, cold despite electric fire, I got up and walked round the farm, feeling to be the ghost of former living. Unable to face the watery desolation of the ruined roads I went up to the arable, averting my head from the undersized swedes and mangolds of the Lower Hanger, and so came to the Squarehead pedigree wheat above, which looked well up. Thank God I had my own way and got the seed in early. On the way down again I passed Jack the Jackdaw and Matt thatching the meadow-hay stack on the causeway between Home and Denchman Meadows. The bitumenised paper laid on the stack in June by Bert Close and myself was already rotten. So much for advertisements in farming journals. So much for ‘theory’, I told Matt.
“Don’t you a-worry,” replied the stockman, kindly. “Only a little bit on the top will spoil.”
Dear Matt, I felt I had been too hard on him. I should have buried his cast-out rats, and Lucy’s chickens (dead ones) myself. I am still able to endure ‘hard graft’. All this is cushy after those two winters—1914 and 1917—in Flanders.
Repassing the Duck Decoy, I saw two soldiers sitting on top of the haystack which Matt and the Jackdaw had just rethatched. They had clambered upon it, leaving broken depressions in the new wheat-reed. The heavy rains would drain into the holes made by foot and knee, and rot the hay. The stack must be re-thatched again.
The two soldiers, friends maybe, were enjoying a quiet moment away from the war, perhaps sharing boyhood memories of a lost life which had receded, maybe for ever. I had not the heart to ask them to get down. Also my throat hurt me when I spoke. I waved and hurried on, to see on the paddock what was left of my little ewe-flock—a collection of bow-backed, limping, and prostrate sheep: like soldiers come out of battle.
In bed.
The road before the Corn Barn is a chain of lagoons. More gate-posts have been bashed into, cracked off. They lie where they have fallen, splintered or pushed askew. In my low state—actively girding against the war and all that the war is, both effect and cause, in the human beings about me—the condition of the farm seemed to be symbolic of urbanised mankind. Uncontrollably to my mind arises the crater-zones of the Passchendaele morasses: tens of thousands of acres of sky-white water and mud extending to a low and serrated horizon: an ocean-storm of upheaved earth, scrolled and detonated by shell-bursts: a horror of enslaved living and the sprawled abandonment of German-British death.
Cold and hollow, set in a wasting despair, I lie to bed; but not to rest. I must work. I must write of things I’ve known before they are lost in death’s dateless night. Here my pen falters. What can I record, but the bare outlines of facts? That nine ewes have died on the swamp paddock in one week. The survivors feed on their knees to avoid pain in fevered feet; soon they will lose heart, lie down, and give up.
I am fortunate: I have a billet: I can sleep (perchance to die) out of the cold. But if I am to die, let it be in the cold, in the rain, among my old comrades. That is how my mind works. It’s hell to be a civilian in war.
Boy Billy had to listen to much disordered utterance from his father as he stood silent at the foot of the bed, to receive orders in the morning, to make his report at night. Upon his slight frame, clad in near-ragged overalls, the burden of the farm was now fallen. Phillip told him that it did not matter what he did, or what went wrong, so long as he reported always straitly any accident or error: the truth, the facts. But too many words from Phillip had already beset Billy: words beyond his world: words insisting, insisting, insisting that it was a rare thing among men first to be able to see the truth, and then to learn how to tell it.
Phillip knew, of course, that his ranting monologues came from a sense of guilt because he, a failure, had landed the family in this mess. In vain, during long hours of temperature hovering between 100 and 103, he was haunted by thoughts of his own lack of courage to act as the author of Walks and Talks Abroad had acted, when confronted by critics who had never been soldiers, in the House of Commons. Lt-Col. Sir Arnold Wilson, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.P., had striven, before the war, for clarity between Germany and Britain and Italy, and thereby had been disesteemed by those who had never been tested in the flame of battle. At the outbreak of war this trained soldier had joined the R.A.F., qualified as a rear-gunner in a bomber, and fallen in flames in the summer of 1940, aged fifty-six.
*
On Saturday Phillip got up and went to Yarwich market. There he learned that barley—the one cereal that was not controlled—had risen to eighty-four shillings a coomb for fine; seventy-five shillings for medium; seventy shillings for common or tail. He had already bought his next year’s seed at the end of October, for seventy shillings a coomb—once-grown pedigree Archer-Spratt from the Cambridge Experimental Station—and wondered immediately afterwards if he had been unwise, for his hunch had been that the price would go up. A few moments after the purchase he had spoken to a merchant acquaintance and asked him if it were unwise to buy seed then. The merchant had replied that he wouldn’t; the top pr
ice of seventy shillings then ruling would not hold when more barley came into the market, he declared. Perhaps it was policy to say this, lest farmers held back their grain for the price to harden: as it had indeed. (In a few months the price had risen to 110S. a coomb).
He drove back in the Silver Eagle. Despite heavy leather coat and flying helmet, he was deathly cold. Once in the parlour, however, sitting by his hearth, Lucy bringing tea and herself to sit beside him, it seemed a marvellously pleasant room, enclosed within white-washed walls supporting chestnut beam over his head whereon horse brasses and pewter mugs hung. All was harmonious: the walnut cupboard and gate-leg table, armchairs and rush-mats on the red tiled floor; Lucy’s silver tray on the polished refectory table. Before his slippered feet arose flames from three-foot long bull-thorns laid across the open hearth. The children came in to greet him, Lucy so gentle and ready to smile. He had had two large whiskies to drink, and felt a strange elation. His mind was floating free: he understood every point of view, especially those directly opposed to his own. If only he were free to write his novels, he would bring clarity to occluded minds—he sat still for so long that Lucy was alarmed.
“You go to bed, my dear,” her quiet voice said over his shoulder, “and I’ll bring you up David’s hot-water bottle.”
“I don’t need one, really. You mustn’t deprive the children.”
“I’m amply hot at night, Dad, I mean chooky!”
“It’s the only one that doesn’t leak. I’ve tried to get one for you at several places, but they say there aren’t any to be bought just now. However, we’ll manage somehow. Don’t you worry. There now—” she saw tears in his eyes—tears for David’s generosity; and grace.
*
There was no rest in bed: he was a failure, part of the European failure, a continent self-disgraced—his body the deteriorating body of England which could but find truth through himself, now that Hereward Birkin was in prison.
Down, down to blackness spreading into the very springs of life: and to escape from this pollution, it seemed that to be dead was the only honourable state. No, that was not the truth! His own condition was but the inevitable dead-end of egotism and selfishness!
*
At times the room swayed one way; and then not so; but it swayed again. The two sides of his mind regarded one another with mutual condemnation. Was this the beginning of schizophrenia? What could he do to be saved? How could he renounce the resurgent ideas, the phoinix ideas, which had become part of his true life ever since the Great War? Had cousin Willie ‘possessed’ him on that day, years ago, when he had walked upon the Burrows by the estuary of the Two Rivers with Lucy, then a shy and virginal girl? Had he begun to go wrong then?
Again if he had been the selfish egoist some people said he was, surely he would have devoted all his energies for himself, and so made a satisfying career? No, that was not true; conceit had distorted his true power. But was it only conceit which had driven him to set out upon the narrow way, to be a writer of the truth? Yet was not all truth relative? To believe a personal truth to be universal, was not that arrogance, self-conceit?
What could he do to be saved? Cease to care what happened? His anguish gave way to despair, that the blind were ruining England, as they were ruining his farm; that he must persist in demanding what was right and just, while he lived.
The doctor came and gave me prontosil, saying I must rest. Despite recurring thoughts of wishing to die, my feelings are not always in dejection. In calmer moments I realize that my mood is due in part to overstrain and lack of sufficient sleep, aggravated by this infection.
Later
Prontosil has done the job. I am back at work. On this my first day out, while I was watching thin beasts moodily eating chaffed barley straw and sugar beet pulp in the yards, David approached with a side-bag of breakfast, together with the mail. What a kind little boy he is. And how thoughtful of Lucy.
There was a letter from the District Claims Officer which Phillip read as he swallowed a cheese soufflé.
With reference to your telephone call of yesterday, I have been in touch with the Sub-Area Quartering Commandant and he was unaware that any part of your farm was in use by Military Personnel and steps are being taken immediately to enquire into the circumstances of this occupation, and to regularise the matter by formal requisition if he is satisfied the occupation warrants such action.
Formal requisition! So the enquiry might result in the farm being taken over as a permanent practice area. That would solve his problem. He could become a writer again. But how would the family live?
So set have I become in my task, a petty Sisyphus, I can see no life beyond that of building up the farm. All former living by now seems to be dissolved away. If my farm is to go, I will go with it. I am worth more dead. There are my two life assurance policies for £1,000 each. I can rejoin the army, in the ranks.
To other eyes the arrival of hundreds of soldiers on the farm provided an opportunity for advancement awaited for more than fifty years. Josiah Harn, the smallholder, having secured the swill for himself and sons, had put up a shed made of beaten sheets of empty bitumen drums on his 2-acre holding. Within this building pigs were being fattened.
Harn was a man of inflexible purpose. Tall and upright in his sixty-odd years, blue-eyed and lean with austere living and strict attention to business, he was to be seen driving every week to market in his gig, hammer-cloth over knees in cold weather. At other times his son drove the same pony, harnessed to a motor-tyred cart containing swill tins, from camp to camp. Always polite, always with raised fore-finger to cap on passing Phillip, these two were building up on pigs as well as cows-in-milk.
The invalid, still weak and a little tremulous, went for a walk above the river. Near the eastern boundary he saw Josiah Harn by the hedge of his small-holding, staring at the neighbouring field, where thistles struggled with foul grass, and shepherd’s purse weed denoted lack of lime.
“Look yew at it!” Phillip heard him yelling, as he shook his fist like a prophet of the Old Testament. “Look yew at Hubert’s dirty land! What do Hubert want all this land for? Harn’t he got enough already, with a thousand acres on his own farm? What do he want these fields for? Look how he tills them! And I hev only two acres! It oughtn’t to be allowed!”
Pretending not to have seen him, Phillip returned the way he had come. He met the Rector, who got off his bicycle to ask how he was. To cheer Phillip, he told him he had seen what he believed to be a rare crested lark on his meadows. But Phillip could hardly bear to hear what he had to say, and with an excuse hurried on.
*
Before the visit of the Claims Officer he went round with a notebook to write down details of damage. The water in the lower road still reflected the sky. The granary door used by soldiers as a pier for drawing buckets of water, had floated off down the river. Of the ewes, denied the dry Home Hills, only four remained. Seven gate-posts were smashed. The gulley road up to the arable was impassable, being a foot deep in mud. The pit, whence the best sand in the district for building was sometimes taken, was filled to the top with broken bottles, tins, garbage, and the carcasses of skinned sheep. The undergrowth in the woods was trodden. Branches of trees torn and chopped off for firewood. Apparently soldiers still preferred privacy to the use of latrines as much as they did in the old war, when every little crater of the pitted surface of a battlefield in summer had its relic of meditation, a place where one might, for a few moments, avoid the war.
Or had the Commanding Officer forgotten to order the digging of latrines? From Phillip’s point of view the woods were foul to walk in. Wire fences were trodden down. Hen houses smashed for firing. Hens disappeared. Scores of small iron screw-pickets, used for tents, remained in the grass at the woods’ edge. Obviously no officer had been detailed to look round before departure. Billy said he had seen soldiers in the workshop, scrounging. All the remaining bottles of wine were gone. Bits of paper and empty tins lay about the Home Hills. Sacks taken,
and straw. Phillip said bitterly that the Commanding Officer of this rabble had left with his illusions unshattered—there had been no complaints. What a bloody mob!
*
A subaltern of the Claims Department came out from Norwich to look around with Phillip. In the back of the camouflaged military-car lay a .410 gun. He asked Phillip who had the shooting.
“I have the shooting in hand.”
With a laugh the lieutenant left the gun in the back of the car.
“This is too much for me to deal with,” he said, when they had gone round. “I think I’ll tell ‘Big Chief’.”
This individual arrived three days later by appointment. Phillip’s throat was bad again, he was feverish. He got out of bed with deep reluctance ten minutes before ‘Big Chief’ was due to arrive.
As he walked in a stately manner up the paved path Phillip saw through the lattice window that ‘Big Chief’ was tall, with red face and jowl, supercilious expression, cold pale eyes, long nose. He opened the door for him, said “How do you do.” The visitor came in, bending under the arch, and without any reply put hat and leather-covered cane on the table.
His highly-polished field-boots, his cane and uniform, together with the Victory Medal of 1918, were from the first war. Slowly he removed doeskin gloves, tossed them negligently into the hat on the table. Then turning abruptly to Phillip said, “Now for your case. Have you a claim made out?”
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 20
