Hawkeye crowed again. Cows in the yards were lowing softly to their calves in boxes. He knew that Matt had arrived. The calves responded with loud blares. Matt was the middleman, as it were, feeding them with milk from the pail.
Pigs in the stall beside Beatrice were beginning to squeal. They had been weaned from the sow only a week before. They knew by the calves blaring that Matt had arrived. They were clean little beasts. From birth onwards they went as far as possible from the communal bed and playground to do their little jobs. As Phillip looked over the wooden partition, one had just returned and was trying to push itself into the serried elongation of pink and happy warmth. Querulous cries of protest greeted the cold outsider trying to muscle-in.
It stood there, fore-trotters between two pink backs, the image of sensitivity, until the mass-breathing was deep again; then gradually, warily, it pushed itself into a warm place. A smaller pig on the outside was squeezed out, and feeling the cold, gave a shriek of unhappiness. Grunts from the drowsy and comfortable ‘haves’ told the ‘have-not’ to keep quiet.
Beatrice munched on. The lowing of cattle ceased. The pigs lay quiet. Phillip’s desire to sleep returned irresistibly, and with eyes tightly closed and arms outstretched to find the way he moved to the heap of clean barley straw in the empty stall beside Toby, the chestnut gelding. Pushing himself backwards into the heap he turned over, pulled straw over legs against the frost and hid face in arms. He was supposed to be master, yet to oversleep, to be late at stables, was ever a dread accompanying what should have been the night’s rest. Lucy’s old alarm clock’s method of recording the passage of time while standing under his bed was such that his alarm or anxiety was chronic and the clock a mere clacking mechanism so independable that he had to make frequent comparisons of its face by torch-light with the luminous hands of his wristlet watch. Thus in the dark flow of the winter night he would find that the clock had lost ten minutes, or gained half an hour: that having corrected the position of the hands he could sleep for another forty minutes, or four hours, before the need to go down to the stables. But thereafter he would awaken perhaps half a dozen times to reassure himself that he had not over-slept, for the hands of the clock might, or might not, be telling the truth. The cogs were badly worn.
The clock had been a present from Lucy’s Girl Guides when she married Phillip seventeen years before.
It is queer how time passes erratically in these bomber-haunted nights. Sometimes an immensely long period seems to have elapsed since I’ve dropped asleep after leaning out of bed to look at the clock; but it is only seven minutes. I redraw the blanket round my neck and with chin near to knees for warmth try to convince myself that I need not worry about waking for several hours. Yet it is of little use to try to order oneself to be tranquil. The fear of being late rules my mind, so sleep is snatchy and broken.
Many times I have wondered how I can get a teamsman to look after the horses, but always comes the countering thought that I have no cottage to offer. Of the three service cottages I rebuilt before the war two are occupied by families which do not work on the farm. The widow of the old pensioner, and spare-time gardener, Mrs. Hammett, lives in one; Mrs. Valiant, with her sixty-six-year-old husband and daughter-in-law and her grand-children, in another. Steve has the third. The rent of each cottage is eighteen pence a week, I as landlord paying rates.
Can I apply to the War Agricultural Executive Committee to have my two older tenants turned out, under wartime urgency? I dismiss the idea as soon as it comes. Also I am apprehensive about a new teamsman.
Supposing he turns out to be obstructive like the old one—over the feeding of hay, for example? Just before the war, hay being short, I asked Luke to see that the horses were rationed to fourteen pounds of hay each a day. He demurred that he did not know what a stone of hay was. I showed him what fourteen pounds looked like, in bulk.
“About this amount,” I said, holding it in my arms, having first weighed it, tied by a piece of string, on a spring balance.
It made no difference. As before, the racks were stuffed hard full, more like twenty pounds for each horse, every night. The horses never ate it. The hay remained there until it was stale. Even when Riversmill, famous painter of horses, visited the stables one day and told Luke that horses liked their hay fresh—and I told Luke afterwards that the painter had bred horses for years, and that he was a Suffolk man—it made no difference. And although I asked Luke always to water his horses before feeding them—to avoid stoppage, or colic—he invariably watered the horses after feeding when he thought I was not about.
Luke wanted his way and I wanted mine. We’ve not had one case of colic since I started farming. Before I came, Luke said, his horses often had stoppages. I told him I had, during the hard winter on the Somme in 1916–17, and again all during Third Ypres, looked after and led into action files of light-draught horses and mules, and knew all about colic.
My words were spilled on the wind.
Luke was afraid of Sheba the black mare. He let her stand in her stall day after day, unworked, until her hind legs had swelled by overeating that dark-green, protein-rich clover-hay. Kidneys overloaded with protein cause swelled legs, or gout, I told him.
‘Her legs was wrong when she come’—and that decided the matter. The teamsman has been gone nearly eight weeks now. We are disastrously late with sugar-beet lifting. The factory at Fenton is closing soon. Years before, when pride of work came before conceit of money, a teamsman would not be happy if his leathers and brasses were not regularly soaped and polished. When I began farming it was a rare teamsman indeed who would clean and polish, after grooming, the brass and leather of his team’s harness. The ordinary teamsman never touched harness between taking-off and putting it on his horses. Human muscles and energy wear out; vitality is expendable; a man, like a horse, can do so much and no more; if he attempts the more, on poor food, he will ‘be all wore-up’ and die the sooner.
Phillip was pulling more straw on top of his legs when a roar was upon the stable building and he saw in the top of the half-open stable door a glowing orange light curving through the air, then another, another, another—rising over the dark fringe of pines on the hill-crest. The chatter of the guns was absorbed by the vaster roar of black wings, three pairs of black wings—one behind another —banking steeply to dive over Pewitts where the Searchlight Camp was sited. Red streaks like a Morse message came from the sky.
The German tracers seemed to have a flatter trajectory than those from the Lewis gun of the camp. Then the aircraft were gone, skimming the meadows and the marshes eastwards to the sea.
He went back to his hole in the straw. Soon near his head was a rustling and a faint mee-ow sounding near his ear. One of the stable cats had a litter of kittens under the manger, and when he lay down she crept to him for warmth and companionship. Purr-purr-purr against his heart. He loved her, loved her——
*
“Are you all right, Dad?” enquired a voice. “Cor, they were what you call tisky, weren’t they?”
“Hullo, Peter.”
Blessed moment—to hear that voice!
Collars, bridles, breechings to be lifted off creosoted pegs and put on; horses led out and down the slippery concrete slab, round the Corn Barn, and to the hovel rimed white under the pines and beeches rilling half the sky above the chalk quarry.
“Back, Toby my dear, back—back!”
Toby stood between the shafts of his tumbril, shafts so heavy to lift, higher, higher—“Oh, be quick, Peter! Hook the chain!”
After a rest, Beatrice was hooked into her shafts, and the horses were stumping past the gateway, heads down for the hard pull up the gulley.
They must have looked to be a couple of spectral vagabonds passing the sentry by the searchlight camp, farmer-carter wearing old bandless felt hat, buttonless tweed coat held together with binder twine, strips of hessian-sacking spiral’d on lower trouser’d legs against the mud of a midday thaw. Behind, leading second tumbril, followed
carter’s lad, old flying helmet on head, greatcoat over thin, hand-me-down overalls covering war-time utility suit.
Arriving at the Nightcraft field, they stood still in the field grey with hoar-frost, awaiting the men.
There they waited, stamping feet, patting horses’ necks; waiting. The topping of the sugar-beet was ‘taken’ work, so Jack the Jackdaw, Steve, and Powerful Dick were more or less their own masters.
When after half an hour no one had appeared, Phillip sent Peter down the hill to his breakfast, and tried to sleep standing between two unmoving horses.
The world was silent, the only movement that of frosty vapour arising from the horses, and a flight of gulls in formation passing darkly across the south-eastern sky. His watch said it was five minutes after eight o’clock.
After years of lifting, hauling, pitching, pulling, straining—hay, straw, roots, cornsacks, mortar, bricks, timber, plough, harrow, roll—the habit of immobility when resting came natural to both labouring animal and man. They shared the warmth of movement up the gulley, each breath adding to the fume hanging over the field.
*
A scurrying of bicycle tyres on rimed gravel, a crackling of thin ice-sheets covering pot-holes in the roadway. Poppy had arrived. Soon another dark shape appeared, wheeling slower, alighting heavier, walking with limp beside his bicycle. It was Powerful Dick, recently returned from his three weeks unleave of absence, after doing a little building job in South Devon. It was good that he had come back, for the sugar factory was closing very soon.
Five minutes later another bicycle appeared, with the red glow of a fag. Steve had come. He was punctual today; but then he was his own master. The work was taken work—so much an acre, to be divided among them as they liked.
Lemon streaks cleft the black of the eastern sky. Jack the Jackdaw was standing by his heap of sacks in the hedge. Like Dick, he began to wrap lengths of pulp bag round ankles and calves. Sacks were tied apron-like around waists. The team was ready. They moved to where they left off the previous evening.
Phillip led Beatrice to the centre of the field, with the mare Sheba as trace horse. Poppy lead Toby. As the first beet were tossed into the tumbril, a black Wellington night-bomber clattered by overhead, low over the trees, coming in from the North Sea. They could see jagged holes in its fuselage and wings. One of its air-screws was motionless, what they call feathered.
When it had racket’d away, they went on with the work. Each man stooped, and with beaked iron-point of small curved topping knife snicked up a parsnip-shaped root, took it in his left hand‚ struck swiftly to remove crown and tops, and tossed it into the tumbril. Bomp, bump, bomp, on thick chestnut planks.
Were the yield good there might be twelve tons to the acre. More likely there was about ten tons, which meant anything from twenty-five thousand to thirty-two thousand roots. Phillip calculated thirty thousand stoopings, or ten thousand each man, with a like number of left-hand tossings into tumbril, for each acre. But he tired of these calculations; and forgot what he was doing.
The first tumbril was full. He led Sheba the trace-horse, attached by chains to the shafts in which Toby was fixed, to the dump by the roadside. There the haulier’s lorry would come later, for all to be lifted again. The tumbril lumbered over old wheel-ruts to the dump, where he threw off the roots with a nine-tine fork, each tine set with a smooth iron blob at tip to prevent it sticking in the roots. Neat piles were made. The roadside roots must be built up like bricks to prevent any falling on the road.
Meanwhile Poppy’s tumbril was being filled. Roz, back from the North, joined them. When Phillip’s tumbril returned, Sheba the trace-horse was taken off and the chains fixed to Beatrice’s tumbril, which then went to the dump. This continued until Peter returned from breakfast to help unloading, and Phillip went down to the farmhouse for breakfast; after which he walked back to the field and relieved Peter and Poppy. Poppy left to spread muck on another field, Peter to the dentist in the market town with his mother, in the weekly ’bus, so Roz led a horse.
Thus the work continued, with half an hour off for dinner, until red streaks of sunset barred the darkening west, and partridges called across furrows of the ploughed fields. Phillip sent the children home. The white owl fanned down the hedge for mice. Searchlights flicked on their violet beams, loud voices called. Once again the black night-bombers began to drone across the darkening sky and away east over the sea to Germany.
It was heavy work. The weekly rations were insufficient for the men. Their drink was a bottle of cold tea, rust-coloured with a little milk; their food, slices of bread from which the energising germ or ‘sharp’ of the wheat-berry had been removed, with a smear of ration margarine and nondescript ration jam, and perhaps a lump of cheese and half a dozen pickled onions.
*
By the light of the moon rising above the mists of the marshes Poppy, Dick and Steve bicycled home to their tea, the substantial meal of the day. Jack the Jackdaw helped Phillip unhitch the horses from the shafts, the tumbrils being left by the hedge. He lifted his sidebag off one tumbril, swung it over the sails of Beatrice, and walked down the gulley, followed by Sheba, Toby and Phillip. While the horses drank thirstily at the water-tank, Jack removed his sidebag from the wooden horns secured to the collar of Beatrice, and shuffled away home, with a throaty ‘Good-night’. The horses sucked steadily.
Afterwards the trio lumbered in through the doorway and each waited in its stall for its feed. Phillip removed harness, hung it on the pegs, then mixed the feeds in the sieve, and so to the mangers, where the trio munched happily.
About an hour later, after resting with the little cat in the straw, she purring and loving his fingers among her kittens, Phillip shogged off home along the path worn through the rough grass to the farmhouse. The village was in darkness, all windows blacked-out like a place of the dead. His footfalls clattered on the road, and to the frozen gravel of his cottage yard. The black-out curtains for the lower room had not yet been hung, so there was no bulb in the electric-light holder, for reasons of safety.
He was used to finding his way in darkness among bacon-pickling tubs, boxes, cider barrels, carpenter’s bench and other obstacles, to his stairway. Sitting on the lower tread, he removed the wrappings about his legs, then boots and jacket, before walking in slippers over the gravelled yard to the bathroom, there to remove all clothes and enjoy the refreshment of soap and water.
In clean shirt, woollen jersey, trousers, and jacket, he entered the parlour; and with a kind of heavy despair realised that at his entry the voices of children had fallen silent. These little creatures were affected by his moods, as, a generation ago, he was affected by the moods of another parent such as himself. Nevertheless, an unreasonable mood persisted with his fatigue: was this the effect, the reward of sacrificing oneself as an artist, for the sake of the family when harder times fell upon England? But he knew such thoughts for what they were—mental feelings of fatigue.
After supper, alone in the leather chair, he heard merry voices in the next room, where before the fire sat Lucy and Roz mending and patching clothes already worn out, the mother happy with her children, Eric the cat purring among them. He helped himself to a glass of rum, and offered a drop to the tame bat hanging on the beam. She refused to be awakened. Sensible Pipistrelle!
*
The moon was high in the sky, pantiles of cottage roofs glistened with hoar. The full hard frost called black would come after Christmas. They were behind with the ploughing. There was yet time to get the work done before Siberian wind turned all to stone. So on with woollen sweater and leather coat, thick stockings and rubber thigh-boots, horse-hide gloves and flying helmet. With flask of hot milk and rum secure in haversack, he crossed the river, and up the hill to where the tractor stood under its stiff canvas cover and filled the radiator from the can below. The water was filmed with ice. Having swung the engine he waited for oil to circulate, and then set off down the furrow.
The tractor moved slowly up and d
own one side of the field. The shadows of the high moon fell short.
Pigeon Oaks wood was dark, the field spectral.
Timid Wat the hare came limping down his path, and found it suddenly ended. He sat up, his ears tall in the moonlight. He fled. Phillip was alone once more, in the immense night of men. What of the steppes of Russia? The icy seas of the Archangel run? The deserts of North Africa? He was fortunate, he was a civvy, an old man on a tractor, his own master, who could go home to sleep whenever he wanted to.
The tractor moved slowly up and down the middle of the field. The shadows of the moon slanted long. The cold was beginning to strike through him, to find his bones, but he kept on, up and down the far side of the field. He was a farmer, he was behind with the work, his job was to provide food. What else was there to do but work, until one died?
The moon declined to the west, the shadows were longer, and vague.
The white owl returned, to hover over its mice-runs. Nothing stirred under its gaze, for the tracks made by the feet of vole and mouse were turned under.
The shadows of the moon were lost in darkness as the orb sank feebly to the west, where frost hung thicker.
Now the bombers were returning from their long flights over Sylt, Heligoland, and Baltic. The tractor-driver’s mind was fretful. It began to churn up old mortifications and vain desires. The flickering snake below the left eye touched the furrow turning behind, the steel breast was whispering through a patch of gravel as he slewed round to watch the turning earth.
And slowly he was being dragged.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 23
