The left arm of the leather coat, worn thin at the elbow, had caught on one of the wheel-spuds. Eye-snake and furrow were one and the busted moon queerly above. It was all happening very slowly.
The tractor was going on alone. He managed to get to it before it reached the hedge, and close the throttle. Then draining the radiator he clumped down the hill to the stables, to lie in his hole in the straw, while with delicate steps the little cat came from her kittens to purr out love against his throat. He could hear the crowing of Hawkeye. Then the belving of Molly, Polly, Cherry and Dolly, the answering blares of their calves. The squealing of pigs. Matt had arrived. He fell asleep; and then it was time to get to his feet, to water, feed, and groom the horses; after which, with eyes squeezed tight, back into the straw, and the warmth of the cat, purring, purring with love for him.
Chapter 14
‘WAR AND PEACE’
Before him a fire of ‘gre’t ol’ bull-thorns’, as Jack the Jackdaw called the logs of hawthorn. Lucy had roasted a ham in the Virginian manner, covered with molasses and stuck all over with cloves. The long polished table reflected the faces of four boys in descending order of magnitude against the wall, Jonathan the smallest beside Father, Boy Billy near the door, ready, as he declared with a merry smile, to make his getaway should ‘Dad get tisky’.
It was Christmas Eve, there was a feeling of relief, even of gaiety in the air. They had been working as a family team during the past three days. Billy, Peter, and Phillip had carted between them fifty tons of sugar-beet in that time. The crop would soon be off the field. The work had gone easily. Billy and Peter got on well together; and in Peter’s company Phillip always felt at ease. He was a gentle, soft-spoken boy, with a quiet courage and determination that were entirely unobtrusive. So the three worked easily together. Perhaps it was because, of the three, Peter was the only one essentially unselfish. Billy had always felt a little outside his step-mother’s family, although Lucy loved him as one of her own children.
For their lunch under the hedge they ate scones of wheaten flour ground in the High Barn mill, baked by Lucy and spread with butter and honey. Scones made out of their Squarehead wheat were fortifying, like steak.
Phillip felt again and again a continued contentment when he ate them in place of the devitalised grey bread from the village bakery: no hollow feeling, no sudden exhaustion with consequent over-running of the imagination upon work undone. And now it was Christmas Eve, there were chains of newspaper cut and coloured by Jonathan—no other sort was now in the shops. The small boy had draped them round the ceiling, with holly and mistletoe. The shaded lights on the table revealed everyone to be eating happily.
On Christmas morning they went to church. No bells rang out from among the trees at the top of the street. Bells were for invasion warning only. A last-minute indecision, as footfalls receded up the street—what hats should Billy and he wear? One should wear a hat to church, surely? There were a bowler, and three felt hats.
“I’ll wear the bowler, if you, Boy Billy, will wear the dark brown felt. It will, I think, enhance your fair thick hair, the vivid colour in your cheeks, the dreamy blue of your eyes.”
He often saw Barley in those eyes, but distantly. Billy guarded his eyes now, when he saw Phillip.
“How about it, Boy Billy?”
“No thanks,” he muttered.
“Well then, this one?”
“Must I wear a hat?”
The lads of the village, the tractor-boys on the wall down by Horatio Bugg’s of an evening, beside the rusty petrol-pump covered by a sack ever since the scares of 1940—the long-haired youths who dreamed of becoming fighter pilots—did not wear felt hats with brims. Such hats were worn only by what they called snobs, which might be anybody who didn’t lean against a tarred flint wall or kick his heels after the day’s work on the brick parapet of the bridge, and talk with envy of the big pay-packets of the workers on the Henthorp airfield. Billy didn’t want to wear a damned hat. David, the spiritually percipient, the merry clown, the boy who as a child always gave away his sweets to other children in record time, now made a suggestion to save further embarrassment.
“You wear it, Dad, you look very posh in it, really you do.”
Rosamund, dark and beautiful and coming into bud, beside Lucy in a blue coat and skirt and beret with grouse-foot set in silver, pinned to the side—relic of departed days—had already left with Jonathan—for Lucy played the organ which a village boy with a head shaped like a mangold-wurzel, hair like barley straw, and eyes like two flowers of speedwell pumped up in full view of the congregation. The felt hats remained on the table; and hurrying up the village street bare-headed, they passed an old lady being helped by another, and slid into their pew and to their knees just in time, for the choir was coming from the vestry.
The Rector is away, prostrate from another stroke. I wonder how much the apathy of the village had helped to wear him out. He was only about fifty years old. He was a Norfolkm’n, an expert on the dialect, yet his lectures to the Women’s Institutes had aroused criticism, since he charged a small fee which went to the Church Restoration Fund.
“What for do he think we want to hear him talk our talk?”
Once a naval Chaplain, he had given me his opinion, when Russia was attacking Finland, that England should declare war on Russia, as we had on Hitler. Before the war, he had been keen on getting up a village cricket team, as in the old days—but with no success.
The Rector found opposition everywhere. If he visited the cottages he was a nosey parker; if he kept away, what did he take the money for? He didn’t ’arn it. Now he is ill; and we have an army Chaplain, who pronounces a number of stock reasons why the war is a Crusade, a Holy War, a War to end War, a War to make a Better World. Verily the tears of Jesus are never dry, I think, quiescent in the chill and slightly mouldy atmosphere of the old church. In one parish the Rector falls, before his time. In the sweeping sands of North Africa; in the sweltering jungles of Malaya; on the seas and in the air young men are falling before their time. What do the other members of the congregation think? Judging by their reserved, passive, and subdued demeanours, they too are withdrawn into themselves, enduring life in the chill of their bones.
Verily the tears of Jesus are immortal.
Phasianus colchicus upside down, wingless, tailless, headless upon a dish beside his brother; No. 6 nicked lead pellets in the flesh; roast potatoes, cut to half an inch thickness, and soft-baked with brown dripped fat; bread sauce with onion, brussel sprouts, slices of bacon crisp from basting the barley-plump breasts of the birds. All from the Bad Lands, with the whole-wheat bread, honey, butter milk and jams of Lucy’s art. Also elderberry wine which must be sipped suspiciously, for while certain acid was necessary for car-batteries it wasn’t altogether good inside the human belly.
“You been at this vintage elderberry poison again, Peter?”
“Who, me, sir?”
“Yes, you, sir.”
“I can’t bestways remember, sir.”
“For belly’s sake you’d bestways leave these bottles alone, sir.”
“Very good, sir.”
Peter was wearing a hand-me-down khaki uniform of his school Cadet Corps.
Inevitably David, the conciliator, must chip in. “They are screw-top bottles, Father, and they might have burst if Peter hadn’t opened them to let the gas out, sir.”
“Ah, good show, Peter. M’yes. That reminds me, sir, I found my gallon cask of port-wine, laid down for Boy Billy’s twenty-first birthday, empty in the farm workshop.”
“So did I,” said Billy. “I found the barrel empty when I lifted it the other day.”
“After lifting it up, or before, sir?”
“No, Boy Billy didn’t drink it, sir!” cried David. “Nor did Peter. Peter is really a teetotaller, he doesn’t like wines of any kind, do you, Peter?”
“Ooh, I dunno,” murmured Peter, going pink in the face.
“Oh well, everybody thieves these da
ys. It’s all part of the new world we’re fighting for. Seriously, why didn’t you tell me about it before, Boy Billy?”
“Peter and I found it was empty only the other day,” said Roz, serenely. She added, “You know what soldiers are, Dad—scroungers, just as you were in your war.”
“Ah. You have a point there—a nice point—as young barristers say. H’m. Ha!”
Phillip had been acting all the time; but the younger children weren’t sure if he was serious or not. Roz had come to the rescue: just in case.
“Sir, tell us about the old days, please do, Dad!” cried David.
“Yes, do tell us, sir, please, Dad,” echoed Jonny.
“Please do, sir,” came very politely from Billy at the bottom of the table.
“You’re all joking again!”
“We’re not!” they cried.
“Tell us what you had to eat when you were a boy, before the first war,” said Roz, adding, “everyone is interested in food.”
“Very well. When I was a boy I used to have to go to church on Sundays with my mother. I did not like going to church, it was dull and uninteresting, but there was always the relief of after-church to look forward to. On Christmas Day there was turkey and plum pudding, ginger and raisin wine, oranges, apples, bananas, nuts, bon-bons, muscatels, Carlsbad plums, crystallised fruits, dates, figs, boxes of fancy biscuits, tangerines, almond nuts, Guauva jelly, with other goodies on the table.”
“Coo, did you have all those things to eat?” asked Jonny.
“I can only just remember having a banana, but it was ever so long ago,” said David. “Do tell us more about when you were a boy, sir.”
“I’m off,” cried Boy Billy, and springing up he opened the door and was gone.
Phillip said, “Lucy, don’t you think he should ask your permission to leave the table.”
“Oh, I expect his friend is waiting, and after all, Billy gets so little time off from the farm nowadays.”
“Go on, Dad, excuse poor old Boy Billy’s manners! Tell us-some more about when you were a boy!” cried David.
But memory was a mirror broken before a grave far away, almost a forgotten grave, in the yellow clay of north-west Kent, now petrofact by London.
“I don’t remember any more, little oafs. Lucy, what a splendid party you’re giving us. Thank you very much.”
“Hurray for old Mum!” yelled David.
After dinner there was a job to do in the Woodland yard. Thither they went, and after feeding the bullocks, Phillip left the younger boys to sport by themselves, and went to his bedroom to make more notes for the series of novels he had been hoping to write for many years past, and which, it seemed now, were likely to remain unwritten.
A writer needs hundreds, thousands of hours of isolation to start, carry on, and bring to conclusion such a task. I can see no way out of the impasse into which I have gotten myself. I’ve known several writers who girded against life and circumstance. They, too, had been young men of promise; they had dropped out, become bores, drunkards, or spongers—all pathetic figures avoided by their fellows. They had resisted life as it was; their resistance had gone; the deep prolonged sigh, the stillness without repose, had succeeded scorn and the jeer at established living. Will this happen to me?
When I look in the glass, it seems to have happened already.
With the electric fire warming him, he sat by the wide window with its view of the two gardens immediately below, and the walnut tree set in the middle of the farther garden. During the past spring, summer, and autumn a retired labourer had been looking after what he called the Walnut Garden, and well he did his work. But Hammett was slow with physical decay. He had a bad heart. The old fellow asked only half-a-crown a week for his work. He was paid several times that amount, while Phillip hoped he would not feel unhappy because his infirmity forced him to stand still many times every morning at his work. He was the good, kind man whose wife had taken in Phillip and Boy Billy during the hard winter at the beginning of the war. His deafness worried him, so Phillip kept away from him as much as he could. His hands were swollen, like his legs. He moved with difficulty. He had worked hard all his life and his body, as they said in the village of an aged man or horse or implement, was ‘all wore-up’.
One morning after his work Hammett had gone to his cottage more slowly than usual. When he reached home he sat awhile in his chair in silence. He held his head on one swollen hand before he began a laborious ascent up the narrow stairs to his bed, wherein his remaining strength was spent. Phillip took him a dressing-gown, and some books to read, with eggs and milk, but his time was come. He had given up.
Since his death no one had looked after the garden, except for one ploughing by the tractor and potatoes set by the farm men, and whenever Lucy could spare a few moments from cooking, mending, keeping house for seven, looking after the bees and ducks and hens, and running the Women’s Institute after the Rector had collapsed, and he and his wife had left. Lucy played the organ in church with what skill she could assemble from the memory of lessons during a schooling which had been cut short by her mother’s death. The only piece she knew well was Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano; and this had been Lucy’s farewell also, since after leaving school in 1917, she had never sat down at a keyboard again until she came to sit below the organ-pipes of St. John, Banyards.
*
Between the two gardens a hedge of ash and elder straggled, tall and ragged. Elder was the poor man’s hedge: a few sticks pushed into the ground, and soon there was growth, substitute for hedge. Elder grew rapidly, with sappy stems, hollow and brittle, that were useless for pleaching and inferior as a barrier for stock. It did not make a proper hedge. It could not be tamed and ordered like beech, thorn, and holly. Elder was a tree-weed. The man who made a hedge of this weed was the man who stopped the gaps of his hedge with worn-out bedsteads, ancient frames of bicycles, and rusty privy-pails. That was the standard of hedge-making in the village when the war broke out; such were the hedges Phillip took over in his garden. He saw them as a manifestation of the inertia, of the lost heart of a village that had been decaying since the Industrial Revolution, and the flight of British capital abroad.
Shabbiness and neglect were now claiming the Island Fortress, a sally-port lying off the continent of Europe. Frustration was now part of life. He had only to look out of his bedroom window, to see how England was decaying. Therefore it was a relief when the time came to draw the black-out curtains, to put the lamp on the table and switch on the light, and with manuscript before him, and music from the radio, to try and forget the immediate world outside.
The wind blew through the casement and billowed the black Italian cloth curtains; the casement had to be closed. For the first time in his life, at least since he had grown up, he slept with the window shut, crouching in bed behind the refuge of black curtains. Night after night it was the same throughout the hours of darkness. Within the cave-like dark of the room there was safety, where he could lie during the cold nights and dawns, secure for a while from the dreaded light of day.
*
Many years before, in the old days of single living and single thinking in Valerian Cottage, at Malandine, when, as a young writer does, Phillip was measuring himself and his imagined powers against established writers, he bought the three-volume Everyman edition of Tolstoi’s War and Peace, putting it on the shelf that held volumes of Jefferies, Hardy, Shakespeare, Shelley, Francis Thompson, Conrad, Barbusse, Wilfred Owen, Wilfrid Ewart and other writers who quickened life for him by their pages. Of War and Peace, he had never managed to read beyond the first few pages. He could not settle to them in those days. His own work pressed upon him. But now, twenty years afterwards, he read what had generally been claimed to be the greatest novel in the world, and found that the entire motive for the Napoleonic War was missing from the work. The original impulse of genius, the vision of Napoleon clenched to his clear and unequivocal will-power, where did it appear, in character, upon the pages of t
he book? Since it was non-apparent to the author, the gradual divergence in time between Napoleon’s spiritual ideals and the physical reality of his actions as the drama of the world entoiled him was not shown in the book. Yet War and Peace brought sharper into focus thoughts which for some time had been growing within his mind, which he had formulated and expressed years before and had seceded from: a conviction that the man of vision and imaginative powers beyond the ordinary must remain an artist, and resist all calls to direct action, however leaderless and unhappy the times. His powers must go into the world through his art, not be applied directly.
During the years between the wars Phillip had often thought of the series of novels that one day must be written—tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow—while reproaching himself for being indolent, wasting his talent on immaterial things. Now as the second war was rasping away the flesh of Europe’s skeleton he began to see that the self-reproach for indolence had perhaps been mistaken: the comprehensive novel had not been written because he had not developed the comprehensive vision to see the war of 1914–18 and the decades preceding it as a human entity.
And, reading War and Peace, he found that Tolstoi’s comprehension of the ordinary human scene was magnificent. His portraits of schemers and spongers, of simple men lacking in courage, of generals and ensigns and wranglers and common soldiers were true, because he understood them. But he did not understand Napoleon, or why Napoleon had gone to war. And it seemed to him that Tolstoi’s powers of endurance were fatigued by the time he arrived at the third volume, where he argued and propagated ideas rather than re-created life as it was.
Tolstoi’s canvas depicting a great war was large and diffused; his own was to have been circumscribed and intensely focused. In one family, almost in one man, he had dreamed of revealing the causes and effects of world war. But the years had gone by, and little had been done, beyond the experimental and romantic Donkin novels. Now in the nights of this dark winter, his personality occluded, Phillip sat at the table, withdrawn from the blacked-out world, writing scenes and making notes while the frozen fields and woods of the Bad Lands echoed the crowing of pheasants disturbed at roost by distant reverberations of bombs or aircraft exploding. He began to feel again the old longings to escape from the world which was too much with him, to live in a world of his own imagining, peopled by human beings who would respond to the most subtle and flexible variations of truth. In that world ideas which were life to one and death to another could be made flesh. The imagination could cross continents and illumine facts which in every moment of present living were distorted and falsified by broadcasts into the ether which surrounded the earth.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 24
