Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  Dare he begin his work now—despite the labours of the farm? The thought was quickening like a candle shining in darkness: but counter-thought smothered the point of light as effectively as the bushel measure in the Corn Barn had hidden the light of a candle he had lit one evening when searching for a tin of mercuric corn-seed dressing. From outer darkness had come cries of Put that light out! The voices were those of newcomers to the Searchlight Camp as they walked past from the village pub. He had put the measure over the candle stump at once; even so, the inevitable and indignant voice had shouted out, Do you want us all to be bombed? O God, it had come to this—after the five infantry battles in which he had taken part in 1914–18. But his suppressed feeling was momentary; of course he knew all the causes of such fake acts.

  The real danger, to him, lay in starting a work, and not going steadily on until it was finished. Once begun, his novel-series must be continued, day after day, week upon week, month after month, year following year. Dare he begin, being so involved and rucked in the black currents of the present?

  The Italian cloth hung slack upon the window. Black frost ruled without. It was time to go into the farmhouse for tea, and afterwards play games of Rummy, Beggar my Neighbour, Draughts and Snakes and Ladders with the children. The nearer he could creep, as himself (not that anxious and often tense creature called Father) to the children, the safer he felt.

  His literary ambition must wait. He must be patient, learn to endure all things.

  Someone was coming up the stairs. “Dad, can you spare the time to play ‘Happy Families’ with us? We all want you to,” said Roz.

  *

  At six o’clock the next evening, over the radio from London, Phillip heard that Japanese troops had entered Hong Kong. British prisoners-of-war, their arms and feet tied, had been forced to kneel before their captors, and been bayonet’d. The conquerors had made a public spectacle of it. An entire Chinese quarter had been turned into a brothel, went on the voice of the announcer. ‘White women have been publicly raped’.

  Perhaps Melissa was nursing in Hong Kong? Be quiet, be calm, he told himself, remember that courage is grace under stress. He tried to thrust away the thought that this had been made inevitable by the lazy ruling class which had always put money first; that their indifference and apathy had ruined England. No no, I must not blame the Coplestons, it was not true, they were the innocent effect of causes beyond their control. He went into the kitchen.

  “I’ve made you your favourite apple pie,” Lucy said.

  “Did you hear the news?”

  She nodded. “The children——”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  He sat quietly in his chair, recalling Conrad’s phrase, ‘the terrible tyranny of a fixed idea’. The farm was the world, where human ideas were struggling for mastery as crystals in a volcanic flow attempted to shatter rival patterns.

  The supper came in. He could not eat.

  “Cor, the Japs are what you call tisky, bor’,” said David to Jonathan.

  “Now, David, eat your supper,” said Lucy.

  “Yes, David, young men are now paying for the sins of their fathers.”

  “‘The international fin-an-seers’,” said Boy Billy, at the other end of the table.

  “You can jeer, Boy Billy! But let me tell you this—as a family we shall fail, because of the very same ideas now causing the ruin of Europe! This war was caused, not by Hitler wanting return of the German provinces taken from Germany by the treaty of Versailles, but by those who wanted things to remain as they were! All Europe rotting on the dole, except Germany, which was raised from the dust of defeat by the vision of one ex-soldier of the Western Front!”

  “Uncle Willie,” said David, pale and serious.

  “Yes! And Britain could have raised the Empire to be the finest the world had ever seen, if Birkin had been listened to!”

  “Like your farm,” said David huskily. “I mean—Father—sir—like you try to convert the slobberers.”

  “That’s me,” muttered Boy Billy.

  “Do eat your supper before it gets cold,” said Lucy.

  “Your Uncle Willie’s ideas were regarded as a nuisance and a bore by most people, as mine were and are by nearly every member of my family! My family relations had no use whatsoever for what I tried to tell them!” He got up from the table. “And now those ‘blind, blunt bullet heads that long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads’, have re-shattered Wilfred Owen’s England! And if your cousin Melissa is in Hong Kong, Lucy, she will be fortunate to be dead—dead—dead! Her death was prepared here in England during the last ten years! The mortmain, the dead hand of selfish, laissez-faire pleasure-seeking, decadent British ruling classes wrecking all Birkin’s, and Maxton’s and A. J. Cook the miners’ leader’s attempts to create a greater, a fairer Britain! Just as, on our little farm the same decadent spirit prevails——”

  At this point the pale and innocent face of Mrs. Valiant appeared at the door. “Now don’t you talk like that, sir! The missus do her best, sir! Missus is not against you, sir. And not everyone in the village either, sir.”

  Mrs. Valiant wept silently as she stood, her thin hands folded, just inside the door. She looked deathly.

  “You will excuse me, won’t you, sir? But I can’t help thinking of my boy James, gone out there with all the County rig’mint, sir. Now do you eat your dinner, sir, so I can wash up the plates, and get back to my Tom. He’s old, and I don’t like to leave him alone just now, if you’ll excuse me telling you, sir.”

  The children were eating their food in subdued silence. Jonathan was being comforted by Rosamund. She looked pale. Then David said huskily, “Sir—Father—I mean Dad—don’t you think they were really only dummies like the straw sacks the Searchlight soldiers play rugger with, when they’re supposed to be at bayonet practice, sir?”

  The small boy’s attempt to ease the tension moved Phillip to his better self. “Yes, Davy, that may be what really happened.”

  Boy Billy had already disappeared before his father’s tirade, to find escape from reality down with the tractor boys gathered in Horatio Bugg’s barn.

  Mrs. Valiant wept silently as she washed the plates in the little kitchen converted from a wood-shed. Phillip went to comfort her, telling her that those Japs had probably been criminals let out of prison, the type found in every army: that it had been an isolated incident: that the news had been released deliberately as propaganda: that it was an historical fact that in the Russo-Japanese war the Japanese had treated their Russian prisoners decently, and with good manners.

  “Oh, sir,” she sobbed. “Everyone else except you and missis have bin coming to say to me, ‘O, your poor boy! Isn’t it awful!’ They all come and say that, sir.”

  “Mrs. Valiant—dear Mrs. Valiant—you are not to believe what people say. There are blackguards in all armies. You must believe what I tell you. Keep your heart up, my dear.”

  It was all he could say to repair the selfish violence of his former words. “Things are never so bad as they seem, you know. And as David said, it may be all propaganda, and the so-called prisoners were painted dummies.” He added, “For photographs. That was done in the first war.”

  He remained with her, helping dry the plates and dishes, but she told him he must go and rest, so he went back to the parlour where the children were now drawing tractors, aircraft, maps, and birds with pencils and paint boxes on the table. David was making a small dummy parachutist, with wooden Bren gun, while muttering, “You’ll see off the Japs, ‘bor, ah, won’t yar!”

  Lucy had gone to the village hall, where she was helping to organise a whist drive for the Red Cross.

  *

  Perhaps the civilian English public, through suffering, thought Phillip sadly, had never felt so deeply as they did at that time. By now the war was right inside the heart and flesh and bone of the Island Fortress, whilst those actively engaged outside it, beyond the encircling sea, were yielding up heart and flesh and bone.

&
nbsp; Hitler, some of the more thoughtful were beginning to say, was an effect, rather than a cause, of the malaise of Europe. That might be the beginning of clear sight. Every situation so far, except General Wavell’s drive in North Africa, had the same pattern. There was no authentic Idea abroad in the country—indeed it was locked up in prison with Hereward Birkin—to replace the creative Idea of Germany, or of that of the British Government’s Machiavellian ally, Stalin. The Germans and the Japanese, the Russians after their great defeats, had a crusade, a fervour, a cause. Before the war British laissez-faire was frustrating creative Ideas beyond the shores of the Island.

  Some popular newspapers began to print daily the slogan REMEMBER HONG KONG. Mrs. Valiant, so tidy and conscientious a worker, said (to Phillip’s surprise) that if she hadn’t believed what he had told her ‘that night’, she would have lost her reason. Thin and pale, she was thinking all her conscious moments of her son, James. Daily she awaited a letter to be brought by the postman, addressed in his handwriting, telling her he was safe. Such, thought Phillip, were the hopes of millions of mothers—British, French, American, German, Scandinavian, Jewish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese. How tremendous had been the task taken on by Jesus of Nazareth—in his life-time a figure ridiculed and detested by the old order, and finally destroyed! The Nazarene had attempted to purify human minds of the decadent materialism of his age.

  “Lucy, please listen to this. It’s from a book published by the Oxford University Press, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922– August 1939, with a foreword by Lord Astor, Chairman of the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, who writes, guardedly, ‘the strength of the National Socialist system lies in the fact that it has turned to base uses ideas and ideals which do but await interpretation to serve as building stones in the reconstruction for which we hope.’ I suppose he’s got to say that. Well, here’s a translated passage of a speech by Hitler made in April, 1922.

  “‘I would like here to appeal to a greater than I, Count Lerchenfeld. He said in the last session of the Landtag that his feeling ‘as a man and a Christian’ prevented him from being an anti-Semite. I say: my feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God’s truth! was the greatest not as sufferer but as fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers … How terrific was his fight for the world against the Jewish poison, today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognise more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross … And as a man I have the duty to see to it that human society does not surfer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilisation of the ancient world some two thousand years ago—a civilisation that was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people’.”

  “Did the Roman Empire fall because of Jews?” asked Lucy. “I’m only asking a question. I’d like to know.”

  “I can’t really say.”

  “Sir!” said David. “I think I know! Teacher told us it was because the Romans put pleasure before duty.” He added with a toothy smile, “You know, Dad, like you don’t do.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t bestways know, y’know. Do I, Chooky?” to Jonathan.

  “Shut up,” replied Jonathan. “Dad told me it was because they had hot baths, not cold ones like Dad has, didn’t they, Dad?”

  Lucy said, when the children were in bed, “Don’t mind my saying it, but while I know why you feel about things as you do, sometimes your attitude, to those who do not quite understand you, does tend to bring about confusion. If only you could see what people are, their good points, I mean, and not their defects, I think you would be happier, and so would they.”

  She looked at him with a slightly uncertain gaze that seemed to quail a little, and yet was not abashed. “Sometimes I think that it is a pity you do not appear to have any regard for my few solid virtues, but see only my shortcomings.”

  “Well, I don’t really, you know, Lulu. It’s only in weak moments that my true nature is driven out—if you see what I mean —and what I can only describe as the luciferic impulse takes possession. I didn’t get it by copying Hitler, you know. Cousin Willie was more like Hitler than I. I know it’s wrong to shout like that. I’m sorry, I’ll try not to think anymore about the war.”

  “Well, Phillip, I understand you. But it’s the children I worry about, to be frank. They are too young to be emotionally disturbed.”

  “I know, I know. Family history seems to repeat itself. As soon as the farm is in proper order, I’ll go back to the Gartenfeste, and be calm and uninvolved, and write.”

  Lucy was thinking, How can I—what can I do, so that he is freed from his burden? Surely someone would be glad of having a farm, especially now that food is so short? Shall I write to Tim about it? He’s much more practical than he was, and perhaps he knows somebody who might buy it.

  That night she wrote to her brother.

  *

  Early in the morning of the last day of the Old Year Phillip started out for the railway station in the darkness with Boy Billy. It was difficult to start the engine of the Silver Eagle, which had been rebuilt of old parts from a scrap yard. The works in Coventry had been blitzed; none were obtainable in Norwich. All garages were on war-work now, as most shops were nearly empty, except of utility ration-coupon goods. However, he managed to get the car out of the yard, Billy and Lucy pushing it down the road until the engine fired.

  The serpentining road was frosty, tyres of the Silver Eagle worn smooth. They glided somehow to the station, and slewed to a stop. He leapt out of the motorcar, ran for a ticket, while Boy Billy rushed down the platform, sprang into a carriage; bag and ticket followed through the open window in the last coach leaving the platform; and Phillip was left watching the end of the train curving out of the station, and yet hopeful that the brief respite on a tractor course at the Ford experimental station in Essex would give Boy Billy an outlook different from that which he was acquiring from village youths with their talk of big money.

  He had been up two hours before, to feed and groom the three horses in the stable, and was tired already; but returning to the farm, there was nothing for it but to take the horses and tumbrils up the gulley as the red sun was rising, and cart the last of the sugar-beet crop. Yet it was a satisfying day, for his second boy Peter was with him to help. He found the work pleasant with Peter by his side, he wearing the overalls his elder brother had out-grown, a garment patched and repatched, worn thin and all the colour washed out.

  Jack the Jackdaw, Powerful Dick and Steve were still lifting beet. They wanted to knock off at half-past two, and as Peter had worked hard, Phillip took the horses to the stable, and watered and fed them. He must plough; he dreaded to be caught with the work undone by the time the frost really set hard in the land; so he put on a sheepskin coat used by an A.S.G. driver in the 1914–18 war and took the tractor to the Scalt. The field had been well mucked and the scald or stoney match had had more mud spread on it. He ploughed a deep furrow while the half-moon rose up above the mist of the marshes and a small red sun went down through the trees of the Lower Wood: pale moth-wing on his left as he moved up the field; burst, blood-clown insect on his right as he ploughed down again. Mechanically his body went up and down the field, while the sunset died out and the last partridge ceased to call over the field. The dusky earth was viewed sadly by vacant moon. He had had enough. Taking the tractor along the Lower Wood drive to the premises—mallard, teal, and wigeon flying up from the dyke on his right-hand—he let the water out of the radiator, covered it up, and went home, wanting the warmth and light of the parlour, and the faces of Lucy and the children.

  *

  He found Peter,
David and Jonathan playing games at the table. He missed his alert and sympathetic daughter. Rosamund had gone to visit cousins in Dorset.

  Since Christmas Jonathan had owned his own pack of cards. He was five, and played his hand well; but he did not like losing game after game. He was a neat and tidy child with large dark eyes and a direct, single mind—when it was not overset by emotional disturbance. He was most sensitive. A couple of months previously he had taken up his garden produce (his garden being one yard square) and stored it in a cupboard, laid out neatly: potatoes, lettuces, beans, cabbages, carrots, together with a heap of earth containing seeds that had not come up. A month afterwards Phillip found the store by chance, most of it rotten. When he showed Lucy with what care he, Jonny, had arranged the vegetables, the child had looked mortified; the dark, blank look of mental pain came in his eyes, and without a word he had gone away. Phillip had been smiling with pleasure; but Jonny had thought he was laughing at him, and his heart or resistance was momentarily broken—hence the tears. He was too mother-tender; he needed more father-friendship. No more fanatics, eccentric with will-power coiled by the frustrations inherent in the age, shall be made in the family, if I can help it, thought Phillip.

  There was a similar scene that evening. Jonny, so keen to hold his own, lost again and again, until he could not bear it; and with red cheeks and blank eyes, he left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. A little later it was opened slightly, and a dark eye regarded Phillip in the narrow space.