And lying in bed, I read the newspapers—Daily Crusader, East Anglian Clarion, The Times, but find in them mainly statements for further countering by my mind. But at least, in The Times, there are some points of view other than those of the policy which, in 1940, had gone forth from Churchill in Downing Street to Europe, urging partisans ‘to set Europe ablaze’.
One of the main items of news is the bombing of the Renault works near Paris, which make me grieve for the name of England. I seem to feel the bombing upon my own flesh: to identify it with the deathly but intangible negation all about me. The only sensible people in Europe are those who want to call off the war in the West: the Germans and those collaborating with them. William Frolich, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, declares that Germany has two opponents—Jewish international capitalism in the West, and its deadly counterpart, Jewish Bolshevism, in the East. The aim of both Jewish Money and Jewish Bolshevism is the same, he reiterates: to replace the Hellenic adaptation of Christianity with that of Jehovah, and so to rule the earth with the Golden Calf, and hold the Gentiles in service to the Chosen Race. I can’t accept that: it is perhaps a latent idea among some luciferic Jewish types: for the war is also the enemy of the Jews, at least on the continent of Europe.
Will the truth be perceived only after complete ruin, when the golden tapeworm writhing in a shattered and enfeebled host is itself destroyed with all in Europe? When the dream of a Union of European Nations is but a mockery to all those now fighting, and dying, for freedom, on both sides of the European ideological impasse? When Armageddon, the final war of the West and East breaks out, fatally for the shattered and defeated soul of the West?
With deepest hope the old idea arises: the people can still be aroused by Birkin in time to perceive the truth of the Empire-creative vision: to develop within our territories all the raw materials we need for our island industries; and by flow and return of materials and manufactured goods, by great devolopments overseas—opening up millions of acres, building dams and power stations on an imperatorially planned basis, providing constructive work within the Mother Country and all the races of Empire, on a coeval basis, to last for centuries. Despite my fever I see myself without illusion: a man trying to walk on water, I am as good as drowned. I am on a cliff top. With hands clenched, and suppressed ragged-screaming cries, I am on the Gadarene slope with others who believe that enmity must become understanding, then amity: that Europeans shall be brothers, building civilisation anew with great works of peace. What can I do to further this? Write another aborted letter to The Times? I reach for pad and pencil; but they would not print it. There is no will to understanding, only anger and fear. Must a writer always wait for Time to clarify all things?
Here are the words of Marshal Pétain at the funeral of the Paris dead, after the bombing by the R.A.F. of the Renault works by the Seine.
‘History will judge the criminal aggression of a former Ally, who could not let our soldiers alone go to their death, but, two years later, brought death with the coldest resolution to our civilians.
There is no law of war, there is no pretext to justify before the conscience of humanity such bloody hecatombs.
In the hard winter which we have suffered, flowers are rare, but each one can bring the homage of his heart to the victims of our ex-Ally.’
Two bullfinches, in the pear-tree outside the bedroom window, were flitting in their spring-time colours. It was already the second week of March. They could not yet move on the land. But on one morning there came a change over the bleak and vacant view from Phillip’s window. The sun shone all day; the snow disappeared in the garden, and on the grass of the Home Hills. But at night the frost returned, and the silence.
Phillip’s weak throat was still painful, with a temperature every evening, but he was doing no good in bed; so on the Monday he got up, and asked Lucy if she would go with him to look at the farm.
Although as usual very busy, she arranged for Mrs. Valiant to take over what she had been doing, and together they went for a walk—perhaps the third or fourth time together since they had come to live there. They went by way of the coast road and river-bridge to the causeway. He felt like a ghost of snow; feeble and patternless. The sight of the lambs was cheering. They looked lively, clean, and good. But Matt the shepherd-stockman looked worn-out.
“I’m tired, master. Boy Billy, he’s tired too, doin’ th’ hosses, an’ then on the dicker all day.”
“There’s nothing for it, I’ll take over the stables again.”
Phillip and Lucy went on to look at the newly-cut hedges, one under the Steep, the other above Brock Hanger wood. The work looked to be well-done. He took heart at their tidy and regular appearance. The wheat on the Hanger field was frost-grey, but living. How fortunate that they had sown it in September! The clover layers of Steep and Bustard were diminished by hares and pigeons; but the plants were alive. The bullocks in the Hanger Yard were still not ‘doing’, though they were not shrinking. The dwarfed roots had long been eaten. They were existing on pulp, straw, and hay. Their coats were staring. What could be done, with no other labour available, and the service cottages let to others?
They walked down to the premises, and there black depression returned upon Phillip. The cart-shed was chaos. Jute corn-sacks, so hard to come by, were chucked anywhere. Rats had made holes in the barley-meal bags still uncollected from the High Barn, despite Billy’s assurances that all the meal had been tipped into the rat-proof galvanised bins. The bins were empty, unused.
“Are people afraid to tell me the truth?” his scraping voice cried. “Can that be the explanation of the repeated evasions and mis-statements I must put up with? Oh yes, I can cast my mind back, and see a parallel in my own evasive boyhood! Does the pattern of life always recur, is there no progress? Whatever the cause, here is the effect!”
“I’m very sorry, Phillip, but really, it is not my affair, you know!”
“Please Lucy—please listen! Our stock is short of food. Here we are breeding rats on the grain which provides the most expensive meal in Britain—. These sacks have been here ever since the day of the last grinding, nearly two weeks ago! I was told that all had been carted round to the bins! Can’t anyone’s word be trusted?”
“I expect there is always so much to do.”
“How can you excuse such things? Look at those tunnelled, torn sacks! What is the good of trying to improve this farm, if all creative work is destroyed as soon as it is achieved?”
“Well, I cannot help it,” said Lucy. “It really is nothing to do with me.” She added, “You know, you ought really to be in bed. Well, I must go, otherwise I shall not get my work done, then we’ll be more behind than ever.”
*
The next day Phillip was in the lower room of his cottage, standing among balls of binder twine, tins of paint and distemper, bags of nails, bolts and screws, sacks of self-hardened cement, plaster, etc., when a man whose face was vaguely familiar appeared in the space of the open door. He asked if Phillip had a caravan for sale. Phillip replied truthfully that he really didn’t know, to which the visitant retorted, perhaps equally truthfully, “Tain no odds to me wewer I buys it or not. What’s it wurf?”
“I’ve no idea. It’s a twenty-year-old Eccles caravan, solidly built, with steel sheets outside, and oak-ply wood within.”
“What I’m arter is a caravan ver ’ouse coupla lorry drivers. I comes from Lunnon—Stratford—East End. I’ve got five lorries a’ready on construction jobs.”
In other words, a small profiteer, as he would have been called in the first war. One of the small fry when compared with the large construction companies known as the Forty Thieves.
“I kin find work fer two more drivers, Irishmen, if I kin give ’m a place to live in. What will yer take for yer caravan?”
For years Phillip’s Uncle Hilary’s old caravan, which he bought from him, had stood in the Corn Barn, a silent reproach for its uselessness. Once he had vaguely planned to stand it in the Great Bustard
Wood, and retire there to write about the Great War—that old dream—and go about barefoot, an anchorite away from it all. Or down by the River Wood. Fish for trout in that short length where the water ran more or less clear; and write. True, the innkeeper at Durston, a hamlet along the coast, was also a poacher of Phillip’s pheasants for the black market. He it was who had told some Czech soldiers of the trout in the pool at the bend at the end of the River Wood, and had lent them a shrimp net with which they had cleared out all the fish there; but it was an idea, to live down there by oneself, beside running water, a refugee from the farm, and the ghastly world of civvies all about one.
The caravan, of course, would have been broken into, the rods either smashed or stolen, and the couches probably soiled with human excreta—the impulse of men unhappy in military servitude, coming from equally unhappy homes. It had happened to several boats moored in the marsh creeks, before all boats were taken away by order of the military.
So the caravan had remained in the Corn Barn.
Now this fellow wanted to buy it, apparently. Phillip said to himself apparently, because the fellow repeated several times that he didn’t trouble if he bought it or not. Phillip knew, from what Bert Close had told him, that two more drivers for two more old scraped-up lorries from a junk-yard would mean another £7 a day added to his income.
“I don’t trouble, I’ve ’ad six lorries a’ready on construction sites, I git a hundred and fifty quid a week for vem, and I never signed no cheque in me life, nor never goin’ to, what’s more. So vey can’t git me fer no tax.”
Obviously this tycoon lived in one dimension of the present only‚ thought Phillip. They’ll get you all right, one day.
Suddenly he remembered the man’s face. Before the war. An acre of land littered with old automobiles. He was a car-breaker, a knacker. His chief tool (professionally speaking) was a pair of pincers with handles a yard long, attached to cutters of chilled steel the shape of a crossbill’s beak. This fearsome implement could bite up the skeleton of a motorcar like a steel hyena.
Phillip had gone there for a spring to fit on the green trailer, to replace one broken by Luke, when backing the trailer. He had written the pattern of dialogue heard in the cess of wreckage fouling the grassy field. A bargain was being sought when he arrived.
It was like two amiable carrion crows talking in that undervoice one hears at dawn, before they fly off, each to its daily round of murder and scavenging.
“Ow ’bout vis front axle? Wanter springs as well?”
“Nah, only ver axle chum.”
“Okay, ’ow ’bout ten bob?”
“I’ll give yer five. Tell yer what, split ver difference?”
“Naoh, Giss two dollars.”
“Okay.”
Crack‚ crack, as the hyaena-grosbeak bit through one set of springs near the shackle bolts. A few more nips, and the axle was free.
“Ver yar chum. Giss two dollars. Ta.”
An axle for eight shillings belonged to another world, that planet called Before the War. Nowadays there were little fortunes in old rope and ancient iron; and big fortunes for the owners of lorries, if they could get drivers.
His visitor was persistent. “What’ll yer take fer ver caravan? Hundred nicker?”
“Well, I value it at about ten pounds. But I don’t want to sell.”
“Ow about a hundred and ten smackers?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Taint bust nowhere?”
“No.”
“Money ain’t narthin’ to me, y’know. I could put a five p’un note between brea’n’burrer and never know I ate it.”
“You must be rich, like Horatio Bugg, for he told me he could do the same all day and night. But seriously, wouldn’t a paper sandwich give you indigestion?”
“Oo cares.”
“Well money talks, they say, so that is how it talks, perhaps, in wind up, so to speak.”
“Thet’s right, guv. Vere’s nothin’ you can’t buy wi’ money vese days.”
“Everything’s gone with the wind.”
“Too true it has.”
“You’re right, too true.”
A gust blew two of the flimsy paper notes from his hand. He clutched them, and as he bent down a thick roll of fivers fell from an inside pocket. Grabbing the roll he let go the two notes, which were lifted among the cabbages. He snatched one and thrust it nervously into a trouser pocket. The other was wrapped round the bundle, and smacked down with the palm of his hand. Obviously the stuff was a nuisance to him. He stammered. His eyes looked anywhere. He didn’t know where he was. The years upon his black-oiled acre of hideous rusting wrecks had settled him to three or four quid a week average. Now he was money-mad and furtive. He was worrying, too, that the war might end before long. He was like the Phantom, the last of Lucy’s bantams, that pale little inbred wisp of a bird that stood about by itself half-lost among the nettles and broken relics of hen-houses under the elms by the Corn Barn. The Phantom was a lost soul, he ran to tread any old hen with hopeless hope. Once Phillip saw him scrabbling on the back of a stag-turkey, crowing voicelessly in the rain.
This money-mad man of the airfields, this walking-talking machine, with its neurotic stare and stammer, went away without the caravan. Phillip wouldn’t have sold it to him for £110 or £1100, although he didn’t want it, and the sight of its uselessness worried him. Was he going mad, too? They were all mad in the war, except the young who were facing death for civilian stupidity; but few knew it. The British moaned about Coventry, while the R.A.F. burned innumerable civilians, old and young, in phosphorus raids upon one artisan suburb after another in all the major German towns, night after night, week after week, month after month…
A writer must, above all, be truthful about himself.
In Lucy’s old home, nearly twenty years before, the cats had the run of the larder. Mummified remains of their droppings, pale-haired with fungus, were on the shelves when first I knew the family. Soon I set about cleaning larder, scullery, and kitchen. This reformatory, interfering attitude was later extended to the ‘Works’, an amateur engineering venture erected in the garden by which, within six months, Lucy’s brothers had lost all the money they had acquired by selling their reversions of the family trust, and the works were virtually abandoned in a state of utter chaos.
This morning the memory of my impotence to alter the minds of Lucy’s brothers flared up. I saw kittens’ messes on the larder floor and shelves, nearly twenty years later. My mind seemed to flash red like a shell-burst. I seized a kitten and hurled it on the pavers. The second kitten followed. The strength of my violence killed them instantly. I saw Lucy on the threshold staring at me beyond the redness behind my eyes. As she backed away into the parlour I struck her face with the back of my hand, again and again. I saw blood on the pale face before me, I heard the gentle voice of Peter crying, ‘Don’t Dad‚ don’t!’ Jonathan began to wail, as I seized his mother, and pushing her backwards, knelt on the ground and bumped her head on the floor.
Peter said again, beside me, ‘Please don’t, Father.’ The quiet voice brought me back to control: I got up, and helped her to her feet before going to my room, thinking to end my life. My gun was in the parlour, so I sat on the floor by the bed with a razor-blade on the counterpane, and arranged one of the pails of sand, kept in the bedroom as a precaution against incendiary bombs, beside me to catch falling blood. I wrote a farewell paragraph in my diary; after which I sat, with eyes closed, leaning my head on the bed coverlet for half an hour or so, feeling beyond despair: to be turned to stone.
Having recovered some sort of balance, Phillip went to tell Lucy how sorry he was for his outburst. Then he returned to his bedroom and wrote a letter to Lucy’s brother, Tim Copleston, telling him of what he had done, and of his fears for the family; ending up declaring that in future he must—he must—put the war out of his mind—before he went out of his mind.
Tim Copleston was alarmed. He filed the letter, after wonde
ring if he ought to go to the police with it.
*
Great relief! There was the familiar sound of the heavy threshing tackle owned by Gladstone Gogney trundling amidst its own smoke past the empty Corn Barn!
Next morning Phillip helped to thresh the oat stack by the Duck Decoy. The team was made up of soldiers from the Searchlight Camp. The work went as usual: the start an hour late; soldiers knocking off every forty minutes for a smoke, thus delaying the work, and their return to camp. Lucy, as usual, brought down sandwiches, scones, cake, and a two-gallon jug of tea, into which went, by request, Phillip’s weekly ration of sugar. At the end of a long day the stack was only two-thirds done. One of the team was a native of Crabbe who had now passed his eighty-eighth birthday. He worked with his usual heroic gustiness; and set off to walk home to his village three miles away with a cheery goodnight. He was the chaff-and-cauder man, who had to endure work in a constant cloud of dust and dirt from the gnawings of mice which had wintered in the oat stack.
So great were the legions from the woods that the oat stack was one vast tunnelled tenement. There the mice had bred. Thousands had become scores of thousands, and thence on in geometrical progression. Even the rats had been driven away in disgust by the smell. Phillip estimated that during five months about a quarter of a million mice had eaten about seventy coombs, or five tons of grain.
All during the threshing hundreds of nimble little grey-silky rodents were springing and slipping, appearing and disappearing in threes and fours and twos and sixes: everywhere grey ripples, in places three and four deep, on dark-yellow oat sheaves. Mice got in his pockets, ran up his legs. Bushels passed through the whirling drum and came out limp and broken, choking the sieves again and again. Apart from the irreplaceable feeding value nearly £100 worth of corn had been lost. He thought of the little mouse-hawk, the kestrel of the Scalt—shot by one of the villagers invited to shoot pigeons (only) in the woods. Afterwards Phillip had found his kestrel lying dead by one of the hides in the Lower Wood. The fellow had shot it and left it there: a small detail in the torn fabric of living.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 28
