Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  *

  How far away, remote, and gone for ever seemed those spacious, those comparatively free and easy days before the war, now that movement was restricted in that coastal district! Police permits were required for entry, although this was no longer enforced. Many shops were shut; roads almost vacant. Everything un-rationed was unobtainable except at an enhanced price. Ugly phrases like black market and the cringe-making under the counter had become part of normal existence. One old soldier of the 1914–18 war had removed the medal-ribbons, including the 1914 Star, of his many-times decimated battalion, lest an inexperienced crowd of rookies deride him as hopelessly antiquated—the bow-and-arrow war, Phillip once heard one of the searchlight-soldiers call it, as he walked past the camp, eyes on the ground.

  Ordered to rest by the doctor, to take things more easily, I have begun to write again during this second grim and frozen winter upon the coast of East Anglia. Is England all ice? As I have already noted in this Journal, neither newspapers nor radio mention the weather. As I sit at this desk, powdered snow is blowing through the Studio roof. It enters by the little gaps between the glass tiles. Behind me is a fire of thorn logs upon the open hearth, but I am not warm. My design of the fireplace is at fault. Above my head cold spirals of air shake and rustle the bunches of my home-grown, home-dried, and home-unsmokable tobacco leaves hanging from a purlin. An icicle of air touches my neck. Sometimes snowdust rattles faintly against the dark brown brittle leaves and a minute shower of crystals drifts down upon the pavers. Yet the thin turbulence of icy air and the friendly flames give a pleasant feeling. I am in a dug-out, away from the war outside; I am safe to write, to live my own life.

  There was comfort in the arrival of a load of logs, by way of tractor and trailer, to be stacked against the white-washed flints of the north wall. We formed a chain. Billy took a log from Jack the Jackdaw—two feet long and anything up to twelve inches thick—I took it from him, and so we stacked a ton. That should see me through the winter.

  Another load went into the woodshed for the open hearths of farmhouse parlour and Lucy’s boudoir. There she could sit warm from the polar wind.

  Phillip felt uneasy about the fourteen bullocks in the Bustard Yard. The yard itself was snug enough against the weather, enclosed as it was on three sides by straw stacks, but the main food for the beasts came from the undersized roots grown on Lower Brock Hanger. And they were almost gone.

  When these roots were taken off the field, they were tossed by hand into the tumbrils to avoid damage. Before the topping, Phillip asked that they be pulled out of the ground by hand, and not lifted by the spike of the topping knife. The wound of the spike caused a black rot around the gash.

  “We want sound roots, every one must be saved, especially as it is only a half-crop.”

  The roots were carted into the wood behind the shed, made into a ‘pie’, or clamp, and covered with earth against growth and frost. Jack the Jackdaw had accepted the job of feeding the bullocks. Generally he was unreceptive; his poor head could not take in, without distress, anything but the simplest ideas. Knowing this, Phillip had told him that the roots, together with the long hay in the stack, and the barley-straw for fill-belly, must last the bullocks between five to six months. In order that there should be no mistake in the daily ration he had bought Jack a bushel skep—two-handled basket made of osiers—and told him that he was to grind, in the root-slicing machine, two bushels in the morning, and two bushels in the afternoon.

  “We are short of keep,” he explained, while the fellow backed away from Phillip like a frightened steer.

  “We have only these roots to last for twenty-four weeks, for one hundred and sixty days. So only two skeps of a morning, and two at night, Jack. Understand?”

  Jack the Jackdaw turned away, making a whuffing noise. “O’ive a-fed bullocks afore!” he mumbled.

  The village carpenter had built a new loft under the roof of the shed, where many hessian sacks, filled with flights and caulder from the threshing of the upland corn-stacks, were stored. Caulder was the local term for the broken beards of barley—the prickly harns. Flights were the softer shucks of oats. They had a feeding value a little better than that of fill-belly barley-straw. Flights and caulder were mixed with sliced roots; the bullocks thereby had to munch thoroughly before swallowing. Only thus could the fodder be eked out until grass arose again on the meadows in late April.

  Despite all Phillip had tried to tell him, Jack the Jackdaw had over-fed the bullocks on roots. When Phillip went up to see them, their coats were staring. Their eyes were bloodshot. They pranced on one another’s backs. Their droppings were too liquid. Their hindlegs and quarters were in a mess. Their strength had run out in scouring. They had been given practically no hay to bind them. Half of their summer pasture condition was run away in squit.

  When he spoke to Jack the Jackdaw he blared, loose-mouthed, like a bullock. The gist of his rant was that he knew how to feed bullocks, that he worn’t going to be told in the village that he had starved ’em. It was useless to try and speak to him then. Phillip reckoned at that rate the rest of the roots would be gone by the end of January.

  Sardonically, Matt the stockman declared once more that ‘the farmer gits narthin’ out’ve it’. Phillip had put Jack on that work to save Matt’s strength. The 30-month old bullocks probably weighed between seven and eight hundredweight apiece. They were not big-framed animals, for they took after the Aberdeen-Angus bull. Even so they ought to have been at least two hundred-weight more apiece.

  Jack the Jackdaw was not really strong. The gunshot-wound from the Somme battle had taken a third of his strength. He became ill soon afterwards, and lay in bed with wheezy chest and breathing. So Phillip fed the bullocks after Peter and David had gone back to school.

  It was peaceful up on the hills. He rejoiced in the sight of the September-sown wheat plants, protected by frost-slurred clods from the sharp sweep of the Siberian wind now coming over the sea. Nothing nagged at his consciousness there. To supplement the meagre root-ration he took up bags of beet-pulp and extra water in which to steep it, twenty-four hours before feeding. Each bullock was now being given seven pounds of soaked pulp every day, with one and a half pounds of mixed ground-nut and cottonseed cake, besides long hay in racks and barley straw which they pulled from the sheltering stacks. Phillip had bought six tons of good cake in 1939; in addition the grey coconut-shell which had little feeding value. (This was the same muck, made into ‘chocolate’, which Phillip had seen on sale in a shop in the City of Dreaming Spires.) Good cake was unobtainable now, except for milk-herds; and ration-coupons were given only against receipts for milk-sales.

  Powerful Dick and Steve spent their time cutting and trimming the trees of the drive under the Lower Wood. They worked in harmony, being of the same stock—the one from Normandy, the other from Denmark. Both men were good, hard workers. When some of the lower oak boughs were to be taken off, they did as asked: first making a cut underneath a bough, close to the trunk, to avoid splitting and tearing when the heavy limb fell. Thus a tidier landscape and firewood for winters ahead was assured.

  *

  Another neighbour rang up and invited Phillip to a cock-shoot on his land. He had met Phillip at Charles Box’s place. Phillip hesitated—dare he go? It was a question of energy; he had to force himself to leave his desk, and the book in which he was living. But once out in the keen air he felt exhilaration, and enjoyed driving over the snow to Tom’s place on the higher lands. Three of them went round the hedges and through the spinneys of Tom’s farm, after the long-tailed cocks only, since pheasant hens must be left for breeding. It was one of the winter’s coldest days on that bleak coast. Sleet drove into their faces and made the very skull of Phillip’s head to ache, yet how heartening it was to trudge with two friendly men upon a blank new world, one’s footsteps scarcely showing in powdery snow streaming over and whitely smoothing the rocky furrows! Eyes were closed to slits while wings rocketing out of white-capped kale h
urtled away with the blast.

  Phillip had the one shot that his gun seldom missed: the shot that seemed to order itself as the high bird passed over, the shooter’s body bending backwards as gun-muzzle stroked line of flight, and when the bird was invisible beyond the limit of bending backwards the barrel fired and the four-pound cock fell far away into the snow.

  It was a body-glowing day, with luncheon in a house that seemed wide and spacious after confinement within the small rooms of farmhouse and cottage. It was furnished with antique oak, for Tom and his wife had sold their comparatively modern furniture, they told Phillip, since the market value was higher than that of the good antique pieces by which it had been replaced—so they had the satisfaction of having made a profit on the deal. People all over England were beginning to seek and to buy in the country, for town-trade was decaying.

  Afterwards they went back into a blank outdoors of wind and sleet. In an hour or two he returned home with a cock pheasant, arriving as the family was sitting down to tea. It was pleasing that Billy enquired of the bag, which was eight cocks and a rook. He and Peter occasionally went out after hares and rabbits, sharing the octagonal-barrel Holland and Holland 32-bore which had belonged to their grandfather nearly eighty years before.

  The gun-cupboard stood in the Studio. Phillip kept the guns clean, and oiled against damp. One day it would be Boy Billy’s sanctum; the guns would be in the case.

  *

  The hard weather held. They could work only about the frozen acre of yards, barns, sheds, hovel, and engine-house—otherwise the Premises. What a blessing it was that the circular saw had been fitted to a concrete base in the corrugated iron shed where the tractor stood ready to drive the High Barn Machinery! This happy memorial was the volunteered work of a delicate and faithful engineer, who had come to help, after reading Phillip’s newspaper articles. Every time Phillip sawed logs there, he felt pleasure at the job the young man had done. It was economic to saw logs while the men worked inside the High Barn, for the tractor had power to spare.

  While Billy ground tail-barley into pig-meal and rolled oats in the Combined Mill, Jack the Jackdaw (who had returned to work, looking after the bullocks in the Woodland yard) and Powerful Dick chaffed hay and straw; Steve helped generally, in intervals of wheeling and hoisting filled sacks into a tumbril ready to go to stable and cowshed.

  During that hard weather the very last reserve set of cogs of the chaffing machine in the High Barn were broken, by the old, old error of not declutching before changing gear.

  Phillip said nothing.

  Powerful Dick looked thwarted. He had been ready to answer back, explosively. Phillip told Lucy, before a great fire in the Studio that evening, “His ancestor at the battle of Hastings must have split many a Saxon skull with a broad-sword, for this is the sixth time he has tried to change gear while the cutter was turning. Now the chaffing machine is out of action until the war is over. So I put him and Jack the Jackdaw for the rest of the day tidying their own untidiness in the cart-shed.”

  Before the breakage, a tumbril load of logs had been sawn, so Phillip had helped Boy Billy at his combined milling-and-rolling machine, above which was built what Luke had called a ‘patent’—an affair of spouts below a two-compartment wooden hopper, from which grains of oats and barley fell to different parts of the machine. Sacks of corn had to be hauled up to a platform in the roof of the barn by ratchet and chain, and the grains shot into the divided hopper. It was a tedious process. Billy was a dusty miller amidst the roar of grinding and rolling.

  “Thanks for your help, Dad.”

  “Thank you for your help, Billy Boy! I’ll give you a hand with loading the sacks for the stable bins, and then go up to the Bustard Yard.”

  Snow drifts hid the frozen furrows of the Steep, the wind pared his eartips as he trudged up and across the Cold Old Land, and through the wood to the bullocks. They blared at him, bloodshot-eyes. Their coats were staring. The water in the five-hundred gallon tank had run out. The bronze tap of the two-hundred-and-fifty-gallon barrel water-cart, which stood there, was frozen. The tap had dripped from misuse; he had told Jack the Jackdaw a score of times not to turn the brass tap completely round, but only half-way: that it leaked if it were completely turned. Now it was sealed with ice. Batteries of lambent eyes glaring, the fog of hoarse blaring, told what the bullocks were suffering. He trudged back to the workshop for the blow-lamp, and returned with it to the yard.

  When at last he freed the tap, and got the first pail of water to the trough, the bullocks fought to drink it, crushing him into a post, but with blazing eyes he yelled at them and they backed away. It was of no use to speak of it to Jack the Jackdaw, who had told him that afternoon in the High Barn, that the bullocks were ‘doing’, Phillip said to Lucy, who gave him the morning’s letters.

  *

  One was from his friend Francis, the Bengal Lancer, declaring that he wanted to farm. It was a natural impulse coming at that time to many elderly civilised men, to escape the darkness and the death-wish of the times. Phillip had had scores of similar letters from people wanting to get clear of what they were doing, as they imagined a bucolic freedom where eggs, bacon, game, butter, milk, and petrol were to be had in apparent abundance. The need of Francis was more imaginative, it was Faustian. He wanted, he wrote, to be only a man harrowing clods, as in Hardy’s Dynasts. Might he pay a visit?

  Phillip replied, with disquiet in his heart, that it would perhaps be best if he came when the bad weather was over, when the sun was higher in its curve. He knew he could not help Francis. He, too, was a man in a broken world, like many of his generation. Phillip felt sad to write such a letter, especially as Francis appeared to think that his life was lived in ideal conditions—freedom in the country, working at the only worthwhile job in wartime; and above all, his own master.

  The truth was, Phillip felt ashamed of his own failure, as he sat before the open hearth in the Studio, not daring to begin his novel-series, for fear of irruption—and destruction. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow …

  Chapter 18

  RELIEF

  It was no longer necessary to keep awake half the night for fear of an hour before darkness each day. Phillip now had a reliable ‘morning alarmer’. The faulty alarm clock was returned with thanks to the owner. Its place—in, not under, his bed—was taken by a copper cylinder holding half a gallon of hot water and covered by a wrap of thick worsted stocking tied at both ends to avoid slip. This ‘bottle’ not only kept Phillip warm in positions varying from lodgment in the small of the back to a clasp against the heart, but told the time according to its temperature. When the moment was reached that the bottle needed to be kept warm, it was time to get up, like a rat leaving a sinking ship, he told Lucy.

  At last the thaw came. Patience! Never plough-under half-frosty soil! ‘Wait until the ground’s in temper, it’s no use mucket-ting’—words remembered from Devon, long ago. Phillip waited. The days passed. At long last the land was fit. He and Boy Billy started on the remaining area of the Nightcraft field. It was a warm but dull day. Phillip felt queer and unbalanced. He went to bed after work, his throat foul. Temperature or no temperature, there was no time to be lost: the corn must go in, so he got up again the next day, stimulated by a letter which came that morning with good news from his publisher, together with a cheque for over a hundred pounds. “It’s yours, Lucy, you deserve it!”

  What could have happened, that his books were beginning to sell again? Could his ideas about the war be spreading? No; more likely due to the fact that the stocks of many other publishers had been burned in the blitz on London, when warehouses in the neighbourhood of Ludgate Hill, holding millions of volumes in the narrow streets adjoining St. Paul’s, had been gutted by fire!

  As soon as the furrows were turned, Phillip and Boy Billy harrowed the back-end ploughed Pewitts’ field. It was a dampish, heavy day, but towards four o’clock the harrow-strokes were drying. Over the boundary Charles Box had already drilled a h
undred acres. Leaving Pewitts’, they started to cultivate the Nightcraft. After four hours Peter came to relieve his brother on the new Fergie. Peter’s eyes were dull. He said he felt unwell, so Phillip sent him home to bed, while continuing with the spring-tined cultivator up and down the field. It was mixed soil, and the heavier patches were coming up claggy and dour. A bad sign; but it was late in the season. The moon was rising; he went on, up and down the Nightcraft until the small bluish orb had crossed over the zenith: then, suddenly exhausted, left the tractor on the headland and went home.

  The next morning there was trouble with Josiah Harn, the smallholder who through persistence and hard work had become the local Swill King. There was a dour look behind the raised finger as he drove past Phillip’s cottage one morning. He drew up and angrily asked what sort of a man was it who would leave a neighbour in the lurch? Apparently he had been expecting Phillip to plough his two acres for some weeks past; and the time for oat-sowing, he complained, was nearly gone. How could he feed his cows in the coming winter? Phillip replied that he had sent a message some weeks back, following Mr. Harn’s request that he plough his land for him, that he couldn’t promise, so would Mr. Harn therefore make other arrangements in good time.

  “That war’n’t what I wor told,” he growled. “I wor told by Mr. Billy that he’d do the wark for me. I’ve waited six weeks, and no one come.”

  The only thing to do was to stop his own work and plough the two acres. Whether Harn believed him or not he didn’t know. Nobody else in the village appeared to keep his word, unless watched and kept up to it. When Phillip, returning after four hours’ work on Harn’s pightle, asked Boy Billy about it Billy shrugged his shoulders; and Phillip said no more.

  The two worked together on the land all through the next day. They harrowed the twenty acres of Pewitts’ over-thwart. Then Phillip sent him home and continued cultivating the heavy headlands of the Nightcraft until dusk and weariness stopped him at 8 p.m. Night came cold and raw and grey. He had been chilled since morning. He could not get warm in bed. The hot-water bottle scorched but did not warm his feet. To his relief it did not mean a return of the bad throat as he had feared, so work was not interrupted. The following morning they began seeding. It was warm and sunny in the middle hours, but chilly towards the end. By 7.30 p.m. they had got the barley into Pewitts’. While they had been drilling, Powerful Dick and Steve had the job of digging leaf-mould from among the oaks and sycamores of Bustard Wood and carting it to the yellow soil of Lower Brock Hanger. They had been doing this off and on for the past two weeks. To make digging quicker Phillip ploughed about six rods of the leaf-mould.