Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  Richard was telling Lucy news of the rest of the family. She was sitting beside him on the sofa, looking at the heavy photographic album familiar to Phillip from boyhood. There they were, his uncles and aunts, grouped around the grandparents whom he had never known—Father’s brothers John and Hilary, his sisters, Isabelle, Augusta, Victoria and Theodora.

  “Only the aunts Vicky and Dora are left now, Lucy. Belle died last year—oh, you hadn’t heard, Phillip? She was rising eighty-four. We’re a long-lived family. Vicky lives not far from here, at Bournemouth. Your Uncle Hilary married again, you may remember, but it did not turn out so well as he hoped. I understand his wife is now a lay sister in a convent in the Pyrenees—but of course you know her! The mother of Barley….”

  “How is Aunt Dora, Father?” he asked quickly.

  “Ah, Dora! I understand that she still lives in Lynmouth, old man. Her ‘Babies’, as she called those two odd old women, died last year. The elder was within ten days of reaching her century. Well, that is all my family news. Now pray tell me about my grandchildren, Lucy.”

  “Oh, we’re all a happy little family,” she said, her cheeks colouring. “We have our little difficulties, of course, like any other family.” She smiled at Phillip, who said, “Billy wants to join the Royal Air Force, but I’m afraid I’ll have to apply for his reservation, as we’re short-handed, and he drives the tractor.”

  Too soon it was time to go. While they were saying goodbye at the gate the young girl was standing, hesitatingly, in the doorway, as though waiting to wave as the car went away. Richard was saying to Lucy, “One day, I hope, I shall be allowed to see my grandchildren, perhaps when the war is over, and travelling becomes easier.”

  “Of course, Father,” replied Phillip. “As a fact, I’ve thought of inviting you to live with us—you’d enjoy the shooting—but always the thought of our poor accommodation stopped the idea.”

  But now, feeling himself once again in the flow of life, he went to him when the others were seated in the car and said, “If you feel too lonely, you can always come and live with us. The children would love it.”

  “May I bring my radiogram, Phillip?”

  “Of course, Father. The more the merrier! We have electricity in the farmhouse.”

  “Well, thank you, old man. It is most kind of you, I must say.”

  He glanced at the young girl as he said this. She was looking at Phillip. When he had started the engine Richard stood by the gate with her, and both waved together. At that moment Phillip remembered where he had seen the tam-o’-shanter before: it had belonged to his mother.

  “I am so glad Father has someone to cheer him up,” said Lucy.

  My father is seeking his own essential innocence in the young girl. Tender and lyrical feelings possess him; my own feelings, indeed, for Melissa. A sense of everyday wisdom, or common sense, has not entirely receded from his life. He must know that his love for her is impracticable, that age is a grievous barrier, and yet he lives—what man does not, or woman for that matter—in the illusion that one day he will be wonderfully happy, a new person.

  Does he hope, too, that he will feel passion, clear and tender and virile, arising in him when the imagined white body is drawn to him in the darkness of the nights?

  While Phillip was scribbling the above in his journal, air-raid sirens went. German bombers were shortly over the Southampton docks, having crossed the Channel from their airfields in Northern France. One dropped half a dozen bombs in a stick near Tim’s Spitfire works, without opposition from night-fighters or anti-aircraft guns. Perhaps they couldn’t be spared from the Kent and Sussex airfields guarding London, but it was not much of a raid.

  He sat on top of the air-raid shelter in the garden, taking care to avoid the stems and flowers of Tim’s Japanese nasturtiums, and watched a chandelier of bright lights dropped by a Dornier bomber. There it hung in the sky, a beautiful sight, slowly drifting down while more bombs whistled and crumped upon the earth, the sky lit by their flashes. There followed a red glow which soon went out. Only six aircraft came over; a nuisance raid.

  Now all was quiet and the chandelier burnt out. He went inside and had a cup of tea with the two women. After the all-clear they walked down to where Tim worked, and found him alert and cheerful. The raiders had been after the docks.

  When Lucy and he went north after two more days it was for Phillip like leaving the light for a sunless land. Not so for Lucy; she was looking forward to seeing her children. Phillip was disturbed about Billy, who was set on joining the Royal Air Force, Tim had told him.

  A day or two after getting back he wrote to his younger sister Doris, telling her what their father had said about his Will; and that when the time came he would see that she was given a third of the probate value in cash, and Elizabeth would have another third. Doris replied at once, asking him if he would ‘sign a legal document making binding’ what he had written in his letter. She did not want the money for herself, she explained, but to help educate ‘your two nephews whom you have never come to see’. She went on to say that Elizabeth was ‘well provided for’; she had had £4,000 from Aunt Belle’s Will; and there was a farmer friend in Sussex whom she visited at week-ends, and might marry.

  Doris was the headmistress of an infant’s school at Cross Aulton, in Surrey, where their mother had lived as a child. She wrote that she had refused to divorce her husband, Bob Willoughby, who had left her some years before the outbreak of war. Phillip replied to her letter saying that as Father was still alive, and might change his mind about his Will should he see fit to do so, such a course as she suggested would be without validity. Meanwhile, he would welcome her boys on the farm during the coming summer harvest, to help with corn carrying if they cared to come.

  *

  The crops on the Bad Lands were standing well up. The meadows were chain-harrowed to level the mole hills, and to tear out the old decayed grasses. Then they were rib-rolled. He and Billy worked all one week-end to get the job done, but in the dusk of Sunday evening Teal Meadow remained to be finished. There was more pressing work during the week that followed, so the meadow lay unswept. Meanwhile, without warning, a series of shattering explosions and the rattle of machine guns followed by vermilion curves of tracers amidst plumes and drifts of white smoke suddenly arose in volume from that boundary meadow. Phillip heard the claquement of bullets on the Hanger as they hissed past his head while he walked down to the meadow, where troops were practising an attack with live ammunition.

  That would never do! He sought out the Commanding Officer, and suggested that, as he and his men had caused alarm and despondency, they were doing Hitler’s work. In course of an infertile conversation the C.O. said, “I’ve read your book about your early farming experiences, and found it depressing.” That was his only comment. Phillip wondered why this lieutenant-colonel had made it. Perhaps he did not connect the depression with the fact that East Anglican farmers had owed over forty million pounds to the banks in 1939.

  When the troops were gone, he found all the gates of the meadows left open, despite a particular request to the lieutenant-colonel that they should be shut when his men left. The Aberdeen-Angus bull took advantage of this slackness of the suburban mind to escape from the unstimulating companionship of the bullocks on the Pasture, and went rampaging among the buds—yearling heifers—on Denchman’s Meadow. What damage was done only time would show.

  When harrowing Teal Meadow two days later his chain-harrow dragged along a tank-bursting grenade. He stopped and picked it up. The split-pin had not been split, but was pushed in straight. It was within one-eighth of an inch of dropping out. He pushed the pin back, and bifurcated it; and dropping the grenade in his side-bag, went on with the harrowing.

  During supper that evening he set upon the table the vaned object of steel and brass as a warning of what to leave alone, but immediately to report, should one be found on the farm or anywhere else. Village children all over England at that time were eagerly collecting
such oddments left behind by poor-quality troops. Several had died from explosions.

  “You children,” he said, pointing to the red and yellow grenade, “will be the exception.”

  Jack the Jackdaw had told him that as he was going up to the Bustard Yard that day bullets had clipped branches just by his shoulder. Phillip at once telephoned the lieutenant-colonel and half jokingly told him that if he and his fifth-columnists came again without authority and without notice for the purpose of firing live-ammunition on his farm he would defend himself with a Winchester .22 repeater rifle, which was lethal up to four hundred yards. The lieutenant-colonel arrived that evening and removed the evidence of his crime, after refusing a drink. Phillip thought, Have I in my time looked at French farmers as he now looks at me? Or had this lieutenant-colonel come without notice in the first place just to show his disregard for one so discredited as himself? In contempt perhaps? Would he have invaded another’s land before the war and its hooligan propaganda?

  ‘Lloyd George could bludgeon the German delegates at the London Conference in 1921 and could solemnly pronounce undivided German responsibility a closed question. But he could not hinder Professor Sidney Fay of Harvard from supporting the Germans in his classic work, The Origins of the World War, and proclaiming urbi et orbi: ‘The verdict of the Versailles Treaty that Germany and her Allies were responsible for the War, in view of the evidence now available, is historically unsound.’

  —Thomas Callander

  Book Two

  The Malevolent Glint

  ‘Surely it is infinitely sad that in a futile effort to arrest the inevitable march of humanity towards liberation and the full life, a few handfuls of arrogant and incompetent rulers endowed with vast, if brief, authority should have been able to touch off in 1914 the train of atrocious disasters which threatens to bury the civilisation of 1900 in a dishonoured radio-active grave.’

  —Thomas Callander

  Part One

  CRUX

  Chapter 19

  THE INQUILINE

  At that time, at least in East Anglia, if not throughout Britain, farmers were telling one another when they met at market, “The men are on clover nowadays. You can’t say anything to them. If you do, they leave.”

  It was reassuring to Phillip to learn that his experiences were by no means exceptional. He saw it as part of the unsettlement of war-time. Although wages had been raised from thirty-four shillings a week to sixty, there was no real improvement in the labourer’s lot. The price of sixpenny beer had gone up to tenpence, a packet of twenty cigarettes to one shilling and twopence. And locally the main cause of unsettlement lay in the high wages being paid by contractors making airfields.

  For if farm labourers were on clover, others were on concrete and tarmac. Steve the red-head told Phillip that one man, a car-knacker, getting before the war perhaps £3 a week, had six old lorries standing on ‘an airfield construction site’. Some were unusable. Each of the six lorries was on the hire-roll of a building firm at 70s. a day. He was ‘pulling in’ £150 a week. Apparently the knacker was but one of innumerable small men. The ‘big men’ had fleets of lorries; and were known in East Anglia as the Forty Thieves. One of the biggest of them was to tell Phillip, a year later, that he owned over a thousand modern lorries, together with a hundred and twenty bulldozers and similar machines. The cost of hiring out a bulldozer was £60 a day.

  And all construction work was done for the Government on a cost plus ten per cent basis.

  “And when I was sixteen my father, a farmer, kicked me out, saying I was no good when I asked him for five bob a week!” the mushroom millionaire told Phillip, indignation behind his eyes. Obviously his money had not entirely compensated him for lack of father-love: and was he like that father, towards his own son, Billy? For recently, when Phillip had been talking to the elder of the two village blacksmiths, a quiet and sincere man who attended chapel regularly, about the death of a young heifer, the blacksmith had replied, “There’s a saying in the district, ‘If you put an old head on young shoulders, it has to be knocked off’.”

  Recently income-tax had come in for all workers earning over £2 a week, or £3 if married. Many farm-workers declared they wouldn’t work overtime. Others worked only at piece-rates, and when they had earned up to the tax-free limit they went home, usually at midday.

  Bert Close, said Steve, was now in a ‘reserved occupation’, and getting £17 10s. a week for the hire of his small lorry. In addition, as the driver, he was paid two shillings and a halfpenny an hour, with double pay on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. He never came near the farm now. Occasionally Phillip saw him in one or another of the local pubs of an evening, having driven there in a saloon car with some of his fellows likewise in ‘reserved occupation’, the uniform of which appeared to be a blue suit, check cap set at an angle, silk scarf round neck, and light walking shoes of black leather with long thin pointed toes. The word ‘Spiv’ came into the English language about this time, in the spring of 1943.

  *

  The strueling cold east wind still drove across the fields while the only clouds in the sky were thin brown streamers from fighter aircraft, like glinting gossamer-spiders new-hatched at immense heights in space. The sun shone brightly but as though dead. These polar winds found a man’s bones immediately. Nevertheless it was spring. Soon the swallow would be flying under the broken bridges of the grupps, revisting its old nest on a rotten balk of timber covered with chalk: reminding the farmer, not of spring, but of the self-appointed task of making half a dozen new culverts to replace those ruinous crossing-places.

  The bullocks on the home meadows were now settled where the grass was growing greener after the harrowing to spread the molehills followed by consolidation with the Cambridge rib-roll. A little black Aberdeen-Angus yearling heifer, one of several on the far Pasture, fell in the dyke by the drinking place. She was set so fast that Phillip had to haul her out with the tractor. After scraping mud from her hair he watched the animal totter weakly to her feet and shamble away. She was the under-beast of the herd, the weakling bullied by the others, who headed her away from drinking.

  “She should go back to the yards, Matt.”

  The next day, walking there, he found her half-drowned in the same place. Again the tractor pulled her out. Again he suggested to the stockman that she should go back to the yards. On the morning of the following day Matt found her lying in the same place, dead.

  That was at nine o’clock. Matt told Phillip’s eldest son, Billy, at noon as he was crossing the river by the bridge to go home, it being Saturday. Twenty-two hours later Billy passed the information on to his father. It was Sunday morning, Phillip was in the Studio entering up the accounts before replying to letters, his. usual Sunday occupation when all was well.

  Had the drowned heifer been reported on the Saturday morning, they could have taken the carcase to Crabbe slaughter-house as a casualty, he told Billy, for disposal as either ‘fit for human consumption’ or for ‘manufacturing purposes’, whichever the Food Ministry official decided. Now the heifer was carrion, to be buried as such. He was explaining that it was not the loss of money that was worrying, but the feeling of not being able to trust anyone. He was standing there when Josiah Harn appeared at the open door.

  “I saw yar young buds running-of the under-bud into the grupp,” he said, threateningly. “Eef you find it too much trouble, why don’t yew give up, and go back where you come from? Tidden justice to sarve a bud like thet, when there be a war on. Others hev seen yar buds running-of thet under-bud, hevn’t urn tho!” and with that he walked away.

  “He’s land hungry, Billy. If this sort of thing happens much more, or our ewes get the fly badly from Mother’s dead hens, I may find myself dispossessed of the farm at a week’s notice.”

  When he told Lucy about it, she asked if it was Billy’s fault. “You know what Matt is, why didn’t you send someone with the trailer to bring it back to the yards? Anyway, it’s nothing to do with me.�
��

  “Your dead hens are! How the hell can I expect Matt to bury the bodies of rats, killed by his terrier about the premises, if the corpses of your hens are never removed from where they die on the Home Hills? It’s no good being complacent! I know you have always too much to do—so why not send the little boys to do it? Keep a roster—David one week, Jonathan the next. Or send them both together. Only tell them!”

  “I have sent the little boys again and again, and they say they can never find a spade in the place at the end of the hovel.”

  “Then why don’t you keep a small spade, specially for the job. in the wood-shed here? And insist on its return. You’re in charge of the hens! They’re your poultry.”

  He felt bitter. The strings of his throat made his voice ragged. This was, as he saw it, the fundamental problem, arising from ideas always in conflict, passively or otherwise. Yet realising the effect of his harsh words upon the lives of others, he could never be consistently certain where the cause of the schism lay. In his attitude of what should be, shall be—or in their complacency? He saw two points of view at the same time. Which was the way leading to defeat—the hard and narrow, or the broad and easy? Lucy’s brother’s words came to mind—If I lived to be one hundred years old, I would never see eye to eye with you. Was that the voice of the Tortoise, telling the truth to the Hare? Had not Ernest Copleston exclaimed tersely on another occasion, If you expect me to take all you say literally, then I have no more to say on the matter.

  As Hare saw it, Tortoise had never taken anything literally: and that was why, or how, in the past, the Copleston estate of four thousand acres, acquired by the virility of a forebear, had been allowed to slip out of terrapinic hands: and why once-great Britain had been slipping away between the two wars.