A day or two later all was calm again: blue air without wind, sea without surf. When he returned there, no motorcar passed him: no grazing bullock was visible. He was alone upon the winding surface, feeling the curious emptiness of sky and earth, the low distances to the grey north sea alien and unfriendly after the green Atlantic combers rolling in upon the shores of the West Country; and when he came back he went to his room, and sat there, until Lucy found him to tell him that the new cowman had come.
I knew him by sight: a village lad whose passion was cows and calves. The children called him ‘Ackers’, his nickname at school. As a boy, ‘Ackers’ had gone down to help Mr. Oldman, the overworked neighbouring small farmer, in his cow-house. Now ‘Ackers’ was seventeen years old. The smiling quiet youth said he had been looking after Hubert’s pedigree black pigs. He said he didn’t want pigs, he wanted cows. I told him he must tell his employer that he had come to me for a job, for I didn’t want any further misunderstandings in my life. ‘Ackers’ said he would do this. He came back to me and reported. “Hubert said it is all right.”
Hubert was a yeoman who farmed two thousand acres. He was a pleasant, kind man. He always addressed me as ‘Squire’, a term which I did not merit.
I knew ‘Ackers’s’ father slightly. He said to me, “Let him get on with it, he won’t let you down.” I spoke to ‘Ackers’ about how I liked a clean cow-house, but had never had one. ‘Ackers’ nodded, and said, “Yes’m.”
The last man who had said “Yes’m” to me had been a groom in the country of the local hunt around Queensbridge in South Devon: a sure and reliable man who could not be unreliable because his entire mind was in harmony with his body. I liked that reminiscent “Yes’m” of ‘Ackers’; and I could hardly believe my eyes when next I saw the cowhouse. It was a disturbing sight, I recalled the story of the old prisoner, released by the French Revolution from the Bastille, who felt lost in the sunlight after so many years in the shades of the prison house.
‘Ackers’ had fixed a hose-pipe to one of the water-pipes put in by Ernest, Lucy’s eldest brother, before the war. ‘Ackers’ had soaked the dung-caked floor then used a shovel. This act, almost of archeological excavation, had brought to light a fine floor with a dung passage. Several years before I had bought a lime-wash pump and pail. It was standing in the workshop. ‘Ackers’ had borrowed it from Billy and bought on his own initiative two bags of lime-putty from the village bricklayer. When I looked in the cow-house my eyes met a startling white. As for Cherry, the consumptive according to the inquiline, she was improving so rapidly that before long she was giving four gallons a day.
The cows’ tails were combed, their bodies washed; pails were scoured and set in a row; black rubber hose pipe was coiled after use, a padlock on the oat-bin, and Matt’s legacy of old bones, bottles, rags, and whatnot, was buried deep in the paddock. It was a disturbing sight, and bewildering, for I could hardly believe that it existed. After praising Ackers I went away, feeling within myself a quietness almost of sadness.
The tide has turned; it is now the ebb.
About once a fortnight in the early winter Phillip went to Henthorpe to shoot. Charles Box and his friends shot what was left of the Henthorpe coverts, and Phillip’s, about eight times in the season. Phillip’s acreage was nearly three hundred, of which forty were woodland; Henthorpe was six hundred acres before the airfield had taken about a third of the land. The arrangement was that Charles should provide the keepering and arrange the stands and drives; while Phillip had two of the eight guns, and one quarter of the game sold after the usual couple of pheasants, or brace and a half of partridges, had been presented to each guest following a day’s shooting.
This bargain relieved Phillip of worry. Hitherto the idea of shooting had been one more thing that required energy to organise, so it had not been much fun. Before he handed over to Charles Box, he used to resent the thought of preparation; which entailed washing and polishing one of the tumbrils, and spreading its wide chestnut floor with clean wheaten straw for the game; clearing the granary-workshop for luncheon; marking out the stands, hiring extra men as beaters, inviting guests. He had lost touch with most of his old friends. But now he had the chance to meet other farmers.
Charles Box’s keeper was one of the Oldstead brothers, all of whom had been raised upon Henthorpe manor. There was a swarm of young children, in addition to the several adult Oldsteads working for Charles Box, all sons of his steward, a jovial character daily visible as he rode over the Henthorpe fields mounted on a cob, from the back of which his rubicund Saxon personality confronted and beamed upon all situations with the appearance of near-merriment: a condition due to constant anxious movements of his false teeth. During a shoot, far away in front of the line of guns, the stocky equestrian figure would be seen, moving slowly in response to the signal of advance given by Charles Box—a long-drawn note on a copper reed-horn. Among the line of beaters—their legs covered with hessian sugar-beet-pulp sacking, as stick in hand they struck at the yellow-green leaves streaked and a-roll with dew globules—walked two guns, to take any birds breaking back in flight. Bang! Bang! distantly in front, as the remaining six guns, spaced out to sixty yards or so, awaited behind a quick-thorn hedge for the first coveys, usually to be followed by rocketing wings and rippling long tails. Bang! Bang!—Strong-flying cocks collapsing in the sky, feathers drifting away in the sky as barley-heavy bodies crashed into the beet, or fell with bouncing thumps upon the stubbles behind the guns.
Usually on a morning of a shoot Phillip felt reluctance to go. It was an effort to put on Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, nailed boots and leather anklets, to fill the leather cartridge bag; and with old-time shooting stick of bamboo with nickel-silver fittings, and packet of sandwiches in pocket, to set forth to the manor house. But once he had started, he was glad. Sometimes in cold weather he walked to Charles Box’s house, up the gulley of the Home Hills to the higher drift or drive, past the Searchlight Camp where he had imagined his new farmhouse to stand when building was renewed after the war.
*
Farmers were given petrol coupons for their motorcars; and a small additional allowance could be obtained for shooting. Phillip did not bother to apply; his tractor had a petrol engine, so he never went short. Indeed, often at the end of a two-month period he had a score or more of gallon-coupons left over. These were supposed to be returned to the Fuel Officer at Cambridge, but he did not do so, lest he be given that amount the less next time. Nor did he sell them—the black market price was two shillings a gallon coupon. He destroyed them. When he told this to a fellow who kept the only pump in Crabbe he was asked why. The fellow seemed to be upset that his offer to buy them was not accepted.
This man was one whose manner, simple and commonplace, was usually a little antagonistic. Once he accused Phillip of being ‘against the country in the war’. He used to ask sudden questions about the army of 1914–18, in which he had served: questions put with abrupt sideway glance, in the manner of the heroes of crime and detective fiction which he read. What was the mark of the infantry rifle in 1916? How many rounds a minute could the Vickers machine-gun fire? Which way did the sun rise in the trenches? Was it ever in his eyes at sunset? Who was Bairnsfather? His suspicious attitude had quieted down by the time of the victory in North Africa, but the puzzle of spare petrol coupons being destroyed, remained. It was unpatriotic, he declared: why didn’t Phillip muck in with the others? He considered Phillip to be a bit stupid. He asked him if he had any shot-gun cartridges to sell. Had he got any to spare? Why hadn’t he? He had a good allowance, didn’t he? What for?
*
One morning when Phillip arrived at Henthorpe Manor Charles Box was offering the numbered ivory counters from his set, which gave each gun his position at the first stand. The numbers were 1 to 8; and at each following stand, a gun advanced two numbers up the line. Thus change and change about.
Mr. Gladstone Gogney was Phillip’s guest for this occasion. He arrived by motor a
minute or so after Phillip. On seeing who was approaching, Charles Box turned to a group of friends and Phillip heard him say, “Only one man in this district would think of bringing that two-faced chump Gladstone Gogney to shoot!” Phillip pretended not to have heard this remark, and turned to greet his guest.
Gladstone Gogney was unique, in that his mind appeared to have been preserved since an Edwardian youth. He was the only child of an upright and bearded father called Walpole Gogney. Sometimes this Victorian worthy was to be seen in the market town, wearing Norfolk jacket, starched linen wide-winged collar, cravat, knickerbockers with fawn cloth bottoms fastened above his calves with a buttonhook (for there were several pearl buttons to be done up) and below thin calves, dark worsted stockings and tall brown boots.
It was obvious from the punctilious manner of Mr. Walpole Gogney that the boy Gladstone had been reared in an atmosphere of respectability untainted by any excess. He had grown up in the solid atmosphere of an established yeoman family: church on Sunday twice a day; awareness of superiority of the ‘big house’; port laid down in the cellar—not many dozen perhaps, but port to be decanted on special occasions like birthdays, weddings and coming-of-age parties. The copyhold of Gogney Hall, its hereditaments and lands, had been in the family for a couple of centuries or more. There was the flint-built farmhouse, or Hall, with its tiled roof, mansard windows and tall red chimney stacks; behind were the farmyard and outbuildings—old gig in a bay of the hovel covered with a moth-eaten horserug, beside that odd-wheeled vehicle called a hermaphrodite; the disused cider press; the office with the business books in the locked desk of the ante-room adjoining the parlour with its armchairs upholstered in black horsehair. In this ante-room stood a quarter-sized billiard table (‘Keep your boys at home’, said the old advertisements) and the black iron safe with brass handle against the wall under the Almanack of the same Seed Merchant, sent every Christmas. Gladstone was his mother’s boy, of course; he was not at home anywhere else but at home. Then came the war of 1914–18.
From what Phillip heard at Henthorpe, he gathered that life in the yeomanry during that disjointing August of 1914 under canvas, twelve to a tent, was misery for the shut-in youth; for Gladstone had left and gone home after two or three exhausting days and sleepless nights, probably embarrassed by the crude remarks of his less inhibited comrades. Anyway, that was the extent of his wandering from the family circle, the assured life that to him was England—the stability of wall and stack and bullocks ‘doing’ in the yards adjoining, and of course the splendid Invicta threshing engine, with its prancing horse in brass on the front of the boiler.
Ordinary codes of those accustomed to other atmospheres often seem unsympathetic, even hateful, to such carefully brought-up young men. Gladstone used to play football. Phillip could imagine how he became a butt of less sensitive youths. One day during a match he achieved fame suddenly by introducing a Queensberry rule, whereby a method of balking an opponent was by punching him on the nose. Ordered off the field, Gladstone returned home to the safe, familiar scene, never again to punch nose or kick ball. The district being comparatively sparsely populated, the fame of the use of fist to replace the lack of skill with foot spread over several square miles; such was the continuity of the farming world in that corner of Old England, that the fame had endured ever since.
Poor Gladstone! The respectable continuity of life with the Gogney family had recently been shocked, for Gladstone had an only son who had served overseas in the present war; and now home on leave, the young man had, without telling his father, siphoned the petrol—‘milked’ was the current term—from the tank of Father’s motorcar into the tank of his motor-bicycle in order to go after the girls. Gladstone was much upset by the duplicity of his own son doing such a thing; especially as the lad, he told Phillip, had deceitfully replaced the petrol with tractor fuel. Result, Gladstone’s car wouldn’t start that morning; dense white fumes poured from its exhaust; then came a loud report, followed by a smell unmistakably of T.V.O. Ah, it was the war, Captain Maddison, upsetting a lot of people! Gladstone was genuinely grieved by the thought of his son, Launcelot, doing such an underhand thing. However, Gladstone went on to explain, he drained his tank, and managed to get to the shoot in time, and as he walked beside Phillip to the first stand he declared that boys would be boys—a fact which Phillip had repeatedly to remind himself that he was often in danger of forgetting in regard to Boy Billy.
*
Another guest for the shooting was as different from the reserved, or preserved, Gladstone Gogney as cosmopolitan experience is from parochial. The word cosmopolitan should perhaps be qualified to mean all experience as Fleet Street saw it. An acquaintance of the Barbarian Club was, in addition to being a propagandist of the B.B.C., a writer for a proletarian red-bannered illustrated weekly paper the photographic pages of which smelt of rubber solution. This journalist wanted to do an article on shooting, and so he wrote to Phillip, who asked Charles Box, who didn’t object.
Bannock MacWhippett would obviously get on in the writing trade. He learned quickly by asking questions and getting just what he wanted. So successful was he that by 1943–4 he was almost an expert on many subjects; for what Bannock MacWhippett knew, he knew intensely.
One afternoon he arrived from Fleet Street in a rattling old car suffusing blue smoke, with a new gun apparently with sawn-off barrels, a new pair of canvas boots, and tremendous enthusiasm. He brought with him a photographer, to get the best action pictures for the best article on ‘game-bird shooting’ ever written. Phillip had had doubts before speaking of this visit to Charles Box, for as a rule shooting men did not want publicity in war-time. However, this newsman was different; for, in time of shortage, he told Phillip that for every pheasant he took back with him to London he would send back a bottle of whisky.
At ten o’clock one late November morning, behold Phillip and Bannock arriving at Henthorpe Manor. There was interest in his gun, which was not, as Phillip had at first supposed, of the sawn-off variety, but a brand-new weapon made especially for him by Kirkben of Fornoster Square, London. A new sporting gun in war-time! Even Charles Box was impressed. His own guns had been destroyed while being cleaned at a gunsmith’s in Yarwich during the night of the bomber raid which had crushed the centre of the city. Even Charles Box had not been able to replace his guns until it happened that a great landlord died shortly after the German raid, and hardly was the funeral over when Charles Box arrived at the mansion, with its art treasures collected from all over Europe by a famous ancestor, and bought a pair of his late lordship’s guns. There the Cheffe crest was—Charles pointed it out to his guests, engraved in gold inlaid upon the mahogany stock of the Purdey No. 2 gun.
The party left Henthorpe Manor on large muddy rubber wheels; nine sportsmen, with wives, dogs, or daughters, transported along a sandy drift or lane, all of them sitting or crouching upon a long and wide platform drawn by a yellow tractor to the first stand. Already the photographer, a young man hatless and wild-haired, an Irish look about him, was fixing Leica to eye, adjusting swiftly the lens, clicking the shutter beside Bannock MacWhippett—lean, electric, horn-rimmed eyes filled with everything.
How the pair worked! They were everywhere, peering and listening. Phillip felt that as a writer his day was done: a literary bow-and-arrow gent faced with automatic prediction. If during lunch, down by the old willows of the Common, an arm raised a bottle of beer—made of Norfolk Barley (the Polish variety temporarily unavailable)—instantly the camera got it. A black Labrador dog yawned; tongue, teeth, gullet, flews, all were snapped. Observe the well-known figure of Hubert, one of East Anglia’s leading Black Pig breeders, down there under the tall sycamore tree. He raises his gun a score of times in a minute, and not a bird in sight. Is he practising on late gnats strayed from the nearby grupp? There, below Hubert, is a second peering, crouching, shifting figure, Leica to eye—hovering, darting low, weaving like a mongoose, then striking—click. ‘Just one more, please’ … click. The
re are a dozen just one more. Hubert is being groomed for one week’s stardom.
Bannock MacWhippett missed one detail, so did his camera man. During a drive a winged partridge fell wounded and was retrieved to the shooter’s hand. Without hesitation the sportsman, a hard Danish look about him, bit the fluttering bird through the brain with his eye-tooth: to drop it dead beside him only a moment before two flying partridges, hit by his left and right barrel, were dropping dead through the air together.
Phillip had listened to this farmer, during lunch, speaking of the feeding of bullocks being fattened in boxes. The question was discussed: How many three-year-old bullocks could a man feed? Twenty said Hubert. Twenty-five said Charles Box. “No, thirty,” said a third. “Forty!” said the skull-biter, grimly. “I make him sweat on the crank! I had to, when Father put me in the yards!” The crank was of course the handle of the root-slicer. “I say a good man can feed forty beasts!” His jaw was set grimly. He was paying tens of thousand a year in Excess Profits Tax. He drove about in a 4½-litre Invicta, 100 m.p.h. sports motorcar, and a Rolls-Royce bought during the London blitz for £300. Both were investments. His judgment was that capital values of all motorcars would increase by 500 per cent after the war. Slicing roots by hand was hard graft indeed, eight steady hours, slicing four to five tons a day. This is a proper farmer, thought Phillip: not the nominal owner of a Convalescent Home.
*
As on former occasions under the direction of the hospitable Charles Box, it was an enjoyable day, with some amusing, even stimulating incidents. Phillip had an interesting experience, being nearly shot in mistake for a hare, which ran out of the Osier Carr and across the Home Meadow. The franc-tireur of Fleet Street and the B.B.C. did not, apparently, observe that barrels, hare, and host were in one line as he pulled the trigger of his blue-new Kirkben. There was a blast of No. 6 shot low into the herbage, a hissing spray of moisture, a hare tumbling over dishevelled by Phillip’s boots; but himself still conveniently upright.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 36
