Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  Had MacWhippett been dropped by parachute among French partisans quite recently? For at another stand, on stubble, just as a beater was coming to the verge of the wood before the line of guns, there occurred a second short-range blast. Fortunately only tree-leaves suffered. Apparently the new gun was a wonderful precision tool, giving the owner much confidence; in contrast to Phillip’s grandfather’s damascene-barrelled grouse-gun by Maloch, Mitchie, and Crockhart, of Stirling; which was later to be seized, with laughter, from his hand, and likened to a pair of rusty gas-pipes. Which was faulty observation by the reporter; for that grouse-gun, which had seen such varied sport in the Hebrides, Yorkshire, Kent, Devon, Essex, and elsewhere, had not a pittle of rust upon it. However, it was all in good fun; and augmented by the generous opinion that with a really decent gun such as a Kirkben, ‘dear old Phillip would be quite a good shot, honestly, he would’.

  The other guns received this prophecy in silence.

  Each one of us, at one time or another, has been what sporting writers of an earlier age called ‘a tyro at the game’. Charles Box was no tyro; nor was he a tyrant; but he had some aspects of a Head Master as he strode from stand to stand, his copper reed-horn announcing the advance to the line of beaters commanded by his steward, mounted on The Bedstead. At times his disappointment could be as vocal as my own upon the landscape. His upsets seemed natural to me. Did not crows and other birds also cry out of their frustrations? Surely it was most natural that Charles, who had planned the best drive of the day across my Great Bustard field—his beaters coming up from the sunken Common below the wood—and coveys of partridges beginning to spreckle the distant air—should utter cries of mortification when he saw, in the middle of my field, a figure laboriously spreading muck? For the coveys also had seen the muck-spreader, and they promptly wheeled to the right, three hundred yards short of the line of guns—waiting with wives on shooting sticks behind them, and dogs procumbent before them—and so out of sight.

  The cries of Charles Box were to the effect that only one man in East Anglia, only that unprintable so-and-so Maddison would have thought of putting a bird-scarer disguised as an unprintable muck-flinger in the middle of his unprintable field across which five coveys of partridges, preserved for three weeks past in the beet field above the Common, et cetera.

  Jack the Jackdaw, who despite his deafness had heard the volume of cries and oaths and whistles amidst yelled instructions, ran hither and thither about the dung heaps, wondering what it was all about. He looked up into the air, as though to see paratroops descending. At last, as a cock pheasant whistled over his head, Jack the Jackdaw literally tumbled to what was happening, and lay flat among the muck. Seeing his figure thus plainly displayed, the cock half-rolled and followed the partridges. Scores of other birds followed the cock. The view was spotted and blotted with pheasants. And not a shot fired. I thought to myself that Gladstone Gogney’s day as the Fairy Fool was done; his reputation had been eclipsed.

  More entertainment was provided for the guests when I walked over to Jack to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but mine.

  “I apologise for not having told you,” I said, and at this admission the serf in him sprang out like a Jack-in-the-box.

  “I don’t give a bugger for you nor no one!” he cried.

  “This field will feel the benefit of the muck you’re spreading,” I replied.

  “Bugger the muck!” he yelled, and dancing with rage he picked up clot after clot of well-rotted bullock-dung and dashed them on the stubble.

  “That’s one way to spread muck,” I agreed.

  “I’ll hev my cards come Friday!” he shrieked, while a lump as mellow as black butter sploshed near my boots. He seemed to hate muck, for he grabbed more, threw handful after handful while spittle frothed the corners of his mouth. “And bugger you!” he raved, casting more missiles to the winds. “I wark my own way, I don’t give a buggerin hell for no man!” And whirling my four-tined Dorset dung-fork into the hedge, he walked off.

  “What was all that about?” Bannock MacWhippett asked when I got back.

  “Oh, just a farewell address. I happen to know he’s been promised another job by Josiah Harn, the Swill King.”

  Phillip preferred shooting alone—and often as not, never fired a shot. He could roam quietly by himself, sit down and be nothing, relax in the quiet winter woods. For this kind of shooting it was best to be unobtrusive. Usually he wore an old green felt hat, of a shape fashionable in 1933, but washed several times since that date, without band or shape, and showing the stains of seagull-splashes of many ploughing hours. Grey locks of hair were pulled over his brow, to break the line of forehead. A brown-and-red mackinaw coat, present from The Atlantic Monthly six years before, was buttoned to the neck; while blue overalls covered corduroy trousers over pyjamas against the penetrating polar air moving in from the sea. It could be very cold in the wood atop the Home Hills, which was called Pigeon Oaks.

  He went up the snow-scattered slopes well before the pigeons flew in the roost. There was time to pause and consider the state of the soil of the Home Hills, which he intended to plough up. Why always be hurrying here, and hastening there? Night would fall in its appointed time, and all human striving end in dust. How wonderful to be able to laugh unto the green holly with Shakespeare. While the bombers flew overhead in their massive exhaustions, it was Euripides, with thoughts of Tolstoi and Spendler, that held the frustrated writer’s thoughts.

  But the farmer, too, had his problems. Would wireworm, when spring came, become active in the rotting grass of the Hills? Would those pests, as soon as the turf was compost, eat their way into many an oat-bulb of the seed he was to drill there? How about sugar-beet, to give an opportunity of cleaning the land of thistles and other weeds? But if there were drought, how would the plants fare in that light soil?

  He thought to buy naphthalene dust to broadcast on the seed-bed of the oats, later on; that was what a proper farmer would do. But if he got the stuff, the odds were that it would not be broadcast properly. To do any good it must be scattered evenly, that costly naphthalene dust. So he set aside the idea, he killed it, saying to himself he’d scatter peas lest oats failed, as he had done on Lower Brock Hanger. Wireworms generally did not eat through peas.

  Enough: sufficient unto the day …

  *

  From the edge of the wood could be seen miles of sea, marshes, and arable. Below stood the Old Manor, once the home of a famous Elizabethan writer and statesman. Had he wandered over this land, once his own, with a flintlock? Would he have seen the same coverts? Surely not the same river and meadows; for the lower land had been tidal then. His house, then new—and the banqueting hall never finished, the roost of white owls—had stood above the tide. He would have seen scores of sea-trout jumping and flashing silver in the flow.

  From the plateau, in another direction, Phillip looked down on the red roofs of the village. The drabness of the village was not apparent from the hill, nor was the narrow road, enclosed by many broken flint walls. It must have been a lovely place before the motorcar came. Now, the military and airfield-builders’ traffic of four years had just about completed the destruction of what once was beautiful—those so carefully built walls, with their matched pebbles from beach and gravel pit. He dreaded walking along that road. Even upon the hill, thought of it lowered the spirit, although the eyes saw only red-tiled roofs against the fields and the trees; but the reality of decadence was there.

  Perhaps the farm of his hopes was the farm of forty years ago, when under the ‘Karnel’, who succeeded Farmer Buck, no man in the village was out of work, and Deepwater farm, not denuded of its best fields as it was now, employed over sixty men. It was said among the older labourers that in the ‘Karnel’s’ day not one dock grew upon any of its fields. Billy the Nelson told Phillip that the Colonel, riding over his estate one day, did indeed espy a dock; and galloping to his steward, made him go dig it up and carry it in his hat to the furnace-house where little potatoe
s were boiled for pigs. There, watched by his master, the steward thrust the shocking thing into the fire.

  The ‘Colonel’ had been a dolled-up desk-officer during the 1914–18 war; a civilian promoted to honorary rank while in charge of district recruiting.

  After centuries under a responsible landlord, when the place had order and design, the lands passed by mortgage to the ‘Colonel’; thence to a London insurance company, which sold it in the depression upon ‘the land fit for heroes’, and so it fell into the speculators’ market; and to dilapidation. And now, thought Phillip, to my microcosmic effort towards resurgence as damned and doomed as the European macrocosm.

  Could any man, small or great, stay the decline of a human culture? History said that what was outgrown did not rise again: and that was the stunning lesson of his life. The bombers were in the air, to complete the lesson elsewhere.

  But no more of such vain thinking! Stop! I am only a farmer today. Young Jonathan is coming up the slope, carrying a side-bag with tea.

  *

  “A mark on the earth by the bank: a fresh footmark. Someone has been before us, Jonny! Who can it be? Hush. Let’s follow the footsteps. You go first.”

  Silently they climbed over the rusty wire fence, and followed the strange footsteps, which soon were lost in the leaves of oak and beech blown with snow under the bare trees. There were pines, too, as well as elm and holly.

  “Those speckled marks on that tree-trunk are made by a woodpecker, chipping the bark for grubs boring into the wood.”

  Farther on, branches of elderberry and other fallen sticks were piled against the trunk of a pine in the form of a rough wigwam. Straw was pushed between and around the sticks to shut out the wind. Inside were two seats—a wooden box, for father, and a genuine pre-war toffee tin—rare sight nowadays—for son. All talk was whispered.

  “But before we settle down, let’s go on quietly through the trees, following these footmarks. See how they reveal an uneven, a stumping gait. There’s plenty of time. Pigeons won’t be flying in to roost yet. You lead the way.”

  The habit of stealthiness and of whispering in a wood had been with Phillip from boyhood. Jonny, who wanted to make himself a rabbit-skin cap, felt the same way. He heard tiny tweedle-dee cries overhead and knew they were from a pair of cole-tits, who lived in the wood.

  “Dad, come forward, slowly. See anything? There, just in front. Do you hear somebody chuckling?”

  “Well now, Jonny, who would think a man was sitting inside that criss-cross of elderberry sticks set up around the bole of the oak-tree? I wonder who it can be?”

  “I know!”

  “Don’t tell me, Jonny. Let me guess. Now then. His brown clothes harmonise with the oak leaves on the ground. His cap is brown. The brown pipe in his mouth breaks up the pink area of his face. I can’t guess, you tell me.”

  “It’s ‘Scroggy’, Dad!”

  “So it is! Well, we mustn’t disturb him, must we?”

  Phillip knew all along that it was ‘Scroggy’, the courteous old wooden-leg cavalryman from Le Cateau, his form perfectly camouflaged in the hide. A double-barrelled gun rested across his knees, his cartridge belt hung on a branch. After a few words of greeting and pleasure, father and son returned to their hide.

  “Now make yourself at ease on the straw, Jonny. If you hear the beat of wings, don’t look up. A pigeon circles the wood first, scrutinising before he swings in to alight. Let him settle. Others will follow. Then slowly I’ll raise my gun, get a bead on a bird, select another for the second barrel, while being careful to see that no immediate twig is in the way of the shot. That’s the way I shoot them; a real sportsman would bring them down on the wing.”

  *

  Pigeons were scarce that autumn, where before the war they crossed the sea in hundreds of thousands. Some declared they had been shot in a starving Europe; but Phillip had his doubts of starving Europe, despite the sea-blockade by the Royal Navy and the fact that the economy of Festung Europa was harassed by bombing everywhere. For himself, he didn’t mind whether the pigeons came or not, except that ‘Scroggy’ and Jonny would have been disappointed. He was content to sit there, to lose himself in the feeling of the wood, to see the tiny glittering heads of the first nettle-points rising out of the snow, to listen to the cole-tits in the tree-tops.

  While Jonny and he sipped tea from the same cup, and ate jam sandwiches, a bird like a brown leaf flitted into the hide. They had invaded the roosting place of Jenny Wren. With a stitter of alarm, she flitted out again.

  “I hope the owl won’t get her, Dad.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Jonny. You go and ask ‘Scroggy’ if you may sit—quietly of course—in his hide. I’ve just remembered I’ve got to send something off by the post. From now on, this hide is yours.”

  “Thanks, Dad! I’ll call it ‘Wren’s Castle’!”

  Chapter 21

  CLEARING THE HOME HILLS

  Often Phillip had regretted that he had allowed himself to be diverted from his original intention on buying the farm: to treat all as virgin land, to make an entirely new beginning, breaking with the past. The entire arable was to be bare-fallowed the first year: the tired turf of the upland grazings to go under the plough, and be re-seeded.

  “What, the Home Hills!” said the old fellow with ragged cap, tattered coat, and hands like roots, who was working on the farm when Phillip had taken it in hand. That was his first meeting with Matt, in 1937.

  “Yes, even the Home Hills.”

  “But no plough could do it, guv’nor!”

  “Ah, but wait till I show you a new invention, a light tractor with hydraulically-attached plough!”

  At that, the old chap uttered a single word of scepticism, “Patent!”

  Soon after that brief dialogue, all British farmers were being induced to plough up grassland by offers of a ministerial grant of two pounds an acre. In 1939 the war came, and immediately afterwards farmers were asked to plough up a million acres of grassland. Local committees had powers to enforce this. Later, the ‘target’ (as the current phrase went) was another million acres; and then a third million. Phillip had wanted to tackle the Home Hills, but with all the seasonal work there was not time to attempt the clearing of trees there. Scores of black, ancient thorns had to be thrown and uprooted first. Luke had declared that the soil under the sward was too light, too sandy for cropping; but Phillip hankered to grow roots there, to clean the land of its immemorial thistles and other weeds, before re-seeding with leafy grasses and clovers.

  The War Agricultural Committee offered to analyse soils for farmers; so he wrote to them, and one day an official had come to see him.

  They talked as they sat on the main plateau of the hills, looking at the distant marshes and the sea. They parted the matted grasses with their fingers, examining the dwarf flowers and the thin plants that made up the sward. The official was doubtful of the land as arable, but said that a crop of rye might be taken off it. As an alternative, since the soil was light, might it not be better to plough early in March and re-seed with grass and clover seeds on the upturned sod? For, he said, the Home Hills were best suited for grazing.

  In his enthusiasm, Phillip said he wanted to use the Hills as arable for some years, in order to kill the thistles which otherwise would flourish in any new pasture. “I can’t bear thistles,” he said. “When it is eventually resown with grass, I want to see a clean, fresh sward.”

  “Well,” replied the official, with a smile, “our usual difficulty is in persuading a farmer to plough up his old grassland; but if you are keen on taking a crop off it, and think you can do so …”

  He was a farmer’s son. Phillip had known his village when he had lived in the West Country. He was keen and alert; his ambition, he told him, was to be a farmer himself, one day. Phillip had heard and read of farmers complaining about officialdom of the various County Executive Committees, he said, but speaking only of his own limited experiences, he could only praise the County Committee. Th
e two had parted amiably.

  There was an old saying in farming, Break a field and make a man. He wondered if the saying had come about in the Napoleonic blockade of the Baltic, when Britain had to depend on her own wheat for bread. The corn in those days was dibbled—put in by hand into holes nine inches apart, three grains to a hole.

  Many of the grass fields ploughed up in Napoleonic times had not been ploughed since those days. Now they were being turned over again in the Hitlerian war. For over a century many of the rich lands of England had been grass, fattening bullocks in spring and summer. What more could man or Government want better than grazing which fattened bullocks into beef, asked the owners of those pastures, when confronted with ploughing-up orders in 1942. During that period there were several letters in The Times about the wisdom, or the foolishness, of such orders. Some declared the advantages of modern grasses, notably those bred by Sir George Stapledon in Wales, saying that they had more leaf and less stalk than the old; that the new mixtures contained strains which grew more quickly than the old, as well as those bred to mature more slowly—thus providing a bite both early and late in the year.

  The protestants declared that their immemorial pastures—carefully grazed and preserved almost like lawns—contained herbs which cattle selected for eating as they felt the need for them. They insisted that a layer of the new improved grasses was too strong, causing indigestion, or blowing, with consequent scouring and loss of condition in cattle. To this the new-grass enthusiasts replied that the modern strains required as skilful grazing as the old pastures, though for different reasons. Once the grazing of the new grasses was understood, they stated, the new pastures would be, for their greater leaf growth, superior to the old. Where before two bullocks grew into beef on every two acres, three might now graze and fatten.