I know that Flanders soil, for the English battalion in which I served as a young volunteer clashed ‘in the autumn of nineteen fourteen’ with the Linz battalion in which the author of that quotation was serving as a volunteer soldier. His genius, or clairvoyance, led him to the highest place in the respect and love of millions of youths. Did he, in that place, forget the authentic truth of the battlefields; will history endorse that what he wrote of others in 1919 was to be his own indictment a quarter of a century later?
And had I foreseen in my dream the death of what Evelyn Waugh in one of his novels calls ‘that creature of the conifers’?
Phillip could not bear the idea of going back to the Bad Lands. He was afraid of what his eyes would see, and rock back into his brain. Lucy drove him home. “I’ll just get you some tea,” she said, leaving him outside his cottage. As soon as she had gone into the adjacent farmhouse he walked back along the coastal road, and wading across the stream hid in the River Wood, intending to make a bivouac there, and relive scenes of the winter of 1914 in Flanders, in the wood below Wystschaete. But the mood passed, and he went slowly home again.
“Where have you been, my man? The children have been looking all over the farm?” said Lucy.
“I’ve been for a stroll, to think about something I want to write.”
Lucy was alarmed. He looked so haggard, he was so quiet. She had more than once wondered if, when he had gone on the meadows, while the soldiers were firing live ammunition, he had gone there deliberately to end his life. And in the morning, when she saw that he had packed a bag and was preparing to drive somewhere, she was again perturbed. Should he be allowed to go alone? But it was no good her saying anything….
“I’m going to see Wallington Christie, and may be away for a day or two.”
Lucy could not get the idea out of her head that all was not well; she wrote again to her brother Tim, telling him of her fears.
*
It was a quiet, almost solitary run along mile after mile of empty roads. Almost the only feeling about the war was in the sky, for the American squadrons of the 8th U.S.A.A.F. were flying daily missions, often a thousand aircraft in the air at once, heading east from airfields in the Eastern Counties. They were well into Festung Europa, and the inner area whence the occupations had spread—Germany. Judging by the many crashed aircraft—motionless, upset, deranged flying machines—visible upon arable field and sandy breck adjoining the road, a great number had been roughened up by the German flak and fighters. Again and again Phillip stopped and got out, to peer amidst scorched earth and pebbles fire-coloured as terra-cotta.
The unburnt ships had been looted of much of their buckled aluminium panels, for Italian Co-operators, taking it easy in gangs lounging about the daily jobs of farm-work—or pretence thereof—had removed metal with which to shape, beat, and engrave rings, cigarette cases, animals, and other souvenir objects for which there was a ready sale at a time when many town shops were empty, or shut, or bombed.
He grew weary of walking across empty fields to look at these abandoned wrecks, each with its history of fear, fatigue, cold at high altitudes—of terror and distraction—and went on his way, coming to an ingrown sort of wild tree countryside, of little lanes winding round and up and down their serpentining ways—immemorial tracks of packhorse, bullock drove, and lumbering waggon—passing one apparently forsaken farm premises after another: semi-ruinous thatch, doors awry, paint flaked away; and finally stopped, after some questioning for direction, at a limewashed building standing within rain-drip of several elm trees looking to have been self-grown from suckers of a long-rooted and fallen ancestor. The plaster of the farm-house had dropped away in places, outhouses looked to be both decadent and in a muddle. Farm-implements, preyed on by rust, were guarded by burdocks and nettles. How like the Bad Lands, he thought, six years ago!
Inside the farmhouse it wasn’t so bad. Told to go to Christie’s apartment up some stairs, his spirits rose to the warm greeting above, where he sat down by the fire, which burned wood.
A fine fire-place it was, too, of yellow-brown brick stepped back below the chimney shelf, course by course, to the narrow throat below the last course. A length of cartwheel-iron beaten straight took the weight of brickwork above. There was a back to the hearth sloping four-fifths of the way up and forward, then sloping sharply back to form a narrow gullet through which flame and smoke hastened. No gate-crashing air could enter through that gullet, so there was no draught when you sat before the fire, which threw out heat from a small huddle of elm logs.
“Cabton put in that fireplace,” said Christie. “You know him, I think?”
“Yes, I’ve met him.”
“We’re trying it out before having others built in several cottages we’re reconditioning. You look thin, Phillip. Are you well?”
“I’ve been in hospital, for an operation.”
“I hope nothing serious?” asked Mrs. Christie.
“A sort of appendicitis,” he replied, looking at the fire. “This hearth is a fine job of work.”
“You must take things easy.”
“Yes, I intend to, Mrs. Christie.”
*
The Community Centre Farm, in ‘C’ condition, had been bought for a sum Christie had got by selling his first wife’s manuscripts to an American. She had been a short-story writer of genius. Poor Christie, he had been kicked around in the literary world, acquiring all kinds of criticism, most of it scornful, some contemptuous, because of an alleged neglect of his wife, who had died of tuberculosis on the Riviera during the Great War, while Christie remained in England. People forgot, or didn’t know, that he was then of military age, with duty as a clerk in the War Office. In the decade following the war, he was again held to be a villain because of his ‘denial’ of D. H. Lawrence. As a fact, Christie had urged that man of genius to write objective, not subjective, novels. But what he had not realised was that a dying man had neither the power to forget his own feelings, nor the time to transmute them into a classic form. To do that required security, a life established with a calm length of time ahead, thought Phillip.
Christie was gentle. He was the product of an insensitive father and a timid, rather silly mother … silly in the equivocal sense of that Suffolk term, saintly. Christie had described his old home, and the relationship with his parents, with admirable frankness, revealing, at times, his bewildered and painful progress between the world of his upbringing in a London suburb to another world, by scholarships, of public school, and university, and the unseen sphere of Literature. After coming down from Oxford, some mortifications stemming from the old world occurred, as he had told in his autobiography, describing how, with the advent of the Great War, both worlds had dimmed behind the glare of that total upheaval. Now, in the second war, Christie was trying to grow new spiritual roots—as well as material roots, swedes and mangolds, as Phillip was soon to discover—upon some of the heaviest brown clay he had ever seen.
With his fourth wife (his second wife also had died of consumption, and in despair of this loss, and for his small children, he had married the nurse—a union of almost complete disaster ending in separation) Christie felt secure, and thereby was happy.
The new wife had been one of the stalwarts of the Reverend ‘Dick’ Sheppard’s Peace Pledge Union, an organisation which had flourished in the ’twenties but not survived entirely into the later ’thirties. She had been joined in her work by a great friend, and no writer had a more loyal, otherwise hard-headed, lady secretary on the one hand, and devoted wife on the other. So Christie, after almost chronic unhappiness and rootlessness since his early life, was now happy and rooted—or almost. For the farm was still the shambles it had been when the previous occupier, old and worn-out, had been forced by the War Agricultural Committee to quit.
Phillip found Christie more lively than when he had seen him, during the battle of France in 1940, at his former Community Centre. He was taken to see what was being done on the land. The two men wa
lked over a field of wheat which was well-forward. The plants had tillered, that is, several stalks—the ear-bearing shoots—had started to grow on each plant.
In the next field Phillip saw the figure of A.B. Cabton, in woollen sweater, oil-stained breeches, and gumboots with the mud of winter still upon them, sitting on one of the earliest and heaviest tractors, a Titan. The engine had an immense flywheel, and the machine must have weighed a couple of tons. The straked wheels slithered about, the furrow-wheel sometimes wandering into the ploughed work.
All wheels wobbled; the engine clattered while the driver, insensitive to machinery and dragged implement, sat there grinning.
He addressed Phillip as follows: “Giving up your farm, you old sod, eh? Come to join us?”
Phillip knew it was fatal to plough such heavy land so late in the season. The furrow-slices, turning up wet—especially on that ill-drained field—had the flaccidity of liver. Those slices would set hard, and be unworkable; and if cultivation was attempted, at best the slices would be tumbled about, to expose part of their weedy undersides, and plasticine would become concrete. When he mentioned this to Christie, Christie immediately deferred to Cabton.
“Will you be able to get a seed-bed in time to drill mangolds, Arty? We need them badly for winter feed for our cows, you know.”
“Don’t worry, Wally, I’ll put paid to these furrows with the heavy Cambridge rib-roll right away, and then work up the seedbed with harrows.”
“What do you think, Phillip?” asked Christie.
“This heavy land really should be ploughed in October or November at latest, for the rains to beat on the furrow-slices, then wait for the frosts to expand the particles.”
“But we can’t wait until October,” Christie complained.
“Well, you might leave the slices to dry out—and they must be left to dry out—or be almost dry, and then the rain to fall, and leave them to dry again—then a stroke of rank harrows may cause the ridged soil to fall apart, to crumble, and so prepare the way for the spring-tined cultivator crossing the work.”
“But mangolds should be soon, now.”
“You can only let it bide. Then ‘come a little dag of rain’, as my steward used to say—”
“The soil of every district is different,” said Christie with the patience of despair, “and must be treated on its merits.”
“The principle is the same.”
“You’re still all principles, I see,” said Cabton, preparing to re-start the Titan.
“Some farmers roll medium land after ploughing, but not when it’s wet, Christie. They roll it when almost dry to prevent evaporation, when the March winds are blowing. Then cultivation, every implement following—rank harrows to work the lumps to the top, where they’ll be spread-out and granulated by medium-weight rollers—then medium harrows to work up small lumps. You’ll notice that harrows, when properly ‘set’, have tines beaten down to points, and then curved forward, so that the hidden lumps are gradually slidden up to the surface, where they can be pulverised.”
He noticed a look of patient weariness on Christie’s face, as though he were gently suffering. Cabton could not start the tractor by swinging the handle, which was large and heavy. After several barren swings he walked away, stopped and called out to the tractor that it was a bastard. It certainly was as inefficient as it was massive; its wheels packing the soil harder than a heavy-draught-horse’s foot, so that as time went on, a pan of soil, made acid by the rains of years, prevented penetration by the roots of all plants, except perhaps wheat, which went down several feet under the surface to draw up moisture.
Christie said, “I must go back now, Phillip. My Peace News article must be done. Then I’m off to London tomorrow. We must also get in the seeds of our roots for winter feeding. Will you help Cabton with his work?”
“Have I got to take orders from the old sod?” asked Cabton, who had returned.
“You mean from your so-called ploughed work?” asked Phillip.
“It’s not a question of taking or giving orders, Arty. What matters is the Community Centre. And we must have winter keep. Well, I’ll leave you two to work out something to meet present conditions. Oh, Arty, don’t forget to put the ewe-flock on the wheat, will you? It’s rather forward, and needs ‘sheeping off’.”
Phillip thought this rather an odd order, for it had been an open season, and most of the wheat in the field they had crossed had tillered. He told Christie this.
“I think local wisdom is usually the thing to go by,” he replied. “And they say here that sheep can be run over wheat until May the twelfth.”
“But your plants have tillered, you know.”
“We’ll follow local custom, anyway,” Christie said, as he walked off.
Phillip tried to start the Titan. It was a beast. It should have been called a Cobra, for as he was swinging the handle after several dud turns it gave a snake-like hiss and the handle rebounded violently, wrenching his wrist and elbow painfully. Cabton seemed to enjoy the accident, for he was grinning widely.
“You don’t understand a Titan,” he said. “I’ll show you, now watch me.”
He put back the ignition lever, retarding the spark. Then switched off. Filled the cylinders, switched on, swung; and the engine fired.
“Did you put the spark forward deliberately for me?” Phillip asked.
“Why didn’t you look to see for yourself?”
“It’s your machine, you know its ways. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You seem to be Mr. Knowall.”
*
The next morning sheep were in the wheatfield. Unlike the bullock, which tears away a bite wrapped around its tongue, Phillip explained, the sheep crops close, eating out the heart of clover and grass plant. The sheep were biting out the sappy young stalks, leaving barren plants. If the sheep stayed on another couple of days, he said, all this field in August will only be fit for running hens on, to pick up grains from an occasional dwarf stalk. But he might as well have talked to the seat of the Titan.
He was going on the morrow, he could not relax there. He was heavy of body, his mind frustrated, despite Christie and his wife’s kindness. Also he couldn’t bear the slovenly ways of many of the communiteers. The kitchen of the farm-house was large, with two long refectory tables, at which thirty men and women sat down to meals. What they all did he didn’t know. Some were compiling a pamphlet with the theme of revolutionary change needed on the land after the war. Meanwhile they talked, occasionally doing small jobs such as weeding the garden. There were bricklayers and carpenters in the community: all, except one man, were of call-up age, but being conscientious objectors, had been ordered to work on the land. So all sorts filled the kitchen three times a day for meals, joined by Christie and his wife and secretary —the two women being known as ‘the Janitors’, who guarded Christie in his sanctum. So Christie didn’t know what was going on, Phillip was told.
The fact was that Christie knew only too well what was going on, and except for a General Meeting every Sunday night, with a free discussion and lecture by himself, he usually appeared only at meal times.
Several ruinous cottages stood at odd places in the lanes around the farm-house. These had been bought for a small sum by Christie, and were being rebuilt, first-class jobs, by tradesmen in the Community—bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, etc. These became the property of the Community Centre. What happened if someone left, did he or she have shares, Phillip asked? No, said Christie; the Community was based on the farm. Individuals might leave, but the Centre remained.
It was his capital which had made everything possible. There were many breakages, losses of stock and poultry. In the kitchen stood a new Aga stove, a rare object to acquire in war-time, but it worked erratically. Something was wrong with both the chimney draught and the cook, or her helpers. The stove was either roaring away like a furnace or silent and cold like a refrigerator. It had been put in only six months, but already looked burnt-out. The cook was a blo
nde young woman of Saxon appearance, called Hester. She had been sent down from college at Cambridge for having had a baby without marriage. She was now being courted by several young men, also by a sad elderly fellow known as Vincent. His world seemed to have collapsed, so he had come hoping for a reprieve in the Community. Phillip was talking to him alone in the kitchen after supper—the others had gone out, or were in their rooms—when Cabton came in.
“Still talking about wheat? Aren’t you thinking of the ‘Tiller Girls’ at the Coliseum?”
“I’m thinking of your absent sheaves in August—the Corn Dollies. If you don’t take off your sheep at once, you won’t have any waisted sheaves to set up.”
Cabton was still in gumboots. He looked permanently unwashed and unshaven, like one of the extraordinary characters in his stories of a countryside known among comic playwrights as Dummersetshire.
The elderly man, who spent his time trying to be of use to the blonde girl, sighed, and went out of the kitchen.
The next morning, as Phillip was about to seek Mrs. Christie, to give thanks and to say goodbye, the secretary came down the stairs and said, “Wally would like to see you in his room. Could you come at once?”
“You’ve got past the Janitors, I see,” Cabton called out. “Don’t forget to tell him about the Tiller Girls!”
Christie was standing at the top of the stairs. “Come in, Phillip. Sit down. We aren’t really started yet,” he said, wearily. “I was wondering if you could stay on for a week. You see, I’m editing Peace News, which means three nights in London with my wife, every month. I try to keep things going here, on my salary. The farm was in a terrible state when we took it over. Of course there are errors here and there, and we try to learn from one another at our Sunday night meetings, when all are welcome to say what he or she cares to complain about, or offer constructive criticism. Phillip, will you help me?”
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 40
