“We didn’t know,” said Jonny, worried.
“I’m only joking. Honestly, your help will mean ever so much.”
They fell on the obstinate turf with the eagerness of starlings, dropping on knees and pushing and heaving with teeth clenched. This was indeed Man wrestling with Brute Nature. After awhile it became too arduous, so they turned it into a game, under Jonny, whose job it was, apparently, to stand above and with a wave of a stick (which was also a tommy-gun) lead his men down to the assault of the backsliding furrows.
It was not long before hands and knees were grubby with soil and faces flushed with exertion, and Jonny came to say they were sorry they could not turn over the furrows properly. Phillip thanked them again, and they departed to the disused hen-house, their headquarters, standing below the Hills. Thereupon the gulls, which had been waiting on impatiently above the small boys, soaring upon the rising currents of air, swept down once more, and the scream and scramble for insects was again audible through the exhaust of the engine.
There were a few more rounds of the headland to be done before the ploughing of the Hills was accomplished. Daylight was fading, the sun was disappearing in the west, small and smoky, when he started on the final round. The engine seemed to be noisier. Doubts came with his fatigue: he put them away. Be calm, be patient: one more round, then leave the tractor by the hedge, waterproof cloth tied over aluminium body. Be calm: think of nothing. La balance, toujours la balance. Consider the probable fate of a Marshal of France! Compared with Pètain, you are the most fortunate of men. At least you are free, your own master, you have a fire to sit by at night, while all over the world homeless men are enduring existence without horizon.
There was a bottle of whisky in the drawer of the tallboy in the parlour. Should he, on returning home, open it and entertain himself to a drink? The bottle was six years filled, the only bottle brought into the house during the years of sparseness and economy, while the farm was being restored to the standards of good husbandry. Or was this restraint due to a puritan complex? A fear of becoming dependent for stimulation on alcohol? After all, whisky was made from barley. Was it unnatural to drink whisky when one was fatigued by the growing of its source? He knew that the puritan complex, driving the body to do things beyond its capacity, was part of the philosophy now obsessing part of Europe, and that it came from early inhibitions, as well as from agonized contemplation of human frustration. And thinking thus, in twilight charged with the thunder of the black bombers passing slowly east in the sky he came towards the end of the last furrow.
In front of him, where a long snake of turf had curled back, something glimmered in the twilight. Stopping the tractor, he got off and walked stiffly forward, to pause above a pair of delicate grey wings spread motionless on the furrows. One of the black-headed gulls, alighting and dipping for a worm, had been caught by the back-curling furrow-slice of the penultimate round, and its head was pressed under the earth. With wings outspread it lay still, as though resigned—or crucified: softly it lay, the pearly bloom of its unruffled plumage seeming to float its body immobile on the earth. He had rescued a gull like this some years before; it had soon flown off his hand; but this one surely was suffocated, after lying under the furrow for twenty minutes? He knelt to heave back the strip of turf. It was heavy, almost beyond his strength; but at last he got it free, expecting the head to be limp and crushed. As he held the fragile frame on the palm of one hand, slowly it raised its head, turned to look at him, and a feeble scream came from its red mouth. It rested there quivering for a further space of time, and then as though dreamily, perhaps with lassitude, it elbowed itself lightly into the air, and with slow strokes of slender grey wings flew away into the dusk.
Chapter 26
JUNE, 1944
It was that blessed interval for the farmer, the gap between hoeing and haysel. The stock was on the meadows, the hoeing was ‘taken work’, so Phillip left for the West Country.
With a feeling of being restored to his own body he sat alone in a carriage of the 8.5 a.m. train from Crabbe as it rounded a curve and drew away from what had been a flourishing little port a century before. Now he might relax, bag on rack, book in pocket, packet of egg-and-watercress sandwiches open on the seat opposite, and read The Times.
The early part of the journey was always an adventure. He moved about from corner to corner, put up his feet; stood to look out over the marshes reclaimed from the sea by a great landowner in the eighteenth century. Some meadows were now in wheat, but many in grass and thistle. Large black Welsh cattle grazed, others lay and chewed the cud among irregular rows of rusty cast-iron cake-pans. No cake—linseed, decorticated cotton, or crushed sunflower seed—had been put in them for years, unless the farmer had bought to store great slabs before the war, yet the beasts looked to be as big as those he remembered before September, 1939.
As the wheels trundled over the expansion-breaks in the rails the feeling of life was flowing back—or rather of the frustrations of life lifting from the consciousness. With trills of happiness beginning to arise in his body, he opened the packet of sandwiches. If he didn’t eat them now, before coming to Bungaloid Junction, he might miss the chance of enjoying breakfast alone.
In due course he arrived at the junction, with its view of hundreds of wooden shacks lying higgledy-piggledy along the verge of the sea. While awaiting the London train there was a feeling of the eyes losing their full absorbent look. He was enclosed within himself again. Too many people. There were soldiers; men of the R.A.F.; Poles, English, Norwegian; members of the 8th U.S. Army Air Force. A civilian in his carriage made the inevitable slogan-joke to a neighbour—‘is your journey really necessary?’ If he had a dog, he would probably call it Monty. His father, and grandfather, would whistle to Bonzo and Rover respectively. Still, it was better to be among the sheep—these kindly, slow-to-anger East Anglians.
Having staked his claim to a corner seat by a deposit of coat and hat (bag hidden underneath) he walked past the barrier to get a newspaper. Safe in his seat, he saw with dismay that the carriage was getting more and more full.
Goodbye to a comfortable journey to London. People were soon standing, politely and stoically, between rows of sitters’ knees. The corridors were full, too. A pretty W.A.A.F. officer looked in; was found room to stand before him. Should he be old-fashioned and offer her his seat? But how could he get on his feet? He was pinned.
Phillip was still wondering what he should do when the train lurched off, and the young woman collapsed with startled apologies into his lap. As the train was still jerky over points, chivalry demanded that he steady her with his arms. When she was able once more to stand upright he felt that the least he could do was to give up his seat to this warm and soft young woman. So with hypocritically-modest eyes averted, he got up and made for the guard’s van, which usually had a solitary vacant seat.
The van was overlaid by recumbent figures in khaki and blue. Among this human clottage a dog on a string looked at him hopefully. After a search along the length of the train he found a seat in a third-class carriage, and sat down wondering if he was committing a fraud, since he had a first-class ticket.
Everything was topsy-turvy in war-time. His publisher once wrote to say that one of his dreads was to have a best-seller, for his paper ration would not stand it. Even his books were selling. Thereby Rosamund might continue at Lucy’s old school in Berkshire, and Peter re-enter Horatio Nelson’s school at North Walsham. Here royalties would run out, so David and Jonathan must continue at the village school.
*
As the train ran south, a glance through the window showed that the English countryside, in the fifth year of war, was superficially a happy scene, compared with what it had looked like before. Phillip spent his time staring at fields of arable and grass of unspoiled farmlands: as distinct from those vast level spaces despoiled by dark-green hangars, squatting like great rectangular toad-robots, claiming the living soil for death; amidst whose runways and perim
eter tracks, during their construction, the spirit of true work in the countryside was corrupted. Many millions of pounds had been sunken under their cruciform slabs, and risen off them, too; and black millions had sneaked away by other ways (later to be run to earth by the hounds of H.M.’s United Kingdom Income Tax Inspectorate Hunt).
Regarding farmlands proper, a more pleasing rural landscape was revealed—but only superficially: for the spirit of the men who served the land was neither free nor happy. Those splendid workers, German prisoners, had helped to restore the face of the land to a look of good husbandry. Hedges which once sprawled ten and fifteen feet high, and several yards into weedy fields, were now trim and tidy. Rivers had been cleaned out; dykes, grupps, rhines, and ditches made as original. The same work, where carried on elsewhere in Europe, was what Press, radio, politicians and fireside patriots would call Slave Labour, or Collaboration, a word of detestation. But in Britain it was done by freedom-lovers or Co-operators, a decent-fellow word for the re-educated. Among this last lot were Italian prisoners who seemed to typify the virtues of their captors, for they did little or no work while co-operating. As for the Germans, most of whom retained their former non-re-educatable minds, they worked with such care and speed and without pay that they had generally won the respect of the farmers for whom they worked.
In the flatter arable districts of East Anglia an old farmer, with his mind formed before the first war, and driving along in his pony and trap, would see over the hedges as he trotted along, undisturbed by motorcars, farm after farm of smooth and pleasant fields, in the early summer revealing broad green lines of growing sugar-beet, dark blue-green oats, paler barley, and robust wheat.
Were he to rein-in his pony and get down, and search field after field of corn, he would scarcely find a weed anywhere, except in the hedge bottoms. Machines spraying sulphuric acid, copper sulphate, and newer, more deadly chemicals with alphabetical combinations of letters like DNG, had wilted the last of yellow charlock, shrivelled the plants of red-weed, wild radish, dock and thistle. In cornfields the weeds had died out altogether, together with the worms that were the soil-makers, the bacteria that broke down dead vegetable tissue which fed living vegetable cells, and many a leveret, partridge chick, sky-lark, and last of that decimated species, the corncrake.
The old farmer would look in vain, on some of those food-factory farms, for one domesticated animal. Everything that is grown in these fields is sold at once. In one operation the barley is cut, threshed, and taken away in lorries to the driers—big machines like the grass-drying plants—where the extra mildew-making moisture, up to fourteen per cent by weight, is removed. After being dried, the barley, already sold by sample, is mechanically sacked-up, weighed by a man who ties the string around the neck of the sack, wheels it on rubber tyres from a ramp level with the floor of a ten-ton lorry, which takes it direct to malt-house.
No hay, no swedes, no fodder. On such farms the harvest is over almost as soon as begun. The straw on the field is picked up by one machine and baled by another. The straw goes for paper-making. Everything is turned into cash; nothing grown for home-consumption; no oats, for there are no horses; no beet-pulp bought back from the factories, no bullocks to eat it. The farms do not have, on all their thousands of acres, so much as one solitary pat of dung.
The men are mechanics, wearing overalls. Labourers are no more, unless Irish gangs of hoers can be called labourers. All such work is done at contract prices, called taken work. The mechanics prefer it that way, for they are working directly for themselves. When they have finished their day’s work, they wash, change into dark suits and pointed shoes, and go to the pub. No gardens or allotments. Tinned vegetables can be bought without trouble.
And thus and thus, while the worn wheels of the train beat out a shaky rhythm on the rails beneath the carriage, while the tune of Lilli Marlene passed through Phillip’s head—that song of the Afrika Korps recently scattered as the sands of the Parthenopian desert, which came to the Eighth Army via Radio Belgrade: there was a little beginning of European comradeship …
In these businesses, too, the farmer, or managing director, as he may be called, has a good time. He shoots five days a week in the season, and keeps a string of hunters. Eight Norfolk farmers, several of them men I have shot with, after the last harvest motored up to a rented Yorkshire grouse moor, where they shot over six thousand brace of birds and played poker at night. After all expenses had been paid each farmer was two hundred pounds in pocket for his fortnight’s fun. The joke was that, before the war, the moor was let to rich distillers who had bought their barley for a song; now it is the farmers, barley men all, who shoot the grouse upon Blubberhouses and other moors.
They are tough, some of those farmers. I know of one who shoots seagulls following the plough, to make up a hamper for the London Market. Another told me that he and three other guns, in two days, shot over five thousand coot on one of the larger Norfolk Broads.
Some agriculturists who doubted all-mechanised farming before the war—declaring that it was ruining the land, taking all out and putting nothing back—have now by necessity to farm that way themselves. They declare that sugar-beet tops, ploughed in to rot down to maintain sufficient humus in the soil, together with the aftermath of the one-year leys (sown with the next crop, barley) will maintain their land’s fertility. Why have all the worry and loss of fattening bullocks to tread straw to make muck to grow roots to fatten bullocks—all costly routines, together with the expense of straw-carting, muck-carting and muck-spreading—when you can plough-in tops and grass-aftermath, and get high yields of both corn and beet by using chemical fertilisers dropped by a machine?
Our old farmer, with his little old pony and trap, went last April to see such a farm. For years it had been fully mechanised. Most of the land was light—sand and gravel. In old times sheep folded on roots turned themselves into mutton, while the golden hoof compressed the land and mucked it for the growing of the finest malting barley.
In these new times, the chemical sack has replaced ‘the walking dung-cart’. Our old farmer went there when the east wind was blowing. He watched streams of tiny sharp flints and sand moving before polar blasts cutting the tender barley plants. In the new gateways, twenty feet wide to take combine-harvesters, sand was piling up before the wind. Was this the answer to the controversy, Muck or Artificials? Was this, on a small scale, a repetition of the Dust Bowl of the Middle West of the U.S.A.? And, in a former civilisation, of the wheat fields of the Roman Empire in North Africa, now a desert littered with broken tanks and aircraft?
Our little old farmer driving his little old totty pony and trap, his head filled up with the ideas of his forefathers of doing his land right by putting back what he took out, looks over the hedge at the row of Bentleys and Fraser-Nash B.M.W.’s, the Lagondas and the Rolls-Royces of Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s ‘big men’, at their wives with aluminium shooting-sticks, elegant canvas long-boots, well-cut tweeds, platinum and gold cigarette cases, lighters and compacts, and wonders if he is not hopelessly out of it all.
And thus and thus ran the worn engine of the brain inside the skull of the little old farmer with a first-class ticket sitting in a third-class carriage while wheels rattle over worn steel rails past wide, flat fields, where patches of ominous yellow clay were beginning to show under the lessening black silt of the Fens.
And now the train was passing into the suburban sprawl of the Home Counties, with the suggestion of an industrial cemetery. On to the smoky sky and stricken areas of bricks and mortar which were the Victorian rookeries of East London—jerry-built and jerry-bombed as the saying went—terminating in the funereal soot of Liverpool Street station and its deathliness penetrated by light in spaces shattered in the black glassed roof.
Outside the congestion and shadiness of an unplanned City was relieved a little by the catharsis of high explosive. A taxi-cab took Phillip through vacant areas around St. Paul’s now so surprisingly light and airy that he must stop, pay
off the cab, and stand and stare. Wild apple saplings were growing in some of the basement areas. Coltsfoot and mouse-ear and hawk-weed were in flower on broken walls. He was looking at a dandelion with a little face of gold beside a scarlet pimpernel. And, could it be—yes!—a black redstart was perched upon the ruined wall of a bank!
The smarting of the country-eye on coming in peace-time to these once inspissated streets was no more, for the slight whiffs of carbon monoxide were soon blown away in these delightful open spaces. Would they build again in this area purified by fire, where now water gleamed in anti-fire storage tanks and wild ducks paddled? Where that sweet flower of the wilderness, the rose-bay willow-herb, loosened its seeds under parachutes for the blessing of the moving airs? O, for more grass and water and trees and flowers in London, he cried within; while the voice of Money, soon to walk again, whispered with a whiff of diesel oil, ‘Gentlemen, the City will never permit it’; words used twelve years before to counter Sir Hereward Birkin’s plea that a loan of a hundred million pounds be raised to put three million workless to make new great motor-roads in what was once Great Britain.
Further west, beyond the City, uniforms were everywhere, of many nationalities, as in Phillip’s war—but no, not quite Phillip’s war: for he had yet to write the novels to establish the right to call it his. The uniforms this time were of khaki, the basic pattern, at least for the legionaries of Europe and Empire, was British. Basic uniforms—basic English—the language of diplomacy of the future, even as New York would be the financial centre of Europe?
*
A minor reason for Phillip going to London was to see, at his cousin’s request, Arthur Turney. Phillip had had little to do with him since, many years before, cousin Arthur had bought Phillip’s Brooklands Road Special Norton motor-cycle, the first model to be built at the Birmingham factory after the 1914–18 war. Their friendship had lapsed after Arthur had repudiated payment on the grounds of having been swindled by Phillip, in that he had sold his B.R.S. model to him in poor condition … this after Phillip had ridden it to Surrey from Devon and left it with Arthur in perfect running order.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 46
