Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

  Another job Phillip did by himself was to cut the Willow Plot in Denchman Meadow, and tie in bundles two tons of osiers. He took a sample to the county town and sold them for half-a-crown a bundle to an old man with a sharp red nose and sodden-looking bowler hat who owned a basket factory. He told Phillip he used to buy osiers from Old Buck who farmed Deepwater forty years since. Feeling himself to be a traditionalist, Phillip, on his return home, loaded them on the green trailer and the next moonlit night set out to haul them to the county town, distant by thirty miles. As the top speed of the tractor was three miles an hour, he arrived there in the early afternoon.

  The basket-maker looked at the load and said, “I’ll gie you eighteen pence a bundle, ’bor.”

  “You bought them at half-a-crown on site! I’ve transported them free to your place. The double journey will take me twenty hours, and I’ve done it free, gratis, and for nothing to help your war effort!”

  “You bin on the cider, ’bor? Christmas ain’t come yet, you know.”

  “No, I haven’t been on the cider, I’ve been on this bloody outfit! You bought these osiers at half-a-crown the bundle, on sample! They’re up to sample! Now you pay up like a true-blue Norfolk dumpling saint!”

  “I’ll pay eighteenpence or narthin’.”

  “Right, ’bor, narthin’!” and Phillip began to throw off the load outside the shop on the pavement.

  The red-nosed bowler-hatted man watched him doing this until the trailer was empty. Then he said, “Do you now reload them osiers and take ’m to my factory down by the river, ’bor!”

  “I give you them as a Christmas box.”

  “They tell me yar one of them facinests,” he replied.

  “Ah, ’bor! And here’s a barricade when the street fighting starts!”

  He arrived back at dawn along the coastal road, and avoiding the farmhouse, went down to the meadow to set fire to the heaps of briar, bramble, and thorn left from the cutting of twenty years’ overgrowth on Teal Meadow. Five tall piles of brush-wood were already made; work of the past week. Near them, concealed in a hollow ash, was a drum of old tractor oil, a pitch-fork, a slasher to sever lesser branches, an axe and leather hedging-gloves. In his haversack was a flagon of sweet milky tea, which he had bought at a shop before his all-night journey on the tractor under the moon. His particular resting place was a tree trunk, growing horizontally. There he sat down, taking out pipe and tobacco. He had telephoned Jonny at seven o’clock, asking him to bring down another flagon of tea.

  How pleasing was the sight before his eyes! Fallen crossing-places between meadows replaced by durable bridges or culverts; great sprawling hedge between Scalt and Teal Meadow laid low and trimmed. Early morning sunlight now entering places which had been dank and shady. The white flints of the little bridges overlaid by concrete slabs, how good they looked in the low rays of the sun!

  The trimmed and shredded limbs and boles for the circular saw were stacked in cords. Brush-wood heaps awaited stabbing yellow flames which would reduce them to grey potash. Now to start!

  After two hours all five fires were burning out in white feathery circles, ruby underneath. The flagon was empty. He had gone hard and fast, and now was sitting once more on the horizontal branch, filling a pipe. The sunbeams were lost behind dark clouds climbing the sky. A few spots of rain fell. Looking to the north-west he saw a crooked bright flash above a dark and tattered cloud-curtain moving in turmoil about a mile away. The meadow lay beyond the edge of this local tempest. Even so, embers were already hissing at the first hail stones, so he made up the fires with his pitchfork before going to shelter in the hollow tree.

  This semi-ruin of the ancien régime had been left when he cut the hedge. Arriving before the trunk’s open hollow as white pellets of ice bounded on the ground about him, he prepared to insinuate himself inside, while wondering if his movements would disturb an owl in one of the dark cavities above. To his surprise a voice said, Ah, that’s good, Chooky. The words came as a shock, for he had been mentally prepared for brown wings flapping past him.

  Jonny had been perched up there some time, he told his father, “with his friend the old tree”. The two remained there while the storm rumbled and tore about, and the flames of the fires struck like snakes at their natural enemy, water. Afterwards they worked together until dusk, leaving the fires to burn themselves out, regardless of black-out regulations.

  *

  The four acres of Teal Meadow had been left, after being ploughed up during the summer, for the furrows to dry out. It was a sullen piece of land. Now Phillip set about ploughing the headlands, including the margin where his fires had burned the day before. Towards evening the work was finished. He had ploughed to the new gate erected across the grupp to the Common. There he left the tractor covered up, while mist, arising from the grupps, was beginning to spread over the ploughed work. It was getting late, he had eaten nothing since returning with the tractor the day before. The children would be sitting on the bench beside the oak table in the parlour, waiting for him to come before they had supper. The fire would be blazing in the hearth, the wireless playing, three electric lamps with their parchment shades casting a yellow glow on white-washed walls. It was a particular evening, being Peter’s birthday supper, and David’s half-term holiday from boarding school. Rosamund was away in Berkshire. Billy was training somewhere in the West Country.

  *

  The ploughing of the old sod of the Home Hills had been simple compared with the tearing up of the old matted-grass of Teal Meadow. The ten-inch double-furrow plough was useless. Coulters and breasts got choked at once. Only the sixteen-inch deep-digger could burst up the tenacious, tangled roots of persicaria, agrostes, silver weed, water poa-grass, and common rush, junta acuta. The turf had never been ripped by coulter or turned on breast of plough during the century and more since the land had been reclaimed from tidal marsh. Probably it had never been ploughed; it had known only sea and air since long before the days of raven-pennant’d prows of Viking galleys—one of which lay buried in a corner of the meadow, after sailing up on the tide a thousand years before.

  Ploughing in bottom gear had been a very slow process. The ragged turf reared up tough as cocoa-nut-fibre matting. Furrows with undersides of peat twisted about in uneven strips until finally they flopped over, irregularly. Share and moldboard scraped and rustled among beds of cockle-shells, fossils, fragments of old black ships-timbers. Once the breast turned up a thin silver coin with a Roman Emperor’s head on it. Gulls came in hundreds to take long worms and grubs. The soil under the horrible turf was a deep rich brown—age-long compost of sea-plant and bullocks’ droppings during a century of summer grazings behind the sea-wall. What a yield of wheat he would see next summer, he thought; rustle of long heads of Squarehead wheat in the sea-breezes of August. If the wheat-plants were not flooded in winter…

  *

  For there had been doubt about the ploughing of those two meadows at the end of Phillip’s farm. During every winter water-plashes had filled the ‘lows’ of one third of the area. For several years he had tried to get rid of the water lying in those ‘lows’ by opening old drains and ditches which wandered across the meadows. Yet this drainage work had seemed to be the cause of more water lying there.

  He watched, and found the cause.

  By digging out those ditches, the penned-up river-water had flowed back the more easily, and spread wider in the ‘lows’ of the meadows. This was good for duck-shooting, but not for plants of winter wheat.

  Phillip had reckoned that in the old days those ditches and drains had been kept clean: that for years they had been trodden-in by cattle, and neglected. But he had more to learn. One day, looking down from the edge of the Great Bustard Wood, well above the Scalt, he saw that the so-called drains were not drains. They were the remains of age-long channers in the marsh before the sea-wall was built. In those pre-wall days the sea had covered the land entirely at high spring tides. The channers wandered about like eels, or wa
ter. No drainage-master would have dug them that way. They were the remains of tidal guts in what had been estuarial saltings.

  Having found the answer, Phillip sought the Drainage Officer of the Catchment Board and got approval for a sluice by the River Wood end. The village carpenter made this door, which he fastened by bolts grouted into the walls of the brick arch.

  When the frame of the sluice was fixed into position, Jonny and he waited to watch the back-flow come up the Old River. They wanted to see if the door would be held closed by the weight of water piling against its lower side. It worked! The down-grupp water-level rose two feet above the water-level behind the door. Taking a chance, Phillip had already ploughed up what he called the wandering ‘drains’ of the meadows, and when they came back the tidal back-press had dropped right down, and the grupp water was flowing under the door.

  When such land south of the farm had, in a past century, been reclaimed from the sea, he told Jonny as they went happily home, swede turnips from Flanders had been grown to the size, according to Luke’s grandfather, of a bull’s head. The old man had told Phillip that when he was a boy he had helped to cart a crop of nearly one hundred tons an acre.

  Chapter 30

  THE MOON IS RISING

  Now it was time to make a seed-bed for wheat on the ploughed work of the Teal Meadow. The wheat must go in before seasonal rains were followed by November frosts. Phillip worked all day and on into twilight, when Jonathan came with a basket of scones and honey.

  The wind was chilly. Dwarf owls were yowling down by the river. Cock pheasants roosting in the pine trees at the edge of the Bustard Wood had ceased to cuckett. He put Jonny on the tractor while he had his tea.

  “Are you afraid, Jonny?”

  “Not likely, ’bor!”

  So while twenty-four synthetic horses droned up and down the meadow, the tiny figure on the tractor was almost obliterated in the dusk.

  What would a critic—and Phillip had many nowadays—have thought? That this was child slavery? Whatever was the farmer doing to let a nine-year-old drive up and down the meadow at that hour? And with a river at the far end of the meadow? Where was the farmer, anyway? Was that he—that still figure crouching before a fire of dry twigs, over which a kettle was hung? Some poor white, a cracker in the swamps of Georgia and Florida? The figure continued to crouch in the ditch, watching his fire, while with two hands he crammed food into his mouth. His felt hat, washed and rewashed after innumerable seagull-spottings, was almost in shreds. He wore a mackinaw, or lumberjack’s coat, tied around his body with binder twine.

  As for his trousers, they were of corduroy of the mode or fashion then current in Great Britain called Utility: short in the leg and low in the waist, and like the hat, shapeless with many washings in river, rain and soap-suds. He needed a hair cut. His grey hair almost covered his ears. It hung in an untidy fringe over his collar. He had not shaved for over a week. His eyes stared like those of a wild animal. His grey moustache bristled like that of an otter as he peered up at the sight of duck flighting over the meadow, glad that he hadn’t got his twelve-bore with him. Live and let live was now the principle of this odd-man-out existing in a world so different from that of current thought that his mind had retired into a world of fantasy.

  *

  The last pale bar of light under black clouds in the west faded out. Night hovered over the earth. And suddenly the cock pheasants in the woods towering above one side of the meadow crowed urgently. Before they had ceased the earth trembled and a dull reverberation shivered through the air. A familiar sound at that time—either a V1 from the back of a Heinkel over the North Sea, a V2 rocket from Holland, or an R.A.F. four-engined bomber loaded with block-busters blowing up as it took off from one or another of the two hundred airfields bordering the North Sea.

  The child driving the tractor was now lost in penumbral dusk, in an unseen existence of engine-noise growing fainter, then gradually louder again as boy and tractor reappeared dimly.

  A searchlight playing on the meadow would have revealed the fact that the tractor was drawing a five-barred gate slung on chains from the towing bar. Not only the gate, but one gatepost was being drawn over the soil. What in heck was all this about? Up and down the meadow the little boy went, drawing the strange load ordered by his father. The soil reared up in an ever-travelling heap before the gate. Sometimes the earth-wave was so large that the engine of the tractor could be heard knocking; then the gear was changed, and the procession went on again, most of the heap having shaken itself free of the five bars and bracing lengths of the gate.

  Putting tea in the kettle, which was now boiling, the cracker in the ditch waited for the leaves to settle, then poured himself a mug, blew on it to cool it, the while combing with his fingers the matted hairs on his skull. Having emptied the cup, he arose and walked towards the machine. The child, who was cultivating for a contract price—‘taken work’—stood on the clutch, closed the throttle, put the engine out of gear, and sat back. He was wrapped in a sheepskin tied round his middle.

  “Thet’s the baist implement we’ve got on the farm, ’bor,” said the cracker, pointing to the gate-and-post, while addressing an imaginary American visitor who was collecting data for a thesis on Backward Cultivations and Myths attending Fertility Rites in the Island Fortress. “Yew hev done some good thar, ma son. Yar’ll feel the benefit of that, won’ yew tho’!”

  “Ah, ’bor.”

  “Are you cold, Jonny?”

  “No, Chooky.”

  “Anyway, I’ll finish the job. You take my sidebag home and tell Mrs. Valiant I’ll pick up the half-loaf, butter, cheese, and pickled shallots at half past eight.”

  “Okay, Chooky.”

  The small figure was dissolving in darkness when the cracker called out, “Are you scared of walking home alone in the dark?”

  “No, Chooky,” same the answer under the rising moon.

  *

  Why the gate, and the gate-post?

  After the meadow had been ploughed, the writhen furrow-slices were pressed down by the Killer, as the 30-cwt. rib or Cambridge roll was called. Then disc-harrows had chopped and re-chopped the furrows, making a tilth into which Squarehead II wheat was to be drilled. Even so, the field of virgin arable was uneven. There were holes where lengths of stubborn furrow-slices, burst up by the deep-digger plough, had fallen the wrong way. How to get those holes filled in, together with the old useless guts and channers? What implement would ‘slade’ the loose soil into the ‘lows’?

  How about the gate, which lay to hand, drawn by chains? The lorry, driven there by Boy Billy in the past, had broken off the post, which had been new seven years before. Both post and gate lay on the clover aftermath of the Scalt. So there, to hand, lay an excellent implement to level the plenteous brown tilth left by the disc-harrow. Gate and post were hitched to the towing bar of the tractor, and after it had gone over the meadow twice, criss-cross, a seed-bed was left nearly as smooth as a lawn.

  Well, almost. More or less. Chiefly less. Anyway, it was Old Michaelmas Day, the dead-line for sowing wheat, which should be well-rooted before the starlings freckled the sky as they flew in from over the North Sea, preceding the frost-winds of the Polar Circle. Starlings were daddies for milky wheat seed, as they used to say in the West Country.

  *

  When the seed-corn was in and covered, Phillip drove the tractor up to the new shed beside the bullock yard in the wood. There he remained, after the cover had been tied down, within the silence of trees, drawing simplicity from the animals lying on their clean straw. He could sense their gentleness and innocence, he drew comfort from being among them. When he got up and climbed the wooden rails, he saw, far away across the tree-tops of Brock Hanger, a light shining. It was the first of its kind he had seen in more than five years. The light came from the window of the distant marsh-man’s cottage, where lived ‘Ackers’, the cowman. It was a brave light, a lonely light, and it meant that the war was at last coming to an end.


  It was Old Michaelmas Day, the eleventh of October—the traditional day by which, in the Granary of England, wheat should be in.

  The meadow had been ploughed, the seed-bed made, and the corn drilled, to time; he had done what he had set out to do. He would go home, he was happy. And the sprawl that night before the fire of thorn-logs, while Jonny sat at table and drew pictures of the scene, was reward enough.

  *

  One Sunday morning Jonny, Peter and Phillip walked down to look at the Squarehead wheat on what had been meadow pasture. During the night it had rained heavily, and the river had risen. Would the new corn-land be shining with water-plashes in the lows?

  The sun was in the south-east, facing them as they walked forward on the black soil covered by a haze of pale green. When they turned their backs to the sun they saw their long shadows thrown upon a myriad emerald needles each with its sharp thin shadow amidst fragments of broken turf.

  The sponginess of that black soil was not exactly reassuring. However high cirrus after nimbus lifted the heart as they walked beside the dyke which once had been the Old River. Across the narrow water were willows and alders of a wild wood. Jonny wanted to be shown where the otter sometimes slept in the thick willow undergrowth at the north end.

  “I think I’d best go back and grind some barley,” said Peter.

  Across a plank spanning the dyke Jonny and his father entered the narrow strip of woodland. Immediately the quality of the light and shade among the trees made them stand still, listening to the silence. The air was now warm and buoyant. Sunlight glanced from wet boles of ash and sycamore. Blue sky gleamed through their tops.