Phillip heard how, after Lucy’s departure, the drawers containing her and the children’s clothes in the bedrooms had been left open. “Mr. Copleston came in his motor, sir, before Missis was ready. So she left in a hurry. Missis was crying, sir. Now sit you down, you look a proper tired man, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.” She went into the kitchen, and returned to say, “Before I forget, sir, Mr. Tim left this letter for you to read.”
I have to inform you upon certain matters undertaken by me on behalf of my sister Lucy. I have handed over all the letters you have written to me since 1926, when I went abroad, until a few months ago. Each of these letters reveal the same mentality as that of Hitler; and in view of your violence towards her on one occasion, I have deemed it my duty to show these letters, together with certain extracts I have copied from your diaries, when I visited your farm recently, to the police with a view to considering that treatment for your mental condition should be inaugurated.
Phillip went down to the end meadow to speak to Peter. The boy saw him and left the lorry he was driving. Phillip said, “Will you farm for your mother and yourself, perhaps with Uncle Tim, if I go away after making the land over to a trust, together with all the live and dead stock, so that when you are of age you will be the owner of the land, and part owner of the farming business?”
Peter’s cheeks became slightly pink. Then he said, “I don’t bestways think I’m any good, sir. I’m sorry, Dad.”
The dark green lorry was covered with chalk drawings and words on bonnet, mudguards, and body. Was that wild angular figure, with arms waving as he chases away soldiers, himself? And the scarecrow chained to a little grey donkey on wheels a self-portrait of Peter? Phillip recognised his rather childish writing.
Wheat nearly all laid
Pigs migrated
Tractor bearing cracked
Ducks gone for a burton
Foreman dud
“I didn’t know you had such a comic talent. You should be a writer, Peter.”
“Well, Dad, I think you’re our writer.”
“Thanks for staying, Peter. I’ll give you a hand, if you like. You’re in charge now.”
“Thank you, Father.”
Later, Phillip called on the owner of the Old Manor, who had long wanted to possess the land once part of the lordship of Banyards. Phillip named his price and the other said he would let him know as soon as he had telephoned a solicitor.
The barley was not yet fit. Phillip walked among whitening stalks and then sat under an oak tree, amidst goldfinches twittering in the thorn hedge while the heated air lisped and swirled in the rustling corn.
These gay birds, crimson of face and gold-barred of wing, these King Harrys of the East Anglian countryman, are lovers of thistle-seed; and now their time of feasting is come. From where I sit in a green shade, lying by the hedge, listening to the twittering of the scarlet and gold Harrys, I think that Peter has had every reason to leave with the others, but I am glad—as one day he will be glad—that he has stayed. Luke, the old steward and teamsman—who is entering as tenant of a sixty-acre holding this coming Michaelmas—meeting me in the village street an hour or so before, said that Peter was the best boy in the district, next to what Billy was. Yes, I replied, and how did I behave towards Billy. Properly ignoring this, Luke went on to say, earnestly, that since he had been away working elsewhere he had learned that many of the new things he thought silly on the farm he had now ‘proved, and knew them to be right’. And many of the old things he tried to tell me, that I wouldn’t accept at the time, I had since learned were right, I told him. Then glancing over his shoulder at nothing, he said in a low voice that if I wanted to sell the old Albion reaper-and-binder, he would give me valuation-price for it; adding that he had heard in the village that the farm had been sold. “Yes, the farm has been sold.”
“To Josiah Harn?”
“Not to Harn.”
“Oh.”
“He may possibly be the tenant.”
“Oh,” he said again, and was silent awhile. Then, “The binder has nothing wrong with it?” He rolled a cigarette and offered it to me. “I’ve a mind to by it at the auction. You won’t tell no one, will you?”
“No. The binder is all right. It has missed its old friends, your screw-hammer and shut-knife.”
“That’s all right. I’ve still got them.”
He went away, after we had wished each other good-luck.
Phillip went into the empty Corn Barn, to be alone. If only he had been less dictatorial, less tense, Billy would still be there. A colt was entered for the Grand National against all the rules of horsemastership, and after the worst of trainings. Since the age of fourteen, when the war began and he took him away from school, this boy, whose form he was always seeing before him, this youth on a tractor with greenish-grey face looking as though paraffin were in his blood-stream—his movements languid in thick dark clothing covered by oil-stained overalls which he wore throughout the year, sleeves never rolled up even in the hottest harvest sun—the small boy who had missed all the joys of boyhood—whose life was all work and no play—jobs always behindhand—implements broken and no one to repair them—tail-boards of trailers being backed to splinter against hedge-banks and walls—tractor spud-wheels going over ladders left in grass—front wheels nearly falling off because roller bearings were worn and when they were replaced by another set the engine crankshaft broke. So it went on and on for you, Billy, it went slower and slower until you felt like a fly on flypaper, and all the dead flies on the flypaper were the hundreds of things that you never had leisure or strength to do properly, and worst of all, you knew you were not doing them properly, like a fly feels trying to walk on sticky flypaper. All Saturday and Sunday you had to sit on the Little Grey Donkey, and be laughed at for it, for the village lads down by the bridge had never heard of anyone else having a Ferguson tractor, and the village was the entire world to you. And Dad mobbed and mobbed until you hardly knew what you were doing, you were bound to be mobbed, anyway, so in the end it didn’t matter what you said or did.
Under the oaks below the Home Hills, the goldfinches, each a king in its own right, are happy at the cardoons of thistles among the corn. And sparrows flock eagerly to their annual feast of grain.
The shadow of the oak extends more and more towards the eastern boundary of the field, it is time to return to the farmhouse, to see Mrs. Valiant, who has been coming every day to prepare meals—out of one meagre weekly ration—for the child whom she insists on calling Mr. Peter. Mrs. Valiant is not well; her legs are painful and she is slow; but she could not, she said, leave Mr. Peter alone.
While I have been away, Mrs. Valiant has learned by telegram from the Secretary of State for War that her own boy, James, died on the Burma railway more than two years ago. Her eyes were bright with unfallen tears as she said to me, “My boy should have stopped here where he belongs, sir, and helped Master Billy on the farm, then there would’v bin no trouble. James, he were a good boy, and always did what he wor told, sir.”
Phillip was the owner of a second-hand Gascoigne six-unit milking-machine; and he did not want it. He paid one hundred and ten pounds, the price asked, with the least inspection, and no enthusiasm. He didn’t want to see it in the first place, and certainly never wished to see it again. But he must advise the Railway Company where to send it, for it was in one of their trucks—three tons of pipes and tubes, canisters and angle-iron. Every day the truck waited in the Robertsbridge siding it would cost an extra ten shillings for demurrage. If it came to the farm it would cost an extra ten pounds, in order to lie and rust in the nettles outside the cow-house.
He mooned about the dim loft above the workshop, where the old sporting prints were still in their pre-war newspaper-wrappings in the tea-chests Ernest Copleston and he brought up from Dorset; and for a moment it seemed, as on one or two other occasions during the past eight years, that there was only one way to avoid ‘revelations’ in the divorce court that might wreck the c
areer of a writer who was also the family provider—unless the charge be contested; which was unthinkable.
But la balance, toujours la balance, as Philippe Pétain was constantly saying to himself during the German occupation. He did not run away, and return to fight another day; he stood; and Mob had dishonoured him. Stripped of rank, honours, and decorations as a Marshal of France, the ‘saviour of Verdun’ in 1916, now lay in solitary confinement, awaiting trial as a traitor. Let him not defend himself; for he could not be tried by his peers; who were dead.
Farming is one long battle, most of it hidden behind the farmer’s eyes. When I began I said that nothing would stop me from creating the best farm in England. I believed then in the power of my will. ‘Yew’ll larn,” said Matt the stockman in the first year. “Not your way,” I retorted—“you who believe that the father of a mushroom is a stallion.” “Yew’ll larn,” he repeated.
Have I learned tolerance of slow (undeveloped) minds, cunning (money-first) minds, deceitful (fearful) minds? Joseph Conrad, who wrote some of the noblest and most austere prose in the English language, said that to learn to submit was one of the fundamental lessons of life. He said also that all true novels could be summed up in a phrase, ‘He was born; he suffered; he died.’
Is to submit to be defeated? To learn that aspiration is of a man’s aloneness, that the human will is not transferable directly, that endurance is by its very nature expendable?
As the phoenix of resurgent Europe has sunk back into its own embers, so the family-farm idea has failed, and for the same causes in miniature, I cannot but believe.
Somewhere in that strange, lost-child mind of genius, which clamped itself to love of country on the battlefields, was a fatal division. It revealed itself at Dunkirk in 1940.
The ploughshare, once bright, rusts in the corner of the harvest field. The youth who left it there late one autumn afternoon was tired; and there the plough has stayed during the following spring and summer. The bright metal was not protected by grease, as requested so many times. Now the ploughboy lies under a coverlet of blue mountain gentians in a Swiss cemetery. The share will gleam again elsewhere. During the years, beset by never-ending problems of which the rusty plough is now my own symbol, I never stopped to listen to the King Harrys twittering in the hedge. To-day I hear them in the garden, while I sit with everything to be done, and little left with which to do it, except words, words, words.
A queen wasp strayed in at the open window, flying still briskly in the early autumn sun. A tortoise-shell butterfly flapped at a second closed window.
Soon wasp and butterfly would be clinging torpid on the rafters of the building which, a year or two back, was made with materials left over from the rebuilding of the farm cottages, and hopefully called the Studio.
The last of the tomatoes ripened on the window sill. The tomtits had forsaken the empty down-hanging heads of the sunflowers which were grown again in the garden that year, to help provide money for the children’s education.
Phillip had sold, the season before, about two hundredweight of the grey seed, at ten shillings a pound. The price was far below that charged in the shops of London and other towns during the war. Sunflowers grown in small gardens were permitted in war-time, but it was against the law to grow bird-seed on farm lands. One farmer did try his hand at two acres of millet, for canaries and other caged birds. He was fined three thousand pounds, and the crop confiscated.
This year the sunflower harvest was not gathered, although the price had risen to twenty-four shillings per pound in the market. Birds had taken the black and grey seeds. But for the cries of greenfinches, sparrows, and tomtits, the garden had been silent since Lucy and the family had left.
Chapter 35
ALL IN ONE POT
“Someone to see you, sir,” said Mrs. Valiant.
The visitor said he was a farmer, who had just been talking to a friend of Captain Maddison’s, Mr. Horatio Bugg; and as he happened to be passing, he had called in to tell him how much he agreed with all that was written in Captain Maddison’s farming book, Pen and Plow.
“That book ought to be read all over England,” he declared. “It would do a lot of good. It’s as true a book as ever there was one. But you left one thing out. In your description of the big protest meeting of farmers at Yarwich, in nineteen thirty-eight, against all the foreign barley coming in, after Munich, you didn’t write about the crazy man who advised us all to join up with Birkin and march to London to take over the Government. I found myself next to him as we went out of the hall and I told him we didn’t want people like Birkin or him in this country, and that they ought to be strung up!”
“You feel strongly about it, I see.”
“Well, wouldn’t you, if you’d been there.”
“Well, I was there.”
“Then why didn’t you put in about that crazy chap?”
“I did.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“He is everywhere in the book.”
“I must have missed it.”
“I’ve missed it, too.”
When the caller had gone, Mrs. Valiant came in with a telegram message sent over the telephone. It was from one of Lucy’s aunts, who asked him to telephone a given number in Yorkshire at seven o’clock that night.
At the given time he telephoned, to be told that Lucy and the children were well, and she was prepared to see him, provided no attempt was made to dissuade her from a course which she had decided upon.
“No, I won’t do that, Mrs. Adams.”
He left for the North the next morning, and was about a mile out of the village when he slowed up to ask a woman if she wanted a lift. She replied that she was going to Fenton, which was nearly thirty miles on the road.
Phillip was driving the Ford 8, and wore blue dungarees. He recognised the lady as a sister of Mrs. Frobisher, wife of the parson of a neighbouring village. Obviously she didn’t recognise him, for soon she was asking him if he had come far that morning.
“I live in the district. I am a farmer of sorts.”
After a while she asked where he farmed. When he told her she remained silent, as though with embarrassment. For Lucy and Phillip had dined at Mrs. Frobisher’s table just before the war, and the lady had been present. She had told her nieces, one of whom had recently married a young doctor who practised in partnership with an older practitioner, that they must remember all Phillip said declaring that he was a famous writer, and one day they would be able to tell their children and grandchildren what he had said.
Her nephew, the doctor, hearing that Rosamund was at a small local boarding school, at Staithe, told him that there was much tuberculosis in the district, from the many sanatoria which once had been filled with consumptives, gone there for the pure air of the coast. He wouldn’t like a daughter of his to be educated at Staithe, the young doctor declared.
This information alarmed Lucy, for her mother had died of what then was called consumption. The next day, without telling Phillip, she had telephoned the headmistress telling her that she had heard from the doctor, giving his name. She felt she must remove Rosamund. The headmistress replied that the school doctor was not only the senior partner of the young doctor, but Medical Officer for the district as well, and that, moreover, he had given the school a clean bill of health.
Phillip had paid a small sum in compensation, as well as a term’s fees; but what had worried him was that his host and hostess must have considered it an odd thing for a guest to use a private conversation to embarrass their son-in-law, who had only just started to make his way in a new district. And Lucy had not written to explain this to the Frobishers, although he had suggested she do it when she wrote ‘her bread-and-butter letter’ of thanks, as a guest at the dinner.
Evidently his passenger, like the caller of the day before, had not recognised him at first because Phillip’s hair before the war had not been white. He drove on in silence until, at the beginning of the town, she said, “Oh, you can drop me
here anywhere, thank you,” and when he stopped she got out without looking at his face, after the briefest thanks.
*
Along winding roads, past fields once full of the bulb flowers of ‘Little Holland’, level lands reclaimed from the sea; past airfield after airfield where long lines of silent bomber aircraft were ranged, rooks and crows sitting on gun turrets and tail fins; while the nearer he got to Yorkshire, after hours of monotonous engine-noise, the more disturbed he began to feel. The old acid, as Billy had called it, was not yet drained from a permanently tired body; sometimes he ranted at the image of Lucy, sometimes at himself for being an utter fool, allowing himself to be ‘ruled’ by anyone who was persistent. Had not Joe, the Dunkirk man who so wanted to be his bailiff now that the war was over, said, “You know, sir, everyone imposes on you. You’re too kind-hearted, if you will forgive me speaking my mind.” And Phillip had explained that he was really a writer, a novelist who must ‘shine on his characters as the sun sees them, without shadows’. And Joe had said no more, not wanting to impose his views on Phillip.
Lucy has never given me moral support, he said aloud; and at once the other side of his mind brought up his own defects. What ‘moral support’ have I ever given her? Left alone, she did her own work nobly. The conflict was exhausting; and when at last he approached a great barrack of a house surrounded on three sides by trees, he thought of turning round and going back to Peter.
He kept on, over a spring-juddering series of pot-holes which had once been a drive between two rows of walnut trees. By painted signs and acres of forsaken huts the army had taken it over during the war. And going slowly towards the house, he saw Lucy on a crumbling stone terrace, and was relieved to find her alone. She was pale, with dark places under her eyes.
He told her at once that he had sold the farm, and the money received would be made into a trust for her and the children.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 60
