These were soon dropping, to slide red-hot across the floor. Ernest dealt with them expertly with a wet mop. The accretion of wood-oil and soot was thick, probably from oak-wood smoke at the beginning of the century. At one moment Phillip feared that the house might burn down, so great was the thunder of flames in the chimney. While Ernest remained on guard with his mop and pails of water, Phillip hurried by the light of an electric torch to a passage window whence the north wing stack could be seen.
Red flames arose from one twisted-brick chimney, sultry in billowing smoke. As he watched the flames became more urgent. They began to stab the darkness, they were changing colour to pale blue and lilac, there was no more smoke. The chimney was a huge stub-exhaust of a bomber aircraft at night. He thought of the rockets the Germans were experimenting with, some attached to racing cars. He had seen a group of young men in a forest clearing while going round labour camps with Martin a year ago. Martin had gone past without looking, saying, “We have seen nothing, yes?” Phillip had considered himself to be a guest, he had not mentioned it to anyone in England.
While he watched, the pale flames rose higher and there was a burst of sparks which swirled and fell with red fragments. And at that moment there was a banging on the heavy oak door below. He remained still. The banging came again, together with faint cries. He waited. The fire in the chimney burnt out, only a spark now and again whirled away in the darkness. Then there came an irregular tolling of the courtyard bell.
“What the hell is all this about,” Phillip said to Ernest who had opened his door.
“Ah,” said Ernest, and closed the door.
“Someone in the village must have thought the bloody house was on fire. I wish to God it was. Not really. It doesn’t belong to me, but to white owls, and bats,” and Phillip went down the stone stairs and through the kitchen to the courtyard door.
A shadow stood there. “Hullo,” it said, and then cleared its throat. “I know you, but you don’t know me,” it continued. “I thought I’d see how you’re getting along. Everyone in the district knows me, I live in the yard by the Cross.”
“Do come in. My name is Maddison.”
“I know that.”
“Oh.”
“I saw your house was on fire, so I thought I’d come and insure it for you.”
“That was kind of you.”
“No-one need know I didn’t sign the cover note this morning. I’m an agent, you see.”
Phillip went into the courtyard and looked up. “I rather think the fire’s out now, but thank you for coming round so promptly.”
“That’s all right. I like to help a neighbour if I can. Everyone hereabouts knows me. I’m Horatio Bugg. I don’t need to work, you know, I do it for a hobby. I live on the interest of my money. Your bell rope is rotten, do you know that? I can supply you with a good second-hand rope if you like. I’ve had it some time. I bought a lot at the auction of Yarwich old prison before it was pulled down and made into flats by the Labour government, robbing the savings of decent people to give it to those who had lived in slums all their lives. They only use ropes once to hang anyone, did you know that? They’re as good as new.”
“Well, thank you for coming. I’ll let you know if I want a rope to hang myself with.”
After playing the torch around the kitchen, rather in the mood of a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, Phillip went upstairs. He felt near to despair. That great rusty range, put in what once was an open hearth thirty years before, when a dozen servants were employed in the house—that horrible old hot-water tank, resting on a diagonal beam, and going up to the ceiling—the pipes solid with lime deposits. Mere fossils. All to be taken down and an entirely new system put in. And a water-softening plant. Then the electric light wiring was perished, where it hadn’t been pulled out of the wall plaster in which some genius had buried it. Everything about the place tumbled down, or rotting—the coach-house with its conked-out oil-engine, said by Ernest to be one of the first ever made. That enormous flywheel weighed about half a ton. Ernest had tried to draw the piston. It had seized in the cylinder, the skirt probably cracked, the rings broken. Value as old iron, eighteen pence a hundredweight.
He wandered into the larders, then to what had been the servants’ hall. Sweating flagstone floors. Damp brick floors of pantry, larder, apple-room, scullery, outhouses. Narrow Jacobean bricks, worth something as antiques for some rich business man wanting to build in the country, according to the agent, who had had the farm on his books for several years.
He flashed his torch-light on hanging, obsolete spider-webs, rat-holes, fungoid growths on damp wood.
Ernest was in his room, reading The Model Engineer by the light of an oil-lamp. He had fitted out his room as a workshop. There was a small treadle lathe held by carriage bolts screwed into the oak floor. He had bored holes first, and filled them with soft wood, without permission. It was a good floor, or had been. Still, he had made a fair job of the lorry they had bought for ten pounds at the diddecais’ field. The diddecais were not true gipsies, or Romanies, but odd family groups dealing in scrap metal. Ernest, having repaired the lorry, was making a model of a traction engine, to scale.
“Someone wanted to insure us against fire.”
“Ah,” replied Ernest, examining a slide-rule.
“He also tried to sell me some old rope.”
“Ah.”
Phillip went back to his room, and turned up the flame of his copper oil-lamp. Greyish-black lumps of wood-tar lay on the oak planks of the floor. Ernest might have swept them up. Odd lumps were still dropping down, perhaps he had been unfair to Ernest. He swept the floor and then brought in a wooden box, filled with selected twigs, to light a fire. The box had been taken outside for safety. A cord of logs, tied-in at each end by header-stretcher, stood against the far wall. When the kindling was alight, he built logs around it, leaving air-spaces. The flames climbed. No smoke came out, thank God. The flames rose higher. Still no smoke billowing out. The chimney was clear of two decades of jackdaws’ nests.
He settled almost happily to write.
My farm is known locally as the Bad Lands. It consists of woodland, meadow, river, and arable beside the North Sea. This country is the homeland of the wild goose, pheasant, partridge, and, in one great park some miles to the north of my holding, a flock of wild turkeys. It is an arable country, growing malting barley, sugar beet, oats, wheat, and hay for fattening bullocks in winter boxes in the yards after grazing on the marshes in summer. My house and my farm premises are near ruinous. My farm, like many others in this bankrupt granary of East Anglia, is mortgaged to a bank.
The villages along this coast are peopled by a mixture of racial types. Dark South Folk, sensitive, easy, and untidy; fair-haired blue-eyed North Folk, descendants of invaders from across the sea, as were the red-haired Danes whose ancestors came in galleys to burn and kill, and seize women and cattle; salmon-eyed people from Iceland.
To me, coming from the West Country, this area of England is a wild, remote, and betrayed country. There is a great arable tradition half-lost in its weedy fields and rotting barns, in its shabby hamlets where live many men who have been without work during the years when it was said that only fools farmed land because they weren’t smart enough to get out in time to put their money into industry of the towns, or even smarter, into industry abroad in backward countries, where factories employ sweated labour to produce goods with which to undercut the home market and so put British people on the dole.
The fields of arable, with their subsoil of chalk, lie on ground a hundred feet and more above the level of the sea and the coastal marshes to the north. The sea used to flow at high tide up to the farm buildings. Even so, in periods of heavy rain, when the river floods over its banks, water comes very near to the farm premises; but when the sea-wall was built on the coast-line, the saltings and flats became meadows. In the mildest winter the meadows are water-plashes, the haunt of snipe, and an occasional bittern. Duck fly across
the North Sea from Holland and farther east, and feed in the grupps, or dykes, between the meadows. It is a sporting country.
Phillip raised his head. Down the chimney came the noise as of a brass band beginning to practise somewhere. He listened at the open window, looking up to the stars. The geese were flying in from the North Sea. A sound remote, romantic, inspiring! When the flock had flown inland to their feeding ground, probably some clover field, he shut the window and went back to his writing.
My four-hundred-year-old premises stand in the valley, the arable fields lie a hundred feet above the premises. This means that everything has to be brought down steep hills, and much of it taken up again later in the season. As a farm it is not, I have been told by my professional valuer, an economic unit. But I did not accept this valuation by ordinary standards. I have other ideas for this farm. I believe that nothing is impossible and nothing therefore is inevitable. I intend, by new ideas and methods, to create a yeoman farm for my family. This time, my second attempt to farm, I must not, shall not fail.
The casual eye of the rambler or nature-lover would see in summer, from the high fields, a world of beauty lying before and below him. I can imagine an enchanting prospect, while sitting on the grassy Home Hills near the pine wood, among plants of ladies’ bedstraw and eyebright, wild thyme, cowslip, and pale July harebell swaying on delicate stalk, while before and below one, the river winds through the meadows, beyond the woods and coverts. Afar lie the marshes and a sunlit line of sandhills below another line of azure sea flawed by a remote whiteness of waves breaking on the shoals of the shallow coast. It is a view beautiful to behold, in rare moments when the mind is free of business details; but to the farmer’s mind those meadows are water-logged, the dykes choked, the trout stream is polluted; while the flowing slopes of arable make the farm so costly to work. Every tumbril of muck from the yards—I am told two hundred and fifty loads, more or less, every year—each load weighing about three-quarters of a ton—has to be hauled up to the high lands, if the fertility of the soil is to be maintained. Every load of straw has to be brought down from those fields, to be spread as litter for cattle in the yards during the winter to tread into muck—to be hauled up once again. Hence the local name of my farm—the Bad Lands.
It is a question of great frictional loss in haulage. I watched a stack being threshed this morning. The day before, the tackle arrived to be set in. Up the steep slope the lumbering traction engine, drawing drum and elevator, had to puff and chuff—relic of the age of steam box and engine and grasshopper-like elevator on wheels weighing well over twenty tons. For every ten acres of corn there is a stack to be threshed; and for every stack, four hundred gallons of water has to be lugged up to those Bad Lands—nearly two tons of water slopping about an iron coffin on wheels, journey after journey down to, and up from, the river below. The corn, too, must be brought down those loamy hills so slippery in winter, and shot in the Corn Barn. I reckon that one hundred and more sacks of corn from every stack—1½ cwt. of oats, 2 cwt. of barley, 2¼ cwt. of wheat per sack—had to be lifted into the tumbril, eight to a load because one horse could not manage more, and brought down, and tipped out on the asphalt floor of the barn; then all the way up again, to fetch another 16-cwt load.
To bring down the corn from one stack means twelve tilting journeys sideways down the grey slippery clay of the hillside, while the old wheels of the tumbrils in the vast puddled ruts look like being wrenched off. It may be better with the old-fashioned waggons with their thin iron wheels, although the pull would be greater than with modern rubber-tyred tumbrils. I helped as an unpaid hand with the nondescript threshing team of twelve men, to gain experience. The result is that I have determined to cut a road up the hillside of the field called Steep to the arable above. How does one build a road? I have made a rough survey of where the route should lie, along the lane under the pinewood and so to a hollow or bottom under a steep slope rising to the skyline field one hundred and fifty feet above. I would need to fill the bottom with a raised road, or causeway, starting at a gap in the hedge: a new opening with a wide curve of entry, for the second-hand lorry I have bought, and big green trailer I have ordered, to turn in easily. Mechanical speed across a causeway and up and down a new cut will solve the horse-breaking problem of the centuries! When I mentioned my idea to the steward—until I came to the district he had been a teamsman—he asked anxiously if it would pay. Meanwhile we are making up the old roads and I drive the lorry and also work in the stone-pit from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. I am more or less fit, but not too well fed—cheese, brown bread, apples, bully beef, and tea—rather monotonous, but better than Flanders in 1914. And I can sleep dry at night.
My woods are now, in winter, a-wing with the grey, or hoodie, crow from over the North Sea. The grey crows are larger than the native carrion crows, and even more wary. The villagers call these ‘foreigners’ Denchmen (Danishmen), the old name for the invading Vikings, a name which possibly has been in use on this coast for a thousand years and more.
Phillip was being paid £25 by the Crusader for a weekly article of 850 words describing his adventures as an amateur farmer working towards the idea of community. These articles appealed to many young men and women who worked in offices all day and longed for a life of adventure, by which they hoped to become changed not only in their circumstances of living, but in their natures as well. A number of letters were forwarded by the Features Editor every week.
One letter was from a young man called Hurst. He stated that he had been educated at one of the ‘better known public schools’ and that he had worked for three years in a private bank of the City of London. As a cypher clerk he read and coded all outgoing cables and decyphered those coming in from the foreign branches of Schwarzenkoph Brothers. ‘It is like being behind the beak of a great octopus, sucking power after squeezing whole areas of economic death by foreclosing on loans and mortgages.’
The letter went on to say that, having read The Phoenix, he felt it to be his mission in life to write and say that he, Phillip Maddison, was the revolutionary prophet Britain was waiting for. Might he come down and visit him on the farm? Phillip replied by letter that there was a chasm between the inspiring word and the hard reality of a political party. The young man was persistent: Deep-water Farm, he declared, might be the centre of what he had long awaited: ‘the protoplasmic dot of an upsurge, a Renaissance’. It was his duty to say so. He was arriving the next day, and would make his own way to the farm. All he required was food and lodging and somewhere to lay his head.
Phillip and Ernest had been alone for the past month. Ernest did the cooking, which too often was fried slices of bully beef and hot pickles. Sometimes it tasted of paraffin; but there had been no dissension. Phillip had given up trying to alter Ernest, and thought of him as the tortoise. He himself was the hare. But when Brother Laurence and Felicity came, it would be different. They had been about to set off in the Toad from Reynard’s Common when Felicity went down with scarlet fever. That meant six weeks before she was out of quarantine.
The hare was dejected. Overworked, underfed and thereby depressed, he became obsessed by the idea that the farm would never be ready for Lucy and the family. With this was another feeling: that the farm was the microcosm of the European macrocosm: it was a race between resurgence and death, otherwise another world war. He knew this was a fantasy, like passing a lamp-post before a car overtook you, otherwise you would have bad luck. Perhaps the young man from Schwarzenkoph’s bank might not be so bad as his letter seemed? He must not be afraid of his coming. After all, he would be going back to his job at the bank.
The young man arrived. He wore in his button-hole a founder-member badge of the N.S.D.A.P. This was surprising, for how could he have been one of the original party-members of 1923, at the time of the Munich putsch by Hitler?
“I had it copied,” explained Hurst. He was dark-haired his pale face was too often clouded by perplexity. “I wish I could get you to see that Birkin is a fraud, C
aptain Maddison. I know many men who were in the Imperial Socialist party, and were expelled for no reason other than that they were advancing the cause too rapidly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, Birkin’s director of propaganda, Frolich, is a brilliant speaker, and drew the biggest crowds to his meetings. Then Birkin sacked him. And no reasons given. All Frolich had done was to advance the cause.”
“What cause?”
“The cause against the Jews, the cause Birkin is supposed to be standing for, but isn’t.” Hurst went on,
“There is a tremendous dissatisfaction with Birkin as the Leader. Frolich, after five years with Birkin, was simply kicked out, but he wasn’t the only one. Jock Kettle was another. Jock can prove that, whenever a branch looked like being a success, and grew in size, the ‘Iron Ring’ around Birkin automatically closed down the branch.”
“Really.”
Hurst looked distressed. His white face took on a look that was almost ugly. “Please hear me, Captain Maddison. I know Jock Kettle very well. I also know Frolich. A Yid at one of the meetings tried to cut his throat with a razor, but only succeeded in slicing his right cheek. Frolich has a scar from his eye to his mouth, so he can hardly be accused of other than devotion to the cause. But if you listen to Jock Kettle, who is coming to see me soon, he will tell you the same thing. Jock brought in over seven hundred members when he was in charge of the Houndsditch branch, and then he was given the push. The same thing has happened to all the other branches which were increasing membership.”
“But why should Birkin work against himself like this? It doesn’t make sense,” said Phillip. “Now look, I must get to work. I’ve got to drive the lorry, we are short of a driver. A friar called Brother Laurence, who served in the war, was due to come up, but couldn’t. Can you drive?”
The Phoenix Generation Page 31
