And now, in this summer of 1938, it was growing a first-rate crop of Squarehead II wheat.
*
Leaving the wheat on the Steep, he went on to the Great Bustard. This field had not been bare-fallowed. It had been sown down to barley, at Matt’s earnest request; and then ‘seeds’ had been drilled, for the following year’s hay, when the barley plants had three or four leaves.
The Great Bustard field adjoined the wood of that name. In past time those birds, now extinct, used to nest in the wood.
There were twenty acres of hay which looked to be not too bad. True, there were many docks, but these when cut could be collected by the children, and burnt. The hay was from a seeds mixture of cowgrass, alsike, Dutch white clover, and trefoil. Above this green ‘bottom’ swayed delicate stalks of rye-grass. Purple bells were hanging on the awns of the Irish rye-grass, but the pollen was not yet come to blow.
It was time to cut, said Phillip.
“I shouldn’t cut if ’twas mine,” replied Luke. “I’d wait and cut for bulk.”
“Bulk means woody stalks. The sap is gone from the clover leaves into the flowers.”
“But if we cut now, there’ll be little more than a ton an acre to carry,” replied Luke, anxiously.
“We can’t expect a good shear while the land is still exhausted after all the corn you and your late master took off it, without putting anything back.”
“But what will father’s stock have to eat next winter if we cut now? That’s what worrying me and father.”
“Last winter the cows gave poor milk, didn’t they, Luke? The hay was little more than fill-belly. There were three reasons for this. In the first place, it was cut too late, and was what you call ‘woody’. Then it was left after cutting until it was bleached, which means it was unpalatable to stock. Thirdly, there was a thin ‘shear’ because your small seeds had been sown on a cobbly seed-bed.”
“That was the weather, you can’t help the weather.”
“Yes we can, if we do things at the right time.”
“But you put us on all that other wark, guv’nor,” said Matt, who had come up silently on worn-out rubber gum-boots.
“True enough, Matt. But this year we mustn’t make the same mistakes. Hay when ‘fit’ should not be brown when put into the stack, but a grey-green colour.”
“Then ’twill go mouldy,” objected Luke.
“Not green-sappy when carried,” Phillip insisted, “but grey-green in colour. Dry hay—sun-bleached—all the sap gone out of it—all the volatile oils which make the scent of it—what is called chlorophyll, or green colouring matter—without this, hay is really no good.”
“Theory,” exclaimed the stockman.
“I know you distrust theory, Matt, but I wish you would trust what I say. Was that a quail?”
A liquid quipping note, several notes in quick succession, like the Morse code dash dot-dot, dash dot-dot repeated, came over the grasses swaying to the breeze in silky waves.
Father and son exchanged glances. They knew that Horatio Bugg had been paid four pounds for a pair by the old gentleman who collected and had rare birds stuffed, and who lived in a neighbouring village.
“Quaquilla the quail,” said Phillip. “That’s what the Romans called him—quaquilla—after his liquid note. He flies from the deserts of North Africa, all the way up the Rhône valley. Wet-my-lips, wet-my-lips—do you hear it? It will be dreadful if we slash through the nest.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Luke, strain in his voice, “if you was to cut now.”
“Perhaps if I found the nest first——”
Phillip felt his mind dissolving. So much to do, so little done. He forced himself to remain calm.
“Hay must be dry, of course. But like a good girl’s hair, never bleached. We had a rick on our land in the West Country—a stack as you say here in the East—of dry, greenish hay, which beasts fought to get at when it was put in the racks.”
“You can’t beat brown hay that’s heated a bit in the stack, guv’nor.”
“Ah yes, I know what you mean, Matt. It heats in the stack and becomes like a kind of silage. In fact, if it is put in sappy and trodden hard when being stacked, so that the air is shut out as it settles, then it wads and heats and becomes almost cake. But if the air gets in, then you get your mouldy hay, Luke. Or perhaps a fire. But the best hay is wind-dried, green and sweet-smelling. Then see how the beasts eat it. All farming books emphasize the value of hay which retains chlorophyll, the essential oils.”
“Theory,” said Matt.
“You can’t beat brown hay,” said Luke.
Phillip knew that to be too keen was a fault when that keenness cut across slower minds or natures; but he did not realise what offence he was giving by his insistence.
“What I say are proved facts.”
“Theory,” repeated Matt, with scorn.
“The men what write those theories have never done a proper day’s work in their lives, Master. How should they know?” Luke’s dark eyes held a hint of pain.
Even so, thought Phillip, there is no hope for the farm unless it is different from the old one. That means altering the minds of those about me. The war of ideas on the farm is like the greater looming continental war of action and reaction.
“Of course I know last year’s crop was brittly stuff, but I won’t have it about green hay,” repeated Luke. “You can’t beat brown hay.”
“You can beat it with grey-green, sweet hay.”
“Then ’twill go mouldy, so I harn’t a-goin’ to do it. What will they say in the village——”
“Is the village running this farm?”
“You’re master,” said Luke, quietly. “If you order me to cut, I’ll cut.”
Not wanting Luke to continue feeling hurt, and also thinking of the quails, Phillip said, “Well, let’s wait a bit shall we?” while knowing that the hay, for the best feeding quality, should be cut now, before the seeds ripened.
*
He felt relief as he left the Great Bustard behind him: at least he would have two or three days clear before haysel, and so he could do some writing. It was nine o’clock. Luke had been horse-hoeing between the sugar-beet ridges when Phillip had asked him to take a look at the hay. The other two men were scoring sugar-beet—the final hoeing of weeds between the plants. It was contract work, they were their own masters, and happy.
He waved to them, and returned by way of the Steep. How time was passing! Only last week, it seemed, the swallow-winged tines were decimating for the third time the growth of thistles underground. Again the sun killed them. Yet once more they arose, yet once again were slain. Thereafter in August nothing had grown on the bare fallow. Hares squatted there, partridges had the dusting baths to themselves.
In the following October Juliana wheat was drilled, ten pecks to the acre; and now the June slopes of the Steep were thick with wheat: the plants had tillered well, each plant had several stalks with thick long ears, every one identical, soon to curve with its own weight, to rustle with its fellows in the sea-breeze of late July and August mornings. It was a sight wonderful to behold. All those corn-heads uniform and close together, brother and sisters in a dream of resurgence: not one thistle or dock or campion or charlock plant to divide them. The soil at the base of the tillered stalks showed neither red pimpernel nor blue speedwell, but only the little plants of rye-grass and clover which he and Billy had drilled across the harrowed rows in April.
It was his first wheat. While he was biting a milky head, Matt appeared under the walnut tree by the steep chalk slope. What did he think of it? Matt snatched a couple of heads, rubbed them out, and went through the motions of biting with his brown teeth.
“They’re full of milk.” He looked at Phillip. “Yew did a good job up here, guv’nor.”
The honest brown eyes regarded him kindly. It was a generous admission, since both he and his son had declared it to be impossible.
“Yew don’t want to cut wheat too late, e
lse ’twill shill out,” he went on. “An yew won’t go wrong if yew cart wheat when it’s raining. D’yew know why?”
“No. Do tell me.”
“The wind blows through wheat straw, guv’nor. So it don’t heat in the stack.”
“I’ve learned something, Matt.”
Sitting on the bank at the top of the New Cut he looked down the valley. He saw the sky-gleaming river, and the red roofs of the farmstead amongst the trees. Then his eye strayed to the sprawling and overgrown thorn-hedge below: and for the hundredth time a feeling of dullness overcame him. When, oh when, would they start to cut those ‘great old bull-thorns’, those interlocked masses of brambles, those clusters of nettles growing eight and more yards out into the arable? They had grown like that ever since the repeal of the Corn Production Act in 1923. Their shadows poisoned more than an acre of ground. Enough sandy soil had been thrown there by rabbits to fill a dozen tumbrils. Thousands of rabbits, grey verminous rodents, were living in the woods and on the Home Hills, though nearly two thousand had been sent to market during the past two winters. From the hedges the restless mind went to the undrained meadows, and to other tasks which burdened the imagination; and trying to put them away, he got on his feet and walked down the Cut, the pale blue sea unseen through the trees below.
The wood was the haunt of pigeons to hear whose cooing was but to think of the flocks of a thousand and more that had eaten bare the tops of three acres of swedes, grown for the small ewe-flock the previous winter. Then there were the adjoining gardens of his cottage and the farmhouse—nearly an acre of ground between them—to be cleared of litter and rubbish and weeds. His own cottage damp as a dungeon, to be reconditioned. Seventy acres of arable must be spread with seven hundred tons of chalk, first picked from the face of the quarry and carted up to the several fields, as soon as the corn harvest was over.
*
A rutted cart-track led to the premises. He felt tired. He had been writing the previous night until the small hours. By the last tree in the wood, a wildling elderberry, he stopped. He had rested there many times before. He had a feeling for the tree-spirit, which was old; only part of it was alive; a clutter and wind-rattle of old yellow bones: a tree damned like himself. No wonder elder was the black witch’s tree, supposed to have supplied the wood of the cross on which Jesus was nailed. Some bird had squitted out the seed there, and the elderberry had grown. Its berries fed the redwings, migrants from Scandinavia, in winter.
“Hold on, old tree. I’m your friend,” he said aloud, with a wave of the hand.
The rough cart-track led to the farm premises, of Jacobean red brick and flint. The first building was the Hay Barn, with double doors tall enough for a loaded waggon to enter by. It was the haunt of doves. Several pairs of these gentle birds nested on the tops of the walls, and upon the wooden platform on which sacks of barley and oats for the grinding and rolling machine below were hauled up on ratchet and chain. Whenever he looked into the Hay Barn a score of white wings fluttered.
The doves were sprung from a couple which had made a nest during his first spring: strays perhaps from some race, birds tired and lost. Now he stopped at the open door, admiring the birds in a remote way—for his mind was fixed upon the needs of so much to be done. He saw herring-bone pattern of the narrow red bricks on the floor. Chinks of light entered by the pantiles of the lofty roof. The rafters were worm-eaten; all must be renewed.
He stopped on the bridge over the river, dreading what he might see of this semi-polluted chalk stream. The water ran clear over a foot or so of quiescent black mud, detritus of organic decomposition from scores of open drains and pitless sewers. Often the water ran murky, a-prickle with bubbles of deadly carbon-dioxide, the inert gas of asphyxiation and death. The stain of the mud-pulling higher up had not yet come down with the stream.
From the bridge a footpath led to the door in the courtyard wall, half fallen from its rust-thin hinges. The courtyard was green with weeds growing between the cobbles. He looked around before continuing his way to the new farmhouse. There from under the porch swallows dived and fled softly dark blue past his head. Their young were perched on a purlin, beside the nest above.
“Aren’t they darlings?” said Lucy, coming out to look. “Breakfast is just ready.”
He sat at the long oak table. It had been polished. Silver gleamed. Sprays of Sweet William stood in a bowl, beside another bowl holding deep blue gentians.
“Penelope gave them to me. She’s just returned from the Black Forest, where she has been with her father.”
“I remember that blue, or its shadow of blue, in the Pantheon—Napoleon’s tomb in Paris. That blue light coming down upon the dome. Do you know D. H. Lawrence’s poem, written as he was dying, Gentians. Of course I’ve read it to you before.”
An hour later, while he was writing upstairs, he heard voices. He retreated from his table by the window. Then Lucy came round the path by the new bathroom building and called out, “George Abeline and Melissa have looked in for a moment. They’re on their way to see ‘Boy’ Runnymeade. They hope they’re not disturbing you.”
He ran down the stairs to welcome them.
George Abeline said, “I suppose this is a call. You’ve got some fine coverts, Phil. Melissa and I saw them from the road. There should be some high birds, from a stand on the meadows. You must come and shoot with us in the autumn.” He laughed dryly. “That’s a lead, Phil, for you to ask me over for a day with you.”
Soon they must be going. “‘Boy’ Runnymeade has arranged for us to go mackerel spinning. By Jove, I must take your photograph, Lucy. You look like a young queen.”
Phillip had to go to the blacksmith, to get spare blades for the cutter. Melissa went with him. And then it was goodbye. What could he do? He thought to look at the meadows.
On arriving where the coastal road ran beside the river, his heart sank to see the thistles on the meadows, the choked dykes, the inert flow of the river, now dark-clouded with suspended mud. The sight was too much, he returned and walked down the street, to speak to the bricklayer about repairing the courtyard wall. Seeing him, Horatio Bugg hurried out.
“That was a pretty girl you had with you just now, when you went into the blacksmith’s shop,” he said. “Who is she?” presenting a hand-enshelled ear for reply.
“That’s right,” he called into the hand.
“Her name was Wright, you say? Where does she come from?”
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Nor do I,” said Phillip, walking on. Looking back, he saw Bugg tapping his forehead. Phillip tapped his, then pointed to Bugg.
“No, you!” shouted the dealer, tapping his brow and pointing at Phillip. Phillip gave him the two-fingers’ sign, as he went to call on Penelope.
Under the monkey tree in the carriage sweep a black Daimler was drawn up. By the open door stood a chauffeur in uniform, rug on arm. On the threshold Penelope was talking to a stout oldish man of medium height dressed in a dark overcoat obviously made in Sackville Street or Savile Row. Here was part of the financial strength of Mansion House and Guildhall; here was Penelope’s father.
As Phillip walked through the gate without hesitation the chauffeur continued to attend the slightest want of his master, whose round pink face under a bowler hat looked in the direction of the visitor. Penelope’s chin went up a little higher, her amiable face moved only its Cambridge-blue eyes. He imagined her assembling words as he came level with the bole of the monkey tree set with its arboreal shark-teeth. No monkey-man catchee Penelopee, he thought absurdly, to the pink face.
Whatever Penelope’s father might have thought, nothing of it showed in his manner of greeting Phillip, who was impressed by his modesty and charm, which showed itself immediately in the interest the noble visitor assumed to have in what he, Phillip, had done and was doing. His courtly manners were most impressive, as he referred to the most interesting and inspiring
newspaper articles pleading for a virile peasantry, and for the unemployed to be used for the draining and reclaiming of idle acres.
“As you will have already imagined,” went on the Earl of Skipton with smiling deference, “I am one of your innumerable town readers who looks regularly, and with anticipation, to your country writings. Penelope has told me how well you are doing your land, too. I am a farmer in a small way, and envy you your work in the open air. I would like to be your pupil, but alas, my dry-as-dust duties call me. I am so glad to have met you at last.”
“I am the one who is honoured, sir.”
“If I get an opportunity during the debate tomorrow in the Lords I shall refer, Maddison, if I may have your permission to do so, to what you wrote about the salmon smolts and the pollution of the Thames. Do you know, the value of waste products cast upon the waters of Spencer’s Sweet Thames—you know the quotation, of course—below the Pool of London is in the neighbourhood of two hundred million pounds sterling annually? In Yorkshire we have perhaps learned to do things a little better. From the reclaimed and treated sewage of the city of Bradford alone, enough polish to shine all the boots and shoes of the Midlands is made. Out of this waste our West Riding Transport lines grease all their omnibuses. Also a valuable compost fertiliser is prepared, and we make a substantial annual profit after the seven percentum interest on the Corporation stock is paid. So you see your article, my dear sir, is both practical and poetical, as, I would venture to say from my most limited knowledge, is the classic literature of our nation.”
Thereupon he held out his hand, and shook Phillip’s warmly, while the chauffeur awaited the exact moment to help his Lordship into the car and put the rug over his knees.
“I’ve just remembered something,” Phillip made excuse to Penelope. “Do forgive me running away,” and he left father and daughter together.
Horatio Bugg, like a dog, was still on the look-out for anything interesting.
The Phoenix Generation Page 36
