The fact is the Bad Lands, as a business proposition, justified neither a full team of men if worked in the old manner with horses and steam, nor labour-saving equipment—combine-harvester and grain-drying plant—if worked in the manner then coming into being on larger farms in East Anglia. The capital outlay in neither wages nor machinery would yield a proper return on so small a holding of second-class arable as Phillip’s farm.
The potential value of the meadows was the key to lock the door on the Bad Lands and open another door leading to prosperity. A pedigree milking herd based on the meadows, in spring and summer, supported by fodder and grain crops in autumn and winter. But a change over to milk was not permitted in war-time. The nation, having declared war on what elsewhere was called the New European Order, was now fighting for survival. If Great Britain succeeded in frustrating the New Order in Europe (wrote Phillip in his diary at this time)
… we shall not only lose our Empire, but find a new Antagonist upon the continent of Europe—or Asiatic Europe.
Both Matt and Luke held to the archaic belief that mushrooms came from a stallion’s spawn. The legend may have sprung, Phillip had tried to tell them, from observation that these fungi were more numerous on grassland where a ‘horse’ (i.e. stallion) had grazed. Possibly the extra ammonia from stallions, he said, was the cause of bigger and better mushrooms?
“Theory,” replied Matt, looking at him with gentle woodcock-eyes.
“That’s what I mean,” added Luke, earnestly. “You can’t beat nature,” he went on, lamely.
“Then you believe that the father of a mushroom is a horse?”
“Theory,” said Matt; and that decided it.
“We ought to git a horse to Sheba,” said Luke. “Then she’ll grow into money.”
“You mean a mushroom farm?”
“A horse is walking the district now,” said Matt. “Shall I tell the groom if I see him?”
“Please do. Only I hope it won’t mean Sheba’ll be covered with mushrooms.”
“’Tis Palgrave Viking,” replied Luke.
So Palgrave Viking, the horse whose life was passed in walking, courting, and apparently spawning mushrooms, arrived at the premises below the Bad Lands. The groom’s fee was two guineas for service to each mare visited on his rounds. When Palgrave Viking walked up the road to the premises, he trumpeted; and hearing this call the aged mare Beatrice, standing still in the quarry while they loaded chalk into her tumbril, was immediately affected. Her docked tail lifted; the thrilling call of life caused a slight dilation in her purse as when a flower in bud begins to open. Phillip sensed her feeling, and proposed that Luke remove her thill gears, or harness.
Sheba, the black mare, remained unaffected. When the horse—his mane braided with red and yellow ribands—approached the premises, Luke closed the five-barred gate before the quarry; and having taken off Sheba’s harness as lead horse, led her by a halter to the closed gate, to introduce the stallion.
Luke, hard-eyed, sucking at stub of hand-rolled fag, said Sheba might slap into him and then the boss’d have a couple of hundred guineas to pay if she damaged the horse. Palgrave Viking, possibly aware of female dislike, stood quivering. But Beatrice accepted him. The gate was opened and the horse led in. The groom stood by to guide the entry, lest in his ardour Palgrave Viking thrust badly and injure the long black member. He sank upon Beatrice’s back, to fall away and stand, with spread legs, quivering. “One more, to make sure,” said the groom. This rocketed off as quickly as the first.
Beatrice was twenty-two years old, and had never dropped foal. Luke said it was money wasted, but the voyeur in Phillip wanted to see Beatrice have some pleasure after all the hard work she had done for the farm during all seasons.
By now, Phillip noticed, Sheba was envious. Viking served her twice before walking sedately away with the groom, heading for the next farm. For the following hour or so, Phillip noticed, Sheba shivered occasionally, and made a quiet sound to herself—a sort of soliloquising huff-huff-huffle. Were these sounds to an imagined foal?
*
The difficulties of the Bad Lands were never more apparent than at threshing time, when they had to wait upon the arrival of Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s tackle, and then on casual labour to make up the requisite team of twelve.
In pre-war days there were several men unemployed in the district who would come for a day’s threshing. Now there were none. All were on airfield construction work, taking home weekly pay-packets double and sometimes treble the wage of a farm-labourer. Phillip had to call upon searchlight soldiers from the camp, and such was the condition and nature, generally, of these twice-culled soldiers, that he dreaded the thought of threshing as the season drew near.
The arrangement made between the County War Executive Committee and Eastern Command was that searchlight soldiers would arrive with a corporal bearing a time-sheet. The soldiers’ time was to be paid for at the rate of tenpence half-penny an hour. The money was to be payable direct to Eastern Command. Such supposition was what Matt and Luke would call theory, and the soldiers bull. Neither corporal, pay-sheet, nor men arrived at 8 o’clock a.m. double-summer-time when the job was due to start. By going hard all day, with a full team of twelve men, a stack might be finished by 3 p.m. After that, it would take the driver and his mate anything up to an hour and a half to set-in by the next stack, for the next day’s threshing. But with a late start they could not hope to finish in a day. And the ‘tackle’ was in such constant demand that Mr. Gladstone Gogney could only allow Phillip three days at most.
On the first morning the soldiers arrived an hour and a half late. Their spokesman, a pale dark youth wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, thereupon beckoned Phillip down from the corn stack. There he told Phillip that he and his comrades would not work without being paid on the nail. What was the offer?
Phillip told them they would get what his men were paid—a shilling an hour. He explained that they were already far behind with the morning’s work. His words made not the slightest impression. The searchlight trio stopped about every forty minutes for a smoke, while the job was held up. They were inferior townsmen, and the work—arduous for trained labourers—was a stress for soft bodies and wolf-spider minds. The horn-rimmed leader had begun with a sort of conceited attitude based on comic paper and vaudeville nonsense, flourishing his fork with an air that this hay-seed stuff was easy, that the British Army would show the yokels what was what. Of course neither he nor they knew how to handle a two-tined fork, which was used without leverage and thereby the foot-poundage was doubled and at times trebled. Phillip tried to explain how to pick out the sheaves, like dates from a box.
“Take them out as they were laid in. Lift each one out by the binder-twine. It’s easier, you’ll find.”
The yobs continued to stick, to prod, to scrabble, to scratch, to heave, to strain in ignorance of the principle of lever and fulcrum. They broke binding twine, trampled grain from the heads of sheaves. The work proceeded at the slowest rate. The face of the engine-driver showed a non-committal resignation. With relief Phillip saw, about eleven o’clock, the forms of Poppy and Bert Close strolling up, and heard Bert saying, “We’ve come to give you a hand, guv.”
During dinner time Poppy asked for a job on the farm. Otherwise, she said, she would be called up. She had been by Bert’s side during many of the dockland blitzes. She started farm-work there and then.
Over the boundary Charles Box, despite his acreage reduced from six to four hundred when a new airfield was marked out at Henthorpe, kept a full complement of machines and men. That day he was threshing a stack on the eastern skyline, two fields away. His team was finished at two o’clock and the men went home, having done their day’s work. Phillip’s lot dragged on until half-past five, and then had not finished. The regular men were grumbling. They had to cloth up the last three feet of the stack. At one period seven amateurs had been on the corn-stack. Later Phillip saw a mistake in tactics: so many trod it flat, flailing out corn with fourteen nailed boots and fourteen steel prongs. The three best men should have been on the corn-stack, for then all the rest would have had to work to their speed.
So the next day Luke, Steve and Phillip worked on the corn-stack and set the pace for the others. When they were half-way down the stack Steve’s fork was found broken below the box. Somehow it had fallen to the ground while he was cutting string bonds of sheaves for a kneeling man to feed into the drum. One prong was snapped off. Steve accused Luke of throwing it down Luke denied it. Steve was white under his sun-burn. He was young and strong, and, by his red hair, of Danish stock. His fork was new, costing a crown. He insisted that it had been thrown down ‘a-purpose to break it’. So far Phillip had been unaware of any tension between these two; though Steve had always been late for work in the mornings. The tension continued, Steve speaking in scarcely audible voice, Luke replying roughly, until Phillip thought they were coming to blows. He said he might have dropped the fork himself, without thinking, since he had generally moved about to help speed the work, now giving a hand to heave up corn sacks on lorry, now on straw-stack, then to corn-stack.
“I’ll buy you a new one, Steve.”
“Little snapper, I could break him like a carrot,” muttered Luke.
*
As the mellow Spratt-Archer barley—very nearly a fine-ale sample—poured out of the spouts watched over by Dick, Bert Close and Phillip lifted filled sacks, each of about 230-lb., into the lorry, taking fifteen a time down to the Corn Barn. There they wheeled the first sack on a sack-barrow to the wooden platform, level with the rear-end of the lorry, called the lewkum, which was built out from the south wall. Properly done, this work was harmonious. First, the lorry backed into the lewkum. All in one movement a sack was levered onto the barrow, which was promptly reversed on rubber tyres and wheeled off, swung round to face the postern oak doorway, where with a jerk the sack was stood upright, the barrow withdrawn, and set aside. Before the sack could move out of the vertical the binder-twine round its neck was unfastened, to be swiftly looped over a nail as the sack began to fall like something stunned. Pressure of one boot on its base, just before it toppled over the edge of the lewkum, held one corner on the edge and all the grains gushed out in one swift vomit, leaving the sack shrunken and empty; to be picked up, folded, and put on the pile at the very moment that its solid successor was being jerked upright off the barrow. It was easy and swift when one had the knack of it. It didn’t really need two to corn-cart, but Phillip had Bert Close by him for companionship. As they worked in harmony they talked of Malandine and the woods. Bert said it was the finest time of his life. Phillip could not remember being happier.
The barley straw, once skirting my corn dollies, is of good quality. It is full of dry clover. I thought of the beasts, during late autumn and winter, eating it contentedly, growing into meat with the clover; not merely filling their bellies. How glad I am that I insisted on drilling the small-seeds of the layer three days after the sowing of the barley, so that the minute plants were established before the dry spell! Next year we should have a fine crop of hay on the Great Bustard field. How happy we might have been, had we all been in agreement! Concordance is life; discord is death.
When we finished the barley, we moved to the wheat stack. Once again we started short-handed. After an hour or so the searchlight boys came sauntering across the field. They were a different lot; they took turns in coming, ‘fair do’s for all’, is the camp’s motto: the money to be shared out.
Bert Close and I, stripped to the waist, worked with Steve on the corn-stack. Sweat glistened on our brown skins. Steve, alone of the regular men, has adopted my habit of working in the sun with his shirt off. He is spare and lithe, all bone, sinew and muscle. He could work with, and outlast, any other, had he a wish to do so.
Drum hummed steadily; corn poured fast; straw stack rose against creosoted railings of Woodland yard. We set the pace for the team of twelve. The soldiers left off to smoke, and to join the small boys hunting mice with sticks below.
“Hi, you dahn there, go easy, mates,” shouted Bert Close, peaked cap askew on head. “Don’t forgit you’ve got to protect us when little old ’itler comes.” To me he said, “Christ guv, you’ve got a lot of runts working for you, you ’ave! I wonder you’re not scatty, straight I do.” (I am half-scatty.)
The stack cast ninety-four coomb of head corn, two of tail. The wheat was a full, red berry. From approximately eight acres of the Bustard field the yield was twelve sacks to the acre. This was good for the Bad Lands. It was a pleasure to run the red-gold seed through the fingers.
The corn was weighed as it was sacked. 2¼ cwt. each sack. I estimated that twelve sacks an acre is 3,024 lb. grown on 4,840 square yards, or very nearly a 2lb brown loaf from little more than a square yard. Some of the wheats I had seen growing in the West Country would yield double.
During the threshing of this stack the manager of a firm of seed-merchants with whom Phillip dealt came to look at the grain. He said he would buy it, but would decide the price in his warehouse. The alternative to trusting him was to leave the full sacks on the field, covered up, and sell the once-grown pedigree seed by sample in the Corn Hall. The usual price for such once-grown pedigree-seed wheats was half-a-crown a sack over milling-wheat price.
In the old days a farmer did not peddle his corn. His merchant took the farmer’s sample and decided the price. The farmer trusted him implicitly. That was how Phillip liked it. So, although he could feel no real confidence in this hard-eyed, rather brusque, half-bald man obviously intent on doing his best for a limited liability company, he left the price to him.
While waiting for the lorry to come to take the corn, he climbed the straw-stack. From the top he could see for several miles. There was a mirage-like prospect beyond the rolling green canopies of the Brock Hanger beeches; miles away and below quivered the red roofs of the hamlet of Durston and the level distances of marshes, now blue with sea-lavender to the sand-dunes and a cloud-capped sea. He saw the prospect as for the first time, he had worked bone and sinews to a clear mind without cumber. The wheat was threshed out, cashed out.
But that night Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s tackle went away. He had given his word to return it at the end of the month to finish the remaining stacks. Soon they would need the oats in stack by the Duck Decoy to keep the cattle alive.
The seed-merchant’s lorry arrived at the site for eighty-six sacks. Bert Close and Phillip, helped by Dick, Steve and Billy loaded them—lifting half of the sacks four feet, the other half seven feet up—about ten tons in all. Then they went home, men to high tea, pub, garden, or cockle bed; farmer and his son to farmhouse parlour. Afterwards Boy Billy to the movies, Phillip to estranging work upon paper—accounts, details of overtime, payments to soldiers, farm diary.
It was weariness, but it must be done. Afterwards he thought to go for a swim; but something had been forgotten—the next day they were to drill the Brock Hanger, that field of biscuit-yellow clay, with wheat. So after supper Peter and the smaller children with Phillip went down to the Corn Barn where the reserved sacks stood. They dressed the seed with mercuric powder in the old churn—a slow job, for the seed weighed just under a ton. He sent the children back at 9 p.m. to bed, and worked on alone. He was weary when it was done, at 11 p.m.—but not so weary as the last owner of the churn, poor Dowsing, the consumptive ex-infantryman from the Somme, had looked when he had given Phillip that churn.
Phillip had allowed Dowsing to graze his one cow rent-free on the grass beside the curve of road above the river; and had accepted the churn, relic of a simpler age, earnestly offered by so decent an old soldier as Dowsing. He had been so quiet, in both manner and speech, as he stood about the river-bank; he was dying of tuberculosis, legacy of the winter morasses of Thiepval and Ancre valley. Slowly he and his beast used to pass up and down the road to the grazing on the river-bank. One afternoon Phillip saw him sitting by the roadside, and heard his words, “I be all wore up.” Soon afterwards Dowsing was dead, and a cattle-float came to the riverside grass and took away his frightened cow.
*
After the threshing of barley, the selling of barley. This was Phillip’s fourth harvest in East Anglia. He was by now fairly confident in the market place. For one thing the pre-war position between farmer and merchant was reversed. Farmers no longer went cap-in-hand, merchants no longer shook their black Foreign-Office-hatted heads. Indeed they glanced about them from their raised wooden stands with the alert glances of hens in grass when daddy-long-legs are hatching. They tried to snap a sale, clinch their bargains with the speed and click of the locks of their solid-leather sample-cases. So eager were they to ‘fill-up’ that some forgot to say good-morning. It was ‘Let’s have a look, how much have you got, what d’you want for it?’ Trickle of corn into soft palm of hand, sniff-sniff, what d’you want for it. Farmer, cap on head, got his price. The trouble was his price might be the wrong one—ten minutes out of date. A lot of grain ships from Canada and Australia were going down; the Baltic was closed; Hitler was getting the grain of Central Europe in exchange for—some newspapers had informed the public—crate upon crate of aspirin tablets. From the look on some of the merchants’ faces a few were needed in the Corn Hall.
As Phillip wandered round the merchants’ stands he carried in his hand a little bag of red target-cloth made for him by Lucy. In it was a sample of Great Bustard barley. Soon he had sold it to a gentleman whose Foreign-Office hat was on his desk: feverishly he was looking round for farmers without any expression on their faces—these were the ones with samples to sell. Phillip let his go for sixty-seven shillings a coomb, top price in the market that day. Also forty coomb of another barley, with Bustard rakings, for sixty-three shillings. Afterwards he treated himself to a pint of beer made from East Anglian coastal barley in a pub called The Shades, down a dark and narrow street leading off the market.
(In retrospect.) If Hare had emulated Tortoise, and kept his barley in stack until the following April, and then threshed, it would have fetched 210s. a coomb of 2-cwt. For barley, alone of other grains, was then still a free market.
One morning as Old Michaelmas Day (11 October) drew near an incident occurred which shook Phillip, although he should have been prepared for it. It started with his discovery that the cast-iron hitch of the heavy rib-roll was broken. The hitch had obviously been broken while being backed into the hovel. Hitches and towing bars of other implements had been wrenched and broken the same way, by being jammed on the lock while reversing the tractor. This practice was dangerous for the light aluminium body of the tractor; and as spare parts were now unobtainable, he had requested that no implements be backed into the cart-shed. Also, he had asked, frequently, that all breakages be reported by the evening of their occurrence, so that repair or replacement could be arranged. This request was usually ignored.
He enquired who had broken the roll hitch, and why it had not been reported. Nobody spoke. He had either to keep silent, or to enquire into it then and there. Had Boy Billy broken it? No, he said. Did he know when it was broken? Last week, Boy Billy said. Did he know how it was broken. Boy Billy did not reply.
Then Luke said he had done it.
“Well, you might at least have told me, Luke, so that I could get another made.”
Luke replied that he’d told Boy Billy.
“Oh well, do be careful about backing heavy implements with the tractor,” said Phillip.
“There’s narthin’ but trouble here,” Luke muttered roughly. “I give up Friday!”
At the time Phillip didn’t take his words seriously. Certainly he didn’t think that Luke had been waiting for an excuse to leave. Since Luke had given up being teamsman, however, Phillip had had to return his name to the Ministry of Labour as not being in an indispensable job. Luke was therefore liable to be called up for the army. Luke did nothing in the village outside his work—no Home Guard or Air Raid Precaution duty—and Old Michaelmas Day was approaching, when the labourer’s year began.
On the following Friday Luke gave notice, and quit a week later. Phillip had never thought he would really go, and momentarily felt helpless: the thought of the extra work involved by his loss passed a wave of fear through him.
I hear from Steve that Luke had been after, and got, a job some weeks previously in a village a dozen miles away. It will mean his. leaving home for the first time in his thirty-three years. The experience will broaden his outlook. I owe much to Luke. He was consideration itself during the early part of our association, and keen to do well. Sometimes he has been right, and I have been wrong. I recall the picture given by his father, of Luke sitting by the fire worrying himself thin. There is something in him which warms me, even at times I feel an affection for him. I don’t think there was any real ill-feeling between us. Steve said that, as teamsman on his new farm, Luke had an agreement with his master to do no loading or unloading, either at corn harvest, haysel, or sugar-beet time. He is to feed and look after five horses, and lead a tumbril in the field; but no more. He will never touch hoe, dung fork, two-tined fork, or sugar-beet fork; and at the end of the year will get a bonus of twenty pounds. Big farmers can afford to pay such bonuses out of money which otherwise will be paid as Excess. Profits Tax, which is 100 per cent after the first £1,500. One farmer not far from the Bad Lands told me he had paid Excess Profits Tax of £80,000 in one year; but this is small money compared with the profits of the big building companies engaged on airfield construction. My average annual profit for the war years so far had been under £200, but then I do not sell milk. And we have our butter, milk, eggs, bacon and poultry ‘free’.
Luke’s help will be missed during the October-November-December sugar-beet lifting, now imminent. And—dreadful thought—the autumn ploughing may not be done—but only disastrous February and March ploughing, if weather permits … I shall have to work at night, by the moon; as well as get up at 5–6 a.m. to feed the horses, for I can’t expect Sarah to do it.
Sugar-beet has priority. We have begun on Steep Bottom—three and a half acres which was loamed during the making of the New Cut before the war. Since then the hedge along its south-western edge, tall and ragged with thorn and elderberry, with a pediment of three and four yards of docks, nettles, and spear-thistles, has been laid low by powerful Dick, working with Billy as his apprentice. It was a hard job, the pleaching and plashing of trunks and branches tough as alligators. The hedge should have been cut to the stub; but that would have meant making a new fence, materials for which were unobtainable.
When the hedge was down the seven broad-winged steel feet of the cultivator levelled the rabbit-mounds in the field. Formerly these mounds looked as though cart-loads had been tipped there. The weeds were torn out, left to dry, then I rolled them up with the chain harrow. Many times the teeth of the pitch-pole harrow dragged along the hedge-border, gathering and casting rootlets. I made bonfires, happy at my task. Later, sun and air and chalk sweetened the new lands. A compost heap, containing among other things the remains of a mad dog and. seven calves, was spread. I enjoyed all that work, done alone. Later, sugar-beet was sown.
Phillip was ploughing, with horses, the sturdy yellow-white roots of beet out of the ground. Dick, Steve and Jack the Jackdaw knocked and topped the roots for an agreed price of seventy shillings an acre. The district-rate for such work, twenty-four-inches between the rows, was sixty-three shillings an acre, but Phillip made a mistake in calculation, and abided by it. Sarah, the land-girl, helped Poppy to unload beet at the lorry-dump.
Sarah had not been an easy person to get on with, as Phillip had feared when she had slapped him on the back, without warning, while he was working the power-saw in the woods. They had little or nothing in common. There was a distraint between them. Even Lucy felt that she was not altogether likeable. Her thoughts went outward from herself; she did not divine. Thus on one occasion when Phillip was complaining to Lucy about another dead hen remaining unburied on the Home Hills, she interrupted, saying, “Why don’t you try to behave like the gentleman you pretend to be?” and with a curl of her lips left the room. And after a few days of carting beet from Steep Bottom, she told Lucy she was going home.
Sarah did not add (as it later transpired) that she had already arranged with Powerful Dick that he go to South Devon and build a wall in her mother’s garden. The first Phillip knew of this was when Dick, clad in an Edwardian golfing suit with knickerbockers, came to the farm-house door and said he was taking three weeks’ holiday. So for the heavy work of lifting, topping, carting, unloading at dump and reloading into lorry about one hundred and seventy tons of sugar-beet off another field, they would be two men short, as well as a third to feed the three horses.
The bank overdraft is now twenty pounds short of the dreaded four figures in red. But money is beginning to come in. For the Great Bustard barley there is a cheque for £341. 10s. The seed-wheat has made 1s. 6d. a sack over milling price, instead of the current 2s. 6d. (This way great impersonal businesses are built up?) Tonight I made ihe annual valuation (estimated) less the corn not yet sold.
£ | |
39 bullocks, 10 cows, 1 bull, 18 calves . . | 929 |
48 ewes and 1 ram . . . . . | 199 |
3 horses and 1 foal . . . . . | 120 |
2 pigs, fat . . . . . . . | 18 |
1,266 | |
Hay, 50 tons, say . . . . . | 300 |
10 acres winter wheat sown . . . . | 100 |
Straw, say . . . . . . . | 100 |
17 acres of sugar-beet, unlifted . . . | 350 |
£2,116 |
When the remaining stacks had been threshed and sold, Phillip would know the value of the corn. With some anxiety he awaited the overdue return of the tackle promised by Mr. Gladstone Gogney, for soon the going would be impassable to and from the Duck Decoy, owing to hill-springs breaking, water in the grupp rising, the ground becoming sodden. And if there were no oats for the winter feeding it would be a disaster. A barley stack also stood there.
Some of the corn in this stack by the Duck Decoy was already spoiled, rotten-wet, grown-out. Matts’ undersized and half-rotten stack-cloth, ending three feet short of the eaves, had led all the water dripping down directly into the stack. An extra small stack, built below one eave of the larger stack was completely saturated. He had asked Luke to put it at the end of the stack, and build it with an angle roof. Luke had built it tight against the side of the big stack, with a lean-to roof. There it had caught all the gutter-drippings from the big stack. Phillip did not think this act was deliberate, but done without imagination, otherwise ignorance.
When at last Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s tackle puffed along the farm road it was November. The next day the threshing of the barley stack was more awkward than usual, for the latest batch of searchlight soldiers were even more inexpert than their predecessors. Four of them arrived nearly two hours late. Their spokesman, another bespectacled pale-face, introduced himself in these words, “How do, I’m a farmer, too.”
Phillip said, “Good,” despite all appearance to the contrary.
“All farms should be run by and for the People,” ‘the farmer’ announced.
“You mean the Sunday newspaper?”
“Nao. I mean Government of the People, by the People, for the People.”
“You’re an American?”
“I’m British.”
“Good. Now help us to get started.”
“After the war, I mean!”
“What’s the big idea?” he cried plaintively, looking to grinning mates for support.
“To thresh this stack, for the Government of the People—that’s me—by the People—that’s you.”
“Capitalism,” he muttered.
“Come on, ‘Farmer’!”
By lunch-time little had been done. The egg-and-bacon pasty that Lucy brought them for lunch, in a clean napkin, was almost all wasted. They threw away what they didn’t want, with never so much as a word of thanks for it, or for the jug of milky, sugary coffee.
However, for the record, it must be said that the majority of the searchlight soldiers who helped Phillip and his men at harvest behaved differently. They were older men, of a later call-up. Two were furniture-removers in civil life, and worked as members of a team.
Once more Bert Close came to give a hand. The farm lorry couldn’t get through the boggy places. Even his lighter lorry, fitted with double wheels, could not get through—until towed by tractor.
While they were shooting corn through the lewkum door Mr. Gladstone Gogney arrived in his car and said his tackle must leave on Monday night, latest. Phillip replied that as tomorrow was a Saturday, and the men didn’t like working on Saturday afternoon, and the soldiers wouldn’t, he didn’t see how they could possibly thresh two stacks by Monday afternoon. He reminded Mr. Gogney that over a year ago he had promised the tackle for his six stacks, for September. He explained that the oat-stack, standing unthreshed by the Decoy, held much of the food of the horses and of the cattle for the coming winter. He was short of labour, the ground was already too soft for the lorry to move, he would have no one to cart the corn with horses later on; indeed, it would be impossible for Mr. Gogney’s tackle to get there until the spring, for otherwise it might disappear forever into black, spongy peat-like soil. With great respect, would Mr. Gogney permit the oat-stack to be threshed now?
To all this Mr. Gladstone Gogney, sitting at the wheel of his car, listened as though impassively, staring in front of him. Phillip had never seen him smile. Was he a shy man? Perhaps a scared man? For suddenly Mr. Gogney said, still looking straight ahead, with a note of pleading in his voice, “You see, Mr. Maddison, a big farmer has just rung me up saying he wants twelve days threshing to get his seed-wheat sold for the market. He’s a big man, Mr. Maddison, and I can’t afford to offend a big man, can I?”
Bert Close, also with impassive face, was listening.
“But did the big man bespeak the tackle before I did? I asked you twelve months ago.”
“No, he asked yesterday. I’ll have to take it away Monday. I can’t afford to offend a big man. The war won’t last for ever, will it? I’ve got to think of that, you know.”
“But supposing it rains all Monday, and I can’t thresh on that day?”
“I’ll have to take the tackle away on Monday, wet or fine.”
“But then my beasts will be without oats all the winter.”
“Well, I can’t afford to offend a big man, can I?” repeated Mr. Gladstone Gogney, appealingly.
“Very well, I’ll have to thresh tomorrow, Saturday, Mr. Gogney. We’ll do the little stack by the barn, that will be a short day. Perhaps half a day if I can get the searchlight soldiers to work properly. Then we’ll do the oats on Monday.” Thereupon Mr. Gladstone Gogney drove away.
But the next day was raining, there was no threshing. Phillip went to market and sold the Steep barley (100 coombs) for sixty-nine shillings a coomb, to his usual merchants, Messrs. Coppice, Douleur, and Less.
There was a cheerful atmosphere in the Corn Hall. Foreign-Office hats were on heads again; merchants looked more ‘filled up’ than on the previous week; hen-jerking glances were gone. The confident atmosphere affected Phillip, and he joked with Mr. Coppice, or was it Mr. Douleur, or Mr. Less? There were, to him, odd names of other merchants painted on their boards or sides of desks. There was a Few, a More, a Sadd; a Case, a Box, and a Bagge; a Gow, a Seago, a Gotobed. Feeling himself to be properly of the market place—a business man indeed—he joked with the corn merchant about gold bricks being at the bottom of each of his sacks. This, since he had already bought Phillip’s barley, got the scantiest attention. They had to work swiftly, those merchants; the Corn Hall was open only for an hour once a week.
*
The weather cleared on Sunday. On Monday they threshed the mixed wheat and barley stack before the Corn Barn. Later Phillip saw his error. He should have asked the driver to return the tackle to the oat-stack by the Duck Decoy. It was a ponderous slow assembly, and he did not like to give Bob the engine man the trouble of setting-in again, since Bob had been so late getting home every evening when threshing there. So he put himself in a muddle by this act of diffidence.
Steve was in charge of making the straw stack. There were to be two layers of the stack, each from the different corn; wheat on the lower, barley on the top half. Steve built the wheat straw on a loose pyramid of calder—straw-dust and fragments from the threshing of the barley. During the interval of cleaning the sieves of barley kernels, before the threshing of the wheat, Steve could have removed the calder heap, or got someone to help him; but he didn’t. Based on the slippery pyramid the stack of wheat straw, just as they finished two hours later, slid over and nearly buried Steve and the new fork Phillip had bought him.
The engine driver, a quiet and decent fellow liked by all, was looking on.
“You wouldn’t think our chaps had all been trained in the Brigade of Guards, would you?” Phillip said.
“No sir,” he said quietly, “I would not.”
“You are right. They were trained by the Marx Brothers.”
“Yes, sir?” said the engine driver, politely. He had never been to the cinema. He added, with a subdued look on his face, “My mate and I always dread coming to thresh in this village. So did my father before him, with this same engine. Elsewhere we go, there’s a different spirit somehow, and the men work with a will. I’ve often wondered why it is.”
“The cockle strand, perhaps. And the fat flat-fish in the creeks. No man need starve in this district, so the fear of being out of a job has never been so severe as elsewhere.”
“I’ve seen several farmers come and go here on the Bad Lands,” the driver went on. “It’s always been the same end. I’m sorry I’ve got to take the tackle away now, sir, but it’s my orders.”
Phillip thanked him with a silver crown for his good services—and they were good. He was the sort of man who did more to help than he need have done to keep his job.
So Mr. Gladstone Gogney’s tackle pulled out of the Bad Lands. It was five months before the plume of jetty smoke above the thunderous mass of iron, coal and water shuddering over pot-holes arose in the valley again, watched by nervous, staring cattle in the yards, their faces grey-patched with under-nourishment.