Lucifer Before Sunrise by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online

only judge by examining the causes of a similar condition in oneself. At times I find Jack unbearable ; so do others, of myself. This gives me a fellow-feeling for Jack. In many ways we are alike. Something damaged us when young children. Indeed, this second war is a continuation of 1914–18; a mass exhibitionism of Europeans with damaged personalities; Churchill versus Hitler.
    There was a one-winged daw that lived, anxious and un-mated, about the farm premises. It climbed trees with aid of beak, wing and feet. At sometime or other the bird had been struck by shot, its wing had decayed, and withered off. The lone jackdaw picked up some sort of livelihood on the paddock and Denchman’s Meadow, and in the yards of an early morning. Matt the stockman sometimes threw it food. The bird was suspicious and wary. It would not let anyone get within gunshot of it. It squatted in the grass, thin and humped, its beak curved downward, almost like a chough’s in shape, its light blue eyes strained and alert. And Jack, that awkward man, with his beaky nose and dark hair and narrow forehead, looked somewhat like the damaged bird.
    Jack the Jackdaw had qualities which were praiseworthy. He was punctual and early-rising, and when things went well for him he was a tolerable fellow; but too often he annoyed the others. Yet Phillip could never bring himself to give Jack notice. If Jack annoyed him; well, he himself also annoyed others. Jack swore at times; but then he swore at times. Phillip knew, too, what giving notice to leave the farm might mean in that cottage where three of a family, broken by decay and death, literally huddled together from a hard world.
    “Oh well,” Phillip would say to Lucy, “Jack the Jackdaw’s an awkward chap, but it’s probably my fault, for I always go on the assumption that we are all equal. But the truth is that few men can take it; few want to do things better; few put perfection first; few see the striving for clarity as the only truth of living. Of course the farm labourer has centuries of fear of starvation behind him. He has never known real security. Poor old Jackdaw, he upsets the other men by his presence. I do too, don’t you think?”
    “Do you know what I think?” cried Lucy suddenly, her cheeks colouring. “I think that everyone has their difficulties!”
    She was, of course, referring to herself, and to Phillip’s frequent criticisms of her, and of her brothers in the past. She relented at once, being a kind and generous woman, entirely unselfish.
    “Now come and have your tea, my dear! I have made some of the wheat scones you like, and there is still some honey left over from the year before last.”
    Nearly all the work of cooking, washing, and mending for seven people fell on Lucy, as well as care of poultry, garden, and a few straggling bees. She also helped in the Women’s Institute, and was a Red Cross Emergency nurse. She had, indeed, almost toomuch to do; but Phillip, like many another husband, did not always allow for it.
    *
    The two maids, who had been with them before the war, were now working, with other local youths and girls, on one of the scores of mile-long airfields being built on level areas in the surrounding countryside. Sections of roads and lanes had been closed to ordinary traffic. New strange machines called bulldozers were levelling centuries-old hedges and cottages, pushing over tall trees. Strange, uncaring men with sharp eyes and thin faces and oil-blacked fingernails filled the little towns. Lorry after lorry loaded with gravel and cement was now passing daily down the narrow coastal road outside the farmhouse wall, sometimes scraping away low tiles, bricks and flints, and once cracking several yards of the new walling of the woodshed, so carefully built by the village mason before the war.
    Vast areas of levelled waste-land lay in place of fields of corn and roots and tiled farmhouses. Never had the village known such money, declared Mrs. Valiant, who