Lucifer Before Sunrise by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online Page A

about this time came to help in the farmhouse for several hours a day. Why, there was Albert Coggin—who could never get work except as a casual day-hand with the threshing tackle, and then only on Chaff and Caulder (a dirty job no man would willingly do)—earning nine pounds a week on the new airfield just wheeling a barrow with a few bricks in it, and with plenty of time for resting and smoking! As for the village girls, too young for calling-up, they were picking up four and five pounds a week, and for what? Just carrying a couple of bricks each in their arms to the bricklayers, who if they laid four hundred bricks a day, straight work, were doing something wonderful!
    “Ah, if my boy James wor’ only working on your farm, sir. He’d give you a proper day’s work, that he would.”
    James Valiant had joined the Territorials when the war came. Mrs. Valiant’s reference to Albert Coggin reminded him of that sad little family which had lived in one of the darker and damper cottages, condemned long before the war. Then, no one would give Albert, the only child, a job. He lived at home on his parents. He was a little simple, like his father, a short bald labourer with flat feet and expressionless good-little-child eyes. Sometimes Phillip saw him in one of the three beer-houses of the village, sitting before a pint of ale, the cheaper ‘fourpenny’. After the war started, several medal ribbons appeared on his waistcoat, eachabout twice the normal depth. Among them was the 1914 Star; for he was one of the survivors of the original British Expeditionary Force, that ghostly ‘red little, dead little army’ of long ago, comrades of the eighteen-year-old Private Phillip Maddison.
    Ex-Private Coggin sat on the inn bench and seldom spoke. After three pots of beer he was liable to rise upon his awkward feet, uninvited and unannounced, and with ceiling-staring bulbous eyes, start to sing a tremulous song, the words of which were obscure, so throaty and strangled was the delivery. It seemed to be his only means of self-expression, for Phillip never saw him speaking to anyone. He had been blown up by a shell at Gheluvelt on the Menin Road in October 1914, and had been helped, gibbering and slavering, to the Field Ambulance, by a wounded comrade.
    The wife in the dark cottage was a different type. She was coherent. Always with a harassed look, this stout body invariably complained with unhappy eyes of her grown-up son who was ‘such a loss’, living at home without work. The son had been sent by her to Phillip for a job when first he arrived to take over the farm; the youth had stood one morning about six o’clock just outside the caravan door, motionless for an hour or more, while Phillip lay a-bed wondering on his presence. His silence and immobility—hands in pockets—hanging head and general air of awaiting impulse from someone else—had discomposed Phillip. He felt distress at the thought of having to overcome the inertia of yet another unclear mind about him. So Phillip was impatient with the stranger, who returned down the hill, as he had come, slowly swinging his arms, and with bent head.
    During the hard winter of 1939–40 the father lost his job. He had hobbled to work before, painfully on ruined feet. The farm where he worked was to be part of an airfield. He, being one of the slower workers, was given notice. He had worked there nearly twenty years. Without work, he was lost. Then his wife died. One night, after a song in the pub, he had sat down and wiped away a tear before going out and drowning himself in a shallow tidal pool on the marshes. Had he not been so depressed he might have lived, like his son Albert, to earn treble his former wages on the Henthorpe airfield.
    He had looked like a child, a fixed simplicity upon his round face: a child who had lost mother, and gone to find her. For months Phillip had felt haunted by the old soldier. He had done nothing to help him.
    Mrs. Valiant was not the only one