Lucifer Before Sunrise by Henry Williamson

Author:Henry Williamson [Henry Williamson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571279708
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

While Phillip was scribbling the above in his journal, air-raid sirens went. German bombers were shortly over the Southampton docks, having crossed the Channel from their airfields in Northern France. One dropped half a dozen bombs in a stick near Tim’s Spitfire works, without opposition from night-fighters or anti-aircraft guns. Perhaps they couldn’t be spared from the Kent and Sussex airfields guarding London, but it was not much of a raid.

He sat on top of the air-raid shelter in the garden, taking care to avoid the stems and flowers of Tim’s Japanese nasturtiums, and watched a chandelier of bright lights dropped by a Dornier bomber. There it hung in the sky, a beautiful sight, slowly drifting down while more bombs whistled and crumped upon the earth, the sky lit by their flashes. There followed a red glow which soon went out. Only six aircraft came over; a nuisance raid.

Now all was quiet and the chandelier burnt out. He went inside and had a cup of tea with the two women. After the all-clear they walked down to where Tim worked, and found him alert and cheerful. The raiders had been after the docks.

When Lucy and he went north after two more days it was for Phillip like leaving the light for a sunless land. Not so for Lucy; she was looking forward to seeing her children. Phillip was disturbed about Billy, who was set on joining the Royal Air Force, Tim had told him.

A day or two after getting back he wrote to his younger sister Doris, telling her what their father had said about his Will; and that when the time came he would see that she was given a third of the probate value in cash, and Elizabeth would have another third. Doris replied at once, asking him if he would ‘sign a legal document making binding’ what he had written in his letter. She did not want the money for herself, she explained, but to help educate ‘your two nephews whom you have never come to see’. She went on to say that Elizabeth was ‘well provided for’; she had had £4,000 from Aunt Belle’s Will; and there was a farmer friend in Sussex whom she visited at week-ends, and might marry.

Doris was the headmistress of an infant’s school at Cross Aulton, in Surrey, where their mother had lived as a child. She wrote that she had refused to divorce her husband, Bob Willoughby, who had left her some years before the outbreak of war. Phillip replied to her letter saying that as Father was still alive, and might change his mind about his Will should he see fit to do so, such a course as she suggested would be without validity. Meanwhile, he would welcome her boys on the farm during the coming summer harvest, to help with corn carrying if they cared to come.

*

The crops on the Bad Lands were standing well up. The meadows were chain-harrowed to level the mole hills, and to tear out the old decayed grasses.

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