A Solitary War by Henry Williamson Page B

causeway, some empty and returning, other awaiting at switch-lines for the more important laden ones to pass in their wide-spaced procession above a hollowed-out countryside whose horizon was set with viaducts, causeways, and tall cranes.
    The queerness, the unreality of this world was heightened by the sight here and there of a derailed truck which had fallen clear of the track, to lay on its back like a huge robot-louse of Martian industry, on a planet become soilless and worked-out, void and dead—discarded by the invisible power whose direction it had lost. I do not like this voided world, with its whiff of acid air coming from that white vapour straying out of the distant rows of tall chimneys; and so thinking, he hastened away through the flat and colourless fields, his thoughts shut in upon himself, and arrived back at No. 2, The Glade in darkness, feeling himself alien to modern life, and now indeed homeless, as he sat in Pa’s chair, for he had severed himself from these romping children, and the amiable brother and sister who were talking so happily together in the adjoining room. In their soft voices they were talking of the happy things they would now be able to do together. The next day he was going back to the farm.
    With empty trailer behind him, he travelled forward into the sand and pine-tree country at fifty-four miles an hour. The trailer, all that was left of Ernest’s old Crossley car which Phillip had taken in settlement of his brother-in-law’s debts to him, was well balanced; it never rolled or gave any feeling of being there unless wrongly loaded. He had to go fast because soon the light would fail, and though he had a 36-watt bulb in the masked headlight instead of the regulation 18-watt, driving in the black-out was a strain. Knowing himself, he wanted to arrive at the farmhouse unfatigued; otherwise in the reaction he would be null, and perhaps show by his manner that he could not bear to enter the place. After all, he thought, if they do not like it—and how could they like the life—they need not stay beyond the month.
    Lucy was to receive little more than a subsistence allowance for herself and the children; for with the loss of nearly a thousand pounds during the first years of farming, and a small harvest the second, Phillip did not see how he could avoid getting more deeply in debt to the bank. All he had to set against the overdraft was ten acres of barley, fourteen of sugar-beet, sixteen of wheat. There were about forty turkeys, and sixteen pigs nearly fat; but no bullocks would be ready as beef for some time.
    The Silver Eagle was sliding about the road as though he were sailing Scylla in the Channel off the Shingle Bank where the conflict of tides had always made sailing there an adventure. Frost patterns were growing on the windscreen. So far no black ice had formed on the road; the surface had been dry: but hoar frost was crystallising, causing the worn treads of the rear wheels to slip slightly. Even an inch sideways thrust was felt at the wheel. He slowed down to fifty, dreading darkness in a frost-fog which would reduce speed to walking pace.
    It was cold. He stopped to put newspapers under his coat. Towards the coast the fog became thinner. The ruddy-brown afterglow of sunset was over ploughed fields, this made him think he must hurry on with the ploughing before frost set hard about Christmas. Matt wanted to fold the fifty-three ewes on the sugar-beet tops of Pewitts, thus keeping them with food until within a week or two of lambing. He said that the dung of ewes was better for barley than sugar-beet tops ploughed in directly; but Phillip thought that ewes forming their lambs would take from the land much of the value of the wilted leaves and crowns of the beet. Matt said no; but if the bony frames of the lambs were made out of the beet tops, it seemed to Phillip that the barley following inspring would find less phosphate in the soil. Perhaps that was good for a malting