A Solitary War Read Online Free Page A

cracked. At the touch of his pick several tons dropped away with a rattling crash. By chance Phillip had found the right way of loosening it. High explosive would have made a satisfying bang and blown a narrow hole out of its cavern; but gunpowder, a low explosive, he explained to the children, had taken its time, and found its vent through hundreds of seams in the chalk. With the least picking, twelve tons, twelve cubic yards, each fragment blackened one side, glissaded down for their bright shovels.
    “The boring tool cost a shilling. The black powder eightpence. The fuse sixpence. A touch of a pick, and rattle down she comes,” said Phillip to Billy, for the steward to overhear.
    As they loaded, and later while driving the swaying lorry up the new surface of the gulley road, Phillip wondered when the Nightcraft field had last been chalked. Probably eighty or even a hundred years ago, before American pioneers discovered that the prairies of the New World would grow wheat, he said to Lucy, who had come to see how they were getting on.
    “Those trees up there, probably seventy years of age or older, growing out of the face of the quarry, were seeds windborne or bird-dropped when your great grandfather was in the Crimean war,” he said to Billy. “I’m afraid they’ll have to come down.”
    “Cor,” said Peter. “Next spring the jackdaws will miss their nests in those old rabbit holes.”
    “And the nests, all damp and mouldy, will be ploughed under with the chalk,” said Rosamund, “and make compost won’t they, Dad?”
    “I’ve brought you some lunch,” said Lucy. “I thought you’d want to keep going.”
    “Yes, we’ve got to take up a hundred and fifty tons of chalk while the fine weather lasts, then nearly the same weight of muck. After that we’ve got to spread both chalk and muck, plough in and drill wheat, before the flocks of starlings come across the North Sea. Also a couple of hundred tons of sugar beet on Pewitts have to be topped and lifted before December.”
    “Well, I must not keep you, my dear.”
    After the first day’s work nearly a hundred and fifty heaps of chalk lay along one side of the Nightcraft. Towards knocking-offtime Luke came to Phillip and said, with a serious face, “Do you think we ought to camouflage our chalk heaps? You’re boss, you say.”
    Phillip took this to be sly humour. He was not so sure when Luke went on, “You see, I reckon it this way. They’re easily seen from the air, and at night they’ll glimmer, and what if German bombers come over?”
    Phillip saw Billy’s face smiling round a post of the hovel.
    “Well, Luke, even with the German reputation for thoroughness , I doubt if they will have time, with their heads already full of Poles, so to speak, to disorganise this part of our farming scheme. If they do, bombs will scatter the chalk and save us the trouble of spreading it with shovels. So you needn’t stop behind after work and cover up the heaps.”
    Luke was not done with his joke—or rather Billy’s. “For this chalk to do any good it must be spread evenly and I don’t trust anyone else to do it, in a manner of speaking. And knowing how the boss likes things to be done properly, I thought I’d just mention about blacking them out. Well, goodnight.”
    *
    Ten days later the four men now working on the farm, using lorry and two horse-drawn rubber-tyred tumbrils, had tipped about one hundred and sixty tons of chalk in roughly a thousand heaps over the Nightcraft. Luke got a man from the Labour Exchange at Crabbe to come and help scatter it. The old sailor worked hard and sweated out by day the gallon of beer he put back at night. While he worked in the field, Phillip and the three regular men, helped by Billy and Peter, got the muck out of the yards into the lorry and took it up the gulley, setting out black and brown heaps beside the yellow patches in the grass where chalk heaps had stood. It was hard, continuous work, and by the end of