Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Page 12

  We all lived out our lives entirely on the farm. It was much more than just a job or a wage. Before I married and us brothers were all at home with father, many’s the time our sisters used to say, “Finish talking farming do! It’s all we hear, farm, farm, farm!” We were at it morning, noon and night. Nowadays it is different; the young men have motorbikes and they’re away, off, out of the village after tea. They don’t care all the time. They’ve learned how to make a break between five at night and seven in the morning, and so they are different to us.

  I don’t want to see the old days back. Every bad thing gets to sound pleasant enough when time has passed. But it wasn’t pleasant then, and that’s a fact. Everywhere you looked there was this graft to keep things going. Working at the graft sapped people of their strength to live their lives decently. The farm labourer used to be looked down on—“You’re an old farm labourer!”—that sort of thing. And the girls would look at a boy in Ipswich on a Saturday night, find out that he was a farm labourer, and then stop looking sharp!

  It was often rough on the farm then. It was hell-fire and water for a young boy then when he started work. The older men made it a point to be rough with the lads because that was how it was, that was the tradition. I remember one man as though it were only yesterday. I was about seventeen and we were working on cattle-beet. I had to pick the beet up, top them, put them in the cart, take them to the clamp and cover them up with old bracken from the heath. We didn’t earth the clumps up until later in the year, after they had dried out a bit. We got 20s. an acre for this work. I was just the boy but I turned and turned about with the men, doing exactly what they did because I was very strong and because, well, if the truth be told, that was the way I liked it. I’d pull half a day, fill half a day and draw-off half a day. It was piece-work and I did exactly what the men did, but at the end of the week the foreman said, “He’s only a boy so he only needs to take half-money!” Only one man stood up for me and he was jeered. Fancy standing up for a boy—it was thought very funny. If a youngster does piece-work today, you chop out the money equally. The difference between a boy and a man at work is that although the boy is strong, he hasn’t got the kind of strength to allow him to keep up all the day. It was this which the men used to mock when I was young. No one liked being young then as they do now; they wanted to get it over with.

  Much of the farm was all waste and ruin then. We used to graze sheep on the fields where the corn is now. When I was a shepherd lad I lay in these fields when they were all rough bracken and ling, so high that you could hardly see the sheep. Now it is corn. I helped to clear it of heather and birch trees and now we get twenty tons an acre of potatoes off it! Who ever would have thought that?

  I’m definitely happier than I was years ago and I’m sure most farmworkers are. We had depressing jobs which lasted so long. Sugar-beeting was very depressing. You’d start it in September and it would go on till January. It made life seem worthless. Now you just sit on the harvester! The farmers have changed for the better too. I work for an exceptionally good boss, although he’s a Tory. I pull his leg about the Tories and he pulls mine about the Labour. You wouldn’t have got this before the war. He’s an altered man, particularly these last ten years. It used to be “Get here” or “Get there”—that is how farmers spoke to their workmen. There were forty men and boys working here then, now there are eight. The boys can go to relief classes if they want to; nobody would dream of stopping them. We have a boy on the farm who went to the Framlingham agricultural engineers for six weeks on a Fordson Major course. He learnt tractor maintenance and all manner of things. The very idea of such a thing would have been unthinkable when I was a shepherd lad, and I am only forty-five. The Secretary of the N.U.A.W. is on the committee which arranges these classes for boys and thinks that they are very important.

  I enjoy working for the N.U.A.W. The members are getting very worried about the present Government. We all feel that we are being let down because of what they said they were going to do and haven’t done. We are also worried about the farm students who go to agricultural colleges. They get their training free through Government grants and then they won’t do the job for which they have been trained. They go into the business side of things, agricultural contracting, fertilizers, that kind of thing. I only know one student who does what I would call proper work on a farm and he’s a foreman. Although that doesn’t mean much. A farmer will make a man foreman by giving him a couple of pounds extra a week but the job isn’t usually as grand as it sounds. It isn’t good enough for a young man who has been educated.

  The students soon learn that they can’t do everything by the book. I tell them, “Look at the land.” On this farm, for example, we’ve got very light land and then, down by the swale, it’s suddenly heavy grey soil. Get past this and it goes light again. That field, if you go by the book, would lead you into the devil of a muddle. If you started ploughing there in a bit of rain, you’d never get through it. All the same, the students who come here are willing boys and I tell them all I know and what we have been through.

  You don’t get as much bickering on a farm as you do in most jobs. The men stay close friends. None of us are looking for wonderful changes. My opinion is that a farm-worker is as important a man as a skilled man in any other industry. The only thing I can’t fathom is why they are subsidizing the farmer to keep the cost of living down and aren’t helping his workers at all. Country people have to pay through the nose for their goods. All the things you buy in the village shop are more expensive than they would be in Ipswich or any town. It has always cost more to shop in a village, and when the village shopkeeper sends things to out-of-the-way cottages, you can be sure he’s going to charge you something for the service. And there’s no choice; there is one kind of cheese, one kind of bacon, take it or leave it. The truth of the matter is that everything a countryman buys in a village is brought to him by little men who sell mostly inferior things. The town worker has more money and cheaper goods.

  Men like myself, who have followed father’s footsteps, we’re a finished race. Boys today won’t take their fathers’ footsteps—that is exactly where they refuse to tread. So the town boys are being told about work on the farms. My boss goes to Ipswich schools and tells the boys about jobs on the land and the town boys come out here on their motorbikes to work. It is just a job to them. They’re not involved, you understand. They just see new machinery. They haven’t heard what happened here or if they have it doesn’t sadden them because it is history. They are glad when you stop talking about it because they want to listen to their transistors.

  I’m very interested in birds—I’m a true ornithologist! I go about with an expert who rings for the British Museum. This year we are ringing reed warblers and sedge warblers and we’re down in the reed-bed just as soon as work and tea are over. I do this every moment I have to spare, so does my brother. We saw a rare sight last Saturday—a grasshopper warbler. I’ve lived here all my life and it is something I’ve never seen or heard before. It is a very rare bird indeed. You might find three or four pairs on Minsmere, and now we’ve got a pair here. They’re usually found in the West Country.

  We’ve had some marvellous recoveries from the birds which we have ringed. A blackbird was ringed in the wood here in 1963, was caught again here in 1964 and was eventually shot in Russia in 1965. A blackbird! I was down at Shingle Street last year and there were oyster-catchers all around. One bird kept swooping so close to me that I knew there was a youngster near by and then I heard a twittering right under my foot. I was covering a bullock’s footprint and there inside it, safe and sound, was the oyster-catcher chick. I picked it out and ringed it. It was the latter week of July 1966 and it was shot in Spain in October.

  There used to be a lot of sheer killing of birds and creatures when I was young. The men all did it, ferreting, breaking necks, stoning. . . . But not now. And there were all the gin traps. The early morning was full of little screams—very exciting and strange. Th
e boys used to blow up frogs. They stuck the end of a straw through the frog’s skin and blew through it. It is different now. People like to look at animals and birds. All the same, I still like my gun sport. I like pheasant- and pigeon-shooting, also wildfowl. I always carry a gun. When I was a boy I’d sooner go out with a gun than watch a football match and in fact I’d really have liked to have taken my father’s footsteps and been a gamekeeper. He kept game for twenty-seven years and it is in my blood. So some things remain and some things pass.

  David Collyer · aged twenty-nine · forester and Labour Party organizer

  David Collyer is married with two sons. His wife belongs to the village and is a very pretty girl with a sharp intelligence and, even at this early stage of her husband’s rural political career, an easy way of crossing difficult social frontiers. They live some way out of Akenfield in a small modern house with central heating and a neat garden, an official car and a telephone. Their attitude towards these things is apologetic. A similar reaction is sometimes seen when an ascetic socialist clergyman is landed with a mansion-size rectory. With the Collyers, the devoted priest analogy can be taken further; he is the custodian of the old village truths and the remembrancer of the sufferings out of which much of the contemporary character of Akenfield has emerged. His job is to organize Labour support in the area. Meeting him, it is impossible to conceive him finding any kind of footing on the slippery Wilsonian platform, and strange that such an innocent man should be able to contribute anything which the sophisticated scene at Westminster finds necessary. Support for socialism in the East Anglian countryside remains cryptic. The scene is one in which only the insider can touch on the realities. David Collyer is such an insider. He comes to the little meetings with a complete understanding of the confused mixture of old-fashioned idealism, secrecy and emotional brotherliness with which they remain informed. He has another advantage. He belongs by birth to the élite of the political field men. His grandfather helped Joseph Arch, the Warwickshire hedger and founder of the modern agricultural trade-union movement, to enter Parliament in 1885, and his father worked staunchly for Arch’s successor, George Edwards. Although David Collyer drives a Triumph Herald along the lanes walked or bicycled by his father and grandfather in their search for union members, his message is very little different to theirs. The world beyond the village roars away. But in the cottages and council houses near the farms primitive problems resist the smart answers. Like mining, agriculture creates its own mysterious climate for those engaged in it. David Collyer’s role in a district threatened by the Common Market revolution, Greater London expansion, wholesale desertion by those who have lost all patience with the way-of-life argument (workers are leaving the land in Britain at the rate of some 30,000 a year) and a void left by rejected skills and beliefs is one of conscience, is partly to reassure.

  He is slight, round-faced and dark. His mildness is of the undefeatable sort. That sweet smile has out-lived the blusterings of history, a subject which Collyer confines to Suffolk and Norfolk village people during the first half of the twentieth century.

  * * *

  I have been interested in village politics for as long as I can remember. My grandfather was one of the founders of the Agricultural Workers’ Union and spoke on the same platform as Joseph Arch. So in fact trade-union life and political life—socialist life, I should say—is part of my family background.

  I hardly left the village all my schooldays—once a month at the most, and then it would be to go on the bus to the nearest town to buy a pair of shoes. You hear of ordinary boys like me who have got on because someone has seen that they could be extraordinary, with a little help, and who have been lent books and given a start, but no one took any interest in me as a child. You also hear people saying, as the nun did on television the other evening, that God called them. Well, I feel that I was picked out for this work which I am doing while I was still very young. I won’t call it “vocation.” Not yet. I must see what happens.

  I went to the village school and had a poor education. I never took the 11-plus exam and I’ve always wondered why. Nobody seems to know and I was never asked about it. I want to know whether, when I was eleven, did everyone have the chance to take this exam? Or was there some selective thing which deprived me of my chance? One misses a lot by going to a village school. I never learned to swim, for instance. It doesn’t sound much but when everything is added up the average village schoolboy is left with a mass of disadvantages. I still cannot mix easily and I am instantly ill at ease when I come into contact with people who have had a university education. Or even for that matter a grammar school. I have an inferiority complex about such things. When I am worried I think of George Edwards, who couldn’t read at eighteen; his wife had to teach him. He became a member of Parliament. I felt that if he could do it, I could do it.

  Although I do not like towns, I think they are very necessary when one is young. A town boy can drift into an art gallery—if it is only to get warm—and then see a picture, and then begin to feel and think about art. Or he might go to a concert, just to see what it was like, or hang around in a big public library. From the minute he does these things he begins to be a different person, even if he doesn’t realize it. He has started to be fulfilled. For an ordinary village boy everything to do with these things is somehow unnatural. The village people live almost entirely without culture. I was over twenty before I realized that classical music was just “music,” and therefore all one had to do was to listen to it. I listened and at first believed that I had no right to listen. I felt affected. But when I began to enjoy it I stopped worrying. Everything I do begins with doubt and insecurity. It is as though I am using a language which I haven’t a right to use. I used to read a lot, although I don’t get much time for books now. But I would still sooner read than watch television. I am not conceited about my achievement but I am spurred on by it—parish councillor, urban district councillor, assistant area secretary and now divisional secretary at twenty-nine—it is an achievement. At each stage I reached a point where I thought I would have to stop because of lack of education, then I thought of George Edwards and passed the point.

  The thing which I believe I have got in my blood is this: our grandparents fought their whole lives to improve the terrible conditions in Norfolk and Suffolk but, although much has been gained, we mustn’t rest. We must go on striving for the farm men. Things are so much better that it is easy to imagine that there is nothing left to do. This is a deception. When I was fifteen my father took out my first year’s subscription to the National Union of Agricultural Workers but he said that the next year I would have to pay the money from my own wages. I soon became very interested and very active in the Union and at seventeen I suddenly became involved in the Labour Party itself, probably because the Union had brought me into close contact with village poverty, tied-cottages and the low status of the farm men. It seemed astonishing to me that these things should still exist. They were a personal challenge to me to use my socialism for my own village. I did voluntary work as the local Labour Party secretary until I was twenty, when I became a full-time official in the Movement.

  All this time I worked as a forester for the Forestry Commission. I had no intention of working on a farm after seeing what my father had to put up with and when I was about to leave school, and my father’s employer implied that he would take me on—for that is the East Anglian way, father-son, father-son, all down the years—I said that I would rather work in the forest. I didn’t know much about it but knew a lot about my father’s situation and I had seen enough to put me off the whole concept of farm work. There were good prospects in the forest. The furthest you can get on a farm is foreman and you won’t be this until it’s nearly time to retire. You see, I am talking of only a few years ago, before the farm-apprenticeship schemes and farm schools got really going. I liked the forestry work and obtained my woodman’s certificate when I was eighteen, which is young for this qualification. If I had stayed in thi
s work I would have become a Forestry Commission foreman while I was still very young.

  The state forests near Akenfield are mostly soft woods—Scotch pine, Corsican pine, larches, etc.—which grow quickly. Oaks take too long to grow. You can collect saleable branches from soft wood trees in eight to ten years of planting. These branches are used for rustic work. There is still a great demand for mining timber and they have discovered that metal is no real substitute for the old wooden pit-props. And these are best when they are soft wood. A pit-prop is thrown away after it has been used once. They use so many that they want the cheapest thing they can possibly get—and also the safest, of course. All the trees are grown from seed. We had to climb the trees and gather it, rear it in a nursery and plant it out. I liked this part of the work very much. When we were felling we moved through the forest in gangs, for safety’s sake. A woodman never works in the forest on his own. He could wound himself and lie in some lonely place for hours before he was found.

  An agricultural worker and a forestry worker have a similar character. The Commission employs hundreds of men who have left the farms. It pays just that fraction more and offers a clear-cut career of exams, promotions and a kind of goal ahead. This goal isn’t visible on the farm; it is all vague. Also, the Forestry Commission gives good housing accommodation. They are tied-houses, of course, but in a quite different way to the farm’s tied-cottage. Men living in these can lose their homes for a quite frivolous reason. There should be greater security. Everybody understands that a farmer must have a cottage back after a man has left his employment but much more common-sense and sympathy is needed during the change-over. It should never come to an eviction.