Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Read online

  You will think that because I rejected the farm I look down on the farm-worker. I do not. The farm-worker has no position, no status, yet he is really the greatest worker in the village. But he has this low social standing. A member of the Union of Agricultural Workers is still thought of as a low-class person by stupid people. But he is the countryman with all the skills. The old men had thatching and ploughing skills and the young men have mechanical skills. Such men should not be classed as common labourers. The shepherds and cowmen know a lot about scientific feeding and breeding methods, and are almost vets. Such men are more than hands. My father was a horse-team man and gave his whole life up to looking after valuable animals, although he received very little in the way of wages. This happens all the time today; great responsibility, not much money.

  There is one good thing. The hostility between the farmer and his men has either disappeared or is on the way out. It definitely is. The young farmers and the young workers are closer together. I don’t really know why there was all this bad feeling. I am not old enough to give a judgement on it. My grandfather was called by his surname—“Collyer!” the farmer would shout—and he had to run. The farmers call their men by their Christian names now and aren’t interested in humiliating them.

  I have a slight guilt about not working on the land but I felt I had to resist getting caught up in a bad system. I also felt that I had my work to do and that I needed all my strength to do it. Politics plays a large part in village life, although you won’t hear much about it. You get it on the Parish Council and in the personality of anyone you talk to. Only it never comes out and proclaims itself. I—my party—try and educate the country people, not about Westminster things but in the political things which concern them at the village level. It is all changing. The young people are becoming educated. They go to Ipswich Tec. or even to the university and they learn to talk about anything. They aren’t a bit intimidated. My greatest job as a political organizer is to persuade people to participate in Labour Party work. It goes against the grain of their secrecy. So many people have been taught to be “loyal” to their employer’s politics that it makes them feel deceitful to vote in another way. But quite a few of the employers are beginning to realize that a man can hold different beliefs and still do his work well. Yet there is still a lot of assumption—kind but firm assumption. A lady near here, for instance, kept her two “dailies” and her gardener tremendously busy during the last general election while she organized transport and refreshments for the local Tories. These people voted socialist but they were expected to work like blacks for the Conservatives on polling day! What could they do? It was an ordinary working day for them, yet they were helping their employer to muster more votes for the other party. I think that the lady should not have assumed that her servants thought as she did. But like so many people of her type in East Anglia, I suppose that she simply believed that anybody who was nice just couldn’t vote Labour. And these people were nice. They had worked for the lady for years and they were all fond of each other. This is a common situation in Suffolk—loving feudalism, is what I call it. There is plenty of it about. And on the other side of the county, during an election about five years ago, a Conservative vicar arranged the Mothers’ Union outing to coincide with polling day and took a bus-load of people to Yarmouth. Some managed to vote but most of them didn’t. This was a case where it was assumed that all the ordinary women were socialists. These assumptions! But what else have you got in village politics, when everything a person believes in is guarded and mysterious? It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

  I find great caginess when I am canvassing. If I ask outright I get nowhere. People will tell you what they wish you to know about themselves but it is usually something different to what you want to know about them. They are strict about this and cannot be persuaded to add any fact which they think better withheld.

  The women play a great part in village politics. They do a lot of the organizing and if their men hold trade-union offices or party positions, they will do all the writing for them. The women are political because it is they who spend the wages. A man will take his wage and think it fair enough but his wife will have a weekly experience of how inadequate it is. She soon comes to understand that it is this constant just-too-little money which must always keep the family static. The Women’s Institute has educated the village women. Women like organizations. They like committees for this and sub-3committees for that. They don’t care what they say to each other when they are on a committee and when they come to a unanimous resolution about something—it has to be done! The women never lost their independence during the bad days as the men did. The men were beaten because the farms took every ounce of their physical strength and, as they had no great mental strength because of lack of education, they were left with nothing. Their physical strength was their pride and as soon as it was gone they became timid. It was the farm versus their bodies, and the farm always won. The farms used to swallow up men as they swallowed up muck and the men realized this quite early on in their lives. Things are different now, of course, but there is a legacy of beaten men in the Suffolk villages. Some of these men are surprisingly young. You don’t find women in this condition, no matter how hard their lives have been.

  It is a good thing in this village that the women are able to find so much part-time work. The money helps to off-set their husbands’ low farm wages. The £14 basic wage for farm-workers should have happened long, long ago. To think that men in one of the country’s greatest industries have to work a forty-five-hour week for £10 12s.—and such skilled work, believe me! And in all weathers. In a factory it could be as much as £20 a week with a roof over your head, music playing and plenty of tea. I have a friend who left a Suffolk farm to work on a farm just outside Northampton, where there is a great shortage of agricultural men because people have left the land to earn better money in the shoe factories. So he got £12 14s. a week. All the farm men were getting this wage in the Northampton district. So my argument is that if farms can pay better wages when they have to—and still make a good profit—then there is no reason to continue paying such a bad one. And the profits of an East Anglian farm are probably as great as they are anywhere because the land is so good. A good-sized village like Akenfield should have a small factory so that the farms have to compete for the good men. It is only when this kind of thing happens that you will be able to push up the earnings of the farm-workers. It is something which must come.

  Money is the primary reason for a young man’s leaving the village, but there are other pressures. When you are young you want the amenities of the town. I have lived in both town and village, and I know. You don’t feel free when you are young if you live in a village. Everybody you meet knows you. It is “Where are you off to?” and “Where have you been?” It is in their eyes even if it is not on their tongues. So the village boys hurry away on their motor-bikes. Ipswich is full of country boys drifting up and down and thinking things out. They belong to a generation who have learned to live partly outside the village. They are good with machines and the farmers with modern farms will always prefer them to the labourer-craftsmen of forty-five and over. But there are still many people who cannot bring themselves to travel and London can remain a foreign country, although it is only ninety miles away.

  East Anglia is a nation, which makes it different. They talk their heads off in the West Country and Wales but the only kind of East Anglian who will talk freely are the fishermen. You will always notice that when a village boy joins the navy he begins to talk easily. It is because the sea is free and people catch the freedom. The inland country people do not have this sense of freedom.

  It is not so much to promote the Labour Party that I work among the village people. It is because I have to serve them. I am one of them. They don’t need to explain to me. I understand their quietness. I am uneducated like them but I know enough to help them. They accept me. They won’t call me David—it is always Mr. Collyer—I don’t
know why.

  Brian Newton · aged nineteen · farm-worker and day-release student at the Agricultural Training Centre

  I don’t belong to Suffolk at all. I was born in Lancashire, I live in Ipswich, I work in this village . . . I am a bit of a mixture! And now I might leave. I like it well enough but I’m thinking of the future, you see. I can’t see a lot of hope in it. In fact, I can’t see any hope in it. Yet I like it, but who can stay where there’s no hope? A farm of my own is out; it is impossible to think of starting one, and now I think that farm work is out because I think that there is something unreasonable about its conditions. The modern machine methods and the old-fashioned wages ideas are all mixed up in a funny kind of mess. I am sorry that I have almost decided to leave the farm and join the police force because I shall be leaving something that I always wanted to do. When I was a boy I stayed on farms in Wales and in the Midlands, and helped with the work. There was never any doubt about what I should do when I left school. Having done it, I think that I made the wrong decision.

  You are all right if you specialize, perhaps. If you work only with animals or become really skilled on the machinery side, and not just a tractor man. The Agricultural Education Centre would then be only the beginning of the training and I would go on to Kesteven. But how could I be sure that, after all this, I wouldn’t come back to the farm and find myself no better off than I was? There are so many trying to get the few really good jobs and so many bad jobs. The opportunity isn’t there. You work for a farmer and one day he will make you his farm foreman, but what is that? Yet it is a pity because although my parents have always lived in towns, I feel like a countryman. I like it here! Although I live in Ipswich and travel twenty miles a day to and from the farm, I know many more country people than I do town people. We live on the main road and, except for our immediately neighbours, Ipswich is really quite strange to me. I met most of my country friends at a Young Farmers’ Club and I have come to think of myself, quite naturally, as a countryman. But I am getting on for twenty and I have become engaged, and suddenly there is all this question of the future. I hope I am not proud, but I can’t think of myself just as a worker—a labourer—for ever. I like reading—I read very much. I study a lot. I listen to good music—and pop, although I am not one for the Big Beat. I mean that although I work on a farm I can’t pretend to be all that simple. I am at the cross-roads and I must think about what I shall be doing when I am thirty—or even forty! The men who work with me on the farm say they didn’t think at all. Perhaps they couldn’t when they were nineteen. I mean that it would have been no use. But I must. At the moment I can’t see any climb or development however hard I work. If I stay I am already where I shall always be.

  The older farm-workers aren’t all that keen on boys like me. They don’t appreciate your running about. There are three men who have been on the farm all their lives and I know they resent me. Two of them have never learned to drive and have nothing to do with the machinery at all, and each year there are more and more jobs they can’t do. It is embarrassing for them, I suppose. They’ll talk all day about what they did years ago. You’ll occasionally meet men who’ll say, “Thank God—those days have gone!” but you’ll still meet quite a few who, if they had their way, would be back with the horses tomorrow. They’ll fiddle about with some ditch or other miles away, making such a rare fuss of it. It is all quite unnecessary but nobody dare say so, of course. They are so slow. They have to touch everything with their hands—they dislike the idea of not touching things. They must handle, touch. . . . They would do the sugar-beeting perfectly—the worst damn job on the farm—even if their fingers were half-dropping off with the cold. If they saw one on the heap with a bit of green left on they’d be scrambling up to get it. All unnecessary. These men are in their early fifties and they hold the idea that theirs is the right way and that we shall have to come round to it. There is another “stranger” on the farm—a boy from the South. Our ideas are different, we speak different and we even look different—to these village men who have never left their village, unless perhaps for the war. The worst thing about these older workers is that they really do believe that we shall have to come round to their way of thinking. They have some sort of fear of the boss. The boss used to expect them to be hard at it all day, although I don’t know that he can expect it these days. What they can’t understand is that work is just work—something to be done and paid for. Of course we know that the old men had art—because they had damn-all else! It kept them from despairing. And we young men have efficiency, and I’m not saying that efficiency is enough either. This tractor is efficient. A man is more than a tractor, isn’t he?

  Most of the older men would find it very difficult to get a job if they left this farm. The jobs they are best at are no longer being done. Each week, after I have been to the Agricultural Education Centre, I come back to the farm and I think how I would run it. I know I shouldn’t say that I would get rid of those three for a start—yet that would be the start. They are not there because they are necessary but because of the farmer’s good-will—and he will have to show them his good-will for another ten or fifteen years. But he knows and I know that another young tractor-driver could do all their tasks.

  The day-release course has been a great help. More and more boys are doing them. They are equivalent to one year at an agricultural college. The farmer who allows me to attend the classes thinks that I should stay at least three years on his farm so that he can get the benefit of my training. I don’t agree with this. The farmers still have this habit of trying to hold a man by some kind of obligation to them. It has all got to change. There should be a good wage-work contract between employer and skilled worker, and nothing else. The farmers aren’t used to their men being free. My farmer gives me little things—petrol for my car sometimes—things like that. He wants more than my work, which he agrees I do well. He needs me to be beholden to him in some way. Loyal. He is emotional and patronizing. He should pay me for what I do and not expect my whole life to be his. He wants me to throw my life into his farm. He wants to own me.

  I have a sense of division but I don’t want it. I really like the Suffolk people and I really don’t want to leave the land. And yet if somebody really made it worth my while I don’t think that I would stay. There is talk that I can have a cottage on the farm when I marry and that my wages will rise, but what is ahead? The basic situation between farmer and farm-worker just isn’t going to change, so there will always be a little wage, a lot of trust and little presents like the petrol.

  One of the drawbacks to working on a farm when you are young is that you are kept away from people and when, as I am, you spend day after day with middle-aged men who never read, who never go anywhere outside the village itself and who cannot understand what makes any modern gadget work, you begin to lose touch yourself. I went to the pub to meet the young men. They never talk ideas, it is always people with them. The church is the vicar—that kind of thing. They seem, well, hemmed-in by the village itself.

  You wouldn’t think that working—and wanting to work—on a farm would be so worrying, would you?

  5. GOOD SERVICE

  “As to all that,” rejoined Sir Walter coolly, “supposing I were induced to let my house, I have by no means made up my mind as to the privileges to be annexed to it. I am not particularly disposed to favour a tenant. The park would be open to him of course . . . but what restrictions I might impose on the use of the pleasure-grounds is another thing. I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable. . . .”

  —JANE AUSTEN, Persuasion

  Christopher Falconer · aged thirty-nine · gardener

  Feudalism is a kind of game, set and match with partners at both the serving and receiving ends knowing exactly what is expected of them and abiding unquestionably by the rules. Questioning, in fact, is pointless; it breaks rule one which is accept the lot of the draw. The last of the old acceptors—on both sides—are now in their sixties or more
and prefer not to see any difference between working for “Lordship” and working for one of the North Sea Gas projects, or “him that grows the peas for Birdseye.” It’s all work, they will untruthfully insist. But “Lordship” and what went with him was far from being all work. A good deal of worship and now lost and forgotten mystery managed to interpose themselves in the ritual toil of the manor or “big house.” Wasn’t this where the god lived? And certainly the goddess. “He was a real gentleman,” said Chris the gardener, “but Ladyship was frightening.” The note of awe and wonder in his voice was familiar enough; one heard it often from aged people either in Akenfield or in any of the neighbouring villages as they tried to describe the particular menace and unpredictability of certain landowners and their wives. It was the duty of a squire to be meaner, odder and richer than any of his equals in the locality. The feudalists on the serving end seemed to demand this. They also liked to have “big people” in their particular “big house.” The Duke of Hamilton and Brandon who lived in the big house at Easton surrounded by the biggest crinkle-crankle wall in East Anglia, and probably in the world, was the Zeus of the neighbourhood. The villagers maintain that it was in the cock-pit in his garden that the Jameson Raid was planned. His coronet, picked out in gloss paint and cheerfully snowcemmed round, remains fixed to many of the cottages. Lord Covehithe was not quite up to this, being but a baron, but he possessed one mystic card which trumped the county—he was a close friend of King George V. His house lay just outside Akenfield, which had supplied it with servants for centuries. The supply gushed until 1939, trickled dutifully until about 1950, then abruptly dried up. Casual people arrived, at times to suit themselves, and “kept the garden down” with park-size mowers and other machines, and on the face of it everything looked as neat as before. Inside, a Maltese butler wearing suede shoes served dinner at seven and drove off to Ipswich in his Fiat at eight sharp. On fine days, Lordship and Ladyship sat on the terrace to a different silence. “We always had to work as if we weren’t there,” said Chris. Now, more likely than not, nobody was there. “I felt sorry for them,” he added.