Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Page 14

  He is an easy, loquacious man who seems to be both ashamed of holding the key feudalistic ideas and at the same time anxious to put in a good word for them. He uses the word “calibre” as a euphemism for the word “class”—“people of my calibre . . . people of their calibre”—stocking Suffolk like an arsenal in which the light modern weapon has taken over from the great crested field-piece. He is married with three children and now works in one of those small, wall-secluded gardens of incredible perfection which lie behind the streets of Woodbridge. He has the rather natty good looks of a tail-gunner advertising Jif or Brylcreem during the last war which, however, he is young enough to have missed. His manner is quick and anticipatory. There is in him a kind of craving to give, to assist, to smooth the path. At less than forty, he feels slightly ill at ease in a world which has turned turtle and encumbered him with a new bungalow, car, television and foreign holidays. He is one of the last generation of initiates of a social faith whose claims (to use his own staunch ballistic metaphor) have been exploded. Father, grandfather and great-grandfather were in service at the big house. Their lives were dedicated to Lordship and Ladyship as totally as other lives have been dedicated to an altar. Chris followed them at fourteen in 1942. The war was on and the big house with its flagpole and royal memories focused the local patriotism. Lordship and Ladyship, both very old, made the most of it. Their refusal to allow “that dreadful man” to change a thing in their lives was the talk of the village and one tale of how Ball the butler had been immediately called to restore the vast precision of the dining table after a bomb had disturbed it was much admired. In such a climate it did not seem odd that Chris should be taken on as trainee under-gardener while civilization rocked. He described it with a kind of apologetic amazement. It was “all wrong” yet, for him, “somehow right.”

  * * *

  I went to Lordship’s when I was fourteen and stayed for fourteen years. There were seven gardeners and goodness knows how many servants in the house. It was a frightening experience for a boy. Lord and Ladyship were very, very Victorian and very domineering. It was “swing your arms” every time they saw us. Ladyship would appear suddenly from nowhere when one of us boys were walking off to fetch something. “Swing your arms!” she would shout. We wore green baize aprons and collars and ties, no matter how hot it was, and whatever we had to do had to be done on the dot. Nobody was allowed to smoke. A gardener was immediately sacked if he was caught smoking, no matter how long he had worked there.

  We must never be seen from the house; it was forbidden. And if people were sitting on the terrace or on the lawn, and you had a great barrow-load of weeds, you might have to push it as much as a mile to keep out of view. If you were seen you were always told about it and warned, and as you walked away Ladyship would call after you, “Swing your arms!” It was terrible. You felt like somebody with a disease.

  The boy under-gardeners had to help arrange the flowers in the house. These were done every day. We had to creep in early in the morning before breakfast and replace great banks of flowers in the main rooms. Lordship and Ladyship must never hear or see you doing it; fresh flowers had to just be there, that was all there was to it. There was never a dead flower. It was as if flowers, for them, lived for ever. It was part of the magic in their lives. But the arrangements were how they wanted them and if one of the gardeners had used his imagination, Ladyship noticed at once and soon put a stop to it! The guests always complimented her on the flowers and she always accepted the praise as though she had grown, picked and arranged them herself. It was logical because servants were just part of the machinery of the big house and people don’t thank machines, they just keep them trim and working. Or that’s how I look at it.

  As the years went by, we young men found ourselves being able to talk to Lordship and Ladyship. “Never speak to them—not one word and no matter how urgent—until they speak to you,” the head-gardener told me on my first day. Ladyship drove about the grounds in a motorchair and would have run us over rather than have to say, “get out the way.” We must never look at her and she never looked at us. It was the same in the house. If a maid was in a passage and Lordship or Ladyship happened to come along, she would have to face the wall and stand perfectly still until they had passed. I wouldn’t think that they felt anything about their servants. We were just there because we were necessary, like water from the tap. We had to listen for voices. If we heard them in a certain walk, we had to make a detour, if not it was, “But why weren’t you listening?” and “Be alert, boy!” and, when you had been dismissed, “Swing your arms!”

  The garden was huge. The pleasure grounds alone, and not including the park, covered seven acres. The kind of gardening we did there is not seen nowadays. It was a perfect art. Topiary, there was a lot of that. It was a very responsible job. You had only to make one bad clip and a pheasant became a duck. The gardeners usually made up these creatures themselves. We were tempted to cut out something terrible sometimes, so that it grew and grew . . . but of course we never did. Even when we went on to mechanical hedge-trimmers we still kept on topiary. There was a great pride in it, and in hedge-cutting of every sort. It was the hedge which set the garden off and all the big houses competed with each other. Fences were marvellous things, too; there were more than two miles of them round Lordship’s and not a pale which wasn’t exact. The hedges had tops like billiard-tables. It was get down and have a look, and stand back and have a look. No hedge was left until it was marvellous. There were so many things which really had no need to be done but which we did out of a kind of obstinate pleasure. The asparagus beds in winter were an example. We’d spend hours getting the sides of the clamps absolutely flat and absolutely at a 45º angle, although an ordinary heap of earth would have done just as well.

  None of the village people were allowed into the garden. Definitely not. Trades-people came to their door and never saw the main gardens. Work in front of the house had to be done secretly. About seven in the morning we would tiptoe about the terrace, sweeping the leaves, tying things up, never making a sound, so that nobody in the bedrooms could hear the work being done. This is what luxury means—perfect consideration. We gave, they took. It was the complete arrangement. This is luxury.

  Of course, they spent a terrific amount of money on the house and garden. It was the machinery they had to have in order to live. So they kept it going, as you might say. A bad servant was just a bad part and was exchanged for a good part as soon as possible. I thought of this when I was doing my National Service as a fitter in the Tank Corps. It made sense. Yet I got so that I didn’t know quite what to think about it all. It was obviously wrong, yet because Lordship and Ladyship were old and had never known any other kind of life, I suppose I felt sorry for them. I always had to give more than was necessary. I couldn’t resist it. It was exciting somehow. But when I got home I would be angry with myself. The butler would sometimes come to the pub and imitate them. Laugh—you should have heard us! But I would feel strange inside, pitying and hating at the same time. His favourite joke was:

  Ladyship: “Shall we ask the So-and-Sos to luncheon, Bertie?”

  Silence, then, “Can they play bridge? Will they like my garden?”

  Ladyship: “No, I don’t think so.”

  Lordship: “Then don’t have ’em.”

  Lordship was a friend of King George V. He was a terribly nice man—a real gentleman. A lot of royalty came down from time to time and Lordship and Ladyship were sometimes at Sandringham. The Queen (Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother) came. She treated us very well and loved the garden. She would tell us boys what they ate for luncheon and then we’d all laugh. The Princess Royal was just the same—easy. But Members of Parliament always imitated Lordship and Ladyship and treated us like fittings. I was amazed by the Royalty. I imagined a bigger kind of Ladyship, but definitely not.

  It was strange coming back to the big house after the Tank Corps. I was married now and we had an estate cottage without inside water, a
bath or electricity, although it was very pretty and we were very happy. At first, that is. Until Ladyship said that my wife must work in the big house. My wife didn’t understand what it would mean. She came from Ilford and had never seen anything like it. She got worried and then she got migraine. The doctor told her that she must leave her work at the big house because it was making her anxious and ill. I told Ladyship, who said, “But she must come.” I told her what the doctor had said but she just drove to the cottage and told my wife, “You must come back to the kitchen—do you understand? You must.” So that is why we went away. I felt sorry for my wife and for Ladyship; they had no way of knowing each other.

  The big house helped me in my life and changed me. Being in private service has educated me. I can talk to anybody. There is one thing about Suffolk folk and that is that they find talk terribly difficult. I don’t. I have learned to talk. But working for Lordship made me a foreigner in the village. Those who remain with their own calibre in the village stay in the village family. I belonged to the big-house family and it was hard to leave. I saw the last of the big house while it was self-supporting. Everything, milk, cream, butter, game, fish, flowers, chicory, endive, melons, they were all there behind the hedges. Whatever Lordship and Ladyship wished for, they asked for, and it was brought.

  I had a great training as a gardener and acquired all my knowledge completely free. Although I was often horrified by the way we were all treated, I know I got a terrific amount out of it. It is a gardening background which few people now have, and scarcely anybody of my age. In a great garden you grow from the seed and then you see the plant growing where it will always grow, but in a nursery garden it is just produce and sell, produce and sell. Nothing remains. A private gardener like myself would never get on in nursery work because I have had the fine art of tidiness drummed into me. I work privately and could have a choice of twelve or fifteen jobs, all with houses. There is no kind of gardening I can’t do. I am not boasting, it is a fact.

  How can you describe this anxiety we have about our gardens in Suffolk? I have been to Scotland and they don’t have it there. Are gardens our pride? I think so: it is a breeding in the Suffolk people. I have never thought about this before but now I would like to get to the bottom of it. We are all obviously urged to do it as a great necessity in our lives. It is my life. I would die in the attempt to produce a plant, a flower, and bring it to perfection. You take my employer. She never goes abroad. All her holiday imagination is put into her garden. She prefers this to a seven days’ wonder. Another thing, I think, which you can put the gardening urge down to is simply ownership. It is wonderful to realize that a beautiful plant is yours. Suffolk people love you to go and boost their gardens. If people want to be polite, the first thing they say is, “What a beautiful garden.” If a man is clipping a hedge, you must compliment him on it. Hedges have to be praised. This is where the old employers went wrong, they didn’t understand about praise. If there had been more praise for gardeners there would still be plenty of good gardeners around. An industrial worker would sooner have a £5 note but a countryman must have praise.

  There are a tremendous number of people who garden morning, noon and night and can’t begin to be got out of their gardens, but they are a different calibre to myself. They are ex-army officers, ex-naval officers. About seventy per cent of the gardens open to the public in East Anglia belong to ex-military men. I think it must be something to do with time and order. They love complete order and nobody can stop them imposing it on a garden. There must be something in this because I have thought about it a lot. So many of my employer’s friends are middle-aged army officers, retired, and they are all fascinated by horticulture. The things which they will do to make a garden is astounding. I’ve known them to drive all the way to Wiltshire to pick up a stone sink. You see, gardening allows them to go on having routine, order, tidiness, straight edges, upright posts. You can be strict in a garden. They were fantastically strict in the Tank Corps barracks. And tidy! “If it doesn’t move, whitewash it,” they used to say. You look at the names belonging to the National Gardens Scheme and you’ll find it’s three-quarters officers. And how they work! Although if they’re going to have a garden and going to have a good one they have hardly got any alternative. I know a colonel near here who, when he opens his garden for the National Gardens Scheme, has all his machines and tools on display. All the mowers, barrows, spades—everything—are polished and oiled and lined up! You wouldn’t have got Lordship doing a daft thing like that—but then you wouldn’t have got Lordship letting Tom, Dick and Harry into the park, let alone into the gardens.

  The village gardens aren’t as good as they used to be for the very simple reason that a man can go to work for an hour or two extra and earn enough money to buy vegetables for a week, whereas, if he grows them, he’s got to dig, buy seed, sow, hoe, water, worry, take up and I don’t know what—and all for something he can buy for a few bob. There’s not time, anyway, because probably he is out to work, fruit-picking and that sort of thing, and so it is easier for them both to have a packet of frozen peas handy. Life now is much less elaborate and, consequently, much less interesting. As a qualified judge of flowers, I would like to say that Akenfield is more horticultural-minded than it used to be, but it is not, and this is the truth. Not the ordinary village worker. But then you have only to go the next step higher, the salesman in his new bungalow, and it’s a very different story. Their gardening is a form of ownership and “getting on.” They garden neatly. They don’t know the difference between tidiness and neatness. They buy expensive ugly things. Their gardens look like shopping. These are the new gardeners who are making the nurserymen rich. It is not the young farm-worker—I wish it was.

  The young boys in the village won’t touch the garden. They earn too much money as far as I can see. They don’t pay enough for what they are learning. I had to help my father in the garden when I was a boy; there was nothing else to do. It was expected of me. You wouldn’t get a boy to do this now. You just can’t reach the boy. I have cousins in the village only just ten years younger than myself and I can’t connect or talk to them. I can talk to educated boys, that is different. They are not changing. Supposing I wanted to talk about horticulture, it wouldn’t do for me to talk to a village boy of about seventeen from the council houses. I’d be much better if I went over to Framlingham College and talked to a seventeen-year-old there. The boy from the village seems to have no interest in anything. That is why the village garden is in decline. But the gardening industry is booming. You have only to go round the nurseries at the week-end—all the car parks are absolutely full. But not with proper village people. The cars belong to suburban folk. They are intelligent and lively. They are busy with gardens, boats and holidays. They buy very different things to the old country chap who spent no more on his garden than the price of a packet of carrot seed.

  I have been judging village flower shows and gardens for nearly ten years, and am one of the officials of the Village Produce Association. There are branches all over the country and Suffolk is actually a very poor one. It is an organization run by the Rural Community Council. Each judge—there are about forty of us in Suffolk—attends about a dozen flower shows during the season. It is very progressive and professional; the old-time amateur judge is out. The shows, and gardening itself, are spoilt by the tendency to try and grow the biggest vegetable or flower. People are not nearly so keen on the professional exhibiting side of things in Suffolk as they are in Yorkshire, for instance. They are more interested in Suffolk in being the first to have peas or potatoes, or whatever it is. The great thing is to produce something before your neighbour does. Real gardening is dying, dying . . . dying. There aren’t many gardeners of my calibre left. I am a young man who has got caught in the old ways. I am thirty-nine and I am a Victorian gardener, and this is why the world is strange to me.

  6. THE FORGE

  You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose,

  suff
er or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.

  —GOETHE

  Gregory Gladwell · aged forty-four · blacksmith

  The blacksmith’s shop in most villages is now either a garage, a smart cottage called The Olde Forge or a forlorn lean-to still redolent of horse musk and iron, its roof gradually slithering down to the couch-grass mat which covers the yard. But any smithy which managed to survive the great transition of horse by machine and the years when, as Gregory put it, “nothing was bought and nothing was sold,” and which is run by someone who is able to combine a traditional training with a new adaptability, is likely to be one of the most prosperous businesses in the neighbourhood. This is what has happened to Gregory’s smithy. Success is his dilemma. Is he keeping faith with the “old ones,” as he calls them, the men of his blood who shod the farm horses and made the ploughs “in the seventeen-somethings—and on this very floor”? Deeds and apprenticeship articles give a formal assent to Gregory’s claims. They were passed on to him when he was seventeen, a mockery it seemed at the time. These curly bits of paper, an anvil, some odds and ends of tools and a lot of trade secrets which had suddenly become a dead language. He was like an anchorite sticking to his beliefs and bare cell in a land which no longer had any use for his sort. Now, with not only the village but every passing car slowing at his door, things are, in effect, much worse! He has become a great craftsman. Calling on him has become a must. Rich open-plan farmers have to wait patiently for the expensive fittings needed in the restoration of their ancient halls and manors—nobody else can make them, and Gregory has only four pairs of hands, his own amazing ones and those of the three boys who are learning the trade. The question he continually asks himself is something like, “Am I exceeding the terms of my indenture?”