Voices of Akenfield Read online

  I returned to my old farm at Akenfield for 11s. a week, but I was unsettled. When the farmer stopped my pay because it was raining and we couldn’t thrash, I said to my seventeen‐year‐old mate, ‘Bugger him. We’ll go off and join the army.’ It was March 4th 1914. We joined the army a few hours after we had made our decision. We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy. At the barracks we kissed the Bible and were given a shilling. The recruiting sergeant said, ‘You can’t go home in all this rain, you can sleep in a bed in the recruiting room’. In the morning he said, ‘Go home and say good‐bye, and here’s ten shillings each for your food and fares. Report back on Monday.’

  In my four months’ training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food but it was really because for the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work. I want to say this simply as a fact, that village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly. I am not complaining about it. It is what happened to me.

  We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th. I was now a machine‐gunner in the Third Essex Regiment. A lot of boys from the village were with me and although we were all sleeping in ditches at Harwich, wrapped in our greatcoats, we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms. I had 7s. a week and sent my mother half of it. If you did this, the government would add another 3s. 6d. – so my mother got 7s. My father died early this year and my mother lived on this 7s. a week for the whole of the war, adding a scrap to it by doing washing, and weeding in the fields. Neither of my parents lived long enough to draw the Old Age Pension. I can remember, when work was short, a group of unemployed young men coming to where some old men were sugar‐beeting, which is the worst job there is, and shouting, ‘Now that you grandfathers have got the pension’ – it was 5s. a week – ‘why don’t you get out of the field and give us a chance?’ These ‘old’ men were only in their fifties but the hardness of their lives had made them ancient.

  All this trouble with the village fell behind us now. I was nineteen and off to the Dardanelles, which is the Hellespont, I discovered. I had two boys from the village with me. We’d heard a lot about France so we thought we’d try Turkey. The band played on the banks of the river as we pulled out of Plymouth and I wondered if we would ever come home again. We were all so patriotic then and had been taught to love England in a fierce kind of way. The village wasn’t England; England was something better than the village. We got to Gib and it was lovely and warm. Naked Spanish boys dived round us for coins. There were about fifty nurses on the top deck and they threw tanners. You could see they were having an eye‐opener. We stopped to coal‐up. The dust blew all over the decks and all over us. We were packed like sardines and eating rubbish again. Water and salt porridge for breakfast. Beans and high salt pork for dinner. The pork was too bad for land‐men to eat so we threw it into the coaldust and the coolies snatched it up and thrust it into their mouths, or put it into sacks to take home for their families.

  We arrived at the Dardanelles and saw the guns flashing and heard the rifle‐fire. They heaved our ship, the River Clyde, right up to the shore. They had cut a hole in it and made a little pier, so we were able to walk straight off and on to the beach. We all sat there – on the Hellespont! – waiting for it to get light. The first things we saw were big wrecked Turkish guns, the second a big marquee. It didn’t make me think of the military but of the village fêtes. Other people must have thought like this because I remember how we all rushed up to it, like boys getting into a circus, and then found it all laced up. We unlaced it and rushed in. It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lines and lines of them, and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I’d never seen a dead man before and here I was looking at two or three hundred of them. It was our first fear. Nobody had mentioned this. I was very shocked. I thought of Suffolk and it seemed a happy place for the first time.

  Later that day we marched through open country and came to within a mile and half of the front line. It was incredible. We were there – at the war! The place we had reached was called ‘dead ground’ because it was where the enemy couldn’t see you. We lay in little square holes, myself next to James Sears from the village. He was about thirty and married. That evening we wandered about on the dead ground and asked about friends of ours who had arrived a month or so ago. ‘How is Ernie Taylor?’ – ‘Ernie? – he’s gone.’ ‘Have you seen Albert Paternoster?’ – ‘Albert? – he’s gone.’ We learned that if 300 had ‘gone’ but 700 were left, then this wasn’t too bad. We then knew how unimportant our names were.

  I was on sentry that night. A chap named Scott told me that I must only put my head up for a second but that in this time I must see as much as I could. Every third man along the trench was a sentry. The next night we had to move on to the third line of trenches and we heard that the Gurkhas were going over and that we had to support their rear. But when we got to the communication trench we found it so full of dead men that we could hardly move. Their faces were quite black and you couldn’t tell Turk from English. There was the most terrible stink and for a while there was nothing but the living being sick on to the dead. I did sentry again that night. It was one‐two‐sentry, one‐two‐sentry all along the trench, as before. I knew the next sentry up quite well. I remembered him in Suffolk singing to his horses as he ploughed. Now he fell back with a great scream and a look of surprise – dead. It is quick, anyway, I thought. On June 4th we went over the top. We took the Turks’ trench and held it. It was called Hill 13. The next day we were relieved and told to rest for three hours, but it wasn’t more than half an hour before the relieving regiment came running back. The Turks had returned and recaptured their trench. On June 6th my favourite officer was killed and no end of us butchered, but we managed to get hold of Hill 13 again. We found a great muddle, carnage and men without rifles shouting ‘Allah! Allah!’, which is God’s name in the Turkish language. Of the sixty men I had started out to war from Harwich with, there were only three left.

  We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging – even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, ‘Good morning’, in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath. At night, when the stench was worse, we tied crêpe round our mouths and noses. This crêpe had been given to us because it was supposed to prevent us being gassed. The flies entered the trenches at night and lined them completely with a density which was like moving cloth. We killed millions by slapping our spades along the trench walls but the next night it would be just as bad. We were all lousy and we couldn’t stop shitting because we had caught dysentery. We wept, not because we were frightened but because we were so dirty.

  We didn’t feel indignant against the Government. We believed all they said, all the propaganda. We believed the fighting had got to be done. We were fighting for England. You only had to say ‘England’ to stop any argument. We shot and shot. On August 6th they made a landing at Suvla Bay and we took Hill 13 again, and with very few casualties this time. We’d done a good job. The trench had been lost yet again, you see. When we got back for the third time we found a little length of trench which had somehow missed the bombardment. There were about six Turkish boys in it and we butchered them right quick. We couldn’t stay in the trench, we had to go on. Then we ran into machine‐gun fire and had to fall flat in the heather, or whatever it was. Suddenly my mate caught fire as he lay there. A bullet had hit his ammunition belt. Several people near jumped up and ran back, away from the burning man and the machine‐gun fire. I could hear the strike of the gun about a foot above my head. I lay between the burning man
and a friend of mine called Darky Fowler. Darky used to be a shepherd Helmingham way. I put my hand out and shook him, and said, ‘Darky, we’ve got to go back. We must go back!’ He never answered. He had gone. I lay there thinking how funny it was that I should end my life that night. Then my mate began to go off like a firework – the fire was exploding his cartridges. That did it! I up and ran.

  There is nobody can say that you have killed a man. I shot through so many because I was a machine‐gunner. Did they all die? – I don’t know. You got very frightened of the murdering and you did sometimes think, ‘What is all this about? What is it for?’ But mostly you were thinking of how to stay alive. The more the killing, the more you thought about living. You felt brave and honoured that you should be fighting for England. You knew that all the people at home were for it. We believed we were fighting for a good cause and so, I expect, did the Turks. You didn’t think personally. You can’t get on with wars if you think personally. You can’t say you shot a man, although you know you hit him, because there were so many guns going at the same time. But I should think that I killed several. [Several means quite a few or many in Suffolk.]

  After Gallipoli I went to France. I went through the Somme and through the battle of Arras, after which I was captured. It was 14th April 1917. We ran and gave ourselves up, there was nothing more we could do. The Germans lined us up and marched us off. I thought, ‘We’re safe now. We’re out of it…’I didn’t know what was going to happen. If I had I would sooner have gone through all the fighting again. It was the worst thing which ever happened to me in my life. We were taken to Lille, where the Germans had to make us ill and wretched in a week in order to march us through the town, so that they could say to the people, ‘Look at the great British army, look what it has been reduced to!’ We were driven into dark dungeons, straight off the battlefield, starved, made filthy and in only six days we were ill and we looked like scarecrows. The Germans knew how to do this to men. After the parade about 300 of us were packed into a half‐built mansion and there we lived on pearl barley boiled in coppers and bread or cake made of weed‐seed. Then we were put into a forest to make charcoal and sometimes the Germans shot into our legs as we marched. We never knew what they would do next. They chose boys to thrash. I don’t know why I was chosen but I was a favourite for this thrashing and was always being taken off for a beating. George Holmes, a farmer’s son from the village, was one of the people who died from the ill‐treatment.

  At Christmas 1917 they took us to Germany, right down to Kiel. It was snowing and we were in rags. No shoes. They gave us wooden clogs. We dug on the Kiel railway, making a track to the Baltic for the big guns. Many people died. On November 5th 1918 some German sailors arrived and set us free. They cut all the barbed wire and left just one guard in charge. ‘You can leave if you like,’ they said. ‘The war will soon be over. There is going to be a revolution, so keep off the roads. You could go and help the farmers pick up potatoes. That would be sensible.’

  So this is what we did. And when the war ended, there we were, Germans, Poles, Russians and Englishmen, working in the fields and realizing that there was damn little growing in them.

  The soldiers who got back to the village recovered very quickly. People who had lost their sons felt strange. Generally speaking, we were thankful that it was all over and we could get back to our work. Yet things had changed and people were different. The farm‐workers who had been soldiers were looked at in a new way. There were a few more privileges around than there used to be. They’d let you take a rabbit or two, for instance. Before 1914, if you’d caught a rabbit, my God, the world would have come to an end! The sack was the least you’d get. We felt that there must be no slipping back to the bad old ways and about 1920 we formed a branch of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union.

  [… ]

  It took a brave man to show his politics in Suffolk all through the 1930s. If you weren’t a Tory you were a troublemaker. All the same, we got the Union going again in 1934. Things changed after this, first very slowly, then faster and faster.

  I am old now. I read library books about the Great War – my war. The one I am reading now is called The Sword‐Bearers. I have these deep lines on my face because I have worked under fierce suns.

  Emily Leggett · aged seventy‐nine · horseman’s widow

  I have been wed and widowed twice. My first husband was head horseman at Round Wood Farm and when we married his wages were 13s. a week. He used to give me 12s. and keep a bob for his pocket. We were children together, then lovers, then I married him. He lived in the next door double‐dweller. We were both nineteen when we wed. A beautiful boy he was. It seems a long time now since I saw him. He had six horses to look after and he used to get up at five o’clock every morning to bait* them.

  When the war came he was sent at once to join the cavalry at Curragh Camp in Ireland because he was such a fine horseman. He was trained there for about three months and then he was given three days’ leave before going to the Western front. But the water was so rough that he only had one day and one night with me. That was the only time I saw him between his joining‐up and his going. One day he was blown off his horse and blown to pieces. There was nothing of him left to find. So he hasn’t got a grave. The chaplain wrote and told me all about it. When the telegram came and I read of his death I couldn’t possibly believe it. I couldn’t think that it was true. My poor young husband! I had only just got his last letter – I still have it. It said not to worry. He was just twenty‐five.

  I was born in this house, so was my father and his father. It is a charity house – or was – we have to pay rent and rates now. Nearly all the people I used to know are gone. I went to school here – what little I went. I was blinded by eye ulcers a lot of my childhood and so I didn’t do much schooling. We took our poorness naturally. We knew within a little what we were going to get and that there would never be any more. So that was that. My father was one of eight and I’ve often heard him say that he didn’t know what it was like to have a new pair of shoes on his feet. He only had shoes which other folk passed on to him. We ought to be thankful to be as we are today. Whatever would our poor old mothers and fathers have thought if they could see all the money we get now! We know that it doesn’t go far but we touch it.

  I can remember the men mowing by hand, twenty‐four of them in the one field, and each behind the other. The children helped in their own way. We started field work when we were five or six. I used to carry my father’s food to the harvest field. It would be crowded with men and when they saw the food they would laugh and cheer. The farmers gave each man two bushels of malt and a pound of hops for doing the harvest. They would have cost 6s. if you had to buy them. Then they got £5 or £5 10s. largess or bonus when it was all over. The quicker they got the harvest in the more money they got. Of course they worked all hours God ever made to get this money. My father would go to the beanfield at two in the morning to get the beans when they were dew‐damp, so that they didn’t shell‐out. Just when there was enough light to see. People now get as many pounds in the week as they got shillings!

  We women and children went gleaning when the last wagons had left the field. We picked up the corn for mother and she cut the ears off with her pig‐knife and put them in a sack. We were allowed to keep all this. We fed it to the fowls or ground it into flour.

  A lot of people shared bedrooms in those days – I mean four and five to a room because of the big families. We never saw anything wrong. People think we did but we didn’t. My sister and me and my brother shared a room until we married but we knew nothing. I’m sure of this. Today they hear too much about sex too early. My father was church‐warden and a good man. He never went to bed without kneeling against his chair and saying his prayers.

  After I had been a widow for five years I married Bob – another horseman! We had no children of our own but we brought up a foster‐daughter. We managed all right although it was hard. I walked ten miles, there and back, t
o Woodbridge every Friday for the shopping, and if it was a dry summer, so that the pond disappeared, I walked two miles there and back for a couple of pails of water. This water came from a spring and it was a treat after the pond, I can tell you! Worth going after. The dust from the roads in the summertime was enough to blind you and if it rained the mud squirted up into your long skirts and made them filthy. People got very dirty then.

  When the second war came it changed the village more than it had ever been changed before, or so I believe. It was because they sent the Irishmen to build the aerodrome. Blackies as well. Hundreds of Irish and Blackies concreted the fields. They got the stones for the concrete from Shingle Street. Two of the Irish boys were billeted on me because I had two bedrooms. The Germans came to bomb the aerodrome and when this happened the Irishmen used to run outside and stand in the pond! Me and my husband we sat in our chairs and waited. Things would fall off the mantelpiece and the village would shake. It was awful.

  My husband began to be ill then. On the days when I had to take him into Ipswich for treatment I always came back to find the tea ready. The Irishmen had done it. I have been blessed with beautiful boys.

  My second husband had an awful death – worse than the first I sometimes think. I never had my clothes off except for washing for twenty weeks. I never left him for an hour. The doctor wanted me to have him put away – they always do – but I said no. Men should die where they have lived. The nurse came in and washed him every day. It didn’t cost me nothing. So I saw the end of him. He died on the Friday and was buried on the Sunday because he was a bad corpse. It was cancer of the throat. The war was over then and they were smashing up the aerodrome and putting back the corn. ‘I shan’t live to see it,’ he said. And he didn’t. Nobody could have wished for two better husbands. My horsemen – both gone!