Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Page 3
The villager may be anyone from an old horseman who, aeons away in social-change time, belonged to a family used serf-fashion as a field-gang, to a rich agricultural technician for whom the word “farmer” is beginning to sound a quaint description, yet both will be one in the great division which separates the growers from the mere consumers of food the world over. Deep in the nature of such men and elemental to their entire being there is the internationalism of the planted earth which makes them, in common with the rice-harvesters of Vietnam or the wine-makers of Burgundy, people who are committed to certain basic ideas and actions which progress and politics can elaborate or confuse, but can never alter. Where the strict village existence is concerned it is Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The villager is often imprisoned by the sheer implacability of the “everlasting circle,” as the poet James Reeve described the fertility cycle. His own life and the life of the corn and fruit and creatures clocks along with the same fatalistic movement. Spring-birth, winter-death and in between the harvest. This year, next year and for ever—for that was the promise. Such inevitability cuts down ambition and puts a brake on restlessness. The villager saw the “promise,” distorted and monstrous though it was, all through the great agricultural depression which began in the late 1870s and lasted long enough to leave its mark on every farmer and farm-worker over forty. The East Anglian corn plateau then sank into heaths, sporting estates and, in many places, simply “went back,” yet still the voice could be heard saying, “Spring, summer, harvest, winter. . . .” The words echoed in the most ruined field and at the most despairing of seasons.
The townsman envies the villager his certainties and, in Britain, has always regarded urban life as just a temporary necessity. One day he will find a cottage on the green and “real values.” To accommodate the almost religious intensity of the regard for rural life in this country, and to placate the sense of guilt which so many people feel about not living on a village pattern, the post-war new towns have attempted to incorporate both city and village—with, on the whole, disheartening results. A number of such towns are spreading into East Anglia, arriving suddenly on the loamy flats where there never was habitation before, and claiming that they can offer the best of both worlds. Trees are landscaped into the concrete. There are precincts, ways, conurbations, complexes . . . enlightened civic nouns. There are open spaces, air and every amenity. Yet the inhabitants, many of whom are the descendants of the great village exodus of the nineteenth century, often look bewildered. They have, in three or four generations, over-filled London and are now spilling back home. Except that the estate-towns aren’t home, so more than ever the old, settled, recognizable village represents the ideal community. More and more are making it. With general car-ownership, perhaps the greatest single factor in village change since the war, a vital new class of countryman has come into existence. Only a generation or so ago, a villager who had to “go away to work” was obliged to give up the close-knit and meaningful village background of which he was an important part for lodgings in an Ipswich or Norwich backstreet. Or, conversely, village life became so suffocating and inhibiting because he had no way of occasionally getting away from it, that a young man would join the army or simply the age-old drift away from his home village which was also his prison. The new villagers commute to the county and market towns. In Akenfield they include school-teachers, technicians from the Ipswich factories, office workers and an architect. These “young marrieds” go less and less for the converted cottage and more for picture-windowed bungalows set in gardens so spectacularly neat that they look as though they had been bought by the yard from a nurseryman—which many of them have. They travel to work daily in Anglias and on mopeds. The towns are numerous and near. There are as many as twelve to choose from and none much more than twenty miles off. Three, Framlingham, Woodbridge and Wickham Market are almost within walking distance, or would have been thought so when walking was a normal human activity.
But the villager who works in the near-by town does not think of himself as belonging to an urban district any more than his ancestor was very conscious of belonging to a Hundred. The first thing a newcomer does when arriving in a village is to begin to claim it. He doesn’t state or stake his claim, he simply starts to feel his way towards the village’s identity, recognize it for what it is and shape himself to fit it. He will often envy the old indigenous stock—there are eighteen families in Akenfield descended from people living in the village in c. 1750—but in effect his life will be far freer than theirs. The sometimes crushing, limiting power which the village exerts on families which have never escaped will be unknown to him.
The new villager’s attitudes are deeply coloured by the national village cult. In Akenfield, evidence of the good life, a tall old church on the hillside, a pub selling the local brew, a pretty stream, a football pitch, a handsome square vicarage with a cedar of Lebanon shading it, a school with jars of tadpoles in the window, three shops with doorbells, a Tudor mansion, half a dozen farms and a lot of quaint cottages, is there for all to recognize. Akenfield, on the face of it, is the kind of place in which an Englishman has always felt it his right and duty to live. It is patently the real country, untouched and genuine. A holy place, when you have spent half your life abroad in the services. Its very sounds are formal, hieratic; larks, clocks, bees, tractor hummings. Rarely the sound of the human voice. So powerful is this traditional view that many people are able to live in the centre of it for years and see nothing more. As G. E. Coulton observed, “Village happiness is often exaggerated beyond all reason. . . .” Perhaps it would be fairer to say that two contrasting conceptions of this happiness, the new—i.e. the literate and informed —and the old—i.e. the mysterious and intuitive—are now existing side by side in Akenfield, and with scarcely any awareness of each other.
The villager who has never moved away from his birthplace for anything more than military service retains the unique mark of his particular village. If a man says that he comes from Akenfield he knows that he is telling someone from another part of the neighbourhood a good deal more than this. Anything from his appearance to his politics could be involved. But on the whole the villagers don’t volunteer much about themselves. They are not loquacious people. The old ones have emerged from indignities and sufferings which taught a man how to hold his tongue, and a guarded note marks much of their conversation. On the whole, they will admit certain information about their lives during the “bad days” and will courteously rake up a few old customs as makeweight, but they remain intrinsically private folk and their characters cannot be termed open. The young men are beginning to realize that the farming scene has no future for them unless they happen to be farmers’ sons and can inherit. The middle-aged workers bore them with their tales of thirty-bob-a-week-and-all-hours but the more intelligent teenager has already discovered that his farming life must in essence be his father’s farming life repeated—plus sufficient training to allow him to cope with the new agricultural machinery. What most modern farms need is a good tractor-driver or two, as once they needed good ploughmen—or horsemen, as they were called in Suffolk—and for the majority of farm-workers this job has to be the ceiling of their expectations. Agriculture is one of Britain’s crucial industries but its skilled workers are the lowest paid and, socially, lowly rated. In East Anglia it remains embedded in a conservatism as heavy as the clay lands themselves.
The nearer native and new villager come together, the more obvious their difference. If the latter is no longer young, he relaxes in what seems to him the security of an undisturbed and benevolent class pattern. He finds life clearly sign-posted once more and knows where he is. He will obey village rules and take immense care not to offend against the least of its little foibles. But he never becomes joined to the place. Whilst the atavistic thread, whether he likes it or not, remains unbroken for the village man. It is both his advantage and his fetter, allowing him certain instincts, knowledge and emotions which can only be inherited th
rough unbroken contact with the life of the earth itself. It is this thread—and it is classless—which creates such lasting barriers as must exist between the agriculturalist and the non-agriculturalist in the modern village setting.
This book is the quest for the voice of Akenfield, Suffolk, as it sounded during the summer and autumn of 1967. The talk covers half a century of farming slump and the beginning of what is being called the second agricultural revolution. It begins with the memories of men who were children when much of the land changed hands towards the end of the nineteenth century. Described as an estate of five farms, “all in the occupation of respectable and punctual yearly tenants,” and combining “accommodation lands, small-holdings, the advowson of the church and the manor itself, in all 712 acres of tithe-free property,” it passed from Earl Howe to a Kentish yeoman, whose grandsons farm it today. The new owners were Unitarians and fitted comfortably into Suffolk’s dissenting background, although their property was bounded in on all sides by the pheasant acres of sporting feudalists, chiefly the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Rendlesham. The new owners switched much of their land from cereals and roots to orchards and produced the greatest farming change which Akenfield can have seen for hundreds of years. It is not a total change: there are still many acres of wheat, sugar-beet, barley and peas, but the presence on the valley slopes of many thousands of apple, plum and pear trees has created a feeling of enclosure from the customary bleakness which is luxurious and slightly foreign. The fruit plantations have also done something else for the communal life of Akenfield—they have perpetuated the old crowded harvest scene. A single youth is now the undoubted lord of the harvest as he steers his vast scarlet pterodactylic combine across the lonely acres, but it takes a full turn-out of many families to gather in the apples.
Down by the river lie the currant and gooseberry fields—literally the fruit of the potter’s field, for the loam there is littered with Roman earthenware. Just above, the bit of straight—or the “Army Path,” as the Saxon farmers called it—shoots past towards the coast. The heights are crowned with mill sites and within the village proper there exists an empty secondary horse village, a deserted complex of packways, stables, smithies, chaff and collar houses, loose boxes, abandoned wagons, carts, harness rooms and tackle. Nothing has contributed more to the swift destruction of the old pattern of life in Suffolk than the death of the horse. It carried away with it a quite different conception of time.
The old farmsteads, snowcemmed and trim, ride high on the hills. They must remain remote unless some huge housing project thrusts up to meet them. And this is not likely. Akenfield itself has no development plans and even if Ipswich’s overspill ever threatened it, it is doubtful if any preservationist society would launch an appeal to save it. It is not that kind of village. One or two new houses have gone up recently, usually in the depths of the valley and at the side of the stream and its meadows, with its carrs and its mosses, where a millennium of villagers have preferred not to live. This, on the quiet face of it, is as ordinary a group of country folk as one would meet anywhere in 1967. Or is it? How much is preserved? How much lost?
Politically, the over-fifties are still locked in the distresses and indignations stemming from the “Revolt of the Field” of almost a century ago. A champion hedge-cutter named Joseph Arch led the revolt, which was to result in the first National Union of Agricultural Labourers—and a subsequent lock-out by the farmers. In Clopton, a parish four miles from Akenfield, the church-wardens gave this notice:
The Society calling itself the National Agricultural Union having ordered strikes in a portion of the county of Suffolk, all members of the same in this parish have notice to give up their allotments, and will be struck off the list of parochial and bread charities.
From this trade-unionism, which was more active in Norfolk and Suffolk than anywhere else in Britain, came years of farmers versus farm-workers skirmishing which embittered the countryside. The social and economic divisions widened to an extent unknown before and the position was worsened by the ruthlessness with which the farmers, deprived of cheap labour during hard times, ignored the Education Act of 1870 by taking boys away from school at eleven and twelve. The older farmers, too, are still emotionally caught up in what they called at the time the “coming down process” and have vivid memories of being young in a twitch-ridden landscape, with water spread in thin lakes on top of the undrained clay and buildings sliding down into nettles. Both groups belong to “those who stayed at home” during the great abandonment of the villages which began in 1881, when 700,000 British agricultural workers and their families, helped by Union funds, emigrated to the colonies. “It was not the idlest and wastrels who sailed,” wrote Herbert Paul, “but the strongest, the healthiest, and the most industrious men in the prime of life. . . .” Two and a half million acres of arable became grass between 1872–1900 and the cornlands which remained needed far fewer workers because of the invention of the binder and other machines. Ironically for the Suffolk farm-worker, the best of these machines were pouring out of factories “just over the way”—from Richard Garrett’s great ironworks at Leiston and from Ransome’s of Ipswich. These events and their consequences have touched all but the post-war generation. It is clear that much of the self-confidence of many of the middle-aged men has been either shaken or destroyed, resulting in protective good manners. They are grave, almost remote. Most remote of all is Davie, born in 1887 and who looks like Meredith at eighty, who cannot read or write a word and who insists that he has nothing to say.
Davie’s life is not really of Akenfield—or of anything. It has been a coda to the old existence. He has never had to protest or state his case because it seems never to have occurred to him that he has a case. He is considered dirty by the village, though quite unnervingly white of skin and hair. Tall and straight, with vast blue child’s eyes, he has lived in one half of the same double-dweller for eighty-one years. The house is turned away from the village and overlooks a sweep of barley and the valley made by the next tributary stream. This view is perfect and Davie hates it. During the 1920s there were rumours that a new road would be cut through it, carrying the traffic to Yarmouth, and then Davie exulted. But nothing happened. Next, it was said that the pylons carrying nuclear power from the Sizewell generator would pass his door, and then that “they would be having his garden up” for the North Sea gas pipes, but again nothing happened. Davie is convinced of a curse.
He has been to the war, one of the strange host of 30,000 farm labourers called up in 1917, when the victims were running out. He was thirty and had already been hard at work in the Akenfield farms for twenty-one years. Then this sudden and amazing journey to the battlefield, equipped with a gun which he understood, because of rabbiting, and a New Testament, which he alternately smoked or used for lavatory paper.
“Did you kill men, Davie?”
“I got several”—the same answer to a question on how he did on a rook-drive.
“What was the worst thing, Davie?”
“Why, the wet, of course!”
He has lived alone since his parents died during a diphtheria epidemic which broke out when he was ten, never marrying, never inviting anyone to his cottage, which is crammed with polished furniture, wine-bottles and rag rugs which he makes himself. He knows of no blood relations. He was baptized in the font in the parish church, the bowl of which is supported by carved stone “woodmen”—the forest gods of Suffolk—but it is the register and not Davie which gives this information. He likes to believe that he has “never set foot in the ol’ place—nor in that chapel neether!” Absence of commitment is a tremendous relief to him. He likes to think that there is nothing to tell. Yet the first thing one notices about him is not negation and recluse-like rejection, but an almost greedy, urgent positivity. It is such a vital existence which informs him. He is, he breathes—though what air? one sometimes wonders. The village fool? So obviously and completely not. Some slight imbalance, some occasional fall due to “nerves,�
�� as all illnesses beyond the immediately identifiable and accidents are called in Akenfield, might have placed him—might have enrolled him in the tolerated company of the “touched.” Yet the one certain thing about Davie is his crushing sanity. His isolation is due, maybe, to some snapping of the communication links between his world and ours. Scraps of old farming practice can be dragged out of him—nothing special. Twenty men and boys scythed the corn and sang as they went.
“What was the song, Davie?”
“Never you mind the song—it was the singing that counted.”
High up on the wall of the biggest barn in the village, almost at the apex of the east wall’s pediment, on the inside and armorial beneath its mantling of cobwebs, there is a deep and perfect impression of a small hand with the fingers fanned out. It is Davie’s hand, pressed into the wet plaster when he was fourteen, after he had helped to mend the barn. A chink in the roof spotlights the clean lines of this dusty answer. “There—that’s something,” says Davie. “Or you could say, ‘that’s all.’ ”
The wind catches at his house. The East Anglian wind does far more than move the barley; it is doctrinal. Probably no other agent except, perhaps, the great forests which once covered this plain, has done more to shape the character of the people who have dwelt on it. It is a quite unmysterious wind, dispelling the fuzziness of things. On a clear day—and they are mostly clear days in this part of the world—you can see as far as you can bear to see, and sometimes farther. It is a suitable climate for a little arable kingdom where flints are the jewels and where existence is sharp-edged.