Voices of Akenfield Read online

  Fred Mitchell · aged eighty‐five · horseman

  I worked with horses. I came from the West. Have you been to Chedburgh – Wickhambrook way? I came from that direction. I lived there two years. Then I lived at Whepstead – have you been to Whepstead? I had a few years along of a farmer there – horseman, machinery man and most everything else. The farmer was a big chapel man from Clare. Do you know Clare? Then on I moved. To Poslingford. Do you know Poslingford? That’s a rum old village. It was there that I met the farmer who brought me to the East and brought me bad luck, as it happened. The farmer had a hold of me. You see, the Great War broke out and he got exempts for me, one after another, until it was all over, so he had me.

  I was living at Depden when I first started ploughing. The farmer said to me, ‘You’re going to plough today’. I was something pleased. The horses were in the stable. I soon got hold of them and off I went! I was fifteen years old and I had been at work for seven years. I kept about on this Depden farm – do you know Depden? – for one year and then, after the harvest, I thought I’d have a go at Newmarket. Newmarket was crowded with village boys who had a handy way with horses. They hoped the toffs would fancy them and put them in the racing stables. I soon found a job there; it was to do with the heavy horses. The man who employed me would cart anything anywhere. He’d got over fifty horses, including a pair of blacks for funerals, a pair of greys for weddings, and everything up to date. Yes, I’ve been about – but it hasn’t done me much good. The trouble is, I shouldn’t have met this Poslingford farmer, then I could have gone on getting about.

  I saw the big change. My father worked on a farm – and his father. They both got very near to ninety, I believe. They were hardy old sorts. They never had a thing amiss with them. They worked and lived, and then kind of toppled over at the end. I should have been like them but my accident made the difference to me. The horses ran away with me on the farm. It was only two fields away from this house. It was a terrible accident; it jagged me all to pieces. The horses bolted in the field and ruined me. We were using the self‐binder at the time. It was the second year I was in this village and thirty‐eight year ago or more. I was at the top of the field whole and then at the bottom of the field broken, and all in minutes. I should not have come here. I wasn’t in the hospital much more than a month. They sent me out on stilts. Hang on, they said, you’ll soon manage. Today, if you’ve only got a finger‐ache they’ll let you stay comfortable until it’s better. I wasn’t half looked after. They had to lift me out of the hospital to get me home. ‘Have you got a nurse?’ they said. ‘I don’t know of one,’ I said. ‘Oh, dear,’ they said. ‘Then however will you get on?’ I had to be massaged but nobody I knew could do that kind of thing for me. So my leg healed but became short and walking on it has wrung me over. It hurts me a bit all the time. But still, I’m lucky to be alive!

  I got no compensation at all. My governor, being a tidy well‐off farmer, made my club money up to my wages, but of course there was the family and they were all young. I had a rough old time from then on, I can tell you! But I pulled through. I’ve got to eighty‐five in spite of it all. They tell me I don’t look it.

  I had a struggle to bring the family up. You had to nearly perish to bring a family up then. It was too much. There wasn’t a penny for nothing. They have money now, don’t they? We didn’t have money. I never had no good times. Nothing began to happen until my boys were all grown up and I was getting old. But there, I wasn’t the only one! The farmers were sharp with us. If you couldn’t do a job you were reminded that plenty more could. So you had to be careful. I had to accept everything my governor said to me. I learnt never to answer a word. I dursn’t say nothing. Today you can be a man with men, but not then. That is how it was. It will never be like that again. I lived when other men could do what they liked with me. We feared so much. We even feared the weather! Today a farmer must pay for the week, whatever the weather. But we were always being sent home. We dreaded the rain; it washed our few shillings away.

  I have this invalid‐chair now. I had a three‐wheel bike up to a few years ago but it got harder and harder to push it along. Then this chair came. The village had bought it for me – they all clubbed together like. The young men made them do it, I’m told. So perhaps it isn’t such a bad village after all. It must have cost pounds and these boys just gave it to me. These boys play a lot. Look up any time and ten‐to‐one you’ll find them playing. Football, riding around. I never did any playing in all my life. There was nothing in my childhood, only work. I never had pleasure. One day a year I went to Felixstowe along with the chapel women and children, and that was my pleasure. But I have forgotten one thing – the singing. There was such a lot of singing in the villages then, and this was my pleasure, too. Boys sang in the fields, and at night we all met at the Forge and sang. The chapels were full of singing. When the first war came, it was singing, singing all the time. So I lie; I have had pleasure. I have had singing.

  [… ]

  Samuel Gissing · aged eighty · retired farm worker

  SAM’S SONG

  It is late on Saturday night, virtually the eleventh hour, and the pub roars its contentment. One or two say they are going to make an early night of it but they don’t make a move. In fact, nobody moves. They stand or sit in controlled, cautious clusters, talking their heads off but somehow rooted to the spot. A note of warning wavers in the blare of conversation and when somebody – obviously a drunken fool – shouts, ‘Come on, Sammy,let’s be hearin’ you!’ there are nervous pleas of, ‘Quiet… quiet…’ ‘Come on, Sam!’ shouts the fool again, but Sam doesn’t look up or react in any way whatsoever. He, too, is talking hard and apparently unable to make head or tail of what is going on. His neighbour is turned to stone. Smoke crawls along the beams. A boy reaches towards the one‐armed bandit, then controls himself. The landlord takes up the attitude of a priest, hands resting wide apart on the bar, head glorified by the glitter of doilies, mirrors and miniature bottles festooned with fairy lights. Mysteriously, for there is no commotion, a space appears in the middle of the room, a ring of worn flagstones littered with matches, ash and beer spots. Still nobody looks at Sam and he talks steadily on to his friend, who now has the worried expression of a man entrusted with a key role. The uproar now becomes less casual‐seeming. Eyes search for ‘young’ Hickey, who is forty‐ish and waiting his cue. He rises.

  ‘Good night, Hickey,’ somebody says provocatively.

  ‘Good night to you,’ Hickey returns in a voice which means, ‘If you bugger things up at this stage I’ll kill you’.

  He then dances. His suede shoes slap lightly on the paving and his tie jumps out of his waistcoat. His hair hangs away from his bald patch in a big flap. He dances with his back to Sam, who at first ignores him and then begins to watch the tripping flutter of Hickey’s feet with a kind of pity. Hickey, the enticer, now breaks into a fast soft, clopping step, then breaks down, slaps his thigh and begins again. He does very well but gives up with a ‘It’s no good. I can’t keep it up, you see…’

  ‘Hickey!’ shriek the women on the settles in affected outrage.

  The landlord holds up a large white hand as though he is going to give a blessing, but it falls on the light‐switch panel. Sam stands up, buttoning his jacket, emptying his glass. He could be leaving – even when he reaches the bare floor he could be on his way home. But he stops, stretches like a wiry old cat, makes himself tall – and dances. His eyes blaze in the firelight. Huge polished boots fly. The dance is a kind of kicking stamp, coltish, vigorous. Sam’s heel‐irons actually produce sparks and this makes everybody laugh. He dances and dances, eventually clasping his hands nonchalantly behind his back with a gesture of, ‘Stop me when you’ve had enough…’ Nobody does and he has to stop himself, which happens in the midst of a crescendo of stamping. His body resumes its old slightly bent position gratefully and heaves with breath. The applause is solemn, a patter of clapping – no shouts. Young Hickey then opens his
melodeon with a great yawning chord and Sam sings his song, with difficulty at first because he hasn’t got his puff back, then with surprising strength. Like his dance, Sam’s song is violent, full of attack. Nobody joins in though ‘several’ know the words backwards.

  There was a man lived in the West,

  Limbo clashmo!

  There was a man lived in the West,

  He married the woman that he liked best.

  With a ricararo, ricararo, milk in the morn

  O’ dary mingo.

  He married this woman and brought her home,

  Limbo clashmo!

  He married this woman and brought her home,

  And set her in his best parlour room,

  With a ricararo, ricararo, milk in the morn

  O’ dary mingo.

  My man and I went to the fold,

  Limbo clashmo!

  My man and I went to the fold,

  And caught the finest wether that we could hold,

  With a ricararo, ricararo, milk in the morn

  O’dary mingo.

  We fleeced this wether and brought him home,

  Limbo clashmo!

  We fleeced this wether and brought him home,

  Says I, Wife, now you’ve begun your doom,

  With a ricararo, ricararo, milk in the morn

  O’dary mingo.

  I laid this skin on my wife’s back,

  Limbo clashmo!

  I laid this skin on my wife’s back,

  And on to it I then did swack,

  With a ricararo, ricararo, milk in the morn

  O’dary mingo.

  I painted her with ashen oil

  Limbo clashmo!

  I painted her with ashen oil,

  Till she could both bake, brew, wash and boil,

  With a ricararo, ricararo, milk in the morn

  O’dary mingo… mingo.

  John Grout · aged eighty‐eight · farmer

  I have farmed in Akenfield since 1926. I had 135 acres and didn’t use a tractor until 1952, and then I never got on with the thing. I have been a man without machinery, as you might say. I was born near Campsey Ash and worked for my father as a child. I did the cows. He was a man who didn’t like cows, so I did them. Then I went to school. My father had five labourers who got 9s. a week but he always gave them a shilling extra when they got wed.

  Nobody really saw money then, though that didn’t mean that they didn’t want to see it. I wanted to see it so much that I applied for a job on the railway. A ‘situation’, they called it, and they weren’t so far wrong – it was a situation all right. Whatever could I have been thinking about! A relation of mine spoke for me and soon I was working at Broad Street Station near Liverpool Street. There were lots of Suffolk men working there and hardly any mortal one of them ever got home again. They all wanted to get home, they were that sad in London. And their big wages were little there. Some ran away to Canada and were never heard of again. They couldn’t write, you see; that is how they got lost. There was a place in Broad Street Station where you can stare through the arches and see the stars, and they were the only things I can remember seeing in London. That is the truth.

  I stayed ten months and then I got home. I wouldn’t go back to my father’s farm, I got a job with Lord Rendle‐sham. He was a rare big gentleman in the neighbourhood and was famous for his horses. Why, he kept three men who did nothing else but see after the stallions. There were scores of horses – mostly shires and punches. The greatest of these was a punch stallion called Big Boy who had won so many brass medals he couldn’t carry them all on his harness. Men came from all over to see these horses but they hardly ever saw Big Boy. He was hid up and not to be looked at.

  The head horseman was called the ‘lord’ – and that’s what he was, lord of all the horses. That was me one day, I was the lord of the horses. The place ran like clockwork. All the harnessing was done in strict order, first this, then that. The ploughing teams left and returned to the stable yards according to the rank of the ploughman. If you happened to get back before someone senior to you, you just had to wait in the lane until he had arrived. Then you could go, but not before.

  The horses were friends and loved like men. Some men would do more for a horse than they would for a wife. The ploughmen talked softly to their teams all day long and you could see the horses listening. Although the teams ploughed twenty yards apart, the men didn’t talk much to each other, except sometimes they sang. Each man ploughed in his own fashion and with his own mark. It looked all the same if you didn’t know about ploughing, but a farmer could walk on a field ploughed by ten different teams and tell which bit was ploughed by which. Sometimes he would pay a penny an acre extra for perfect ploughing. Or he would make a deal with the ploughman – ‘free rent for good work’. That could mean £5 a year. The men worked perfectly to get this, but they also worked perfectly because it was their work. It belonged to them. It was theirs.

  The plough‐teams left for the field at seven sharp in the morning and finished at three in the afternoon. They reckoned a ploughman would walk eleven miles a day on average. It wasn’t hard walking in the dirt, not like the rough roads. The horsemen were the big men on the farm. They kept in with each other and had secrets. They were a whispering lot. If someone who wasn’t a ploughman came upon them and they happened to be talking, they’d soon change the conversation! And if you disturbed them in a room where the horse medicine was, it was covered up double quick. They made the horses obey with a sniff from a rag which they kept in their pockets. Caraway seeds had something to do with it, I believe, although others say different.

  A lot of farmers hid their horses during the Great War, when the officers came round. The officers always gave good money for a horse but sometimes the horses were like brothers and the men couldn’t let them go, so they hid them. I wasn’t called up. Nothing happened to me and I didn’t remind them. We didn’t really miss the men who didn’t come back. The village stayed the same. If there were changes, I never felt them, so I can’t remark on them. There was still no money about. People seemed to live without it. They also lived without the Church. I’m sorry about this but it is true. I hardly ever went when I was young. The holy time was the harvest. Just before it began, the farmer would call his men together and say, ‘Tell me your harvest bargain’. So the men chose a harvest lord who told the farmer how much they wanted to get the harvest in, and then master and lord shook hands on the bargain.

  We reaped by hand. You could count thirty mowers in the same field, each followed by his partner, who did the sheaving. The mowers used their own scythes and were very particular about them. They cost 7s. 6d. in Wickham Market, but it wasn’t the buying of them, it was the keeping them sharp. You would get a man who could never learn to sharpen, no matter how he tried. A mate might help him, but then he might not. Some men mowed so quick they just fled through the corn all the day long. Each mower took eleven rows of corn on his blade, no more and no less. We were allowed seventeen pints of beer a day each and none of this beer might leave the field once it had been brought. What was left each day had to be kept and drunk before eight on a Saturday night. It was all home‐brewed beer and was made like this:

  You boiled five or six pails of water in a copper. Then you took one pail of the boiling water and one pail of cold water and added them together in a tub big enough to hold eighteen gallons. You then added a bushel of malt to the water in the tub. You then added boiling water from the copper until there was eighteen gallons in all in the tub. Cover up and keep warm and leave standing for at least seven hours, although the longer the better. When it has stood, fill the copper three parts full from the tub, boil for an hour and add half a pound of hops. Then empty into a second tub. Repeat with the rest. All the beer should now be in one tub and covered with a sack and allowed to cool. But before this, take a little of the warm beer in a basin add two ounces of yeast and let it stand for the night. Add this to the main tub in the morning, then cask the beer.
You can drink it after a week. And it won’t be like anything you can taste at the Crown, either.

  The lord sat atop of the last load to leave the field and then the women and children came to glean the stubble. Master would then kill a couple of sheep for the Horkey supper and afterwards we all went shouting home. Shouting in the empty old fields – I don’t know why. But that’s what we did. We’d shout so loud that the boys in the next village would shout back.

  Stacking was the next job, all very handsome they had to be – handsome as a building. Then thrashing. It was always reckoned you had to thrash a stack in a day. There wasn’t any rest after the harvest. The year had begun again, you see.

  Robert Palgrave · aged fifty‐five · bellringer, tower captain

  During the war, in 1916, the parson here had two daughters who did a bit of ringing. I once saw them what they call ‘raise the bell’, that is bring it full circle. So one day I went into the church and climbed the belfry, wound a sack round the clapper, went downstairs – and pulled! To my amazement I got the bell up, so then I started practising. That is how I first came to ring. I then brought other boys to the tower and taught them how to do it, and then one day we all walked to Burgh and rang the six bells there. After this we hurried off to Hasketon and rang the bells there – we couldn’t stop. A ringer is first attracted by the sound of the bells, then he comes to see how it is done and something quite different gets a hold of him. Some people say it is the science of the thing.