Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Read online

  POPULATION AND HOUSES

  POPULATION, 1961 = 298. (146 males, 152 females.) The figures show a dramatic drop from the 1931 census, when 416 people lived in the village.

  HOUSES

  Ten farmhouses dating from the late fifteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, all built of stud and plaster, and with tiled roofs. The largest of these farmhouses is The Hall but each has been constructed on the same principle of timber uprights spaced out along a great wall-plate beam, with the sections infilled with either split oak lathes over which clay bound with flax stems, straw and tow has been smoothed. A lime plaster completed the process. The wall-plate usually rests on a dwarf masonry wall which is pitched on the outside to prevent rising damp. The roofs are steep and the ground floors paved with bricks. A great and often ornate brick chimney complex rises through the centre of these substantial farms. Most have been modernized, and five are not now connected with farming.

  Two sixteenth-century cottages made of wattle and daub. The wattles were the hazel-branch infillings between the oak posts. One of these cottages is the only thatched dwelling left in the village.

  Six seventeenth-century cottages. Stud and plaster. On some of these the plaster has been combed or lined with a stick into patterns called “bird’s foot,” “the dot” and “the rope”—the basic motifs of Suffolk “stick-work.”

  Twenty-four eighteenth-century cottages. Stud and plaster, clapboard and brick. Nearly all of these, and indeed some forty-two buildings in the village all told, are pantiled. Sometimes called “Roman” tiles in the district, these large orange tiles glow in the hard Suffolk light. They originated in Holland and first entered East Anglian ports as ballast during the seventeenth century. They were manufactured here a century later and are a dominating feature of the local architecture.

  Twenty-three nineteenth-century cottages and houses, nearly all of local brick. These include “double-dwellers” put up at an average cost of £70 each during the worst days of Victorian farm labour exploitation. Some remain much as they were, plus television, others have been successfully extended to form good agricultural cottages.

  1900–20. Only three houses were built in the village during this period. 1920–40—nineteen houses built, including sixteen council houses and bungalows. The latter stand in an attractive position in the main street but reveal their authority’s brutal indifference to taste, feeling and imagination. Although built in the late 1930s, bathrooms and water closets are only now being installed (1968).

  Post-war. Twelve houses have been built, mainly since 1950. They include four excellent estate cottages for the orchard workers and a few bungalows for professional people. One of these, put up by a young architect a year ago, is one of the most beautiful buildings in the village. All the houses are surrounded by, usually well-kept, gardens.

  WORK IN THE VILLAGE

  FARMERS

  Roger Cable (fruit and arable)

  Eric Milburne (fruit and arable)

  Duncan Campbell (sheep, dairy and arable)

  Bernard Nunn (livestock and arable)

  Roger Adlard (weaner pigs and chickens)

  Colonel West (weaner pigs and arable)

  Jamie Mclver (mainly arable)

  SMALL-HOLDERS

  Adrian Ranson (fruit, catch crops)

  L. and J. Oldfield (market gardeners)

  Barney Tucker (fruit and catch crops)

  Winston Plummer (dairyman)

  Geoffrey Whitehead (market gardener)

  Oliver Quantrill (battery hens and pigs)

  Sammy Whitelaw (fruit)

  Terry Lloyd (pigs)

  FARM MANAGER

  Robert Palgrave

  FARM FOREMEN

  Ken Baker

  Dana Appleby

  Charles Holden

  Alan Mitton

  FARM MECHANIC

  Laurence Honeywood

  PIGMAN

  Abel Paternoster

  ROAD-WORKERS

  Donald Cooper

  Andrew Fletcher (foreman)

  GRAVEDIGGER

  William Russ

  ODD-JOBBERS

  Persis Ede (fruit-farm work, dealer)

  Kitchener Mead (clock-winder, sweep and barber)

  PUBLICAN

  Barnaby Palmer

  VAN-DRIVERS

  Stella Fletcher (travelling shop)

  Hector Watson (travelling shop)

  Dawn Parsons (travelling shop)

  “Hickey” Briggs (travelling shop)

  David Parsons (travelling shop)

  SHOP-KEEPERS

  Alec Rix (general store and post office)

  Chris Kilderbee (general store)

  Janet Smith (general store and petrol pump)

  VETERINARY SURGEON

  Tim Swift

  INSURANCE AGENTS

  Ted Hughes

  John Stennett

  GARDENER

  Christopher Falconer

  SHEPHERD

  Anthony Summer

  TRACTOR-DRIVERS

  Tom Dix

  Derek Warren

  GENERAL FARM-WORKERS

  Alan Ling

  Kurt Fischer (ex-prisoner of war)

  “Angle” Double

  Mervyn Watson

  Stanley Ling

  Hugh Paternoster

  Douglas Cooper

  George Keeble

  Eddie Toogood

  WOMEN WHO DO OCCASIONAL WORK ON THE FARMS

  May Ling (fruit-picking)

  Olive Watson (fruit-picking)

  Greta Paternoster (fruit-picking)

  Mary Paternoster (fruit-picking)

  Sheila Keeble (fruit-picking)

  Winifred Reeve (fruit-picking)

  Phyllis Briggs (fruit-picking)

  Jeanette Appleby (fruit-picking)

  Ivy Kempe (fruit-picking)

  Molly Gaunt (fruit-picking)

  Mary Mitton (fruit-picking)

  Sue Crawford (fruit-picking)

  Flora Appleby (fruit-picking)

  Margaret Ransom (fruit-picking)

  Millie Double (general farm work)

  Peggy Nunn (general farm work)

  Deirdre Cant (general farm work)

  CREATIVE ARTISTS

  J— W— (poet)

  Stephen Welham (painter)

  VICAR

  The Rev. Gethyn Owen, M.A.

  BAPTIST PASTOR

  Mr. Dermott Thompson

  SCHOOL-TEACHERS

  Mrs. Sullivan (headmistress)

  Daphne Ellington (assistant mistress)

  SCHOOL CARETAKER

  Theresa Judd

  CRAFTSMEN

  Gregory Gladwell (blacksmith)

  Bruce Buckley (forge apprentice)

  Francis Lambert (forge worker)

  Ernie Bowers (thatcher)

  Horry Rose (saddler)

  Jubal Merton (wheelwright and carpenter)

  CIVIL DEFENCE WORKER

  Major John Paul, M.C.

  HOUSEKEEPERS: four

  HOUSEWIVES (i.e. married women): thirty-three

  WIDOWS: ten

  PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THE VILLAGE BUT WORK OUTSIDE IT

  James Gaunt (building trade)

  Errol Creed (building trade)

  Dennis Creed (building trade)

  Barry May (building trade)

  Rayner Creighton (schoolmaster)

  Hugh Hamblin (schoolmaster)

  Sheila Brooke (schoolmistress)

  Robert Munro (primary school-teacher)

  Alice Steed (nurse at mental hospital)

  Jack Barton (farm manager)

  Derek Riley (nurseryman)

  Dick Goodman (seedsman’s lorry-driver)

  Lesly Judd (clerk on U.S.A.A.F. base)

  James Law (flour-mill worker)

  Adam Scott (coal merchant’s driver)

  William Ridge-Powell (city businessman)

  Moreton Gage (county council architect)

  Bob Kenyon (grocer’s driver)

 
Ray Kenyon (office worker, Ipswich)

  Keith Robinson (fruit-canner)

  Geoffrey Riddleston (bank cashier)

  RETIRED PEOPLE

  John Grout (farmer)

  Emily Leggett (domestic servant)

  Leonard Thompson (farm-worker)

  Luke Last (farm-worker)

  Fred Mitchell (farm-worker)

  Bill Scott (tailor)

  Sidney Summers (schoolmaster)

  Frederick Whittaker (hotelier, Great Yarmouth)

  Samuel Gissing (farm-worker)

  Ted Mallett (fishmonger, Ipswich)

  Marjory Jope (district nurse)

  Peter Morley (builder and decorator)

  Albert Wolfson (civil servant)

  The above analysis doesn’t include every name but attempts to show the main work pattern of the village people. Altogether, some eighty-five men and women are full-time earners, whether self-employed or wage or salaried employees.

  Some eighty-two men and women are directly or indirectly connected with agriculture and horticulture. This number includes retired farming people, farmers’ wives and part-time workers. Also people who work in flour mills, drive corn lorries or who work in farm-machinery works.

  Only one man commutes to London each day (ninety-two miles), but there has been a steady increase in Ipswich (ten miles) commuting over the last seven years.

  DOMESDAY FOR 1936 AND 1966

  The Second Agricultural Revolution

  THE FOLLOWING figures, taken from the official agricultural returns for Akenfield, reveal the immensely increased yield from the village’s 1,355 acres during the last thirty years.

  ACRES 1936 1966

  wheat 185 238

  barley 147 572½

  oats 19 23

  potatoes ¾ 36½

  beans and peas for stock-feeding 107 27

  turnips, swedes and fodder beet for stock 3 —

  kale for stock-feeding — 5¼

  sugar-beet 76 116¾

  vetches, taws and lucerne 14 —

  clover, sainfoin for mowing, grazing 136 26

  permanent grassland for mowing, grazing 486 131

  rough grazing 31 1½

  vegetables for human consumption (not potatoes) 7 127½

  ORCHARDS AND OTHER FRUIT

  Acres 1936 1966

  commercial orchards 76 120¾

  other orchards 9 7¼

  small fruit 14 53¾

  BARE FALLOW

  Acres 1936 1966

  fallow 61 17½

  STOCK

  1936 1966

  cattle 266 111

  sheep 115 750

  pigs 674 1278

  poultry 3293 24105

  1. THE SURVIVORS

  You went to the verge, you say, and come back safely?

  Some have not been so fortunate—some have fallen.

  CONRAD AIKEN, Prelude XIV

  Leonard Thompson · aged seventy-one · farm-worker

  Len and his wife live in a solitary house which stands not more than a yard off the Roman road. The foundations of the house must rest in the ditch made by the road-builders when they dug out earth for the camber. The mixture of fragility and tenacity which marks the cottage is somehow indicative of Len himself. Although there is nothing particularly frail about him in the physical sense—he is a little brown bull of a man with hard blue eyes and limbs so stretched by toil that they seem incapable of relaxing into retirement—he has stood firmly in the apocalyptic path of events which have wrenched the village from its serfdom. He is astute, unsentimental and realistic. He is neither proud nor regretful to have endured the bad times. He is political and holds large, simple convictions which make a lot of today’s social hopefulness sound oddly irrelevant. In fact, his evident political nature makes him untypically East Anglian, for politics on the corn plain are notoriously vague, furtive and unreal.

  Len is also an extraordinarily interesting survivor of Britain’s village lost generation, that mysterious army of horsemen, ploughmen and field workers who fled the wretchedness of the farms in 1914. The army had provided—along with the railways—an escape route for many years before this, but it was the First World War which swept Len and his contemporaries off the hated land to conditions which forced the thinking countryman to decide to halt a system of degradation when they returned. The climate of the 1920s and 1930s suited Len perfectly for what he had to do. The war had given those who survived it confidence. Len showed his by stolidly denying the village farmers their virtual ownership of the labourers and their families. He organized the union branch. The successes and defeats of the struggle, which was basically a nineteenth-century one and little different from that of Joseph Arch and his colleagues, suited him excellently. He wanted “improvement,” not metamorphosis. But for a man of Len’s age, the change which has swept through the village is metamorphosis, neither more nor less, and so one sees him, a fine old man, doing his utmost to comprehend the foreign place in which he happened to have been born. Grandchildren arrive during the university holidays. Nephews and nieces fly in from Canada, while the ash at the end of the road, which marked the last point at which soldier and emigrant sons could turn and wave before walking to Ipswich to catch the train to Gallipoli or Quebec, still blocks the view.

  * * *

  There were ten of us in the family and as my father was a farm labourer earning 13s. a week you can just imagine how we lived. I will tell you the first thing which I can remember. It was when I was three—about 1899. We were all sitting round the fire waiting for my soldier brother to come home—he was the eldest boy in the family. He arrived about six in the evening and had managed to ride all the way from Ipswich station in a milk-cart. This young man came in, and it was the first time I had seen him. He wore a red coat and looked very lively. Mother got up and kissed him but Father just sat and said, “How are you?” Then we had tea, all of us staring at my brother. It was dark, it was the winter-time. A few days later he walked away and my mother stood right out in the middle of the road, watching. He was going to fight in South Africa. He walked smartly down the lane until his red coat was no bigger than a poppy. Then the tree hid him. We never saw him again. He went all through the war but caught enteric fever afterwards and died. He was twenty-one.

  Very soon after this it was very hard living indeed for the family. There were seven children at home and father’s wages had been reduced to 10s. a week. Our cottage was nearly empty—except for people. There was a scrubbed brick floor and just one rug made of scraps of old clothes pegged into a sack. The cottage had a living-room, a larder and two bedrooms. Six of us boys and girls slept in one bedroom and our parents and the baby slept in the other. There was no newspaper and nothing to read except the Bible. All the village houses were like this.

  Our food was apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, and we drank our tea without milk or sugar. Skim milk could be bought from the farm but it was thought a luxury. Nobody could get enough to eat no matter how they tried. Two of my brothers were out to work. One was eight years old and he got 3s. a week, the other got about 7s. Our biggest trouble was water. There was no water near, it all had to be fetched from the foot of a hill nearly a mile away. “Drink all you can at school,” we were told—there was a tap at school. You would see the boys and girls filling themselves up like camels before they left school so that they would have enough water to last the day. I always remember the bitter metal taste of the tap in my mouth; it was cold—beautiful! I remember once coming home from school and feeling almost mad for water. My mother was washing the linen on the doorstep and when her back was turned I swigged two cupfuls from the tub. Up it came at once—it was all soapsuds! Mother did no more than box my ears. That is how they thought about you at that time.

  Our parents and all the cottage people were very religious and very patriotic. The patriotic songs and the church hymns seemed equally holy. They took our breath away. The boys marched through the village singing,

  Lords Roberts and Kitch
ener, Generals Buller and White,

  All dressed in khaki, going out to fight . . .

  and their faces would look sincere and important. It was all “my country”—country, country, country. You heard nothing else. There was no music in the village then except at the chapel or the church and our family liked it so much that we hurried from one to the other to hear all we could. People like us, who went where we fancied on a Sunday, were called “Devil-dodgers.” We all went to one service after another and ate packets of bread-and-jam in between. People believed in religion then, which I think was a good thing because if they hadn’t got religion there would have been a revolution. Nobody would have stuck it. Religion disciplined us and gave us the strength to put up with things. The parson was very respected. He could do what he liked with us when he felt like it. One day he came to our house and told my eldest sister, who was eleven, to leave school. “I think you needn’t finish,” he said. “You can go and be maid to old Mrs. Barney Wickes, now she has lost her husband.” Mrs. Barney Wickes was blind and my sister was paid a penny a day out of Parish Relief to look after her.

  People were strict. Parents were strict. All the village children thought of was how to get away, how to “get on.” But we had our games and treats. We had a game called “Hudney.” A stone was placed on a brick and had to be knocked off by another stone when it was aimed at it. When you ran to retrieve the stone a boy would try and hit you with a ball and if he did you were out of the game. We played this for hours on end. We had no toys, no books and we didn’t play cricket or football. But all the boys and young men swam naked in the river in the summertime. It was our biggest happiness. Boys were washed until they were about two, then their bodies didn’t see water again until they learned to swim. We didn’t look dirty. We were healthy, strong children, but small. One of our great desires was to have cake. Nearly all our food was boiled on account of there being no oven in most of the cottages. A “treat” was any party where you could eat cake.