Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Read online

  I walked two miles to school. There were so many children you could hardly squeeze in the room. All the same, it was very cold in the winter. Most of the boys had suits and boots on with nothing underneath. Every now and then we used to have to stand on the outside of our desks and mark-time to get our circulation back. We did left-right, left-right for about five minutes—good God, what a row we made! Later on, I heard this sound again in Gallipoli. It seemed homely and familiar. We must have been bashing some landing-stage. The school was useless. The farmers came and took boys away from it when they felt like it, the parson raided it for servants. The teacher was a respectable woman who did her best. Sometimes she would bring the Daily Graphic down and show us the news. I looked forward to leaving school so that I could get educated. I knew that education was in books, not in school: there were no books there. I was a child when I left but I already knew that our “learning” was rubbish, that our food was rubbish and that I should end as rubbish if I didn’t look out.

  When I was six we moved to another house. It was a tied-cottage with a thatched roof and handsome beams. My father said, “We shall be better off, boys, we shall have a nice spring of water just across the road, and that will be a great relief. Also we shall have a nice big garden with two apple trees, a Doctor Harvey and a Blenheim Orange.” We moved to this house in 1904. As soon as we got there, mother went stone-picking in the fields. She didn’t have to do this because we were living in a tied-cottage but because we had to buy some new clothes. We helped her when we got back from school at five o’clock. She had to pick up twenty-four bushels of stones a day to get 2s. Each parish had to mend its own lanes then and the stones were used for this. A tumbril was put in the field and a line was chalked round it. When you had filled it up to the line you got the 2s. It would take the whole day. We did it every minute we weren’t at school and all through the holidays. It was all I can remember.

  But during the harvest holiday we had a change—gleaning. The women would meet and say, “Is Scarlets ready for gleaning yet? Is Great Mosses?”—these were the names of the fields. They meant, not has the field been cut but have they cleared the “policeman.” The policeman was the name given to the last trave or stook which the farmers would leave standing in the middle of the field so they could have time to rake-up all the loose corn they could before the gleaners arrived. There was one farmer who made a habit of keeping the gleaners waiting and one night a young man stole the “policeman.” The next morning the gleaners hurried in and gleaned masses—the field hadn’t been raked, you see. The whole village was laughing—except the farmer. He raked-up quick the next year, I can tell you!

  I gleaned all my boyhood. I ran away from it once but came to grief, and since the results have been with me all my life, I will tell you about it. When I was six I got fed up with being in the gleaning-field with all the women, so I ran off to help the boy who worked the cattle-cake machine. In no time my hand was caught and my fingers were squashed. The farmer was just coming up by the granary on his horse when he heard me screaming. “What have you been up to, you young scamp?” he shouted. “My fingers—they’re in the cake-breaker!” And he said—I shall never forget it—“Get you off home then!” But when he saw my hand he changed his tune and said, “Get up to the house.” The farmer’s wife tied some rag round my hand and took me home and my mother wheeled me miles to the doctor’s in a pram. My sister was home from service, so she came with us and held me while the doctor scraped the grease out of my wounds with a knife, stitched up one finger, cut another, pared it like a stick and tied what was left to the bone, and then moved on to the next finger. I lifted the roof, I can tell you. There was no anaesthetic, nothing. My sister began to faint and the doctor got on to her something terrific. “Damn silly girl—clear off outside if you can’t stand it! Fetch my groom in.” So the groom came and held me until it was finished. All the time the doctor worked he shouted. “What did you do it for? Why? Damn little nuisance! Stupid little fool!”

  Nobody used pity then, and especially not to children, and particularly not to boys. The farmer told my father and he said, “I’ll give him something to think about when I get home!” It was harvest so it was late when he returned. “Where’s that boy Leonard?” he said “I’m going to give him a good hiding.” “He’s gone to bed, he’s had enough,” said mother. My father didn’t realize how bad it was, you see. The tops of three of my fingers had been cut off. So he didn’t touch me.

  There were a lot of hidings then. My father was a good man and didn’t like giving them to us, but some people did. Father never smoked or drank, and he looked after his children. He had a wonderful character in the parish. He would go to work with three-quarters of a loaf of bread and a little bit of cheese, and maybe a couple of onions, but when we ran to meet him after his day’s work, he would give us the cheese. He had saved it for us. “I can do without that,” he would say. We were thrashed a lot at school. Fathers would be ordered to the school to hold their sons while the mistress thrashed them. Most of the teachers were big thrashers. But we were tough, very tough. Everybody said, don’t-don’t to boys then and after awhile we didn’t listen. We were wondering how we could get away.

  I left school when I was thirteen, on April 20th when the corn was low. I helped my mother pulling up docks in the Big Field for a shilling an acre, which my mother took. She could see that I was too big to have money taken from me like this, so when the farmer came round she said, “Can’t you give my boy a proper job?” She meant a regular job with a wage. But the farmer just laughed and rode away. So the next week I tried my luck at another farm. Mr. Wakeling, this farmer, was very tall and he had three sons of about eighteen to twenty-one who were all over six feet. They all stood looking down at me and smiling. “So you are thirteen and you have left school, but what can you do?” “I can do anything.” “Well, there’s a mangold field over there—you do that.”

  “What are you going to get?” asked my mother when I told her. “I never asked and he never said,” I replied. It was the beginning of being grown-up.

  I had a week in this field, singling mangolds, and I did well because I had often done the job before after school. The farmer came and looked and said, “You’ve done very well, my little man. How much have I got to give you?” “My mother said half-a-crown but perhaps you would sooner give me a rise.” But the farmer thought half-a-crown was good, which was what I got for sixty hours’ work. When the harvest came along, the boy who was doing the milking, and who was seventeen and strong, was told to load corn and I had to take over the cows. The farmer’s riding ponies and then his sons’ ponies were added. Then the farmer said, “You’ll have to work Sundays now, but I shall be giving you another sixpence.” So I got 3s. a week. Mother said, “How lucky you are!”

  Shortly after this my father came to grief with his farmer and we had to leave the tied-cottage. We moved down by the river and when we were settled father took my brother and myself to his new employer and, twizzling me round so that I could be seen, said, “Here’s a good strong boy. I want 4s. 6d. a week for him.” “We’ll see about that at the end of the week,” said the farmer. Then my father made my brother stand forward—he was fifteen—and said, “Look what a fine lad. I want 8s. a week for him.” The farmer thought for a minute, looked us up and down and said, “All right.”

  The second week that I was at this new farm I had to drive a herd of cattle to Ipswich. I was thirteen and had lived only ten miles away all my life, but I had never been to this big town before. The farmer went ahead in his trap and waited for me at Ipswich market. He sold the cows and bought some more, and told me to drive them back to the farm. Most of my work was like this, walking cattle along the roads backwards and forwards to the market—about twenty-five miles a day. The farmer was a dealer. I stayed with him a year and four months and was paid 4s. 6d. a week. And then I got into a hell of a row. I’d driven a flock of sheep from Ipswich and the next morning they found that one had died. The far
mer was in a terrible stew. He ran down the field and met my mother on her way to chapel and told her all about it. I had driven the sheep too hard, he said. “And you drive boys too hard!” said my mother—she had no fear at all. Well, the truth of the matter is that she said a lot of things she’d only thought until then, and so I left the farm. It must seem that there was war between farmers and their men in those days. I think there was, particularly in Suffolk. These employers were famous for their meanness. They took all they could from the men and boys who worked their land. They bought their life’s strength for as little as they could. They wore us out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour. Fourteen young men left the village in 1909–11 to join the army. There wasn’t a recruiting drive, they just escaped. And some people just changed their sky, as they say, and I was one of them.

  Every week in the Suffolk Chronicle and Mercury there was an advertisement which said, “Lads for Yorkshire. Milk or Ploughing. Good Homes. Fares Paid. Apply: Woods of Stowmarket.” All the Yorkshire farm-workers, you see, had left the land to work in the factories and mills. So they hit on this idea of getting workers up from Suffolk, where things were desperate, to cultivate the Yorkshire farms. So I thought, right, I’ll go! I was getting 9s. a week for a seventy-five-hour week in a cowshed. I had four hours off a week, from 10–2 on a Sunday. So I went to Yorkshire. I met Mr. Woods on Bury St. Edmunds station and he gave me my ticket. I went to a farm in the West Riding. It was the first time I had been away from home. I lived in a little old room on the farm with two other boys and was told that I would get £12 at the end of the year, which was 5s. a week, but also my food and keep. The food was good; we ate it with the servant in the kitchen. We worked like little donkeys until we were a bit unsteady on our feet, then it was bed. Then work. I had to pay a pound a year to an old woman to do my washing, pay a pound to get home again and a pound for boots and corduroys, but I came to Suffolk with eight golden sovereigns in my hand and felt a millionaire.

  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! A
llah!,” 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.