Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Page 6

  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.

  1920 looked like being a good year. The awards made by the Central Wages Board were enforced in the spring and we were getting 38s. 6d. a week on the farms. We worked fifty-four hours a week and had a half-holiday, and if we worked overtime it was 1s. 1d. an hour. What a change from 1914, when it was 13s. a week and just enough grub and sleep to keep you on the move! The farmers were able to pay the new wages because of the prices guaranteed by the Corn Act of 1917, so we didn’t feel that we were diddling them. Only two or three hundred men belonged to the Union before the war, now thousands and thousands joined. This was the summer one of our members, Mr. Edwards, won South Norfolk for Labour. He was the second farm-worker to get into Parliament. We were so pleased with the way things were going that we felt we must consolidate. We had never had anything before, you see. We felt glad but unsafe. So we demanded 50s. a week and said that we would strike if we didn’t get it. Then things began to go wrong. It had nothing to do with the strike plans.

  The slump set in during the great hot summer of 1921. I remember it well. We had no rain from March right through to October. The corn didn’t grow no more than a foot high and most of it didn’t even come to the ear. We harvested what we could and the last loads were leaving the field when we heard, “the wages are coming down this week.” It was true. The farmers told the men that they would be given 42s. 6d. Then it was 38s. 6d. A fortnight later on the farm where I worked it was “You’ll have to be on short-time—the boss can only afford to give you 27s. 6d. a week.” And that is what we lived on all that bad winter.

  It was the Government’s fault. They ended the Corn Act less than a year after it had been made law. They said it was best if the farmers made their own bargains, which meant that they wouldn’t pay the subsidies. The price of wheat was quartered in a year. Cattle were sold for next to nothing because the farmers couldn’t afford to keep them. The farmers became broke and frightened, so they took it out on us men. We reminded them that we had fought in the war, and they reminded us that they had too! So it was hate all round. Then we had to close down our Union Branch because nobody could afford to pay the 4d. a week membership fee. I remember the week this happened. I drew 27s. 6d. from the farmer and after I had given my wife 24s. and paid my Union 4d. and my rent 3s. 1d., I had a penny left! So I threw it across the field. I’d worked hard, I’d been through the war and I’d married. A penny was what a child had. I wasn’t having that. I would sooner have nothing.

  The farmers were utterly against the Union and utterly against the Wages Board. Now, in our village, we had no Union, no Board—nobody to look after us. Sixteen men fell out of work but there was no dole for farm labourers. An unemployed married farm-worker got parish relief but a single man got nothing. So the young men began to walk to the other villages, searching for odd jobs. Soon East Anglia was full of these men and, by 1930 or so, you’d get up to fifty of them passing the cottage every night as they tramped from workhouse to workhouse. The farmers knew about our Union activities from their grooms and gardeners, who had always reckoned themselves above the men who worked in the fields. They would return from the pub and tell their masters all they had heard. There would be fights sometimes between the field workers and the farmers’ creepers. 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 churchwarden 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, to 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!

  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.