Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Read online

  I had all these sons and no money. I had to make a decision—food or clothes? Never mind the clothes, I thought. I sent my sons to the chapel raggedy. “We can see your boys a-filling out!” the mawthers used to laugh. “If you’re looking that close, you can also see that they are spotless,” I said. They were fed, they were clean; I couldn’t dress them too. Sometimes, when I look back on it all, it makes me feel bad. But I shall have to forget, shan’t I? Wise people are men who have learnt how to forget. There were times when I didn’t know what to do. Before I had my accident I just got away. I up-sticks and went. But now I was stuck in one place like a tree, and perhaps the shopkeeper was after me. “Had I forgotten this little account . . .?” Oh, dear, oh dear! “I’ll give you a little on account,” I’d say, and hap as not the little would be my all. Not Tommy Ramsey at Framlingham, though. He’d let me have any mortal thing, money or no money. He knew he’d get it in time. Tommy never worried a man. There were shop-keepers round here who were like little worrying terriers.

  We all had heaps of children in the village when I was young. Boys and girls were piled up in one bedroom. It wouldn’t be allowed nowadays, would it? I don’t know what they got up to—nothing very dreadful, I fancy. My family was decent enough. We had a nice little house with three bedrooms, so we all laid proper, two by two.

  My wife died three years ago. She was a good sort. I could read to her from the paper of an evening. But as for writing, I can just about sign my name for my money. She did all the writing. But when the money went over the mark, it was me they’d come after! It would sometimes make me feel very queer. But we ate well. My wife made her own bread and there was something cooked every day, no matter how broke we were. She was a great hand at long puddings with plenty of suet and lemon peel in them, which she made in a boiler. Today, they make a dinner out of nothing. You can hear the paper packs being torn open and in five minutes it’s dinner. I don’t call that dinner.

  One of my sons went into the army and stayed in it for twenty-eight years. He’s got a tidy old head on him. He came out of the army with a lump sum and bought a little business, but he got too big and he fell. Now he has to work for a farmer. It doesn’t matter how well off you become, you can overdo it. Then you will fall. But I fancy he isn’t the only one who has done something wrong.

  My youngest son looks after me now. He is nigh on forty but he doesn’t think about getting married. He’s not the marrying sort, I think. His best friend is an older man—well, he takes the pension, so you know how old he is! Been taking the pension a twelve-month. My son works on the next farm. He has looked after me well since his mother died. He went to Burma during the war. Just before he went, he said to his mother, “Mother, if I ever get out of this alive, I’ll never leave you again.” He kept his word. He was her baby and they stayed very close. He did all her housework when she got old, ironing and all. The mawthers say, “A woman couldn’t do it better.” But he’s too tidy, too straight. I get in the wrong if I leave ash in the fender. And I mustn’t sit in the dark. I mustn’t do this, I mustn’t do that. Take my advice, don’t get old.

  My son has a car but he doesn’t take me for a drive. I’ve been out with him once, that’s all. He took me to the Horse Show at Framlingham—me and my neighbour. And that is the only ride I ever had in his car. I never ask him for another one, although I’d love to go. He must offer. I daresay if I said, “I would like to go for a ride,” he’d take me. But I won’t ask. You would think that he would take me for a ride without being asked, wouldn’t you? I don’t worry too much about it. I have my chair. There is some comfort in the world now. More comfort and less talk. My son doesn’t talk to me. He’ll wash, change, cook the tea and be out by seven. I don’t know where he goes. He doesn’t tell me. I’m pleased to think that I’ve lived to see such nice times.

  Samuel Gissing · aged eighty · retired farm-worker

  I just went when they called me; I didn’t mind. A lot of us went from the village but we soon got split up. I never saw most of them again. All the time I was in France I only saw three boys I knew. It was a funny thing, but when I came home on leave the women would say, “Did you meet my George out there? My John? He’s in the Artillery, you know. You must have seen him.” They thought we were all fighting in one big old meadow, I suppose.

  The war changed me—it changed us all. You could call it experience. It broadened your mind and one thing and another. Everybody ought to have this military training. It would do them good and make them obedient. Some of the young men now, they need obedience. They don’t know what it is. Our lives were all obedience.

  I was home on leave when the Armistice was signed. I came to the village on the Friday and the Armistice was signed on the Monday. I went back to France but now it was like a holiday. I was now in a Scottish regiment—the glorious 51st. The officer tried to persuade me to stay in the army but I said, no, sir! I wanted to get home. We all did. We were fed up, you know. And we had seen terrible things.

  It was hard when we got demobbed. And wicked later. You couldn’t get any kind of work.

  It is really wonderful how the time has gone. It has absolutely faded away. It all goes so fast. It doesn’t seem many minutes from the time we sign the pension book to the time we sign again. But a school morning was a whole lifetime. Life fades while it is still yours. I still do all this garden myself but sometimes I stop and think, “It was me who had a half-holiday from school for the relief of Ladysmith!”

  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 ac
tually 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

  Mr. Grout has been recently widowed after sixty-seven years of marriage. He was married at eighteen—“I was a pretty lad”—but had begun work on his father’s farm when he was eleven. Both his father and his grandfather had worked this farm of some 150 acres and had lived to a great age, so Mr. Grout had often talked with men who knew the Suffolk farmers of the eighteenth century. He is short and sturdy, with a shining brown face and the strange new-looking wide blue eyes of the very old countryman. Day by day he sits in his hilltop house, dressed in thick rough clean clothes and polished buskins, sometimes listening to the clock, sometimes to the radio. [Where is Vietnam, Mr. Grout?—“Faraway . . .”]

  The rooms in the house, once the Akenfield miller’s home, are sedately brown: brown paint, pale oatmeal brown wallpaper, snuff-brown tablecloth, oily brown lampshade, creamy brown curtains. There are sash windows at a right angle and nothing passes on the road which doesn’t offer the chance of a second complete glimpse if one happens to have missed the first. Just outside, and casting a livid reflection on to the ceiling, is the harsh green circle of the miller’s pond. At the side of the house rest the millstones, with nettles and honeysuckle sprouting through the shaft-holes.

  * * *

  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 Rendlesham. 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 fa
rmer 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.