Читать книгу Farmer's Glory - A. G. Street - Страница 7

Table of Contents

The point I would again stress about this type of pre-war farming is that one didn’t consider whether the crop one was sowing would pay a profit over the cost of production or not. That never entered any one’s head. In good seasons farmers did pretty well, and in bad ones, presumably not quite so well. Granted, there were occasional instances of farmers going bankrupt, but these rare cases could always be definitely traced to drink, gambling, or some other vice or extravagance causing neglect of the farm by the master. If one attended to one’s business decently, one got along all right. Some did better than others, but all got along all right.

The fact was that the four-course system allied to a Hampshire Down flock paid pretty well in those days, and was the accepted practice of the district. Farms were laid out for it, and let on the understanding that the customary rotation would be followed. And once you were fairly into that system, it swept you with it, round and round, year after year, like a cog in a machine, whether you liked it or not.

Let us take the start of the farming year at Michaelmas. The cleared stubble of the previous spring corn that was not sown to clover had to be ploughed and sown to rye, winter barley, and vetches, to provide sheep keep for the following May, June and July. It was no good wondering whether this would pay. You had four hundred ewes, which would, God willing, produce some four hundred lambs in January, and require food in May, June, and July. In October, these ewes would be folding off rape and turnips, and behind them would come your ploughs and harrows, sowing this land to wheat. But would wheat pay? What were the prospects of the world’s next harvest? Don’t be silly! This land was due to come into wheat, and wheat must be in by the end of November if possible, so you didn’t worry over abstruse problems, but got down to the job.

This done, the wheat stubble was ploughed up by Christmas, cross-ploughed in January, and sown to barley and oats in February and March. By this time your flock would have lambed, and be folding off swedes and kale. You have only got enough keep sown to keep them until the end of July, the rye, etc., which you put in in October. They will want rape and turnips from then onwards, so your horses must follow them in April, as they feed the swedes and kale, and sow rape and turnips.

But what about next winter? You will require swedes and kale for the flock. So your ploughs and harrows must follow them in May, June, and July, as they feed the rye, winter barley, and vetches, and sow swedes and kale for next winter.

And so it went on, year after year, one continual hopeless striving to feed the flock. Sheep! Sheep! It was always the sheep. Your life was ruled by them, the whole farm revolved round them, and in my case, my father’s temper varied with the state of the flock’s well-being. They were a kind of Moloch, to which we were all sacrificed.

The old labourer referred to in the preceding chapter was quite right in saying that all we did was to wait upon their needs. He used to vent his hatred on them, when they were dipped. He would stand at the side of the swimming bath filled with Cooper’s Dip, armed with a long pole with a cross piece at the end, and push them under the evil-smelling liquid with great glee.

We got a little respite from this eternal striving to satisfy the sheep in August and September, when the whole farm concentrated on the harvest. Sometimes even the shepherd would help in the evenings in a condescending sort of way, as one conferring a favour. I generally used to take my dinner with me during harvest. Field work started at 6 a.m. and continued till 8 p.m., and it was much nicer to eat bread and cheese and cold bread pudding in the field, than to waste the dinner hour in the journey home and back.

Many people think that the agricultural labourer of those days was slow in his movements. This is incorrect. He looked slow, I grant you, but the experience of countless ages had discovered the simplest and easiest way of doing his manifold laborious tasks, and years of practice had transformed his gnarled and clumsy hands into extraordinarily deft and dexterous instruments. Also, he struck a gait at any job which he could keep up from daylight to dark, day after day. Any attempt to hurry him was disastrous. He considered it to be a slight on him, and that you didn’t realize that he always gave of his best.

When we were carrying corn the number of pitchers in the field loading the wagons, and the number of men at the rick emptying them, had to be regulated to a nicety to keep the wagons going backwards and forwards steadily without a hitch. That is where Tommy and the trap came in. Tommy would be required earlier during the harvest; as a matter of fact he stayed harnessed to the trap all day until knock-off time. The wagons were led from the field to the rick and back by small boys. One of my father’s dictums was that two boys together did half as much as one boy by himself, and that three boys did nothing at all. Let two of the boys stop for a minute or two as they passed, one with a full wagon and the other with an empty one, and the whole business of carrying was disorganized. Then, from some point of vantage, Tommy and the trap descended on them like the wrath of God. On these urgent occasions Thomas moved quite smartly.

I can appreciate now that my father’s work in this way was very important. He would also play off the rick staff against the field men. Perhaps we would be a pitcher short of the required number owing to one of the carters having gone to the station for a load of something. Father would drive out to the other pitchers, and say to the head carter: ‘ ’Fraid you won’t be able to keep us going so well to-day till Fred gets back. Still, we must put up with it. Just do the best you can.’ Or perhaps the rick staff would be a man or two short for a similar reason, and it would be: ‘I wonder if I’d better drive down to the dairy, and see if a milker can be spared for a bit. You chaps won’t keep those pitchers going else.’ ‘Doan’t ’ee worry, zur,’ they would be sure to say, ‘we’ll manage somehow.’

If the occasion were desperate, and another hand must be got somehow, the shepherd was the last resort. You didn’t send the foreman to see if the shepherd could get away for an hour or two. That would have been to court disaster. The sheep would have been in such a critical state that if the shepherd left for a moment, they would all be sure to die. Neither was I sent. Youth hadn’t the tact required for such a ticklish operation. Oh no! That was a job for the Guvnor, and we would see from the rick, Tommy being urged to his most furious speed up the far slope towards the sheep fold. Having arrived my father talked sheep, sheep, and nothing but sheep, thus relegating the harvest to an unimportant detail unworthy of mention. After a bit the shepherd would be sure to say: ‘And how be getten on wi’ the carrying, zur?’ ‘Pretty fair, shepherd. We’re a bit short-handed to-day. I’m on my way down to the village to see if I can pick up another man.’ ‘Well, zur, I be about straight yer just now, in a manner o’ speaking. Ud it be any good if I were to gie ’ee a hand fer an hour or two?’ And back to the harvest field would come Tommy, hauling both the shepherd and my father, who had achieved his object without mentioning it. All this may sound childish to many people, but some will, I hope, recognize it for what it undoubtedly was—pure genius.

My own personal relations with the men in those days were of the best. I know that I liked them, and I think that they liked me. I did not do much actual laborious work, but my father made me do every job on the farm at some time or another in order that I might, from personal knowledge, be able to estimate whether a man was working well or ill at any particular job. I was much older before I realized how much I did learn in those first years after leaving school. It is curious that one doesn’t know the exact moment when one felt qualified to say whether the sheep were doing well or not, whether a certain cow or horse were a good or bad one, or what precise cultivation was needed for a particular crop or field. One only knows that suddenly one does know. You don’t learn by going round and asking why, but by growing up with the whole business. One assimilates knowledge unknowingly. And it isn’t all knowledge. One learns a good bit about faith in the beneficent wisdom of the Supreme Being. I remember once the foreman saying to my father when he was going to carry some barley rather quickly after cutting it: ‘Don’t ’ee do it. Thee’s left it to the Almighty fer six months. Let un have it dree more days.’

Naturally I learnt a lot from the men. You cannot work with people day after day, all the year round, without doing so. They were, without exception, very definite about things. They never explained anything. They just said so. And usually I found out that these statements were correct. Our old dairyman once said to me: ‘ ’Tis no good buying cattle from down stream fer these meadows. They don’t do up yer. You wants to goo up stream and get ’em.’ Ten years afterwards I bought a lot of cattle from down stream, and they didn’t do. That deal cost me at least a hundred pounds, and then I appreciated the old man’s words.

They didn’t mince matters, either. The first harvest after I left school, I was one day on the top of a rick with an old rick-maker. The surface we were working on was getting smaller and smaller as the roof drew in, and I was being particularly careful not to get in his way, and to place each and every sheaf just to his hand, when he looked up and said: ‘Thee best get down.’ I got down.

There is no doubt that the agricultural labourer is much better off now than he was during the period of which I am writing. He has to-day a higher standard of living, a broader outlook on life, and a taste for amusements and interests outside agriculture, but whether he is any happier or more contented is open to question. Definitely he is not such a good farm hand. These other interests distract his attention from the farm. I do not say this in any spirit of criticism, but merely state the fact. Why should he worry about the farm after his working hours, allotted by law, are finished? But twenty-five years ago his sole interest was the farm on which he worked. Nowadays he does what he is paid for, but then he did what was right and necessary to the well-being of crops or stock, irrespective of payment. Then he took a pride in his particular department of the farm, and also took the responsibility of it, but now he runs to the boss for instructions at every touch and turn. The same alteration in outlook and amusements has taken place in the farmers also, with, I think, the same consequent deterioration in their value to the land. In those times, the farmer’s sole interest was his farm. What went on in the world outside of farming he didn’t know, and didn’t care. The farm supplied all his amusements also: shooting, hunting, fishing, local tennis—one didn’t go to Wimbledon in those days to watch tennis, one concentrated on the best method of dealing with one’s neighbour’s devastating first service, a very real and urgent problem—an occasional point-to-point meeting, a puppy show, and countless other festivities pertaining to one’s calling. One never got away for a moment from the atmosphere of farming. Both farmers and labourers might have been justly called narrow-minded clods by townsmen in those days, but as guardians of the soil in their particular district they were unbeatable.

But that large tenant farmers were doing pretty well then, there is no question. As I have said, they did their duty by the soil, and, in the words of the Scriptures, it repaid them, some twenty, some sixty, and some a hundredfold. Home scenes of that period come back to me quite clearly. A tennis party, some ten or a dozen people on the lawn, a man and a boy bedding out geraniums and lobelia, and in the background the rambler roses flaming in all their June beauty. The local hunt running a fox to ground not far from the farmhouse, and Tommy and the trap being immediately requisitioned to take liquid refreshment to horsemen and diggers. The meet of a shooting party at nine o’clock on a December morning: friends and neighbours arriving in governess cars and dog-carts; the varied fortunes of the day’s sport and the gargantuan high tea in the evening, which was invariably followed by cards till all hours. Not the quiet solemn bridge of to-day, but the blunt, noisy, cheery penny nap, followed by an hour of that full-blooded gamble, Farmer’s Glory, to wind up the evening. I believe the correct name for this game in urban society is Slippery Ann, but that Farmer’s Glory was the more appropriate in rural circles there can be no disputing. The whole business of being a farmer in those days was indeed a splendid glory.

No record of this period would be complete without a mention of the weekly pay-day. What a business it was! The yellow canvas bag had a partition dividing the gold from the silver, for we had gold in those days. Most farmers paid fortnightly, but my father always said that the money was of more value to the men if they got it weekly, and paid accordingly. He made a special point of going round the farm and paying the men at their work. There were no time-sheets. ‘What do you make it this week, Tom?’ my father would ask one of the labourers. ‘Two and a half days fer you, zur, four hours overtime, and t’other hoeing.’ ‘What’ll you draw on the hoeing?’ The hoeing was piecework, and the ‘two and a half days fer you’ day work. ‘Aight shillin’, zur, and I’ve a ketched two dozen moles.’ And from his pocket Tom would produce a grimy screw of paper containing twenty-four moles’ tails, for which he would be paid one penny each.

We met the head coachman of the estate during the round one pay-day, and after due salutations my father offered him the screw of paper containing the tails for twopence, on the ground that he had purchased it for two shillings only five minutes previously. I was only about fourteen at the time, and I can remember wriggling with suppressed excitement, as the coachman rode up to the trap, and eyed the parcel suspiciously. ‘Well,’ he said to my father, ‘if you’ve paid two bob for it, I don’t mind chancing twopence.’ Which he did, to my father’s great satisfaction and my own undisguised glee.

On the pay-day before Christmas, the men received Christmas boxes, carefully graduated according to their proper status. On these occasions the foreman, head shepherd, head dairyman, and head carter, received orders on the local butcher for joints of beef, while the other hands got cash, half-crowns for men, down to sixpences for boys. It was indeed a perfect example of that ideal form of government, a benevolent autocracy.