Читать книгу Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45 - Duff Hart-Davis - Страница 7

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke.

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The First World War had taken thousands of young men from the land. Farmers paid them such miserable wages that they were virtually slaves, so when they saw a chance of escape from drudgery they jumped at it. In Akenfield, his classic evocation of a Suffolk village, Ronald Blythe recorded that in March 1914 one nineteen-year-old, Leonard Thompson, was earning 11s a week, and later told the author: ‘The village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It was not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly.’

When the farmer stopped his pay because it was raining and the men couldn’t thresh,

I said to my seventeen-year-old mate, ‘Bugger him. We’ll go off and join the army …’ 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 … 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 … We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th.

Leonard survived the horrors of Gallipoli, the Somme and German prison camp, but thousands of his contemporaries did not. When he returned to Suffolk, for a while things were better on the land. The Corn Production Act of 1917, which guaranteed cereal growers good prices for wheat and oats, enabled farmers to pay higher wages, and hundreds of men joined the Agricultural Labourers’ Union. But then a severe drought in the summer of 1921, and a repeal of the Act in August, precipitated a decline which led to a prolonged agricultural slump.

In 1938 Britain was growing only 30 per cent of its food, and only nine million acres of arable land were under cultivation, compared with eleven million in 1914. The Government saw that if war came the nation’s essential supplies of wheat travelling by ship from North America and Canada would be threatened by Germany’s U-boats. It was imperative that more corn should be grown at home.

Life in the countryside was still largely feudal. Many of the great estates had remained intact, and even if the proprietors no longer flaunted the size of their possessions in their Who’s Who entries (‘Owns 22,000 acres’), they still presided over very substantial areas of the country. Yeoman farmers had their own relatively modest houses and land-holdings, but most farm workers lived in tied cottages – that is, in houses owned by their landlords which went with their jobs. If a man lost his job, he lost his house as well – a system which gave owners an absolute grip of their employees.

By the middle of the 1930s huge areas of the countryside had fallen into a state of dereliction. Landowners had lost heart and let their acres go to ruin; tenant farmers, unable to make a living, had simply given up and gone away, leaving houses to decay or fall down and fields to rot. In the absence of grazing animals or cultivation, thousands of acres had been overrun by weeds, brambles and shrubs. In the high Cotswolds huge tracts had been taken over by thorn bushes and stunted trees. In low-lying areas drain clearance had been abandoned, with the result that hawthorn and bramble had spread so far outwards from the hedges that the undergrowth almost met in the middle of soggy fields.

Farming was decidedly old-fashioned. Mechanization was creeping in, but heavy horses still provided most of the power, outnumbering tractors by thirty to one. At the Centenary Royal Show held in Windsor Great Park early in July 1939 and attended by the King and Queen, the entries included 150 Suffolk Punches, along with 100 Percherons, eighty Shires and fifty Clydesdales.

As Ronald Blythe recorded, the horsemen were always 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! 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.

Since, in 1939, most tasks were still tackled by hand, farm workers needed to be strong, fit and hardy. A ploughman plodded over ten or eleven miles of ground every day, guiding his team, as did a man broadcasting seed or fertilizer by hand. A tractor driver had no protection from sun, wind, rain and snow except for his coat and hat: winter and summer he sat in the open on a steel seat, sprung on a flat steel tongue, and maybe slightly padded with an old hessian sack. He had no cab to shield him from the elements, still less any ear-defenders. His only air conditioning was provided by nature.

Starting one of those old bangers was a labour in itself, especially in winter. Having primed the fuel pump, the driver had to turn the engine over by swinging the crank handle at the front – a procedure that might drag on for ten minutes or more in cold weather. If he failed to keep his thumb on the same side of the handle as his fingers, and the engine kicked back, his thumb could be dislocated or broken. Some farmers had trouble progressing from old equipment to new: one in Cornwall tried to get his new machine to stop by shouting ‘Whoa!’ – and in consequence drove straight through the wall of a shed.

A tractor with rubber tyres was rare. The majority had all-steel rear wheels fitted with angled cleats or protruding lumps called spade-lugs. These gave a grip on fields, but made driving along hard roads impossibly rough – on the surface, the machine and the driver – so whenever a farmer wanted to move his machine any distance along a highway, he had to go through the laborious process of fitting protective metal covers round each wheel, bolting two semi-circular sections together. Rubber tyres were much coveted; they gradually became more available, in effect making a tractor a dual-purpose vehicle, equally at home on field or road; but early in the war any tractor passing along a road attracted attention.

In March 1940 the law was amended to allow boys of twelve and upwards to drive tractors on roads. But boys of eleven or twelve, who had never taken a test, were already working unsupervised on the land. Francis Evans, son of a Gloucestershire farmer, was eleven in 1941 and frequently went ploughing on his own all day. ‘My father would come with me along the road to the field being worked, and then go home on his bicycle, leaving me to carry on.’

At hay-time, in June, everyone turned out to help make the most of good weather: wives and children as well as men. Round the edges of fields, where the grass might be wet and choke a mechanical knife, the hay was still mown with scythes. The mechanical cutter was a reciprocating knife with jagged teeth, powered by gears from the axle, and (in the absence of a tractor) it was pulled by two horses walking slowly.

The cut grass was evenly spread with pitchforks until it had begun to dry in the sun, giving off a delicious smell like that of biscuits cooking; then it was turned and left until it was ready to be collected, either by hand or by a horse-drawn rake with long, curved, downward-facing tines, which could be lifted clear of the ground by pulling a lever. A boy riding jockey on the rake had to pay attention, for if he fell off he might be impaled on the tines before he could stop the horse.

Every available person and every available vehicle joined in. In the summer of 1940 the actress, singer and monologist Joyce Grenfell turned out to help at Cliveden, the Astors’ home in Buckinghamshire, driving a twelve-year-old, two-seater Chrysler. ‘Now it is entirely paintless, bonnetless, brakeless, roofless, floorless and hornless,’ she wrote of the car,

but still it goes in bottom gear. It is equipped with a giant wooden comb-like device that is fixed on in front. You drive the car along rows of raked hay and this arrangement collects it up. When you have enough you steer off the row into the open and deliver your load in a part of the field near the rick. To unload you merely reverse; in fact, that is the only means of stopping anyway!

Loaded onto horse-drawn wagons, the hay was transported to the farm, where, again, pitchforks lifted it onto a rick. The entire process was labour-intensive, and greatly dependent on the weather: for good hay, dry days and hot sun were essential. As one reader of The Farmers’ Weekly remarked, ‘Of course, the ideal is to have ideal weather, but only in the fields of Elysium is the ideal continuous.’ In the rick, during autumn and winter, the hay gradually solidified, so that when it was needed for feeding horses and cattle, slices of it had to be cut as if from a loaf of bread with a knife three feet long.

After haymaking, the busiest time of year was harvest, from July to September, when everybody again joined forces to bring in the corn. Cutting and stooking were only the start. The next step was to load the sheaves onto a cart, passing them up one at a time with a pitchfork to a man who had the skill to lay them in overlapping layers so that they bound each other in and did not slip off as the cart lurched towards the farmyard on its wooden wheels. Once there, the process had to be repeated: an elevator ferried the sheaves up onto a rick, and again a skilled operator built them up so that they would hold together and not slide outwards.

By the beginning of the war a few early combine harvesters were working, but these were large, inefficient contraptions and needed tractors to pull them – which meant that a good deal of the corn was flattened ahead of the cutter. The first self-propelled prototype, the Canadian Massey-Harris M-H 20, which appeared in 1938, travelled at four miles per hour without running down any of the crop, and cut, threshed and delivered a continuous stream of grain into sacks. Two men were needed to operate it – one to drive, and one to stand on a platform at the back, changing the sacks and sliding them off onto the ground when they became full. As each of them weighed 200 lb or more, and they were scattered about the field, collecting them up and lifting them onto a wagon was no easy task – and then at the farmyard they had to be carried up a long plank or flight of steps and tipped into the barn.

Other farm tasks were less dramatic. Ploughing was one of the slowest, demanding skill, patience, strength and stamina. Although even early tractors could plough far faster than horses, many people clung to the old ways. Angus Nudds, who started work on a farm in Wiltshire when he was fourteen, and later became a gamekeeper, remembered, ‘Not many people have had the pleasure of ploughing with horses.’

Instead of the roar of the tractor, there was just the occasional gentle cough of one of the horses, the sound of the soil coming off the plough-share, the jingle of the harness and the constant cry of the seagulls which competed for the worms that were turned up out of the ground. I loved working with horses; they are such noble animals, not asking much out of life, just a warm stable, some good food and a bit of kindness, and they repay you by working for you eight hours a day.

No one endorsed those feelings more warmly than John Stewart Collis, an intellectual who worked as a farm labourer in Sussex and Dorset from 1940 to 1946. Already almost forty when the war broke out, he opted for work on the land and wrote two classic books about it, While Following the Plough and Down to Earth, which he later combined into a single volume, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Precise, accurate and never for a moment boring, he described the ancient rituals of farming in a marvellously lucid narrative of day-to-day tasks and events.

He scarcely mentioned his wife Eirene and two daughters, whom he packed off as evacuees to America: he referred but rarely to Bindo, the devoted dog which always accompanied him. His whole narrative was dedicated to describing work on the land, and he wrote about the most basic tasks with lyrical grace. Like Angus Nudds, he loved ploughing with a horse:

Your feet are upon the earth, your hands upon the plough. You seem to be holding more than the plough, and treading across more than this one field: you are holding together the life of mankind, you are walking through the fields of time.

Most farm workers’ language was as old-fashioned as the plough. In many counties ‘w’s were dropped – for example, the word ‘woman’ was pronounced ‘ooman’, and grammar was all over the place. When an old gamekeeper agreed that one of the park deer looked poorly, and said, ‘Arr, I seed one up there crope about fairish’, it was clear that he meant the animal looked pretty sick. No point in telling him that ‘seed’ was not the past tense of ‘see’, nor ‘crope’ that of ‘creep’. One day Jack Hatt, who farmed at Checkendon in Oxfordshire, returned from market to see Olive, his Shire horse, lying prostrate on the field, with the ploughman, Danny, standing disconsolately beside her.

‘Danny! Danny!’ cried Jack, running up. ‘What’s wrong with Olive?’

‘Blamed if er didn’t go and die on me,’ Danny answered, ‘and I’ve never knowed she do that afore.’