Читать книгу They Seek a Country - Francis Brett Young - Страница 13

Table of Contents

It was this abrupt severance of the only human tie that held him and the restlessness bred of unwonted solitude that turned John Oakley’s thoughts in the direction of Grafton Lovett. His imagination, concerned of late with impressions so much more substantial, had always retained the imprint of those scenes his mother’s wistful stories had stamped on it; and in his present state of grief and bewilderment, these childish images, blurred and indefinite as they were, had more actuality and offered more hope of solace than the visible desolation amid which he stood. Nothing bound him to Dulston. It was years since he had seen his father. He neither knew nor cared if he were dead or alive. Though his uncle’s friends treated him kindly enough, they were not men of his age. No woman’s face had yet troubled or made insecure the self-sufficiency of that bachelor house. He had learnt a craft that should earn him a living wherever he went, but the prospect of pursuing it in Dulston, where life was not only grim enough of itself but also beset at every turn by reminders of death and bereavement, appalled him and urged him to turn his back and escape. And whither, he asked himself, could escape be more right and natural than to the place where the only forbears that he cared to acknowledge had lived and died and been buried for generations?

During his long years of meagre living, his uncle had managed to scrape together a minute hoard of guineas which now were his. Though the cottage and the shop were rented, the goodwill of the cobbler’s business, the bench and the furniture were worth a few more. When a customer offered himself he had no hesitation in selling. With a sense of unbounded relief, he packed up his books and his money and set off beyond the hills whose outlines had always tempted him, his tool-bag slung across his back, to find his grandfather.

Over the far hills he walked, out of the grit and smoke of Dulston into lands green past all belief and, as it seemed to him, unbelievably lonely. He had never imagined the country to be so utterly unpeopled as this, one village so distant from another, and the spaces between them so silent. In Bromsberrow, indeed, where he enquired the way to Grafton Lovett, there were nail-shops, and the familiar tinkle of hammers met his ears; but the folk who worked in them looked less grimed and stunted than the nailers of Dulston; life seemed to press on them less heavily in that sweeter, cleaner air.

It was evening, in a hush only stirred by late and lazy bird-song, when he reached Grafton Lovett. He had never tramped so far before, and his feet were blistered. An old man in a smock-frock, cruddled over two sticks, raised one and pointed the way to Joe Barley’s cottage. His speech was burred and rustic and barely intelligible, but John’s heart leapt to hear it and he laughed with joy, for the accents were those of his mother, remembered in dreams. He was touched to think he was going to see the cottage in which she had been born, and the common on which she had played as a little girl.

So he came to the squatter’s door. The house was one-storeyed, built of dab and wattle. Projecting thatch shadowed the door. Inside, it was dark, and the low-ceiled chamber was thick with the pungent smoke of a fire of wet sticks on which Joe Barley was boiling potatoes for his supper.

“Who bi’st thee and what do’st want, young man?” he asked suspiciously. His voice was thin and quavering. He was older and feebler than John had imagined him.

“I be your grandson, John Oakley. I’m Mary’s son, grandfather,” he said.

“Mary? Mary? What Mary be that?”

“Your own daughter Mary, grandfather.”

“I don’t rightly mind none of that name. Be her come along wi’ you?”

“My mother’s been dead and gone of a decline these seven years.”

“Poor soul. Well, to think of that now! And you be her lad? Well, come in and sit you down, then.”

John dumped down his heavy tool-bag and straightened his shoulders. He was conscious of his own upright strength and youth, standing above that bowed writhen figure from whose loins, remotely, he had sprung, and whose hands wandered so indeterminedly adjusting the spitting sticks. As the bag fell to the floor the old man gave a jump.

“What’s that? What’s that?” he asked anxiously. “ ’Tis to be hoped you don’t mean no harm, young man. I’ve no money to give you.”

It was an unpromising beginning, and the night that followed was even stranger. There was one great bed built into the earth-floored room behind the kitchen, and this he was forced to share with his grandfather; but he could not sleep for the unwonted silence broken only by sounds that were new to him, such as the hooting of owls and the boom of the bittern in the marshy bottoms of the Chaddesbourne brook. Before dawn, the old man woke and began to hawk and wheeze and complain of the rheumatism that gnawed his bones like rats; and John was glad to release himself from discomfort. Outside the bedroom it was lighter than he had imagined, and the beauty that greeted him as he opened the door of the hovel and let out the smoke caught his breath; the furzy heath sparkling in level sunlight with spangles of dewy gossamer; the solemn line of elms that sheltered the village, so noble compared with the smoke-blighted trees of Dulston; the sandstone tower of the church transfigured by golden air; above all, the perfume of that sweet-breathing countryside—of new-mown hay and meadowsweet and almond-scented gorse. In that moment he knew why his mother had loved Grafton Lovett and why he himself must love it as long as he lived.

He was soon to be glad for other reasons that he had come to Grafton. It had been clear, from the night of his arrival, that his grandfather was failing and not long, as they said, for this world. Though he managed to exist and to tend the cow and the flock of geese that grazed the common, it was beyond the strength of his crippled limbs to keep the dark hovel clean, to cut wood for firing, or to till the small plot that, in his prime, he had reclaimed from the wild and in which he grew the crop of potatoes that were his staple—and very nearly his only—food. There was some satisfaction for John Oakley in knowing that he had come to his grandfather’s aid at the right moment; to feel he was justifying his own purposeless existence by giving the old man an arm on the downward slope. The accumulations of neglect and disorder in the house and on the land kept him busy well into the winter. It took old Joe Barley a long time to realize who his grandson was; there were days on end, indeed, during which he appeared to forget and regarded John with suspicion as a stranger whose motives were doubtful; but at other times, when they sat together over a fire that no longer filled the cabin with smoke (John had scraped the soot from the chimney with a weighted holly-bush), his failing wits brightened by a jug of hot cider, he would suddenly recall and rehearse the story of how he had built the house in which they sat with an astonishing clarity resembling that of a distant landscape glimpsed through thinnings of mist. He was grateful, too, for the welcome relief from toil John’s labour gave him. Sometimes he would stare at John and say: “You be our Mary’s boy, bain’t you? Ay, I might have knowed it without being told. You do favour her uncommon.” When he heard he was like his mother, John’s cup of happiness was full.

There was no question, as he had imagined, of his ever plying his cobbler’s trade in Grafton. One cobbler, already established, satisfied, in his spare time, the needs of the village, which were small enough—for most of the children went barefoot and many of the labourers made their own footwear with hides and thongs. Until they knew who he was, he found the village people much less forthcoming than Black Country folk, accustomed to the constant influx of floating labour; but when once they had accepted him they were not long in taking him to their hearts and counting him as one of themselves.

The knowledge of their lives revealed by this intimacy appalled him. In his uncle’s school of politics he had been taught to deplore and resent the conditions in which the Dulston miners and nail-workers lived. Compared with the Grafton villagers’ lives, they were princely. A few of the better-placed had the right to cultivate strips of land in the common field and some rights of grazing, out of which, in favourable years, they could make a living. A few, like his grandfather, had “squatted” and taken in land from the common with the same result. But the bulk of the Grafton cottagers laboured for hire from dawn to sunset on the land of Mr. Ombersley of Chaddesbourne or Colonel Abberley or in the fields that belonged to them and were rented to men like Tom Collins, the farmer; and the average wage each household received was twelve shillings a week, out of which, since they had no land of their own, they must pay for food, to say nothing of clothes and firing. The houses or hovels in which they dwelt were more ancient and therefore more dilapidated than those of the Dulston workers—rain dripped through their thatch and on to their puddled clay floor; nor did they enjoy the comfort of a forging-hearth or a blaze of coals carried from the pit spoil-heap, which made the nailer’s or miner’s house tolerably warm in winter. There was no school for their children in the village, no religious instruction save Parson Ombersley’s perfunctory catechizing, and no place of recreation (if they had had time for it) for themselves. Two ale-houses brewed a turbid fluid from spoiled barley-malt; but little of this was sold; Grafton Lovett labourers had no money to spend on beer. Yet, as drink they must, since only in drink could life seem bearable, they distilled in their homes a variety of fiery liquors that they called wines, fermented from a hogwash of crushed turnips and over-ripe plums and potato-peelings and sprouting grain, which stupefied at the best and at the worst made men fighting-mad. They were of a sturdy, good-humoured race, and at least they breathed pure air. Otherwise they could not have survived their superhuman excesses of drink and labour. But fatigue and poison and privation, together with the inbreeding decreed by the isolation which the Settlement Acts, by forbidding the labourer to leave the parish of his birth, imposed upon them, had stamped on the men of Oakley’s own age, or those rather older, the stigmata of spiritual degeneration: stupidity, sullenness, apathy.

It was the last and most terrible of these that shocked him, coming, as he did, from the industrial area of Dulston where his fellow-workmen, for all their poverty, were quick-witted and independent of spirit. The Grafton Lovett villagers’ acceptance of their condition seemed to him even more sinister than the condition itself. Their state was subdued and frightened. They lived under the shadow—not of the two great houses in which the squires of Chaddesbourne and Grafton preserved (save in matters concerning the Game Laws) an attitude of mildly benevolent detachment towards the human fauna of their estates, nor even of the Law, of whose savage penalties they had heard during the assizes that followed the machine-breakers’ riots—but of that bleak and sombre barrack of brick, the new Bromsberrow Workhouse, and of their natural enemy, the stoat of this hapless warren, Mr. Willets, the parish overseer.

This gross man, the boon-companion and ally in corruption of Collins the farmer, held the unlucky village in his hands. Under the Old Poor Law, when wages were “made up” by rates for the farmers’ benefit, he had provided his friends with able-bodied labourers at a few shillings a week, or harnessed his paupers, men and women together, between the shafts of the parish cart to drag muck from the middens and cess-pits to fertilize Collins’s fields. Under the New Poor Law, his power became even greater. For no farmer would now give work to a man whose possession of geese or a cow diminished his own share of grazing, while now no able-bodied man who was workless had a right to outdoor relief; with the result that, if he and his family were not to starve, they must toil for a shilling a day from dawn to dark on the roads that were most serviceable to Willets’ friends and others who bribed him, or leave their homes and enter the workhouse to pick oakum, like convicts, or crush bones, and fight with other half-starved men for the gristle that clung to them.

Old men who, like the squatter, Joe Barley, until his grandson came, found it hard to fend for themselves, had no choice nor power of protest. To the workhouse with them! The fuller it was, the better. The more bellies to starve, the more contracts for musty meal and frosted potatoes: the more profits for Mr. Willets’ friends, the more bribes for himself! And, supposing the old man were married: then off with his wife to the workhouse as well. But let him not think he would ever set eyes on her again: not even if he had lived and slept with her for fifty years. The New Poor Law insisted on sexual segregation.

All these things John Oakley saw and noted with growing bitterness during his first two years at Grafton. Though he was powerless to remedy them and equally powerless to raise his neighbours’ crushed spirits against them, the tradition of service in which he had been reared in his uncle’s workshop forbade him to keep silence. He talked radical politics whenever he could to such as would listen to him—without much effect but that of exciting the farmers’ suspicious hostility. He offered to teach the children their letters, much to the concern of Parson Ombersley—not so much because Mr. Ombersley dreaded the diffusion of knowledge as because he had heard that Joe Barley’s grandson was a Methodist, and therefore an instrument of doctrinal corruption among his neglected flock. He did his duty, as he saw it, to his best; but when the best was done he knew how little of the seed he scattered on the cold Grafton Lovett clay would germinate and take root.

It was only after two years—his grandfather, mercifully, had died of a winter bronchitis, and Oakley himself, succeeding to what he had left, was contriving to make a bare living out of the squatter’s “encroachment”—that he smelt the first smoulder of resentment in his neighbours’ minds. The spark that fired it was the news that Squire Ombersley and the colonel, putting their heads together, had decided to improve their estates by enclosing the common of Grafton that lay between them: a proposal that affected not only squatters like himself, but also the more substantial cottagers who, up till now, had enjoyed rights of grazing for their pathetic livestock. Oakley knew all about Enclosure and its effects; he had not read his Cobbett for nothing; and because they knew he was knowledgeable, many of those who stood to lose and, before this, had used him contemptuously, came clamouring for information.

There was not much he could tell them, except that it was rare for an Enclosure Bill to fail; that men who had land or rights were likely to lose both unless they fought for them, and that those, like himself, whose rights were slender and questionable, would probably waste time—and money, if they had it—in fighting. The legal procedure was leisurely and inexorable. First of all, a notice of petition would be affixed to the door of the church on three Sundays in August....

“Can’t we tear down them there notices?” asked a middle-aged cottager named Aaron Sheldon.

“You can tear them down,” Oakley said, “but they’ll only put them up again. And if you’re caught tearing them down, the constable’ll be after you.”

“Ay, he’s right, he’s right,” others said. “It be no good a-puttin’ yourself in the road of the Law. What comes a’ter that, John?”

“They’ll call a parish meeting.”

“And what can us poor folks do, with all the quality settin’ there and Tom Collins, damn him, talking a lot of stuff us can’t understand?”

“Us can break up the meeting, chaps,” an old soldier named Dicketts suggested.

“And that bain’t no good neither, George. D’you want your ’ead broken? Didn’t you ’ave enough fighting at Waterloo with the Duke when you lost your leg? If there’s any parish meetings going to be broke up, I shall keep away from them. Can’t you think on anything better nor that to do, John?”

“We can pay a lawyer to speak up for us in Parliament.”

“I’ve no fancy for lawyers—foxes, I call ’em—and where be the money to come from? There bain’t no money in Grafton that I’ve ever heard on to pay ’em with. Nor I wouldna trust him nohow to do his best if Mr. Collins, he went behind of us and give him more.”

They trusted nobody. They did not even trust one another. Would they trust him, John Oakley wondered? After all, he was in the same boat as they, or one even leakier.

“I could go to London myself and ask to speak. A man who’s going to suffer has the right to do that for himself, but I’ld do it, and willing, for you chaps as well.”

At this most of them looked doubtful. Though they were far too polite or too timid to hint at it, Oakley knew they were asking themselves what he stood to gain at their expense. Only Dicketts, the one-legged soldier, rose to the project.

“Why should John go alone? Let’s all go in a body,” he cried. “Let’s go straight to the Duke: you’ll get justice from him, I tell you. If the Duke sees a wrong being done, he’ll tell King William of it. John here, having the gift, he can do the talk in Parliament while all the rest of us stands behind him and signify we be of one mind. The more on us goes the better, I say.”

“Hold your silly hush, Guy,” said Sheldon, “and don’t talk foolish. Who be you, with a peg for a leg, to walk all the way to London, and where bi’st going to find fittles to eat, I should like to know. And I’ll tell you another thing. If the lot on us went marching in a body, the way you say, we should get no further than Worcester. Mr. Collins would hear on it and ride on ahead and get the police to stop us by warrant. Unlawful Assembly: that’s what the justices call it. If anyone’s going, I say: let John Oakley go quiet and go alone to speak for us.”

“If so be as he don’t mention no names,” an anxious voice murmured.

“If he don’t mention no names nor particulars, what’s the good on it, Harry?”

“I bain’t going to have my name mentioned, Aaron,” the other said stubbornly. “If Mr. Collins he heard as I’d put my name forward against him, like, there’ld be no work for me next week, nor yet for my lads and my missus, and the lot of us’ld find ourselves cracking bones in Bromsberrow work’us in no time. Let John speak for himself, if he wants to, and leave us out of it.”

“Whether John goes or don’t go, there’s one thing I know,” Aaron Sheldon said bitterly, “and that is, if the squire takes the common in and puts me off of it, there won’t be one bloody pheasant left in his woods come Christmas that I can get hold on.”