Читать книгу Wild Life in a Southern County - Richard Jefferies - Страница 11

A short distance below the cottagers’ ‘dipping-place’ just mentioned, the same stream, leaving the deep groove or gully, widens suddenly into a large clear pool, shaded by two tall fir trees and an equally tall poplar. The tops of these trees are nearly level with the plain above the verdant valley in which the stream flows, and, being side by side, the difference in the manner of their growth is strongly contrasted. The branches of the fir gracefully depend, as if weighted downwards by the burden of the heavy deep green fringe they carry—a fringe tipped with bullion in the spring, for the young shoots are of so light a green as to shade into a pale yellow. The branches of the poplar, on the contrary, point upwards—growing nearly vertically; so that the outline of the tree resembles the tip of an immensely exaggerated artist’s brush. This formation is ill adapted for nest-building, as it affords little or no surface to build on, and so the poplar is but seldom used by birds.

The pool beneath is approached by a broad track—it cannot be called road—trampled into innumerable small holes by the feet of flocks of sheep, driven down here from the hills for the periodical washing. At that time the roads are full of sheep day after day, all tending in the same direction; and the little wayside inns, and those of the village which closely adjoins the washpool, find a sudden increase of custom from the shepherds. There is no written law regulating the washing, but custom has fixed it as firmly as an Act of Parliament: each shepherd knows his day, and takes his turn, and no one attempts to interfere with the monopoly of the men who throw the sheep in. The right of wash here is upheld as sternly as if it were a bulwark of the Constitution.

Sometimes a landowner or a farmer, anxious to make improvements, tries to enclose the approach or to utilise the water in fertilising meadows, or in one way or another to introduce an innovation. He thinks perhaps that education, the spread of modern ideas, and the fact that labourers travel nowadays, have weakened the influence of tradition. He finds himself entirely mistaken: the men assemble and throw down the fence, or fill up the new channel that has been dug; and, the general sympathy of the parish being with them and the interest of the sheep-farmers behind them to back them up, they always carry the day, and old custom rules supreme.

The sheep greatly dislike water. The difficulty is to get them in; after the dip they get out fast enough. Only if driven by a strange dog, and unable to escape on account of a wall or enclosure, will they ever rush into a pond. If a sheep gets into a brook and cannot get out—his narrow feet sink deep into the mud—should he not be speedily relieved he will die, even though his head be above water, from chill and fright. Cattle, on the other hand, love to stand in water on a warm day.

In rubbing together and struggling with the shepherds and their assistants a good deal of wool is torn from the sheep and floats down the current. This is caught by a net stretched across below, and finally comes into the possession of one or two old women of the village, who seem to have a prescriptive right to it on payment of a small toll for beer-money. These women are also on the look-out during the year for such stray scraps of wool as they can pick up from the bushes beside the roads and lanes much travelled by sheep—also from the tall thistles and briars, where they have got through a gap. This wool is more or less stained by the weather and by particles of dust but it answers the purpose, which is the manufacture of mops.

The old-fashioned wool mop is still a necessary adjunct of the farmhouse, and especially the dairy, which has to be constantly ‘swilled’ out and mopped clean. With the ancient spinning-wheel they work up the wool thus gathered; and so, even at this late day, in odd nooks and corners, the wheel may now and then be found. The peculiar broad-headed nail which fastens the mop to the stout ashen ‘steale,’ or handle, is also made in the village. I spell ‘steale’ by conjecture, and according to pronunciation. It is used also of a rake: instead of a rake-handle they say rake-steale. Having made the mops, the women go round with them to the farmhouses of the district, knowing their regular customers—who prefer to buy of them, not only as a little help to the poor, but because the mops are really very strongly made.

In the meadows of the vale the waters of the same stream irrigate numerous scattered withy-beds, pollard willow trees, and tall willow poles growing thickly in the hedges by the brook. The most suitable of these poles are purchased from the farmers by the willow handicraftsmen of the village up here, to be split into thin flexible strips and plaited or woven into various articles. These strips are made into ladies’ workbaskets and endless knick-knacks. The flexibility of the willow is surprising when reduced to these narrow pieces, scarcely thicker than stout paper. This industry used to keep many hands employed. There were willow-looms in the village, and to show their dexterity the weavers sometimes made a shirt of willow—of course only as a curiosity. The development of straw weaving greatly interfered with this business; and now it is followed by a few only, who are chiefly engaged in preparing the raw material to go elsewhere.

From the ash woods on the slopes, and the copses, of the fields, large ash-poles are brought, which one or two old men in the place spend their time splitting up for ‘flakes’—a ‘flake’ being a frame of light wood, used after the manner of a hurdle to stop a gap, or pitched in a row to part a field into two. Hurdle-making is another industry; but of late years hurdles have been made on a large scale by master carpenters in the market towns, who employ several men, and undersell the village maker.

The wheelwright is perhaps the busiest man in the place; he not only makes and mends waggon and cart wheels, and the body of those vehicles, but does almost every other kind of carpentering. Sometimes he combines the trade of a builder with it—if he has a little capital—and puts up cottages, barns, sheds, etc, and his yard is strewn with timber. There is generally a mason, who goes about from farm to farm mending walls and pigsties, and all such odd jobs, working for his own hand.

The blacksmith of course is there—sometimes more than one—usually with plenty to do; for modern agriculture uses three times as much machinery and ironwork as was formerly the case. At first the blacksmiths did not understand how to mend many of these new-fangled machines, but they have learned a good deal, though some of the pieces still have to be replaced from the implement factories if broken. Horses come trooping in to have new shoes put on. Sometimes a village blacksmith acquires a fame for shoeing horses which extends far beyond his forge, and gentlemen residing in the market towns send out their horses to him to be shod. He still uses a ground-ash sapling to hold the short chisel with which he cuts off the glowing iron on the anvil. He keeps bundles of the young, pliant ground-ash sticks, which twist easily and are peculiarly tough; and, taking one of these, with a few turns of his wrist winds it round the chisel so as to have a long handle. One advantage of the wood is that it ‘gives’ a little and does not jar when struck.

The tinker, notwithstanding his vagrant habits, is sometimes a man of substance, owning two or more small cottages, built out of his savings by the village mason—the materials perhaps carted for him free by a friendly fanner. When sober and steady, he has a capital trade: his hands are never idle. Milk-tins, pots, pans, etc, constantly need mending; he travels from door to door, and may be seen sitting on a stool in the cart-house in the farmyard, tinkering on his small portable anvil, with two or three cottagers’ children—sturdy, yellow-haired youngsters—intently watching the mystery of the craft.

In despite of machine-sewn boots and their cheapness, the village cobbler is still an institution, and has a considerable number of patrons. The labourers working in the fields need a boot that will keep out the damp, and for that purpose it must be hand-sewn: the cobbler, having lived among them all his life, understands what is wanted better than the artisan of the cities, and knows how to stud the soles with nails and cover toe and heel with plates till the huge boot is literally iron-clad. Even the children wear boots which for their size are equally heavy: many of the working farmers also send theirs to be repaired. The only thing to be remembered in dealing with a village cobbler is, if you want a pair of boots, to order them six months beforehand, or you will be disappointed. The business occupies him about as long as it takes a shipwright to build a ship.

Under the trees of the lane that connects one part of the village with another stands a wooden post once stout now decaying; and opposite it at some distance the remnants of a second. This was a rope-walk, but has long since fallen into disuse; the tendency of the age having for a long time been to centralise industry of all kinds. It is true that of late years many manufacturers have found it profitable to remove their workshops from cities into the country, the rent of premises being so much less, water to be got by sinking a well, less rates, and wages a little cheaper. They retain a shop and office in the cities, but have the work done miles away. But even this is distinctly associated with centralisation. The workmen are merely paid human machines; they do not labour for their own hands in their own little shops at home, or as the rope-maker slowly walked backwards here, twisting the hemp under the elms of the lane, afterwards, doubtless, to take the manufactured article himself to market and offer his wares for sale from a stand in the street.

The millwright used to be a busy man here and there in the villages, but the railways take the wheat to the steam mills of cities, and where the water-mills yet run, ironwork has supplanted wood. In some few places still the women and girls are employed making gloves of a coarse kind, doing the work at home in their cottages; but the occupation is now chiefly carried on nearer to the great business centres than this. Another extinct trade is that of the bell foundry. One village situate in the hills hard by was formerly celebrated for the church bells cast there, many of which may be found in far distant towers ringing to this day.

Near the edge of the hill, just above the washpool, stands the village church. Old and grey as it is, yet the usage of the pool by the shepherds dates from still earlier days. Like some of the farmhouses further up among the hills, the tower is built of flints set in cement, which in the passage of time has become almost as hard as the flint itself. The art of chipping flint to a face for the purpose of making lines or patterns in walls used to be carried to great perfection, and even old garden walls may be seen so ornamented.

The tower is large and tall, and the church a great one; or so it appears in comparison with the small population of the place. But it may be that when it was built there were more inhabitants; for some signs remain that here—as in many other such villages—the people have decreased in numbers: the population has shifted elsewhere. An adjacent parish lying just under the downs has now not more than fifty inhabitants; yet in the olden time a church stood there—long since dismantled: the ancient churchyard is an orchard, no one being permitted to dig or plough the ground.

Entering the tower by the narrow nail-studded door, it is not so easy to ascend the winding geometrical stone staircase, in the confined space and the darkness, for the arrow-slits are choked with cobwebs and the dust of years. A faint fluttering sound comes from above, as of wings beating the air in a confined space—it is the jackdaws in the belfry; just as the starlings and swallows in the huge old-fashioned chimneys make a similar murmuring noise before they settle. Passing a slit or two—the only means of marking the height which has been reached—and the dull tick of the old clock becomes audible: slow and accompanied with a peculiar grating vibration, as if the frame of the antique works had grown tremulous with age. The dial-plate outside is square, placed at an angle to the perpendicular lines of the tower: the gilding of the hour-marks has long since tarnished and worn away before the storms, and they are now barely distinguishable; and it is difficult to tell the precise time by the solitary pointer, there being no minute hand.

Past another slit, and the narrow stone steps—you must take care to keep close to the outer wall where they are widest, for they narrow to the central pillar—are scooped out by the passage of feet during the centuries; some, too, are broken, and others are slippery with something that rolls and gives under the foot. It is a number of little sticks and twigs which have fallen down from the jackdaws’ nests above: higher up the steps are literally covered with them, so that you have to kick them aside before you can conveniently ascend. These sticks are nearly all of the same size, brown and black from age and the loss of the sap, the bark remaining on. It is surprising how the birds contrive to find so many suitable to their purpose, searching about under the trees; for they do not break them off, but take those that have fallen.

The best place for finding these sticks—and those the rooks use—is where a tree has been felled or a thick hedge cut some months before. In cutting up the smaller branches into faggots the men necessarily frequently step on them, and so break off innumerable twigs too short to be tied up in the bundle. After they have finished faggoting, the women rake up the fragments for their cottage fires; and later on, as the spring advances, the birds come for the remaining twigs, of which great quantities are left. These they pick up from among the grass; and it is noticeable that they like twigs that are dead but not decayed: they do not care for them when green, and reject them when rotten. Have they discovered that green wood shrinks in drying, and that rotten wood is untrustworthy? Rooks, jackdaws, and pigeons find their building materials in this way, where trees or hedges have been cut; yet even then it must require some patience. They use also a great deal of material rearranged from the nests of last year—that is, rooks and jackdaws.

Stepping out at last into the belfry, be careful how you tread; for the flooring is worm-eaten, and here and there planks are loose: keep your foot, if possible, on the beams, which at least are fixed. It is a giddy height to fall from down to the stone pavement below, where the ringers stand. Their ropes are bound round with list or cloth, or some such thing, for a better grasp for the hand. High as it is to this the first floor, if you should attempt to ring one of these bells, and forget to let the rope slip quickly, it will jerk you almost to the ceiling: thus many a man has broken his bones close to the font where he was christened as a child.

Against the wall up here are iron clamps to strengthen the ancient fabric, settling somewhat in its latter days; and, opening the worm-eaten door of the clock-case—the key stands in it—you may study the works of the old clock for a full hour, if so it please you; for the clerk is away labouring in the field, and his aged wife, who produced the key of the church and pointed the nearest way across the meadow, has gone to the spring. The ancient building, standing lonely on the hill, is utterly deserted; the creak of the boards under foot or the grate of the rusty hinge sounds hollow and gloomy. But a streak of sunlight enters from the arrow-slit, a bee comes in through the larger open windows with a low inquiring buzz; there is a chattering of sparrows, the peculiar shrill screech of the swifts, and a ‘jack-jack-daw-jack-daw’-ing outside. The sweet scent of clover and of mown grass comes upon the light breeze—mayhap the laughter of haymakers passing through the churchyard underneath to their work, and idling by the way as haymakers can idle.

The name of the maker on the clock shows that it was constructed in a little market town a few miles distant a century ago, before industries were centralised and local life began to lose its individuality. There are sparrows’ nests on the wooden case over it, and it is stopped now and then by feathers getting into the works: it matters nothing here; Festina lente is the village motto, and time is little regarded. So, if you wish, take a rubbing, with heelball borrowed from the cobbler, of the inscriptions round the rims of the great bells; but be careful even then, for the ringers have left one carelessly tilted, and if the rope should slip, nineteen hundredweight of brazen metal may jam you against the framework.

The ringers are an independent body, rustics though they be—monopolists, not to be lightly ordered about, as many a vicar has found to his cost, having a silent belfry for his pains, and not a man to be got, either, from adjacent villages. It is about as easy to knock this solid tower over with a walking-stick as to change village customs. But if towards Christmas you should chance to say to the ringers that such and such a chime seemed rung pleasantly, be certain that you will hear it night after night coming with a throbbing joyfulness through the starlit air—every note of the peal rising clear and distinct at the exact moment of time, as if struck by machinery, yet with a quivering undertone that dwells on the ear after the wave of sound has gone. Then go out and walk in the garden or field, for it is a noble music; remember, too, that it is a music that has echoed from the hills hundreds and hundreds of years. Rude men as they are, these bellringers gratefully respond to the least appreciation of their art.

A few more turns about the spiral staircase, and then step out on the roof. The footstep is deadened by the dull coloured lead, oxidised from exposure. The tarnished weathercock above revolves so stiffly as to be heedless of the light air,—only facing a strong breeze. The irreverent jackdaws, now wheeling round at a safe distance, build in every coign of vantage, no matter how incongruous their intrusion may be—on the wings of an angel, behind the flowing robe of Saint Peter, or yonder in the niche, grey and lichen-grown, where stood the Virgin Mary before iconoclastic hands dashed her image to the ground. If a gargoyle be broken or choked so that no water comes through it, they will use it, but not otherwise. And they have nests, too, just on the ledge in the thickness of the wall, outside those belfry windows which are partially boarded up. Anywhere, in short, high up and well sheltered, suits the jackdaw.

When nesting time is over, jackdaws seem to leave the church and roost with the rooks; they use the tower much as the rooks do their hereditary group of trees at a distance from the wood they sleep in at other seasons. How came the jackdaw to make its nest on church towers in the first place? The bird has become so associated with churches that it is difficult to separate the two; yet it is certain that the bird preceded the building. Archaeologists tell us that stone buildings of any elevation, whether for religious purposes or defence, were not erected till a comparatively late date in this island. Now, the low huts of primeval peoples would hardly attract the jackdaw. It is the argument of those who believe in immutable and infallible instinct that the habits of birds, etc, are unchangeable: the bee building a cell to-day exactly as it built one centuries before our era. Have we not here, however, a modification of habit?

The jackdaw could not have originally built in tall stone buildings. Localising the question to this country, may we not almost fix the date when the jackdaw began to use the church, or the battlements of the tower, by marking the time of their first erection? The jackdaw was clever enough, and had reason sufficient to enable him to see how these high, isolated positions suited his peculiar habits; and I am bold enough to think that if the bee could be shown a better mode of building her comb, she would in time come to use it.

In the churchyard, not far from the foot of the tower where the jackdaws are so busy, stands a great square tomb, built of four slabs of stone on edge and a broader one laid on the top. The inscription is barely legible, worn away by the ironshod heels of generations of ploughboys kicking against it in their rude play, and where they have not chipped it, filled with lichen. The sexton says that this tomb in the olden days was used as the pay-table upon which the poor received their weekly dole. His father told him that he had himself stood there hungry, with the rest—not broken-down cripples and widows, but strong, hale men, waiting till the loaves were placed upon the broad slab, so that the living were fed literally over the grave of the dead.

The farmers met every now and then in the vestry and arranged how many men each would find work for—or rather partial work—so that the amount of relief might be apportioned. Men coming from a distance, or even from the next parish, were jealously excluded from settling, lest there should be more mouths to feed; if a family, on the other hand, could by any possibility be got rid of, it was exiled. There were more hands than work; now the case is precisely opposite. A grim witness, this old tomb, to a traditionary fragment in that history of the people which is now placed above a mere list of monarchs.

The oldest person in the village was a woman—as is often the case—reputed to be over a hundred: a tidy cottager, well tended, feeble in body, but brisk of tongue. She reckoned her own age by the thatch of the roof. It had been completely new thatched five times since she could recollect. The first time she was a great girl, grown up: her father had it thatched twice afterwards; her husband had it done the fourth time, and the fifth was three years ago. That made about a hundred years altogether.

The straw had lasted better lately, because there were now no great elm trees to drip, drip on it in wet weather. Cottagers are frequently really squatters, building on the waste land beside the highway close to the hedgerow, and consequently under the trees. This dripping on the roof is very bad for thatch. Straw is remarkably durable, even when exposed to the weather, if good in the first place and well laid on. It may be reckoned to last twenty years on an average, perhaps more. Five thatchings, then, made eighty years; add three years since the last thatching; and the old lady supposed she was seventeen or eighteen at the first—i.e. just a century since. But in all likelihood her recollections of the first thatching were confused and uncertain: she was perhaps eight or ten at that time, which would reduce her real age to a little over ninety. A great part of the village had twice been destroyed by fire since she could remember. These fires are or were singularly destructive in villages—the flames running from thatch to thatch, and, as they express it, ‘wrastling’ across the intervening spaces. A pain is said to ‘wrastle,’ or shoot and burn. Such fires are often caused by wood ashes from the hearth thrown on the dustheap while yet some embers contain sufficient heat to fire straw or rubbish.

The old woman’s memories were wholly of gossipy family history; I have often found that the very aged have not half so much to tell as those of about sixty to seventy years. The next oldest was a man about eighty; all he knew of history was that once on a time some traitor withdrew the flints from the muskets of the English troops, substituting pieces of wood, which, of course, would not ignite the powder, and thus they were beaten. Of date, place, or persons he had no knowledge. He ‘minded’ a great snowfall when he was a boy, and helping to drag the coaches out and making a firm road for them with hurdles. Once while grubbing a hedge near the road he found five shillings’ worth of pennies—the great old ‘coppers’—doubtless hidden by a thief. He could not buy so much with one of the new sort of coppers: liked them as King George made best.

An old lady of about seventy, living at the village inn, a very brisk body, seemed quite unable to understand what was meant by history, but could tell me a story if I liked. The story was a rambling narrative of an amour in some foreign country. The lady, to conceal a meeting with her paramour, which took place in the presence of her son, who was an imbecile (or, in her own words, had ‘no more sense than God gave him,’ a common country expression for a fool), went upstairs and rained raisins on him from the window. The son told the husband what had happened; but, asked to specify the time, could only fix it by, ‘When it rained raisins.’ This was supposed to be merely a fresh proof of his imbecility, and the lady escaped.

In this imperfect narrative is there not a distorted version of a chapter in the ‘Pentameron’? But how did it get into the mind of an illiterate old woman in an out-of-the-way village? Nothing yet of Waterloo, Culloden, Sedgmoor, or the civil war; but in the end an old man declared that King Charles had once slept in an old house just about to be pulled down. But then ‘King Charles’ slept according to local tradition, in most of the old houses in the country. However, I resolved to visit the place.

Tall yew hedges, reaching high overhead, thick and impervious, such as could only be produced in a hundred years of growth and countless clippings, enclosing a green pleasaunce, the grass uncut for many a year, weeds overrunning the smooth surface on which the bowls once rolled true to their bias. In the shelter of these hedges, upon the sunny side, you might walk in early spring when the east wind is harshest, without a breath penetrating to chill the blood, warm as within a cloak of sables, enjoying that peculiar genial feeling which is induced by sunshine at that period only, and which is somewhat akin to the sense of convalescence after a weary illness. Thus, sauntering to and fro, your footstep, returning on itself, passed the thrush sitting on her nest calm and confident.

No modern exotic evergreens ever attract our English birds like the true old English trees and shrubs. In the box and yew they love to build; spindly laurels and rhododendrons, with vacant draughty spaces underneath, they detest, avoiding them as much as possible. The common hawthorn hedge round a country garden shall contain three times as many nests, and be visited by five times as many birds, as the foreign evergreens, so costly to rear and so sure to be killed by the first old-fashioned frost.

The thrushes are singularly fond of the yew berry; it is of a sticky substance, sweet and not unpleasant. Holly berries, too, are eaten; and holly hedges, despite their prickly leaves, are favourites with garden birds. It would be possible, I think, to so plan out a garden as to attract almost every feathered creature.

A fine old filbert walk extends far away towards the orchard: the branches meet overhead. In autumn the fruit hangs thick; and what is more exquisite, when gathered from the bough and eaten, as all fruit should be, on the spot? I cannot understand why filbert walks are not planted by our modern capitalists, who make nothing of spending a thousand pounds in forcing-houses. I cannot help thinking that true taste consists in the selection of what is thoroughly characteristic of soil and climate. Those magnificent yew hedges, the filbert walk—all, in fact are to be levelled to make way for a garish stucco-fronted hunting-box, with staring red stables and every modern convenience. The sun-dial shaft is already heaved up and broken.

The old mansion was used as a grammar school for a great many years, but has been deserted for the last quarter of a century; and melancholy indeed are the silent hollow halls and dormitories. The whitewashed walls are yellow and green from damp, and covered in patches with saltpetre efflorescence; but they still bear the hasty inscriptions scrawled on them by boyish hands—some far back in the eighteenth century. The history of this little kingdom, with its dynasties of tutors and masters, its succeeding generations of joyous youth, might be gathered from these writings on the walls: sketches in burned stick or charcoal of extinct monarchs of the desk; rude doggerel verses; curious jingles of Latin and English words of which every great school has its specimens; dates of day and month when doubtless some daring expedition was carried out; and here and there (originally hidden behind furniture, we may suppose) bitter words of hatred against the injustice of ruling authorities—arbitrary ushers and cruel masters.

The casements, broken and blown in, have permitted all the winds of heaven to wreak their will; and the storms sweeping over from the adjacent downs beat as they choose upon the floor. Within an upper window—now obviously enough a wind-door—two swallows’ nests have been built against the wall close to the ceiling, and their pleasant twitter greets you as you enter; and so does the whistling of the starlings on the roof. But without there, below, the ring of the bricklayer’s trowel as he chips a brick has already given them notice to quit.