Читать книгу The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated - W. H. Hudson - Страница 16

It is very pleasant to follow this slight track, this connecting thread, which brings to mind Richard Carew's account of the poor Cornish farmers of his time, three centuries ago, when he says that "amongst themselves they agree well and company lovingly together." I recall, too, that some social rodents, that live in communities, in collections of burrows or villages, have a track of that kind leading from village to village, worn by the feet of the little animals in visiting their neighbours. The fields being small you have innumerable stiles to cross in a five or a ten miles walk; but they do not want climbing, as they are very nearly all of that Cornish type made with half a dozen or more large slabs of granite placed gridiron-wise almost flush with the ground. You step easily over the stones: but the cattle do not follow, since, owing to their inability to see just where their feet will be set, their legs would come down between the slabs.

Cows are in most of the fields, the dairy being the main thing in these farms; and next to the small Jersey-like cow, the native breed, the pig ranks in importance. It is pleasant to see the pigs in these parts, as they are allowed more liberty in the fields and about the house than they usually get in other places; or, indeed, anywhere on this side of St. George's Channel. If not "the gintleman that pays the rint," the pig contributes a good deal towards it, and short of liberty to walk in at the front door and take his place in the family circle he has every consideration paid him. On going up to a farm-house one is sometimes obliged to get round or step over a pig lying comfortably in the path. One day, going to call on some friends who had taken lodgings at a small farm, I found a portly sow lying in the way a dozen yards or so from the front door. My friends were getting ready for a walk, and when we came out the sow got up and, placing herself at the side of the lady, set out with us. We all tried our best to turn her back, shouting indignantly at her and pushing her away with our sticks and boots, but all in vain—she would come. "I'm to blame," said the lady. "When we first came we had tea out of doors, and when this pig came up to look at us I foolishly gave her a slice of bread and butter and spoke kindly to her, and now I can't get away from her. I give her nothing, and I try to escape her attention, but she watches the door, and when she sees me with my things on she insists on keeping with me even if I walk miles. It is most inconvenient." It certainly was, and we carefully avoided the village for fear of remarks. Fowls, too, are reared in numbers, and it is a great grievance of the farmers that foxes must be religiously preserved along this coast where they cannot be hunted. Here, again, I am reminded of Carew's Survey of Cornwall, in which he writes: "The fox planteth his dwelling in the steep cliffs of the seaside, where he possesseth holds, so many in number, so dangerous of access, and so full of windings, as in a manner it falleth out a matter impossible to disseize him of his ancient inheritance." He still keeps it, and after three centuries is more secure in it than ever, since there is now no stronger law than this unwritten one which gives immunity to the fox.

As a rule, several dogs are kept on the farm; but he cares little for them. His fastness is close by in the cliffs, and between it and the farm there is a wilderness of furze bushes and stone fences, the ins and outs of which he knows better than the dogs. They cannot come near him. At one place the farmer's wife told me the foxes came about the house almost every night and started barking, whereupon the dogs barked in reply, and this would go on, bark fox, bark dog, by the hour, keeping them awake, until at last the dogs, tired of the useless contest, would go to sleep; then the foxes would sneak in to see what they could pick up.

There is very little cultivation—hardly more than is required for the use of the farm, and in many fields even this little is carried on under difficulties on account of the stones. The stones are taken out and piled on to the walls or hedges at the side, and though this process has been going on for centuries many boulders and huge blocks of granite still remain in the little fields. I was amused one day at the sight of a field of only about two acres on which I counted 135 stones appearing like huge mushrooms and toadstools over the ground. Corn had been grown on it, and I asked the farmer how it was managed. He answered that he would laugh to see a man and horses from any other part of the country try to cultivate that field and others like it. Here the men are used to it, and horses know their part so well that if the share touches a stone they stop instantly and wait for the ploughman's word to move on.

This same farmer told me that one day last summer a lady visitor staying in the neighbourhood came to where he was doing some work and burst out in praise of the place, and told him she envied him his home in the dearest, sweetest, loveliest spot on earth. "That's what you think, ma'am," he returned, "because you're here for a week or two in summer when it's fine and the heath in bloom. Now I think it's the poorest, ugliest, horriblest place in the whole world, because I've got to live in it and get my living out of it."

They certainly have to work hard to make the per acre they have to pay for their stony fields. But they are a tough, industrious, frugal people, in many instances little removed from peasants in their way of living, and are strongly attached to their rude homes and rough country. If you tell them that their lot is exceedingly hard, that they pay too high a rent, and so on, enumerating all the drawbacks, they assent eagerly, and will put in many little touches to make the picture darker; but if you then advise them to throw up their farms and migrate to some place you can name, in the Midlands say, where they will pay less for better land, and be out of the everlasting wind which tears every green leaf to shreds and makes their lives a perpetual discomfort, they shake their heads. They cannot endure the thought of leaving their homes. It is only the all but complete ruin of the tin-mining industry that has sent so many Cornishmen into exile in distant lands. But these wanderers are always thinking of home and come back when they can. One meets them every day, young and middle-aged men, back from Africa, Australia, America; not to settle down, since there is nothing for them to do—not just yet at all events; but because they have saved a little and can afford to take that long journey for the joy of seeing the dear old faces again, and the dear familiar land which proved so uninteresting to the reverend author of Forest Scenery.

But farming, unlike the mining and fishing industries, cannot fail utterly, and so long as a living can be made out of it these men will stick to their farms.

One brilliant spring-like day in midwinter I came upon an old man on the footpath at some distance from the nearest house, painfully walking to and fro on a clean piece of ground with the aid of two sticks. An old farmer, past work, I thought. His appearance greatly attracted me, for though his bent shrunken legs could hardly support him, he had a fine head and a broad, deep, powerful-looking chest. His face was of that intensely Irish type so common in West Cornwall, but more shapely, more noble, with a look of strength and resolution not at all common.

Seeing that he was old I supposed he was deaf, and shouted my "Good day," and the remark that it was a very fine day. But there was no need to shout, his senses were very good. "Good day to you," he returned, his stone-grey stern eyes fixed on my face. "Yes, it is a fine day indeed—very, very fine. And no frost, no cold at all, and the winter going on, going on. We are getting on very well indeed." And to this subject he kept in spite of my attempts to lead the talk to something else. The lovely weather, the extraordinary mildness of the season, the comfort of a winter with no frost or cold at all—to that he would come back. And at length, when I said good-bye and left him, the last words I heard him say were, "Yes, the winter is going—very freely, very freely."

For he was old—his age was eighty-seven; he had come to that time of life when the weather becomes strangely important to a man, when winter is a season of apprehension; when he remembers that the days of our age are three-score years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to four-score years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth it away. I was told that he had farmed the land where I found him taking his constitutional since he was a young man; that some months ago, on account of his infirmities, he had handed the farm over to one of his sons, and that he was still able to help a little in the work. His arms were strong still, and once up on the seat he could drive a cart or trap or reaping machine as well as any one.

He was but one of several grey old men I met with on the farms, and it seemed to me that they were something like their neighbour the badger, that they are as tenacious of their dreary-looking little homesteads and stony fields as that tough beast is of his earth among the rocks.