Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  But she visited the workhouse with him, when her old friends in the close usually preferred to stick to the pleasant almshouses, and there were few places in Sarum she had not seen and understood.

  “It’s the farm labourers on the plain that worry me the most,” Mason explained. “They have the hardest lot.”

  But today, as Jethro Wilson and his two wretched children drove the cart away, he clarified:

  “I always lament the lot of the poor farmers on the plain, Miss Shockley. But that man,” he glared after Jethro, “has only himself to blame.”

  The great Michaelmas Fair at Salisbury that came at the end of the harvest time, was not a proper fair – for little important business was done. But it was carefully kept up all the same, for money was freely spent. There were harvest accounts to settle, clothes to buy, entertainments of every kind to spend money on and the market place was crowded with brightly coloured booths. It lasted three days and on the first two, Monday and Tuesday, it was open until eleven at night for all the peep-shows, rides and pleasures that the fairground folk who journeyed across the plain could provide.

  It was on the Tuesday, at nine o’clock, that she saw Jethro.

  He was standing stock still by the gothic arches of the big poultry cross. Occasionally he swayed a little from side to side. By the light from nearby windows, she could see that his face was red; he appeared to see nothing around him at all. His beard had several days’ growth. His two children were sitting miserably under the cross, half-dressed and shivering, but the handful of by-standers were paying no attention to them.

  She gazed at them. Nobody moved. She went over.

  His lips were moving, very slowly. He seemed to be mouthing words, but she could not hear anything as she stood beside him.

  Then the little boy spoke:

  “He’s singing, miss.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Singing. She drew closer. He was staring down the street towards Fisherton bridge, and was completely oblivious to her.

  She put her ear close to his lips.

  “Ther vly be on the turnip.”

  Barely a whisper: the raucous old Wiltshire song, sung at every celebration. She listened again.

  “Ther vly be on the turnip.”

  It was just the first line: he was repeating it, under his breath, again and again.

  “Will he be like this for long?”

  The little boy shrugged.

  “Dunno, miss.”

  “His brain’s stopped,” the girl volunteered.

  “So I see.” She looked at them. “You’ll die of cold. You’d better come with me.” Rather to her surprise, they got up obediently. She began to turn towards Brown Street, where Mr Mason lived.

  “No you don’t, damn you.” He had suddenly been galvanised into life. He had both children held by the neck. His eyes were blazing at her. “Temperance bitch.”

  “He don’t mean it, miss,” the girl said.

  “I do,” he roared. He released the children, clenched his fists, and shaking with rage, took a step towards her.

  “Run, miss.”

  “Certainly not.”

  She faced him calmly.

  His eyes seemed to stand out; he raised his arms as he stepped forward. Then he crashed to the ground.

  “I thought he would,” she murmured.

  It was a surprise to her when, two days later, she visited Daniel Mason at the little temperance hotel he had set up for himself near the Greencroft on the city’s east side, and was told that Jethro Wilson had undergone a change of heart.

  “It may not be permanent, but it is a start,” Mason remarked.

  “Mr Mason, you are a wonder. How did you do it?”

  He shook his large head and smiled at her.

  “As a matter of fact, Miss Shockley, you did.”

  “I? I did nothing, except bring them to you.”

  “Not according to Jethro Wilson. His children are here. They spoke of your kindness continually. And he has been told that he attacked you.”

  “He didn’t. He lurched towards me.”

  Mason gave her a quick, shrewd look.

  “He thinks he did, Miss Shockley, and the shock is doing him good.”

  She smiled.

  “As you wish. Is he a perpetual drunkard?”

  “No. From all I know of him, he comes into town occasionally but then drinks heavily for several days – heavily to the point at which you saw him. His wretched children then have to put him in the cart and take him home. They fend for themselves like neglected animals.”

  “It is terrible.”

  “Yes. But the best news is,” Mason told her excitedly, “that he is prepared to give them up and put them in our care. See him,” he urged. “He is already much changed.”

  He was indeed.

  The figure who now respectfully rose from his chair in the little room Mason had provided, was shaven and washed. He had been provided with a clean coat; it was brown and went well with the now shining mane of russet hair that was combed straight back over his head. His black eyes, no longer swollen and reddened, took her in with a strange gentle intensity she had not encountered before.

  “I am sorry for the other night, miss.”

  He was still a little pale she noticed. He must have drunk heavily indeed.

  “It is forgotten.”

  “Not by me. I never tried to strike a woman before.”

  A woman, he had said, not a lady; as though she had been one of his own kind. For some reason she did not mind.

  “Are you better now?”

  “I was far gone.”

  “You were indeed.” She smiled. “How long is it since your wife died?”

  “Three years,” he answered quietly. “Giving birth.”

  “And you have no one to look after them?”

  “An old woman. A farm hand and his boy. That’s all there is – except for help at harvest.”

  “Where is your farm?”

  “Winterbourne – on the edge of the plain.”

  “How big?”

  “Fifty acres.”

  She sighed.

  Of all the combinations, this was the worst. For in recent generations, a great change had taken place at Sarum.

  Beginning with the threshing machines which the rioters had attacked back in 1830, the process of industrialisation had come to the Wessex region in many forms. Already, not only threshing machines, but the first steam ploughs had begun to appear in Wiltshire.

  “Even paying the ploughman more, and adding the cost of fuel,” Mason told her, “the steam plough cuts a deeper furrow for only a third of the price.”

  Rich men like Lord Pembroke could afford to purchase a fine Brown and May steam engine from Devizes. Enterprising men with access to capital, like Lord Pembroke’s consulting agent Mr Rawlence, could afford to build up flocks of prizewinning sheep.

  She had questioned Mason about the situation many times in the course of their work together.

  “The cloth trade’s weak, and a thousand acre sheep farmer up on the downs can keep over twelve hundred sheep with only three men and a couple of boys. There are many more farm labourers than available work, so the labourer is to be had for cheap. Our men are the lowest paid labourers in the county, you know,” Mason explained. “That’s why you see them leaving for Australia – or here in the workhouse.”

  “So it is hard for the labourers; what about tenants like Jethro Wilson?”

  “Hard for them too. Landlords are looking for tenants to improve their land and give them a better return for as little outlay as possible. That’s why many of the biggest will only give a farmer a one year lease. Men like Jethro Wilson are getting thrown out.”

  “Yet new men are coming in all the time. From the north.”

  Mason grimaced.

  “The fact is, most tenant farms are still a good proposition if you’re forward-looking. And the trouble is, most of our poorer sort aren’t.
That’s why when the Scots discover the low cost of our labour, they come south as fast as they can.”

  She had sometimes noticed strange accents in the market.

  She had made other inquiries about the subject, which confirmed everything Mason had said and told her much more besides.

  So now when she questioned Jethro Wilson, she had a shrewd idea of his predicament: too small to be economic, too poor to improve. And probably, certainly, too backward to take steps to save himself.

  And yet, as he stood before her now, gazing at her with his surprisingly quiet, keen eyes, she wondered – might there be hope for him after all?

  “Your children. Mr Mason says you’re prepared to put them in his care.”

  “’Tis not the workhouse. I’d never allow that.”

  “No.”

  “He says a Methodist farmer will take them in if I pay for keep and they’ll get schooling until I’ve put the farm to rights.”

  “I see.”

  “Me with no wife. I think it’s for the best. For the time being.”

  “So do I.”

  He seemed thoughtful.

  “I must reform myself, miss.” He said it not with shame, but with a quiet certainty that she found far more impressive.

  “It would be as well.”

  “Thank you, miss.”

  Then she said it. Partly on impulse, partly out of curiosity to learn more about the subject.

  “I think I shall come and see your farm, Mr Wilson.”

  She went the next week.

  There were many hedgerows on the high ground above the valleys-huge, untidy hedgerows, six, seven feet high or more, sometimes loaded with great tangles of ripe blackberries, bristling with nuts, elderberries, sloes – a storehouse which even the intense occupation of mice, red squirrels and visiting birds could never completely plunder. There were hedgerows enclosing fields around old Sarum and over the high ground far beyond.

  She rode out over the plain, taking the old turnpike road.

  The main roads were covered with tarmacadam now. But once off these, they were still often no more than dusty lanes or mere tracks and it was not long before she was passing along these more primitive, rutted ways. Then, leaving the world of close hedgerows she came out onto the bare, empty waste, and rode on, quite alone, for nearly an hour, until, coming over a ridge she saw in a dip below her the village she was looking for.

  So this was Jethro Wilson’s Winterbourne. She had not been there before, but it was just as she had imagined it probably was. There were dozens of villages in Wessex with that evocative Saxon name. The stream that flows in winter, the winter bourne. Nearly always they collected an extra name, to distinguish them from their neighbours: but for Jane Shockley, this one of many such places was always to be just Winterbourne.

  It lay on the very edge of the high ground, in a dip. On each side of its single little street, a line of cottages, with a mixture of brick, stone and plaster walls, and mostly thatched. There was a small stone church without a tower. Behind the houses, small fields with hedgerows extended a little way up the slope. There were two yew trees in the churchyard, a little windbreak of trees on the church’s northern side. And all around, the bareness of the chalk ridges, where the sheep were grazing.

  The windswept ridges and their sheep: there were half a million sheep on Salisbury Plain.

  She rode slowly down the slope and into the village street.

  It was very quiet. It was as if the great harsh light of the open spaces above had been carried by the wind itself so that, in the dip where the village lay, it had been softened, filtered.

  The children in the street were mostly barefoot; from their doorways, their mothers watched her curiously. It was possibly years, she realised, since this deserted hamlet on the edge of the empty plain had seen a lady riding side-saddle pass along their dusty street.

  The thatched cottages, she noticed, each bore the same little decoration – a thatch pheasant, set perkily near one end, staring to the south west. This was the thatcher’s mark, his signature, and would appear in each of the villages he visited to do his wonderful work.

  But the most important feature of the place lay on her left: the bourne.

  It was empty. Dry as a bone. Strands of straw, twigs, husks from nut-filled hedgerows, stinging nettles and dockleaves were all the small trench contained. From the roadway, over this ditch, three little wooden bridges led to the path that passed along the front of the cottages on the left.

  It had been dry all summer, for such is the nature of the winter bourne. But when the November rains began to fall upon the high ground, when snow and ice covered the rolling ridges and then the great thaws of spring set in, then the waters would descend, sometimes a steady stream, sometimes a deluge, cascading off the uplands, down slopes, down grassy ravine and chalky gulch: the waters would descend off the great bare spaces and flow joyously, carrying all before them, into the channels of the winter bourne. For six months of the year the quiet, deserted hamlet would quiver into renewed life beside its briskly running stream.

  This was the ancient magic of the winter bournes round the edge of Salisbury Plain.

  A child directed her to Jethro Wilson’s farm, which lay up a small track, two hundred yards from the main street. The track was overgrown and rutted; her horse picked her way up it gingerly.

  “I have come to see Mr Wilson.” Why did she suddenly feel awkward?

  “He’ll be back presently.” There was no invitation to enter. Obviously this was the old woman who kept the place, a thin, hard-faced, sharp-eyed creature in a red and purple shawl. She gave Jane a strange, measuring look before closing the side door.

  It was – it had once been – a typical farmhouse with a low fence of wooden railings, once painted white, across the front. A narrow path led thirty feet from the little gate to the front door, hardly ever used except for a wedding or a funeral. There was a room with a window each side of the door, and three smaller windows above. On the left hand side, a wing went back another thirty feet, in which a door and a motley collection of small windows seemed to have been set at random. The walls were brick and stone. Behind the wing was a once splendid addition enclosing the vegetable garden: a long chalk wall. They were one of her favourite features of the region, these chalk walls. Quarried from the sides of ridges, solid white chalk, cut into huge blocks and stacked, two feet thick, seven or eight feet high, soft to the touch, and surmounted by a coping of thatch that jutted out with an overhang of up to a foot, to protect the soft sides from the weathering of continuous rainwater.

  It could have been a fine place. But it was not.

  Jethro Wilson’s farm was utterly desolate.

  The paint was peeling from the window frames and the paths around were overgrown; the thatch, turned grey with age, was falling slowly apart; the two thatch pheasants that had once stood proudly on the roof of the house and on the top of the chalk were now nothing more than broken frames. She sighed. Nothing was sadder than a run-down farm.

  Yet when he appeared a few minutes later, Jethro seemed in good spirits. His shirt was open at the neck and he had a day’s growth of beard; but as he came to her side, the place seemed to take on a more hopeful aspect.

  He motioned towards the farmhouse, a little ruefully.

  “A lot to do, miss.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you Want to see round?”

  She did.

  He took her into the walled garden first. There were two damson trees and an old mulberry, whose soft fruit had been gathered in a basket. There was also a pear tree but it seemed to be dying. There were potatoes and carrots.

  “If you don’t repair the thatch on that wall, the chalk will wear away. Worse, the water will seep inside and then crack the wall when it freezes.”

  He nodded. “Have to mend the house too.”

  “Can you do it?”

  He shrugged.

  “I dunno, miss.”

  “Show me the rest,”
she ordered.

  It was a pitiful farm, though there were many others like it. His sheep were out on the ridge above and they walked slowly up there together. She inspected them.

  “All Southdowns? No Hampshires?”

  “They’re less trouble.”

  “And they give less in return too,” she said briskly.

  In the last few years, a great change had taken place in the vast population of sheep above Sarum, and Jane knew all about it. The hornless Southdowns which had replaced the old long-horned Wiltshire stock in the last century were now being replaced themselves with another, even more productive breed, the Hampshires.

  The Hampshires produced lambs which fattened earlier: they gave a better return; but they were, as Jethro said, more trouble, and certainly more expense, to feed.

  “I don’t like hurdle sheep,” he added. “Have to feed them root crops in a field instead of just turning them loose on the downs like a grass sheep.”

  “Even so, all the best farmers are changing to Hampshires,” she reminded him.

  He did not seem to be very impressed, but strode on before turning.

  “I can’t afford the investment,” he said quietly.

  It was very likely true.

  “But what about the agricultural societies?” she suggested. “Can they help? And what about your landlord?”

  Many farmers had found the machinery and investment needed in the new age too much for their individual purses; but for more than a generation now, clubs had been formed of small farmers who banded together to buy machinery and make capital investments. In a similar spirit, Mr Rawlence had recently set up a loan company for improving landlords.

  “Landlord’s an old man. Won’t spend anything,” Jethro replied. “As for the societies,” he gestured towards the little hamlet and the bare downs above: “we’re cut off here, you see.” She noticed that when he said it, there was a faint glint of satisfaction in his eye, and she understood. There were many in those quiet, desolate regions, miles away from the bustle of the city and its market, who had no longing for change.

  They began to walk down the slope again.

  “Have you any relations who could help?” she asked.