‘Well, no, not exactly. It’s all a question of application ‒’
‘Then Philip must be made to learn a little application, too, though you’ve left it rather late in the day to remedy that yourself, seeing that soon he will be going to school.’ John Sutton was somewhat nettled. He thought the vicar a feeble fellow. ‘But you said you wanted to discuss Jim and I still haven’t got to the bottom of what it is you’re trying to say.’
‘It’s really quite simple,’ the vicar said. ‘Jim is getting an education better suited to a gentleman than the farm bailiff he is going to be and I think, if we continue with it, it may cause problems later on.’
‘Make him discontented, you mean, and give him ideas above his station? Yes, well, you may be right.’
Feeble fellow he might be but, now he had come to the point at last, the vicar was talking good sense.
‘What do you advise me to do?’
‘I think, when Philip starts going to school, Jim should stop his lessons with me and start work on the farm straight away. After all, he’s nearly thirteen, and most boys of his class would have been working long ago. I shall be sorry to lose such a good pupil but I think it’s in his own best interests. He’s got to find his proper level, and if we leave it too long, that may prove very hard for him.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ Sutton said. ‘He’s had a good grounding with you, anyway, and that’s about what I had in mind when I sent him to you. I’m glad you mentioned the matter to me. I shall do exactly as you say.’
In the second week in September, therefore, when Philip went off to Surpingham, Jim began work on the farm.
‘The boy is to learn everything,’ Sutton said to Oakley, the bailiff. ‘He’ll be treated like any other farm boy and do exactly the same work. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, if he hasn’t been spoilt for it,’ Oakley muttered under his breath; and to Jim, as he led him away, he said, ‘Bit of a come-down for you, isn’t it, doing some real work for a change?’
But Jim himself had no such feelings. The farm was where he wanted to be. He had never had any doubts about that, and if his lessons with the vicar had absorbed him, his lessons in farmyard and cowshed and field absorbed him even more completely. He was strong, healthy, and energetic, and exulted in his ability to tackle any job on the farm. The work, far from degrading him, brought him satisfaction and joy. He liked nothing better them to take off his coat and roll up his sleeves and ‘get pitched in’, as old Abelard said. And Philip, home for the holidays, watching Jim heaving and sweating, pitching sheaves to the threshing machine, or loading dung into a cart, would laugh at the vigour and cheerfulness with which he toiled.
‘You never seem to mind getting yourself in a muck sweat. I suppose that’s the peasant in you.’
‘Arr, if thee zay zo, zir,’ Jim said with a grin, and tugged at the peak of his corduroy cap.
John Sutton’s plan was that Jim should spend two years working with the cowman, two with the carters, and two with the shepherd, George Abelard. This suited Jim very well; he wanted to know everything that cowman and carter could teach him; but his greatest friend on the farm had always been George Abelard and any spare moment he had was spent helping with the flock.
Because of his special interest in sheep he was always allowed ‘time off’ in the spring so that he could help with the lambing and this was perhaps the happiest of all the year’s happy seasons. He would spend a good many days at a stretch up in the lambing field under the hill and would sleep at night with the old shepherd in his hut on wheels, waking to the slightest sound in the pens as quickly as Abelard did himself. Jim had a sort of instinct for sheep; an understanding of their needs; a sympathy with them so acute that by the time he was fourteen he already had the shepherd’s gift for sensing in advance that a certain ewe would need help in lambing.
‘You’re the best helper I ever had,’ Abelard said to him once, and this was high praise indeed, for the old shepherd was hard to please.
Jim was not paid with the other farm employees because he already received an allowance, just as Philip did, and this custom was kept up even though he now worked on the farm. Jim’s allowance was ten shillings and to him it always seemed a fortune, for even grown men on the farm received no more than this, and they had families to feed and clothe, whereas Jim’s ten shillings was his to spend just as he pleased.
In fact he spent very little and in this he was different from Philip who, although he received a whole guinea, was always ‘skint’ by Wednesday or Thursday and badly in debt by Saturday night. Often Philip would ask Jim to lend him a shilling or two and in the early days Jim would oblige. But there came a time later on when Philip, home for the holidays, borrowed half-a-crown from Jim and returned to school without paying it back. So the next time he was at home and asked Jim for a loan he met with a forthright refusal.
‘Lord, you are a mean old stick! You must have stacks of tin put away, always saving the way you do. What are you going to do with it?’
‘You’ll see one of these days.’
‘Do you have to be so mysterious? Can’t you answer a chap straight out?’
‘All right, I’ll tell you,’ Jim said. ‘I intend to buy some sheep.’
‘What on earth for?’ Philip asked.
‘For one thing, I happen to like them,’ Jim said. ‘For another, they’ll make a good investment.’
‘Well, you’ll have to ask my father’s permission before you start keeping sheep of your own, since you’ll be raising them here on our land.’
‘Yes, of course, I intend to,’ Jim said.
John Sutton gave his permission without any hesitation and at the autumn sheep fair that year Jim bought twenty Cotswold shearling ewes ‒ theaves as old Abelard called them ‒ and a Cotswold ram to go with them. The Peele flock consisted of Downs and Leicesters and Jim chose to keep a different breed so that his twenty-one sheep could be picked out easily from the rest.
His ‘investment’ cost him thirty-eight pounds, but he had only to walk out into the pasture and see his sheep grazing there, their thick curly fleeces a rich pale gold in the autumn sunlight, to feel that they were worth every penny even of this huge sum. The pride he took in them was immense. There were no sheep like them in the whole world. And because of them he was much chaffed by the men and boys on the farm.
‘Here comes the flockmaster,’ they would say, and once the head carter, Joe Greening, pinned a bunch of ‘daglocks’ in Jim’s cap, saying, ‘There, now you look the part to a tee.’
Jim’s flock lambed in April, giving him twenty-six lambs, and of these he lost only two. One of the original ewes proved barren and she was sold off with the twenty-four lambs early in August. Together with the sale of the wool, Jim’s profit that year amounted to some forty pounds and the Suttons, who were with him at the sale, watched in amusement as he stowed his money away in a small washleather bag.
‘Ah, Jim will end up richer than any of us, you mark my words,’ John Sutton said with a laugh. And Philip, with a look of disdain, replied, ‘He’ll end up a miser if you ask me.’
At the sheep fair in October Jim, again with Sutton’s permission, bought twenty-one ewes, so that he now had forty in all. Thus, in the following spring, his flock yielded fifty-three lambs, fifty of which he reared successfully, and that year his total profits amounted to eighty-eight pounds. Once again he planned to buy a new draft of ewes but this time John Sutton was less ready with his permission.
‘How many were you thinking of buying?’
‘Another twenty.’
‘H’m,’ Sutton said, doubtfully. ‘Well, I think myself it would be better if you were to buy just ten, and keep your flock to a round fifty. That’s plenty big enough for you to manage, what with your proper work as well, and we don’t want the land getting sheep-sick, do we, eh?’
‘No, sir,’ Jim said.
But he was puzzled by Sutton’s edict, for the main flock at Peele had been reduced in recent years and
there was no risk whatever that the two hundred sheep now kept would render the land sheep-sick.
‘Why does Mr Sutton want me to keep my flock down to fifty?’ he asked old Abelard. ‘The farm doesn’t carry nearly so many sheep as it used to, so why should he say that?’
Old Abelard gave a grunt.
‘Mr Sutton’s the master here and the master don’t have to have any reasons for what he says to us underlings. We’ve got to be kept in our place, you see, and it seems that goes the same for you as it does for all the rest of us, even though you’re a special case and have been brought up with the master’s son.’
Jim made a face. He was somewhat cast down.
‘It seems I’ve been overstepping the mark. Getting above myself, as they say. Had I better give up my flock altogether, d’you think? After all, I do graze them on Peele land.’
Old Abelard shook his head. His hand rested briefly on Jim’s arm.
‘You keep your flock,’ he said quietly. ‘Keep ’em so long as you’re allowed. That’s your investment, isn’t it? Your stake in the future, as you might say. It gives you a bit of independence and no doubt that goes against the grain in certain quarters, if you follow me, but don’t you worry too much about that. Your little flock isn’t doing no harm. As for grazing Peele land, why, they manure it at the same time, don’t they? And many a flock gets its keep free for doing that.’
So Jim kept his little flock and tended them with earnest care, culling those ewes that were sickly or barren and replacing them with vigorous theaves, but always, conscientiously, keeping their number to the round fifty that John Sutton had stipulated. And every year his profits were such that he added upwards of eighty-five pounds to his savings in one of the Missenham banks.
Philip was always scornfully amused at Jim’s interest in sheep. He did not care for them at all. They were ‘poor man’s stock’, he said, and out of place now on a farm like Peele.
‘If I had my way, I’d get rid of them all. We only keep them for tradition’s sake. We no longer need the Golden Hoof, not with modern farming methods, and God knows there’s no real money in them.’
Old Abelard disagreed. ‘You’re wrong there, Master Philip. There’s money in sheep, sure enough, only it’s silver, you see, not gold. But silver mounts up in time, you know, if only you’ve got the patience to let it.’
Philip, with a smile, looked at Jim.
‘And is the silver mounting up for you?’
‘I’m not complaining,’ Jim said.
‘How much have you got in the bank so far?’
‘I don’t see why I should tell you that.’
‘God! You are a secretive beggar! I don’t know why I talk to you. And what are you going to do with it ‒ all this money you’re putting away?’
‘I hope one day, if all goes well, to rent a few acres of land of my own.’
‘A smallholding?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘But you’re going to be our bailiff here and take over from Oakley when he gets old.’
‘I can easily do both. Many a bailiff does that.’
‘Small farms are a thing of the past. They’re uneconomic. They’re suicide. You’ve only got to look at Godsakes, going to ruin over there. That’s a hundred and ten acres and yet just look at the state it’s in. Fields overgrown with brambles and thorns! Stock reduced to nothing at all. House and buildings falling down!’
‘That’s nothing to do with the size of the farm. It’s a good-sized farm, taken all round, what with the hill pastures and common rights on the meadows and all. It’s just that Riddler has had bad luck and isn’t very good at managing things.’
‘Bad luck my eye! The damned fool bit off more than he could chew when he decided to buy that place. A man’s got no business buying land when he hasn’t even got the money to pay for it let alone do right by it!’
‘No, well, you may be right, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?’ The story behind Riddler’s misfortunes was as well known to Jim as it was to Philip himself, for it was often discussed at Peele and John Sutton made no bones about the part he had played in it. ‘It’s not entirely Riddler’s fault, is it, that he ran into trouble over money when he first bought his farm?’
‘He blames my father. We all know that. And to judge by the way you’re talking now, it seems as though you take Riddler’s side.’
‘I don’t know about taking sides, but I’m sorry for Riddler, I must admit.’
‘Sorry for him!’ Philip exclaimed. ‘After what he’s done to that farm, letting it go to rack and ruin, an eyesore and a damned disgrace? Why, my father says it’ll take five years to put that land in order again, when we do get hold of it. Hanging on by the skin of his teeth, year in, year out, the way he does! He only stays there to spite us and stop us getting our hands on it. And yet you say you feel sorry for him!’
Philip turned and marched off and old Abelard said to Jim: ‘It doesn’t do to stick up for Morris Riddler. Not with the master or his son. The master’s been waiting a long time to get his hands on that farm and it’s a sore subject with him that he hasn’t managed it so far.’
‘I suppose he’ll have to give up in the end? Riddler, I mean.’
‘It’s only fair amazing to me that he’s hung on as long as he has, but that’s how it is in farming, you see. It can take a man twenty years to go to ruin good and proper. And I reckon it’s a terrible thing, to see land go back like that, and the people on it brought so low that they’re scarcely nothing better than beggars. It’s Riddler’s wife and young daughter I feel most sorry for, stuck over there, working so hard, scarcely ever leaving the place from one year’s end to the next. If Riddler’s got any feeling for them he should sell up and get out and give them the chance of a decent life.’
‘Yes, I suppose he should,’ Jim said. ‘But if I were Riddler and had my own farm I reckon I’d feel the same as he does. I’d stick it out to the very end and fight for it to the last breath.’
‘Well, that’s what he’s doing, sure enough,’ Abelard said, with a shake of his head.
It happened not long after this that Jim had a meeting with Morris Riddler. It was a day in early August and he had gone with the other Peele men to begin cutting a field of corn on that part of the farm that had once been Granger’s and which lay on the same side of the valley as Godsakes. The men were at work with their scythes, cutting a broad path round the field, to make way for the reaping machine, when the warm west wind, blowing down from Godsakes, brought with it a scent of hay so exceedingly sweet and strong that the men stopped work and sniffed the air.
‘Riddler’s got a hot stack,’ said Joe Greening, and turned to look up at Godsakes, rising in a series of grey-green fields beyond the boundary of Granger’s. ‘There it is. At the top there, look.’ And he pointed to an ungainly haystack standing in a deserted field immediately under Hogden Hill. ‘Whew!’ he said, sniffing again. ‘That’ll go up in flames directly if something isn’t done about it.’
‘Going to tell him about it, are you?’ Arthur Slatter asked slyly, for the Peele men, these nine years past, had kept clear of Morris Riddler for fear of offending their employer.
‘Somebody ought to,’ Greening said.
And Jim, putting away his scythe, volunteered.
Riddler had been milking his cows and was letting them out into the pasture when Jim came up the adjoining field and spoke to him over the farmyard wall.
‘You’ve got a hot stack,’ he said, and pointed in its general direction. ‘In the field with a hut in it, just under the hill. It’ll go up in flames, Joe Greening says, if you don’t do something about it soon.’
‘Damn and blast!’ Riddler said. ‘If it isn’t one damned thing it’s another!’ He closed the gate behind the last cow and came across the yard to the wall. ‘Did Joe Greening send you to me?’
‘He said somebody ought to come.’
‘That was good of him. Good of you, too. Your master would never h
ave done that. He’d have stood and watched it burn.’ Riddler was eyeing Jim curiously. ‘You’re Jim Lundy, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘The boy Sutton found in his barn that time? I’ve seen you about these many years, but never close to like this before.’ Resting his folded arms on the wall, he looked across the valley at Peele and gave a slight lift of his grey stubbled chin. ‘I see the lot of you, over there, coming and going about the place. You look like a lot of puppets from here and no doubt we look the same to you.’
‘Yes,’ Jim said, and the thought made him smile.
He was just as curious about Riddler, seeing him close for the first time, as Riddler was about him; but, being a boy, barely seventeen, he was rather less open about it and only when the man’s queer, crooked face was averted did he steal a few quick glances at him. And after these quick glances he found himself wondering how it was that Morris Riddler, who was not really a big man, should nevertheless give an impression of bull-like solidity and strength.
‘Does John Sutton treat you all right?’
‘Yes. He treats me very well.’
‘Expects you to work, though, doesn’t he?’
‘Everyone has to work,’ Jim said.
‘He used to treat me pretty well, too, until it suited him not to. But no doubt you know that old tale … John Sutton’s side of it, anyway.’ Riddler’s gaze came back to Jim’s face. ‘Is he still waiting to buy me out?’ he asked with harsh jocularity. ‘Still waiting like a carrion crow to have my carcass, is he, eh?’
‘I must get back to work,’ Jim said. He turned away.
‘Hang on a minute. I’ll walk down with you and look at that stack.’
Riddler, with awkward agility, climbed over the farmyard wall and dropped down beside Jim. Together they walked down the sloping fields, all of which, in one way or another, were in an advanced state of neglect. In one a dozen sheep were grazing and Jim, who had passed them on the way up, now carefully looked away, for the sheep had not yet been shorn, although it was August, and their wool hung from them in tatters, scratched off on the thorn bushes that grew dotted about the field.
The Two Farms: A moving family saga set in a Victorian farming community Page 4
