‘For myself ‒ no. For you ‒ yes, perhaps. I feel I haven’t considered you enough. I’ve been thinking too much about myself. I feel you’ve been thrust into this thing without having enough time to think.’
‘I’m not a fool. I know what I’m doing. You said you didn’t want a proper marriage and I said I felt the same, so as long as we both mean what we say ‒’
‘Don’t you want children?’
‘No. I do not.’
‘Most women do.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Well,’ he said, uncertainly, ‘it’s an understood thing, I would have thought.’
‘When women marry, they generally have children whether they like it or not. They’re given no choice in the matter. They just have to make the best of it. But I don’t intend that to happen to me because I wouldn’t want to bring a child into the world. Another life, another soul … And to be responsible for raising it … That thought is frightening to me.’
‘Frightening?’ Jim asked. ‘But surely if a man and a woman love one another ‒’
‘Yes? What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, with a shake of his head. The subject was painful to him; he had stumbled thus far unwittingly. ‘Nothing. Never mind.’
‘I’ve heard my father say that he loved my mother, but he had a queer way of showing it, driving her into the grave.’
‘That’s a very harsh thing to say.’
‘It’s true all the same.’
‘You have a poor opinion of men.’
‘They like their own way,’ Kirren said, ‘and they always make sure that they get it.’
‘Aren’t women the same?’
‘I’ve never had my own way in my life.’
‘Perhaps you haven’t gone the right way about it.’
‘If you are trying to tell me that I need to be sweet and pretty and soft and admire everything men say or do ‒’
‘I’m saying nothing of the kind.’
‘What are you saying?’ Kirren asked.
‘Well, we seem to have strayed from the subject, rather, but in the beginning I was trying to ask you if you had thought deeply enough about this marriage proposition ‒’
‘The marriage, as agreed between us, will suit me very well,’ Kirren said. ‘My father’s been nagging at me for years to find myself a husband and I am sick of hearing it. By marrying you I shall get some peace. But his idea is a good one all round. It means you get the farm in the end, but without taking it away from me, and if you can really make it pay ‒’
‘That I promise and swear to do.’
‘Then I shall be well satisfied.’
‘You seem very sure.’
‘Yes. I am.’ She looked at him with unsmiling gaze. ‘If you can be sure, why can’t I?’
There was no further argument after that; the matter was settled once and for all; and it only remained to see the vicar and arrange for the marriage to take place at the earliest possible date. And Jim, his last lingering doubts removed, felt free to give his mind to the farm.
Chapter Seven
It was a strange thing after living at Peele all these years, looking across the valley at Godsakes, to find himself now living at Godsakes, looking across the valley at Peele. It induced a queer feeling of dislocation in him, as though the sun itself were at fault for rising in the wrong part of the sky. Sometimes, in the fields at Godsakes, he would look up from his work and be stricken with a sense of confusion, because the tilt of the land was wrong and seemed to rear itself up at him, catching him unawares. But this confusion was purely instinctive, induced by sheer physical habit. He never for one single instant forgot where he was or why he was there.
The work at Godsakes was a challenge to him. His whole being rose to it, embracing it as a kind of crusade. His blood raced in response to it and he felt himself filled with the strength of three men. His mind was forever occupied with schemes, plans, calculations, ideas. While performing one task, he would be thinking over the next, so that no time was ever lost for want of knowing where to begin.
But although his mind was so full of schemes, it remained always cold and crystal clear. He knew what needed to be done and the best way of doing it. There was never any uncertainty. For one thing, he already knew the farm; had watched its downhill progress for the past fourteen years of his life; and had listened to John Sutton and Philip discussing what would have to be done to put Godsakes in order again when at last it came into their hands.
And here Jim’s heart always gave a leap, because of the way things had fallen out; because Godsakes had come into his hands and the Suttons would never have it now ‒ he would make quite certain of that. Philip had taken Jane from him and he in turn had taken Godsakes from them. There was immense satisfaction in this. It was a method of revenge that had a sense of rightness to it: a sense of fitness so complete that it tasted incredibly sweet on the tongue.
Whether it was right morally was, as he readily admitted, a matter of secondary importance to him, for he would have done it anyway without any compunction whatever. But there was a moral side to it and this added an extra dimension to the satisfaction he already felt. He had always had some sympathy for Morris Riddler in his struggles. The man had been treated badly by John Sutton, there was no doubt of that, and much of his life had been spoilt by it. Now Jim had given him the weapons with which to fight back and win. The two of them worked to the same end, the satisfaction of one magnified by that of the other.
‘There’s justice in this,’ Riddler would say. ‘I could almost believe in the goodness of God for sending you over to us.’
Not that they were always in agreement. Far from it, in fact. There were endless arguments between them, especially in the early days: arguments over the horses Jim bought; the implements, the new machines; and arguments over the new farm stock: the cows, the sheep, the pigs, the fowls.
‘Why Shorthorns?’ Riddler asked. ‘What’s wrong with Old Gloucesters, I’d like to know? And what do we want with so many sheep? The place is swarming with them already.’
‘This farm needs the sheep,’ Jim said. ‘Especially on the lighter lands. They’ll tread the soil and make it compact and their dung will put new heart into it. As for the cows, well, Shorthorns are more adaptable and milk better than Old Gloucesters do, and their milk makes better butter and cheese.’
‘Well, if you say so, of course! It is your money, after all. I suppose you can spend it how you like.’
‘Yes,’ Jim said, ‘and so I shall.’
‘Even waste it,’ Riddler said, ‘paying it all out in wages!’
This was a sore point with him because Jim had engaged an extra man, thus making three in all, and was paying them eight shillings a week.
‘You can’t expect good work if you don’t pay for it,’ Jim said, ‘and six shillings is not enough.’
‘You won’t get good work out of Lovell and Smith. They don’t know the meaning of the word.’
‘I know well enough how they’ve played you up. I’ve seen the way they slack in your fields. But Townsend is a first class man. Abelard recommended him. And as he will get eight shillings a week, Smith and Lovell will get it, too. And if they don’t earn it they’ll be dismissed.’
‘Have you told them that?’
‘Yes,’ Jim said, ‘and they will find I’m a man of my word.’
These were among the first changes Jim made on the farm, for he wanted to get as much land ploughed that autumn as time and the weather would allow. And so it was, on a warm misty morning in mid-September, that there were five teams at work in the fields at Godsakes, three ploughing the fifteen acres of old oat stubble behind the barn, and two ploughing the borecole ground between the barn and the hazel copse.
Jim had not ploughed for three years. It was good to take hold of the stilts again and to walk behind a team of horses that steamed in the early morning air; to feel the ploughshare cutting the ground and to see the furrow-slice heeling over, burying the stu
bble and weeds and the rough clumps of couch-grass.
Riddler worked in the same field as Jim, grumbling all the while at his plough, blaming his horses and swearing at them when they turned too sharply at the headland, yet ploughing nevertheless with a certain jaunty, swaggering gusto, because of the new life and hope that had suddenly come to the rundown farm.
‘Three years since you ploughed, did you say? For me it’s more like five or six!’ he called across to Jim once when both, on reaching the headland together, paused to give their teams a rest.
‘You’ve still got the knack of it, anyway.’ And Jim looked back at Riddler’s stetch, its furrows running clean and straight.
Riddler also turned and looked back. Then he spat into his hands.
‘I’m glad I’m still good for something!’ he said.
The weather that autumn was open and mild and the work of ploughing, rolling, and harrowing went ahead without hindrance until just a few days before Christmas. Riddler grumbled endlessly at the many cultivations Jim considered necessary for the cleaning of the land and he thought it the height of folly that Jim meant to plough up certain ‘pastures’ only to sow the ground with new grass. The pasture in question was actually a neglected arable field where couch-grass had been allowed to grow, with stubborn weeds such as thistles and docks and even clumps of thorn and briar.
‘This may be pasture to you,’ Jim said. ‘Myself, I would call it something else. Look at those sheep grazing there. They only graze one tenth of the field ‒ the rest of it is unwholesome to them. Even the grass they do eat isn’t nearly good enough for them ‒ it will keep them alive but that’s about all. I intend to sow proper leys, with the best seed-mixtures I can buy, containing clover and lucerne, and I’ll sow forty pounds of seed to the acre to be sure of getting a good, close pile. And then I hope we shall have some pastures that are really worthy of the name.’
‘Yes, if we’re not both dead by then!’
Grass was just grass to Riddler and he would stare in astonishment when Jim pointed out the various species, giving their scientific names and describing their respective virtues. Poas and festucas were nothing to him and although he listened to Jim’s ‘lectures’ it was only to pour scorn on them.
‘Cocksfoot and cowgrass! That’s all I know in the way of names. The rest is all flummery to me!’
It was the same with the artificial fertilizers Jim had bought.
‘Guano?’ he said, sniffing the sacks. ‘All the way from Peru? Seems a bit far-fetched to me! And as for this bone-manure of yours, I don’t see what we want with it. I’ve never used it in my life.’
‘Are you holding yourself up as the best of examples?’ Jim asked. ‘Because if you are I would like to point out ‒’
‘All right, all right, don’t rub it in! I know I’m a failure!’ Riddler said. ‘You’re the one that’s running things now. I don’t have any say any more. My only business these days is to stand with my mouth wide open in wonderment, watching you run my farm for me.’
But although he argued at every turn and was always making sarcastic remarks, Riddler’s desire for Jim to succeed overrode everything else, even his jealousy and pride.
‘I’d stand on my head if you told me to, if it meant doing good to the farm,’ he said, ‘and I damn well mean that, every word.’
‘I don’t want you to stand on your head, I want you to stand on your own two feet.’
‘Hah! And what about my corns? Am I to put guano on them?’
‘Yes, if you want them to grow,’ Jim said.
Riddler went off with a loud guffaw and, passing Kirren in the yard, he said: ‘One thing about this husband of yours! ‒ At least we get a few laughs since he came!’
And as the fine autumn progressed and more and more land came under the plough, changing acres of grey scrub grass to the clean brown-ribbed pattern of ridge and furrow, Riddler’s spirits expanded and soared.
‘I hope John Sutton is watching this!’ he said one day, jerking his head towards Peele. ‘I hope he can see what’s happening here. See what we’re doing, you and me.’
Jim, forking field-rubbish onto a fire, paused and looked across the valley at Peele. The big square house, very white in the sunlight, against its dark background of trees, stood without any sign of life, but out on the land there was plenty of activity, especially in the arable fields, where the winter corn was being sown.
‘He can see it all right,’ he said quietly. ‘He has no choice but to see what we do.’
‘Well, that’s the whole idea, isn’t it? To show them what stuff you’re made of, eh, and let that wife of Philip Sutton’s see that she married the wrong man?’
Jim, in silence, turned back to his work, forking up the couch-grass and weeds that had been raked and harrowed out of the ground and placing them on the slow-burning fire.
‘Well?’ Riddler said, provokingly. ‘Can you deny that’s what you want?’
‘I understand from Abelard that Philip and Jane are still away.’
‘On their honeymoon?’
‘Yes. What else?’
‘Seems they must be enjoying it, staying away so long as this. How long is it? Five weeks or six?’
‘I haven’t been keeping count,’ Jim said.
Riddler, so often forced to give in to Jim over the management of the farm, could always get his own back by taunting him in this way, and he took a malicious delight in it. Philip and Jane had been married on the second Sunday in October, a week after Jim’s marriage to Kirren, and the young couple, according to gossip, were spending their honeymoon abroad, travelling in France and Italy.
‘France and Italy!’ Riddler would say. ‘Now you could never have given her that. Not on a farm-bailiffs wages, eh? Not unless you had been prepared to spend all your savings doing so.’
Towards the end of November the young couple returned home and a week or so afterwards three large covered vans were seen driving up to Peele.
‘Paintings and statues and sculptures and such,’ old Abelard told Jim when they met down at the brook one day, ‘and something my sister calls a spinette, that they’ve brought back with them from Italy.’
Whatever happened at Peele these days was soon known at Godsakes, and if some of the tales were exaggerated, obviously others were not, for the changes being wrought there, now that the house had a new mistress, could be seen and heard plainly enough. There were often parties in the evenings, when fine carriages came to the door and the whole house was a blaze of lights, and sometimes, when the wind was right, the sound of music could be heard across the valley at Godsakes.
‘No wonder that girl jilted you,’ Riddler would say, shaking his head. ‘She wanted a lot more out of life than you could’ve given her, didn’t she, eh?’
‘Yes, it would seem so,’ Jim said.
In between those times when the fallow lands were being cleaned by repeated cultivations, Jim and Riddler and the other men were busy cutting and laying the hedges, and day after day great fires of brash blazed and crackled in the fields, sending their thick grey smoke rolling out over the valley. The hedges were hawthorn, hazel, and ash, and because they were so badly overgrown, much stout timber was cut from them. This was trimmed, cut into lengths, and tied in bundles of such a size that each of the men employed on the farm could carry one home on his back when he chose. And the rest of the timber, stacked in the yard, was enough to feed the farmhouse fires for at least six months.
Jim also engaged a warrener to trap the rabbits infesting the farm and during the first month or so more than two hundred rabbits were killed. These were the warrener’s source of income but often, when his ‘bag’ was extra big, he would leave a couple of brace at the house, so that rabbit stew and rabbit pie appeared regularly at the table.
‘Better than reisty bacon, eh?’ Riddler would say, grinning at Jim, and to Kirren, more than once, he said: ‘You’re getting to be quite a good cook now that you’ve got a husband to feed. This rabbit pie is something li
ke.’
‘Give me good meat to cook,’ Kirren said, ‘and I will give you decent meals.’
Certainly the reisty bacon had proved too much for Jim and he had soon asked Kirren to bring home a joint of fresh meat every week from the butcher’s in town.
‘A pretty penny that must have cost!’ Riddler said, when the first of these joints, a rib of beef, was brought smoking hot to the table. ‘But that’s what comes of being genteel ‒ his viands have got to be paid for in cash before they’re good enough for him!’
‘It’s his own money he’s spending, remember.’
‘As though I’m likely to forget!’
‘Are you going to carve?’ Kirren asked.
‘No, not me!’ Riddler said. ‘Not at sixpence a pound, I’m not! He paid for it, he can carve.’
Kirren, in exasperation, picked up the great dish of meat and put it down in front of Jim.
‘I’m sorry about my father,’ she said. ‘He’s always had this childish side.’
‘Childish be damned!’ Riddler said. He poured himself a mug of ale.
Jim picked up the carving-knife, sharpened it on the whetstone, and tested the blade with his thumb. Then he picked up the carving-fork and began carving the joint.
‘Nice thick slices for me,’ Riddler said, ‘and plenty of fat off the outside.’
These joints of meat, as Jim knew, had to be brought home by Kirren, along with all the other provisions, which meant a six-mile walk in all, sometimes in pouring rain. She would go in to the Wednesday market, carrying a heavy load of produce, and return almost as heavily laden with the week’s shopping. As this caused him some concern he would, in the early days, walk down to meet her at Abbot’s Lyall and carry her baskets the last two miles home.
Kirren was astonished ‒ she had never been helped before ‒ and because she was unused to it, she was inclined to be ungracious.
‘You’re wasting good working-time, trailing out here like this. I can manage perfectly well. I always have done, up to now.’
The Two Farms: A moving family saga set in a Victorian farming community Page 10
