The Two Farms: A moving family saga set in a Victorian farming community

by Mary E. Pearce

  ‘It’s never worried him in the past. If it had he would surely have taken care to see that it didn’t happen again.’

  ‘He’s not often as drunk as this.’

  ‘Often enough,’ Kirren said.

  She picked up her father’s saddlebags, heavy with the bags of coin he had drawn from the bank that day, and went indoors. She slung the saddlebags into a cupboard. It was past nine o’clock and she began preparing for bed, making up the fire for the night by heaping wood-ashes over it, and filling the kettle on the hook.

  While she was doing this, Jim came pushing in at the door, carrying her father’s limp body head downwards over his shoulder. ‘I’m taking him up to his bed,’ he said.

  He crossed the kitchen to the opposite door and went out into the hall; she heard his tread on the creaking stairs; then in the bedroom overhead. She reached up to the mantelpiece, took down her candle in its holder, and lit it at the oil-lamp at the table. She stood waiting for Jim to come down, and the moment he entered the room she said:

  ‘Perhaps you think I should have carried him up to bed?’

  ‘No, I do not. But I think you could have done something more than leave him lying out in the yard.’

  ‘That was where he chose to fall.’

  ‘You are very hard on him.’

  ‘Yes, I daresay.’

  ‘He is your father,’ Jim said. ‘Your own flesh and blood. Don’t you care anything for him at all?’

  ‘No, why should I?’ Kirren said. ‘He’s never cared anything for me.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can say that.’

  ‘I know him better than you do. I’ve lived with him all my life. He’s never been able to forgive me because I pulled through the flu years ago and my brother did not.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

  ‘I heard him say it,’ Kirren said. ‘I was out there in the yard and my mother and father were in the barn. “Why did it have to be the boy that died?” That’s what he said. I heard it plain.’

  ‘Did he say that?’ Jim was shocked. ‘That was a terrible thing to say.’

  ‘Terrible? Yes, perhaps. But it’s only what I felt myself. That if we had had the power to choose I would far rather my father had died than my brother Eddy who was only twelve and was always so quiet and gentle and kind. But we cannot choose. We have to accept. And that’s what my father couldn’t do. Oh, I realize it’s not his fault that he cares nothing for me, but it’s not my fault, either, that I care nothing for him.’

  ‘What you overheard him say ‒ people do say cruel things in moments of stress, things they don’t really mean at all. I can understand how you’ve felt all these years, after hearing him say that, but I think you should try to forgive him now, if only for your own sake. It’s wrong to store up bitterness.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Kirren said, ‘you should know about that, shouldn’t you?’

  For a moment Jim was taken aback. He had not expected such a counterstroke.

  ‘That is scarcely the same thing. And I wasn’t talking about myself. I was talking about you.’

  ‘Yes, it’s always easier dwelling on other people’s faults. It helps you to overlook your own. But what was it that brought you here if it wasn’t bitterness against the Suttons? Why did you make up your mind to stop them getting their hands on this farm if it wasn’t to have your revenge on them?’

  Jim was silent, staring at her. What she said was perfectly true and there was no denying it. But it was not the whole truth and, try as he would when he answered her, he could not prevent some sense of pique from betraying itself in his tone.

  ‘You choose to overlook the fact that part of my reason for coming here was to help your father keep the farm.’

  ‘It was part of your reason, perhaps, but not the whole. But you don’t have to justify yourself to me because your coming here was the best thing that ever happened to us and the reasons behind it don’t matter one jot. What you are doing on this farm profits us all equally.’

  ‘I’m glad you can find it in your heart to give me some credit at least for doing good.’

  ‘Is credit so important to you?’

  ‘I am only human, after all.’

  ‘A moment ago you were lecturing me for my lack of daughterly tenderness towards my father out in the yard. But at least I covered him with a rug. Perhaps you will give me credit for that.’

  ‘If I did lecture you, I have been repaid in full,’ Jim said. ‘It seems we are quits together then, so I’ll take myself off to bed before we begin wrangling again.’

  The atmosphere had eased between them. There was humour in the glance they exchanged. But afterwards, when she had gone and he stood for a while alone in the kitchen, he was filled with an irksome restlessness; a sense of something left unresolved.

  At five o’clock the following morning he was out in the lambing-pen, attending to his ewes and lambs, and as he went to and fro, he found himself brooding more and more on what Kirren had said to him about his bitterness against the Suttons.

  Why it should so vex his mind he could not at first understand. The events that had led to his leaving Peele had indeed caused great bitterness in him, and that bitterness had prompted him to avenge himself on the Suttons. Furthermore, as he had to admit, he still felt immense satisfaction at having taken Godsakes from them. It was so right in every way. There was justice in it, as Riddler said. And Jim felt the same fierce elation now that he had felt at the very beginning. So why, when the fruits of his revenge were still sweet and satisfying to him, should he feel irked by what Kirren had said?

  Slowly he realized that it was because the element of revenge was no longer of prime importance. He had been at Godsakes more than six months now and during the latter part of that time he had scarcely thought of the Suttons at all. He had been too busy; too absorbed. And he now saw, with great clarity, that what he was doing at Godsakes had become more important to him than his original reason for doing it ‒ important for its own sake; important because it was good in itself.

  This realization gave him a jolt of pleasure; a feeling of wholeness; a sense of release. And as he deliberately let his thoughts dwell on the Suttons ‒ on the treatment he had received at their hands; on the way he had vented his spite on them by snatching Godsakes from their grasp ‒ his feelings became clearer still, his pleasure more and more profound. The satisfaction was still there ‒ he knew he would feel that all his life ‒ but the bitterness and spite were gone.

  With this discovery fresh in his mind he returned to the house. It was now half past six and Kirren was laying the table ready for breakfast. Jim was glad to find her alone and he came to the point immediately, wanting to get it off his mind before Riddler came in from milking.

  ‘I’ve been thinking over what you said, about my feeling bitter against the Suttons.’

  Kirren stood looking at him in surprise.

  ‘It seems to worry you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, because it’s not quite true.’

  ‘You still want to make me believe that you only came here to help us out of pure Christian charity and goodness of heart?’

  ‘No, I’ve never pretended that. I came here, as I said at the time, because I wanted to spite the Suttons. But what I am saying now is that I no longer feel the bitterness you charged me with last night.’

  ‘You mean you’ve forgiven them?’ Kirren said, with barely perceptible mockery.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Jim said, ‘that I would put it quite like that.’

  ‘But you do perhaps regret what you’ve done and would now turn us out of the farm so that your old friends the Suttons can have it after all?’

  ‘I can see you’re determined to make fun of me instead of listening to what I say.’

  ‘I am listening now. With all my ears.’

  ‘Are you indeed?’

  ‘Indeed, I am.’

  There was a pause. She looked at him. But her assumption of earnestness did not deceive him for o
ne moment. He knew it was not intended to.

  ‘It isn’t easy, talking to you, when you so plainly think me a hypocrite.’

  ‘Does it matter what I think? I told you last night that you don’t have to justify yourself to me, but it seems you are determined to do so.’

  ‘No. I just want you to understand.’

  ‘You want me to think well of you.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true all the same.’

  ‘Very well, supposing it is? Am I so different from anyone else? Don’t you want to be well thought of yourself?’

  ‘By you, do you mean?’

  ‘By anyone.’

  ‘Being well thought of,’ Kirren said, ‘is something I’ve had to do without, whereas you, being a man, take it for granted as your right.’

  ‘You think me conceited, then,’ Jim said, ‘and altogether too full of myself.’

  ‘You are no worse than other men. You have at least got something to be conceited about. You do at least get things done.’

  ‘I’ve been a lot luckier than some. Luckier than your father, for instance.’

  ‘You are always defending him. I don’t know why that should be, I’m sure, when he talks to you the way he does, jeering at everything you do, even when he knows you’re right.’

  ‘I try not to let that worry me because I understand how he feels. I know how I should feel, myself, if I were in his shoes and had a stranger coming in, telling me how to run my farm.’

  ‘You are certainly very patient with him. More patient than he deserves.’

  ‘Your father is rough and careless, I know, and you have suffered at his hands. But he minds about you, in his way. I’m absolutely sure of that.’

  ‘In his way? Yes, perhaps.’

  ‘You are all he’s got left in the world ‒ of his own flesh and blood, that is.’

  ‘So he’s reminded me many times, and therein lies my importance to him. I’m all there is left of the old stock and he is hoping to breed from me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have I shocked you, speaking so plain?’ Kirren’s dark gaze was amused. There was mockery in her tone again. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve lived so long with my father, the language of the farmyard comes easy to me.’

  ‘It’s not the language,’ Jim said. ‘It’s the fact that you seem to have known all along what was in your father’s mind.’

  ‘That is never difficult. His mind is like an open book. When he suggested a business marriage, he thought it would turn into something else. I could see that as clear as glass.’

  ‘And I,’ Jim said wryly, ‘saw nothing at all.’

  ‘But no doubt he’s spoken about it since.’

  ‘Yes, a few weeks ago. How did you know?’

  ‘He was bound to speak of it sooner or later. And, you may as well be warned, he’s bound to speak of it again.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about it,’ Jim said. ‘You have nothing to fear from me.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said steadily.

  ‘I told your father, in positive terms, that he was to put it out of his mind.’

  ‘Good advice, so long as he takes it. But he won’t, of course.’ And after a short pause she said, ‘You never really finished saying whatever it was you were trying to say when you first came in.’

  ‘You wouldn’t let me,’ he said with a smile. ‘You thought I was making heavy weather of it and you were probably quite right. But what I was trying to say was this ‒ that what I felt about the Suttons doesn’t matter any more. At least, not in the same way. What I am doing on this farm is more worthwhile than anything else I could ever have done with my life and that matters more to me than simply having my revenge. Or, to put it another way, the fact that I no longer hate the Suttons somehow makes my revenge complete.’

  He went outside to wash at the pump, and Kirren, as she prepared the breakfast, heard him talking to her father in the yard. After a while Riddler came in. He stood at one side of the hearth, watching her as she swung out the hook and hung the frying-pan over the fire.

  ‘Somebody put me to bed last night.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Seems I’ve got a better son-in-law than I have daughter,’ he said.

  ‘By that same token,’ Kirren replied, ‘I’ve got a better husband than I have father.’

  ‘I don’t see that that follows at all.’

  ‘At least he doesn’t come home drunk.’

  ‘Did you bring my saddlebags in?’

  ‘Yes, they’re in the cupboard there.’

  ‘And what about the fowls I brought you? Did you see after them?’

  ‘I shut them up last night and this morning I let them out with the rest.’

  ‘Don’t I get any thanks for them?’

  ‘I’ll thank you when they begin to lay.’

  ‘And when will that be?’ Riddler asked.

  ‘It will never be, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why, what the devil’s wrong with them?’

  ‘They are all cockerels,’ Kirren said.

  Chapter Nine

  Soon the second and larger batch of ewes began lambing and again, because of the dry conditions, all went well. These hundred ewes produced a hundred and thirty lambs and of these a hundred and twenty-six were raised, so that the lamb harvest altogether numbered a hundred and eighty-eight, including the orphans fostered by Kirren.

  By early May, too, the six heifers bought in the autumn had all calved successfully, and were milking well, which meant so much more work for Kirren that Willie Townsend’s wife Prue came every day to help in the dairy. They were making a good deal of butter and cheese at Godsakes now and much of the surplus buttermilk went to fatten the barrow pigs which, penned on a new piece of land every few days or so, were clearing the ground of rough grass and weeds, as well as enriching it with their dung, ready for ploughing at the end of the year.

  The farm was teeming with life these days. The old silent fields had been transformed and on all sides there was movement and noise. In the evenings, especially, the gentle clamour of the ewes and lambs constantly calling to one another was heard from one end of the farm to the other, and, indeed, all over the valley.

  ‘I hope they can hear it,’ Riddler would say, jerking his head towards Peele. ‘I hope it damn well pleases them that that handsome flock of theirs, bleating away over there, has got company here to answer them back.’

  The farm was so heavily stocked now that towards the end of May Jim was glad to be able to turn his flock out onto the hills, thus giving the home pastures a rest and a chance to grow a fresh green bite. And all through May and part of June, in those fields that had been ploughed and harrowed and cleaned and rolled, and harrowed again to a fine tilth, the teams went steadily to and fro, drilling in the turnip seed, the rape and the kale, the chickling vetches, the peas and beans and French sainfoin. One half of the old winter pig-ground was sown broadcast with rye and the other with ‘seeds’ and so soft and moist was the weather just then that both crops were greening the ground within a mere eight or nine days.

  On a warm sunny day in late June, Jim brought his flock down from the hill; onto the meadowland by the brook, where the ewes were separated from the lambs and herded into a long pen that led steeply down to the edge of the washpool. The upper sluice had been opened wide, the lower one almost closed, and as soon as the ewes were all penned, Jim and his helper, Billy Smith, lowered themselves into the pool, into water that reached to their very armpits. Riddler, in the pen with the sheep, seized one in his great clumsy hands and swung it over into the pool, where Jim in turn took hold of it, dunking it three or four times in the water before sending it down to Billy, who guided it onto the stone-paved slip that led up through a gap in the bank and out onto the open meadow.

  Each ewe, as she struggled up to the top of the slip, stood for an instant dazed and drooping, weighed down by the water in her wool; but then, as the greater part drained from her, she woul
d give herself a double shake that sent a little glistening shower rippling out from each side of her body. Another quick, rippling shake; a rainbow of droplets in the sun; and the ewe would move out over the meadow, giving a querulous, high-pitched cry that soon brought her lamb, or lambs, running to her with an answering cry; butting her with such eagerness that she was lifted off her feet, working away, pump and suck, at her cold, clean, watery udder.

  This sheep-washing pool in the Timmy Brook had been dammed and banked many years before ‒ as long ago, some said, as when the Benedictine monks had lived and farmed in this quiet valley ‒ but the sluice-gates had been put in only a few years before by John Sutton, who at that time, was the only farmer using the pool. Neither Jim nor Riddler, therefore, felt any great surprise when they looked up from their work to find that they were being watched from the other side of the brook by two men on horseback. One, Jim saw at a glance, was Philip Sutton, and the other, he could easily guess, was Dick Bowcott, who had taken his place as bailiff at Peele. They sat their horses, talking together, and some way behind them, under an oak tree, Abelard leant on his shepherding stick, his dogs lying peacefully at his feet.

  ‘Aye, you can watch!’ Riddler muttered, as he flung a ewe into the pool. ‘And think what thoughts you damn well please!’

  He and Jim and Billy Smith went on working without pause but after a while the man Bowcott, obviously acting on Philip’s orders, rode across the meadow to the pool’s edge.

  ‘How long are you going to be? Our shepherd is waiting to use this pool.’

  ‘It’s a damned funny thing,’ Riddler said, ‘that you should want to use the pool just when we are using it.’

  ‘From what I’ve been told,’ Bowcott said, ‘you haven’t used this pool for years.’

  ‘Well, we’re using it now,’ Riddler said, ‘and your shepherd will just have to wait his turn.’

  Bowcott, plainly disliking his errand, could find nothing more to say, and Philip Sutton, perceiving this, now rode to the edge of the pool, there to look down with angry contempt, first at Jim, in the water, then at Riddler, on the opposite bank.

  ‘You Godsakes people have no business to be using this pool at all, seeing that we put these sluice-gates in without a penny piece from you.’