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

by Mary E. Pearce

  ‘Sluice-gates or no sluice-gates, it’s all as one to me,’ Riddler said. ‘The rights of washing our sheep in this pool are written into the deeds of my farm, just the same as they are in yours, and if you think you can stop us using it, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought.’

  ‘Your farm, did I hear you say?’ Philip, defeated in argument, hit back at Riddler with a sneer. ‘All things considered it seems to me that the farm is more Lundy’s than it is yours.’

  Riddler looked at him evenly.

  ‘At least it’ll never be yours,’ he said.

  ‘As to that, we shall see!’ Philip said. ‘There’s many a slip between cup and lip and you’ve got a long way to go yet before you’ve paid off that mortgage of yours.’

  He and Bowcott rode away. Riddler stood looking down at Jim.

  ‘I don’t know which I hate most, John Sutton or his son.’

  ‘Take no notice of Philip’s threats. He’ll never take the farm from us.’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ Riddler said, ‘because if there was any chance of it, I should damn well kill him first.’

  The sheep washing was resumed, but after a while they paused again to let the dirty water out and refill the pool with clean. While this was going on old Abelard came and spoke to Jim.

  ‘That there fuss of Mr Philip’s ‒ I didn’t have no part of it.’

  ‘I didn’t think you had,’ Jim said.

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ Abelard said. ‘Just thought I’d mention it, that’s all.’

  As soon as the washing and shearing of the sheep were done with, it was time for haymaking in the meadows, and as soon as the hay had been carted and stacked, it was time for the weaning of the lambs. The ewes were put into poor pasture so that their milk should slowly dry off and the lambs were put into a field as far from them as the farm would allow so that neither ewes nor lambs should be distressed by the other’s cries.

  At the end of July came the summer sheep sales at Dunton Payne and here Jim’s lambs were sold, together with a number of draft ewes, for a total of four hundred pounds. Riddler was up on stilts at this. He could scarcely believe his ears. That sheep from his farm should fetch such a sum! But Jim was already well known at the many local sheep sales, and, as the auctioneer remarked, so was his stock.

  ‘My Lundy’s Cotswolds need no introduction here, gentlemen, and the interesting circumstance that he now farms at Godsakes instead of Peele has not, as you can see for yourselves, occasioned any decline whatever in the quality of his flock.’

  ‘Why the hell should it?’ Riddler muttered, but he was pleased nevertheless by the auctioneer’s remark, and later that day, as he and Jim rode home together, he said: ‘It’s a pity the Suttons weren’t there today to see your lambs fetch four hundred pounds, because there’s not much chance of our losing the farm so long as we can raise stock that fetch prices like that, eh?’

  ‘Are you still frightened of losing the farm?’

  Riddler shrugged. ‘I was thinking of what Philip Sutton said down at the washpool a few weeks ago, that showed he’s still hoping to see us fail.’

  ‘Philip has always believed,’ Jim said, ‘that he has only to want something and it will surely come to pass.’

  ‘Sometimes it does, doesn’t it, as when he took your girl from you?’

  ‘Yes, well, sometimes it does. But Godsakes is another matter. Philip will never take that from me.’

  ‘She can’t have been much of a mucher, that girl, judging by the way she treated you.’ Riddler glanced at Jim’s face. ‘Seems to me you’re a lot better off married to my Kirrie,’ he said.

  ‘In the circumstances, yes, I am.’

  ‘Damn the circumstances,’ Riddler said.

  ‘They are of your making, remember.’

  ‘I thought to have seen you unmake them by now.’

  ‘So you said to me once before.’

  ‘Dammit, what’ve you got in your veins? Beetroot juice instead of blood? Or is Kirrie so unattractive to you that you can’t bear the thought of bedding her?’

  ‘I have no intention of discussing Kirren with you in this manner, now or at any time in the future, and you may as well make up your mind to it.’

  ‘Strait-laced devil, aren’t you, by God?’

  ‘If you say so, certainly.’

  ‘You’re a lot different from what I was at your age.’

  ‘That I can easily believe.’

  ‘D’you want to know what I think?’

  ‘No,’ Jim said.

  ‘I think you’ll come to it in the end.’

  ‘That, too, you have said before. But if by any chance you are right ‒’

  ‘Yes?’ Riddler said, with a keen, bright glance.

  ‘‒ you may safely leave the matter in the lap of the gods and spare me all further importunings.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a gentleman’s way of telling me to shut my mouth?’

  ‘On this one subject, yes,’ Jim said.

  ‘Be damned to you, then,’ Riddler said, and then, after another few minutes’ ride, as they came within sight of The Crown at Marsh End: ‘You can buy me a pint of ale for that and I’ll drink to these precious gods of yours.’

  Long before the day came round for paying their half-yearly mortgage dues Riddler wanted to pay off an extra portion of the principal sum.

  ‘If we were to pay in the four hundred pounds we got for our lambs, that’d reduce the loan by more than half, and then it shouldn’t be all that long before we can pay off the rest and be rid of it once and for all.’

  Jim, however, would not agree.

  ‘That four hundred pounds ‒ and it’s not all profit, remember ‒ must go back into the farm, otherwise it will never improve. For one thing, we’ve got to buy more stock. For another, I want to build special tanks for dipping the sheep against the scab. Then there are the new sheds we need for stall-feeding steers in wintertime. And by the time we’ve done all that ‒’

  ‘I know, I know!’ Riddler said. ‘There’ll be precious little left and I shall be just as I have been for years ‒ still with that blasted mortgage tied like a millstone round my neck.’

  ‘So long as the farm is doing well, the mortgage dues needn’t worry us. They amount to little more now than the rent you paid in the old days when you were just a tenant here. But if we let the farm go down again ‒’

  ‘Yes, well, you’re right, of course. I can see it all clearly enough. But somehow, so long as that mortgage is there, sucking the blood out of us, I can’t really feel that the farm is mine. And sometimes I get the feeling that I shan’t live long enough to see the damned thing paid off at last.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you will,’ Jim said. ‘It’s only another four years and four months. Surely you can live that long?’

  Riddler glared.

  ‘I’ll damn well have to, won’t I?’ he said.

  It was a good summer that year, the soft, moist, misty spring, which had given the crops such a good start, being followed by dry spells in June and July, which enabled the horse-hoe to be used, clearing the weeds from between the rows and keeping the soil well-worked. And the crops, for the most part, were flourishing. Swedish turnips, sown in May, were bulging nicely in the ground by late July and were covered in a good growth of green sappy ‘tops’. The rye, which was mown early in August, before it had time to go to seed, was soon growing tall again and would without doubt give another worthwhile crop in late September. The rape and the kale were doing well; so were most of the pulse crops, especially the long-pod beans; and, most beautiful of all, in Riddler’s eyes, the eighteen acres of dredge-corn, oats and barley growing together, were ripening splendidly in the sun.

  This was the first successful corn crop grown at Godsakes for ten years and Riddler could not keep away from it. He would visit the two adjoining fields two or three times a day, trying to estimate the yield, weighing a handful of grain from one against a handful from the other, his optimistic calculations rising higher every
day. No oats ever danced so merrily, no barley ever bowed so low, as the oats and barley at Godsakes that year, and when the day came to begin cutting, Riddler was the first man in the field, wielding his scythe with such strokes that the corn went down in front of him, h’ssh-h’ssh, h’ssh-h’ssh, as though laid low by a fierce rasping wind.

  ‘Can’t you keep up with me?’ he roared, pausing once and looking back to where Jim and the other men worked together, in echelon, some little way behind.

  ‘The question is, master,’ said Willie Townsend, ‘can you keep up with yourself?’

  But although, indeed, as the morning progressed, Riddler was obliged to slacken his pace, he nevertheless worked in a fever all through that day, and the following days, until the last of the corn was cut.

  ‘I may not be so clever as some, but at least I can use a scythe!’ he said.

  Behind the men, as they cut the corn, came the women and children, binding the sheaves. There was much chatter and laughter then, especially from Willie Townsend’s wife, Prue, for she shared her husband’s sense of fun and could make a joke out of anything. When the last sheaf was bound, Prue tied her red and white neckerchief round it, held it up for all to see, and finally placed it in Riddler’s arms.

  ‘There you are, master! There’s the neck and my neckerchief round it. What’ll you give me in return?’

  Amidst a burst of applause from the watchers, loudest of all from Prue’s own children, Riddler gave her a smacking kiss and pressed a coin into her hand. He then carried the ‘neck’ aloft and placed it on top of a nearby stook. A warm south-easterly wind was blowing slantways across the valley; the oatseeds dangled and danced in it and the red and white ’kerchief fluttered gaily, and all over the harvest field, the rows of stooks went marching away, in regular columns, up and down whichever way you turned and looked.

  ‘One thing about it,’ said Nahum Smith, looking across the valley at Peele, ‘we shall get our harvest in before them.’

  This was a sly joke on Smith’s part, made at Riddler’s expense, for against the eighteen acres of corn grown at Godsakes the acreage grown at Peele was immense. Field upon field of pale-ripening wheat, field upon field of bronze-ripening barley, glowed on the opposite slopes of the valley, and day after day, from morning to night, the reaping machines chackered and whirred, and swarms of dark figures were seen, moving busily to and fro, bent double, in the wake of the reaper, first in one cornfield, then in another. These swarming figures looked black, like ants, seen against the pallid corn, moving over the pallid stubble, and all day long like ants they toiled, under the fierce, blind-burning sun.

  Riddler made no secret of the fact that he was jealous of the harvest at Peele. Corn at that time was the glory of England. It ripened, guinea-gold in the sun, and, on land such as that at Peele, which had been cultivated to a state of perfection, it meant golden guineas for those who grew it. Riddler, looking across the valley, would sometimes stand in a kind of trance, shaking his head now and then, as though not believing what he saw.

  ‘Just look at it!’ he would say. ‘More and more corn every year! And prices, from what I hear, just as high as they’ve ever been!’ And once, coming to Jim, he said: ‘How many acres all in all do you think they’re harvesting this year?’

  ‘Counting Granger’s,’ Jim said, ‘I would say a hundred and fifty of wheat and maybe a hundred or so of barley.’

  ‘And what profit will they clear on that?’

  ‘I would say upwards of three thousand pounds.’

  ‘By God!’ Riddler said, and made a sucking noise through his teeth. ‘And all we’ve grown over here is a paltry eighteen acres of dredge corn for feeding to the stock!’

  ‘You know as well as I do that we can’t grow good quality corn on this farm until we’ve built up fertility and as fertility depends on stock ‒’

  ‘Oh, spare me the lecture for once, will you?’

  ‘Anyway, this is a smaller farm, and even in the long term, when fertility’s been restored, it will always need to be managed by different methods from those at Peele, if we’re to get the best out of it.’

  ‘Your methods, needless to say!’

  ‘That was what we agreed from the start.’

  ‘Everlasting bloody sheep! That’s your method, such as it is!’

  ‘Sheep will be the making of this farm. They are already playing their part in founding our prosperity.’

  ‘They’ll never make us a fortune, though, will they, the way corn is doing for the Suttons?’

  ‘I promised to make Godsakes pay. I didn’t promise you miracles.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ Riddler said with a scowl. ‘I should have thought the odd miracle was nothing to a man like you!’

  Contemptible though their own harvest might be, compared with Peele’s, Riddler could think of nothing else and when, in a few days’ time, the corn was carted to the stackyard and built into two neat round stacks, his pleasure and pride in them knew no bounds. Not usually a tidy man, he fussed over these stacks for hours, and while Smith and Townsend were up above, thatching them, Riddler was busy down below, first patting the sheaf-ends in with a flat piece of wood and then, still not satisfied, trimming them with sheep-clipping shears until the stacks were neat all round.

  As soon as the corn was gone from the fields, the sheep and the pigs were put in onto the stubbles, to feed on the fallen ears of grain and to dung the land ready for ploughing. The pigs, rooting about in the ground, cleaned it thoroughly of couch-grass and weeds and turned it over at the same time, and this too was pleasing to Riddler.

  ‘There are nothing like pigs for turning over the land,’ he said. ‘They work it better than any plough.’

  At the sheep sales towards the end of August, Jim bought fifty theaves to make up his flock and four new Cotswold rams, great sturdy beasts, three years old, with a rich golden bloom upon their wool.

  ‘Pure-bred, every inch of them, and don’t they know it!’ Riddler said.

  At the Missenham cattle sale soon afterwards Jim bought a four-year-old Shorthorn bull, a handsome blue roan, costing thirty pounds.

  ‘I never thought to see the day when Godsakes would have its own bull, let alone a bull like him that’s got a dash of blue blood in his veins.’

  Riddler enjoyed attending the sales: the outing, the gossip, the company; but, more important than this, was the fact that he and Jim were there, not merely as spectators but as buyers bidding along with the best. After the bleak, empty years it was pure balm to him to hear the auctioneer bring down his hammer with the words, ‘Sold to Messrs Riddler and Lundy of Godsakes Farm.’ And if it happened that the Suttons were there, as they were at Missenham when the bull was bought, then Riddler’s joy was complete.

  John Sutton and his son, with their bailiff, Dick Bowcott, always ignored Riddler and Jim and carefully took no interest in any item for which Jim was bidding.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ Riddler would say, ‘but they don’t seem to get the same pleasure from seeing us at the sales as I get from seeing them!’

  He was always conscious of the Suttons. They had become an obsession with him. Whatever improvements were made at Godsakes, he knew that the Suttons were bound to see them, and his pleasure was doubled, even trebled, thereby. As more and more land came under the plough; as old crops were harvested, new ones sown; as cartloads of timber and quarried stone were delivered at Godsakes for building new sheds, he would jerk his thumb towards Peele and say: ‘I hope the Suttons can see all this! See what we’re doing, you and me!’

  One morning at breakfast time when he made some remark about the Suttons, Kirren suddenly burst out at him, exasperated by his refrain.

  ‘Can’t we forget the Suttons?’ she said. ‘Can’t we get on with living our lives and give their names a rest for a change?’

  ‘It might be easy enough for you to forget the Suttons, my girl, but it’s not for me. Oh dear me no! Not after what they did to me.’

  ‘I have just as muc
h reason to hate them as you. What they did to us years ago spoilt my life just as much as yours and helped my mother to an early grave. But we have nothing to fear from them now and it seems to me only common sense ‒’

  ‘Nothing to fear?’ Riddler said. ‘There will always be something to fear so long as this land has a mortgage on it and that’ll be for a long while yet!’

  He finished his breakfast and went out. Kirren was left alone with Jim.

  ‘Is it right, what he says? Must we always live in fear so long as the mortgage hangs over us?’

  ‘No, there’s nothing to fear,’ Jim said. ‘Not so long as we pay our dues, and that will not be any problem, now that the farm is productive again.’

  ‘Ought I to go more carefully, buying things for the house? The money I make on my poultry these days ‒’

  ‘Whatever you make, that money is yours, and you may spend it as you please. And in case you are worried about the future, I have enough money put by to cover any calamities.’

  He rose from the table and pushed in his chair. He stood for a moment looking at her. ‘You do believe me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And trust me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hope you do. You’ve had too much worry over the years. I’d like to feel that I’ve changed all that. I’d like you to feel safe and secure. Of course there are bound to be hardships enough. We’ll have our troubles, our setbacks, no doubt. But we’ll keep the farm and we’ll make it pay and neither the Suttons nor anyone else shall ever take it away from us.’

  ‘It’s a pity my father can’t believe that.’

  ‘He will come to believe it, given time.’

  In mid September the green rye was mown. It was turned in the swath and ‘made’ like hay. The weather was very hot at that time and because there were thunderstorms in the offing, all hands were out in the field, setting the rye up into cocks. But the thunderstorms passed them by; the rye was carted and built into stacks; and all the time as the carting proceeded, the weather continued sunny and hot.