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

by Mary E. Pearce

  Kirren, who rarely wore a hat when working in the fields, had caught the sun. Her skin, always dusky, became deeply tanned, while her dark brown hair took a lighter hue, especially at her forehead and temples, where the loose curling strands were bleached golden fair. Riddler strongly disapproved of women exposing themselves to the sun. He viewed Kirren’s tan with some distaste.

  ‘Kirrie, my girl, you’re too brown by half. Jim must think he has married a gipsy. You’re as brown as a nutmeg. You should wear a hat.’ And, turning towards Jim, he said: ‘Just look at her, how brown she is! Can’t you get her to wear a hat?’

  ‘I’m not going to try,’ Jim said. ‘Kirren is a grown woman. She’s her own mistress. She may do as she likes.’

  ‘Huh!’ Riddler muttered, turning away. ‘It’s a pity she’s not your mistress!’

  Jim had now been at Godsakes a year. Much had been done during that time. Much remained still to be done.

  ‘You’ll do it all right,’ Riddler said, as they walked together over the farm one Sunday evening. ‘You’re young and you’ve got most of your life before you. How old are you now? Twenty-five? Yes, you’re lucky, you’ve got time on your side. Though in certain respects I must say I wish you would show a bit more dispatch.’ Receiving no response to this he suddenly burst out in a passion: ‘Dammit, man, don’t you want a son?’

  Jim looked away over the fields. The question had caught him unawares. Yes, he would have liked a son. Every man wanted that. And when he had hoped to marry Jane, he had taken it for granted that he and she, living together in the old farmhouse at Peele, would have raised a healthy young family. But all his plans had gone astray and he had committed himself to a life in which love and the joys of fatherhood would never now have any part.

  Riddler, easily guessing his thoughts, broke in on them in his rough, gruff way.

  ‘It’s no good dwelling on the past, you know, moping over what might have been. It’s the future you’ve got to think about and you need to face up to it fair and square. Stand still a minute and look at this farm. When I’m dead it will be yours ‒ you and Kirrie will carry it on ‒ but what about when you and she come to die? What will happen to Godsakes then if you’ve got no sons to come after you? Who will you leave it to? Answer me that!’

  ‘I can’t answer it,’ Jim said. ‘But the future you are talking about is, I hope, a long way off and at present I have enough to do thinking of more immediate things.’

  But although he dismissed the future in this way, reluctant to discuss it with Riddler, he found himself thinking about it all the same and often in the following days he was filled with a kind of restlessness. A strange kind of loneliness came over him, bringing back old memories; not only of Jane, who had jilted him, but of his uncle Albert, the drover, who had treated him brutally as a boy and had at last abandoned him, in a strange district, all alone, caring not what became of him. He felt sorry for himself, a feeling he had not known for years, and he took himself sternly to task for it, remembering that many good things had happened to him as well as bad. Still, the same thoughts and feelings persisted, touching him sometimes with melancholy, and he thought how very strange it was that he, who had never known a father, should be fated never to know a son.

  Sometimes, as he worked in the fields, he would see Kirren in the distance, shooing hens from the barn, perhaps, or carrying skimmed milk to the pigs, and he would think to himself: ‘That girl, that stranger, is my wife.’ And the thought, framed in words like this, brought a sense of shock even now. A sense of amazement and disbelief. How, how, he asked himself, had he come to agree to such a marriage? And, for that matter, how had she?

  She was not such a stranger now, of course, for he had lived in the same house with her for a whole year. In some respects he knew her well: he knew what her capabilities were; he knew something of her history; and he knew what to expect of her when her patience was tried, her temper roused. But what of her innermost feelings and thoughts? Her hopes and dreams? Her woman’s heart? Was she so hard as she chose to appear? So unfeminine, so self-complete? Could she really be so indifferent to all ideas of love as to close her heart and mind against it so utterly?

  He himself had experienced love and, disappointed in his hopes, he had turned against it. But Kirren had rejected it altogether. She wanted no part of it. It was something she scorned. But was such a thing possible? It seemed to him quite absurd that a young girl, in her early twenties, should choose celibacy as resolutely as any nun.

  And why, asked a quiet voice in his brain, should Kirren’s rejection of love be any more absurd than his? There was no answer to this, he thought, but an answer presented itself all the same: Kirren’s rejection of love was absurd because she was a woman. Women were made to love and be loved. That was a fundamental truth. Anyone would say the same. And then he laughed, deriding himself, recognizing that he had been guilty of blatant male hypocrisy. Because, of course, it was man who chose woman’s role for her, and man made the rules to suit himself; and if Kirren, for reasons he could well understand, chose to reject the whole scheme, why should it matter to him? It was none of his business, he told himself. It had, by a series of chance happenings, worked to his profit and advantage.

  Still, he could not help wondering about her, and sometimes he wished they could talk together, quietly, just the two of them, without Riddler chipping in with his sly, provoking remarks. There were few opportunities for this but one day when he was up on the hill looking for a bunch of sheep that had broken out of the upper pasture, he came upon her quite by chance, picking blackberries in a sunny hollow.

  At first she was unconscious of him and he stood for a while watching her as she rose on tiptoe, with arms upstretched, trying to reach a high bramble that arched out from the centre of the thicket. It afforded him a certain amusement to watch her thus, all unknown, observing the slender shape of her body stretched to its uttermost, strong and lithe, as she reached up to the arching bramble. But then his two dogs, Jess and Sam, went running down the slope to her, wagging their tails, and she turned to make a fuss of them, giving each a few blackberries from one of her baskets, which was half full. Jim too went down the slope and when he got close to her he reached up with his shepherd’s long stick and hooked the high bramble down to her. With a little laugh she picked the fruit and he let the bramble spring back again.

  ‘Why are the best blackberries always out of reach?’ she asked.

  ‘What’s out of reach always seems the best, whether it is or not,’ he said.

  He hooked down another high bramble and watched her pick the fruit from it. ‘You’ve come a long way in search of these.’

  ‘Yes. The farm hedges are so well kept since you came that there aren’t any blackberries in them now.’

  ‘The farm hedges are not so well kept as they should be, however, otherwise I shouldn’t be here looking for five runaway sheep. You haven’t seen them by any chance?’

  ‘No, not a sign,’ Kirren said.

  ‘Ah, well, never mind. I shall catch up with them in the end.’

  Jim laid his stick on the grass and motioned the dogs to lie down beside it. Kirren watched in surprise as he picked up the second of her baskets and began picking blackberries.

  ‘I warn you, if you are seen doing that, it will lead to talk,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is women’s work, of course.’

  ‘You do men’s work often enough, helping us in the fields,’ he said.

  ‘That’s different. It’s expected of us. But men do not help their womenfolk with such trivial tasks as this.’

  ‘Then it seems I am not as other men.’

  ‘No, that’s true, you’re not,’ she said.

  ‘Knowing your opinion of men in general, I suppose I may take that as kindly meant?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose you may.’

  It was a perfect September day and the blackberries, warm in the sun, filled the air with the smell o
f their ripeness. For a while Jim and Kirren picked in silence, moving slowly away from each other, around the thicket of bramble and briar. In a grove of hawthorn trees nearby a flight of goldfinches twittered and whirred and high overhead a skylark sang. The two dogs lay on the grass, alert yet relaxed, moving only to snap at the flies. Jim came to a bramble bush that grew no higher than his chest. Kirren was on the other side.

  ‘I’m glad to have met you up here like this,’ he said. ‘It gives us the chance of a quiet talk. I was thinking about you as I came up the hill and it suddenly occurred to me that we have now been married a year.’

  ‘Not quite a year, surely?’ she said.

  ‘Well, all but a week or two, anyway.’

  ‘All but three weeks, to be precise. But surely, in a marriage like ours, we shall not be keeping anniversaries?’

  ‘No, hardly that,’ Jim agreed. ‘It’s just that it seemed a good time to be taking stock of ourselves as it were.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean by that.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, thinking it out, ‘I am looking for some sort of assurance that you do not have any regrets.’

  ‘Then you have that assurance,’ Kirren said. ‘Our marriage suits me very well.’

  ‘You are quite sure?’

  ‘Yes. Quite sure.’

  There was a pause. She looked at him.

  ‘Have you any regrets yourself?’

  ‘No. None.’

  ‘Yet something is troubling you, I think.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I was troubled exactly, but I have been looking back over the past and … thinking rather too much, perhaps, about certain aspects of my life.’

  ‘You mean you’ve been thinking about Jane Sutton?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you still love her?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He thought for a while before speaking again. ‘Love, as I see it, is a two-way thing. It’s a kind of bargain that one human being strikes with another ‒ or fails to strike, as the case might be. If love is one-sided, it doesn’t last long.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ Kirren said.

  ‘Well, in very rare cases it might, I suppose … where the object is exceptionally worthy. But Jane was amusing herself with me, without any regard for my feelings, and that is not a worthy thing. However, I know I’m not the only man to have suffered such a blow to his pride, and I don’t intend to let it spoil my life. We can most of us get along perfectly well without love ‒ if we are called upon to do so.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to bring much happiness to those who are afflicted with it.’

  ‘We are better without it, you would say?’

  ‘I thought that was what you were saying.’

  ‘Yes, well, perhaps it was.’

  For a while they gave their whole attention to the business of picking the blackberries. Then Jim spoke again.

  ‘Certainly there’s a lot to be said in favour of a marriage like ours, based as it is on a practical footing instead of on sentimental ideas. It means we do not ask impossible things of each other, and that, in turn, means that neither of us can fall from grace. The very fact that we have been married a year without any serious disagreement speaks very well for the arrangement, I think. Indeed, the only person who isn’t pleased is your father, whose idea it was.’

  ‘Ah, yes, my father,’ Kirren said.

  ‘We are a great disappointment to him.’

  ‘He will get over that in time.’

  ‘I’m not sure that he will,’ Jim said.

  ‘Then he must just put up with it.’

  ‘Unfortunately for me, your father’s disappointment is not something he keeps to himself, as you already know.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m sorry,’ Kirren said, ‘but what can I do about it?’

  ‘Nothing whatever, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I think you bear it very well.’

  ‘I have no choice,’ he said ruefully.

  Chapter Ten

  The warm sunny weather continued right up to Michaelmas Day and then came a sudden change. The last of the autumn ploughing was done in a searing north-easterly wind and the winter corn was no sooner sown than it was lightly covered with snow. The snow did not lie long because rain came and washed it away and the rest of the autumn was so wet as to stop all further work on the land.

  The wet weeks were not wasted, however, for Jim and the men were hard at work building the new cattle stalls that would house the steers for fattening in winter. Jim was keen on this system, not only because of the profit that winter-fed beasts would bring, but because of the saving of manure. The stalls, open along the front and built round three sides of a square yard, were finished by the end of November and twenty-two steers were housed in them. Jim then turned his attention to the farmhouse, doing all those repairs that had been left over from the previous winter.

  If anyone entered the front door at Godsakes ‒ which, as in many a similar farmhouse, was in fact a rare event ‒ and stood in the wide passageway, a door on the left led into the kitchen and a door on the right, under the staircase, led into the only other ground-floor room, which Riddler called the house-place and Kirren the parlour. There was no furniture in this room ‒ it had all gone to pay Riddler’s debts ‒ and for years the place had only been used for storing sacks of grain and meal and a great variety of lumber. But it was a fine, spacious room, half as long again as the kitchen, with two double casements at the front, over looking the valley, and two single casements at the back, looking towards Hogden Hill; and, at the far end of the room, a fire-place with a big open hearth.

  The lumber and sacks of grain were removed, the dirt and cobwebs were swept away, and the whole room was scrubbed throughout. Jim then got to work; repaired the cracks and holes in the plaster; whitewashed the ceiling, between the beams, and distempered the walls a pale shell-pink. The timberwork was all oak, including the plank-and-batten door, and this he treated with linseed oil. The casements were metal and he painted them white.

  Kirren, meantime, had been busy shopping. She had bought three rolls of thick fibre matting which, laid on the stone-flagged floor, felt warm and kindly under the feet; also a dark red Wilton rug which made a cheerful splash of colour in front of the hearth. She had bought some second-hand furniture, too, which Jim fetched home in an open cart; a dining-table of dark oak, with four ladder-back dining-chairs; three Windsor armchairs, with flat cushions on the seats and backs, for sitting in comfort at the fire-side; and a bookcase to hold Jim’s books and Riddler’s collection of almanacs. There was also a large, handsome lamp, which held a quart of oil at a time, and had on it a round shade of rich amber-coloured glass engraved with a pattern of ivy leaves. Lastly there were some heavy curtains, old but with plenty of wear in them, of crimson and gold brocade. Kirren had to alter these to fit the windows at Godsakes and with the material that was left over she covered the cushions on the Windsor chairs.

  ‘Oh, it’s a fine handsome room right enough.’ Riddler said, ‘if only we had time to sit in it.’

  But in less than a week it was Christmas, which fell on a Sunday that year, and Riddler, in the middle of the morning, looking in at the door intending to scoff, stood on the threshold and marvelled instead. For the room, with a great log fire in the hearth, with red-berried holly on the beams overhead and sweet-scented pine-branches over the door, with the table arrayed in a white linen cloth on which the silver cutlery and the smoothly polished pewter mugs reflected the red glow of the fire, was a warm and welcoming place indeed to a man coming in from feeding the beasts on a winter morning, cold and raw.

  ‘It does you credit, Kirrie,’ he said, ‘and I only wish your mother was here to see the place made so homely again.’ He was much impressed by the cutlery ‒ ‘You must be making a pretty penny out of your poultry and eggs these days’ ‒ and by the three white linen napkins which lay, each in its horn ring, on the side-plates of brown-and-white cottage ware. ‘I’d no idea you had it in you to be so genteel,’ he said.
‘I must go and spruce myself up before I’m fit for a room like this.’ And later that day, after a dinner of roast goose, followed by a rich dark plum pudding, served with thick cream, he said: ‘Kirrie, I reckon you’ve done us proud! I doubt if they’ve had a better Christmas dinner at Peele than the one you’ve given us today. You’re as good a cook as your mother was and I can’t speak better of you than that.’

  He and Jim went to sit by the fire and when Kirren had gone from the room, leaving them to their hot spiced wine, he sat back in his armchair and looked around him appreciatively.

  ‘It’s good to see the old place coming back to life again. You and Kirrie between you have made it into a proper home. All it needs now to make it complete is a few children sitting here, gathered round the fire with us, and all of us playing “Robin’s Alight”.’

  Jim remained stubbornly silent, staring into the heart of the fire, his mug of spiced wine between his hands. Riddler, watching him, gave a sigh.

  ‘Ah, well!’ he said, sadly. ‘You can’t stop an old man from dreaming his dreams.’

  The parlour was used every Sunday after that. It became a regular thing and Riddler teased Kirren about it.

  ‘You’re getting ideas above your station, my girl. It comes of marrying a gentleman.’

  The mockery was automatic. He was in fact well pleased with the improvements Kirren had made. And gradually certain changes were taking place in Riddler himself. He was now shaving regularly and was taking more trouble with his clothes. His boots and gaiters were well-polished, his breeches and jacket brushed clean, and he had bought himself a new hat. Jim and Kirren, although they noted the change in him, said nothing to Riddler himself, but Kirren mentioned it to Jim.

  ‘My father’s a different man these days. He’s not so slovenly in his habits and he goes off to town now looking quite smart. He’s easier to live with than he was. All of which is due to you, because of the way you’ve pulled up this farm. You’ve given him back his self-respect. He’s able to hold up his head again.’

  ‘Your father has always held up his head, even in the bad times, and so have you,’ Jim said.