In spite of this I rose conscientiously after an hour and returned to the potash, and while crunching the strange white substance tried to grapple with the mystery of its action against the potatoes that I had put in the ground – and was irritated beyond measure by my ignorance.
The afternoon seemed remarkably long – longer than the usual longness. And no wonder, for my watch had stopped and I had worked two hours’ overtime – for continuing to hear the distant chug-chug of the spraying-machine, I thought it could not yet be five-thirty, but there had evidently been a pause for tea, and then on again. So that day my hours were from 5.30 a.m. when I rose, till 8 p.m. when I got back. Going home I remembered that I had to get some eggs (you could still get eggs at this time). After some searching up a hill I found the place and bought the eggs. The woman who gave them to me also gave me three small cakes gratis, for I had impressed her with ‘a tired look’. This was encouraging. I seldom succeed in working either long enough or hard enough to look properly tired, and this was the first time in my life that a kind woman had taken pity on me as a worn-out man and given me three cakes.
If you have a fair distance to cycle to your work, then the question as to whether it is uphill going or coming back is of some moment – freshly considered every day. Is it better to have it downhill on the way to work? Yes, for as you always start out late you can arrive on time. But the return home! A slow push up a long slant is no pleasing prospect to the labourer who has achieved his 5.30 p.m. That was to be my experience later. Here, going home I started with a long swoop down, lovely in the evening but imperfect in the morning. However, I now asked the boss whether instead of doing this long bicycle journey every day I could live in the old house, putting into it the furniture which soon had to be taken out of a house in Kent, my wife having to go in another direction. This was agreed to. There was no road to the house, as I have said – only a railway line! No doubt it once had a fine approach to it: some of it dated back to the Elizabethan era, I believe. But any such approach had long since been abandoned, and the house itself forgotten and finally lost. Only in England, with its forty-seven million inhabitants, could you actually lose a house.
However, during certain months of the year there was a sufficiency of dry ground and even a track to make approach by lorry possible, even to the doorway. But of course in the eyes of furniture removers and tradesmen it was ‘out in the wilds’. This latter phrase is frequently heard in twentieth-century England. ‘You are out in the wilds!’ people will say to anyone in the Home Counties living somewhere not on or very near a bus route, and perhaps two and a half miles from a railway station. Such is the imbecility to which industrialism can reduce a nation whose sons have travelled to the ends of the earth, pioneering and colonizing into the unknown and ruling millions of waves just for the fun of the thing.
Nevertheless I managed to persuade a firm to undertake this tremendous task. Unluckily, when the driver got near the house he left the hard track at one point and the van sank into swampy ground and had to be dug out. But in the end the furniture was carried into the house with amused condescension by the men.
I decided to occupy two rooms of the seven or eight – a large one upstairs, and the one underneath it, both supported by colossal beams. Thus beamed and buttressed by earlier centuries, I felt myself in a strong position. The ground floor of my bed-sitting room upstairs was uneven with age, as roughly wrinkled as the waves of the sea. Twelve beams crossed the ceiling from east to west, while a really fine one, besieged in vain by insects, crossed from north to south. The ancient cupboards, notched and dented by the artillery of Time, might well have concealed alarming skeletons. The fireplace was so wide that you could have put a child’s bed into it. The long latticed window looked across at the old oast-house, which in the declension of the sharp evening light had a wood-cut perfection about it. And the evening, after-tea sun came into the room – one of the most soothing of all Nature’s effects. It was an ideal room, and all the time I was there I thought how I would hate to leave it when the time came. But there was a curious draught near the door. When you approached it, it became quite windy, almost hat-blowing-off, even when it was calm outside. The cause was obscurely connected with the peculiar exit. It opened on to two doors, one trap-door, and two stairways, and whichever one was opened at this junction was banged by a cold tempest, the gale not coming from any certain direction but rather occupying a central typhoonish position. To complete this survey – the trap-door led to two separate attics which, like all attics, were utterly abandoned to despair. One door led to a bathroom, itself leading into a small room and it into another up two steps. The other door opened on to a commodious staircase and four big front rooms. While if you opened no door you could go down a steep back staircase leading to a scullery and one-time kitchen, now filled with sacks of potash. And then, should you wish to continue your odyssey, you could open a door in the corner of that and go down some stone steps to a cellar, damp and dungeoned as the Cells of Chillon. Many of these rooms, I sometimes felt, when in no lofty mood, would have been less lonely with a few ghosts.
Having installed myself here, it was suggested that I should have a meal per day with the boss and family. ‘Our chief meal of the day,’ he said, ‘is tea, at 5.30. What about coming in to that?’ I gratefully accepted, at the same time wondering how that meal could be the chief one on a farm. Next day he told me that his wife preferred to make it dinner. The truth was of course that the midday meal was a real square one, and the other just tea, but he couldn’t bear the thought of letting me have the dinner. His charming wife, however, wasn’t standing for that. I have often noticed farmers’ wives, before giving anyone anything, glance nervously to see if the husband is looking.
I had heard it said over and over again that ‘Mother Earth’ keeps men sane. This is so. But I have found from my own limited experience, and from a certain amount of note-comparing with others, that she makes all farmers, with few exceptions, go slightly off their heads. The above instance would easily find its counterpart, and shows to what a pass these men are brought by their unique struggle. I must add, if only to make the psychology of the thing more difficult, that this man did not charge me a penny rent for the house nor a penny for potatoes. He may have had ulterior motives, but I don’t know what they were; and there it is, he charged me nothing, while at the same time he really could not bear serving a double-helping at table.
6 The Spraying Operation
My services were soon called for at a new job – as assistant at the spraying of fruit trees. What we performed in this line was something wholly outside any previous experience of mine. Once or twice in my life I had sprayed; that is, I had taken a hand-syringe in the garden at home in childhood, put it in water, filled it, and squirted rose trees. But here was something colossal.
It might be thought that an apple or plum tree would bear fruit as satisfactorily as a gooseberry or blackcurrant bush, if left alone to a certain extent. This is too optimistic, it appears. The pear, the plum, but especially the apple, it seems, are open to the attack of hosts of enemies. First to the fungi: a fungus being a plant which does not prepare its own food but feeds on other plants. The apple tree lends itself as such food better than most, so it has to be protected against the Leaf Blight which is capable of despoiling all the leaves of whole orchards; against the Bitter Rut, Black Rut, and the Brown Rut which devour their way into the fruit; against Rust which yellows the leaves and eats into the growing apple; against Scab which forms dark circular spots on the fruit and leaves. It must also be protected against a host of insect enemies: against the Aphis, an insect which, gathering in massed battalions, sucks the juices from leaf and blossom; against the Bud Moth which chooses the tree as good hatching ground in the crevices of the twigs so that the larvae can feed upon the foliage; against the Canker Worm, a caterpillar which, after feeding upon the tree, lowers itself to the ground by means of its self-produced thread; and against seven other kinds of moth and w
orm.
Such is the story, at any rate. How the unattended apple tree in your back garden manages to survive and produce fruit in considerable quantities would therefore seem something of a mystery. But it is not for me to question or even raise an eyebrow. My place is beside the spraying-machine. It consisted of a motor-pumping engine attached to a tank – the whole being mobile. A large tubular sucker (glorified hose-end) entered the tank which was filled with the spraying liquid, and a long coiling hose conveyed the spray to the place desired. I must say I took a fancy to this machine, partly because of its important noise while it chugged away pumping out the stuff; partly because it often went wrong, thus creating diversion and relaxation; partly because of its dramatic filth and habit of leaking and spitting out green slime.
Its accompanying tank was filled with water, sulphur, and lime, a combination of such a poisonous complexion that even to look at it was mentally disturbing. Nor was I always in a position to keep my distance; for when the tank began to get empty and it became necessary to deal with the tubular sucker, it was like grappling with a vicious inhabitant of the first swamp. I have rarely handled an inanimate object that was more animated. It seemed bent on spraying me personally with its unspeakable juices.
My main task was to lug round the immense length of hose after Morgan who thus could hold a free lance with which to spray the trees when he went down the aisles. This was the most exhausting job I have ever had to do. It was like a solo tug-of-war of interminable duration. As the morning wore on and wore me down, dinner and its, as yet, appalling distance from realization, became too often and too painfully my sovereign thought. Morgan seemed entirely indifferent either to time or hunger – he never carried a watch and never appeared to be hungry. Luckily this endurance test was occasionally broken by the hose bursting at some point and sending up a high fountain of spray like a whale’s jet, or the machine would go wrong, or the tank need refilling. And sometimes I sprayed also, both of us pulling the hose after us as best we could. It was anything but easy to spray effectively. No use just squirting a tree and passing on: the tree must be wet all over, on all the branches, and on both sides of every leaf; for an insect or fungus is not killed until the poison gets it – and does not accommodate a farmer by committing suicide. The direction of the wind was an important matter: it was necessary to see that it was blowing away from you, otherwise the lotion blew back upon your face . . . not itself in need of protection against fungus, scab, or blight.
Thus it goes on at this time of the year in all the big orchards of the country, hour after hour and day after day, an unceasing offensive against these enemies of table-fruit.
The refilling of the tank provided a species of light entertainment. The spraying-engine and the tank were mounted on the chassis of a Morris Oxford. When refilling time came we attached a tractor to the chassis and proceeded towards a pond, the engine of the spraying-machine still chugging away. Morgan drove the tractor while I guided the platform, since the steering-wheel of the old car was still attached. We reached the pond and filled the tank with water, and then poured out two bucketfuls of the sulphur-lime liquid from a barrel, and added that to the tank. We were now ready to return to the scene of operation. The jolts and jerks caused by the exceedingly uneven ground made the liquid in the (now very full) tank splash about, shoot up, and pour down the back of my neck – the steering-wheel being between the tank and the tractor. Meanwhile the open radiator of the spraying-machine full of hot water splashed in a similar manner, going down the back of Morgan’s neck and into my face. Thus we would proceed, the roar of both the engines and the double splashing of the waters providing a spectacle sufficiently disquieting in itself, you might fancy, to frighten away any enemies of the fruit.
‘Will you have an apple, Mr Brown?’
‘Thanks very much.’
‘Oh dear, Bridget hasn’t put any on the table! She must have forgotten to bring them up. I’ll ring.’
‘Please don’t bother, it doesn’t matter a bit.’
‘But I particularly told her to put them on the table!’
Yet, before Bridget can bring them up, I, for one, am glad to realize what a lot must be done by God and man before she is even in a position to forget to ‘put them on the table’.
7 Morgan and Miles
In spite of Morgan’s extreme neglect of clock and absence of hunger, it was a pleasure to work with him. I thought at the time, and have frequently thought since, how impossible it would have been to have had a nicer foreman to start with. He was not in the least like the usual kind of foreman. He never lost his temper, never even raised his voice – it was quite phenomenal. He was a ‘working man’ but with no accent one way or the other. Almost totally lacking in class-consciousness. Very grave, respectable, correct, and ungossipy, but also with a sense of humour that lit up a peculiarly pleasant smile. There are so many classes within classes and grades upon grades in England that I am hard put to it to describe the social position of Morgan. His complete absence of accent or dialect was rather baffling. He had been the clever boy at school and could have taken scholarships and risen ‘higher in the world’, as it is called, but he had not liked schooling and had gone to Canada at first to farm – hence his wider horizon. He liked his work (not so common with land workers, I was to find). He was also fond of reading. This generally means, quite simply, reading novels. For many readers it is hardly known that there are any other books. And so it was with Morgan – a book was a novel. As he liked to mention books sometimes, I found it a bit awkward. Indeed I know few things more psychologically harassing than this kind of literary conversation, when one has seldom read any of the books mentioned and cannot name others that will convey anything. However, we managed somehow, and often he asked for a book. He never turned down a good one. I lent him a Hardy. He approved and said it was ‘quite good’. He listened to book-talks by the BBC and heard of War and Peace. I lent him my copy and he was not to be daunted. But he did not enjoy it. He confessed at intervals that he was ‘wading through it’. (I wondered how many would have taken it on at all.) His paper was the Daily Express – and he quoted its opinions. Arthur Miles read Picture Post – ‘very good value’ he said. The boss read the New Statesman – and quoted its opinions.
Arthur Miles was a rough diamond. At many farms, it seems, there is one man who is ‘always right’, who ‘knows everything’, who puts everyone right and shouts loudly. An ordinary man might say ‘You will find it in the shed’ or ‘You’ve got it the wrong way round’, without undue emphasis or excitement. Arthur would yell the information in apparent fury. He was a tremendous blusterer. But an efficient blusterer, the regular handy man always called upon in difficulties for masterly improvisation.
In the agricultural world, I soon discovered, all sorts of problems must be solved on the spot, the difficulty must be got round somehow, there is no question of getting someone from outside to do it. Thus endless improvisation in the mending of breakages and the construction of suddenly essential gadgets. It is an agricultural habit of mind – foreign to the townsman. Wrestling with nuts and screws is an almost daily thing. Hence the agricultural labourer is an amateur mechanic (who afterwards went into the town and specialized). He is the first mechanic, the first man to ‘conquer nature’ just as he was the first man to get fed up with nature and to wall himself off from her by building the town. All things start on the land – not least the townsman, and most surely the mechanic. The idea that the engineer is a special kind of town-bred person was dispelled for me after a very short acquaintance with agricultural workers. Arthur always got round the difficulty somehow, provided he had a piece of wire. Your agriculturalist can do anything with a piece of wire – not a day passes but he saves some crisis with it. Arthur, with hands the size of spades, could twist the stuff about like twine.
He was a great master of 1anguage, though his mastery was confined to one word, beginning with b. It is a famous word, yet never reaching the status that would allow i
t to appear on the page, though it has long since lost its etymological significance. It is used equally as a noun, an adjective, or a verb. Dr Johnson, I think, described it in his Dictionary as ‘a term of endearment amongst sailors’. That is when used as a noun, one sailor calling another a b. On land it is used less as a sign of affection than in terms of music-while-you-work – an accompaniment. Swearing came as naturally to Arthur as leaves to a tree, and having command over all the possible variations in which the word could be used it came from his lips almost in terms of song – ‘It’s a b,’ ‘well I’m b’d’, ‘he’s a b’, ‘you can b off’ . . . Once, when I heard him preserve silence for a few minutes on account of the proximity of the boss’s wife, it seemed unnatural and disquieting, and I felt anxious for him until he started up again.
He roared out his council to everyone, including Morgan, his way being the right one, never allowing for two schools of thought even about potato planting. Morgan was careful to keep his temper, thus avoiding a pig-headed hold-up. Arthur’s roaring at me was more extensive and violent – sometimes I thought he overdid it. But he possessed what is called ‘a good heart at bottom’ – which is by no means true of all men with rough tongues. He had another mood, perhaps later in the day, in strange contrast. He would be doing something in the lower stable, say; he would swing the door open slightly (it slowly went back on its hinges without needing any push) and would say as it swung back – ‘Open Sesame’. I do not know what he thought the words meant, but with a gentle humorous expression he would give the door a little kick with his toe, saying – ‘Open Sesame’.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 3
