During this hay-cutting period I did a good deal of couching, in company with Alf and his boy who were newcomers. (I’m not bothering to put in surnames. For in practice I have a good working rule-of-thumb method in this matter. I call a gentleman, after knowing him a bit, simply ‘Jones’; I call a lower-middle-class person ‘Mr Jones’, otherwise he is indignant, for he regards the Mr as his only title to fame; and with the working man I take a flying leap as soon as possible to the Christian name.) I don’t know how Alf would have been described before Dickens, but now one can simply say that he had a Dickensian appearance and countenance, and leave it at that. Even his cap was Dickensian, even the back of his cap. He was a town worker really, from building and other trades, and was trying his hand at agriculture for the first time. He groused even more than land workers, but was more independent, and much less hard-working. In the old days I had heard about the British working man always taking it easy and ‘resting on his spade’. Perhaps this is true of the town worker. At the beginning of the war I did some ARP work in Kent amongst a few labourers who were not agricultural. In the digging of a shelter I found that my pace was much too fast, especially for a wonderful man called Knight whose flow of tongue was unexampled in my experience. He required frequent intervals for a breather and some talk. ‘The two bottom evils in the world, brother,’ he would say, ‘are the purse and the female,’ and he welcomed as many stoppages as possible to develop this and other themes. But as soon as I found myself amongst agricultural labourers I saw that their pace was much faster and steadier, and that stoppages, if any, were furtive and seldom lasted longer than the lighting of a cigarette. Alf was finding the difference very marked, and gave me amazing examples of easy work and easy money from other trades. And it was clear that Alf’s boy, about fifteen, had reached the conclusion that one shouldn’t work at all on any account. All the same Alf was a nervous and inferior little man, and more apprehensive than anyone else at the approach of ’E. He worked in a feverish, jerky, busy manner. He pursed his lips, continually blowing outwards as if exhaling invisible smoke; it was evidently habitual, an unconscious technique to give the impression of earnest concentration and hard work going forward at full steam ahead.
When I joined him he had already decided to quit. ‘’Taint good enough,’ he said. ‘Don’t do nothing ’ere but work, looksee. No one won’t speak to you on this ’ere joint. Nothing but blank work for arf the money wot you get in the town. The missus can’t stand it ’ere with them neighbours wot don’t say a word, and I won’t ’ave her locked up in no ’ome.’ This tribute to agricultural and village life was followed by an expression of gratitude that I alone addressed him in a friendly manner. But I think this was only because I had taken the trouble to find out his Christian name. I said something about the others not being interested in things outside. He said that this was owing to ‘the bloke wot nurses ’em, they get so as they loses ’art’. At this point the Van appeared at the other side of the hedge, and stopped for a minute while ’E regarded us with no enthusiasm, then shouted across, ‘I don’t want it raked up but picked up’ – a distinction which, when analysed by us, yielded no clear idea as to what we were doing wrong.
I asked Alf whether in the days of unemployment he had been unemployed. He said no, he always found it easy to get work. But many couldn’t, I said. He insisted that they didn’t want it, that they were better off without it, especially with a large family when the ‘Benefit’ would amount to about three pounds. I mention this, not because ‘better off’ has any meaning there, but because this is the sort of remark workers make about themselves. And it is undoubtedly true that when the level of wages and the level of unemployment pay were nearly the same, as was sometimes the case, many preferred not to work. Only people who are ignorant of what work really is, and ignorant of human nature, can be surprised or shocked at this. Those who like their work are the only people who like working. We tend to forget how much work is unlikeable. We used to get it done at the point of the starvation bayonet. Terror of starvation is now a thing of the past. If the spur of necessity is entirely removed, much basic work will simply not be done – unless enforced. My knowledge of the working man is riskily unexhaustive, but what has struck me most forcibly is the fact that he now worries about money much less than the middle classes do. Money affairs really haunt the middle-class person. A sudden loss of job or income is a fearful blow, a family catastrophe, the break-up of the whole machinery of life. But ever since unemployment achieved considerable dimensions the working man has felt increasingly secure. In the days when there wasn’t a great deal of unemployment and the State left every man to look after himself, the fear of losing your job was often a nightmare (this, as short a time ago as, say, the publication of Galsworthy’s Silver Box). When things got bad enough to be dangerous, Unemployment Benefit or the Dole was brought in and the dread of not being able to find a job and the next meal vanished. Then if a job fell through, the workman would say, to my astonishment I have heard him say it with the greatest cheerfulness (before the war-boom in work) – ‘Well I’ll go down to the “Labour” tomorrow and see if there is anything I fancy.’ If there was nothing he fancied he would take the Benefit.
If the reader feels that the exceptions that disprove the above rule, if it is a rule, are just as important as the rule itself, I shall not disagree with him. I am content to make the one observation that the working people today, if not less greedy for money, are less anxious about it that the middle classes, and are less afraid of being broken – or ‘broke’. Many of the latter receive a good deal of their income from investments. This brings with it nowadays a terrible feeling of insecurity – for, as Rebecca West has observed, there is a great difference between getting your money from some strange invisible source like investments, and getting it for definite work done or goods produced. In the latter case you do feel in unsettled times that your source of income may dry up. True, while things are all right, the middle-class person has more than the labourer. But this only makes him more anxious. And even that little extra cash which he gets is spent to support visions and apparitions and ghosts of reality, and to wind round him scarves and veils of illusion, which he calls ‘keeping up appearances’. When money fails or lessens he cannot cope with the situation, he is terrified of the Appearances disappearing. The machinery of his life breaks down, he is broken. But the labourer gets the Benefit and can cope. The onus really falls upon ‘the wife’ who ‘makes do’ a bit more. Middle-class people cannot make do, they are stuck in their fantastic swamp. Indeed fantastic: the labourer, accustomed to living within his means, is astonished and bewildered at hearing people with more means than himself speaking about ‘my overdraft at the bank’. He lives in a world mercifully oblivious of such nonsense and such failure in the art of life.
Up till this he had also been free from another word – taxes. Now that it is coming into his ken he is highly indignant. ‘I’m not going to do no overtime,’ he frequently declares, on the ground of paying Income Tax if he does. The tax is always spoken of as if it were equal to the amount earned! I’m told it hurt their pride to be taxed – though I don’t follow this. Certainly they seem to prefer to make less money than pay a small tax. They prefer to marry in a hurry rather than pay a bachelor-tax, as is now virtually the case. The Beveridge business means a lot more paying out; and as insecurity is not their chief fear, one meets with no wild enthusiasm for the scheme. Actually, one never hears it discussed or even mentioned, indeed many seem not to have heard of it. It will be interesting to see how the working man takes to it when he comes in practice to realize its full implications. Accustomed to regard the State as something absolutely external, whose business it is to look after him and pay for his children’s education and so on, he may not relish joining the privileged classes whose main privilege it is to pay taxes and to regard the State as part of themselves. But according to a section of the Press he is supposed to be clamouring for it. For all I know this may be true of
the working man in the towns; and of course it is still not thought proper to consider the countryman as actually existing. ‘A fortnight’s holiday is now universal,’ writes Sir Richard Livingstone, calmly turning his back on the whole agricultural world, just as a man called Commander Campbell never misses an opportunity to tell the twelve million listeners of the Brains Trust that their Christmas dinner, or any dinner, is entirely due – to the Merchant Navy.
17 Masters and Men; A View of Farmers
How hard it is to see the whole while merely grappling with the part! I had done a great many things to this field, but what interest had it for me after a few hours’ work on the couch? I was just ‘burning couch’. The labourer is too close to the earth to see the earth, to glimpse the whole or even the glittering of the part. As for Alf, it was just ‘this bloody couch’. His knowledge of agriculture was as limited as his interest in it. He referred to Robert as ‘the sheep man’. Once when we were spreading some caving-compost he had no notion that he was doing anything except throwing down some wet mushy straw to please ‘the old man’, and when I said it was manure he said – ‘Oh, it’s manure, is it?’ While Jimmy was cutting grass on the neighbouring field, Alf thought he was cutting corn. And once he remarked to me – ‘The old man don’t do much farming, dun ’e? Just removing this ’ere couch.’ He could see no relation between this couch destruction and the preparation of a seedbed, nor could he visualize any previous work on the other silent fields.
Sometimes Dick joined us, and his presence always enlivened the atmosphere by his humorously exaggerated grousing and take-offs of ’E. ‘I hope you are making a good show!’ we would hear as he approached. On such occasions I heard nothing good of agriculture. I enjoyed this, for I like unearnest people, and easily suit my mood to theirs. In fact, I like to grouse with a grouser. I don’t like to spoil things by appearing too conscientious to a grouser or too slack to a non-grouser, just as I don’t like to be too sincere in the presence of an insincere person, and, I may add, just as often lie to liars.
Sometimes ’E also joined with the couching, for there was nothing he was above doing himself. The Van! – and if it was near the end of the day we wondered if his object would be to finish the field, which would mean going a bit past the hour for ‘shutting out’. And we didn’t like that, though it was the natural thing to do – to finish a job even though it meant an extra fifteen minutes. How often I have thought of this business of masters and men, arising both from my own experience and from what I have heard from others. The labourers don’t think about the master. For he seldom thinks about them. They are to him simply ‘labour’. ‘I haven’t got the labour,’ he will say, not colleagues, not assistants, not even labourers. If a job is finished at five-fifteen instead of five-thirty, he doesn’t say ‘That’s all right boys, we’ll call it a day,’ thus making it easy for himself next time he wants that extra quarter of an hour. Oh no, he says Go and do so and so. He can’t bear the idea of losing that time; think of ‘the money’ I’m throwing away, he feels.
It is sometimes put forward that farmers on the whole are not amongst the choicest spirits of mankind. It is represented that they are mean, permanently disgruntled, hard, unsympathetic, greedy, and lacking in idealism and interest in the world. If there is truth in some of this, as seems likely owing to the frequency of the charge, it cannot be the fault of the farmers. That is obvious, since you and I, so vastly free from these faults, on becoming farmers tomorrow, would in due course have to be included in the charge, if it is true.
It is the effect of the Earth.
The Sea has a good effect upon men. On the sea we are travellers; we voyage in an element of alien mystery which belongs not to us but to fish, and where no Man trespasses without fear of prosecution. He who ploughs the main does really plough in fear and praise, does really feel the mystery; so that even the humblest seaman becomes fascinated and cries ‘Back to the Sea!’ if he goes away from it.
The influence of the Air is often good. When an airman speaks we hear the language of the Ideal, either open or disguised; and some attain the perspective of pity and love.
The spirit of the ancient Earth is sterner. Hoary with cruel taxation from morning to night she exacts a singleness of purpose that shall not waver and shall not tire. Her demands are not only too great but too constant to allow those who battle with her any relaxation, any contemplation, any ideology, any interest in the spirit and the mind. She cannot permit her servant to get lost in reverie like a sea watchman, nor to hold the world in proportion like an airman. He must not pause beside Beauty. He must not open the book of Learning. He must not pay homage to Art. He shall be kept submerged in his great task by perpetual apprehension of failure and ruin.
18 Work on a Rainy Day
A series of breakages were holding up the hay-cutting, and I was glad not to be involved in it. Also some wet days came on. A good farmer is never at a loss to know what to do with his men on a wet day, and ’E had plenty of handy jobs waiting down in the barn and shed – oiling machines, doing repairs, sack-tidying, mixing artificial. I spent one morning removing sacks of beans. They had been left too long and were splitting at the bottom. I mention this job, for now in actual practice, I did really spill the beans. But the most usual job was mixing artificial – so much potash with so much sulphate of ammonia. We poured it out on the floor, crunched it up, and mixed it. Some of the mixture seemed to make a remarkable potion, burning boots badly (Alf had his soles destroyed), and I wondered whether it wasn’t all a bit too scientific. Often ’E would give his instructions regarding the proportions to be mixed, and then go away. We all heard his words (perhaps four of us), but when we got down to it no one was sure whether he had said, say, half a hundredweight of potash to a hundredweight of ammonia, or more or less of each, or phosphate as well. In due course ’E would return and say we were doing it wrong, he had said less of one and more of the other. But curiously enough, he didn’t seem to mind very much.
I did much of this with Alf alone. He seemed to like doing the sack-lifting or to dislike my doing it. I don’t know which; anyway, he always refused assistance and even seemed to want to do most of the shovelling. It took us an hour and a half to mix and bag up a pile of manure. Once when there was an awkward three-quarters of an hour to go, we lessened the next pile by informal proportions, without, I felt sure, making the slightest difference to the yield of the ultimate crop.
But Alf didn’t like working in the barn. It was too close to ’E. One afternoon it was half-raining. After dinner, as it looked like clearing, I went up to the field and carried on with the couch (not trying to burn it of course, but to cart it away). It began to rain a bit more but still not much. Now, as a general rule, if there is a drop of rain the English labourer (as opposed to other nationalities I am told) rushes for his raincoat and stops outdoor work on the spot – so much so that some farmers dare not be seen putting on a coat themselves if a shower threatens, in case there is a general cessation of work on the job in hand. But out came Alf now. Seeing that the rain wasn’t much, he had made a bee-line for the stable, got the cart and hastened away from the barn up to my field. He was considerably amused at his own haste and determination to get clear of the barn, and kept repeating, ‘I weren’t going to stay down there with ’e if I could ’elp it. ’E won’t find me going down there, rain or no rain. It’s better up ’ere. Peace and quiet ’ere, looksee. No one don’t get me to go down there this afternoon, we’re better off up ’ere.’ Observing my amusement at this, he repeated it over and over again with variations every five minutes for the first hour and a half. Sometimes I thought he was going to introduce a new element into the conversation, but no, it would just be – ‘’E don’t get me to go down there if I can ’elp it. Don’t want no work in that there barn with ’e around. Better up ’ere, looksee.’
The Saturday mornings were long, for we knocked off, not at twelve-thirty but at one-thirty. This made our lunch hour an important meal and break. On one S
aturday morning many of us were working at different jobs within visible proximity: Alf and myself spreading some caving compost; Dick over the way carting hurdles for Robert; the carter loading hay; Harold using the tractor. We were all about to break off for lunch at 9.30 when the Van was seen approaching. Better wait till ’E’s gone, was the general feeling, so we went on working. He approached Alf and had something to say about his method of getting the straw loose, then over to me, finding that there was room for improvement in my scheme of distribution. He then passed over to Harold with whom he remained long in converse. But he’ll be off soon, we thought, and carried on. He left Harold and went over to the carter. Then over to Robert where he remained some time in conference, all of us still working on, and then back again to say something more to Harold. Finally he moved off stage left, and when the Van was out of sight we all sat down – a most memorable break.
Dick was always in a tremendous hurry to be off, on every day, but especially on Saturdays, to see his girl. This morning he had been told to carry three wagon loads of straw to a given place. He loudly declared to us that he could fit in one load and a half, at most two, certainly not three if he were to make a getaway on time. So with a stream of suitable language he assured us that he would get two loads and no more – and he stuck to it, passing us eventually on his way down to the stable with time enough in hand to make his exit and then catch his bus. Meanwhile I carried on with Alf and Harold. ‘Speed one-thirty,’ they said. ‘Speed one o’clock,’ I said, since by one o’clock one could sight land, as it were.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 13
