Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 835
It was, I imagine, during the French Revolution that some idea of this sort began to permeate the field labourer. But even then it was more a matter of individuals than of a body corporate. The print to which I have referred already is not, at any rate, in any form discoverable earlier than in a French version of 1782. It shows a man bearing upon his back many others: a king on the top, then, in a bunch, a soldier, a priest, a lawyer, a doctor, a merchant. Those who form the burden bear scrolls: “I govern all,”
“I fight for all,”
“I pray for all,”
“I cure all,”
“I sell for all,” and the figure with its bowed head, like Atlas groaning beneath the weight of a world, exhibits the legend: “I work for all.” I have seen versions of this print, redesigned with different attributes in wood engraving, in steel engravings, in chromolithograph or even copied by hand, all over Europe — in estaminets in La Vendée, in inns in Herefordshire, in farms in Kent, and in the Kotten of Westphalia. If it is not the charter, it is, this print, at least the claim to recognition of the worker on the soil. It was probably first designed in the France of 1782. Yet even in the England of a century and a quarter later the field labourer has not found any corporate or articulate means of intercommunication; he has not imagined any method of revenging himself on the classes above him. He has not, I mean, waged any war, claimed the land, or so much as “struck” in any vast numbers. What he has done has been simply to go over to the enemy. For, with the spread of education, 126 with the increase of communication, there has come not the determination to better the conditions of life in the country, but the simple abandonment of the land. It is, I think, a truism to anyone who knows the country, though I have found townsmen to deny it, that there are whole stretches of territory in England where a really full-witted or alert youth of between sixteen and thirty will absolutely not be found. I visited lately eighteen farms of my own neighbourhood, covering a space of about four miles by two miles, and on this amount of ground only five boys found employment. Four of these were below the average intelligence, and had at school not passed the fourth standard; the fifth was so “stupid” that he could not be trusted to do more than drive the milk-cart to and from the station. And of all the farm-labourers’ families that I know well — some forty-six in number — only two have youths at home, and one of these has “something the matter with his legs.” Of one hundred and twelve of other families that I know in a nodding way, not more than five have boys at work in the fields. Making a rough calculation of the figures as they have presented themselves to me, I find that just over five per cent, of the country-born boys I have known have stayed of their own free choice on the land. The public statistics for the whole of England are somewhat higher in this particular; but in the purely agricultural Midlands the standard of intelligence is somewhat lower, and in the North of England the living-in system still prevails, and does for various reasons keep the young men in their places.
The figure among the girls is probably even more striking. A girl of moderately good looks or of an intelligence at all alert is almost unknown in many, many villages of England. I was much struck by the statement of a friend of mine the other day. A man of much intelligence and of unrivalled knowledge of country life, he had been spending a month watching the birds and small beasts of a certain countryside. He had covered a good deal of ground in that time, and at last he saw a pleasant and bright-looking girl. He had grown so weary of seeing only worn, stupid or dazed faces that he got off his cycle and remarked to her that he was glad to see that she at least was stopping in her own village.
“I!” she said with an accent of scorn; “I wouldn’t stop in such a dull old hole if you gave me £10 a day! I’m visiting my parents for three days.”
Yet the village in question was almost world-famous for its beauty, and her father’s wages were rather high.
I do not for the moment want to extract any other meaning from this striking rural exodus than may attach to my own astonishment. But it does seem to me astonishing that this really downtrodden class should have given just this form to its protest. There has not, I mean, been any discoverable attempt worth the mention to fight the battle as a battle.
You do not anywhere find that the field labourer has attempted to raise the price that he receives from his employer, nor do you find that the young people of the countrysides have ever made any attempt to brighten or to enhance the intellectual colourings of their lives.
(You will find this most strikingly exemplified in the case of such temporary industries as that of hop-picking, where a whole village turns out together, and where, if anywhere, some sort of stand for better money might be made. “Strikes” do, of course, occur where there are many “foreigners” employed, but practically never where all the pickers are village people. The cottagers accept uncomplainingly the grower’s wage, which is based upon his computation of what the price of hops may be expected to prove; of course, when I say the peasant has never struck, I do not forget the name of Mr. Joseph Arch. But from his day back to that of John Ball agitators and stack-burnings have been so comparatively rare that “never” remains a word sufficiently accurate for the uses of impressionism.)
You do not find anywhere spelling bees, newspaper clubs, debating societies, or subscription dances. Yet there is no reason in the world why these things should not have been attempted. Nay more, all the old seasonal excitements of the country are dying out: the fairs, the May-day celebrations, the sparrow shoots, the bonfire clubs, even the very cricket clubs, which are subsidised, as a rule, “from above” — all the old merriments and “merry-neets” of the country have almost gone. In the course of the last four years I have seen the custom of May Barns and the village waits abandoned in a place where they have existed since its first houses were built. But no trace of any attempt to amuse themselves is to be found amongst the peasants of this countryside. The whole population of field workers is simply throwing down its tools; it is making no struggle for existence; it is simply going away in silence, without a protest and without a trace of listening to outward persuasions. And I know very well that if I live to be as old as my old Meary there will be no one like her to lift my basket over the stile.
And when I think of her, standing dun-coloured, smiling and square in the dusk of that sunken footpath, I am rather saddened. For, following her footsteps into the shadowy land that is the past, all the generation for whom she stood is going, now so fast.
There will be none to take their places. It any remain they will be the slow-witted: whilst she and those she stood for were merely unlettered, a thing very different. Yet, perhaps, we do wrong to regret that there should no longer be a whole world of our fellow - creatures pulled out of their natural shapes, stunted in their minds and leading lives dull and unlovely so that we may have certain aesthetic feelings gratified. No doubt in the scale of things the young shop-assistant, with her preserved figure, her gayer laugh, her brighter complexion, her courtships, her ideals and her aspiration for a villa in a row, with a brass knocker and an illustrated bible on the parlour table — no doubt the young shop-assistant is a better product of humanity than Meary, with her broad face, her great mouth, great hands, and cow-like heave of the shoulders. Nevertheless, I suppose that we must needs regret this passing. For, after all, it is a stage of the youth of the world that is passing away along with our own youth. It is the real heart of the country that is growing a little colder as our own hearts grow colder. It is one of the many things that our children — that our very adolescent nephews and nieces — will never know.
CHAPTER IV. TOILERS OF THE FIELD
I DO not know why in particular, and at this particular moment, there should come up in my memory a very rainy day. I was with three other men, driven in from work by the weather. We were idly watching the heavy showers that slanted across the triangular farmyard, driving down from the grey hollows and grey slopes of the downs behind, until the water dropped like curtains of beads from the eaves of the waggon lodge beneath which we sheltered.
I had been making a new strawberry bed, and a Falstaffian, shiny, shaven-faced scamp, by-named Sunshine because of his appearance, had been helping me. The shepherd, or, as we styled it, the looker, was flaying a sheep that hung from one of the tie beams of the open shed, and Hunt, a retired soldier, who also did a job of lookering on the farm, lank, ill-shaven and sallow, leant back against a mowing machine, and looked with red and malignant eyes across the slants of rain. He rubbed his wet nose with the back of his hand and snarled out, “Now if I had my rights I shouldn’t be here wet and sick feeling.”
The shepherd — who had been a shepherd all his life on the one farm — made a slight incision with his knife, and drew the skin a shade lower on the red carcase.
“If we all had, we shouldn’t none of us be,” he said, with a laconic air.
Sunshine, who had run away from his wife in the next county, grunted merrily.
He himself would be sitting in Brock Castle drawing-room, and all the lands below the hill would be his, Hunt drawled viciously.
“And I’d have a tidy bit of land of my own, too,” the shepherd said.
An aunt of his had died with property in the Chancery, Sunshine laughed, and, as luck would have it, I could make a similar claim.
“‘Reckon no one would have to work if it wasn’t for they lawyers,” Hunt snarled; and the shepherd said that if a man in a black coat came along questioning him he kept very whist and quiet.
“Might be a parson, now,” Sunshine argued.
Well, parsons and lawyers pig together, too, the shepherd answered. More than once he had taken a note to the vicarage, and seen parson and lawyer Hick having tea together. No — take his advice, and do not speak to a man with a white collar and a black coat.
He was of opinion that your own quality was as much as you could deal with: “Never you have no truck with strangers, or as like as not you’d sign away rights of yours you’d never heard of — and before you could say Jack Ploughman.”
The retired soldier had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, I believe, for I could not otherwise make much of his wrongs, and a large liver, gained in India, seemed to sour him. But both Sunshine and the looker were of most contented kinds. Yet they told remarkable stories of the wrongs that they, their relations, or A., B. and C. of that countryside, had suffered at the hands of the local Quality. The shepherd’s father, for instance, had owned a mud cottage and a good orchard — probably squatted land. One day, when he was about sixty-six, Squire C — k had come along and said, “Look here, old looker; I’ll build you a brick cottage and let you live in it till you die, roomy and comfortable, if so be when you die you will engage it comes to me.” The old looker had consented; and all the other squatters on the common had taken similar offers. But the old looker had died before the new cottage had been built two months, and out the old woman and her kids had had to turn.
“That was how the C—’s came into all the C — n property,” the looker said.
Sunshine beamingly told the story of how his aunt had signed away her land in Chancery to a lawyer come all the way from the shires to get her name to a paper when none of her nephews were by. And the shepherd capped it with the tale of old Jacky Banks, who had worked all his life on that very farm. He had had fifteen pounds a-year for forty years, never spent a penny of it except for baccy, and had it under his bed when he died, along with his watch. Well, he lived in, on the farm, and died in what was now the drawing-room. Old missus, who was a powerful old woman, lugging buckets about the stackyard and doing a man’s work till she died, had taken all old Jacky’s money from under his bed before his eyes were properly glazed, and his relations never saw a penny of it, nor the watch and chain neither.
I have frequently thought that the reputation for stupidity, for slowness of brain, for grossness of manner that the townsman accords to the field labourer must really arise from mere suspiciousness. The shepherd’s advice to his friends to keep a shut head to people wearing black coats is very generally followed in the cottages. It must be remembered that the labourer cannot see any reason why his betters should want to talk with him. The only motive that he can accord to them is that of desiring to “get something out” of him. He has heard of land-grabbing, of land in Chancery; he has known of cases innumerable in which the small tenant-farmer, the three-hundred-acre man, has over-reached his labourers. His cottage doors are beset by pedlars of sorts — watch pedlars, pension tea pedlars, illustrated Bible pedlars, and the agents of foreign lotteries. All these people wear black coats and speak with specious and silky accents of gentility. I remember, too, walking along a dark road from the station with a youngish girl of the scullery-maid type. She chatted amiably as long as I was invisible, but when the light of a carriage fell upon me she looked at me with startled eyes, uttered, “Why, you’re a gentleman!” and took to her heels. For in the eyes of the cottage mothers there is only one reason why a gentleman should wish to talk to a cottage girl.
And the speculation has sometimes occurred to me, too, what impression the voice, the accent and the language of the more instructed class must make upon the ears accustomed to broader and harsher sounds. I remember discussing a certain rather charming lady with an old labourer, and he said —
“Why, she was very nice in her ways, but she’d a pernicketty way of speaking that ah couldn’t stomach much.”
If, in fact, brogues, dialects and dropped “h’s” affect the educated ear disagreeably, must not soft and delicate inflections of vowel sounds cause a vague or a very definite feeling of unrest? I do not imagine that a labourer can ever feel really at ease with that particular kind of foreignness. It cannot be home-like. Most country speech nowadays is tinged and coarsened by the horrible sounds of the cockney language, but it was not always so. I remember, years ago, going to order a waggon at a new dismal-looking villa residence, the property of a selfmade man. The man himself came to the door. He was over ninety, tall, straight, with faded blue eyes, very white hair and trembling hands; but his voice and accent were charming and flute-like. He said, for instance —
“De harses beien’t home from plovin’ most deas till niin.”
The words look grotesque in print, but all the sounds were very clear and precise. And indeed with the very old people of all countrysides it is generally the same. They give the impression of speaking, very correctly and with great self-respect, a dead language.
So that for these and many reasons the person of quality, the strange squire, the Bible pedlar, the parson, or the dog-licence man, are suspect. All these wearers of clothes not weather-beaten and soil-stained, all these speakers with unhomely voices, all these people who have too ready a flow of words to be easily trusted — all these English foreigners, in fact, are individuals to whom it is wisest to keep a “shet hed.” You can gain nothing from them, they may be after some vague property of yours. I think, really, that the attitude of the field-labourer towards his betters is that of, say, a Dutch colonial farmer towards the early diamond prospectors. There may be diamonds, gold, petroleum, or Heaven knows what upon his property; who knows what these strangers might make out of the unknown mysterious possibilities?
I heard, for instance, the other day of a quite authentic Chancery case. Here an old labourer, who had served with distinction in the Army, was really the heir to some property. His children had employed lawyers, but the old man obstinately refused to give them any assistance. Once he went to the solicitor’s office with his medals and birth certificate as means of identification, but having surrendered them he sat all night upon the doorstep for fear they should be taken out of the office and sold. Now, having recovered them, he sits upon them continually in his hooded chair, he absolutely refuses to swear any affidavit or to give any testimony in any court of law. And there the case remains at a standstill. This, of course, is an extreme instance, but it is as it were a symptom of a very widespread disease.
For it must be remembered that the field labourer has not any reason for courting the society of his betters. He cannot by any possible means rise in the social scale. A successful draper will become a knight and build a manor-house, but there is no kind of “success” open to the usual farm labourer. Hence he has no reason for snobbishness and “knows his place.” A lady of my acquaintance once invited her wood-reeve to sit down to tea with her. He gave as a reason for refusing that —
“You don’t put a toad in your waistcoat pocket.” Perhaps for that very reason the field labourer has as a rule much less of class hatred than his town cousin. You do not hear, beside the ale-house ingle, the same 141 diatribes against the rich that you will in a workman’s train; you will not, if you are one of the rich, have such approaches as you may make met with an ostentatious defiance. I have been met in the country by “shut heads,” but have never been harangued for my lewdness or luxurious habits as has time and again happened to me at the hands of town labourers. The nearest I have come to it in the country was once when I asked my way of a statuesque old woman in a lilac sun-bonnet. She misdirected me, and when, returning an hour later, I saw her and reproached her, she said —
“Well, you idle chaps has nothing better to do than to waste time. How did I know ye really wanted to go to L — ?”
The feeling expressed in the lines I have quoted from Piers Plowman does undoubtedly still exist. Once I took one end of the table at an underwood sale dinner in an inn barn. The churchwardens had been brought in; I had made the best of ladling out rum punch with a ladle that had a George II. guinea inlaid in its bowl (and you have no idea how difficult it is to ladle punch into thirty tumblers without spilling a quantity. The quill-like silver stem quivers in your hand and you feel that sixty or a hundred eyes are fixed upon your fingers). The smoke from the pipes ascended to the rough rafters of the barn; repletion mellowed the talk of cants of ash-saplings and of chestnut wattlegates; we had eaten roast;goose and plum pudding with brandy sauce; we were a matter of ninety buyers, all labourers, except for three farmers, the auctioneer and myself. Then songs were called for; ten or a dozen men set themselves to press one of the farmers for Old Joe’s Wedding Day. The farmer, a man who worked himself, fat, hard, bullet-headed and inscrutable, sat with twinkling eyes, sunk deep in his chair as if he heard and saw nothing of his persuaders. Suddenly in the midst of their clamour a high, clear, thin sound thrilled through the air. Coming as it did from his lips which hardly appeared to move, it produced a most extraordinary impression, as if a bull had spoken with the voice of a canary.
