Farmer's Glory

by A G Street

  I can appreciate now that my father’s work in this way was very important. He would also play off the rick staff against the field men. Perhaps we would be a pitcher short of the required number owing to one of the carters having gone to the station for a load of something. Father would drive out to the other pitchers, and say to the head carter: ‘’Fraid you won’t be able to keep us going so well to-day till Fred gets back. Still, we must put up with it. Just do the best you can.’ Or perhaps the rick staff would be a man or two short for a similar reason, and it would be: ‘I wonder if I’d better drive down to the dairy, and see if a milker can be spared for a bit. You chaps won’t keep those pitchers going else.’ ‘Doan’t ’ee worry, zur,’ they would be sure to say, ‘we’ll manage somehow.’

  If the occasion were desperate, and another hand must be got somehow, the shepherd was the last resort. You didn’t send the foreman to see if the shepherd could get away for an hour or two. That would have been to court disaster. The sheep would have been in such a critical state that if the shepherd left for a moment, they would all be sure to die. Neither was I sent. Youth hadn’t the tact required for such a ticklish operation. Oh no! That was a job for the Guvnor, and from the rick we would see Tommy being urged to his most furious speed up the far slope towards the sheepfold. Having arrived, my father talked sheep, sheep, and nothing but sheep, thus relegating the harvest to an unimportant detail unworthy of mention. After a bit the shepherd would be sure to say: ‘And how be getten on wi’ the carrying, zur?’ ‘Pretty fair, shepherd. We’re a bit shorthanded today. I’m on my way down to the village to see if I can pick up another man.’ ‘Well, zur, I be about straight yer just now, in a manner o’ speaking. Ud it be any good if I were to gie ’ee a hand fer an hour or two?’ And back to the harvest field would come Tommy, hauling both the shepherd and my father, who had achieved his object without mentioning it. All this may sound childish to many people, but some will, I hope, recognize it for what it undoubtedly was—pure genius.

  My own personal relations with the men in those days were of the best. I know that I liked them, and I think that they liked me. I did not do much actual laborious work, but my father made me do every job on the farm at some time or another in order that I might, from personal knowledge, be able to estimate whether a man was working well or ill at any particular job. I was much older before I realized how much I did learn in those first years after leaving school. It is curious that one doesn’t know the exact moment when one felt qualified to say whether the sheep were doing well or not, whether a certain cow or horse were a good or bad one, or what precise cultivation was needed for a particular crop or field. One only knows that suddenly one does know. You don’t learn by going round and asking why, but by growing up with the whole business. One assimilates knowledge unknowingly. And it isn’t all knowledge. One learns a good bit about faith in the beneficent wisdom of the Supreme Being. I remember once the foreman saying to my father when he was going to carry some barley rather quickly after cutting it: ‘Don’t ’ee do it. Thee’s left it to the Almighty fer six months. Let un have it dree more days.’

  Naturally I learnt a lot from the men. You cannot work with people day after day, all the year round, without doing so. They were, without exception, very definite about things. They never explained anything. They just said so. And usually I found out that these statements were correct. Our old dairyman once said tome: ‘’Tis no good buying cattle from down stream fer these meadows. They don’t do up yer. You wants to goo up stream and get ’em.’ Ten years afterwards I bought a lot of cattle from down stream, and they didn’t do. That deal cost me at least a hundred pounds, and then I appreciated the old man’s words.

  They didn’t mince matters, either. The first harvest after I left school, I was one day on the top of a rick with an old rick-maker. The surface we were working on was getting smaller and smaller as the roof drew in, and I was being particularly careful not to get in his way, and to place each and every sheaf just to his hand, when he looked up and said: ‘Thee best get down.’ I got down.

  There is no doubt that the agricultural labourer is much better off now than he was during the period of which I am writing. He has to-day a higher standard of living, a broader outlook on life, and a taste for amusements and interests outside agriculture, but whether he is any happier or more contented is open to question. Definitely he is not such a good farm hand. These other interests distract his attention from the farm. I do not say this in any spirit of criticism, but merely state the fact. Why should he worry about the farm after his working hours, allotted by law, are finished? But twenty-five years ago his sole interest was the farm on which he worked. Nowadays he does what he is paid for, but then he did what was right and necessary to the well-being of crops or stock irrespective of payment. Then he took a pride in his particular department of the farm, and also took the responsibility of it, but now he runs to the boss for instructions at every touch and turn. The same alteration in outlook and amusements has taken place in the farmers also, with, I think, the same consequent deterioration in their value to the land. In those times, the farmer’s sole interest was his farm. What went on in the world outside of farming he didn’t know, and didn’t care. Hie farm supplied all his amusements also: shooting, hunting, fishing, local tennis—one didn’t go to Wimbledon in those days to watch tennis, one concentrated on the best method of dealing with one’s neighbour’s devastating first service, a very real and urgent problem—an occasional point-to-point meeting, a puppy show, and countless other festivities pertaining to one’s calling. One never got away for a moment from the atmosphere of farming. Both farmers and labourers might have been justly called narrow-minded clods by townsmen in those days, but as guardians of the soil in their particular district they were unbeatable.

  But that large tenant farmers were doing pretty well then, there is no question. As I have said, they did their duty by the soil, and, in the words of the Scriptures, it repaid them, some twenty, some sixty, and some a hundredfold. Home scenes of that period come back to me quite clearly. A tennis party, some ten or a dozen people on the lawn, a man and a boy bedding out geraniums and lobelia, and in the background the rambler roses flaming in all their June beauty. The local hunt running a fox to ground not far from the farmhouse, and Tommy and the trap being immediately requisitioned to take liquid refreshment to horsemen and diggers. The meet of a shooting party at nine o’clock on a December morning: friends and neighbours arriving in governess cars and dogcarts; the varied fortunes of the day’s sport and the gargantuan high tea in the evening, which was invariably followed by cards till all hours. Not the quiet solemn bridge of to-day, but the blunt, noisy, cheery penny nap, followed by an hour of that full-blooded gamble, Farmer’s Glory, to wind up the evening. I believe the correct name for this game in urban society is Slippery Ann, but that Farmer’s Glory was the more appropriate in rural circles there can be no disputing. The whole business of being a farmer in those days was indeed a splendid glory.

  No record of this period would be complete without a mention of the weekly pay-day. What a business it was! The yellow canvas bag had a partition dividing the gold from the silver, for we had gold in those days. Most farmers paid fortnightly, but my father always said that the money was of more value to the men if they got it weekly, and paid accordingly. He made a special point of going round the farm and paying the men at their work. There were no time-sheets. ‘What do you make it this week, Tom?’ my father would ask one of the labourers. ‘Two and a half days fer you, zur, four hours overtime, and t’other hoeing.’ ‘What’ll you draw on the hoeing?’ The hoeing was piecework, and the ‘two and a half days fer you’ day work. ‘Aight shillin’, zur, and I’ve a ketched two dozen moles.’ And from his pocket Tom would produce a grimy screw of paper containing twenty-four moles’ tails, for which he would be paid one penny each.

  We met the head coachman of the estate during the round one pay-day, and after due salutations my father offered him th
e screw of paper containing the tails for twopence, on the ground that he had purchased it for two shillings only five minutes previously. I was only about fourteen at the time, and I can remember wriggling with suppressed excitement, as the coachman rode up to the trap and eyed the parcel suspiciously. ‘Well,’ he said to my father, ‘if you’ve paid two bob for it, I don’t mind chancing twopence.’ Which he did, to my father’s great satisfaction and my own undisguised glee.

  On the pay-day before Christmas, the men received Christmas boxes, carefully graduated according to their proper status. On these occasions the foreman, head shepherd, head dairyman, and head carter, received orders on the local butcher for joints of beef, while the other hands got cash, half-crowns for men, down to sixpences for boys. It was indeed a perfect example of that ideal form of government, a benevolent autocracy.

  CHAPTER IV

  Harvest finished usually early in September, and the final event in the farm year was the large sheep fair in the middle of that month. The only work done on Fair day, apart from essentials such as milking, was the driving of the three hundred odd sale lambs to the fair. Half the lambs would be ewe or chilver lambs, and the best one hundred and fifty of these would be kept at home to replenish the flock. The male or wether lambs would be sorted into a best hundred and two fifties. The remaining ewe lambs would provide another lot of fifty, and the odd ones of each sex would be put together and sold as so many mixed lambs.

  As the farm was only a bare two miles from the fair ground, the sale sheep were driven to the fair in separate small flocks, as they were to be sold. Truly, a lordly procession, which left the fold at 4 a.m., led by the head shepherd and the best hundred lambs.

  I have seen seventy thousand sheep penned and sold in that fair in one day, in addition to many cattle and horses. To the uninitiated the fair field must have appeared as a confused muddle of rustics, sheep, and dogs, with a cacophony of baas and barks as a never-ending accompaniment.

  I think that the auctioneers who sold the sheep enjoyed the day’s work thoroughly. I can see the leading one now. He had a raised plank walk down between the pens, from which he surveyed the sheep and company as an admiral upon his quarter-deck. Servant of the farmers he might be, but when selling that day, he was master of all, both buyers and sellers.

  The sheep sold, the farm settled down to the customary ploughing and planting for the next season, but before I leave this prosperous period there was one more happening in the farming year which is worthy of mention. I refer to the harvest supper.

  The big barn would be cleared out sufficiently to make room for the seating of thirty or forty people. The words, ‘God Speed the Plough’, in letters eighteen inches high, on the wall at one end, would be freshened up with whitewash; this was usually my job. A local caterer would arrive in the morning with tables, benches and provender. The menu consisted of cold meat, beef, mutton, or ham, with hot boiled potatoes for the first course, and hot figgety duff puddings with whole raisins in them for the second. They were boiled all the day in the dairy copper.

  There were no windows in the barn, and the lighting was provided by oil lamps hanging from the beams on chain plough traces. I can visualize that scene quite clearly: three tables in U-shaped formation, my father in the chair at the top table, and the foreman and myself at the ends of the others. I can see the ruddy countenances of the company, shining like burnished copper in the pool of light from the lamps overhead. The light would filter through cracks in the reflectors here and there, and faintly outline the arching rafters of the barn, giving the whole scene almost a churchlike appearance, Indeed, the company might have been a gathering of old and jolly friars, save that whiskers predominated.

  Most of them drank beer, and here I would like to correct the common impression that the farm worker of that day lived only for beer. Very rarely did I ever notice anyone drink to excess on these occasions, although a certain mellowing was apparent. And there was no stint. A barrel was horsed at one end, and they helped themselves. As a class they had arrived at the correct valuation of beer in their scheme of things. For long hours of manual labour in hot weather, beer was the best drink. In the days years before, when part of their wages consisted of beer, the allowance for a carter in the harvest field was one gallon daily, while the head carter was allowed five quarts. And in my day in the harvest, if you wanted to get a field finished before nightfall, you were far more likely to get the extra effort out of your men by sending out some beer in the evening than by any promise of overtime pay. But on an occasion like this, to get fuddled with beer when you were not working, was deemed a breach of good manners, and frowned on by all.

  Supper finished, and grace said, the toast of the King was given, and then china basins filled with shag were placed at intervals down the tables. The effeminate, who smoked only cigarettes, had to provide their own. I was in this category in those days, and used to take a plentiful supply with me. My father would beckon me to take his cigar-case round to the foreman and heads of departments. There did not seem to be any jealousy at this subtle distinction. After all, the farm labourer lived so close to nature that he had a true sense of fundamentals, and thought it only seemly to give to every man his proper due according to his station. Also the non-cigar men got a good deal of amusement out of the laborious efforts of the favoured ones to smoke their cigars. The shepherd, I remembered, burnt his at one end and chewed it fiercely at the other. When you consider that he had the best part of a leg of mutton inside him, it was probably wisest to finish the cigar as quickly as possible. As his face was whiskers all over, I used to imagine horrible catastrophes as the glowing end got nearer and nearer to the jungle.

  The evening then developed into a smoking concert, interspersed with speeches, much like a lodge dinner. First, my father would give the toast of the staff. I cannot remember the words he used, but he sincerely thanked them for their year’s work, and gave them the impression that it was greatly appreciated by him, which it was, and he would finish up with a special reference to the foreman, the head shepherd, the head dairyman and the chief carter.

  The visitors and he and I would then rise and solemnly drink their health. Then my father would ask if anyone would give us a song. After much chaff, one of the under-carters would drink deeply, and rise to his feet prepared to do his worst. Their songs were chiefly of a morbid sentimental type. Some I can remember now. ‘It was only a beautiful picture in a beautiful golden frame’, was one; something about angels’ eyes watching a lonely little cabin on the railway line and averting some terrible catastrophe, was another; and ‘They laid him sad and lonely in his faded coat of blue’ was a third. A note of humour crept in when one of the labourers sang about the delights of jumping out of bed when the cock begins to crow, as my father’s love of bed was common knowledge.

  However, when once started there was no need to call for volunteers; they were ready and waiting—at least amongst the younger men—to exhibit their prowess. The old men bided their time. ‘Let these boys finish their squawking, and then we’ll show ’em zummat’, was their attitude. Once, I remember, we got a modern note. A young dairy lad about sixteen sang ‘All the nice girls love a sailor’, which some of the old hands thought hardly suitable for the occasion. That particular lad is now managing a large Grade A Tuberculin Tested Dairy up in Hampshire. Not only in his choice of song at sixteen was he more up to date than his fellows, but also in the outlook which shaped his subsequent career.

  However, his song brought a lull in the proceedings, and the foreman seized the opportunity to rise to his feet and call for order. His speech, as I remember it, went something like this. ‘Chaps, we be all yer once again, and we be glad to be yer, and wishes to say thank you to the Guvnor fer a downright good spread. We’ve a finished another year together, and we be truly thankful. The Guvnor, he said as ‘ow we ain’t ’ad no on-pleasantness, and that ’ee do vally our work. Well, speaken fer one and all, I says as ’ow we do vally to work fer un. Course, there mid
a bin a bit ov a miff, now and agen. The Guvnor, ’ee will get hisself into sich a tear at haymakin’ and harvest. But there, we do know as a can’t ’elp it, and we’ve a come droo thease year all right, and shall agen, please God. Still, ’ee do play fair, in the manner o’ speaken, and we do vally it. We be pleased and proud to work fer un. Course, there’s the young Guvnor. ’Ee do know a lot, and there’s a limb ov a lot as ’ee don’t know. But ’ee don’t do so bad, and we be a learnin’ ’im smartish. But I low fore I asks ’ee all to drink their health, that I muddn’ ferget the Guvnor’s wife, who dod do a lot fer we. You do know, chaps. When you be ill, or when yer wife do ’ave a youngster, ’tis the Missus who do make it go easier and more suent like. Well, now then, let’s ’ave you. We’ll drink their health and long life to ’em all.’ The toast over, the foreman would start the chorus ‘For they are jolly good people’, to which an accompaniment would be played on an accordion by the head carter.

  The serious business of the evening being over, the old dairyman would offer to give us a song. He was, and is, a dear gentle old man, and he had usually two or three goes before he could pitch his song so that he could sing it without breaking down. After two or three false starts he would have another swig at his glass, beam at the company, and launch forth into that old South Country song, ‘Buttercup Joe’. As the singer is happily still with me as I write, I am able to give you the words of his song. I asked him the other day if he would write them out on a piece of paper for me if he could remember them, and he agreed to do so. This morning, I was over in the dairy, printing up some butter, and he came up to me and said: ‘About thic zong, zur. I bain’t much ov a scholard like, and they at whoam don’t want to bother wi’ un. But we be yer by ourselves now. There iddn nobody about. If I were to say un to ’ee, you could write un down, couldn ’ee?’ So on a sheet of butter paper I wrote out the song as he repeated it. He did so in a sing-song voice, and kept straying into the tune at intervals. Here it is.