by A G Street
‘Won’t go? Then he must be made to. Come on, back you go.’
And back we all squelched to the scene of our failure. My father’s manner seemed to infuse a feeling of briskness into the proceedings. During the preliminary hitching he gave everybody the impression that this was a trivial business which would soon be over. As his son I knew jolly well that I would never dare to stand still if he wanted me to go anywhere, and I began to be a bit sorry for the colt. I felt that he couldn’t possibly realize what he was now up against. When all was ready my father gave one last vicious instruction to the carter. ‘Now then, Tom, when he starts let un go. If you holler woa, I’ll sack you. I’ll tell ’ee when to stop. Now then.’
I think everybody present hoped that the colt would refuse to budge. I know I did, as I wanted to find out the way to overcome this difficulty, but I can remember feeling quite sure that my father would have a certain cure for it.
‘Noo then, Vi’let, coom up,’ said Tom. As before, Vi’let came up in great style, but her companion failed again. But this time he went one better than just standing still. He went backwards a bit and sat down heavily.
Now a cart colt weighs nearly a ton, so if you can imagine a very fat man about twenty stone sitting down in a chair with a bump upon the point of a long sharp tin-tack, you will get some idea of what happened. There are lots of spiky things on an iron plough, and the colt sat down fairly on one of them (the drail pin is its correct name) and ran the point some three inches into his ham.
He didn’t sit for long. No, by golly, he was up and away with Vi’let doing her best to keep up, and Tom hanging on to the handles for dear life. The other men ran alongside over the rough ground in a stiff, scrambling, awkward gait—one’s knees do not bend easily for running at sixty or thereabouts—whilst my father gallumphed along behind in like manner, giving tongue with hunting calls to cheer on the horses. ‘Keep ’em going, Tom,’ he puffed. ‘Don’t let ’un stop on his own. He must go till we want him to stop.’ And they kept him at it until he was a lather all over, and afterwards he was very little trouble. He was christened ‘Squatter’, and carried the mark of his squat all his life, as although he was a bright bay in colour, a small patch of white hairs grew over the wound in his ham.
Having demonstrated how easy it was to make a stubborn colt go, my father lectured the men on the imbecility of hitching off a colt before conquering it, and set off for another part of the farm to wake up somebody else. I stayed behind. The men’s comments were much the same as my own would have been. ‘Guvnor, ’ee do take all the credit for thic young vooil runnin’ thic pint in his backside. Why hadn er bin yet at the beginnin’ and showed us how to do it? I ’low that ud a beat un. But there, things do allus goo right fer ’ee somehow.’
Things did go right for him, somehow, even his mistakes. He was great on checking everything one wrote. ‘Check and double check’, he would say to me again and again. It was relic of some far-off business training in his youth. I remember once making a frightful mistake in an order, owing to omitting this double check business. I had written:
2 gross Cooper’s Dip
6 —— White Oils
meaning of course six bottles only of the latter commodity. When the consignment arrived I got it pretty hot. You know the sort of thing. ‘Can’t I leave a simple thing like that to you? Perhaps you’ll listen to me next time I tell you to check what you have written.’
However, he got the firm to take back most of the six gross of oils, and there wasn’t much harm done. And then, shortly afterwards he made a slip in ordering himself, and I felt that the Lord had delivered the enemy into my hands at last. He was away on holiday when I got a notice from the station that forty tons of linseed cake had arrived. I knew that only four tons was expected, but I had no alternative but to get the lot hauled home. I wrote to my father fully about the matter, and took a great joy in composing the letter. A few days afterwards he returned home, and next day after breakfast, when I went up to his bedside to give him my usual report, he said sardonically: ‘I suppose you’re rather pleased that I made a mistake over that cake?’ My face betrayed my satisfaction. ‘H’m,’ he went on, slapping the newspaper. ‘We all make mistakes some time or other, but when I make ’em they’re worth while. Look, cake’s up twelve and sixpence a ton. Tell Bill to have the trap outside in a quarter of an hour.’ I did so, and we went into the market town where he got seven and sixpence a ton profit on thirty tons of the cake from a merchant, who hauled it in to his store the next day. Pure luck, as my father admitted to me some years afterwards, but very impressive at the time to my inexperienced youth.
Of course, not all his mistakes were profitable. Against the foreman’s pleading he carried some barley one harvest, before the butts of the sheaves, which were full of clover, were sufficiently withered to be safely ricked. But we had come to the last field, the weather was perfect, and there was the whole harvest team in working order with nothing to do. So we put eighteen acres of barley into two ricks each nine yards long by four and a half yards wide. There was no joy in the doing of it, either. The men knew it was wrong, and were sullen and sour. My father knew it was wrong, but wouldn’t go back on his first decision. Two days afterwards vapour was coming from the roofs of the ricks as from a chimney. A long iron rod was thrust into the heart of each rick, and left there for two hours. When we pulled them out the ends were too hot to hold. ‘Nobody’s fault but mine,’ said my father. ‘Well, we’ll have to pull ’em apart.’
We did so, and the scent of the heated barley in them comes back to me as I write. It was like a malt house. We made those two ricks into eleven little ones, placed carefully at the back of the buildings out of sight from passers in the road. The two original ricks were very hot, and the heat made our feet very tired and sore, as we stood on them and worked all that day. Later on when the little ricks were threshed the barley was ginger brown in colour. It was valueless for malting purposes, and was crushed and fed to our own stock. One didn’t blazon one’s mistakes abroad to one’s neighbours by exposing such a heated sample of corn in the market. But rural communities had even in those days a means of communication which beat Marconi’s, and my father got a good deal of chipping about this business from his neighbours.
Still, it was his mistake, and his pocket was the only one to suffer. And it could stand it. There was a margin of profit in those days with which to take chances, and I admire my father more and more as I get older. He was a good winner and a good loser, and he was always scrupulously fair. Moreover, he was always boss of his job. Not only on the farming side, but he interfered in the men’s private lives when occasion required. The foreman reported once that one of the men used to get too much to drink of a Saturday night, and go home and beat his wife. ‘Didn’ ought to be, zur.’ At that time my father was rather badly crippled with rheumatism, and the man in question was a husky chap about fifty. We drove along to his cottage that evening, and I sat outside in the trap whilst my father hobbled up the garden path, and knocked at the door. For any normal purpose he would have stayed in the trap and had the man come out to him, but this was a man-to-man thing. The man came to the door, and my father bullyragged him unmercifully. ‘I’d sack ’ee this minute if it wasn’t for your wife,’ he wound up. ‘Now mind, one more word about this sort of thing, and I’ll come down and give you a damn good hiding in front of your wife. Pah, look at your garden, full o’ weeds. But there, a coward who’d beat a woman is never much good at anything. Now mind, if I hear you’ve been down to pub till I give you permission, I’ll knock your head off, whether I’m up for assault or not.’ And such was the awe in which he was held by the men that the wife-beater not only stayed away from the pub, but turned teetotal soon afterwards, and became a model husband. I used to wonder what would have happened if my father had had to carry out his threats of a hiding, as he would have stood a poor chance physically.
I can see now that it was inevitable that we should come to serious argument
as time went on. I was most certainly an insufferable young pup in many ways, as, I think, are most of us at eighteen or thereabouts. Anyway, some two years after I left school we came to the parting of the ways. My idea was that I had become a sort of errand boy between my father and the foreman, and that this was hardly good enough for a man of my qualifications. My father’s idea seemed to be that he was blessed with a half-wit for a son, at least that was the thing he was always most careful to infer at all times in order to keep me in my proper place. Finally the thing flared up into open rebellion. I said that I was tired of being an errand boy, and wanted a job on my own with some responsibility. Privately, I thought that either my father or the foreman, preferably both, should retire, and leave me to show them a thing or two. My father said, more or less like Bairnsfather of later date, that if I knew of a better job, why not take it? Youth’s pride being mortally injured, I said that I damn well would, and was rebuked for swearing in addition to my other crimes.
Chance so willed it, that before I had time to cool off, I found in the local paper an advertisement for a young man to go to Canada, and I wrote for particulars. A day or so later I got a letter from a Mr. Hartley. He was a solicitor in the north of the country, and was trying to get a lad to go out to his son in North-west Manitoba. After some correspondence between him and my father, who privately thought that each of us had bluffed a bit too far, but that anyway it would do me a power of good, the whole business was fixed up, and on 5th September 1911, I stood on the deck of the S.S. Corsican of the Allen line, watching my father’s figure getting smaller and smaller as the tugs towed the liner down the Mersey.
PART II
A CANADIAN INTERLUDE
CHAPTER VIII
Any details of the voyage seem to be non-existent. I can remember being seasick for one awful twenty-four hours, but I soon recovered and was able to do justice to the excellent fare provided. I had five pounds in my pockets and twenty-five sovereigns in a leather belt round my waist next my skin. Although this was extremely uncomfortable, it made me feel a bit like a pioneer going out to savage parts, and I had visions of great doings in the wild and woolly West, in which I should be the central figure. I can remember feeling extraordinarily alone. For the first time in my life I was in a world where no one knew who I was, and seemingly cared less. England and Partridge Farm seemed very far away.
My cabin mate was a mining engineer named Curtis. He proved a good Samaritan in many ways. He showed me round the boat, fixed up our places together in the dining saloon, and gave me lots of good advice. ‘Shouldn’t drink much if I were you, son, and don’t play cards for money. I shall do both, I guess, but I’m past praying for.’ Again, as we passed two pretty girls: ‘If you must spoon in the evening, choose chairs that haven’t got a light over ’em, or you’ll feel an awful fool when they’re switched on.’ As I was only eighteen this last piece of advice was wasted. I was much too scared to engage in light dalliance with any of the damsels. Besides, they had no lack of cavaliers.
We landed at St. John, and I got through the customs farce very easily. I had booked right through from Liverpool to my destination—Barloe, Manitoba, Canada. The purser of the Corsican had returned to me a long strip of paper, which, he informed me, was my railway ticket. The train journey seemed endless. Not knowing anything about Canadian travel, I had booked at the cheap Colonist rate, and the train was full of men of all nationalities, going West for the harvest. They fought and swore in many languages.
The sleeping accommodation was crude. I slept in a hard rack which was pulled down at night as a sleeping bunk. Sometimes I would be awakened by the train shunting; not ordinary shunting as practised in England, but just as if the engine-driver was in a bad temper, and was trying to shake off a carriage or two. It was usually in the middle of the night that the officials examined our tickets. Each time this happened my ticket got shorter and shorter, as pieces were torn off, and I arrived at Winnipeg with a piece only about an inch long.
By day, the journey was uninteresting. After all, I was a farmer. But where were the golden wheat fields as depicted in the shipping posters? All I could see from the train was scrubby trees and rocks. The land seemed to be almost solid rock. Every now and then one of the fence posts at the side of the track was propped up with boulders as evidently no hole could be made for it. Grain land, I gathered from my fellow travellers, did not start till west of Winnipeg.
In places the track skirted the great lakes, and the train ran along a ledge cut in the side of the mountain. In one place I saw, lying in the lake below, a train which had evidently rolled into the lake at some time or other. Some years afterwards when I came back it was still there. After three days of this I arrived at Winnipeg about 7 a.m., and found out at the inquiry office that a train started for Barloe at ten. I had a wash and a good breakfast, both of which I needed, and filled in the remainder of the time watching my surroundings.
Winnipeg Station, at any season of the year, presents a varied and interesting throng to be studied. The men were of all nationalities, but they nearly all had one thing in common; they were clean-shaven. There were townsmen in high-shouldered suits and boots with funny bumps on the toecaps, leathery-faced miners, lumberjacks, and teamsters; excited French Canadians come up from the East for the harvest, North-West Mounted policemen, one or two cowboys in high-heeled boots and Stetson hats, and one Indian in a blanket and moccasins, who surveyed the bustling crowd with haughty indifference. There were various types of peasants from central Europe with their families. Women were few, and these were chiefly Galician peasants’ wives, who sat amongst their brood waiting patiently, oh, so patiently, for someone to tell them when to continue this interminable journey from Austria. Ten o’clock came along very quickly, and after walking across several tracks, I climbed up the steps into the train.
Barloe is about one hundred and fifty miles west of Winnipeg, and we stopped at Portage la Prairie, which is about half-way, for lunch. ‘Dinner, son,’ said the conductor. ‘Come on, we’ve got twenty minutes.’ We had a good meal at an hotel, during which the conductor found out that I was going to a farm near Barloe. ‘You’ll be in time for threshing,’ he said. ‘Most all the crop’s cut, but they ain’t threshed much.’ The engine bell recalled us, and I continued my study of the countryside.
Barloe was reached about 3.30 p.m., and I was the only passenger to alight. ‘One green Englishman, and Jack Smither’s pair o’ boots, is all for you ’sides the mail,’ I heard my lunch companion say to the station agent. The pair of boots, I discovered later, was in reality two bottles of White Horse whisky in a boot box, consigned as boots to overcome the local option regulations, as Barloe was dry.
The station agent grinned cheerfully at me as the train pulled out. ‘Where you makin’ for, son?’ Everybody called me son, so I suppose my youth and innocence was pretty apparent. ‘Mr. George Hartley’s farm,’ I answered.
‘George ain’t in to-day. He’s still busy cutting. Still I guess there’ll be someone in for mail who’ll give you a lift. Follow old Mac over to the store, and ask him to fix you up.’ He pointed to the postmaster, who was walking across the track with the mail bag. I did so, waited till the mail was sorted, and then inquired of the postmaster as to the best way to Mr. Hartley’s farm.
‘Hartley’s, laddie? Ay, George telled me ye was coming. There’s Henderson now, he’ll do yer business fine and dandy. Say, Pop!’ At this a man at the other end of the store came up to the mail counter. ‘This young mon’s goin’ to George Hartley. ’Tis a wee bit out o’ yer trail, but if ye’re no busy, Pop?’
‘Sure thing, Mac. I can go that way. I’ll pull out right now.’
‘There y’are now, all fixed up,’ said Mac. ‘Bide though, ye can take George’s mail.’
Having pocketed some letters and a newspaper, and thanked the postmaster, I followed Henderson out of the store to a waiting two-horse buggy, and we set out.
As we drove along the trail between stooks of grai
n, chiefly oats, Henderson inquired my name and I let out in conversion that I was a farmer’s son. ‘Then you’ll be some good to George this Fall, p’raps. Gordon, that’s the fellow who’s been batching with him, is off to the Peg next week. Say, do you farmers in the Old Country ever do any work?’ I said that I thought so.
‘H’m, think you could drive a stook team?’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘Wagon with a sheaf rack on. Get a load of sheaves, and pitch ’em into the separator.’
‘I think I could do that all right.’
‘I wonder, but we’ll soon see. Can you open that gate?’
The team had stopped at a barb-wire fence across the trail. I got down, and after a few moments’ fumbling, found out the trick of the fastening, opened some four yards of the fence to let the team through, and closed it behind them. Presently Henderson pointed out a wooden shanty some fifty yards away from it. ‘George’s,’ he said, and shortly afterwards we drove between some scattered farm implements up to the door of the shanty.
‘Out, I reckon. Hop down and make sure.’
The shanty gave no sign of life as I approached it and knocked on the door. ‘Lord! Don’t knock. Open the door and go in.’ I did so, and the interior seemed to be tenanted by flies only.
‘No luck,’ said Henderson. ‘Here, chuck your handbag inside, and we’ll go and find ’em.’
‘Now where?’ he went on, as I rejoined him. ‘Can’t be cutting, ’cause there’s the binder. Buggy’s in the shed, and the wagon, so they ain’t away. Listen! That’s a post hammer. I know, George is fencing a pig pasture. Saw the fence on his wagon two days ago. They’ll be t’other side of the bluff.’