The Two Farms: A moving family saga set in a Victorian farming community

by Mary E. Pearce

  Riddler was even more astonished. He was also amused.

  ‘Kirrie, you’ve married a gentleman! How are you going to live up to that?’

  ‘We shall see if he stays a gentleman when he’s lived here with you for a year or two.’

  ‘One thing we may be sure of at least ‒ he won’t make a lady out of you.’

  ‘Nobody asked him to!’ Kirren said.

  ‘It’s her own fault she has to go to the town,’ Riddler said. ‘We used to have the higgler here, buying her butter and eggs and such, but she turned against him and stopped him coming. But you don’t need to fuss over her. She’s a good strong girl. She can manage a couple of baskets all right.’

  ‘Yes, I daresay,’ Jim said. ‘But I don’t intend that she should for much longer. I’m going to buy her a pony and trap.’

  ‘God Almighty!’ Riddler said. ‘We shall end up at auction after all if you go on spending at this rate.’

  ‘I don’t need a pony and trap,’ Kirren said, frowning at Jim. ‘I’d sooner you hung on to your money in case of unforeseen trouble ahead.’

  ‘What I spend on a pony and trap will not break us, I promise you.’

  The trap was bought at a farm sale: rather old and shabby, perhaps, with its dark blue panelwork blistered and crazed, but sound enough in all other respects; and with it a docile Welsh pony called Griff, said to be eight years old but in fact nearer ten, Jim judged.

  ‘Pot-bellied brute, isn’t he?’ Riddler said critically.

  ‘He won’t be, though, when he’s properly fed.’

  ‘I hope he understands English,’ said Kirren, offering the pony a lump of sugar, ‘because I don’t speak any Welsh.’

  The pony ate the lump of sugar and nuzzled her apron in search of more. She gave him a second lump from her pocket, then stroked his bristly, mottled nose.

  ‘He understands sugar, anyway,’ she said, and turned with a little smile towards Jim, who was standing nearby, watching her.

  Riddler was also watching her and because it was such a rare thing to see her smiling in this way, with a faint flush of colour in her cheeks, he could not allow it to go unremarked.

  ‘Why, Kirrie, what a difference it makes to see you looking pleased with yourself. It’s something I haven’t seen for years.’

  ‘No, well,’ Kirren said, ‘it isn’t every day of the week that you get given a pony and trap.’

  ‘Seems you’re like all the rest of them, then, if a man’s got to dip into his pocket before he can get a smile out of you.’

  ‘I didn’t have to dip very deep,’ Jim said, ‘for the whole turn-out, harness and all, only cost me four pounds.’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ Riddler said, affecting a grandiloquent tone. ‘And four pounds, as we all know, is nothing to a man like you!’ Then, in his normal voice, he spoke to Kirren again. ‘But I must say it’s worth every penny to see you smiling like that. You should do it more often. You should, that’s a fact.’

  ‘What for?’ she said. ‘To please you men?’

  ‘There, that’s gratitude for you, by damn!’

  ‘And why should I be grateful to you?’

  ‘Because, if I hadn’t found you a soft husband, he wouldn’t have bought you a pony and trap.’ Riddler, pleased with his own logic, turned and walked away from them, saying in a loud voice as he went: ‘A pony and trap, by God! ‒ just to take a few paltry eggs and a bit of butter to town every week. Seems the chap’s got more money than sense!’

  Kirren, blank-faced, watched him go. ‘He doesn’t seem to realize that oftentimes in the past the money I’ve earned from my “few paltry eggs” has kept us out of the County Court.’

  ‘I daresay he does realize it, but it wouldn’t be an easy thing to admit, for a man with his pride.’

  ‘Pride!’ Kirren said scornfully. ‘And what has he got to be proud of, pray, when he came within inches of losing this farm and then was only saved by you?’

  ‘Your father’s a fighter,’ Jim said. ‘Not clever, not wise, I grant you that, but a stubborn fighter through and through. It’s always been a wonder to me that he managed to hang on as long as he did.’

  ‘It seems you admire him,’ Kirren said.

  ‘Is that so strange?’ Jim asked.

  ‘To me, yes, it is very strange. But then, I’ve lived with him all my life. I know him better than you ever can.’

  ‘You so often speak of him like that, and yet you have stuck by him all these years.’

  ‘What else could I have done? Left him here all alone to drink himself into the grave? Turned my back on the place, knowing the Suttons would filch it from him? This farm is my home, such as it is, and I certainly wasn’t going to let it go so long as I still had breath in me!’

  ‘All of which goes to show that, whatever you may say about him, you’re your father’s daughter after all.’

  ‘Am I indeed?’

  ‘I would say so, yes.’

  ‘Well, I can hardly be blamed for that!’

  Kirren turned to the pony again and after a moment Jim spoke of the trap.

  ‘Have you ever driven before?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Then you’d better have some practice,’ he said.

  A little while later Kirren was driving round the farm and Jim, beside her in the trap, was giving such advice as was needed in making the awkward double turn that led past the linhay and down the pitch. As they drove down the steep rutted lane and out onto the open track they were watched from the Middle Field where Lovell and Smith were at work together digging out the lower ditch.

  ‘I reckon they make a handsome couple, don’t you, Bob?’ said Nahum Smith, leaning on his trenching-spade.

  ‘Handsome enough,’ Lovell agreed.

  ‘I must say it came as a winger to me when Miss Kirren upped and got married like that. Somehow I never thought she would. But she’s done pretty well for herself, marrying a chap like Jim Lundy, even if she was second choice as they say.’

  ‘It’s the farm he’s married, not the girl, and if she has done well for herself, so has he, seeing he’ll get the whole lot in the end. He’s a fly young chap, our new master, for sure, and knows which side his bread is buttered.’

  ‘As long as he goes on paying me eight shillings a week, he can be as fly as he likes,’ said Smith, ‘and damned good luck to him all the way.’

  Kirren, now that she had her trap, could drive in to town in comfort and was glad of it, for the quantity of produce she took with her was growing all the time. There were six cows milking at Godsakes these days and six more were due to calve at intervals between Christmas and May. She had butter and cheese to sell again now and as there was more poultry on the farm ‒ geese and ducks as well as hens ‒ she also had many more eggs, often two baskets full every week.

  Riddler scorned using the trap and even in the worst weather rode in to town on his grey pony mare who, as he said to Jim, could be trusted to bring him safely home even when, ‘as happened sometimes,’ he had had a glass or two more than was wise. But Jim, if he had business in town, often drove in with Kirren, partly because it suited him to and partly because he somehow felt that he and she, being husband and wife, ought to be seen together sometimes.

  He never spoke of this to her. For one thing the feeling was much too vague and, as he told himself, rather absurd. Everyone in the district knew that theirs was not a marriage of love; that it was a cold-blooded partnership entered into for practical reasons; and it was nothing to him or to her that people knew this much about them. Why, then, did he have this desire to be seen now and then in public with her? It was, he concluded after a while, because he wished the world to see that, cold-blooded partnership though it was, he and she were well satisfied with it.

  One market day when they went in to town and were on the many-gated road between Abbot’s Lyall and Marychurch, they had a brief meeting with Philip and Jane Sutton who, driving a smart four-in-hand, came up behind them at Cooper’s Bridge. Jim
had got down to open the gate so that Kirren could drive through and he was about to close it again when the four-in-hand came bowling along. He saw at once who was in it and held the gate open for them, giving a little formal nod as they slowed down, crossing the bridge, and passed within a few inches of him. Jane, who was closest, smiled at him, somewhat hesitantly at first, then with a sudden radiance, and as she passed she spoke to him.

  ‘Thank you, Jim. That was very kind.’

  Philip drove past without a glance, staring ahead, red-faced and tight-lipped, and his angry annoyance was made worse when Jane again turned her head to nod and say good morning to Kirren, who had drawn in onto the verge.

  ‘Damn it, why do you speak to them, Jim Lundy especially? He only opened the gate for us because he wanted to annoy.’

  ‘Then why give him the satisfaction of seeing that he had succeeded?’ Jane said.

  Jim returned to his place beside Kirren and they drove on along the road, both of them silent for a time, watching the carriage in front as it rapidly drew away from them. Then Kirren spoke.

  ‘So that is the famous Jane Sutton? I’ve never seen her close-to before.’

  ‘You certainly saw her close-to today. She stared at you hard enough as she passed.’

  ‘She was probably wondering what sort of creature you had married.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said curtly, ‘I daresay she was.’

  His mind was still full of Jane’s smile; full of the memories it had evoked; and dwelling on these memories brought a kind of painful pleasure very difficult to renounce. But with an effort he purged himself, bringing his thoughts back to the present; back to the girl sitting beside him; and, turning to look at her, he said: ‘Sometimes I wonder that myself.’

  ‘What sort of creature you’ve married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Surely you must know that by now, having lived with me these three months or more.’

  ‘I know you as cook and housekeeper, yes. As dairy woman and rearer of hens; as an extra milker when called upon …’

  ‘In other words,’ Kirren said, ‘you know me as an all-round drudge.’

  ‘You certainly work very hard.’

  ‘So do we all. We have no choice. We are slaves to the farm, all three of us, bound to it body and soul.’

  ‘Do you resent that?’ he asked.

  Kirren, considering, gave a shrug. ‘I used to, in the old days, when everything seemed so hopeless,’ she said. ‘When it seemed as though we should lose the farm however hard we worked to keep it. But that’s all changed now, since you came. It isn’t hopeless any more and I don’t mind hard work so long as I see some reward at the end of it.’

  ‘What reward?’ Jim asked.

  ‘To keep the farm, of course,’ she said, ‘and get it running properly.’

  ‘It that reward enough for you?’

  ‘What more would I want? Do you want more?’

  ‘It’s different for me,’ Jim said. ‘Work is a man’s whole life but women, from what I know of them, ask for something more than that.’

  ‘What am I supposed to want? A house full of servants to order about? Statues and paintings from Italy? A spinette to play on in the evenings?’

  ‘I hope you don’t want those things because I shall never be able to give them to you.’

  ‘You may rest easy,’ Kirren said, ‘for the sum total of my ambitions, for today at least, is to get a shilling a pound for my butter and eightpence a dozen for my eggs.’

  Jim smiled. ‘And what about the future?’ he asked. ‘There must be things you would like to have.’

  ‘Yes, there are, but I look to my poultry to pay for them, and as I’ve gone without them for so long, I can easily wait a while longer yet.’ She gave him a brief sideways glance and said: ‘I am not like your Jane Sutton. I’m prepared to work for what I want.’

  No, he thought, as they drove on, Kirren was not like Jane. Indeed the contrast between the two young women ‒ the one he had loved and the one he had married ‒ could not have been greater. And as always when he dwelt on this contrast between them it was with the same angry elation that he had felt at snatching Godsakes away from the Suttons. It seemed peculiarly right, somehow, that whereas Jane was fair and blue-eyed, with gentle manners and a bright, easy smile, Kirren should be dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a temper that, more often than not, moved between sullen reserve and a quick, dark, withering scorn.

  Kirren’s life, from the age of six, had been made up of hardship in all its forms. It had toughened her and made her strong, physically and mentally, and now at the age of twenty-two she had no softness or gentleness; no charm of manner; no feminine grace.

  Jim took grim pleasure in this because Jane possessed these qualities and he had been led astray by them. That would not happen again; not with the girl he called his wife; for he expected nothing from her and therefore could never be disappointed. And although they had made certain vows in church, strictly as a formality, in private the only vow they had made was to work together for the good of the farm. Nothing else mattered to them. Only Godsakes, first and last.

  Sometimes when Jim was working down in the meadows he would pause and look up at the farm and note the improvements made so far. They could be seen plainly from there, the three ploughed fields that were still bare showing up a rich red-brown between other fields already sown, where the winter corn was like a green mist creeping softly over the soil, and the new leys, a darker green, were already growing thick and close. Even the old neglected grasslands, grazed in turn by cattle and sheep, looked a healthier colour now, and where the hedges had been cut, the fields looked very trim and neat: larger, more open, more full of light.

  ‘Are you pleased with what you see?’ Riddler asked once.

  ‘Yes, I am well pleased,’ Jim said.

  ‘So am I,’ Riddler said, and for once he spoke simply and quietly, looking up at Godsakes with a bright, steady, satisfied gaze.

  But the changes Jim had made so far were only a beginning: the first moves in a programme of improvement worked out to the last rod, pole, or perch; and the implementation of his plans would, he thought, take five or six years. He kept careful notes of everything that was done on the farm and often on cold winter evenings, beside the fire with Riddler and Kirren, he would discuss his plans with them.

  ‘In five or six years, if all goes well, every acre we possess will have been cleaned and put in good heart again, yielding the best quality crops, supporting the best quality stock. I hope to start work on the buildings soon ‒ I’ve ordered timber and tiles for the roofs ‒ and next year we’ll need to extend the byre. I also intend to build new stalls for fattening steers in wintertime, modern stalls built on modern lines, and in time everything on the farm ‒ the house, the buildings, the land itself ‒ will be in tip-top order.’

  ‘In other words,’ Kirren said, ‘you want to make it a place like Peele.’

  ‘No! Like itself!’ he said sharply. ‘It must have been a good place once, and it will be again, I shall see to that.’

  ‘We shall all see to it,’ Riddler said. ‘But go on with what you were saying. I like to hear these ideas of yours.’

  ‘I mean to have every inch of land producing its maximum yield,’ Jim said, ‘but exactly what that yield may be only time will tell.’

  ‘If you’re talking about corn, I can tell you the maximum yield on this farm ‒ twenty bushels of barley to the acre and fifteen or sixteen of wheat. Not very good, I know, but if you were to sow twice as much as you are, that’d make up for the low yield and with corn prices holding up so well we’d make a small fortune next harvest-time.’

  ‘The corn we grow on this land will not fetch the prices you’re thinking of. Not till fertility’s been restored. And that will only come about if we stock the land to capacity. All of which means growing crops we can feed directly to the stock. Turnips, kale, vetches, rape, carrots and beans … kohl-rabi, perhaps. And dredge-corn fed to them in the sheaf.’r />
  ‘At present you’re buying feed for them. I don’t see any profit in that. There’s plenty of grass here, if nothing else, until we get our own arables. And as for this notion of feeding the ewes ‒’

  ‘Ewes should always be given extra, coming up to tupping time, just as they get extra again shortly before they are due to lamb.’

  ‘Chopped up dainty and fed by hand?’

  ‘Chopped up, certainly,’ Jim agreed.

  ‘And what about the tups themselves? Don’t they deserve an extra feed? Spinach, perhaps, or asparagus? Something sweet and tasty like that?’

  Just as Riddler jeered at Jim on the subject of artificial manures, calling him ‘Old Potassium’, so too did he jeer when Jim quoted from certain pamphlets published by The Royal Agricultural Society.

  ‘You can’t learn farming out of books!’

  ‘I didn’t, I learnt it on the land. But books are written by men, remember ‒ men who have tried things out for themselves ‒ and it’s only common sense that we should be willing to learn from them.’

  Riddler picked up a small book that Jim had left lying about. ‘This isn’t one of your famous pamphlets?’

  ‘No, that’s something different,’ Jim said.

  ‘Shall I learn to suck eggs from it?’

  ‘If you can read Latin, yes.’

  ‘Latin! Good God!’ Riddler exclaimed, and, opening the little book, he stared at the printed page in disgust. ‘Lawyers’ language! The language of rogues! Damnum absque injuria! Is that what your damned book is about?’

  ‘No, it’s a poem about farming, written by a man called Virgil who lived and farmed in Italy about two thousand years ago.’

  ‘Two thousand years? You’re codding me!’

  ‘No, I’m not, I promise you.’

  ‘Read us a bit,’ Riddler said, tossing the book across to him. ‘In English, so’s we understand.’

  Jim found a suitable passage, studied it for a moment or two, and then rendered it aloud in English:

  ‘ “There comes a time when the corn is blighted; when thistles spring up everywhere; when no crops grow but wild tares and wild oats, beggar-weed and spiky caltrops. You must, therefore, wage war on the weeds unceasingly; cut down the trees that darken your land; shout the birds away from your crops and, in the summer, pray for rain. Otherwise, though your neighbour’s granary be full, you will have to shake the acorns from the oak to stay your own hunger. ” ’