He is lanky and fine-boned—not at all like the classic forge Samson. Silky black hair fringes out from an old cap and the shirt gapes to reveal an ascetic olive-skinned chest stippled with spark-burns. In some ways Gregory could be a Celt, yet not with those tall gaunt lines of nose and cheek; the eyes piercing their way from their deep sockets. These are East Anglian features, to be traced in the Ipswich and Norwich streets or in stone high up on the church walls. He is married to Nancy, a beautiful woman from “up London like.” She is educated; a trained artist. She is disciple as well as wife—as are the three apprentices. So is everybody who buys anything.
The furnace blazes away at all hours as Gregory breaks the time barrier. Crucifixes, iron coats of arms, hurdles, harrows, vast abstract light-holders for a West Country cathedral, surgical horseshoes and the primitive templets made by his ancestors rage in the flames. Orders roll in. Gregory views them with misgiving. Sometimes he thinks that it would be better to break faith with the boom than with the Old Ones.
Newcomers to the neighbourhood are good customers. Most of them aren’t in search of the old ways but of the original fireplace in the old house which they have bought. If they can tug out a Victorian grate and find the ancient hearth around which centuries of field men have sat, they are moved profoundly. It is the old sacred place and nothing is too good for it. The re-garnishing of this cavern made of small orange-rose bricks, with its stately breast and blackened chimney-beam, has become the most popular tribute paid by the twentieth-century middle-class villager to his ancestors. It will lead him into great expense—copper canopy, huge log basket, firedogs, fireback, brass and pewter ornaments, light brackets—but the money is never grudged. Only the forge can supply these essentials. Gregory’s forge contributes as much to the hearth cult—and all its decorative subsidiaries—as does any firm in the area, but with a difference. Everything he makes has to be signed by a signature which is recognizable and acceptable to the “old tradesmen,” as he calls them. The nameless ones who built and adorned the village, and whose bolts and horseshoes lie about with the flints in the fields, and none of whom would have laid claim to be “artists or architects or anything of the like.”
Nancy smiles. She follows her husband, of course, but on an enthusiastic circuit which takes in student journeys to churches, castles and mansions where she sketches anything from a hinge to armour. She reads and checks. The village says that she has made Gregory. He agrees. They say that he must have known that he was on to a good thing when he took on the family business. He agrees. But they aren’t thinking of the same good thing. Gregory hankers for the hard past. He is an atavist but his history is all voices, forebodings, notions—hauntings, really. Nancy’s are the facts as they are generally known. “Gregory talks a lot,” says the village. He is a man who is fighting not to be more than he is.
* * *
I was born in Akenfield. It was in the year 1923. I have spent all my life here. I have the family records back to the eighteenth century and my name is mentioned in Domesday Book. We were at Saxmundham then. Then there was a time when we got lost—right out Dennington way. But we found our path eventually. I have a lot of my grandfather’s features, although I’m not so tall as he was. I have his hands. Hands last a long time, you know. A village sees the same hands century after century. It is a marvellous thing but it’s true. My grandfather was a most extraordinary man and very headstrong. He’d got a way of his own and I tend to take after him. My father started work when he was ten and I started when I was fourteen.
My family had been Liberal till several years ago, then they changed over to Conservative. I don’t know why; it was before my time. They had damn little to conserve so I don’t know why they did it. Suffolk people are cagey about politics. It makes me laugh when the Tory women stand outside the voting booths on election day “just ticking the names off the Electoral Roll,” as they say. How on earth do they reckon they’ll ever discover a thing about the village politics? All the same, I don’t think it should be allowed. It makes people nervous. I have a tendency to be like Charles Bradlaugh, who was a Suffolk man. I am not an atheist but I have strong views about politics and the Church. Bradlaugh wasn’t against Church, he was against the set-up. I’m against the set-up. But I think it was an extremely good thing that religion should be accepted as the saviour of civilization. So I think it right that it should be carried on. If you forsake religion, it’s back to the savages. This is what is happening now. Whatever you think, this is what makes you. You don’t have to tell folk everything you think. I have a lot of personal views about religion, for instance, which I never tell a soul. But I’ve often been tempted, particularly when I was young. I saw cases of men—grown men—in this village, packing their bait to spend the whole Sunday at chapel. People used to go to chapel at nine in the morning and not come home until eight at night. It is the truth. Most of them behaved shocking during the week. It’s a fact. They were nothing but a lot of bloody hypocrites. Suffolk used to worship Sunday, not God. I don’t know why they all went to this trouble. Anybody with a mite of common sense could see how useless it was, chapel, chapel, chapel, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Best suits. They were Baptists. What were they trying to do? There were so many of them they could have set the whole village on its ear had they followed Jesus. But all you heard them say was Sunday. Bugger Sunday, I say, and praise God when you can. People never think why they go to church or chapel, they just go. It is very strange.
I was born during the bad times. My brothers and myself went to school for part of the day and to work for the rest of it. When we left school at half past three we’d go gleaning, picking up beans and all such things as that. We’d most likely work till eight if it stayed light. We biked to school at Framlingham. It was 1934 time. Things weren’t very sharp. Father was making out by killing pigs for Danny Linton at Pettistree so we had to bike from school to home, eat some bread and cheese, or whatever there was—and there wasn’t much—get an old sack and then bike on to Danny’s farm to collect the pigs’ insides. Then we biked home with them and tipped them out on the scullery floor and scraped them. We had to get them as white as a board, scratching out all the filth with the back of an old knife. Then we washed them in salty water and—hey presto!—sausage skins. But it wasn’t the end. There were all these pails and pails of muck to be got rid of. We had to bike out of the village and bury it. On Saturdays we used to take a bundle of these skins to old Boot the butcher and he’d give us a three-cornered lump of brisket, all fat and bone, and weighing about a stone, in exchange. But even this is better than what happened in 1930, the big black year. In 1930 we had blackbird pie for Christmas dinner—and we had to catch the blackbirds before we had the pie! It had got to Christmas morning and we were going to make do when my father said, “Come on, boys, let’s try a blackbird!” We knocked a few over quite easy. I could take you to the spot where we did it. We cooked the pie in the brick oven.
This was the year my grandfather had to shut down the forge. He never went back to it. I used to walk by it, eyeing it and thinking. But nothing was rosy wherever you looked. Nearly everybody went out of business. Nothing was sold. People who had left school began to think about the Big House. You realized that it was there, with all the gardeners, grooms and maids and food. You have to face it, the Big House was then an asset to the village. It paid us to raise our hats, which is why we did it. I hear people run the gentry down now but they were better than the farmers in a crisis. Theirs was the only hand which fed us which we could see. So we bowed a bit; it cost nothing, even if it wasn’t all courtesy. Nobody left, nobody went away. People were content. However hard up they were, they stayed content. The boys had the arse out of their trousers, no socks and the toes out of their boots. My brothers and myself were like this, yet so happy. I think other families were the same. The village kept close.
The biggest change which I have seen in Akenfield is the growth of discontent. Greed. Nobody ever said, “Bugger you, Jack, my he
ad is out!” when I was a boy. When you wanted help it was given. It was “Thank you very much,” and that was that. You mustn’t pay. It was good enough for a row if you offered to pay. Payment was a crime. This was how things were when I told my parents that I wanted to go into the family business. My grandfather had died and my grandmother was paying a man to open the forge and try and do some trade. My father couldn’t afford to pay the apprenticeship fee of half-a-crown a week, so I had to do another job as well. I worked from eight to five at the forge and then three more hours night and morning for a man who kept 160 pigs. I was paid a-penny-a-pig-a-week to feed and clean them out. They weren’t the little old things you get today, they were big pigs. Enormous . . . 30–35 stone apiece. The pigman used to pay me when the pigs went to market. It would sometimes come to £5 10s., which was a tidy fortune.
It was all agricultural work at the forge. Mostly shoeing. All the horses were still with us and at seventeen I was shoeing an average of eight horses a day. I remember making my first horseshoe. I started work at the forge on August 2nd and I made this shoe on August 4th. They put you straight into the collar in those days! There was no messing about. When you got a job you began doing it right away. You were expected to catch on quick.
The man my grandmother allowed to run the forge was old and when I was just over seventeen he retired, and I had to carry on alone. I now had to do every mortal thing myself. What I didn’t know I had to find out or make up. There was nobody to ask. It was a terrible job, but there, we got over it. It was still all farm work, of course. Mostly shoeing. The horseman would stand at the head while the work was being done, so that was a bit of help. He could hold it like. I was such a thin little lad it was a masterpiece how I could hold anything! There was no thought of what you might call art-and-craft work, only plough counters, harrows, door-hinges and such farm things. There was no money about; everybody was bare-poor. I charged 6s. 8d. to put four shoes on a horse. I reckoned that with a quiet horse with good feet the task would take an hour. I hardly made a profit. There are still plenty of horses round here, of course—hunt horses, pony-club horses—it is most unusual for a village to have so many of them around. And I don’t mind shoeing them. The trouble is that people who have these kind of horses reckon on you shoeing them for next to nothing. I won’t do that. Not now. If people will pay what I charge and won’t grumble, then I’ll shoe for them, but not otherwise. I am supposed to have served a five-year apprenticeship, and if work isn’t worth a little when you’ve done that, then blast them. I won’t mess after it. I remember how hard it was to make myself free, for that is what I was really up to when I was here all alone before the war. I don’t know what it is, I can’t explain it, but you see I am the only one out of all my family—and there are five of us brothers—who had any intention of coming to the smithy. My brothers couldn’t have cared less about the place. I wanted to come, had to come. But it is silly to be sentimental. What I sometimes think is that I am my grandfather, an old one. It is the truth when I say that I can sit in the shop of a Sunday, smoking my pipe, and be as happy as if I were sitting in the house. I wasn’t born soon enough, that is the trouble. By rights, I should be dead and gone. I think like the old people. I have a tendency to do what I want to do, if the maggot bites. However pressing matters are, I do what I fancy. I think, probably, my attitude could be wrong. We have our pressures now with bills and bank managers and book-keeping, but I say to myself, this is not the highest thing; this is business. You are a tradesman; this is the highest thing. Making, doing. I feel I should have lived during the 1700s. That would have done me. But I am losing my place, aren’t I?
Well, the war came, and one or two German prisoners came to help me out. They were pleasant lads. When they went back I had a boy from the army school, after he had finished his training. He had been an army apprentice farrier and I finished him off. When he left, one or two more arrived and for the first time in my life I had a few minutes to spare, so I began to amuse myself by making ornamental things. I entered one or two competitions and won prizes. And then, after the war, this wonderful thing happened, I married. The business was steady now. I had over a hundred horses on my books which had to be shod three times a year, which meant that I was making 1,200 shoes a year. Of course, the horses were passing, but so slowly that it didn’t seem possible that they were soon to disappear off the farms for ever. I still saw the things I sent to the crafts section of the Suffolk Show as a hobby. I couldn’t imagine living by such work.
Then new people came and bought up the old houses. They’d spend a mint of money “putting it all back as it was.” They couldn’t buy the things they needed for the restoration; they hadn’t been made for donkey’s years. So I had to start making them again. My wife went round, keeping her eye open for bolts, latches, handles, grates; drawing them and finding out their dates, and I made more of them as exactly as you’re not likely to tell the difference. Mind you, it took time. It took all hours. But it was a fine thing for me to have something lying on the bench before me made by one of the old men, and my hands doing again what his had done. The new business grew and grew. The Trust House people had bought the Suffolk coaching-houses and now they were doing them up regardless. They wanted to do everything in the old-fashioned way, all mortise-and-tenon studs and plaster. And, of course, hand-made nails. I made all the nails they used. They were each forged and hammered from the hot spar. And they were expensive, I can tell you. You can buy a pound of ordinary machine-made nails for 9d. but mine cost 4½d each. A strange thing happened while I was hammering these nails. They found a great pile of Roman nails in the Welsh mountains, all as bright as if they had been made yesterday. I could quite understand why this was because these nails would have been made from lowmore which doesn’t rust. It is steel which rusts. Do you know what I thought when I heard of these great Roman nails?—those would have been like the nails they would have used for the Crucifixion. They would have been made from iron smelted with charcoal. This is why the Swedish iron is so good, because they were using charcoal right up to my day. But you can’t buy iron now; it is all steel. They will smelt it especially for you if you order ten tons of it, but charge you a ridiculous price.
We have to make do with mild steel for all our work, and this is why you get all this trouble with agricultural things breaking sudden like. These steels are too strong. They cannot give. They just get fatigue and snap. They are too good for rough purposes—if you can call anything too good. Iron would do the job much better. But then you can’t electric-weld iron. It has to be fire-welded. That is why they manufacture mild steel, to fit in with modern methods of production. It is not easier to work—oh no! It is simply easier to weld because you are using electricity and not fire. But iron is always better for bending and real forging. The various parts of the new agricultural machines are all profiled out in the gas-flame; they are cut out flat, not bent. All this has happened during the last few years, so everything is different. We’ve got a profile machine which cuts the pattern out in a piece of tin. You screw it in on top, light the gas—propane and oxygen—and work with a cutting-head with an electric motor and a magnet attached to it. This runs around your plate and carves out its shape in the metal below. Ours will cut two inches thick. Before this method was invented everything at the smithy had to be forged and knocked into shape.
I don’t have a catalogue. I don’t like making two of anything. I find out what people can either afford or mean to pay and do a design in keeping with the price. We like to think that when a customer gets something from the forge it is their individual thing. But how much longer we can stick it, I don’t know. Not long, I fancy. The time must come when we shall have to settle down to a standard line. It will be a terrible pity if this should happen. So many smiths are just copying the old designs. And making a poor job of it. It is abusing the old tradesmen. I believe that we should work as they worked; this isn’t copying, it is getting back into their ways, into their skins. We should either
do this or we should go right ahead, like the Germans, and do something absolutely new. The Germans are streets and streets ahead of us with metal designing. They wouldn’t do this pretty scrollwork which all the English people love; they only do beautiful, genuine 1960 designs. I show some books of these modern German patterns to the customers. They hesitate. I try and push them, they back away. The man with money to spend on a village house in England has got to have everything quaint and curly.
I never employ extra men, no matter how big the job. I stay up late—we all five stay up late—we crowd the hours. You can’t bring outsiders into a place like this; they wouldn’t fit in. They would upset the whole atmosphere. I have the boys. They were born in the village, they went to the village school and then they came to me, and I have taught them how to work. And soon they became part of it. It would be fatal to bring in an outsider to spoil it all. When we do a big job we have to work. This is understood. Eventually, we get through it. A big job is a big experience.
We don’t do more repairs to farm machines than we are forced to. The farmers get most of their repairs done by some mechanically-minded youngster who drives the tractor and they resent having to pay money to people like me. But we don’t turn anybody away because the old business was built up on farm work and it is our moral duty to stay within the farming band. We haven’t told the farmers not to come. We never did make ploughshares. This is cast-iron work and has to be done in a foundry. But we used to do the plough-counters—the cutting knives. It was a swine of a job. You always swear terrible when you are doing it. You’d think you’d welded it on and beaten it out, and then you hadn’t. It was best not to come to the forge when the plough-counters were being mended—not if you were squeamish. My father, who was a butcher by trade, said, “The Lord sent the meat and the devil sent the cooks.” The devil sent the counters too.
Akenfield Page 15