I haven’t got a girl-friend and have never had one. I’ll put it like this. As things are today you’ve got to be careful. There are no end of marriages breaking up. You must pick the right girl, you must know the meaning of marriage. I have seen young boys in this village get married. They think it is all bed, poor fellows. I see it quite different to this. I’m in no hurry at all. I must work. I mustn’t be worried or distracted. Not yet. I couldn’t spend time on my work if I was married. I’ve always said that thirty will do very well. I should know myself by then.
I wouldn’t like to own my own business. I wouldn’t care for the worry of it. When I say “the worry,” I’m only going on what I’ve seen at Mr. Gladwell’s. What I should like would be people to teach. I think I have patience. I teach the two apprentices. You have to be understanding with these youngsters. Some are timid, some are pig-headed. I’m timid with the timid and pig-headed with the pig-headed. If you act the same as the person you are teaching he will be at ease with you and will learn better. The apprentices have to pass the Rural Industries Bureau examinations. The examiners look for four skills: in overhead, vertical, down-hand and horizontal welding. People say that the exams are easy but when you realize that the examiners will be searching for thirteen faults in every piece of weld and that you’ve only got to drop two on each piece to fail, then you know that it is not. They send a man to the forge to watch. I was nervous and a bit shaky when he watched me, I can tell you! You have to get 120 marks or more out of 200 to pass. I got 160.
The village blacksmiths used to have to be great strong men but you don’t need that kind of brawn now. I’m not hefty and I wouldn’t want to be. The days of the sledge-hammer have gone; the power-hammer has taken its place. I’m reasonably broad across the shoulders, which is good enough. I don’t want to be fat. The Americans are fat. My father is fat—he weighs over fifteen stone! I’m eleven, eleven, which is decent, I reckon. There are people in this village whose motto is “Eat.” Don’t eat sometimes, I say. Have a day off. I never eat breakfast on Sundays, although my dad creates like anything. I drink a lot of Lucozade—a bottle a day. I keep myself fresh. My hands aren’t so good—they can’t be—but I don’t think that anybody meeting me of an evening would know that I did dirty work. Anyway, I like dirt. I couldn’t bear a job where I was clean all day. It wouldn’t suit me.
A lot of people remark on the happy kind of feeling at the forge—it is something they notice. Mrs. Gladwell has done this. She has great understanding. She considers everybody. Although she knows that I can’t draw or design she always listens if I say, “Couldn’t this go like this . . .?” Then she will sketch—and there is my idea. It is very important to get on with your employer and his wife. A lot of the farmers have trouble with their workmen because the men can’t get on with the farmers’ wives. A man might be quite happy with a farmer but will have to leave because his wife is awkward.
The visitors go for the churches in Suffolk. People come here just to see them and for no other reason. I might go in ours to look at a lock, a hinge, but for no other reason—I’ll be quite honest with you. Some of the people round here who go to church lead bad lives. I know this to be right. I say that if you lead a good clean life it is not necessary for you to go to church. The churches have fallen right out. Sundays have fallen right out. Sunday is now the big gambling day. My father prefers the chapel to the church—most people do. This used to be big chapel country.
What would I like to do? I would like to have a go at a masterpiece. The cathedral lights took us a year to make and we had to work until midnight to finish them off. My hand was in each one of them. I would like to work like that again.
7. THE WHEELWRIGHT
Harry Hole came Friday (October 31st 1919). He spoke of the waggon which has just been repaired at the shop. He himself once fitted new raves and stays to it. But the original waggon he thought was built before his time, by my Uncle John, whom I just remember as a cripple. Harry mentioned, as evidence, that the main “sides” show Uncle John’s handiwork peculiar to him. That is to say, they are not much shaved, but are decorated with a beading cut with a router or “match-bit” which Harry never knew any one else to own. “Oblows” was what Harry said this adornment was called . . .
But apropos of this word Arnold lately told of a miserly Dorset farmer who, ordering a new waggon required that it shouldn’t have “any of them ’postles.” He meant shavings, which, he properly held, cost time and therefore money. “Apostles,” Arnold surmised, was a name derived from the carvings in church . . .
—GEORGE STURT, Journals
Jubal Merton · aged sixty · wheelwright and blacksmith
I’ve lived in the village all my life. I’ve never been away. I left school in 1922, when I was thirteen, and was apprenticed to my father and my uncle, who owned these premises. My father was the wheelwright and my uncle was the blacksmith. I was the only apprentice and they were very strict. “You’ve got to have a good eye,” they said. “Everything that’s got to be done in wheelwrighting has got to be done by the eye. You’ve got to let your eye be your guide.” They were right, of course. What we do here isn’t like ordinary carpenter’s work. When you get the hub of a wheel it has to be morticed once and only once first go.
The first job I had to do was to make spokes, and sometimes I was allowed to saw out the shafts for the tumbrils. All the shafts were cut out by handsaw from heavy planks of wood about 3 1/2 inches thick and about two feet wide. We planed these and shaped them up fine. Heaps of times I did a shaft and I’d think, “That’s lovely!” Then my father would rub his hand up it and say, “Why, boy, it ain’t half done!” He was a first-class wheelwright and was known all over Suffolk, and my grandfather and great-grandfather were the same. They all worked in this same shop and the wagons they made lie about in the farmyards. They ain’t used but they can’t wear out. When I got so that I could use a plane and a wheel-shave, I started to make wheelbarrows. They were a difficult job, a most difficult job indeed. Especially the front pieces which we called the stumps. The stump was another thing you had to cut right first time else it was no good. There was no second chance in so much of what we did. It made us cautious but at the same time it made us willing to take a risk. It was as much in the eye as in the hand. There was a moment when you had to say now! Then you could breathe again.
One of the most exacting things was making the fellies [fellows] for the wheel. There would be six fellies and when they were put together they made the rim of the wheel. These were all cut out by an old bow-saw which belonged to my grandfather and the inner part shaped with an adze. They were made of ash and the wheelwright always chose roadside trees for his fellies. He’d never touch a low-meadow ash because that wouldn’t do at all. Of course, ash that grew down by the river was lovely timber to use, but a wheelwright would never use it. He went to the hedges, where the wood was tough and hard. He’d walk through the lanes and note the ashes and when he saw a good one, he’d buy it, cut it down and let it lie in the ditch for a couple of years until the bark fell off. Then it was ready. He also looked for shaft wood. If you look at the ash trees you’ll find that many of their boughs grow in the shape of shafts. When my father saw a good shaft shape a-growing, he’d keep his eye on it until it was just the right size to cut and plane. Then he’d have it.
For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm. A wych-elm twists in the growth and it is impossible to split it. You cut the hub out of a ring of the trunk and fixed the fellies to it by twelve spokes. The body-work of the wagons was made of oak, although some farmers had a fancy for poplar wood because you couldn’t scratch splinters out of poplar with a rake. It was the old English white poplar which they fancied.
When I had helped to make a wagon I had to learn to paint it. We did everything in this shop, you see. The farmers were most particular about the painting. The colours were all bought in Ipswich. There was red lead and vegetable black, white lead, which was like thick distemper, and there wa
s Chinese red and Venetian red, all these were the old colours used by the wagon-makers. The body-work was all painted blue. Always blue. The blue rode well in the corn. The wheels were done in Chinese red and lined-out with Venetian red, which was marvellously expensive—about £1 an ounce. We mixed all the paints here. Paint for small jobs was ground on a little stone but if we had a lot to do we ground it in a paint-mill. Nothing whatever was wasted of anything. You had to grind paint very, very slowly so that the mill didn’t warm-up. If it did it would discolour the paint. The farmers were very proud of their wagons and tumbrils and would wash them down every week-end. Some of them had to go to Ipswich two or three times a week and they had to look fine. A tumbril could travel with about two tons a time. They were beautiful and they had to be kept beautiful. They weren’t very expensive. My father made tumbrils for £12 a time when he was a young man. When I first started making them they cost £25—that is a one-horse tumbril. A wagon would cost about £40. Once they were finished they lasted for ever. The village was full of wagons a hundred years old or more when I was a boy, and still perfect.
My father made the first bus ever used in this part of Suffolk. In 1919. He bought the chassis from Ford’s of Dagenham and built a tall old thirty-seater top for it. In this very shop. It had straight sides and an oval roof and it ran to Ipswich every Tuesday and Saturday. It went with crates of chickens strapped to the back and it came home with timber for my father tied to the roof.
I went to the village school but left when I was thirteen because I wasn’t learning anything. I did my learning in this shop. Two women taught us; one had been a missionary abroad. All they did was keep us silent and keep us caned. Boys and girls were caned every day. It was down with your trousers and up with your shirt for the big boys! Girls were thrashed on the backs of their legs. These teachers taught us nothing, only to sit still. I was glad to leave school and begin learning in the shop.
It was very hard work from seven in the morning until five at night, winter-time and all. It was reckoned a fine job but the money wasn’t great. Sometimes I earned half-a-crown a week, sometimes five bob. Sometimes nothing. Imagine that! My apprenticeship lasted four years and I was happy. In my spare time, particularly when it was chill and wet because it was such a cheerful thing to do, I used to help my uncle in the blacksmith’s shop. The fire roared and if it was a real bad day so that they couldn’t get on to the land, they would bring the horses down for shoeing. The best place in the village on a wet day was the smithy, with about ten horses and us boys crammed together in the cosy heat. When I was strong enough I was allowed to wield the pliers. There were about a hundred horses in Akenfield at that time. All the farm machines were mended in the shop and all the harness repaired there. You couldn’t complain then if life hurt you. The sparks would fly into your eyes or between your fingers but if you said anything my uncle would answer, “Don’t fret, there’s plenty more where they come from!” We worked until he chimed on the anvil with his hammer, then we stopped.
What I notice most about the village now is the way people no longer want to get together. All through my boyhood it was a regular thing for twenty or more folk to sit on that bank outside the shop and talk of an evening. They sat on the verge if it was fine and on the benches inside the shop if it was wet. The boys would be there too, rollicking and laughing but listening all the same. It was the good time of the day and we all looked forward to it. We told each other about the things that happened to us, only a long time ago. People didn’t usually tell each other things that were happening to them at that moment! But if it had happened years ago—no matter how awful it was—you could tell it. We sang songs. We sang the army songs from the war. “Nellie Dean” and “Pack up your Troubles.” Also “The Fakenham Ghost” and “The Farmer’s Boy.” And sometimes we step-danced, although mostly the step-dancing was done at Cretingham Bell. All that is finished now. People are locked in their houses with the television and haven’t any more time for talk and the like.
A lot of young men and boys used to bike to Brandeston to talk. I had a bicycle and went too. We used to stand in the road in the middle of the village, as many as thirty of us sometimes. The policeman was there, waiting for us. “Move on, boys,” he used to say. You could see that he couldn’t bear the talk. It was a strange thing. We could have talked in the middle of a meadow, I daresay, but somehow we needed to do it in the middle of the village. It was understandable. Of course the best place to talk was the public house. Men hadn’t got much money and I don’t know where they found what they did have, but find it they did for the pub. It was all they had, you see. They reckoned that if they had enough to “lift the latch” that gave them the right to stay in the pub all the evening. Or they might play a game of quoits and win some beer. Our pubs were the Cretingham Bell, the Brandeston Queen and the Akenfield Crown.
I was a master-hand at quoits when I was a lad. I started playing when I was eleven and only packed up five years ago. It’s a great Suffolk game. Every village had its quoit club and everybody played. You had to pitch the quoits eighteen yards in a clay bed. I played in the Akenfield team and won the Woodbridge Cup seven times. You can’t buy the quoits now. We each had our own and we treasured them. They’re heavy things, 7½ pounds a pair, but you didn’t have to be strong to throw them well. The art was in the letting of them go.
I can remember being really hungry—there are not many people who can truthfully say that now, are there? It was during the First War when folk who had the money had the rations. Rations! That was a joke. We never saw sugar at all. We used to have golden syrup in our tea and if we couldn’t get that we had black treacle. We had cakes without sugar—and our bread! My grandmother still baked it, as she had always done, but now, when you cut off the top crust you could put your hand in the hole which was left. The farmers’ houses were full of food, dairy butter, sweet cakes, meats—everything. They got it off the shop-keepers. They had some kind of mutual arrangement. It was nothing like the rationing during the Second War; that was very fair and most ordinary village people ate better then than they did before rationing arrived. They don’t like to believe this but it’s true. I can remember when I was about twelve that we boys were so hungry that we used to get together, crouch down in the corn and bark. It distracted people but once we started we couldn’t stop. Barking like dogs—imagine!
Things got worse after the war, yet the land didn’t suffer. It went on looking pretty good. The houses came to pieces and the people were hungry and keeping themselves warm with bits of old army clobber, but the fields stayed absolutely perfect. The men forgot that they were the farmer’s fields when they were ploughing and planting them, and decked and tended them most perfectly. They were art itself. The farmers like to think that the men did this fine work for them, but they did it for themselves. The farmers had got the upper hand now and wherever he could he made his worker a slave. That was what it was coming to. Have no doubt about it. No man dare open his mouth, or out he went! A man had to be silent to stay in the village. The farmers had become too powerful—and mean! It wasn’t their talk which separated them from the gentry, it was their meanness. I’ll tell a tale about this.
There was a farmer in the village who gave his men a £5 bonus each for getting the harvest in, and which was money the men counted on for buying the winter boots for their big families. These men, they worked for as long as they could see, day and night, for the first week of the harvest. They were mowing barley mostly and they’d be at it from four in the morning until ten at night. Time made no difference so long as they could see. Well, on the Saturday night they’d had enough so they had a wash and went to the Crown for a drink, which they well deserved. And on the Monday the farmer got them all together and said, “So you all went home early on Saturday, did you, and left the barley. Well, since you seem to like going home early you can bugger off home now—and stop there!” The men were all still and silent. Nobody dared open his mouth, not because he was afraid for himself b
ut because of his tied-house and his family. Nobody moved. The farmer kept them standing dumb like this well-nigh half an hour and then he said, “Get to work . . .” The men didn’t hurry their harvest; they made a masterpiece of it. It was their defiance. The farmer didn’t understand this and Tom Makin heard him boasting in the Great White Horse at Ipswich to some other farmers about how he had made his men “hustle up.”
The labourers’ children worked in the fields and so did their wives. The women’s job was to pull the grass and weeds out of the corn. They also picked up loose beans and were allowed to keep them. The beans were 5s. a combe—about eighteen or nineteen stones. It was surprising how much money the women managed to earn like this. And then, when there were no more beans, they would pull up the blackened stalks for kindling.
Socialist feeling was very strong in the village before Hitler’s war because of the poverty. Nobody had a thing. No one knew what to do or where to turn. It was terrible for young men to be so hopeless when all around them there were these perfect fields. They went on doing their work so carefully. But for nothing. No one said, “Good!” And when at last the farm-workers were able to go forward, they went forward until they went out of sight! They went off the land if they could. The farmers were used to having the same men for a lifetime and they were muddled when the old men retired and the young men went for any job they could rather than a farm job. So you got young men coming from other villages to work on the farms and when the farmer said, “I want you a-carting hay on Saturday,” they simply answered, “Oh no! Not on Saturday. We’re off!” “I want the hay carted,” he’d say. “And we don’t care what you want,” the young men would answer. These young men, they changed the farmers in Akenfield. It was a good thing. Their power had got too great.
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