Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

  I’m all for breaking patterns in order to make fresh ones. Life must stay fresh, every day of it if possible. Only how do you do it? Don’t ask me. These Oh-hos don’t know and don’t want to know. They’re in Suffolk to be country gentlemen, which is plainly what they are not. There’s an O.B.E. at the end of their rainbow. I think they are frightened men. The world is different for them and the nice people fewer. My wife used to baby-sit for an Oh-ho and when he drove her home she had to sit in the back of the car. I mean, sitting in the back of a big car and the door shut behind you! It’s incredible. This man writes letters to The East Anglian Daily Times about lapwings, Harold Wilson, Rhodesia, churchyard grass, caning boys, West Indians in Ipswich . . . I think of the chaps on my film course and then I think of him. We are in another country. The Oh-hos would say it was class because East Anglia has always been classy, but it isn’t. Anyway, they aren’t class, so how would they know? They are ourselves taking shelter in worn-out moulds.

  Looking back on my life, I can’t ever recall ever making a decision. One thing leads to another with me and if anything happens it’s just because of this. I imagine I choose but in fact it is external pressures which force the choice. Look at this present film-course business which I’m doing at the moment. Could anything have been more accidental? I buy an ancient cine-camera for seven quid to make some home movies. Then I take it to school and let the boys use it. They are fifteen-year-olds, so great excitement. I teach art but I have never had such a response. It must be developed, this school film thing. So here I am back in class again myself, learning about Eisenstein and Huston. People look to education now in the same way as they once looked to religion. Are you saved? Have you got your O-levels? It’s the same thing—salvation. I think I am an innocent man. Not in bed, I don’t mean that! And not by choice. I teach but I don’t know that I believe in education. I am interested, presumably, in showing people how to preserve the valuable part of themselves; only, as this profound thought has only just this minute occurred to me, I can’t enlarge on it! Innocent Hambling . . . that would make the lads sit up.

  We read The Observer and The Guardian. A group of us also share a Telegraph because it has the best cycling coverage and cycling is the new trendy thing. It is going to be like France. Football has become international and intellectual, and cycling is going to be the same. It is going to halve the coronaries! It is interesting to note that the village boys haven’t started cycling yet. Our crowd all comes from Ipswich. The thing is to get perfectly physically tired—it is the most tremendous sensation. I can’t describe it. One feels nicely hurt. Animal weariness. What people think of as we hurtle through the lanes I can’t imagine. The cycling reminds me really why I came here—to paint. I first started painting when I was fifteen. I wasn’t a bit sporting then. I wandered about seeing the land joining the sky in the huge way it does in Suffolk. I thought of Constable. I did national service but I still thought of the Suffolk land and sky, and the training lay all in the background unimportantly. I used to say to myself, I’ll go there. I meant, I’ll stay there. This sounds sentimental, doesn’t it? I went to an art school but nothing I learned hit me as this landscape does. The truth of the matter is that I don’t see the village, I see the sky touching the land and nothing ever interrupting. This is what I think about during these trendy bike rides. I’m in it, I think, right in it. Up to here. In London I stare at the people and wonder to myself, how do you do it? But I shall have to move. I must get on in my job because of the children. The cottage—Suffolk—has come to my wife and myself too early, that’s the truth of the matter. We are concerned with roots when we should be spreading. But it will be an almighty wrench. I’ve been around and I know I don’t all-function anywhere else. I’m an East Anglian and if it has a sign it is on me. Should things like this matter in 1967? I don’t know. Perhaps I’m too easily contented. Perhaps I lack a demon. Life just charms me—how daft can you get? I worry about this.

  * Suffolk writer and television personality.

  10. THE AGRICULTURAL TRAINING CENTRE

  To be sixteen years old and spend the first

  week of paid employment alone in a beet field as

  vast as that ninety-two acres was, may be a rough

  baptism, but it spelled out in unmistakable terms

  two facts. First, that my pupilage was a working

  one, and second, that even a chosen and desired

  occupation or profession is heavily compounded

  with elements of drudgery.

  —HUGH BARRETT, Early To Rise

  Raynor Creighton · aged forty-four · master at the Agricultural Training Centre

  I was brought up to farm in Suffolk in spite of the fact that my father had to carry his farm right through the Depression and made no living out of it at all. He was so stunned that he had no strength left to take all the opportunities offered to farming during the war. This has influenced my whole outlook. Yet in spite of everything, my father was the most contented man I ever met. Not placid, contented. Grateful, even! These boys I teach don’t have this contentment; they are restless.

  Agriculture is about the last industry to have technical training at the operative level. The farmer and the farm-manager have been trained at institutes, colleges and universities for over fifty years, now we are just beginning, these last ten years, to train the workers themselves. Those who go through the agricultural institutes have very generous support from the authorities and they will come out and be—skilled stockmen. Never much more than this, never farmers or managers. The cost is high—£8–£900 per student a year. I have a thing about this. I say, give me £900 for my village school and see how much more I will do with it. You could have another teacher at the school, or a new classroom, or some wonderful visual equipment which would transform the whole dreary feeling of the place—for the money it takes to keep one lad on this course. The money should be invested in these village children’s education at its beginning, not at the end of it. A boy has only to pass his Stage One, City and Guilds, and he’s in, and I’m sorry to say that in many cases the country isn’t going to see much of a return for its £900 investment. All the same, the courses are very popular and they do give the young village worker an extraordinary psychological lift. He feels in where he used to feel out.

  A lot of the boys would never dream of going away for residential courses, even if they could. These part-time classes sort the seed from the chaff at an early age. Some will eventually go on to full-time agricultural institute studies because they have done their basic stuff with us. Every county is taking care of its farm-workers’ education now. It is a phenomenon which we have only seen these past few years. The centres are handsomely equipped and teaching in them is still something of a novelty. They are proving that if you give an operator a good training in a short time you waste far less resources than if he were simply left to pick up what facts he could while working on the farm. Most of them come to us for about four years and are aged between sixteen and twenty-two. The course is regarded simply as a technical education although it could, and should, be a seed-bed in which to plant real ideas about life. These village boys are going to see massive changes and they may have to be re-trained before their working lives are over. They don’t think about this. Nobody thinks about it. We’re not like Holland, say. Holland is one of those countries which think ahead, which are in good time. We don’t do things until it is past time. The education of the village boys has been forced onto us and for the first time we are seeing what these people are really like.

  Well, they have a strong sense of belonging to a farm, which is a funny thing in 1968 because it is very much in the old tradition. The farmer’s son will still feel that he must follow his father on the farm and be apologetic and guilty if he breaks from it. And the farmer will feel more responsible towards his workers and their families than the village grocer will to his, say. Paternalism is a strong factor and you will sometimes get a young worker fighting off a farme
r’s protective interest in him with the same trapped kind of anger he feels towards his parent. There are farms where the employer is “good” to his men, which generally means that the paternalism works, or is accepted. I know of one farm not far from here where £50 is added to a man’s wages each time his wife has a child. And I have actually heard one farmer say to another, “If ever you take one of my men, I’ll never speak to you again!” He was smiling but he meant it. A worker is made to feel ashamed and disloyal if he leaves a place to get more money on another farm in the district. The simple fact that the man was earning less never comes into it when the farmer bemoans his loss. It is always, “How well I treated him,” and “Fancy So-and-So taking my cowman—that’s a neighbourly thing to do, if you like!” If, as often happens, the man returns to his original employer after a year or two, there is quite a prodigal son atmosphere on both sides. A lot of the more independent young men, particularly if they are properly trained agricultural technicians, can’t bear all this business. All these men want is a straight contract—so much work for so much money—and to be left alone. This detachment cannot last, of course. The land, as these chaps find out in time, is quite an emotional business. Also there must be some good in this sense of being tied to a particular farm when you think of how well the agricultural workers have adapted themselves to the huge changes in their industry during the last fifteen years. Almost no strife. Factory farming, mechanization, everything his father understood turned upside-down—a man and his employer couldn’t take such a revolution if there wasn’t something more than just a pay-packet between them, could he?

  But the best village men are trickling away to Ipswich and other nearby towns. They have all got cars and motor-bikes, and it is just as convenient to drive off to a factory five or ten miles away as it used to be to bike a couple of miles to the farm. When they get to the factory they will work in a way your ordinary conventional industrial worker will never work—really hard. The factory won’t change their country natures. I once taught a young cowman—a head cowman who was doing a regular sixty-hour week for a low wage—and he left his farm for a job in the I.C.I. works. This was about ten years ago. I see him now and then and I always think how little he has been changed by the factory. He is a villager still. A wonderful worker. You will find that nearly every man in the village likes to be considered part of the atmosphere on a farm where hard work is the thing—the good thing! He never really gets used to the kind of “average” day’s work which has to be put in in a factory and he can’t understand the kind of bargaining which goes on in industry between the workers and their employers. Having got the job, he likes to really slog away at it and he’s bewildered when the town workers say, “Look at that fool!” A lot of the tough slogging in the farm-worker’s life really isn’t necessary any more but you can’t stop it. It is an East Anglian thing. They’re all a lot of little puritans, you know! They used to be proud of how they did a task, now they are proud of the sheer quantity of the work they can shift in a day. You can’t blame them. The employers don’t want quality work any more. They want young men who will stay with their tractors until the moon is up. Most of these farm-machine operators can’t hedge, ditch, stack, use a scythe, thatch or do a fraction of the things which went into “labouring.” It is the skill needed to control the machine rather than doing good agricultural work which motivates them. To be perched on the top of a 130-h.p. tractor is to be perched on the top of their tree.

  Everything isn’t rosy. There are plenty of the really lumpen ones. They plod on the land because they simply haven’t got the gumption or enterprise to try anything else. We don’t see many of these at the Centre. This kind of worker just isn’t concerned with getting any kind of farm education. He has no ambition. I interview at the village schools and I meet these people. It is “no answer” to most of the questions. The village just absorbs these boys. They’ll hardly ever leave it. They’ll be “old Tom So-and-So.” They’ll never marry—the girls know their type and won’t look at them. They’ll live with their mothers, and then with an old sister, and then on their own. They’ll do all the odd jobs. They’ll be on the go until they die but they seem to take real care not to arrive anywhere! They are sly, private sort of people. Set apart. You get quite an element of this stolidity in the bright ones. They have what you might call a low enterprise horizon. They mostly don’t want to emigrate, for instance. When I was teaching in Norfolk we had people going out to Australia and New Zealand regularly. It was almost a tradition. So was joining the Police Force, strangely enough. But what is really happening is that the young village men are beginning to doubt whether they are duty-bound to work on the land. It is not logical, is it, that just because a man is born among the farms he should be expected to spend his life working them? It might have been once but it isn’t now. But what else is he going to do? This is the difficulty, because having come to this conclusion that he has a job-choice like everybody else, these youngsters still find their feet stuck solid in the Suffolk clay. They long in many ways to move out, to meet new people, but somehow they can’t. Their characters seem fully formed very early in life and they are able to resist acting on many of the normal youthful impulses. They are quite unadventurous in every way. They are also sceptical and cynical for their age. I wasn’t half as doubting—I believed that politicians would do as they say. These village boys who come to us don’t. They aren’t patriotic and they don’t love their individual villages in the way that their parents love them. They are detached—and yet they are still stuck hard in the local soil. They have quite a problem. I am convinced that primary education in the rural areas is to blame for much of this. Country children develop early and yet hardly anything is done at the primary-school stage to cope with this. The state is pouring money into further education, but there is so little for us to build on. By far the greater proportion of boys who come to the Centre are without any development in the personal use of their faculties. We can’t do much about it because, at eighteen or roundabouts—their peculiar Suffolk personalities have set like concrete! You can scratch away but you can’t shape. It’s too late for that. You feel a terrible sense of waste.

  You will feel that I perhaps despise them but I am of them and I resent what is happening to them. It was different during the Depression; there was more excuse. But there’s little excuse now, it is just a matter of feeding the new shoots. They’re young; they should be critical, vital, but they’re not. You can never get a critical statement about a television programme. It will either be “all right” or “good.” It is a passive occupation for them. They talked about Cathy, Come Home because of the hot language—not because they were indignant about the housing situation. They are very careful about not sounding original, yet they often come out with things which prove a strong individuality. They make statements—big, flat statements. They never explore ideas. Nobody has taught them how to use words to convey theories, so now that all the old village story-telling has died out their talk is very poor dull stuff. Although sometimes you’ll get a flood of the old richness when somebody has to relate a bit of gossip. There is terrific animation. Eyes light up. The man isn’t really gossiping in the trivial sense of the word, he is story-telling. Some of the gossip stories are told many times over and people will begin to laugh at the first sentence although they know the whole tale backwards. The East Anglians are serious people who laugh a lot. You’d hardly call them colourful yet they certainly aren’t grey. They have this kind of iron composure. It is this that you are seeing when you look at them—not them themselves. Something occasionally shifts it—one of these funny stories, perhaps—and then you see an entirely new, unsuspected person. Talk about sunshine after rain!

  We call them all “Mr” at the Centre—even if they’re no more than sixteen. They like coming here and regard it as a bit of a club. The social function of the place alone is worth half the cost of it. It grades the boys up to the level of friends who are going to Ipswich Civic College and
the actual psychological effect is enormous. And it should help to bring the farm-worker’s son up closer to the farmer’s son—but it doesn’t. The farmer’s son is of a different mould altogether. He thinks as a manager. He’ll talk about buying tractors and the choice of fertilizers. The farmworker’s son doesn’t discuss the buying and administrative side of the farm. There is a distinct cleavage between the boys. They don’t really mix. The farmers’ sons stick together. They have mostly been to Woodbridge or Framlingham schools. Both sides feel strong class differences and the farmers’ sons don’t really like farm-workers—I don’t know whether you realize this. You will find very few farm-workers in the Young Farmers’ Clubs. The clubs go with a sort of status and, being full of such brash types, are hellishly snobbish. The boys have sports cars and Simpson tweeds, and they like to take their girls out to dinner at the beamy old hotels. But most of them have strong or easily traceable local accents and a person of genuine culture wouldn’t find all that much difference between them and the ordinary village boys. I don’t like it. It should all be disappearing but the fact is it is stronger than ever!

  Both groups are conservative to an amazing degree—I mean, considering how young they are. I asked my class the other day, “What about hanging?” There were thirty boys in the class, all aged between seventeen and nineteen, and every one of them was in favour of hanging. It shook me. You find some funny things out. They all have a streak of cruelty. They kill animals in a way which would disturb the ordinary town boy—very few town boys have ever killed anything. But by the time he is twenty a countryman will have killed a considerable number of animals. It doesn’t mean anything to them. It doesn’t mean much to me. I’m a countryman and I was brought up in an atmosphere of natural killing. On a stock farm you see the animals going away to slaughter. You see cows which you’ve milked for years and which you have named, and with whom you might have built up quite a little relationship, going off to the butcher and you don’t feel a thing. It is logical. The countryman has no reverence for life. Things are born, things die. All the time. Death is as familiar as birth. To take a murderer’s life is just sensible to them. What is the good of “leaving him in his misery” and eating his head off, as it were? Might as well kill him. Killing isn’t a dreadful act to the village people. The idea that one mustn’t take life doesn’t make sense to them. I argued against them in our hanging debate but I could go outside this minute and kill a rabbit with my bare hands or shoot a bullock without the least bother. We also discussed corporal punishment and the class was all for bringing back the birch. It was, “Give him a good thrashing and he won’t do it again.” There wasn’t the vaguest sexual interest in these vengeances. This comes later, I suppose. Shooting, of course, is their big thing. It is the recreation. The farmers’ sons shoot in organized parties and the farm-workers’ sons shoot in solitude. Boys who shoot are often good naturalists but you’d have a hard job getting them to invest in a pair of binoculars instead of a gun.