Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

  We discussed the colour problem—we have these topical debates, you see—and the class said, “Get all the coloured people out of England; they don’t belong here.” Later on I found out that not one of them had ever even spoken to a coloured person—except maybe to an Ipswich Corporation bus conductor! It isn’t simply education which will change things. Think of the Tories in Suffolk—they’ve had “education.” Don’t talk to me about Tory Suffolk! It is, well, illiterate. My mother is one of them, so is my brother—ordinary farming folk, you would say, nice, kind—but how they hate, hate all liberalization! It upsets them. They used to say that the farmers round here would vote for a baboon if it had a blue arse and this is as true today as ever it was. This is where the real rural primitivism exists. Not in the cottages. But who really knows about the cottages? They are still mysterious. Much of the life in them is still concealed. Something happened to the East Anglian people during the great Depression. They lost their staunchness and independence. They were made to fear. They won’t talk freely.

  There is still far greater control in the village than in the town—control of parents over their children, employers over their men, church and chapel controls, etc. The older men pick on the boys and are always looking for faults. The young are watched and criticized, although you would hardly find a better behaved and amiable lad than the average village boy. They rebel sometimes, like the occasion when scores of them from miles around put on their leather jackets and zoomed down to Felixstowe on their bikes. Well, you know what Felixstowe is—a sort of decaying ground for retired people—and when they got these massed motor-bikes surging along the front, there was panic! The boys chose Felixstowe because it was refined. They wanted to make a noise in it and assert their virility. Then the police arrived—then the television cameras! Plenty of pushing around and some resistance. The local papers had a field day. But what happened really—just a lark, an hour of glory. Suppose the bikes and jackets had been horses and riding habits—all these young countrymen sitting up straight and dashing along—the old men might have shivered a bit but I’m sure they would have said something like, “How splendid!” The truth of the matter is that many of the older country folk are eaten up with jealousy of the young. Fathers see sons of seventeen doing things that they would never have been allowed to do, and are envious. They see things such as the way the boys behave in the local pub. Before this generation a countryman went into his pub to have a damn good session—it was their pleasure, wasn’t it? But the young men hardly drink at all. And before transport the pub men stayed loyal to one pub for maybe the whole of their lives. Each man’s little ways were known—just as they were in the midst of their families. If you wanted to keep any private life at all it was necessary to watch your step when you’d had a few. But the boys will drive down to Southend or Clacton and let off steam in pubs where nobody knows them. They’ll pick up girls and make love to them, and nobody in the village will be any the wiser. They are living in a bigger scene.

  The boys at the Centre will discuss sex quite easily. Most of them have had quite a lot of experience and their attitudes are fairly uninhibited. They live in dread of getting “caught”—of having to marry because their girl is pregnant. Farmers’ sons are reckoned good matches and a particularly attractive eligible male from a good farm will be noted down for miles around. A surprising number of men stay bachelors but nobody finds this very extraordinary.

  All these discussions we have are extras. They shouldn’t be. Every course at Ipswich Civic College has a liberal studies element attached to it, and so should ours. At the moment we allow a certain amount of discussion in order to help the farm-workers with their problems and not with any intention of broadening their lives. Yet we should be broadening their lives, I feel. We don’t employ a naturalist, for example. But we should. Somebody should be saying to these boys, “Let us go and look.” I want the whole approach changed. I would have been the first to call this “broadening” idea airy-fairy nonsense when the Centre first opened but I’m changing. One of the extraordinary things about this latest generation of villagers is that it is too comfortable! They need provocation, stress. They are sturdy young well-fed animals being trained as farm-machine operators who don’t feel strongly about anything. They are content for the world to stay as it is, poverty, pain and everything, as long as they are comfortable.

  11. OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN

  What have I done for you,

  England, my England?

  What is there I would not do,

  England, my own?

  With your glorious eyes austere,

  As the Lord were walking near,

  Whispering terrible things and dear . . .

  —W.E. HENLEY

  Colonel Trevor West · aged forty-eight · retired army officer and highly successful pig-farmer

  Colonel West is an heroic, complex man who doesn’t fit into the conventional mould of the typical retired army officer. Tall, eloquent and with noticeably fine manners, he is like a figure from another age. Ten or so years ago he bought the local “Muck Hall”—the farm with the jinx, with the legend of ruin and defeat, and has, almost single-handed, turned it into a rich and thriving property. He has the English mixture of extreme practicality and dream. His ignoring of the local jeremiahs and his indifference to the clan activities of the various social groups in the neighbourhood, plus a certain old-fashioned “distinction” in his personality, sets him rather apart. He is married and has three sons. He is a lonely man, although it isn’t Suffolk which has made him so; his is the nature which is alone in any country.

  * * *

  I returned from the Middle East in 1956 but long before becoming a soldier I meant to farm. I was taken with it. I was a little bit afraid of what I saw in London—oversensitive, perhaps. Anyway, it wasn’t for me. Farming was something I came to. As soon as my sister married a farmer, which was my first real introduction to agriculture, I was taken with it. It was in harmony with what I was—with what I am. But then it was an idyll. I had no notion of the £ s. d. side of it. I just knew that I needed to be involved with livestock, life production, creating an existence in which you yourself was answerable to yourself, and to no one else.

  Well, then the war came. I was eighteen. Just before joining up and going abroad I met Elizabeth—the daughter of a farmer. I met her on the farm itself, which was just below where I was stationed. We were friends for just a fortnight and then I went to fight the war. I was away five years and we were married within seven days of my getting home. By this time I was an Arabist and soon, being back in Jordan with the Arab Legion, I was lost to the Western world and utterly absorbed in and devoted to what I was doing. I felt I was part and parcel of an effort. I didn’t try to assimilate Jordan or anything like that but my spirit was with this country and I felt that I was living to a purpose and creating something. And then, gradually, everything changed. I stuck it out until the situation became ugly, which I always knew at heart would happen. I—all of us out there—was being estranged from a natural position and being forced into an unnatural position. It is all difficult to explain. The country drew me. I wanted to be there indefinitely. I never thought of my own personal future but of myself as part of a great idea. The money—a pension—was absolutely negligible and not tied in any way to Britain, so that when at last I was forced to resign I came away with little or no money with which to start another life. My wife had little, I had little. Towards the end of the life in Jordan—the last three years—when the stresses were such that you had to act against your will, I made a personal act of conscience. I told myself, I disagree with what I am doing but it is an instruction, so I will carry it out. At home we both said, “Oh, to get away from here! All this—it is horrific! It is terrible. We are becoming part and parcel of the destruction of the thing which we have spent our lives creating. We are being employed to tear down what we have built up. It was good. Now we are part of the bad. We must go!”

  We both still lo
nged for the English countryside. For my wife—a farmer’s daughter—it was natural, and I wanted no part of the townee life. We wanted to regain something which would allow us to be in complete control again. In my imagination I felt that agriculture was the only life where one could be master of all one did. If you made a mistake you were answerable only to yourself. I also thought that if I obtained this independence it would help me to forget the Jordan horror. And so we came home. At first, farming seemed out of the question—we just hadn’t got the money for it. It just wasn’t on. As my cousin farmed in quite a big way in Dorset—about 2,000 acres—I thought of asking him for a job. I also thought of other jobs, such as photography. I have always been interested in this and it would have meant that I could work on my own. I had once been a press officer so I thought I could do free-lance news pictures. But I knew all this was a very tricky business and that I hadn’t the right to expose my family to such a gamble. But whatever I did, I knew that I must do it quickly, otherwise my little nest-egg would erode. So one day I saw my cousin and said, “Bill, I have this money, do you think I could begin to farm?” I remember this moment exactly. My cousin was in his car and I had stopped him as he was leaving the drive; the engine was running. He thought for about a minute, staring across a field, then he said, “I think you could make it. I’ve got to go now. Excuse me.” And that was all he said. He was a hard kind of man—stodgy, if you like. A good farmer but not what I would call an imaginative one. Every step he took was stolid and careful and he only adopted a new process after a neighbour had given it a good try-out. He wasn’t the kind of man I admired but I could believe in him. So I went home and said, “Elizabeth, let’s try and get ourselves a farm. Let’s do it!”

  I went out and bought a couple of farming papers and then I wrote off to various land agents—and was immediately inundated with “splendid properties.” I got a map and ringed all the likely ones. Fortunately for us it was 1956, when the first fall in land prices occurred—the first time since the war when people felt that there wasn’t a fortune to be made in agriculture. Up to this time, rationing and everything else had created a very false impression of security but now the war-time boost was over—so was the post-war feather-bedding. A farmer who lost money during those years was a man who would lose money anywhere. It took an abject fool not to make a good living then. It was different now. We drove around in my big sports car which, except for my cameras, was my only real possession, and eventually we came to Suffolk. The farms here were extraordinary, mysterious, very individualistic. One, I remember, had sixteen ponds round the farm-house! Anyway, we ended here. I discovered this farm of sixty-five acres which had been bought for £10,000 just ten years earlier, when the prices were up, since when it had been worked—not too seriously!—by a young man who had lost about £1,000 a year on it. I didn’t worry about this. I knew that my attitude and the young man’s attitude towards the place were poles apart. Elizabeth and I walked round it. It had a “lifting” feeling for us. We had my cousin with us to explain a few things but we didn’t know what we were walking into. The farm was a mudpie—not an inch of concrete. Nothing. But there were nice Victorian red-brick buildings and barns which looked like barns, and not tumble-down shacks. It was one of the Duke’s farms and had been built with bricks from his own kilns. There were three cottages and the old homestead—a Tudor house in a terrible state. My cousin stumped around in the mud and said, “This is all right. It will give you as good a chance as any. Take it.” I got it for £5,000, lock, stock and barrel—a sixty-five-acre Suffolk farm with a house and three cottages.

  Three days later we began trying to tidy it up. There were bedsteads in the garden, rats in the house and muck everywhere. It was June but you still couldn’t walk anywhere without getting slush over the top of your boots. But we weren’t defeated. We were on a hill and on our own. We could breathe again. We went around clearing rubbish from the fields into an old truck. We did nothing else for a whole month. Two village men came and helped us each evening, after they had finished work. The barns were crammed with great worthless machines and junk—it took us two entire days just to strip the masses of old binder-string hanging from their nails. It had been looped and pulled, looped and pulled for generations. When the farm was clean, I fixed a perimeter fence round it—this was obligatory in those days. I now had an empty farm, £1,000-worth of cameras, a hard-topped, long-wheel-based Land Rover—and our TT licence. It was time to begin.

  I heard that there was a genuine sale of dairy stock at Bishop’s Stortford, the reason for the chap’s selling of his herd being that his land was being taken by Harlow New Town. It was a dispersal sale—just what we were looking for. So we drove off to it and I bought six cows—not heifers—so that we should have some milk to sell. Soon after this we bought more stock from an old Scottish farmer. This kind man remembered his own struggles when he first came to Suffolk and often came over to give us good advice. I told the men who came and helped me in the evenings, “If we get eight out of ten heifers during the calving, I’ll buy you a barrel of beer!” And we got eight out often! This was the beginning of our herd. I had to install milking equipment, of course. Now this is a dreadfully expensive thing to do but I discovered an almost new set of Simplex equipment in a country market and got it, pump, motor—the lot—for £60. All we had to do after this was to put the piping in. I was milking. I had tried my hand at it years ago, when I was about eighteen and before I joined the army, and here I was, with the scrub-brush inside the pails again and feeling as though all those years in Arabia had never been.

  We then sold the cars and the cameras, and so we cut ourselves off. We didn’t employ anybody. We couldn’t leave the farm. We had the telephone and we shopped on that. We were isolated. For six months we never went beyond our gates. We continued to sell everything and anything we could do without in order to buy cows. We kept on breeding and buying. We started all this in August 1956 and by Christmas we had ten cows and within a matter of four years we had thirty. We bought in one or two Jerseys to maintain the colour and quality of the milk. Our first sale—of five gallons a day!—went to the Stowmarket Creamery. I was embarrassed to see their great lorry calling for such a small quantity and at first tried to get rid of it by making cream cheese. The whole place was festooned with sheets and bowls, and we couldn’t move for cheese so there was nothing for it but get the milk taken some other way. Eventually, we were selling 100 gallons a day.

  My wife and I did everything. We had no help. We worked seven days a week and 365 days a year. We haven’t had a holiday as such in twelve years. During all this time we have only been away from the farm for three nights. The local people became intrigued by us. “Who’s bought Sinai?” they asked.—“Oh, a Colonel Somebody . . .” “He won’t last long!”

  I pressed on, I mortgaged, I did all the usual things to raise money. I used the bank—I worried the guts out of it. I went on and on. Kept on laying concrete, embellishing, struggling, arranging. My books weren’t exciting. The profits didn’t show up because I was constantly expanding. “That Colonel,” the locals said, “what do he think he’s doing?” But I would not work in improper conditions: I meant to have a model farm. It was going to be poised in such a way that it could undertake something of considerable import. It is hard to explain except by saying that I seemed to be fussing with the frame of a picture which had yet to be painted.

  There was no water, so we had to bore. No electricity. My wife and I had to start three different engines before we could milk each morning. If only one of the three failed we were foxed. Then I managed to get a great second-hand diesel—and 240w. Each battle had to be fought inch by inch. All the things taken for granted by everybody else were battles for us. The main electricity didn’t come for five years and wouldn’t have come then if I hadn’t raised the roof with the local M.P. I fought all the time. Nobody wanted to do anything when I mentioned Sinai. That is its name—Sinai Farm. It seemed a cursed place. We took every scheme th
at was available. If there was a loan to be had from the Ministry for draining land, we took it. We drained and drained. It was ironical that with all these neglected wet fields we had to pay such a fortune to get water.