We had to get the water on a three-year plan. It was an expensive game. First we had to get a temporary five-year licence to bore, then we had to put the motor in—this cost £1,000—and then, in the third year, it cost us £1,200 for the actual irrigation part of the scheme. But it was a great success. We hit the water 100 per cent and have a far better yield than any farm round here for miles.
Our sixty-five acres were originally a poor little arable set-up but we turned them all into pasture. We were one of the first people in Suffolk to go in for zero-grazing—that is, you don’t allow the animals to go out and graze, but graze the crop yourself with a flail and bring it to them. This method has many beneficial side-kicks. We tried everything that was new, no matter how odd it seemed. If we sensed some kind of intelligence behind it, we tried it. We got help from the Agricultural Mortgage Corporation. And at the end of all this—our “first phase”—we had fair meadows, twenty Jerseys each with an average of 1,000 gallons of milk a year and twenty-five Friesians, each with an average of 1,200 gallons at four per cent butter fat a year. In the end we sold the Jerseys because of the premium on the bull-calves. This was the only thing which swung us to the Friesians. We were the first farmers round here to use pea-hulm for silage. The district grew peas on a large scale and by purchasing the hulm we saved our acreage—we didn’t have to find winter-feed from the same land.
Well now, here comes the really mad part. Joining our farm was the real Muck Hall of the parish. I mean Sinai had some kind of mysterious reputation for destroying men’s hopes but Maris Farm—this adjoining place—was honest enough not to offer any hope at all. Absolute Muck Hall, that was Maris. The laughing stock of the neighbourhood. There it stood, derelict amongst all the local wealth, and no one would touch it. A few acres of its land had once gone with our farm, which is why I began to think about Maris. I thought it would be nice to have them back. Then I began to think, “I would like Maris very, very much . . .” It challenged me. It drew me so much that I had to force myself not to go near it or walk it. I dreamed about Maris, what I would do with it, how I would bring it into Sinai. I spoke about it to my neighbours, who said, “For God’s sake, now you are going mad!” They said it had broken many men and that it would break me, and that it was all right as long as you didn’t go stirring its mud up—it would leave you alone if you were content to rot away on it—but try to put it in order and it would turn on you and kill you. That is what they said. Well, with the help of the A.M.C. we bought Maris and I remember walking to it on a September morning and thinking, “Where shall I begin?” To add to the dreadfulness the last owners had tried to burn the hedges. They had raked the straw up from the fields on to the hedges and put a match to it. It was just a mess. When I measured the hedge stumps I found that these and the roots spread thirty-five feet across and that they would have to be bulldozed out before anything could be done at all. You couldn’t get a plough near them. What top was left, and there was plenty of it, was sixteen feet high. The bulldozers arrived and the mud turned into quagmire. I knew that we must get the hedges out before winter and the corn sown. I knew that unless I could crop this Muck Hall I couldn’t keep it. I wouldn’t be able to find my payments for it. The work went slowly—two bulldozers now. The neighbours drove by; they couldn’t bear to look. It rained—how it rained! The farm turned into slurry. I couldn’t see the end of it. But a year passed and we cropped Maris, and we got a third again as had ever been grown on it before. The happiness of it—I can’t describe it. It made us quiet, thoughtful.
It was this relief which made me realize that my dream of achieving something truly unusual in farming still hadn’t come to anything. I had done wonders but it was conventional wonders. So I began to think of new methods. I discussed everything with Elizabeth and we came to the enormous decision to replace the dairy herd with pigs. We sat down and worked and worked at it. Sheep and pigs and corn . . .? Just corn and pigs . . .? Sheep? Calf-rearing? This was about 1962–3. I rang up a perfect stranger, one of the biggest farmers in Suffolk, and said, “I want to produce weaner-pigs. Will you buy them? Are you interested?” “Very,” he said—that was all. So we had a sale of our cows and the village thought we had gone crazy. “Changing in mid-stream,” they said, “dear-o-dear!” One of the reasons for their amazement was because they could see me making a concrete road to join my “Muck Halls” together. “Two dung-hills tied to each other,” they said. We laughed but it was really very frightening to listen to. Country people aren’t all that kind; they like to see a bit of a crash. I suppose it breaks the monotony. But once I could get from one to the other of my farms, I knew I would have a viable 170 acres. Because of its deadly reputation we bought Maris for £100 an acre—a tremendous bargain.
Well, pigs it was. I converted an old dairy to what I believed a rearing house should be. I’d first had a look around and seen other people’s rearing houses and had been appalled by them. I knew that I had to see my pigs and be able to reach out and touch them. And I looked forward to their arrival; they would be less dictatorial than cows. Four months later the big farmer whom I had telephoned came over to see our first weaners—and we were away! I started off by just buying Large Whites but changed to Saddlebacks on this rich farmer’s advice. The Large Whites converted slowly—so many pounds of food to make so many pounds of flesh over a given period, this is what conversion means. He helped me get a Walls boar. This firm take boars from various breeds, test them at a progress station and then tell one, “This boar can convert at X.” It will eat, shall we say, 2½ pounds of food and put on a pound of flesh. It will arrive at the Heavy Hog weight of 260 pounds in 170 days. The boar soon improved our stock for, like a bull, a good boar is fifty per cent of your herd. Eventually he is mated to every one of your animals. This farmer came to the quarterly boar sale with me and helped me choose. It was evident that we both had considerable sympathy for one another. I liked his outlook. I liked his appreciation of what I was trying to do. I admired someone who had just got a contract to produce 14,000 Heavy Hogs taking such time and trouble to help me find a mate for my thirty sows. Eventually, he got me a fine Walls Gilt. And soon I became a “multiplier,” breeding foundation stock to produce sows for the rich farmer, who needed a sow herd of seventy-five “to put him on the ground.” We—Elizabeth and I—had eighteen animals only—sows which we had to breed from their own kind before we could “cross off.” We had to multiply the original eighteen to seventy-five before we could “cross.” It was a long haul! Two years of no return, with money just going out all the time. And, of course, more accommodation, more farrowing quarters—and no financial help whatever at this stage.
The bank made a fuss but I said, “Look. I’ve lived as a pauper for six years and I’ve stuck to my guns about embellishing my farm. If my profits don’t amount to very much it is because my place has never carried a job which is worthy of all the groundwork which has been put into it. Now there is a worthy project and it should be, ‘All systems go!’ ” But it was the A.M.C. who really helped me. I had the kindest, most fantastic response from these people. They went to the very edge to help me.
This business today, well we have literally built it up out of the unwanted mud. It belongs solely to us and we are still independent. The sow herd now numbers 200 and I’m keeping it at that. It means about 2½ thousand weaners a year. Our food bills run at the rate of £25,000 a year but they will eventually rise to between £30–40,000. We run the double farm with four people and have a bit of time and cash left over to spend on the old Tudor homestead, which we are restoring with our own hands.
Round here, there is no doubt about it, they wait for the big trip. They would like to see me stumble. I am positive about this. They say that no man has pigs for two years without a major breakdown—and I have had them for four years. I am resented because I’m absolutely independent of them all. The whole area is a matter of indifference to me. I could do what I have to do in Scotland—or China. The National Farmers’ Un
ion means nothing to me. If the local farmers want to sell me straw, they can do so, or they can forget it. If I owe them anything and they send their account, I pay it by return post. It is the way I behaved in Arabia.
We had students to begin with and I would have liked to have gone on with this method. But we find that the material is getting poorer and poorer. It is the idiot who seeks agriculture and, even when he has a degree, he’s incapable of implementing what he has learned. It is pathetic. Quite terrible. Labour on all the farms round here is considered untouchable. You should be able to say to a man earning £800 a year, “I’ll give you £1,000 a year if you’ll come as my manager,” but if you did you’d never live it down. If you offer a local man a better job than he has on another farm in the area it is considered a kind of seduction. I am chided because they say I don’t know how to pick good men but I am forbidden by the local customs from approaching the men I see doing good work because they “belong” to this farm or that. The men should move about freely, getting the best wages they can.
I find the East Anglians cold and hidden. I have never experienced such coldness before. They can be barbarous and there is an innate cruelty in them. You find it all over the village. The strange thing was that, to begin with, I had the feeling that Suffolk had been seriously maligned because when we first came here people came forward to help us. They helped us get the harvest in and I was touched. There was this apparent communal spirit. It was like North America. But now I realize that this “help” was nothing more than prying. What was I? Was I steel or was I soft metal? Was I going to give? Soon, they withdrew. They will help you in distress but they don’t really like to see you not in distress and doing fine. They don’t come and say, “Good show! It’s a pleasure to see what you have done!” They never say this. The average Suffolk farmer is one of the hardest kind of men I have ever met. You find the exceptions, of course. I’m afraid the neighbours and myself are a bit “lost.”
I don’t feel entirely settled here. This is our year of truth, the year when the real profits should start. I feel restive. If it all “happens,” as they say, I shall begin to feel that I have done what I set out to do and might want to move on. My mind has to create things and, when they are completed, go on to another venture. But some ventures refuse to be over. I never sleep one night without dreaming of Arabia.
Major John Paul · aged fifty-one · ex-colonial officer, now senior Civil and Home Defence Organizer in East Anglia
The Major has lived in the village for six years. He is a small, dark, authoritative-looking man who expresses himself with quiet lucidity. He is the unexpected rebel, for although his family, house, political and church-going patterns appear orthodox on the surface, there are oblique currents underneath which are tugging him away from mainstream conclusions. He is conservative but anti-traditional. The traditionalists, perhaps from their arrogantly self-assured bastions, may have given him a few knocks, one thinks. Unlike so many ex-officers who have travelled the world, Major Paul is travel-educated. His job is to establish a nucleus of civil defence in every village, as well as to co-ordinate the defence of Suffolk as a whole. The volunteers, between one and four in each village, wear navy-blue uniforms and are required to give fifty hours a year to their training. They have exams and are fully qualified at the end of four years. The work has parallels with that of the W.V.S., the Red Cross and the St. John Ambulance Brigade and attracts the same type of workers. When the Major took over, the units were full of people re-living the halcyon experiences of the Home Guard and air-raid wardens of the Second World War; now it attracts young people, many of whom gain such side-advantages as trips to Denmark, Germany and France. These young people have driven out many of the 1939–45 veterans, who were fighting their old battles all over again.
What is the object of the defence? The Major is diffident—“Relief work, emergency, floods, that kind of thing.” But it is really to do with the Bomb, isn’t it? The Major agrees, not so much reluctantly as having to admit a regrettable truth. One senses that he would prefer to put out forest fires or maybe direct famine relief. He has to organize: this is what he really is, an organizer. What do his volunteers think about the Bomb? In what way are they different from the rest of us who see it as a kind of the end of the world against which all precautions are futile? The Major thinks. “They take a positive attitude to something horrifying . . .” he says at last. We return from this brink to such reasonable subjects as the effect of “abroad” on the villagers, many of whom have never left Suffolk before. “They were amazed how hard men worked in Holland and Germany. They watched astonished.” Were they impressed? “No, they thought it was foolish. ‘Life wasn’t meant to be lived like that.’ ” The young men were quite changed after a week on the Continent: it was as if they had stepped out from behind their Suffolk masks.
Major and Mrs. Paul live in a beamy, chintzy ex-farmhouse, but with a difference. There is no attempt to re-create the country idyll. The garden is in such a state that it approaches a kind of coat-trailing. The lawns flop hairily into the rosebeds and rampageous plants mock the refinements—sun-dial, crazy paving, wrought iron-—of a previous owner. Inside, passe-partouteded photographs of mess groups from Aden, Kenya and other places are hitched to the beams. Mrs. Paul was a nurse in Nigeria—“They were beautiful, lovely people and marvellous where they had been left alone, but as soon as they got to learn about a few things they got a bit Bolshy, you know.” There are four pretty children, all under eleven. Did they get on well with the village children?—“It was hard going at first.” How about herself?—“It has taken a long time to make friends.”
Major Paul, talking with the quiet patience, “My job is to produce an organization of 600–1,000 people to deal with any sort of emergency. It is done on the parish basis. There has to be someone, or preferably a group, in each village who can deal with any kind of emergency, local or . . . national. Farm labourers, factory workers from Ipswich, farmers and their wives, retired service and colonial officers, those are the people who help. I have to weld them into some kind of county organization. People have said that the volunteer spirit has been killed by the Welfare State but this is not so, and this volunteering is the strength, not only of East Anglia but of Great Britain. There is still this tremendous urge, this great centre of the people who want to serve others. My work is basically to train people to help other people within the village unit—but there is a lot more in it than this, of course. Six years ago our average age was fifty-seven, now it is forty-five. Young people from eighteen to thirty make up a third of the Civil Defence force. They are not paid but they get their expenses, petrol allowance—that sort of thing.
“I came here mostly because of my job, of course, but also because of the sailing. It takes a long time to be accepted, especially if you’re not prepared to go into a group and re-live your memories. Retired officers like myself—I know any amount of them—they get together, with their wives, a little clique or whatever it is, and they re-live memories. I like meeting people I served with but I wouldn’t do this as a social habit. I would avoid this sort of thing. After all, it’s the past. It has no bearing on what is happening today and it won’t matter tomorrow. . . .
“The people who do this are a class on their own; it is their deliberate choice. I think that they gather in groups like this almost as a form of protection. They are rigid in outlook and they keep to their own customs. Their outlook is pre-war and the social changes are so great that to keep this outlook they are forced to live entirely artificial lives. All they do is discuss the past and my view, as somebody from outside and who has come from a different life, is that they are parasitic. They don’t make their own groups because they can’t get in with the ‘county’—it’s simply a deliberate choosing. It’s an inward-looking nostalgia. They are living a life that’s gone. Why do they do it? Fear. They know they are regarded as strangers in the village and they cannot bear it. So they look around Suffolk for people like themselves and i
gnore everybody else.”
All the time they worked abroad, they had a dream of England? They hankered after a microcosmic scene of non-change and certainty. And when they got their retirement and their Suffolk house, they found things were not so, and they cannot bear it. So they bury themselves into their gardens, which are the village where they are concerned.
“I find the average village person, well, not very quick, shall we say. His intelligence doesn’t compare with that of the average Londoner. His knowledge of world affairs or even of U.K. affairs is not very high. He’s not really interested. But he’s kind—they are all very kind people. I am always astonished by their kindness. Their roots are deep in the past, they haven’t been what I would call ‘de-tribalized’ and they still look towards their parish councils, which I wouldn’t say were very effective. The village is changing but it is still very undisturbed. The people who belong have lived here for ever. They’re contented—no, complacent. They all think they live in a very fine place and they’re really not bothered by people who say, ‘We’ve got something which you haven’t got.’ They like things as they are, whether it’s work, religion—anything. They’re not keen on the arts.
“Without being derogatory to them—I am very fond of them—I think they look solid, and I’m referring to both sexes now. Their faces, though, they are Celtic. They have eyes which, while seeing obvious things, are also at the same time seeing things in a world of their own. Sailors’ eyes are like this. The Suffolk people remind me very much of Cornwall. They have the same intensity. They are very intense people. They are loyal, but more loyal to an idea than to a person. The young are not very articulate, unless they are a long way from the village, abroad, perhaps, as I have seen them.
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