“There are two bad things about Suffolk villages. They contain groups of retired officers and colonialists who cling together and ignore life as it really is, and the ordinary country people are incurious—and proud of it. And, of course, there is the feudalism, particularly between the Blythe and Ipswich, where there is a tremendously strong “inward-looking outlook” and everybody from the County Council to the lords are fighting to keep village life intact, and where people go to great lengths to preserve rural life, buildings, customs—anything. The great social changes of the last twenty years have made little progress around Akenfield. It is quite different in North Suffolk. I am new. I travel. I see all the Suffolk villages—so I know.”
12. THE ORCHARD MEN
Adam lay I-bowndyn, bowndyn in a bond,
Fowre thowsand wynter thowt he not too long;
And al was for an appil, an appil that he tok
As clerkis fyndin wretyn in here book.
—ANON, Bless the Time the Appil was Taken, fifteenth century.
DIARY OF THE AKENFIELD FRUIT HARVEST
16–20 June Gooseberries picked. The main varieties grown in the village are Careless, Leveller and Golden Drop, although the latter are only seen in cottage gardens.
21 July Laxton plums.
1–7 August Main plums picked. The varieties are Earl Rivers (considered the tastiest), the Yellow and Purple Pershores, Czars (chief canning plum), Warwickshires and Droopers (best jam plum).
1–21 August Black currants picked. The varieties are Boscrop, Wellington, Mendip Cross and Baldwin.
15 August Apples picked. George Cave and Scarlet Pimpernel (these have taken over from Beauty of Bath, which used to be the first eating apple of the season).
1 September Apples picked. Worcester Pearmain, Grenadier (first of the cooking apples) and Lord Lambton.
20 September Apples picked. Egremont Russet, Laxton’s Superb, Cox’s Orange Pippin (thought to be the finest English apple. Raised by a brewer named Mr. Cox at Slough in 1830. “Pippin” because they are propagated from pips—the royal fruiterer brought pippins to Henry VIII.)
1 October Bramleys (best English cooker, heavy cropper and easiest apple to sell), Newton Wonder (cooks until Christmas, eats after) and Blenheim Orange (pips first taken from a garden in Woodstock. Produced fruit 1818. Nobody knows where the original tree came from.)
Mid-September Plums. Victorias (bought by Heinz for baby food), Burbank, the “giant prune” plum, and President.
September–October Pears picked. Conference, Comice, Orange Pear (cookers).
25 October Apples picked. William Crump, Discovery (four acres just planted—no fruit yet).
East Anglian apples, some of which can be found in the old gardens in the village but which aren’t grown commercially.
Lady Henniker (raised at Thornham Hall, Eye, 1840–50)
Norfolk Beauty(1902)
Norfolk Royal (a very old variety)
Green Roland
Histon Favourite (Cambridgeshire)
St. Edmund’s Russet (raised at Bury St. Edmunds, 1870)
Doctor Harvey (the great winter apple from Norfolk)
Sandringham (raised 1884)
Sturmer Pippin (raised 1880)
Lord Stradbroke (raised 1933, a big angular apple)
D’Arcy Spice (the most valued apple in the Eastern Counties. It was discovered growing in the gardens of Tolleshunt D’Arcy Hall in 1880.)
Costard (not an East Anglian apple but familiar throughout Britain. There are records to show that it was being sold at Oxford in 1296. The original costermonger was a seller of Costard apples.)
Alan Mitton · aged thirty-eight · orchard foreman
His name appears regularly in the church records way back to the late seventeenth century and on a great crop of Victorian tombstones. He is tall, Viking-looking, the biggest man in Akenfield, a natural leader and king-pin of the apple-workers. Courteous, self-assured, he has the “gentle giant’s” good nature. He has never been away from the village since he was born—in the same house in which he now lives with his wife and family—and although Akenfield is his world, it is a broad rich world. He has never felt the need to explore another. He is deacon at the Strict Baptist Chapel and at the Anglican-Non-conformist get-togethers he prays in lucid, mannered eighteenth-century English. If somebody says, “We will read from First Kings Seventeen,” or “Ezekiel One-Six,” he opens his Bible in a single movement at the place. He plays football every Saturday, his limbs in their modest knee-warmers contrasting with the crutch-length shorts of the rest of the team.
“Ask Alan to do something, and he will do it,” they say in the village. “Ask him how to do something and he will tell you.”
* * *
I am an orchard man. The orchards I was born into, as you might say, are the biggest in the village. There are nearly 140 acres of them and they lie on the slopes to the south of the houses. More people are employed here than anywhere else in the village. I actually started work on this farm three years before I left school, mostly during the summer holidays. And then, when I left school, the farmer said, “You used to enjoy being on the fruit cart, maybe you would like stay on it regular?” I said, “I would rather,” and that is how I came to be in the fruit all the while.
When they first planted the orchards, before the First War, they began with just a little patch containing two or three trees of each kind of fruit and then they began to lay out the Bramley orchards—probably about five acres apiece. And gradually the orchards spread their way up the hill—because of frost reasons, I suppose. We’ve got about nine acres of old-established Bramleys left from those days. Some are over fifty years old and if the pruning is done correctly there is no reason why these trees shouldn’t go on for always. Right at the bottom of this old orchard there is a row of the original trees planted in the 1890s—just five trees planted at twelve yards square, which is double the space usually given to a Bramley. One of these five trees, which is nearly eighty years old, never produces less than twenty bushels of apples. And the funny thing is that the apples are all big. No one really knows why this tree is so marvellous, why every year without fail, as you might say, it gives eighteen out of its twenty bushels which are first-class apples. In 1965, which was a good apple year, we picked 124 bushels of fruit off this one row of old trees. The next row, where the trees have only half the space, gave 120 bushels.
In the days when I began, out of the twenty men on the fruit farm, only four were allowed to prune. This was because of the old-fashioned idea that when you were cutting a piece of wood you were taking so many apples off the tree. So the trees went up and up, and bushed out and became enormous. They got so thick that it was difficult to spray them and so tall it was hard to gather. And they didn’t get enough air. But about fifteen years ago we tried a new drastic cutting method. We said, “Right! We’ll have this bit out and this bit out!” The old men came and looked and said, “You aren’t pruning, you’re pollarding!” They were very shocked. “Poor trees, poor trees . . .” they said. All the middles were ripped out; the trees looked like umbrellas. In fact, it looked really shameful. It was always the old boys’ pride to keep the shape of a tree, so they were shocked. It was their main art, to keep the tree-shape. Well, nothing was said. The sawing went on. The middles were taken right out and the lower boughs removed so that the tractors and sprayers could drive through the orchard. These trees looked terrible and the next year they grew so much spur-wood where the boughs had been that we wondered if we had done right. Then, the next year, the fruit started to come. It was exciting. The apples got better and better. It was amazing; you had to see it to believe it.
So much changed after this. Once, you had to wait five years between planting a tree and picking its fruit, now it is only three. These young trees are no more than three feet high and with a stick no rounder than your thumb. They have had their tops cut off at knee level and have burst out into four or five branches which, a year or so later,
have been cut halfway back again—tipping, we call it—and then the third year we have the apples. You can pick as many as twenty pounds of apples from a fourth-year tree. It is all so quick.
We buy our trees from a nursery in Sussex. They come as maidens, which is a first-year tree which has been grafted and budded. We plant them at the end of the year and then, just before the sap rises, we snip the top out. Should any flowering buds appear the first year, we rub them off. We never let apples come the first year. These trees are low and small, so that we can pick the fruit easily. All the big trees are gradually disappearing.
We are expanding the Coxes. Twenty years ago there wasn’t a Cox tree on the farm at all. We were told that the soil in the village was wrong for Coxes and that they wouldn’t grow. The only field which might grow them, they said, was down by the river. They said they might grow there. But then, they said, the frost will lie in the river belt, so better not plant there. Well, we planted them on the slope with a pollinater and they have borne extremely heavy. Coxes are expensive apples but very popular; there is always a sale for them. You can eat them all the way through from early October to February and they will always be good, whereas an apple like a Worcester can only be eaten in September for the full flavour. It soon goes clung, as we say. We pollinate the Coxes with James Grieves—one James Grieve to about every fifteen Coxes. If it looks like an apple-glut year and we think that the Grieves aren’t going to sell very well, we pick the biggest of them in early September and sell them as cookers. The apples which are left on the James Grieve trees won’t be picked at all. They will just drop onto the ground. Last year they were all picked and sold because the spring frosts caused an apple shortage.
We’re growing Matsus, which is a new kind of apple from Japan which has been crossed with a Golden Delicious. There are more Golden Delicious apples grown in the world than any other variety. We find that the Matsu will hang on the tree longer than any other apple. With Coxes, you’ve got to rush and pick before the mid-October winds take them off but there is no hurry with a Matsu. It will hang firm until you have finished picking all your main eaters and cookers. Last year, this one particular Matsu which we grew on trial had eleven apples on it. They were great things. We cut one up into pieces for the women to try and they said it was juicy and nice and fine-flavoured. This year, this same tree bore 511 pounds of fruit! The weight of it carried the boughs to the grass, so that it was like an open parasol. Every apple went over the two-inch mark, which is the grade an apple has to be for market. So we are pleased with the Matsus.
Like everything else in the village, the fruit trees are being made to fit into less and less space. We have four acres of apples which Mike Poole and myself trim on the “pillar” system, pruning away so that a maiden is left with the main stem going up to about ten feet eventually. It is a bit complicated to learn. It means that instead of getting 132–6 trees on an acre of land, you can get over 300. It also means that all the apples are low enough to be picked from a short pair of steps. But we have come up against a snag. With so much pruning you get a lot of little spurs and a density of leaves, so the apples don’t ripen all that well.
All the apples go into the gas-store near Beccles when they have been gathered. They are picked straight into bulk bins and are graded when they reach the store. The store has about fifty departments, each one of which holds 200 tons of apples. It operates as a syndicate run by thirty fruit farmers. The apples can stay in the gas-store for as long as they like but once a store has been opened, the fruit has to be got out onto the market within a week. Most of it goes to Newcastle and Glasgow, and some of it may go abroad. We also send our pears to the cold store. These are Conference pears, or what we call “banana” pears, which are picked round about 16th September, which is really three weeks too early. But the store is being prepared then for all the farmers in the neighbourhood, so there is nothing for it. The farmers say, “This week it must be Conference pears; it is the only time we can manage them! “So Conference pears it is. They are often still growing and if you had to keep them in the ordinary way they would go clung. Liverish. But they’ll come out of the cold store perfectly ripe. A good Conference pear must make 1 7/8-inch grade and we don’t pick them if they are smaller than this. We round-up those which haven’t made the cold-store grade about 20th October and sell them to the merchants of Saxmundham. They are sweet little things by then. We grow seven acres of pears altogether. Plums are not stored. They are sent straight up to Covent Garden and the London barrow markets.
The year begins after the picking. We start pruning. We look at the trees and say, “This is the fruit bud, this the leaf bud,” and we wonder at the prospect of good blossom. Except with pears, for you can never tell with pears. A heavy blossom show never means a heavy crop. It seems to me that the pears thin themselves out. You’ll get a pear orchard covered in bloom and worth anybody’s time to walk down, the trees will all “set” and then, just when you expect them to bulb-up, half of the fruit buds will drop off. It is the tree sorting itself out. Unlike the Bramleys—they won’t drop off and during a great blossom year like that of 1965, we had to go round with ladders and thin them by hand. It was a terrible job. You’d find a cluster of blossoms with seven or eight apples in a heap and you have to take three or four out and throw them to the ground in mid-June. Because, always in June you get what we call the “June drop,” when plum-sized apples will drop to the grass automatically. But now we have a spray which does the thinning-out. The Coxes were sprayed by an aeroplane this year. It was done three or four days before they were picked to prevent store-rot.
During the picking season, you’ll get twenty to twenty-five young people coming to the orchards for a job. Most of them stop about a couple of days—they don’t like ladder work! They come with visions of a lovely holiday, sunbathing, transistors, larking about and a pound or two right easy at the end of each day. But they can’t use the ladders. They will lay it flat, like a thatcher on a stack, and break the tree with their weight. The straighter a ladder is put up, the better. I put the ladder up for them and show them how to pick. Just turn the apple up, put it gently into the pail and when the pail is full empty it softly into the box below by letting the apples fall across your arm. They’ll do this for about half an hour, then they’ll think that they’re not getting along nearly fast enough, and you’ll hear the apples rattling down in the orchard! They’ll be throwing them in the pail. The picking of the tree-fruit is really controlled by nine special women—our regulars, we call them. These nine will pick eighty acres of fruit, earning between £10–12 a week. They come to the orchards at various times after they have managed to get their housework done, mostly between 8.30 and 4.30 and they only stop for a flask of tea. In the old days, when people were hard up, the orchards were crowded with women at picking time. Nowadays, the women work in twos and threes, one picking from the ground, one collecting the middle apples and one picking from the top of the ladder. Each orchard is planted in six or eight rows and the women strip it row by row. It doesn’t matter how tall a tree is, there is never a single apple left on it. Although they pick fast, their hands are so gentle that you never find a bruised apple. It is a miracle.
The children come for work as soon as they have broken up for their summer holiday at the end of July. Those who are in their last year at school are often hoping for a regular job. The boys and girls are good on the gooseberries and currants. Top pickers on gooseberries can earn as much as £5 a day. The currant fields are being extended all the time and we now have thirty-six acres of them altogether. About half of these currants are being picked in a new drastic fashion, with the entire bush being cut off close to the ground and fed into a picker made out of a converted hop machine. It is an experiment which, I think, came from Kent. The bushes can be grown very close together and you can get twice as many on the same acreage. The only snag which we have come up against is that the bushes don’t grow enough the second year to warrant their being cropped do
wn again. It is a strange sort of picking. There is this great field covered with thick bushes one day, and as bare as a bit of ploughing the next.
This is a good village. It has its faults, but it is a good village. It is in the old Liberal Eye area. The election before last happened to come in the middle of the fruit-picking and the women came down from their ladders and said, “We’re going down to vote in our picking clothes! “So off we went, me driving the tractor and them all in the truck behind “rough and ready,” as they said. When we got to the school, there were the Tory ladies sitting outside with their markers. The fruit-pickers shouted, “You don’t want to worry your heads over us—we’re all Liberal!” Ninety per cent of the old village folk are staunch Liberal but the young men only talk politics round about election time. They always find fault with whoever is in power because they think they are paying too much tax out of their wages. For most people, politics is something to do with your wages. The young people go with the tide—the young tide. They feel safe then. They are very careful, watching the money. We find it with the football club. They’ll pay their dues but if we say, “Can you manage a bit more?” they at once say, “We can’t afford it.” But everybody spends without thinking on a Saturday night. All the rest of the week, you think about what you spend, but never on a Saturday night. Groups of boys will get into a car and spend pounds between six and twelve on a Saturday evening. They don’t spend much on clothes. They reckon these are just a necessity, not an extravagance. They won’t buy fancy for the fashion. The young men will work all the hours God ever made to get an extra bob or two but if you ask them what they are going to do with the money, they don’t know. Some of the boys save and save. They love money.
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