Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

  The village keeps the same pattern. You get more or less the same groups of people keeping the same ideas. They don’t mean to get out of their ruts. But it is still very lively here and outsiders don’t realize just how much goes on. There is the tennis club, the youth club, the darts club—a club for everybody. I belong to the football club. It was started in the bad times before the last war when the boys couldn’t even afford goal-posts and had to use sticks pulled out of the hedge. Then somebody lent them a field. Then they got a committee. Then the war came and everything had to be stored in a barn, then we had to begin all over again. I was fifteen then and I have played ever since. I feel old amongst all these lads, but there, they’ll be old too one day. We have two teams and no age limit. Each member pays 10s. a year and we belong to the Third Division of the Ipswich and District League. You have to start at the bottom, you see. We play on a field near the river which has a natural rise and which is under the shelter of a hill. It has been a meadow for years and years and the grass is smooth as well as tough—real meadow grass which the cattle have put into good heart. Our first field was dreadfully muddy. We mole-drained it, we raised the turf with forks, we sprinkled the pitch with sawdust, but we always came off it drenched. This meadow is beautiful. We have thirty players, twenty-two for the first and second teams and a few reserves. We are insured and if any player gets hurt he gets £3 a week. We had a boy who broke his leg and who was off work for seven weeks, so the football money came in handy. The club provides the balls and shirts, but each boy buys his own boots, socks and shorts. We think we did very well last season. We bought a new dressing-room for £60 and still had £70 in hand! But there are always other things. A new set of shirts costs £12, nets £16, a ball £5, a marker £15 and our annual insurance premium £30, so you see why we have to get money for our club. We wouldn’t be able to manage without the women. They are mainly the players’ wives and girlfriends. They have been brought up with the notion that men have to play football. They make tea at half-time; they wash the shirts and shorts. You are expected to be dazzling clean when you begin a match. We have now got into the Second Division and with good luck we should soon be in the First. The talk is football, football, and only the summer can stop the talk.

  Three women sit in a little hut at every match. They have a teapot, twenty-five beakers and a primus stove. “Who won?” they say.

  Michael Poole · aged thirty-seven · orchard worker

  Michael is one of Akenfield’s some twenty or so bachelors, a good half of which share his age group. They are simply waiting for a time which suits them to marry but he waits in vain for any opportunity which will take him from his parents’ hearth. There are scarcely any words left to describe him; the world has become a much kinder place where his sort is concerned. “He is simple . . .” people will say, putting a wealth of meaning into the description to make sure that it implies something quite unalarming. Simple is exactly what he is not. He is illiterate and it is this which cuts him off. He cannot read or write a single letter. “He couldn’t learn,” it is explained. While the others thundered their way through the multiplication tables, collects, Alfred Noyes’s Highwayman and history dates, Michael made rag rugs. He worked with incredible speed and ingenuity, translating bundles of old coats, skirts and frocks into cosy oblongs to lay along the side of beds, warm shaggy islands in the icy lino seas. The women brought the rags and the school provided the time. Nobody seemed to realize that a child who could work so hard and who could make such good designs might have been able to learn if learning had been a less rigid thing.

  He is sharp-featured and fair. There is no rest in the “simple” face, it has the alertness of a forest creature, eyes seizing at every object. Michael must outdo everybody in work, carry heavier loads, bicycle more miles to a casual job, leave everything with a neatness so devastating that it is almost showy. He saves hard and has hundreds of pounds. He actually left the village school with a bank account of £8—his rug earnings. He drinks a lot of beer and will “talk with anyone who’ll talk to me.” On Sunday nights he sits right at the back of the church, his yellow hair thick as one of his own rugs, his nervous face ablaze. After church the congregation queues up to persuade him to cut hedges, scythe orchards, empty cess-pits, saw wood, cart manure, dig. He takes every job on. He never refuses. It could be the pressure of so much work which makes him do it with a kind of franticness too fast, too earnestly. Unlike most countrymen, it is not pleasant to watch him work, he is all too obviously compensating. He is a discreet gossip and the big news from the village is handed on in one or two pithy phrases with a look which says, “Make what you can of that.”

  * * *

  I used to get up of a morning. I used to take two pails. I used to climb Scarlett Hill to the pump. I used to carry the water home. I used to find the house all dark, all sleeping. I used to clank the pails and shout, “Come you together now! Let’s be having you!” and my dad would jump out of bed bang! I used to walk back to Scarlett Hill, to old Mackay’s house. I used to hang around his door and then go in and watch him cut fat bacon and slip it in the pan. Then eggs. I used to say, “Is that your breakfast then, Mr. Mackay?” and he’d say, “That is.” He’d slip a bit more into the pan—“For the dog,” he’d say. “What dog, Mr. Mackay?”—“That damn young puppy,” he’d say. I used to take a chair. After breakfast I used to say, “It’s nice for you to have a mite of company like, Mr. Mackay.” And he’d say, “Oh?” I used to be ten then.

  I went to work on the fruit when I was fourteen. I never minded it. I got my money and that was the main thing. I grew, my money grew. It was nice to have it.

  Summer was best. You’d get the women come and give you a look. You’d torment them and they’d torment you. There used to be a regular procession of old girls who’d bike up from Framlingham for the picking. When I was sixteen, one of these old girls came up to me in the orchard and said, “Let me see your watch.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Aren’t you going to let me see your watch then?”

  I said nothing. Anyway, she could see my watch; it was lying on my waistcoat under the apple tree.

  “I shall take it . . .” she says.

  “Take it then.”

  “I reckon you want me to take it?”

  “I can see you’re bent on it,” I said, “so you may as well.”

  So she took it, for devilry. It was on a chain and she hung it round her fat neck the whole live-long afternoon. I wouldn’t let her see it worried me. She’d walk by and shout, “Come and get it!”

  I said nothing. She brought it to me about five, before she set off home. She put it over my head like a necklace and said, “There you are, you young bugger.”

  I wouldn’t speak to her.

  The next morning, along she comes, straight to where I’m about to start. Her arms were stuck out full length and she was all smiles. She got her mouth on my face and, my God, she must have thought it was her breakfast, or something.

  I pushed at her. I said, “Don’t! Look out, he’s coming!”—He was, too. Old Fletcher the foreman. She broke away but back she arrived later when I was lying on the scythings, eating my bait. It was long grass all around.

  “Don’t fret,” says she.

  I said nothing.

  “The coast is clear,” she says, and comes down on me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t see nothing but grass. There was such a rocking. I couldn’t tell whether I was babe or man.

  At tea-time the women went rushing home with their aprons full of apples—shrieking, you can be sure. They shruck a bit more when they saw me and a couple of them rang their bike bells. My old woman shouted, “Don’t torment him! He’s like his old watch—not so bad when he’s wound up!” Laugh! You should have heard them!

  It was my first time.

  Christ, that was a summer and no mistake.

  13. FOUR LADIES

  Go and ask Robin to bring the girls over

  To Sweetwater, said my A
unt; and that was why

  It was like a dream of ladies sweeping by

  The willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass, and the river.

  —JOHN CROWE RANSOM, Vision by Sweetwater

  Marjorie Jope · aged seventy-nine · retired district nurse

  Nurse Jope is mother-confessor to the village, a person of absolute trust and fidelity. There is no conscious sense of vocation about her and the idea of doing good is quite obviously unknown to her. She is unsentimental yet at the same time un-matter of fact: one instinctively realizes that a great part of her genius or triumphant personality—call it what one will—lies in her simple belief that each individual is different and that so much difference as a community of 300 souls is likely to display in a working life of forty years, such as she has experienced, must dispel most of the convenient conclusions. For all this time she has seen Akenfield naked in birth, naked in death and, most privately and multitudinously between-whiles, bare and vulnerable in its human despair. The amazing thing is that for all these years it was not only Akenfield which rested in her care, but eight other villages also. She was paid at the beginning a basic salary of £2 a week and, although this sum was haphazardly supplemented by gifts from better-off people, most of the cash she had left over from household and professional expenses went on the purchasing of extra medical supplies. She neither condemns nor feels any nostalgia for Akenfield between the wars. As for the wistful paternalism revealed in programmes like Doctor Finlay’s Casebook and talk of old-style village self-help and charity, mention of such things causes her to smile and shake her head the merest fraction. “Certainly people were more neighbourly then. They went in and out of each other’s houses to help with what was needed, and thought themselves well-paid with a cup of tea, yet [a small smile at the paradox] it wasn’t better than now. It was worse, much, much worse.”

  She is a neat, brown-skinned woman with fine eyes. She lives in one of the old farmsteads now called cottages and possesses a cheerful new car which she uses to transport “anyone who has to go anywhere.” Children picnic in her orchard. They obey her with a special gravity—“Yes, Nurse: no, Nurse . . .”

  * * *

  I started in 1925 with Akenfield and three other villages and then, in two-three months, some more villages came under my care until I had nine altogether. I was a novelty, I can tell you. None of these places had had a nurse before; the births and deaths were attended by secretive old women, just as in the olden days. I was appointed by the local nursing association which was affiliated to the East Suffolk Nursing Association. I had a little car. There were no cars then, so you can imagine how important I looked! My salary was £2 a week and at first my father had to help me pay my lodgings. I had to pay all my own expenses but soon the villages had to raise my salary. This was done by individual people paying the Nursing Association 4s. a year. Well-off people paid more. My first lodgings were with an old lady who disapproved if I went out earlier than nine in the morning or got back later than four in the afternoon. I changed lodgings a few times because nobody understood that I had to be free to go out and come in at all hours. The vicar had to be severe with them. His name was Mr. Paternoster and the verger’s name was Creed. It sounds funny but it was a fact. Anyway, the vicar said, “We’ve got a nurse now and we’re not going to let her go,” and then he searched around and eventually found me a kind of hut. I soon made it into a house and then I was independent. The relief! I paid rent for it and I was always on duty in it, although officially I had Thursday afternoons off. I had the telephone and that was a novelty too. Most ordinary people didn’t use the phone: they walked or biked miles and miles with news of accidents, maternity cases, troubles of all sorts. What with the phone and people calling at all hours, it was non-stop. I often wonder how I did it. But I was young and the young find all things possible.

  There was a great difference inside the cottages in those days. One had to explain every single thing. The most simple instructions had to be said twice over. Living conditions were very, very poor. Akenfield was an agricultural labourers’ village. The only “people” here were the Cretinghams. They were the only “people,” you understand. So everything fell on me. I was school nurse, too, and once or twice a year, when the school doctor came round, I had to assist him examine the children. I knew them all so well they could have been my own children. I knew their homes and in most cases I had delivered them. There were so many dirty children in those days, dirty hair, dirty feet, impetigo. It was thought a disgrace to have a dirty head, but lots did. There’s nothing like that now. Children have never been as beautiful as they are now. There were quite a lot of “home” children in the village in those days—more than twenty, perhaps. They came from Dr. Barnardo’s and from the Church of England Children’s Home. They were all boys—nobody wanted girls. They came sometimes when they were only a few weeks old but they were rarely adopted in the full legal sense, perhaps because the foster-parents would lose the home-allowance if they were. Two of these boys became a schoolmaster and a Battle of Britain pilot and both tried to find out who they really were, but they never did. A lot of the Barnardo boys were sent to Australia when they were fourteen and new ones came in their place. Their foster-parents didn’t seem to turn a hair when the replacement happened; it always amazed me.

  The old people were not taken care of. This is another thing which people like to think now, that grandfathers and grandmothers had an honoured place in the cottage. In fact, when they got old they were just neglected, pushed away into corners. I even found them in cupboards! Even in fairly clean and respectable houses you often found an old man or woman shoved out of sight in a dark niche. People were most suspicious at first when I called. There was no such thing as a welcome, you had to make your own way. They didn’t want anybody outside to know their business. I had to ask questions, especially about TB. They hated that. I had to collect long lists of facts about them and they were so unwilling that it often took me days. I had to feel my way, exchanging trust for trust. They had their secrets, like all families, but I had to know some of them! There were families in Akenfield who never told anyone anything. It was—their entire life, you know—all bolted up behind the back door. Not many people were taken away to the infirmaries. They were born at home and they died at home. I now know so much about them all—things nobody else could ever know. In time I heard everything. They told me things they could not tell each other. I knew them body and mind. None of them, neither the best nor the worst, were so very different to each other, if they did but know it. They liked to imagine they were, of course. I suppose we all do. Five years after I arrived in Akenfield it got so that I could walk in nearly every house. Sometimes they all looked so strong and well that I wondered why I had been sent for, then the worry would come spilling out. It was usually about the relations. Practically every family was related. It is the same with myself, except I don’t know my own cousins. So many village marriages used to be cousin marriages. It is different now because the young men drive about all over the place and find girls. Nobody moved a yard in the old days.

  People died from much the same things as they do now, except there was more cancer then, unless they whip the cancer patients off to Ipswich and one doesn’t hear of it. If they thought they had cancer in the old days they would keep quiet about it. They put up with it in secret for as long as they could. Things were more or less hidden—all life was hidden—and then, of course, it was difficult to move the doctors. They didn’t bother too much. Time after time I would try and get a doctor to a bad case in the village but most times he never came. He would come when he thought he would. Sick people were on parish relief but the doctors ran their own medical clubs. If people didn’t pay into the club, then they didn’t get a doctor. A doctor could not be reported for not coming, although I did report a doctor once. It was for refusing to believe that a woman had TB and telling her to get up. She got up and she collapsed. But then there was Dr. Denny who would come out any time of the day or
night. He was most unusual. There were quite a few country doctors in the neighbourhood but none of them did this. They were important folk then and the villagers were a bit nervous of them. But Dr. Denny was different. Even if it was somebody else’s case, he’d come. As for the old family doctor—he was for the old families, if you know what I mean.

  People think of me as the person who is present at the beginning of their lives but in most cases I have been present at the end of them too. I used to stay up one night or several nights when they were passing. Some talked of God, but very, very few. Even the people who had been brought up in chapel or church rarely talked of God as they died. It is a fact. What can you make of it? I was with them as they passed. Not much talk of God at the last.

  Quite a lot of old people spent their last weeks alone. Their absence of family was only noticed at this time. I remember a clean, respectable old man who lived in a hut on the Framlingham Road. His name was Dixon and the name of his hut was “Travel On.” He had not worked in Akenfield but had arrived there, presumably after he had retired. Some people said he had been a sailor. He certainly looked clean like a sailor. Then people began to say, where was he? Where had he got to? So the vicar went to “Travel On” and, oh dear! What a sight. Apparently Mr. Dixon had been terribly ill and had just laid in his hut. Worse, he had tried to light his oil-stove to keep warm and had knocked it over and burnt himself. The vicar had walked up after midday Communion on Sunday, just to say hello, as he thought. Instead of which he spent all the afternoon cleaning Mr. Dixon and scrubbing “Travel On” out. He was so convinced that it was a case of village neglect that he prayed about it during the evening service, but we later discovered that Mr. Dixon had been attended by his own doctor, who, seeing he couldn’t last much longer, had simply shut the door on him. There were plenty of things like that. I often found awful, dreadful things. The village wasn’t shocked. They expected people “to go a bit behind at the end.”