Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

  I’ve got a boar. I haven’t been too choosey about him because I’m not fattening. A good boar is very expensive—about £90. Mine was cheap—he cost me £37. He’s a pretty good boy.

  I like the work so much. I have to do it all. So I wouldn’t step the sows up any more. I feel that the more you get the less well you can do the work. So many people say, “Ah, we’ve done very well, we’ve made so many pounds profit, so look what would happen if we got 100 pigs! We would be home and dry.” But it doesn’t work out like this, because you either have to pay wages or not be able to give so many pigs the same attention which you can give a few.

  I breed Essex pigs, which are very good mothers. They produce a blue pig which sells pretty well and is very hardy. I do all the buying and selling myself, and have this sense of freedom. It is wonderful. Freedom, if you would like to know about it, is getting up at 6.30 every morning, having a wash and breakfast and being outside by seven to start feeding. I feed all the pregnant sows on the meadow by throwing sow-cake down on the grass. I’m very lucky, I’ve got this little stream running through my land, so I water from it. After feeding and watering, I start cleaning out. I do it twice a day. The old traditional method was to clean out once a week but it is much simpler to do a bit each day and work right through. Then I water everybody and go home to eat a proper breakfast. After breakfast, I might go to market at Campsey Ash with the pigs which are fit to sell. I like to watch them being sold. If they don’t make the right price, back they come! I used to have a man cart for me but now I take them in a little pick-up which I managed to buy. I’m not very fond of people who live by carting animals around, they tend to knock them about and pigs especially look very bad when they are bruised.

  The market is full of dealers forming a ring. They’re whispering at the tops of their voices, as you might say. It’s “bid for this” and “don’t bid for them.” But if there happens to be a scarcity they will bid for anything. They go mad for pigs. I like to introduce a smart pig right off the teat at eight weeks. You can actually take a pig off at three weeks, but I’m not very fond of this practice. You get five litters in two years with three-week weanings—two and a half litters against two of the eight-week method. But it is a very expensive system because you have to buy a special milk substitute feed for them which works out at £70 a ton. The best way I know is the outdoor weaning system, with your pigs out on grass in little bale shelters. You build up disease if you keep pigs in the same building year in, year out.

  I have dinner at twelve, do all kinds of jobs until half-past four, then it’s feeding again. I have tea at six and at eleven, just before I tuck in myself, I have a walk round to see if everybody is cosy. Pigs are funny animals and like a sense of being cared for.

  It’s a long day but I don’t mind. I’ve never had a holiday since I left school. I have been out of the county now and then but I always get back the same day in time to feed. I honestly don’t mind. I think that once you’ve started this animal business, you’ve started a way of life within yourself. I couldn’t live without a pig, which might seem a funny statement to you. I work every Sunday. It seems worse when you’re talking about it than when you’re doing it. East Anglia is now the pig area and the chief thing about myself is that I tend not to join in the huge Suffolk pig world. I may see it all differently later on. Maybe.

  It is a very precarious business. Pigs are a difficult stock to control. They don’t stay steady, they waver from surplus to shortage. What happens is that, in February, the Government assesses what the nation’s pig requirements will be for the next year and guarantee what they call the “middle band.” The middle band consists of between six and eight million pigs. It has a guaranteed price. This year it was 45s. 5d. a score. If production falls under this band, the Government steps up the guarantee to encourage production; anything over, and the price just drops off. This is how it is supposed to work, but it doesn’t unfortunately. There will be pig surpluses at the end of 1968—even if foot-and-mouth really hits us. At the moment about one pig in 200 is being slaughtered. It is nothing! One gilt will produce twenty pigs a year. You could, if you wished to, keep the ten or so gilts out of this twenty and breed them—and so on. I don’t belong to any of the groups like Porcofram. I work alone and sell on the open market. I have to do this, it is the way I am. I am all right now but when the surplus time comes I shall get hit. The price on the open market will sink; I will know all too well that it would have paid me to be in the group.

  Walls have really spoilt the pig market round here. When they first introduced their pig scheme they said, “Right! produce a pig for us as fat as it is long!” They weren’t interested in grading. They wanted a big pig of between 250–300 pounds—a heavy hog, a cutting pig. The legs of this pig went into hams, the rest into sausages and pies, and the fat into ice-cream. Well, eventually they got so much of this pig fat stored away into the hangers and Nissen huts of an aerodrome that they said, “Right! We’ve got enough.” And so they packed their big pig scheme up—and a lot of pig-farmers came unstuck.

  I am a member of the Young Farmers’ Club. It is not a thriving club. A lot of these Y.F.C.s lack something, I don’t know what exactly. They’re made up of sixty per cent farmers’ sons, thirty per cent young men from the service industries and a sprinkling of farm-workers’ children. The service industry people are reps or officials. The reps join because it’s the policy of the feeding stuffs and fertilizer firms to establish friendships between their young representatives and the boys who are soon going to own or manage farms. I joined to get to know people. No, this isn’t exactly true; I joined to get an education. That was the real reason. We go on farm walks and that sort of thing. But the fact is that these clubs offer the working man’s son very little. They cater for boys with £1,000 a year and a sports car. The clubs are rather snobbish and even if you don’t care about snobbery you can’t help seeing it. It is the bugbear of the clubs, spoiling everything. To tell you the truth, I feel completely out of it. Some of the members simply don’t want to associate with you. You are not in their class, they think. They have been to Framlingham or Woodbridge School. Or even to Felstead. They either won’t or can’t conceal that they are “different.” I tolerate all this simply because of the educational side of it but I have learnt that if you don’t have certain kinds of clothes, a car like theirs and spare money, then you don’t just belong—even if you’re a member! All the clubs have this atmosphere. I keep away from the strictly social activities and only attend the walks and talks. Very few girls come to the clubs—at this particular branch, anyway. I often wish that I had joined the Ipswich branch. The atmosphere could be better there. It is so hard to get accepted. I never understood anything about this until I joined the club. I don’t want to “get in,” as they say; I just want to go and be ordinary. I am the only member of this club who isn’t a farmer’s son—my father is a farm-worker—or a rep. The gentlemen-farmers’ sons are quite different. For instance, they arrive in sloppy jumpers and jeans when everybody else wears Simpson’s hacking jackets. These boys haven’t a clue what it is all about and obviously can’t tell me from the rest. But Suffolk isn’t really a snobbish place. I wouldn’t like you to think that.

  The Agricultural Training Centre is a far better meeting place than any Y.F.C. I belong to the Stockman’s Club there—what a difference in the atmosphere! It is a wonderful club, really useful. It costs 5s. a year to join—and 25s. a year to belong to the Y.F.C.

  Working on my own tends to cut me off from people. I am involved in the little circle around me but, so far, I have never managed to make a successful move out of this circle. Even with a car.

  I do quite a bit of reading. I have read a novel sometimes but most of my reading is connected with pigs. It would do me good to broaden my outlook, I suppose. The trouble with my life is that, except for Mr. Austin, nobody has ever talked to me about anything except farming. I watch television but if you look back on television—it is the saddest thing
. I like the News. And documentary programmes, like that old film about the Russian Revolution.

  We often have discussions at the Y.F.C. but the members, although they are not much more than boys, have already learned to shut their eyes to what is going on in the world. They have firm opinions about everything. They can’t debate, they make statements such as “The Americans are doing a good job in Vietnam, stopping Communism.” Full stop. What is the point of arguing? they seem to say. When I told my father he said, “Funf has spoken”—it is an old wartime joke. I told the Y.F.C. that the Vietnamese were really just farmers in revolution, but nobody spoke—except to say that the Americans are doing a good job, etc. I am astonished that they are able to hold such strong, solid opinions about things which they can’t possibly know a thing about. A lot of them are the sons and grandsons of self-made men who worked very hard until the war made them rich.

  I am a member of N.U.A.W. I think it is a very bad thing when young men don’t join the Agricultural Union. Everybody connected with modern farming should be united in this way. The pity is that the young men are affected by the “beaten” men. But the beaten men are all so old now—over fifty, so why worry what they say? You take George Annerley, he has the fear on him still. Farmer-fear—it went all through Suffolk. George thinks that he is betraying his farmer if he joins the Union, and I know plenty like him, men who would sooner admit to anything than that they were socialists. Catch them putting an election poster in their cottage window! The young men are absolutely different. They speak their minds. The boys who go to the Training Centre aren’t fools; they know that they are able to do specialist work on the farms and that a good worker isn’t going to be sacked because of his politics. A good worker can get a farming job in a day. A lot of us think outside all the newspaper talk and believe in the Labour Party—not just the Prime Minister, but in the socialist movement. But I haven’t very strong political feelings myself and I am not an outright socialist. I just want to go forward and to stop this everlasting looking back.

  I am recruiting for the Union. I got six members in one week! All from one farm, and not one of them had thought about joining before. One of the older chaps said that he couldn’t see what good the Union did because it wasn’t getting us the money up. But how I look at it is this, unless there is a complete and intelligent new support for the Union, how can you expect it to work? Too many of the members do nothing but look back into the past. The past is finished. Over. Whatever happens, it will never be like that again. These old farm men make you feel so damned miserable. Be what you are, say what you have to say. Stop staring over your shoulder. Laugh at old Sammy Eden. Do you know what happened on his farm during the election before last? All his men stuck red rosettes on the tractors and things and drove around all day before he spotted them. That night he sacked the whole bunch—and then three days later he had to re-employ them all again because he knew he’d got the best men in the whole neighbourhood.

  I don’t feel all that personally attached to Suffolk. I often fancy Scotland. I dream of Scotland. I think it would suit me. It was the Scottish farmers who came down here before the war and worked harder than the Suffolk men, and began to put new life into the place. A lot of these men farmed on the rock. Think of farming on the rock and then drawing a plough through this rich earth! How surprised they must have been. But I don’t think a lot about the future. I find life quite enjoyable. What I would like would be to farm like the Barber brothers. There are four of them and they’ve got about sixty acres each. They aren’t mechanized but they are wonderful farmers. They follow the Norfolk four-course plan of wheat, barley, beans and roots. Mind you, they live virtually hand-to-mouth, as you might say, yet comfortable. Their fields are beautifully clean. Everything is traditional, but without the struggle and misery. I would love a little traditional farm, plenty of muck, plenty of grass. I would go right in and say, “For the first two or three years I shall rob this land and get a return.” When I talk of “robbing,” I mean that where there’s plenty of grass and muck there will also be plenty of phosphate and potash in the soil. My fertilizers would be cut right down. I could rob and get away with a good start, and probably take off three crops of wheat before I had to start spending real money.

  East Anglian country people work very hard. The young men will do anything to make a start. The working-class village boy gets on because he won’t mind what he does or how long he does it to get a start. A lot of boys start with a partnership. When he has proved that he can make a bit of money, another young man will go in with him and the pair of them won’t marry or spend a penny for several years. They live very carefully. They will sell beansticks to the gardens on the Ipswich estates. They don’t have such a strong sense of missing things as the town boys have. Not many country boys round here have record-players, so pop music doesn’t “take” in the same way as it does in London. The boys will listen to the music on the radio but they won’t buy records. And most of them won’t buy the fashions because one of the things about a village is that you never give anyone anything to talk about if you can help it. That is why I admire Hughie. Do you know Hughie? Hair like a girl and trousers so tight you wonder he can breathe. What a nerve he’s got! The old women clack about him and the men whistle. But he takes no notice at all. But why shouldn’t he do as he likes?

  I haven’t got a girl-friend. Plenty of time. And I’m not promiscuous either—what a word! Sometimes I go to the dances in Ipswich but it is very, very hard to get a partner. The girls come with their boy-friends and won’t dance with anybody else. The boys are mostly mods. Not many boys from the village go to these dances. I have also been to the Saturday-night dances at Framlingham but it seems virtually impossible to meet a girl in this way. The village girls like to get married very young but the boys don’t. Many of the boys don’t want to marry until they are about thirty, although plenty of them have to long before then. I have a friend whose girl made all the running before they were wed, now he has to beg for it. I sometimes get lonely for girls.

  I have been to London three times but have always returned the same day. I have never slept there. It means getting up very early in the morning, getting all the work done in advance, having a bath, getting there—real drudgery! But it is only once a year. I go to the Smithfield Show. But I think I will try and take a proper holiday this year. You might say that I have had an awful warning! It was like this. A chap I know down the lane, a very hard-working chap who started up like me, only twenty or more years ago, has just had to sell half his farm. It seems that he was so busy working, saving, making sacrifices, that he forgot how to bargain. So here he was, buying his clothes from the second-hand shop in Ipswich, getting streaky bacon ends from Sainsbury’s at twopence a pound, never having a day off and working like a black. This was how he got on when he started but now that he’s getting old—forty-five or more—he has become lackadaisical in the strangest way. You would think that he was working for somebody else instead of himself. You could say, “This hay is £20 a ton”—and although it might be the biggest rubbish, he’d buy it! Everybody was having him on. Things began to fall down on his 120-acre farm. Then there was a creditors’ meeting. It was a wonderful thing for him. He saw the light. He said to me after last harvest, “Fenner the contractor tried to charge me 7d. a bale for this baling hay. A bit dear, ain’t it? I said. I cut him down and got it for 5d.” Now the deed of agreement has been drawn up, this small farmer has become a saved man. He’s paying cash for everything. He’s a saved man. Redeemed by the auditors! So perhaps I shall get to Scotland for a week this summer—let my brother look after the pigs. I mustn’t get like old Charlie. I am getting on. I shall be twenty-two on Valentine’s Day.

  But I am forgetting, I do quite a lot of things. I shoot. Commotion—and not just for the birds. I’ve got these four acres and if I see a pheasant on them, I might shoot him. But no sooner than the gun is heard there is somebody rushing round, wanting to know this, wanting to know that. It is not
hing to do with them. They are my fields, it is my gun. I have a licence for it. The pheasant is the god, you see. People like me aren’t supposed to pot at the god. But I do—I have just done so. With any luck I am just picking him up when this face appears over the hedge. “I thought I heard a shot,” says this man. He looks as if he could burst or faint or something. He wants to shout, “Sacrilege! sacrilege!”

  There is something else I do—silversmithing. I learnt it at evening classes. I have made a beer-mug and a chalice.

  Bruce Buckley · aged seventeen · forge apprentice Thomas Dix · aged seventeen · farm-worker

  Bruce and Thomas (Tompo) are the classic mates of the “Til-death-do-us-part” kind and are at present at the zenith of the bosom-pal stage. Time, with its steadying proprieties, is the only thing which will prevent them colliding joyously like a couple of ponies whenever they meet. Mrs. Sullivan pushed them into the same double desk on their first day at school when they were five and told them to look after each other. An arranged mateship which works has followed. At eleven, they were both pulled out of a hole in the ice, drowned to all accounts. At thirteen they ran away to hitch-hike. Where? That was the problem. So after two days of it they walked home. These two events seem to have made them staid, cautious and quite gratuitously contented.

  Bruce is thin and fair. His long, pale neck grows out of his leather jacket like an iris stylosa stem out of glossy damp, dark mould. He is watchful, sharp. He thinks quite a bit of himself but his friend manages to rub the edge off the worst of Bruce’s conceit without his realizing it. Tompo, in fact, makes Bruce more likeable than he would be if left on his own.