Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

  * * *

  I have been ploughing continuously since last June. All the time. Now it is February and I haven’t stopped. I have ploughed every day, Sundays too, for eight months. But it is nearly finished now. There will be a break until after the harvest, then, as soon as a field is cleared, I’ll be on it. There are about 400 acres of corn-land and I plough it all. All the fields are different. They have their names and they feel to be different places. It is how it should be. I wouldn’t like the village to become a Tannington where the hedges have gone and the ploughman doesn’t know where he is. A well-kept hedge is a good sight and tells you where you are. The hedges belong to the village. You get so used to seeing them standing there—they are like buildings and you miss them when they are knocked down. Some hedges are important and when they go you feel as bad as if a wood had been taken away. I think that there are certain hedges which the farmers shouldn’t touch without asking the people—although I can’t see this happening.

  I’m contented here. I haven’t got the education for a farm manager’s job and I wouldn’t like it even if I had. All the same, as things are today you really do want some education whatever you do. But if you haven’t got it you must learn contentment. Without education you can pick up plenty of practical experience on the farm, but you’ll never grasp the new theory or understand the money. If I had gone to the agricultural college it would all have been different, no doubt. I started off working with the cows when I first left school. I didn’t like this. I hoped I was going to be a keeper, you see. Ever since I was a boy I wanted to be a keeper but it never happened. “You won’t like it,” they said. “It is seven days a week and a young lad likes his week-ends off.” I don’t know why they said this. They knew I had no Sundays, so to speak. I was in working clothes and round the woods of a Sunday, just as of an ordinary day, so I might just as well have been paid for it. You see, keeping is the job for a man who has an eye to nature. There will be something different to look at every day and you’ll have never seen it all. But there is no keeper in the village now. The last keeper had the double job of forester and keeper. He had to plant trees when he wasn’t feeding pheasants. Whether you can really do both these jobs together, I don’t know. There wouldn’t be much time to think if you did. You’d have to be two men, which one man can’t be if he’s to stay honest. But there you are, that’s modern demands for you! All the same, keeping would have suited me wonderfully.

  I started ploughing, with a reversible plough, when I was eighteen. Somebody took me up to Scarlett Hill and said, “This handle turns this over, this does something else—and away you go!” I kept straight as I could but I don’t trouble so much these days. I don’t know why. Because of the plough I suppose. With the old plough you had to have everything marked out and the furrows had to be kept straight if you wanted to finish up anywhere at all. The old men criticize. “That wouldn’t have done,” they say. “You’d have had to have made a better job of it than that when I was a boy—God’s truth, you would!” But they forget that they had the labour to do these fine things. There is double the arable in the village and few men wanting to stay and work it, so fancy fine ways aren’t needed. The old men will tell you what an interest they took in their tasks—you could call this their main argument. They were brought up on quality work. Now it is quantity work—you’ve got to cover the ground. I can plough up two acres of the clay land in a day, and more on a light field.

  I am a man on my own. I am not interfered with much. I am on the plough and that is where I keep. I am alone nearly all my work time but I can’t say that I feel lonely. Not ever, not at all. People say, “There’s Derek, by himself up on that great old field, turning round, going back . . . he’s lonely. He must be lonely!” Not at all—and what is “lonely”? I am watching the whole time, you see. I might have more than a hundred birds in my wake. It is surprisingly interesting. The gulls are with me. But now and then it’s nice to see a face and have a chat. Somebody will come past and speak, and that is good. It makes a break. After all, I’m a man and not a bird! But, honestly, if I knew that I was lonely, I’d pack it up tomorrow.

  I think my wife feels she misses something by being in a remote village like this. She used to live in Leiston before we were married and she still misses being able to shut the front door and walk along to the shops and such-like. She says that going to the village shop isn’t shopping. She didn’t know anybody when she came here and she still misses her friends. But she is settling down. We have a car so she isn’t stranded. I hope she is happy here. I like my work and I like the open air. I couldn’t be put to work inside. Although I knew a man from this village who went to work in an Ipswich factory after being a gardener here until he was forty-five. He settled down easily. He put his mind to it, you see. I couldn’t put my mind to it.

  There was a junior branch of the Suffolk Naturalists when I was at the school—this is how I began to take an interest in birds. About fifteen boys joined but the club is disbanded now. They learned a few things but probably the only thing they still keep up is a spot of fishing—if you can call that natural history. As for wild birds, they might pick you out a sparrow or a swallow, but other than this they won’t know much. I may be wrong. It is difficult for me to explain to you what all these living creatures mean to me. I can’t really say that I study them although I write down anything unusual that I happen to see. It is just that I seem to know where they all live and what they do. The pesticides are having a nasty effect. I mean a bird can adapt itself to most things but it can’t adapt itself to poison. Dressed corn is poisoned corn. It must kill. The kestrels are getting scarce. There were always several pairs in the air here when I was a boy. You could always look up and see them hovering about on the wind then. Now you’ll be lucky if you see as many as three pairs on the entire estate. Linnets, too, used to be a common sight but I don’t recall seeing a linnet for many a year. It is a seed-eater, so you can imagine what has happened to it. The wrens got very scarce after the hard winter [1962–3] but they’re recovering. And the hard winter took the kingfishers off the pond, where I’d seen them for six years. They had a nest where the old boathouse used to be—where the stream runs away from the pond and down towards the bottom pasture. I saw one flash there last summer while I was fishing pike. There are new birds up on the old aerodrome—waders and redshanks. They feed in the shallows where they have pulled the concrete runways up. We have had a flock of waxwings on the big contoneaster up at the Big House, and there are always the martins. Each house seems to have so many people in it and so many martins. You must never bang their mud nests down or make them unwelcome, it is very unlucky. It is thought poor manners to destroy a martin’s nest while he is abroad.

  A lot of my friends have left the village. Most of the old gang. I am about the only one still here. They’ve all got jobs away. They got married and their wives took them away. Kelsale, Leiston, Ipswich, they’ve all gone away.

  I don’t go to the pub. I haven’t been inside the door for six years. It is something you’ve got to like doing—to go in two or three times a week—I’d have no interest in that. But the young chaps who work with me would sooner go there than anywhere else. I watch television with my wife. I like travellers’ tales abroad. The tribes of people faraway.

  15. THE LAW

  Figures here prove nothing.

  One step took him through the roaring waterfall

  That closed like a bead-curtain, left him alone with the writhing

  Of what he loved or hated.

  His hands leapt out: they took vengeance for all

  Denials and soft answers. There was one who said

  Long since, “rough play will end in tears.” There was Cain

  In the picture-book.

  C. DAY LEWIS, Sex-Crime

  Candlemas Day, 1871.

  Sarah Whitney told me that Mrs. Jones, the jockey’s wife at the corner, had a fortnight ago left some linen drying out on the churchyard hedge all night having f
orgotten to take it in. By morning . . . two pairs of drawers and a “shimmy” had been stolen . . .

  Kilvert’s Diary

  Mrs. Christian Annersley · aged fifty-five · magistrate and Chairman of the Bench

  I think that what I actually enjoy about the Bench is that it is simply endlessly interesting. How people live, how people behave, how they think—and all at this vulnerable, naked moment in their existence. I often ask myself if I have a sense of power at this moment—does it give me this? I think it probably does. I think I am probably better than other people—then I know I’m not! (Laughs) I see how fond I am of people. Good people in a muddle, bad people and just poor low people who never have an earthly. I like my fellow-magistrates very much and we think of ourselves as a nice team who are passionately interested in the same things. We’ve always been a very soft Bench. In fact, people who have been had up in other areas often ask to come up before our Bench. I suppose we would be called upper class—in fact, we could hardly be called anything else. But apart from this our actual Bench status is certainly not greater than it used to be when I first sat twenty-five years ago. People were more frightened of the magistrates than they are now, when it is realized that the magistrate is a conscientious person and not just a stick-wagger. And there is no doubt that today’s magistrate is a far better person than his predecessor. He goes to conferences, he goes to prisons, reads the law and does try to find out. Whereas before it was simply Colonel Bloggs who prided himself on being just an ordinary decent chap, and all that this implies. Rigidity. Ignorance. If I am going to send a country boy to an approved school I want to know what the school is like. I visit prisons and study after-care. So do we all. It is something of a status symbol among modern magistrates to have visited a great many institutions.

  Our court covers four market towns and their surrounding areas. There are seven magistrates but we never sit more than five at a time. I have been Chairman for the past three years. We elect our own Chairman every three years, also our Deputy and the Chairman of the Juvenile Bench. Then there is the Licensing Committee; no magistrate who is in the brewery trade can sit on this. As I have said, we have always been upper class, which I think is a bad mistake. We did have a working-class magistrate years ago and he was always right. It was fascinating. We’d have this great strapping fellow come up, a horse-coper or something, and we’d all agree to fine him so much, when our working-class friend would add another £10. Then out would come a huge wadge of notes, fingers would be licked and ten of them would be peeled off. He always understood who could pay, who should be made to pay and how much. In those days we were all people with special sympathies. My aunt, for instance, was always sympathetic with people had up for speeding. She identified with them, you see. We all knew she drove twice as fast herself. Then this working-class magistrate, he always showed a special sympathy towards chapel folk who had got into what they call a muddle. But he was always down like a ton of bricks on a village toughie. Then we had a retired colonel to whom anything sexual was red rag to a bull. He would thrash it out of them, given half a chance!

  Things were simple then. It was just after the war and this part of Suffolk was very basic. There was incest and bestiality on the one side, an American soldier getting drunk and driving into a brick wall on the other, and people riding bicycles without lamps in the middle. We get much more variety now. In the village there was always the Bad Family. Every village had one and we knew them all. They came up over and over again, and we watched them going slowly, inevitably downhill. I remember one young man and his predestination as a Bad Family person seemed to shine out of him, so that he simply hadn’t a chance. He deteriorated. He deteriorated and we watched. It was terrible really. I have remembered him all this time, one of the small percentage of people who go wrong and who will keep on going wrong whatever you do. It is a dreadful thing to say, but nothing can make any difference for some people. Since then, I have visited schools and borstals, prisons and hospitals, and there they are. One can pick them out. They are cursed in some way. Nobody knows what with really. Even abroad, in Denmark, for instance, where conditions seem so perfect, you get identically similar results and statistics. I don’t think that these poor men feel cursed themselves; they just think that although they haven’t managed to beat the law this time, they might the next. Hard to help—hard to reach. I think that they feel shame but I’m not really sure. Our village Bad Family—father and three grown-up sons—doesn’t feel any shame I am sure. Their lives are a little war, winning and losing, mostly losing. When they lose it is simply, “That bloody old policeman has got me again!” Our Bad Family isn’t bad at all—just stupid. But they’d sooner be called bad than stupid.

  I wouldn’t say that the sexual mores of our district have been changed very much by the freedoms and ideas of the past few years. I think they are very much the same, in fact. People know more about it now, that’s all. Anyway, ordinary sex wasn’t as restricted as people imagine. You can sum it up by saying that it used to be in the hedgerows and now it is in the back of the car. There was more incest in the past and it was always fathers and daughters, never brothers and sisters. It happened when mother had too many children, or when mother was ill, or when mother was dead. And very often it didn’t matter a bit. The daughter usually proved to be very fond of the father and there would be no sign of upset in the family. No, I think it was quite an understood thing that a daughter would take on the father when the mother was ill or dead. It would always happen in a “basic” family, of course. Then somebody would give them away. Or it would come out when the daughter became pregnant. You would then come up against a strange form of innocence. Not ignorance, innocence. You would hear all about it from the police notebooks, pages and pages and pages, and you’d wonder why the man didn’t look like a monster. Then you’d realize that what he’d done and what we were saying he had done seemed to be two quite different things. We had strayed into the dark, into the deep—the hidden ways of the village. They aren’t all light now. All explored. But things are less strange and secretive than they were—even as little as twenty years ago. We’ve had families where we never had a clue about what was going on. You would find sub-2normal boys, a crippled girl, and you would beg the parents to let them attend special schools. But they wouldn’t. They felt they had to have these children close by them to offer them some kind of extra loving. We had an instance of this only last month—a fourteen-year lad who had been stealing girls’ panties off the lines. He was one of a family of eight and needed help. Poor old mother brought the boy to court—father wouldn’t appear. Mother had no idea what it was all about and was upset. We deferred the case three times in an effort to get both parents together and obtain their consent to allow the boy to go to this school, where he could have stayed until he was sixteen, been brought forward educationally and helped emotionally, but no. They flatly refused to let him go.

  Stealing women’s underwear off lines is a fairly recent thing. Perhaps women didn’t have dainty underwear years ago or perhaps it is because all the underwear ads are so extremely erotic now. Pantie-stealers and indecent exposure people are the same type of man, lonely, nervous, fantasist. Of course, they are always put on probation. We never treat them unkindly. We send them away for a medical report. It is the report in the local newspaper which ruins them. They are shunned in the village. Young boys caught doing this kind of thing have a bad time after the publicity. It is difficult for them. Nobody ever forgets it.

  Then we get worrying sex things like the half-witted man who had been had up for interfering with little boys coming up again on another charge of the same sort. There were six little boys this time, and they all told their tales with giggles or blushes, according to their nature, except for the last boy, who was only seven, and he had simply been struck dumb with shock, I think, at being brought into court. It took us something like two hours to get him to say enough to convict the man, and it had to be done because everything depended on his evi
dence. I shall never forget it. I was absolutely pouring with sweat by the time it was over. He wouldn’t say, he wouldn’t say. He could not bring himself to say what had happened. I thought it was dreadful to go on. But they insisted on us going on to make him say—the prosecution. This child sat on a chair right up close to us and we asked and he couldn’t answer. His eyes and our eyes were stuck together for hours. God knows what harm we did him. I felt myself dying inside with horror and wretchedness. Real corruption it was. That’s the kind of thing which makes one ashamed of a legal situation. Finally he said it. He was seduced into saying it. We seduced him.