It was fun being the village vet; the work had just that kind of fascination which you get with anything to do with medicine. Animals often lived a long time, particularly horses, of course. I would be treating a horse with a discharging joint for months—maybe for years. Many of the horses were lame and had to wear surgical shoes. Nobody would put a horse down until it was absolutely useless. The sick animals were often affectionately treated but they suffered a lot. I had almost no drugs, no antibiotics. The sick horses would be nursed and worked until another day’s work couldn’t be got out of them, then they were shot. If you could keep a horse going, you did. Ethics were different then. My job was to keep a horse on his feet.
I saw the great Suffolk pastures just before they disappeared. Tremendous, they were. It has all vanished under the plough, except down by the rivers where the meadows get flooded. All the cows have gone. There is not a cow in Framlingham parish, there is not a cow in Saxted parish, there is one cow in Bedfield parish, there are no cows in Monk Soham parish and when you get to Wilby I wouldn’t be sure but I think that the main herd there has just been sold out. But there is still a cowherd in Akenfield because of the stream and in the river valley at Debenham there are still a couple of herds—although there used to be eight. But there are no cows on the high land any more because the farmers can make more money by ploughing up the old pastures. It is awful—although one is not supposed to be sentimental about anything in the countryside these days. It is such a comfort to see the small herd of Jerseys at Earl Soham. But even where you still get a farmer with a modern cow set-up, the dairy feeling is all changed. Supposing he is milking 120 animals, it is most unlikely that he will be employing a cowman and paying him a wage. He will be far more likely to contract a man to milk at so much a gallon and who will undertake to feed the animals at so much food per gallon of milk. The man who takes on the job will be in complete charge on the understanding that the more milk he produces, the bigger his wages. Next year the herd may still be on the farm but the village people will never see it. Cows will no longer graze under the sky. They will be in herring-boned sheds all their lives. No mud—and no sun. Most of the beef-fattening animals are already indoors. The time will come when villages like Akenfield will have thousands of creatures living in them, but they will be, for all that the ordinary person knows, non-existent.
It is because our land is so valuable. Because we can grow such very high quality corn and catch crops. We can no longer afford to let animals roam on fields as valuable as this. They have to be locked up. They will never eat another blade of living grass. It is unprofitable. But they will have a ventilator to every pen and thermostatic heat control, sawdust floors, and automatic feeding and watering. Hotel conditions. The stockmen must change too. There is all the difference in the world between a man who just feeds stuff to pigs for a few weeks and a man who calves a cow, milks it with his hands and walks with it daily to the pasture. There is only one man I know who has managed to carry the personal touch into the animal factory and he is an ex-German prisoner-of-war named Hans Faber. Hans can walk into a shed where there are a thousand pigs and point at one of them and say, “That is number 734.” And it would be. He is probably the greatest pigman in Suffolk. He is paid £1,500 a year.
This is the biggest pig district in England. Pigs and barley. They go well together. You can pack all your pigs up so that they roughly work out at 1,000 animals an acre—and an acre of buildings is an awful lot of building!—and there you are. All tidy. An average Suffolk farm will have 300 pigs but many of the farmers are going for them in a big way and one farm near here has 2,000 animals. As they are fattened through four times a year, it means that 8,000 pigs spend twelve weeks out of their twenty-two-week lives on this farm per twelve-month. This is real factory-farming. This farmer doesn’t breed at all; he buys, fattens, sells. The pig is a wonderful animal for this sort of farming. There is nothing to waste on him. The Chinese even export the bristles. The only part of a pig you can’t sell is his squeak.
But there are problems. I don’t know what to think. Everything is being so drastically simplified. The pig-farmer will come down to me and say, “I know what diseases I’ve got. I just want a few pails of this drug or that and I’ll treat them myself.” He does. He injects, and that is that. It costs £1 to have a vet call at the farm and when you are working on today’s superfine profit margins you are going to think twice before asking him to. So they rarely ask me to the pig factories—unless they’ve got an unusual epidemic. It will be the same when all the cattle are locked up.
We’ve got cannibalism coming up. The imprisoned creatures are eating each other. Everything is being controlled except their natural instincts. These are frustrated, so they have problems. Tail-biting among pigs is becoming a quite incredibly large problem. They just bite each other’s tails right off. You go in first thing of a morning and find three pigs running around with a mass of blood on their buttocks. Then you have to sit and watch for hours. At last you see a pig walk up to his neighbour and go chunk! and there is the most dreadful scream. Then more screams, for it takes about three good snaps to get the tail off. It is boredom which causes this and they are now considering taking the tails off baby pigs to avoid it. There is a lot of argument about whether a law should be brought in to prevent tails being cut off without an anaesthetic. De-tailing pigs is still in the basket—although in New Zealand they de-tail cows. They do it to stop the cow swishing muck into the milk bucket and to prevent dirt collecting round the cow’s bottom. It was the clean-milk production people in New Zealand who started this practice but the whole of the British veterinary profession are dead against it. We say, “We are not going to turn cattle out on a hot summer’s day to get covered with flies and not to be able to flick at its tormented ribs.” The New Zealanders say, “If the cow wasn’t mucky, there wouldn’t be any flies.” We don’t agree; it is often the sweetness of the udder which draws the flies. Many of the farmers like this de-tailing idea but we are fighting it. We are having to face up to a great ethical question—to what extent can an animal be mutilated in the service of man? Allowing for the fact that one believes that the animal exists for the benefit of man.
There is castration. We’ve tried to get that more and more humane. We’ve brought in a law saying that every animal over a certain age must be anaesthetized before it is castrated. But it is economically impossible at present to do this. We haven’t got an anaesthetic which works quickly enough. Imagine a big pig factory with hundreds of pigs waiting to be castrated. Each animal would have to be injected twice, put down, given a quarter of an hour and then stood up again. You simply couldn’t do it. Think of the vet’s fees. The farmer simply wouldn’t put up with such a loss. If we had something we could spray, that would be easier. But we haven’t. So you have the big question—can you ethically castrate a pig without an anaesthetic? And the answer for most people is yes. Because most people will never separate ethics from profits.
It is accepted that you dock lambs’ tails because if you don’t all the fat runs into the tail and, also, the whole thing is likely to become a seething mass of maggots in the summer. So the farmer will turn round and say, “If you dock lambs, why not calves?” He is being reasonable. So you have to answer with a very reasonable point of view. He will remind you that horses had their tails docked because they caught in the reins when one drove, and were dangerous. He might even have cheek enough to remind me that I hunt! I hunt partly because I like it and partly because a hunting vet attracts the horse-work in the district. I have the horse-work for miles around. And all vets love horse-work. I suppose it is because the horse is a noble animal, if I dare say it. He’s clean. He’s above every other animal. A horse is pleasant to treat. I am making distinctions between animals, you see. It is wrong—unjust—but I am making them. I am caught up in this new confusion. I must get myself right by thinking of the chickens.
They hardly bear thinking about. They are our great cruel compromise. I don�
��t know how many chickens there are in Akenfield but there must be many thousands. People prefer to think of them as little machines which wear out in ten months and are then replaced. They are all deranged. Once you get such a fantastic number of birds together in one big room a kind of mass nervousness sets in. Each bird is surrounded by as many as 9,999 individuals. When you open the door of an enormous broiler house, the inhabitants will end up against the far wall in one vast shrieking pile. Or that is what happened. Now you play them music. You play it loud, so that there isn’t that sudden extra sound when a door opens. But the chickens work themselves up “over” the music, as it were. They are like a lot of women gossiping, gossiping until the uproar forces them to shout. The Bramble Report permits more than one battery hen in a cage, which is interesting—rather strange. Ethics and profits once more, I’m afraid. The battery hens are bewildered by their lives, so there is all this cannibalism again. They eat each other. First they pick a feather and taste blood, and soon some poor hen is disembowelled. This is a very frequent thing. The only answer to this is de-beaking—taking off the top part of the beak. But the Bramble Committee says you mustn’t de-beak. To allow more than one hen in a cage and not to allow de-beaking is a good example of their strange compromise between what is economic and what is savage.
We have a new broiler house at the top of the village. There are six sheds which hold 10,000 birds each. You fill the site, fatten out and then empty the whole place, and give it a rest to keep it clean. The farmer used to just empty one shed at a time but he found that this method didn’t keep disease under control. The broilers are ready for the fried chicken trade in twelve weeks. They are taken to a processing factory ten miles from Akenfield, hung by the legs to a conveyor belt, made to travel about two feet, stunned by an electrified plate, bled, bathed, dressed and packed into the deep freeze—and all in about ten minutes. Between one and two thousand birds are killed and dressed each day at this factory. And that is poultry-keeping as it is now. I’m not really wanted in this business—not the same bird-doctor me, that is, who attends the parakeet bird farm where every creature is a special living thing. Talking of birds, a ploughman told me that he counted thirteen different kinds of birds following his furrow this week [12 November 1967].
There are lots of dogs in the village. The pet population of England is fantastic. Of course, it is different in the country. All our village animals are economic, with the exception of the dog. The difference between a town veterinary practice and a country one is that in town you are dealings with pets which have become members of human families, lovers, partners—anything you like—so when they are sick you can charge their owners anything you like. They will spend fantastic sums. In the village you only treat an animal up to the economic level. Cats don’t rate as high in the country as in the town, although they are intensely useful. You see a farm where the cat population has been wiped out by enteritis and then you’ll see something! The rats and mice arriving—in armies! A farm will have as many as a dozen cats queened over by some great “Betty-cat” who is the mother and great-grandmother of them all. They live pleasant, active, unsentimental lives. They are lucky.
18. NOT BY BREAD ALONE
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bowed locks of the corn.
WILLIAM MORRIS, Summer Dawn
There is a Southern saying—fine words
butter no parsnips.
—SIR WALTER SCOTT
The Poet
I think that living in the country, for all their sentimental denials, is something which is held in contempt by most people today. They believe that one has opted out of a concern for all kinds of problems. The country is where one doesn’t get on. But if I was interested in getting on, as it is called, I wouldn’t be a poet. Writing poetry is a way of life. Money is necessary for this way of life, of course, but it has to be earned in some way which doesn’t injure the poetry. This is the most important thing. I think a poet should have a job which he likes. He will be a better poet if he isn’t nagged by unsuitable work. The work I happened to love is cultivating the land, raising plants, eating my own vegetables and fruit. So much of poetry is oblation and the putting of the seed into the ground is also a religious rite—perhaps the oldest religious rite that there is. Like the rest of the villagers, I grow not only for myself but to give away. This is important. All country gardeners do this.
When I was a boy I lived in a country suburb of London—it was still possible to talk of a suburb being in the country then. After Oxford, I worked in London, where I wrote a poetry of despair. It was a continuous cry for what I had lost, for the hills and fields, and the vixen wood, with the dog-fox barking at night. I imagined myself dying inside and so I came to this village to find my health. My wholeness. That is what I am here. It was not my village but to say that I had returned to it seemed a true way of describing what had happened to me. Suffolk amazed me—the great trees, the towering old buildings soaring out of the corn. The huge clear spaces.
I am now at home here. I know everybody and everybody knows me. Words have meaning for me here. I am lucky, I came here to get better but I have in fact been re-born. I have escaped into reality. There are no nameless faces; I am identified and I identify. All is seen. Although you may not be capable of loving your neighbour as yourself, you can at least know him nearly as well as you know yourself.
One has to have a leaning towards village life. It is often a life of poverty in contrast with that of the towns. Poverty is sometimes believed to be a great stimulant of art, but I don’t believe this. Except I am willing to forego a lot of the things other people now take for granted in order to keep Akenfield, by which I mean the deep country. The power of wonder is here. In spite of machines and sprays, I still find Nature with a capital N in this valley. It is man’s rightful place to live in Nature and to be a part of it. He has to recognize the evidence of his relationship to the great natural pattern in such things as flowers, crops, water, stones, wild creatures. Where he destroys such evidence, in the towns, for instance, he gradually destroys a part of himself. This is where poetry comes in; it has to utter the response to the reality of the whole man, and it is only by living in Nature that the whole man can develop. City life fragments a man. He is not complete when the reminders of the great natural complex of which he is a part are absent. The business of poetry is to mend the fragmentation which occurs when men forget their place in the natural creation. City poets are in danger of blocking the imaginative river with concrete and hearing so much noise that they miss the voice of the Goddess! Of course much excellent poetry is written in cities, but I sometimes think that it is informed by an improper, a Satanic fury. And with clever words disguising the lack of wonder. This is the dichotomy of city life. The city poet records an alienation which began perhaps with Blake’s awesome poem “The Mental Traveller.” I understand the reason for this way of writing but living here, in touch with the earth and the woods, I can hardly believe it. I don’t want to believe in their alienation! For in a sense, in not believing, I myself am alienated from men who do not have and who do not wish to have my experience of the village. I think that it is their tragedy that they don’t want such a thing and can even call it escapist and “uncommitted.” The twentieth century, with its great comforts and its great crimes, has produced immense alienation experiences. People need the seasonal design of country time to remind them of what they are.
Time in the village is quite different from time in the town. You enter time when you enter a town—you rush through it. In a village time enters you, slowly, naturally. I knew so little about time and its importance when I came here. Eventually, its poetic value has been revealed to me.
They say that I have opted out. That is what they say. I am out of all the great events of the day—or so they tell me. The accusers come yearly and usually in the summer, for none of these kind of people have patience with a village in winter, and they point their finger at me for
having turned my back on what they call current affairs. They tell me that a poet should not avoid what is going on in the world. A poet should be with the mass of mankind, they say; a poet should carry a banner. I do not march, I do not protest, I have not the people’s cause at heart—so I am guilty! I do not argue about the colour question or the religious question. I am a guilty innocent, I suppose. Can one be that?
19. THE NORTHERN INVADERS
Where the mowers mow the cleanest,
Where the hay lies thick and greenest,
There to track the homeward bee,
That’s the way for Billy and me.
—JAMES HOGG, A Boy’s Song
Jamie McIver · aged sixty · farmer
The Mclvers farm a tenancy of 180 acres east of the river. Forty years of East Anglian life have made little or no mark on their Scottish positivism or Scottish sentiment alike. Jamie is a man who doesn’t change his views to suit the times and, now that he is getting older, he clings more than ever to the clear-cut rules laid down during his boyhood. He is didactic and authoritative, stating strong opinions in a way which contrasts dramatically with Suffolk caution. Like most of his countrymen, he has remained both emigrant and exile. His son Lister, leaving for a Queensland farm in the autumn, might achieve a more total break. Jamie is toying with the idea of joining him. His wife wouldn’t mind a change, and, what does it matter, Suffolk or Australia, if one isn’t back home?
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