A really trained-for-trial-work sheep dog costs between £1–£300—as much as that! But it will be as valuable as a man on the farm, have no doubt about it. They will even collect cattle if you will let them. I have become an authority on these wonderful animals and have judged the English National Trials on two occasions.
My method is this where training is concerned. I select a puppy from intelligent parents—I am not interested in the puppy if his parents aren’t good workers. I feed the puppy well and give him cod liver oil once a week. Then comes the hard part. He loves you now and is all over you the minute you show up, kisses and everything. But he has to learn to stay away from you and it is against his whole nature. You start by getting him to stay still at five yards, then you walk a little farther—“Now, Ben, sit down—sit!” You are taking the frolic out of him and putting the confidence in. After much effort on both your parts he begins to become a sensible dog, instead of jumping and running to no purpose. Once you have taught him stillness you’re getting somewhere. When you come to work on the sheep and you can stop them (high short whistle) and make them absolutely still from a distance, then you are getting somewhere. You can stop ’em and start ’em. You have made great progress.
I might work on a dog once or twice a day for a month and after this, when we get to the sheep, the principle is to get the dog to go to the other side of the flock. And to get there he must go in such a way as not to disturb the sheep. So if the sheep are in the twelve o’clock position, the dog must start getting to the other side of them from the nine o’clock position. Then he must come round in a curve. Now, how are you going to teach it to do all that? Well, my method is to start the dog off with five sheep placed about fifty yards in front of me. I walk half-way to the sheep leaving the dog motionless. I then ask him to come round. Naturally, he comes straight, so I step out towards him as he’s rushing past and shout, “Git out—Git out, Ben!” and before he knows where he is he’s running to the side. Then I whistle him to sit down. He should be about ten-twenty yards off at the side of the sheep by now. And then I start to give him his come-on whistle, or I say, “Come on up, Ben.” But I don’t let him do this right away. I stop and start him a number of times. It is a game now and Ben is enjoying it. There is no dog so anxious to work and to please his master as a Border collie. Well now, he’s gone round the back of the sheep and bringing them towards you. You mustn’t teach him too much at once. He must do nothing more than this for a fortnight—just to run out keeping a nice circle line and bringing a handful of sheep up to you quietly. Then you teach him flanking, running to the right or to the left. If the sheep try to escape to the right you must have a command to make the dog come round and head them off. A short double high whistle means “come to my right” and one long low whistle means “come to my left.” You have to give him encouragement and lots of kindness after each command. And all the time he must be quiet and gentle with the sheep—never to worry them, you understand. And there is another important thing. When you have given a command and the dog begins to respond, never add another command until he has completed the first one. And don’t repeat the command. So long as he’s doing what you have asked, don’t say anything. Never shake his confidence in any way.
You need to understand sheep; they are very special animals. Down-bred sheep are very placid and those which come from the hills are timid and wild. Their fright is infectious, it fills the air. It is some old habit which makes them keep together and if there weren’t dogs to manage them I don’t know what we would all do. I’ve often said that the British sheep industry would suffer to the extent of a thirty per cent loss if it weren’t for the collies. They are the brightest dogs in the world—and all due to the National Sheep Dog Society.
Sheep have to be maintained in a splendid condition, once they begin to go down there is no pulling them up. You have no end of trouble with them if you let them go down. You must understand how to flush them and make them thrive, so that they bring you a good crop of lambs. And how to winter and summer them. And all the time you must do the job as economically as possible, and yet still present them in nice condition at lambing time.
Some East Anglian farmers have no use for sheep at all; others are sheep-minded. They know the value of them on the farm and just wouldn’t be without them. Sheep keep a farm in a high state of fertility and also provide a tidy little income. Double purpose creatures, they are.
There is an important sale in Bury St. Edmunds during the third week of August and last year I had to come home from holiday in order to get my sheep to it. I had 130 sheep and I took them all. And why? Well, the year before the Queen sent a flock of sheep from Sandringham to this sale—which deals with between 13–14,000 animals altogether—and I saw her get the highest prize. She had sent shearing ewes—ewes which are ready to go to the ram as soon as you get them home and which will lamb in the spring—and they made a lovely pen. Now, I told myself, I would like to beat the Queen. By jove, I looked about and bought a very nice pen of ewe lambs, brought them home, brought them up, took them to the Bury sale the next year and—what do you think? I got the highest price. But only just. I beat Her Majesty by five shillings!
A chap comes up after the sale and says, “How did you manage it?” Well now, I says quite simply, “I kept them clear of worms—dosed them in the autumn and again in the spring. I cleared every parasite right out. Then I dosed them for such things as pulpy kidney. I injected them—the scientists have done a tremendous lot for agriculture, make no doubt of it! Things are incredibly better since I started farming years ago—and then I fed these lambs all the winter as economically as I could with sugar-beet pulp, and on the fields before the grass faded and the goodness went out of it. I was never too late or too early with the different cares they needed. I was being a good shepherd. That is how I managed it.”
There is more in the business than making money, you know. I always wanted to be a farmer. I was quite sure. It is a great life. You must praise the land as well as take from it. And order it. There’s a field out there—now what have I done to that? I’ve put humus and nitrogen on it, and now the cows will graze it. I’ll fold it twice over and then I’ll plough it up, then sow these hand-picked beans. I took over five tons an acre off it this year—two crops in twelve months! The beans go to Birdseye to be frozen. I am growing eight acres of sprouts for Birdseye. Thirty-two boxes of them left the farm yesterday, and thirty-two the day before. I kept a pedigree herd of cows on only forty-two acres of grass. I add fertilizer to the good natural humus in the grass and freshen it all up with irrigation. The rule with land is to give—then you can take.
The days are better now but people refuse to believe it. I felt quite angry at a meeting in Ipswich the other day. A man got up and read a paper called “The Countryside through the eyes of the Urban Dweller”—and how he criticized us! Taking down hedges! Putting up ugly buildings! It was awful. We just ignored him. But one man did get up and answer him. He said, “In spite of all you say we have still got hedges and the land is fertile, and there is no more beautiful sight than fertile land.” The farmers are thought to lack feelings. I have sometimes accidentally put my big foot on a skylark’s nest, eggs and all. It is damn awful—it is you know! “Clumsy fool brute! Brute!” I tell myself. But it is done. Robbie Burns once ploughed-in a mountain daisy and wrote:
Wee modest crimson-tipped flower
I’ve met you in an evil hour
For I must crush among the stone
Thy slender stem. To spare thee now
Is past my power—thou bonny gem!
Have you seen the townspeople in the spring-time, driving out to the lanes and woods, and tearing up the flowers? It is a shocking sight.
20. IN THE HOUR OF DEATH
There Dewy lay by the gaunt yew tree,
There Reuben and Michael, a pace behind,
And Bowman with his family
By the wall that the ivies bind.
—T HARDY, The Dead Quire
To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
—ROBERT GRAVES, To Bring The Dead To Life
William Russ · aged sixty-one · gravedigger
“Tender” Russ is a widower and lives by himself in a severe brick cottage called Malyons. The cottage is built endways to the road and into a bank so high that blackberries can hang away from their roots and trail on the slates. The garden is planted but rank. Rows of sprouts have rotted until they have become yellow pustulate sticks; potatoes have reached up as far as they could go and fallen back into faded tangles. Tender sows but apparently doesn’t reap. He has retreated to one room in the cottage and closed all the others up. It is a Charles Spenserlahye room, a jackdaw’s nest of saved matchsticks, preserved newspapers, clung-to coronation mugs and every kind of clutter. In a corner a bakelite radio gives every news bulletin there ever was. Tender’s two budgies, Boy and Girl, drown announcements of famine, war, murder and sport with an incessant chatter. He is short but strongly built. Vivid blue eyes strain and flash to add meaning and explanation to what he feels are inadequate words.
Tender is a monopolist and a pluralist. He amalgamates graveyards and pounces on cemeteries. Although there has been little or no competition for this great accumulation of burial grounds, Tender has a right to feel unique and powerful, privileged and indispensable. He has buried 608 people in thirty different churchyards since 1961 and keeps his own records of “where they lie and how they lie.” And this is only the work of his maturity. Before this mortuary climax there were decades of interrings. Tender has never had a day’s holiday, never missed a church service on a Sunday and also never missed an opportunity to carry on his rancorous love-hate debate with his God, the clergy and the quick. The dead are exempt from his fury and he is on their side against the living. He has all their names in an address book contrived out of shelf-paper and a bulldog-clip. The young and the old, the rich and the poor are listed in violent pencil at first, and in biro later.
He works incredibly hard and with great independence, travelling from village to village on a moped to the carrier of which is tied a gleaming spade and fork. He drives well out towards the centre of the road and the Anglo-American traffic has to swerve and swear to avoid him. Quite a lot of people recognize him, however, for he is a famous person, and give him a wide berth. They know they are seeing Time’s winged chariot with a two-stroke.
When people need Tender they need him badly, and will make much of him because of this. The need over, they avoid him. Or is it that he avoids them? His eloquence is enormous and violent, and seems to be only indirectly aimed at God and man. He is arguing with the mindless knife-bearing wind which carries the ice of the sea to the vulnerable flesh and fields of the inhabited places. He is a religious man who is listening for God in a hurricane. There used to be certainties but now the parsons say they aren’t so certain after all. The Bible itself has whirled past him—a mocking paper-chase of discarded views. Almost every day he hears about the “resurrection of the body” as he waits tactfully behind a tree, filling-in spade covered with a sack. Most days he is left alone with the new dead. The pity of it all! The muddle of it all! Automatic bird-scarers go off in the pea-fields like minute guns. Something has gone wrong—very wrong.
“Why ‘Tender’?”
“Oh, that’s not his name,” said the woman at the pub. “He inherited it from his father. We call him Tender because of his father, but that’s not his name.”
I started digging graves when I was twelve years old and before I left school. I began by helping an old man and by the time I was thirteen I could do the job as well as I can now. I dug graves before my voice broke—there now! People would look down into the hole and see a child. The work didn’t upset me; I took it in my stride. Right from a little boy—if Mother was alive she’d be able to tell you—I used to bury guinea-pigs, rabbits, all sorts of things. I had about fifty rabbits and when one died I would make a coffin for it, get my choir surplice from the church vestry and read the Burial Service over it. So burying has been in my blood from a child. I never wanted to do anything else; graves are my vocation.
I’ve been at the church, official-like, since 1918. I was the legal sexton when I was thirteen and I’ve buried damn-near the whole of the old village, every one of them. I remember the first grave I dug. It was for a man named Hayman. I’ve got all my burials down since the day I started, men, women and children.
So far as funerals are concerned, we’ve gone from one extreme to the other. Bodies used to be kept in the house for twelve days. Everyone kept the body at home for as long as they could then; they didn’t care to part with it, you see. Now they can’t get it out quick enough. They didn’t like hurrying about anything when I was young, particularly about death. They were afraid that the corpse might still be alive—that was the real reason for hanging on to it. People have a post-mortem now and it’s all settled in a minute, but there’s no doubt that years ago there were a rare lot of folk who got buried alive. When a sick man passed on the doctor was told, but he never came to look at the corpse. He just wrote out the death certificate. People always made a point of leaving an instruction in their wills to have a vein cut. Just to be on the safe side.
There was an old man near Framlingham, old Micah Hibble, he was laid out for dead three times. The last time he was actually in his coffin and waiting for the funeral to begin. When I asked, “Anymore for a last look before he’s screwed down?” there was the usual nuisance pushing his way through the mourners and saying, “Yes, I do!” Trust somebody to get you fiddling about and making the funeral late. The bell was going, so you know how late it was. Anyway, when this man looked in the coffin he saw that Micah had moved. Well do you know, he recovered! And what’s more, he is supposed to have written a book about what he saw, although I’ve never set eyes on it. He reckoned he saw Heaven and Hell but he wouldn’t say what he saw in Hell; he thought it would be too much for Framlingham. He lived for years after this.
And there was this old lady at Wickham Market and she was in three different coffins. They called her Cheat-the-grave at last. All these things happened because people will insist on checking on death with a mirror, which isn’t a mite of good. The only way is to stick a shred of cotton-wool where the lips part and if there’s the least little wind of life it will flutter. I can always tell if a person is dead by looking at the eyes. I never make a mistake about dead eyes. I see at once when the seeing has gone.
Village folk have been buried over and over again in the same little bits of churchyard. You have to throw somebody out to get somebody in—three or four sometimes. I always put all the bones back so that they lie tidy-like just under the new person. They’re soon all one. The parson said to me, “How is it that you get so many in one grave?” and I always tell him that I must have disturbed a plague pit. Parsons will believe anything.
The rich people are buried in vaults, you know. I had to open a vault the other day and put a woman in. She joined six or seven others and I had to shove ’em over and say, “Come you together now, make room for a little ’un!” Vaults are sweet places. Everybody lies in lead first, then wood, so there’s no smell. I went into the vault at Stanton when Lord Eastham’s wife died. It was full and I had to lay her on the floor because her relations had all the shelves. It was first come, first served. The coffins were all made of panelled oak, great black things as black as a fireplace. Good God, they last for generations!
I’ve dug for all denominations, from Catholic to Plymouth Brethren. The chapel people are the worst. First of all they’re a good three-quarters of an hour in the chapel while the preacher spouts about the dead man and estimates whether he’s saved, and then, when they get to the grave, on it goes again. There’s no end to it. They forget we all knew the corpse. And then, when they’re none too sure about the saving, you sh
ould hear them then! There was Jed’s funeral—well we don’t need any telling about Jed! Well Jed might have been a bad lot but he wasn’t a bad sort. You know. I mean he was Jed, wasn’t he? Well, this chapel preacher stood there by the hole I had got ready for Jed and was as near as damn-it saying that Jed wasn’t saved although he hoped he was. So after the funeral I went up to him and said, “My God, you’ve had some talk about Jed, haven’t you? I know you’re here to say a few words—but you’ve said too much!” I said, “Do you reckon that you are saved?” He said, “I hope so.” “Very well then,” I said, “but do you remember when you get in front of your Maker he won’t ask you what Jed has done—he’ll ask what you’ve been up to.” You could see he didn’t like it.
The parsons aren’t much better. But there, you don’t find many parsons now. Only men who have done their life’s work serving as a colonel or a schoolmaster and then get themselves ordained. I don’t really call these people parsons. I don’t mince my words with them. When you bury between 180–200 people a year you can afford to be honest.
Dust to dust they say. It makes me laugh. Mud to mud, more like. Half the graves round here are water-logged. Foxton is a terrible wet place; the moment you get the grass off, you’re in the water. I float grass on the water so the mourners can’t see it but when the coffin is lowered it has to be held under with a pole until you can get a bit of heavy soil on top of it. At Dearburgh the graves fill up to within eight inches of the top. I’ve drawn as much as fifty pails of water out of a grave at Dearburgh, the last when the funeral was coming up the path. And still the coffin had to be held under three feet of it. It all comes down from the cricket pitch.
The bodies are washed and dressed in shrouds. Except for a parson, and he’s buried in his robes. When you bury a parson you always bury him “re incumbent”—the opposite way to everybody else. Everybody lies with their feet to the east so that when they rise they face the Lord. But a parson, you see, you bury him with his feet to the west, so that when he rises he faces his flock. And serve him right, I say. I had a bit of bother about this once.
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