by Tom Fort
The lawn proper began where the sunlight was able to filter through the extremities of the canopy created by the cedar’s outreaching lower branches. It extended about fifty yards, to a yew hedge which formed a break between the formal gardens and what we called The Point, where there was a concrete paddling pool – later converted to a site for bonfires – enclosed by shrubs, hazelnut trees and silver birches. There was a gap in the yew hedge, a few yards in front of which stood two slender, cigar-shaped yew bushes. These served as the goalposts in the games of football I played with two of my brothers, and Ralph, the son of our cook, who grew up with us.
Our posts were slightly to one side, allowing centres to be delivered satisfactorily from the right side only. This touchline was formed by the meandering edge of a long sweep of flower beds. The boundary between them and the road was guarded by a line of holly trees. The other touchline, as it were, was formed in part by one of the side walls of an outdoor squash court, festooned with the tentacles of a climbing rose which over the years had accounted for a host of punctured plastic footballs. Our games of cricket were played crossways, with the squash court wall acting as a barrier behind the batsman’s stumps. The greenhouse was at deep gully and sustained numerous breakages.
As far as we were concerned, this garden existed for one purpose only, our sport. My mother was then, and still is, a very keen and accomplished gardener. Her perspective and ours were slightly at variance, which led to occasional difficulties. When we moved to the house, in 1952, I was a babe-at-arms, and the main lawn enclosed rectangular herbaceous borders. As we grew, these displays suffered from the impact of balls and the trampling of youthful feet. My mother decided to sacrifice them, to provide an uninterrupted sweep of grass for our games. She, reasonably, expected in return to be left in peace to her weeding; and would react with alarming fierceness if disturbed by a football whizzing past her nose, or – on one indelibly appalling occasion – landing on the back of her neck.
The influence of the lawn was at work on me at an early age, though I did not know it. To keep the grass in order we had a great and beautiful machine, a shining, green devourer of grass, designed and manufactured by engineers and craftsmen of the first excellence employed by Dennis Brothers of Guildford. My father had bought it just after the end of the Second World War. He loved to stride behind it; and after his death, when I was eight, the task was performed by Albert, who was our oddjobman; and later by my elder brothers and, later still, by me.
I am no sort of engineer. I have no interest in, or knowledge of, the working of machines. Nor have I ever had affinity with them, except this one. Over the many years I grew to love the Dennis; that is, if the notion of loving an insensate arrangement of metal is not an absurd conceit. All right, I grew to admire it mightily, for the brilliance of its design and the marvellous reliability of its performance, and I took delight in its majestic appearance, its smell of oil and petrol and dead grass, the music it made. I became in tune with it. Without having a clue how it worked, I learned how to coax it into life when damp, or long disuse, or being overheated made it reluctant to fire. I used to scrape the accretions of dark earth from the underneath of the hard steel cutters, then rub my index finger along the burnish of the faces, imagining those edges slicing through my flesh and bone. I used to place my hand over the curve of the fuel tank, feeling it throb with the turning of the engine. I used to watch the whizzing of the leather drive belt, half persuaded that the machine had a life of its own.
The ritual at the start of mowing was akin to preparing to receive the sacrament. The Dennis was kept in a dark shed at the back of the squash court, at home on an oil-stained patch of compacted earth decorated with little clods of old grass. I would drag it out backwards, grasping the smooth steel holding bar, and the big grooved roller behind the engine would produce a grating dissonance as it scraped over the concrete standing by the door.
Outside, I would unscrew the lid to the petrol tank. It took a surprising number of turns to remove it, and one had to be careful not to drop it into the dark confusion of cogs and wheels below. The smell of the petrol as it gurgled through the funnel was delicious to me. I would turn the little bronze tap to allow it to flow, then tap a tiny knob on top of the carburettor until the metal suddenly darkened with the infusion of fuel. The starter handle was kept in a socket to one side of the roller. I would take it out, open the metal flap that protected the compression chamber, then insert it until the grooved end engaged within. A firm upward lift against the resistance would produce a throaty cough. I would depress the accelerator a touch, lift the handle again. Then would sound the music of the engine, deep and powerful. The metal beast would pulse with power and the smoke of burning oil would rise. We were ready. I would turn it towards the lawn, thrust forward the upstanding lever which engaged the cutters. As the blades whirred, the first grass would fly forwards into the curved bottom of the catching box, and the tone would swell. Forward would go the other glistening steel lever, engaging the drive mechanism; and forward the Dennis would plunge, like a war horse to the fray.
I was instructed in all this by Albert, whose affection for the mower was jealous. Albert worked on the buses, then the railways. He was small and strong, a Berkshire man with a mighty thirst for Brakspear’s beer, and a mocking, laconic manner of expression which we adored. He was married to Fifi, a tiny Scottish woman who cleaned for us, polished the silver and, on occasions, made immense quantities of drop-scones which we guzzled, faces and chins shiny with melted butter. She had been ‘in service’ most of her life, and I don’t believe thought herself any the worse than us for it. Fifi and Albert were an essential part of our extended family, a unit which, in those dim days of the 1950s and 1960s, still seemed a permanent feature of the social landscape.
Albert came one day a week – to mow, saw logs, chop down trees, cut hedges. His approach to the mowing was unvarying. He would start at the margins, cutting the fiddly bits around the shrubs and bushes and hedges. Then he would define the boundary of the main lawn with a double width of cut grass, all the way round. He would shut the Dennis down and come to the kitchen for elevenses: tea and several Woodbines. Now he was ready to bring the ceremonial to its protracted climax and conclusion. The first stripes were necessarily short, filling the curves. But as they spread towards the middle, they became longer. Back and forth he would stride, laying down those lines, pausing only to scoop up the cuttings from the box and dump them in the two-wheeled cart.
In my memory, I can still hear the regular crescendo and diminuendo of Albert’s morning march, and see the spread of his imprint across our lawn. I can smell that curious sweetness of grass just cut. I can feel the soft dampness of it between my fingers, see the sparkle of the daisies against the lustre of green, recall the recurring wonder at the speed with which that glow departed and the grass became mere vegetation. Sometimes, when the truck was full, I would help push it to the compost heap, which lay against the wall beyond the big oak. At the height of the growing season, we might have to empty three or four truckloads on to the heap; and if, at the end, you turned over the harvest, you would find that it was already yellowed and greyed by decomposition. And if you pushed your hands in, you could feel the heat of decay.
By half-past twelve or so, the main lawn was finished. The Dennis, hot and smoky, would be wiped down and returned to its berth. There would be beer for Albert, and more Woodbines. Then he might take out the rotoscythe to cut the rough grass in the orchard. But, for all its usefulness, the rotoscythe had none of the magic of the Dennis, and its sound was an insistent snarl, most unmusical. Anyhow, now we had half an hour before lunch for cricket and, with the stripes fresh and new, we might imagine ourselves at Lords or the Oval, our drives and cuts applauded by a shirt-sleeved crowd.
Later I graduated myself. My mother had ordained that each of us had to do half-an-hour’s work in the garden each day. The cultivation of flowers held no interest for me. I loathed weeding, could not stand the sen
sation of drying earth around my chewed fingernails. But I did not mind sweeping leaves, and quite liked cutting the yew hedges and the high hornbeam which ran like a rampart above the front wall, and lopping the tops off the line of conifers which extended along the fence below the squash court; and I positively gloried in the management of giant bonfires. And I came to like mowing, without quite knowing why.
The Dennis was, in its essentials, the same model as was first marketed in the 1920s. Ours was new in 1945, and we had it for the best part of fifty years. Long after my father was dead, after the house had been sold and my mother had retreated to a lawnless town garden which we could not despoil, after the lawn which our feet had pounded for so long had been covered in new houses, after our goalposts (which had long before reached a height undefendable by the most agile goalkeeper in the world) had been uprooted, after Albert and Fifi and the nannies and that world which we and they inhabited had all gone, the great machine was still doing its duty on the cricket ground.
This was our village cricket ground, and for me is so still, after more that thirty seasons. It corresponds in almost no respect to the sentimental notions of English village cricket, of thatched pub, church spire, old stone cottages, gnarled yokels on sturdy benches. Our pavilion was – until its destruction by fire in the summer of 1999 – a primitive wooden shack devoid of all but the most elementary conveniences. It acted as a meeting point for the youth of a typical Home Counties commuter settlement, where they would smoke, drink, swear and glower, using its dark, wooden frontage as a board on which to express sexual aspirations and disappointments. A concrete path ran between the pavilion, with its attendant tidemark of rubbish, and our outfield, a popular venue for dogs to defecate. Our square stands roughly in the middle of the recreation field – or ‘rec’, as it is generally known. There are football fields either side, and the field is bounded by housing developments, and a youth centre from which, on summer evenings, pound drum rolls and hideously amplified guitar chords, rehearsals for performances unlikely ever to happen.
For several years in my late twenties and early thirties (I am now a creaking veteran approaching his half century) I was captain of our Sunday team. My duties extended far beyond the mere conduct of affairs on the field – to selecting the team and massaging the egos of its disparate members, organising the making of teas and the washing up, to marking the boundary, arranging for the outfield to be cut, and preparing the pitch. I generally used the Dennis to mow the square, and an exquisitely precise Ransome Auto Certies for the strip on which we were to play. As I marched behind the mower my father, and Albert, and my brothers had marched behind, I would recapture a powerful, pungent flavour of the past. Of course, it could not be the same. There were no sinuous lines and troublesome obstructions requiring deft twirls and turns and fancy footwork; just a square, thirty yards by thirty. But enough was the same as it had been, the cleaning of the cutters, the ritual of the start, the cloud of flying grass and the smell that came with it, the division between cut and uncut, the familiar, dependable, deep-throated voice of the machine.
Then, one summer, the compression departed and could not be coaxed back. The man who ran the mower repair workshop in the village said he would take the Dennis off our hands, and we saw it no more.
PART TWO
Budding Genius
We could no more abandon the use of the mowing and go back to the scythe than we could exchange an express train for the old stage coach
Gardener’s Chronicle (1872)
Had your business required you, any working day in 1800, to walk in the direction of the Severn estuary along the high grassy slopes between Minchinhampton and Stroud, you would have been kept company in the valley below you to your right by a fine bustle of industrial activity. Along the valley’s floor, shut in by steep, wooded sides, twists and turns the little River Frome, its waters hastening to join the Severn. Since the early Middle Ages, when man discovered he could clothe himself more conveniently and comfortably by spinning the wool of sheep than by cutting skins off animals, the river had nourished a proud industry. The ready availability of swift-flowing clean water to drive the mill wheels and flush away the dyes, and of the prized fleeces of Cotswold sheep, combined with ease of transport to the great port of Bristol, had sustained centuries of prosperity in this place, which they called the Golden Valley. Generations of fullers, dyers, weavers and shearers had come and gone, handing on their traditions of craftsmanship and sturdy independence of mind. They had made the broadcloth of Gloucestershire famous throughout Europe, so that a generous measure of the stuff was an invariable component of Royal dowries and diplomatic exchanges of gifts.
In this year, 1800, there was a mill every quarter of a mile or so between Chalford and Stroud. Threaded along the hillsides were the rows of craftsmen’s cottages, a short, steep walk from their places of work. Some of the more modest mill owners chose to live here too, their sturdy houses of Cotswold stone perched on precipitous gardens. The well-to-do tended to prefer the comforts of Stroud; others still, the magnates, commissioned their mansions at a distance sufficient for them to avoid the smell and the noise altogether, and left the dirty work to their underlings.
By now many of the mills had gone over to steam power, and no longer needed the energy of the river to drive the wheels. Brick chimneys had sprouted, to shroud the valley in smoke. But the water was still useful, to wash away the dyes and to fill the new Thames-Severn canal, which was to be the industry’s highway to a sure future, an east-west artery to bring the coal to power the new machines and to take away the cloth to markets near and far.
You could not have guessed, looking down into that smoky, busy valley, that the seeds of the ruin of the industry which, for centuries, had made the Stroud area one of the most prosperous and densely populated provincial centres in England had already been sown. But already the traditional heavy broadcloth was being elbowed aside in popular affection by the lighter worsteds being produced in great volume by the much larger and more efficient mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Its remaining major market, making the uniforms to clad the British soldier in the campaigns against the French, had but a few years left. The introduction of the new machines, bitterly and sometimes violently opposed by the traditional craftsmen, would let loose the scourge of unemployment. But mechanization failed to enable the historically and geographically fragmented Gloucestershire mills to organize themselves to compete for the new markets.
With our convenient turn-of-the-millennium perspective, we can see it all. Look down now into the Golden Valley from Brodborough Common. The little river runs clear, unpolluted by dye, looping through a clutter of industrial estates, car parks, breeze block offices, grey corrugated warehouses. Here and there an old mill still stands, its fine old stone shaming the pre-fabricated tackiness around. One can forget that they were built, not for beauty, but to earn their keep. Now they are either empty, the looms cloaked in dust and cobwebs, or have been converted into offices. The canal, opened with such a fanfare in the 1790s, has long since been annexed by silt and bulrushes, a few stretches kept open for boys to fish for tench and roach. The roof of the canal tunnel at Sapperton – two and three-quarter miles long and one of the engineering wonders of the age – collapsed early in the 20th century and has never been repaired.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Gloucestershire woollen industry had, by and large, gone to the wall. But fifty years earlier, there was no obvious reason for anyone to suspect that this would happen. This, after all, was the Industrial Revolution. Man, through the exercise of his energy and ingenuity, was transforming his world. A new way to live had been invented, in which the potential locked up in the planet given by God would be exploited to the benefit of all. The machine was the key. Wherever there was a task which custom dictated must be discharged by hand, sooner or later a machine would be devised to do it quicker and cheaper. The social idealists believed this would liberate working people from the brutishness of their lives; t
hough the people themselves knew better. The bosses of the mills of the Golden Valley did not much care about that aspect: profit and competition were their imperatives. They embraced the new age and put the power of their minds at its service; and the age then left them behind. It is a quirk of history that the most enduring legacy of that small burst of creative energy which attended the beginning of the end for the Gloucestershire mills should have been a machine which had no application in the cloth industry, and could do nothing to save it.
One the best preserved and most handsome of the mills of the Golden Valley is the one at Brimscombe, three miles or so upstream from Stroud on the Cirencester road. The breadth of its stone frontages, the wide slopes of slate above, seem to exhale a solid, complacent confidence. There is a plaque here, in honour of the men who founded the Thames – Severn Canal Company in 1783. The waters of the Frome slide away beneath low arches at the base of the building.
In 1790 Brimscombe Mill was bought by a prospering clothier, Joseph Lewis, who, in time, handed it down to his three sons, John, William and George. Nothing much is known of any of these Lewises, beyond the dates of their births, deaths and marriages; and the fact that one of them, John Lewis, had the gift of original thinking. In 1815, as the wars which had convulsed and exhausted Europe for a generation were coming to an end, John Lewis registered the patent of his Shearing Machine: ‘My machine is so contrived that it will shear a piece of cloth in the longitudinal direction with great accuracy and rapidity, and without any intermission being necessary before the whole piece is shorn from one end to the other.’