The spring she is a young maid who does not know her mind,
The summer is a tyrant of a most ungracious kind,
But the autumn is an old friend that does the best he can
To reap the golden barley and cheer the heart of man.
All among the barley, oh who would not be blithe
When the free and happy barley is smiling on the scythe!
The wheat he’s like a rich man, all sleek and well-to-do;
The oats they are a pack of girls, all lithe and dancing too;
The rye is like a miser, he’s sulky, lean and small
But the free and golden barley is monarch of them all.
All among the barley, oh who would not be blithe
When the free and happy barley is smiling on the scythe. . .
Epilogue
I have had such a happy life. This place is truly wonderful, even though some of the other women staying here are – and there’s no kind way to put this – not quite right in the head. The food is tolerable, I have been given plenty of books to read, and everything is very clean. For the last few years I have even had my own room.
Mother came to see me once a week at first, but I think that it upset her in some way. I do recall clearly the last time I saw her, though. We were outside in the grounds, and it was spring: I remember the green smell of it, and the wild cherry blossom like confetti drifting down. We stood on the petal-strewn grass and she held both my hands and made me look at her, and she said that I could go back home with her if I wanted – but I shook my head. She told me that she loved me, and made me promise to send for her if one day I changed my mind. I never have.
Frank and Mary came too, of course, and Miss Carter; even old Elisabeth Allingham from Copdock Farm – unless I am misremembering that. I dimly recall talking to Sally Godbold’s sister Anne, too; I think she might have been staying here when I came. She wasn’t well at all.
It is good that I was brought here, I can see that now; although it was only to be a short stay at first, I’m glad to have remained. I am very powerful sometimes – it waxes and wanes – and it is better to be here where I am prevented from doing any more harm. It hasn’t happened for some years now, but I am given to understand that it may return at any time.
When I was a child I believed that what I wanted mattered so little that it wasn’t even worth me discovering what it might be. And I thought, too, that I was helpless – and that is a dangerous belief to hold, for it makes one susceptible to the influence of others, for good or for ill.
I often wish I could go back and help the child I was somehow, but the truth is there is nothing I could say now that she would understand.
They tell me, when I ask, that I am seventy years old now – but I don’t feel it. They say that a woman is now our prime minister; they say the country has changed beyond all recognition. But there are times when that summer seems only just to be over; when 1934 could have been but a week or two ago.
Frank told me in a letter that most people in the village believed Father torched the ricks, so deep in debt was he; Frank, though, was of the opinion that they simply heated and caught fire from being damp and badly made. Of course, I confessed at the time that I had set them alight with my powers and so caused the farm to burn. I told anyone who would listen, I told them over and over, but they merely hushed me, and then began to look at me strangely, and after a while I came here. I don’t insist any more on my part in it all, for I have found that it frightens people, and I have no wish to do that. The truth is, though, that I caused the fire that moment on the field path with the Rose boy, and everything that happened afterwards is my fault.
Father’s body was never found amongst the debris, and I do not know whether he perished in the blaze or got away. Mary told me that someone had been seen living at Hullets, and a watch was kept there for a while; but he would have been far from the only farmer out on his uppers in those years, so goodness only knows if it was him. I don’t think of him very often any more; although for a long while I did.
Doble lived for only a few weeks after the fire. I knew when I left him in the orchard that he would be gone soon; it was very clear to me. I would like one day to visit his grave, if he warranted a headstone; if only to find out his given name. Constance was right about one thing, perhaps: for with him died a part of England that will never return.
The farmhouse survived the fire, though the barn burned to its brick foundations. Having returned from visiting Doble, Mother, it turns out, had climbed out of the dormer window in Mary’s room and onto the thatch, where she sat beating out any sparks that landed with a wet cloth. She had been hidden from us in the dark, I suppose, by smoke, and the pitch of the roof.
There was some insurance money, and she took over Wych Farm after the fire and ran it with John; when Grandfather died, some years later, I’m told John moved into the house. I feel sure – though I couldn’t quite say how – that Frank and Sally now farm there, Mother and John being long dead; and I have written a letter addressed to the farm, to find out. I hope someone will reply soon.
Frank and Sally married, of course, and took up one of the new council farms somewhere quite distant, near a little village called Milton Keynes. He stopped coming to see me then, though he wrote for a while – well, it was Sally’s hand, but Frank’s sentiment, I’m sure of it. But after some years the letters dwindled, and at last they stopped.
Of course, I was not able go to Frank’s wedding, or the christenings of the children Frank and Mary had. I wasn’t even told when Granfer and Grandma died, or where they are buried; I can only assume that they’re gone. You might have thought I’d have known when Clarity passed, but I felt nothing. Perhaps it was the pills they used to give me; they interfered very strangely with my thoughts.
I have no idea what became of Constance FitzAllen. I know she left the district, and wasn’t seen in our parts again; I don’t think she ever came to see me here – though there is much I cannot remember about the very beginning of my stay. Perhaps she visited; or perhaps she simply vanished back to London and became something else entirely. She was good at that.
I was pleased to discover, some years ago, that her ideas for the country did not catch. I have had the opportunity here at last to grow up, and read, and formulate some opinions of my own, and while I never did manage to leave any mark on it, I have perhaps come to understand something of the world.
Nothing stands still, and nor should it. I think of John, and of Grandfather: ‘Change – we must have it!’ they both would say. This place is closing down, for reasons unclear to me, and I am being returned to the world. They have been preparing us for some time now, with television programmes, classes on how to use electrical kettles and pop-up toasters, and afternoon trips by motor coach. And they have said I can take any books I like from here, and the framed pictures of rural scenes that hang on the wall of my room, which is kind.
I will be cared for in the community, they say. I asked which community, and they said my own: I am to go back to Elmbourne to live out my days, along with a few of the other people here. I can’t quite picture where in the village they plan to house us. I only hope it isn’t the row of old cob cottages Constance and I cycled past one sunny afternoon half a century and more ago, for they were very damp.
I used to dream all the time about the valley I grew up in. Asleep, I’d find myself by the horse-pond in Greenleaze, or at the circle of oaks, or on the sunny, green bank of the river where Frank and I bathed. Awake, I would picture in loving detail the valley’s fields and farms, its winding lanes and villages, conjuring up a vision of a lost Eden to which I longed to return. But at last I came to see that there is a danger in such thinking; for you can never go back, and to make an idol of the past only disfigures the present, and makes the future harder to attain.
Alfred Rose became a soldier and wrote to me once, from Egypt. I still have his airgraph letter here, on thin Forces paper:
October 15th 1942
To Edie,
I thought you would be pleased to have a letter from your old friend Alfie. I am here with Sid in the desert of Africa a place I never thought I would see. We have moved up to the line and are waiting for orders. We get enough to eat and soap sent by the Daily Sketch but no baths to wash in for water is in short supply. All of us very sun-burnt but cheerful enough.
Well I must tell you that when all this is over I plan to marry. Her name is Iris Barker, a great girl, I hope you will not be too much upset.
Edie I hope you are recovering your strength and do not dwell on things past. You are a great girl but it would not have worked out for you and me. Lately I have found myself thinking I should not have done as I did but then I think of your ardour and know that you would tell me that we were both ‘just kids’.
Please write back with news of home if you have it.
Your friend,
Alfie Rose
I never replied to his letter, God forgive me. I do not know whether or not he came home.
It is December now, and cold. Dusk falls earlier every day, and the trees in the grounds here have lost all their leaves. At night, if I open my window, I can sometimes hear the birds Grandfer called windles calling to one another, high in the darkness overhead.
This morning my friend Aisha took me in a silver motor-car to Market Stoundham, for tea in a café, and I wore my red winter coat. The town was both different and the same, and I felt at every moment that I might be about to glimpse myself as a girl, hurrying down Sheepdrove or entering the corn exchange with Father, holding his hand. But of course all that was many years ago, and that child is me now, something I know to be true but can’t quite believe all the same.
I didn’t choose my red coat, but I like it. Everyone has been so kind.
Aisha is from Ipswich; she is some kind of volunteer. She’s been coming to see me for some weeks now; we talk about my grandmother, Clarity, and John’s horse magic, and what little I know about witch-bottles and poppets and the ballads and songs we all used to sing. She even brought me a copy of Constance’s book, This Happy Breed, which she had found in a library; but I told her I had no wish, no wish at all, to read it now. I gave her a corn dolly to thank her for her friendship; she asked if it was from the olden days, but I had to confess that I’d made it in one of the craft classes they put on here.
Aisha has promised to help me settle in to my new lodgings, and to come and see me often. They say I will be in by Christmas, and that everything I need will be taken care of; I only hope someone has thought to season an ash faggot for the fire. Perhaps the person on hand there will have done so – for they tell me someone will be available in case anything should happen to me, or to one of the others. In case I should need help.
I was somewhat apprehensive about leaving here when they first broke the news – we all were – but now I am so looking forward to going back to the place where I grew up. It will only appear strange for a moment, I’m sure of it; and then it will seem quite ordinary, and I shall be part of it all once again.
Historical Note
The Order of English Yeomanry is an invention, but in febrile, depression-hit 1930s Britain dozens of similar groups, large and small, sprang up in town and country, many with openly fascist agendas and beliefs. Some were little more than crank outfits, but others wielded real influence, both locally and in press and parliament. These complex, fragmented groups differed from one another, sometimes slightly, sometimes profoundly; but all drew from a murky broth of nationalism, anti-Semitism, nativism, protectionism, anti-immigration sentiment, economic autarky, secessionism, militarism, anti-Europeanism, rural revivalism, nature worship, organicism, landscape mysticism and distrust of big business – particularly international finance. Fascism in Britain was not a phenomenon solely of the far right; it proved attractive to some disaffected socialists, some veterans of the World War One trenches (most famously Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter), and some suffragettes. The British Union of Fascists claimed that 10 per cent of their candidates were women, a higher proportion than for any other party.
In 1945, the year Auschwitz was liberated and the horror of the Nazis’ Final Solution revealed, George Orwell published an essay called ‘Antisemitism in Britain’. He began by recording instances of anti-Semitic speech he had encountered in the previous years, among them:
Middle-aged office employee: ‘I generally come to work by bus. It takes longer, but I don’t care about using the Underground from Golders Green nowadays. There’s too many of the Chosen Race travelling on that line.’
Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: ‘No, I do not like Jews. I’ve never made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not antisemitic, of course.’
Middle-class woman: ‘Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they push their way to the head of queues, and so on. They’re so abominably selfish. I think they’re responsible for a lot of what happens to them.’
‘Something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil,’ Orwell wrote.
A final note. In the early 1990s, when I was studying for my A-levels, I began spending an afternoon a week at one of the last of the big psychiatric hospitals (or ‘mental hospitals’, as they were known), then earmarked for closure. With other volunteers, I helped with occupational therapy classes, the aim of which was to ready patients for deinstitutionalisation as part of the ‘care in the community’ programme which had begun in the 1980s.
Many of the elderly patients had spent their entire lives in the hospital, or had been transferred there from county asylums at a young age. Most had diagnoses ranging from psychosis and schizophrenia to Huntington’s chorea, but several of the elderly women, I was told, had been committed after becoming depressed, falling pregnant as teenagers, suffering trauma of one kind or another, or simply behaving in a way that was somehow troublesome to those around them. They had never been allowed to leave.
Acknowledgements
I learned an awful lot in the process of writing All Among the Barley: about the interwar years; about East Anglia; about farming; about storytelling; about myself. I learned the most, by a long chalk, from my agent, Jenny Hewson, and my editor, Alexa von Hirschberg, two brilliant women without whom . . . well, I dread to think.
This book was lucky enough to have several early readers, and their feedback was very valuable. Thank you, Matthew Adams, Saskia Daniel, Sarah Ditum, Peter Francis, Lewis Heriz, Helen Macdonald, Paraic O’Donnell and Peter Rogers.
I am once again grateful to the writer and psychotherapist Martha Crawford (www.subtextconsultation.com), who helped me understand what a psychotic episode might look (and feel) like, and how it might be represented on the page.
My copyeditor, Silvia Crompton, was a dream to work with. I will be eternally grateful for her eagle eye when it came to continuity, as well as for the sensitivity of her edit.
Thank you once again to David Mann, Bloomsbury’s jacket designer extraordinaire; and to Neil Gower, whose heart-stoppingly beautiful maps made the world of the book real, and brought it to life.
Thank you to the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), and the University of Reading, for illuminating 1930s farm life and agricultural practices for me. In particular, thanks are due to Dr Paddy Bullard, Dr Jeremy Burchardt and Dr Oliver Douglas.
Thank you to all the people who put me up, looked after me and gave me the time and space to write: Anthony Young; Jo, Tom, Matilda and Anstice Ridge; Ted Ridge, Lauli Moschini and Sukey and Xander Ridge; Joanna Walsh; everyone at Gladstone’s Library; and Elizabeth and Michael Evans.
Thank you to Sam Lee, who gave me the timely gift of the book’s title.
And thank you, finally, to Marigold Atkey, Jasmine Horsey, Rachel Wilkie and Ros El
lis at Bloomsbury; Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey, authors of 20th Century Pub: From Beer House to Booze Bunker ; Ian Brice; Mike Burgess of www.hiddenea.com; Brian Clist; Susan Golomb; Jonathon Green of www.greensdictofslang.com; Sjoerd Levelt; John Lewis-Stempel; Jamie Muir; Andrew Roberts, creator of studymore.org.uk/mhhtim.htm; Matt Shardlow of Buglife; Adelle Stripe; the Suffolk Horse Society; Pip Wright (pipwright.com); and Louisa Yates.
Note on the Author
Melissa Harrison's debut novel Clay won the Portsmouth First Fiction Award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year for 2013. Her second novel At Hawthorn Time was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2015 and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 and the Encore Award. Rain, a work of non-fiction, was longlisted for the 2016 Wainwright Prize. A nature writer, critic and columnist for The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian, she lives in London and Suffolk.
melissaharrison.co.uk / @M_Z_Harrison
Also available by Melissa Harrison
Clay
An intimate and captivating portrait of four people struggling with the concrete confines of city life.
Eight-year-old TC skips school to explore the city’s overgrown, forgotten corners. Sophia, seventy-eight, watches with concern as he slips past her window, through the little park she loves. She’s writing to her granddaughter, Daisy, whose privileged upbringing means she exists in a different world from TC – though the two children live less than a mile apart.
Jozef spends his days doing house clearances, his nights working in a takeaway. He can’t forget the farm he left behind in Poland, its woods and fields still a part of him, although he is a thousand miles away. When he meets TC he finds a kindred spirit: both lonely, both looking for something, both lost.
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