PENGUIN BOOKS — ENGLISH JOURNEYS
Voices of Akenfield
1. Voices of Akenfield Ronald Blythe
2. The Wood John Stewart Collis
3. From Dover to the Wen William Cobbett
4. The Pleasures of English Food Alan Davidson
5. Through England on a Side‐Saddle Celia Fiennes
6. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Other Poems Various
7. A Shropshire Lad A. E. Housman
8. Cathedrals and Castles Henry James
9. Walks in the Wheat‐fields Richard Jefferies
10. The Beauties of a Cottage Garden Gertrude Jekyll
11. Country Churches Simon Jenkins
12. A Wiltshire Diary Francis Kilvert
13. Some Country Houses and their Owners James Lees‐Milne
14. The Clouded Mirror L. T. C. Rolt
15. Let Us Now Praise Famous Gardens Vita Sackville‐West
16. One Green Field Edward Thomas
17. English Folk Songs Ralph Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd
18. Country Lore and Legends Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson
19. Birds of Selborne Gilbert White
20. Life at Grasmere Dorothy and William Wordsworth
VOICES OF
AKENFIELD
Ronald
Blythe
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This selection taken from Akenfield, first published by Allen Lane 1969
Published in Penguin Books 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-141-93283-5
Leonard Thompson · aged seventy‐one · farm worker
There were ten of us in the family and as my father was a farm labourer earning 13s. a week you can just imagine how we lived. I will tell you the first thing which I can remember. It was when I was three – about 1899. We were all sitting round the fire waiting for my soldier brother to come home – he was the eldest boy in the family. He arrived about six in the evening and had managed to ride all the way from Ipswich station in a milk‐cart. This young man came in, and it was the first time I had seen him. He wore a red coat and looked very lively. Mother got up and kissed him but Father just sat and said, ‘How are you?’ Then we had tea, all of us staring at my brother. It was dark, it was the winter‐time. A few days later he walked away and my mother stood right out in the middle of the road, watching. He was going to fight in South Africa. He walked smartly down the lane until his red coat was no bigger than a poppy. Then the tree hid him. We never saw him again. He went all through the war but caught enteric fever afterwards and died. He was twenty‐one.
Very soon after this it was very hard living indeed for the family. There were seven children at home and father’s wages had been reduced to 10s. a week. Our cottage was nearly empty – except for people. There was a scrubbed brick floor and just one rug made of scraps of old clothes pegged into a sack. The cottage had a living‐room, a larder and two bedrooms. Six of us boys and girls slept in one bedroom and our parents and the baby slept in the other. There was no newspaper and nothing to read except the Bible. All the village houses were like this.
Our food was apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, and we drank our tea without milk or sugar. Skim milk could be bought from the farm but it was thought a luxury. Nobody could get enough to eat no matter how they tried. Two of my brothers were out to work. One was eight years old and he got 3s. a week, the other got about 7s. Our biggest trouble was water. There was no water near, it all had to be fetched from the foot of a hill nearly a mile away. ‘Drink all you can at school’, we were told – there was a tap at school. You would see the boys and girls filling themselves up like camels before they left school so that they would have enough water to last the day. I always remember the bitter metal taste of the tap in my mouth; it was cold – beautiful! I remember once coming home from school and feeling almost mad for water. My mother was washing the linen on the doorstep and when her back was turned I swigged two cupfuls from the tub. Up it came at once – it was all soapsuds! Mother did no more than box my ears. That is how they thought about you at that time.
Our parents and all the cottage people were very religious and very patriotic. The patriotic songs and the church hymns seemed equally holy. They took our breath away. The boys marched through the village singing,
Lords Roberts and Kitchener, Generals Buller and
White,
All dressed in khaki, going out to fight…
and their faces would look sincere and important. It was all ‘my country’ – country, country, country. You heard nothing else. There was no music in the village then except at the chapel or the church and our family liked it so much that we hurried from one to the other to hear all we could. People like us, who went where we fancied on a Sunday, were called ‘Devil‐dodgers’. We all went to one service after another and ate packets of bread‐and‐jam in between. People believed in religion then, which I think was a good thing because if they hadn’t got religion there would have been a revolution. Nobody would have stuck it. Religion disciplined us and gave us the strength to put up with things. The parson was very respected. He could do what he liked with us when he felt like it. One day he came to our house and told my eldest sister, who was eleven, to leave school. ‘I think you needn’t finish,’ he said. ‘You can go and be maid to old Mrs Barney Wickes, now she has lost her husband.’ Mrs Barney Wickes was blind and my sister was paid a penny a day out of Parish Relief to look after her.
People were strict. Parents were strict. All the village children thought of was how to get away, how to ‘get on’. But we had our games and treats. We had a game called ‘Hudney’. A stone was placed on a brick and had to be knocked off by another stone when it was aimed at it. When you ran to retrieve the stone a boy would try and hit you with a ball and if he did you were out of the game. We played this for hours on end. We had no toys, no books and we didn’t play cricket or football. But all the boys and young men swam naked in the river in the summertime. It was our biggest happiness. Boys were washed until they were about two, then their bodies didn’t see water again until they learned to swim. We didn’t look dirty. We were healthy, strong children, but small. One of our great desires was to have cake. Nearly all our food was boiled on account of there being no ov
en in most of the cottages. A ‘treat’ was any party where you could eat cake.
I walked two miles to school. There were so many children you could hardly squeeze in the room. All the same, it was very cold in the winter. Most of the boys had suits and boots on with nothing underneath. Every now and then we used to have to stand on the outside of our desks and mark‐time to get our circulation back. We did left‐right, left‐right for about five minutes – good God, what a row we made! Later on, I heard this sound again in Gallipoli. It seemed homely and familiar. We must have been bashing some landing‐stage. The school was useless. The farmers came and took boys away from it when they felt like it, the parson raided it for servants. The teacher was a respectable woman who did her best. Sometimes she would bring the Daily Graphic down and show us the news. I looked forward to leaving school so that I could get educated. I knew that education was in books, not in school: there were no books there. I was a child when I left but I already knew that our ‘learning’ was rubbish, that our food was rubbish and that I should end as rubbish if I didn’t look out.
When I was six we moved to another house. It was a tied‐cottage with a thatched roof and handsome beams. My father said, ‘We shall be better off, boys, we shall have a nice spring of water just across the road, and that will be a great relief. Also we shall have a nice big garden with two apple trees, a Doctor Harvey and a Blenheim Orange.’ We moved to this house in 1904. As soon as we got there, mother went stone‐picking in the fields. She didn’t have to do this because we were living in a tied‐cottage but because we had to buy some new clothes. We helped her when we got back from school at five o’clock. She had to pick up twenty‐four bushels of stones a day to get 2s. Each parish had to mend its own lanes then and the stones were used for this. A tumbril was put in the field and a line was chalked round it. When you had filled it up to the line you got the 2s. It would take the whole day. We did it every minute we weren’t at school and all through the holidays. It was all I can remember.
But during the harvest holiday we had a change – gleaning. The women would meet and say, ‘Is Scarlets ready for gleaning yet? Is Great Mosses?’ – these were the names of the fields. They meant, not has the field been cut but have they cleared the ‘policeman’. The policeman was the name given to the last trave or stook which the farmers would leave standing in the middle of the field so they could have time to rake‐up all the loose corn they could before the gleaners arrived. There was one farmer who made a habit of keeping the gleaners waiting and one night a young man stole the ‘policeman’. The next morning the gleaners hurried in and gleaned masses – the field hadn’t been raked, you see. The whole village was laughing – except the farmer. He raked‐up quick the next year, I can tell you!
I gleaned all my boyhood. I ran away from it once but came to grief, and since the results have been with me all my life, I will tell you about it. When I was six I got fed up with being in the gleaning‐field with all the women, so I ran off to help the boy who worked the cattle‐cake machine. In no time my hand was caught and my fingers were squashed. The farmer was just coming up by the granary on his horse when he heard me screaming. ‘What have you been up to, you young scamp?’ he shouted. ‘My fingers – they’re in the cake‐breaker!’ And he said – I shall never forget it – ‘Get you off home then!’ But when he saw my hand he changed his tune and said, ‘Get up to the house’. The farmer’s wife tied some rag round my hand and took me home and my mother wheeled me miles to the doctor’s in a pram. My sister was home from service, so she came with us and held me while the doctor scraped the grease out of my wounds with a knife, stitched up one finger, cut another, pared it like a stick and tied what was left to the bone, and then moved on to the next finger. I lifted the roof, I can tell you. There was no anaesthetic, nothing. My sister began to faint and the doctor got on to her something terrific. ‘Damn silly girl – clear off outside if you can’t stand it! Fetch my groom in.’ So the groom came and held me until it was finished. All the time the doctor worked he shouted. ‘What did you do it for? Why? Damn little nuisance! Stupid little fool!’
Nobody used pity then, and especially not to children, and particularly not to boys. The farmer told my father and he said, ‘I’ll give him something to think about when I get home!’ It was harvest so it was late when he returned. ‘Where’s that boy Leonard?’ he said ‘I’m going to give him a good hiding.’ ‘He’s gone to bed, he’s had enough,’ said mother. My father didn’t realize how bad it was, you see. The tops of three of my fingers had been cut off. So he didn’t touch me.
There were a lot of hidings then. My father was a good man and didn’t like giving them to us, but some people did. Father never smoked or drank, and he looked after his children. He had a wonderful character in the parish. He would go to work with three‐quarters of a loaf of bread and a little bit of cheese, and maybe a couple of onions, but when we ran to meet him after his day’s work, he would give us the cheese. He had saved it for us. ‘I can do without that,’ he would say. We were thrashed a lot at school. Fathers would be ordered to the school to hold their sons while the mistress thrashed them. Most of the teachers were big thrashers. But we were tough, very tough. Everybody said, ‘don’t‐don’t’ to boys then and after awhile we didn’t listen. We were wondering how we could get away.
I left school when I was thirteen, on April 20th when the corn was low. I helped my mother pulling up docks in the Big Field for a shilling an acre, which my mother took. She could see that I was too big to have money taken from me like this, so when the farmer came round she said, ‘Can’t you give my boy a proper job?’ She meant a regular job with a wage. But the farmer just laughed and rode away. So the next week I tried my luck at another farm. Mr Wakeling, this farmer, was very tall and he had three sons of about eighteen to twenty‐one who were all over six feet. They all stood looking down at me and smiling. ‘So you are thirteen and you have left school, but what can you do?’ ‘I can do anything.’ ‘Well, there’s a mangold field over there – you do that.’
‘What are you going to get?’ asked my mother when I told her. ‘I never asked and he never said,’ I replied. It was the beginning of being grown‐up.
I had a week in this field, singling mangolds, and I did well because I had often done the job before, after school. The farmer came and looked and said, ‘You’ve done very well, my little man. How much have I got to give you?’ ‘My mother said half‐a‐crown but perhaps you would sooner give me a rise.’ But the farmer thought half‐a‐crown was good, which was what I got for sixty hours’ work. When the harvest came along, the boy who was doing the milking, and who was seventeen and strong, was told to load corn and I had to take over the cows. The farmer’s riding ponies and then his sons’ ponies were added. Then the farmer said, ‘You’ll have to work Sundays now, but I shall be giving you another sixpence.’ So I got 3s. a week. Mother said, ‘How lucky you are!’
Shortly after this my father came to grief with his farmer and we had to leave the tied‐cottage. We moved down by the river and when we were settled father took my brother and myself to his new employer and, twizzling me round so that I could be seen, said, ‘Here’s a good strong boy. I want 4s. 6d. a week for him.’ ‘We’ll see about that at the end of the week,’ said the farmer. Then my father made my brother stand forward – he was fifteen – and said, ‘Look what a fine lad. I want 8s. a week for him.’ The farmer thought for a minute, looked us up and down and said, ‘All right.’
The second week that I was at this new farm I had to drive a herd of cattle to Ipswich. I was thirteen and had lived only ten miles away all my life, but I had never been to this big town before. The farmer went ahead in his trap and waited for me at Ipswich market. He sold the cows and bought some more, and told me to drive them back to the farm. Most of my work was like this, walking cattle along the roads backwards and forwards to the market – about twenty‐five miles a day. The farmer was a dealer. I stayed with him a year and four months and was
paid 4s. 6d. a week. And then I got into a hell of a row. I’d driven a flock of sheep from Ipswich and the next morning they found that one had died. The farmer was in a terrible stew. He ran down the field and met my mother on her way to chapel and told her all about it. I had driven the sheep too hard, he said. ‘And you drive boys too hard!’ said my mother – she had no fear at all. Well, the truth of the matter is that she said a lot of things she’d only thought until then, and so I left the farm. It must seem that there was war between farmers and their men in those days. I think there was, particularly in Suffolk. These employers were famous for their meanness. They took all they could from the men and boys who worked their land. They bought their life’s strength for as little as they could. They wore us out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour. Fourteen young men left the village in 1909–11 to join the army. There wasn’t a recruiting drive, they just escaped. And some people just changed their sky, as they say, and I was one of them.
Every week in the Suffolk Chronicle and Mercury there was an advertisement which said, ‘Lads for Yorkshire. Milk or Ploughing. Good Homes. Fares Paid. Apply: Woods of Stowmarket.’ All the Yorkshire farm‐workers, you see, had left the land to work in the factories and mills. So they hit on this idea of getting workers up from Suffolk, where things were desperate, to cultivate the Yorkshire farms. So I thought, right, I’ll go! I was getting 9s. a week for a seventy‐five‐hour week in a cowshed. I had four hours off a week, from 10–2 on a Sunday. So I went to Yorkshire. I met Mr Woods on Bury St Edmunds station and he gave me my ticket. I went to a farm in the West Riding. It was the first time I had been away from home. I lived in a little old room on the farm with two other boys and was told that I would get £12 at the end of the year, which was 5s. a week, but also my food and keep. The food was good; we ate it with the servant in the kitchen. We worked like little donkeys until we were a bit unsteady on our feet, then it was bed. Then work. I had to pay a pound a year to an old woman to do my washing, pay a pound to get home again and a pound for boots and corduroys, but I came to Suffolk with eight golden sovereigns in my hand and felt a millionaire.
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