There are a tremendous number of people who garden morning, noon and night and can’t begin to be got out of their gardens, but they are a different calibre to myself. They are ex‐army officers, ex‐naval officers. About seventy per cent of the gardens open to the public in East Anglia belong to ex‐military men. I think it must be something to do with time and order. They love complete order and nobody can stop them imposing it on a garden. There must be something in this because I have thought about it a lot. So many of my employer’s friends are middle‐aged army officers, retired, and they are all fascinated by horticulture. The things which they will do to make a garden is astounding. I’ve known them to drive all the way to Wiltshire to pick up a stone sink. You see, gardening allows them to go on having routine, order, tidiness, straight edges, upright posts. You can be strict in a garden. They were fantastically strict in the Tank Corps barracks. And tidy! ‘If it doesn’t move, whitewash it,’ they used to say. You look at the names belonging to the National Gardens Scheme and you’ll find it’s three‐quarters officers. And how they work! Although if they’re going to have a garden and going to have a good one they have hardly got any alternative. I know a colonel near here who, when he opens his garden for the National Gardens Scheme, has all his machines and tools on display. All the mowers, barrows, spades – everything – are polished and oiled and lined up! You wouldn’t have got Lordship doing a daft thing like that – but then you wouldn’t have got Lordship letting Tom, Dick and Harry into the park, let alone into the gardens.
The village gardens aren’t as good as they used to be for the very simple reason that a man can go to work for an hour or two extra and earn enough money to buy vegetables for a week, whereas, if he grows them, he’s got to dig, buy seed, sow, hoe, water, worry, take up and I don’t know what – and all for something he can buy for a few bob. There’s not time, anyway, because probably he is out to work, fruit‐picking and that sort of thing, and so it is easier for them both to have a packet of frozen peas handy. Life now is much less elaborate and, consequently, much less interesting. As a qualified judge of flowers, I would like to say that Akenfield is more horticultural‐minded than it used to be, but it is not, and this is the truth. Not the ordinary village worker. But then you have only to go the next step higher, the salesman in his new bungalow, and it’s a very different story. Their gardening is a form of ownership and ‘getting on’. They garden neatly. They don’t know the difference between tidiness and neatness. They buy expensive ugly things. Their gardens look like shopping. These are the new gardeners who are making the nurserymen rich. It is not the young farm‐worker – I wish it was.
The young boys in the village won’t touch the garden. They earn too much money as far as I can see. They don’t pay enough for what they are learning. I had to help my father in the garden when I was a boy; there was nothing else to do. It was expected of me. You wouldn’t get a boy to do this now. You just can’t reach the boy. I have cousins in the village only just ten years younger than myself and I can’t connect or talk to them. I can talk to educated boys, that is different. They are not changing. Supposing I wanted to talk about horticulture, it wouldn’t do for me to talk to a village boy of about seventeen from the council houses. I’d be much better if I went over to Framlingham College and talked to a seventeen‐year‐old there. The boy from the village seems to have no interest in anything. That is why the village garden is in decline. But the gardening industry is booming. You have only to go round the nurseries at the week‐end – all the car parks are absolutely full. But not with proper village people. The cars belong to suburban folk. They are intelligent and lively. They are busy with gardens, boats and holidays. They buy very different things to the old country chap who spent no more on his garden than the price of a packet of carrot seed.
I have been judging village flower shows and gardens for nearly ten years, and am one of the officials of the Village Produce Association. There are branches all over the country and Suffolk is actually a very poor one. It is an organization run by the Rural Community Council. Each judge – there are about forty of us in Suffolk – attends about a dozen flower shows during the season. It is very progressive and professional; the old‐time amateur judge is out. The shows, and gardening itself, are spoilt by the tendency to try and grow the biggest vegetable or flower. People are not nearly so keen on the professional exhibiting side of things in Suffolk as they are in Yorkshire, for instance. They are more interested in Suffolk in being the first to have peas or potatoes, or whatever it is. The great thing is to produce something before your neighbour does. Real gardening is dying, dying… dying. There aren’t many gardeners of my calibre left. I am a young man who has got caught in the old ways. I am thirty‐nine and I am a Victorian gardener, and this is why the world is strange to me.
Gregory Gladwell · aged forty‐four · blacksmith
Nineteen‐nineteen was the year my grandfather had to shut down the forge. He never went back to it. I used to walk by it, eyeing it and thinking. But nothing was rosy wherever you looked. Nearly everybody went out of business. Nothing was sold. People who had left school began to think about the Big House. You realized that it was there, with all the gardeners, grooms and maids and food. You have to face it, the Big House was then an asset to the village. It paid us to raise our hats, which is why we did it. I hear people run the gentry down now but they were better than the farmers in a crisis. Theirs was the only hand which fed us which we could see. So we bowed a bit; it cost nothing, even if it wasn’t all courtesy. Nobody left, nobody went away. People were content. However hard up they were, they stayed content. The boys had the arse out of their trousers, no socks and the toes out of their boots. My brothers and myself were like this, yet so happy. I think other families were the same. The village kept close.
The biggest change which I have seen in Akenfield is the growth of discontent. Greed. Nobody ever said, ‘Bugger you, Jack, my head is out!’ when I was a boy. When you wanted help it was given. It was ‘Thank you very much’, and that was that. You mustn’t pay. It was good enough for a row if you offered to pay. Payment was a crime. This was how things were when I told my parents that I wanted to go into the family business. My grandfather had died and my grandmother was paying a man to open the forge and try and do some trade. My father couldn’t afford to pay the apprenticeship fee of half‐a‐crown a week, so I had to do another job as well. I worked from eight to five at the forge and then three more hours night and morning for a man who kept 160 pigs. I was paid a‐penny‐a‐pig‐a‐week to feed and clean them out. They weren’t the little old things you get today, they were big pigs. Enormous… 30–35 stone apiece. The pigman used to pay me when the pigs went to market. It would sometimes come to £5 10s., which was a tidy fortune.
It was all agricultural work at the forge. Mostly shoeing. All the horses were still with us and at seventeen I was shoeing an average of eight horses a day. I remember making my first horseshoe. I started work at the forge on August 2nd and I made this shoe on August 4th. They put you straight into the collar in those days! There was no messing about. When you got a job you began doing it right away. You were expected to catch on quick.
The man my grandmother allowed to run the forge was old and when I was just over seventeen he retired, and I had to carry on alone. I now had to do every mortal thing myself. What I didn’t know I had to find out or make up. There was nobody to ask. It was a terrible job, but there, we got over it. It was still all farm work, of course. Mostly shoeing. The horseman would stand at the head while the work was being done, so that was a bit of help. He could hold it like. I was such a thin little lad it was a masterpiece how I could hold anything! There was no thought of what you might call art‐and‐craft work, only plough counters, harrows, door‐hinges and such farm things. There was no money about; everybody was bare‐poor. I charged 6s. 8d. to put four shoes on a horse. I reckoned that with a quiet horse with good feet the task would take an hour. I hardly made a profit. The
re are still plenty of horses round here, of course – hunt horses, pony‐club horses – it is most unusual for a village to have so many of them around. And I don’t mind shoeing them. The trouble is that people who have these kind of horses reckon on you shoeing them for next to nothing. I won’t do that. Not now. If people will pay what I charge and won’t grumble, then I’ll shoe for them, but not otherwise. I am supposed to have served a five‐year apprenticeship, and if work isn’t worth a little when you’ve done that, then blast them. I won’t mess after it. I remember how hard it was to make myself free, for that is what I was really up to when I was here all alone before the war. I don’t know what it is, I can’t explain it, but you see I am the only one out of all my family – and there are five of us brothers – who had any intention of coming to the smithy. My brothers couldn’t have cared less about the place. I wanted to come, had to come. But it is silly to be sentimental. What I sometimes think is that I am my grandfather, an old one. It is the truth when I say that I can sit in the shop of a Sunday, smoking my pipe, and be as happy as if I were sitting in the house. I wasn’t born soon enough, that is the trouble. By rights, I should be dead and gone. I think like the old people. I have a tendency to do what I want to do, if the maggot bites. However pressing matters are, I do what I fancy. I think, probably, my attitude could be wrong. We have our pressures now with bills and bank managers and book‐keeping, but I say to myself, this is not the highest thing; this is business. You are a tradesman; this is the highest thing. Making, doing. I feel I should have lived during the 1700s. That would have done me. But I am losing my place, aren’t I?
Well, the war came, and one or two German prisoners came to help me out. They were pleasant lads. When they went back I had a boy from the army school, after he had finished his training. He had been an army apprentice farrier and I finished him off. When he left, one or two more arrived and for the first time in my life I had a few minutes to spare, so I began to amuse myself by making ornamental things. I entered one or two competitions and won prizes. And then, after the war, this wonderful thing happened, I married. The business was steady now. I had over a hundred horses on my books which had to be shod three times a year, which meant that I was making 1,200 shoes a year. Of course, the horses were passing, but so slowly that it didn’t seem possible that they were soon to disappear off the farms for ever. I still saw the things I sent to the crafts section of the Suffolk Show as a hobby. I couldn’t imagine living by such work.
Then new people came and bought up the old houses. They’d spend a mint of money ‘putting it all back as it was’. They couldn’t buy the things they needed for the restoration; they hadn’t been made for donkey’s years. So I had to start making them again. My wife went round, keeping her eye open for bolts, latches, handles, grates; drawing them and finding out their dates, and I made more of them as exactly as you’re not likely to tell the difference. Mind you, it took time. It took all hours. But it was a fine thing for me to have something lying on the bench before me made by one of the old men, and my hands doing again what his had done.
[… ]
I think I am a dedicated man. I won’t have financial trouble – I mean, to hell with it! I won’t have life all spoilt by money. I don’t worry about dying, although I am mid‐way through, but I dread being old and unable to work. We are all living in the rat‐race, however far out in the wilds we are. The village is so quiet now. Nobody walks about in it. You don’t say you saw your neighbour, you say you passed his car. People wave and toot where they used to talk. They’re all out for what they can get. Nobody goes to look at what somebody else has done and have a chat about it. If you saw somebody ploughing or clearing the marsh, you used to meet up with a neighbour and say, ‘Let’s go and see what he’s up to.’
I talk to the boys. I train them in ‘steps’. The oldest is twenty‐two now and doesn’t want much supervising. But the others are fifteen and seventeen and you have to watch them. I treat them as individuals. There’s young Den, if you said something amiss to him it would upset him so much you wouldn’t do nothing with him for a week. Big as an ox and soft as a girl. He is a great tradesman already. But Robin, you have to swear at him regular once a month, or you wouldn’t do anything with him. If those two boys had been apprenticed together, you would have made a man of one and offended the other – or vice versa. You must never offend a boy. I always look at the parents before I take an apprentice. If you know the home, you already know the son.
I’m against sport. I hate it. If work and sport changed places, this country wouldn’t be in a muddle. Sport and holidays have become a mania, an insanity. If anybody wanted a holiday, I wouldn’t stop them from taking one, but I hate holidays as much as I hate sport, and that’s saying something. These boys won’t be like me; they’ll never work as I have worked – and perhaps they shouldn’t have to. I’ve been working two pieces of metal together on the anvil with the sledge‐hammer, when my vest caught fire and I daren’t pause to put it out! When two men were working, hitting the anvil in turn, they would get each other’s sparks. You would be open right down the front and they flew against your nakedness. A blacksmith always rolls his shirtsleeves under, so the sparks don’t lodge in the folds. Now, with the emery sparks, we have to watch out for eye‐trouble.
[… ]
Jubal Merton · aged sixty · wheelwright and blacksmith
I’ve lived in the village all my life. I’ve never been away. I left school in 1922, when I was thirteen, and was apprenticed to my father and my uncle, who owned these premises. My father was the wheelwright and my uncle was the blacksmith. I was the only apprentice and they were very strict. ‘You’ve got to have a good eye,’ they said. ‘Everything that’s got to be done in wheel‐wrighting has got to be done by the eye. You’ve got to let your eye be your guide.’ They were right, of course. What we do here isn’t like ordinary carpenter’s work. When you get the hub of a wheel it has to be morticed once and only once first go.
The first job I had to do was to make spokes, and sometimes I was allowed to saw out the shafts for the tumbrils. All the shafts were cut out by handsaw from heavy planks of wood about 3½ inches thick and about two feet wide. We planed these and shaped them up fine. Heaps of times I did a shaft and I’d think, ‘That’s lovely!’ Then my father would rub his hand up it and say, ‘Why, boy, it ain’t half done!’ He was a first‐class wheelwright and was known all over Suffolk, and my grandfather and great‐grandfather were the same. They all worked in this same shop and the wagons they made lie about in the farmyards. They ain’t used but they can’t wear out. When I got so that I could use a plane and a wheel‐shave, I started to make wheelbarrows. They were a difficult job, a most difficult job indeed. Especially the front pieces which we called the stumps. The stump was another thing you had to cut right first time else it was no good. There was no second chance in so much of what we did. It made us cautious but at the same time it made us willing to take a risk. It was as much in the eye as in the hand. There was a moment when you had to say now! Then you could breathe again.
One of the most exacting things was making the fellies [fellows] for the wheel. There would be six fellies and when they were put together they made the rim of the wheel. These were all cut out by an old bow‐saw which belonged to my grandfather and the inner part shaped with an adze. They were made of ash and the wheel‐wright always chose roadside trees for his fellies. He’d never touch a low‐meadow ash because that wouldn’t do at all. Of course, ash that grew down by the river was lovely timber to use, but a wheelwright would never use it. He went to the hedges, where the wood was tough and hard. He’d walk through the lanes and note the ashes and when he saw a good one, he’d buy it, cut it down and let it lie in the ditch for a couple of years until the bark fell off. Then it was ready. He also looked for shaft wood. If you look at the ash trees you’ll find that many of their boughs grow in the shape of shafts. When my father saw a good shaft shape a‐growing, he’d keep his eye on it until it
was just the right size to cut and plane. Then he’d have it.
For making the hubs we always chose wych‐elm. A wych‐elm twists in the growth and it is impossible to split it. You cut the hub out of a ring of the trunk and fixed the fellies to it by twelve spokes. The bodywork of the wagons was made of oak, although some farmers had a fancy for poplar wood because you couldn’t scratch splinters out of poplar with a rake. It was the old English white poplar which they fancied.
When I had helped to make a wagon I had to learn to paint it. We did everything in this shop, you see. The farmers were most particular about the painting. The colours were all bought in Ipswich. There was red lead and vegetable black, white lead, which was like thick distemper, and there was Chinese red and Venetian red, all these were the old colours used by the wagon‐makers. The bodywork was all painted blue. Always blue. The blue rode well in the corn. The wheels were done in Chinese red and lined‐out with Venetian red, which was marvellously expensive – about £1 an ounce. We mixed all the paints here. Paint for small jobs was ground on a little stone but if we had a lot to do we ground it in a paint‐mill. Nothing whatever was wasted of anything. You had to grind paint very, very slowly so that the mill didn’t warm‐up. If it did it would discolour the paint. The farmers were very proud of their wagons and tumbrils and would wash them down every week‐end. Some of them had to go to Ipswich two or three times a week and they had to look fine. A tumbril could travel with about two tons a time. They were beautiful and they had to be kept beautiful. They weren’t very expensive. My father made tumbrils for £12 a time when he was a young man. When I first started making them they cost £25 – that is a one‐horse tumbril. A wagon would cost about £40. Once they were finished they lasted for ever. The village was full of wagons a hundred years old or more when I was a boy, and still perfect.
Voices of Akenfield Page 5