Voices of Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

  Like everything else in the village, the fruit trees are being made to fit into less and less space. We have four acres of apples which Mike Poole and myself trim on the ‘pillar’ system, pruning away so that a maiden is left with the main stem going up to about ten feet eventually. It is a bit complicated to learn. It means that instead of getting 132–6 trees on an acre of land, you can get over 300. It also means that all the apples are low enough to be picked from a short pair of steps. But we have come up against a snag. With so much pruning you get a lot of little spurs and a density of leaves, so the apples don’t ripen all that well.

  Michael Poole · aged thirty‐seven · orchard worker

  I used to get up of a morning. I used to take two pails. I used to climb Scarlett Hill to the pump. I used to carry the water home. I used to find the house all dark, all sleeping. I used to clank the pails and shout, ‘Come you together now! Let’s be having you!’ and my dad would jump out of bed bang! I used to walk back to Scarlett Hill, to old Mackay’s house. I used to hang around his door and then go in and watch him cut fat bacon and slip it in the pan. Then eggs. I used to say, ‘Is that your breakfast then, Mr Mackay?’ and he’d say, ‘That is.’ He’d slip a bit more into the pan – ‘For the dog,’ he’d say. ‘What dog, Mr Mackay?’ – ‘That damn young puppy,’ he’d say. I used to take a chair. After breakfast I used to say, ‘It’s nice for you to have a mite of company like, Mr Mackay.’ And he’d say, ‘Oh?’ I used to be ten then.

  I went to work on the fruit when I was fourteen. I never minded it. I got my money and that was the main thing. I grew, my money grew. It was nice to have it.

  Summer was best. You’d get the women come and give you a look. You’d torment them and they’d torment you. There used to be a regular procession of old girls who’d bike up from Framlingham for the picking. When I was sixteen, one of these old girls came up to me in the orchard and said, ‘Let me see your watch.’

  I didn’t answer. ‘Aren’t you going to let me see your watch then?’ I said nothing. Anyway, she could see my watch; it was lying on my waistcoat under the apple tree.

  ‘I shall take it…’ she says.

  ‘Take it then.’

  ‘I reckon you want me to take it?’ ‘I can see you’re bent on it,’ I said, ‘so you may as well.’

  So she took it, for devilry. It was on a chain and she hung it round her fat neck the whole live‐long afternoon. I wouldn’t let her see it worried me. She’d walk by and shout, ‘Come and get it!’

  I said nothing. She brought it to me about five, before she set off home. She put it over my head like a necklace and said, ‘There you are, you young bugger.’

  I wouldn’t speak to her.

  The next morning, along she comes, straight to where I’m about to start. Her arms were stuck out full length and she was all smiles. She got her mouth on my face and, my God, she must have thought it was her breakfast, or something.

  I pushed at her. I said, ‘Don’t! Look out, he’s coming!’ – He was, too. Old Fletcher the foreman. She broke away but back she arrived later when I was lying on the scythings, eating my bait. It was long grass all around.

  ‘Don’t fret,’ says she.

  I said nothing.

  ‘The coast is clear,’ she says, and comes down on me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t see nothing but grass. There was such a rocking. I couldn’t tell whether I was babe or man.

  At tea‐time the women went rushing home with their aprons full of apples – shrieking, you can be sure. They shruck a bit more when they saw me and a couple of them rang their bike bells. My old woman shouted, ‘Don’t torment him! He’s like his old watch – not so bad when he’s wound up!’ Laugh! You should have heard them!

  It was my first time.

  Christ, that was a summer and no mistake.

  Marjorie Jope · aged seventy‐nine · retired District Nurse

  I started in 1925 with Akenfield and three other villages and then, in two–three months, some more villages came under my care until I had nine altogether. I was a novelty, I can tell you. None of these places had had a nurse before; the births and deaths were attended by secretive old women, just as in the olden days. I was appointed by the local nursing association which was affiliated to the East Suffolk Nursing Association. I had a little car. There were no cars then, so you can imagine how important I looked! My salary was £2 a week and at first my father had to help me pay my lodgings. I had to pay all my own expenses but soon the villages had to raise my salary. This was done by individual people paying the Nursing Association 4s. a year. Well‐off people paid more. My first lodgings were with an old lady who disapproved if I went out earlier than nine in the morning or got back later than four in the afternoon. I changed lodgings a few times because nobody understood that I had to be free to go out and come in at all hours. The vicar had to be severe with them. His name was Mr Paternoster and the verger’s name was Creed. It sounds funny but it was a fact. Anyway, the vicar said, ‘We’ve got a nurse now and we’re not going to let her go’, and then he searched around and eventually found me a kind of hut. I soon made it into a house and then I was independent. The relief! I paid rent for it and I was always on duty in it, although officially I had Thursday afternoons off. I had the telephone and that was a novelty too. Most ordinary people didn’t use the phone: they walked or biked miles and miles with news of accidents, maternity cases, troubles of all sorts. What with the phone and people calling at all hours, it was non‐stop. I often wonder how I did it. But I was young and the young find all things possible.

  There was a great difference inside the cottages in those days. One had to explain every single thing. The most simple instructions had to be said twice over. Living conditions were very, very poor. Akenfield was an agricultural labourers’ village. The only ‘people’ here were the Cretinghams. They were the only ‘people’, you understand. So everything fell on me. I was school nurse, too, and once or twice a year, when the school doctor came round, I had to assist him examine the children. I knew them all so well they could have been my own children. I knew their homes and in most cases I had delivered them. There were so many dirty children in those days, dirty hair, dirty feet, impetigo. It was thought a disgrace to have a dirty head, but lots did. There’s nothing like that now. Children have never been as beautiful as they are now. There were quite a lot of ‘home’ children in the village in those days – more than twenty, perhaps. They came from Dr Barnardo’s and from the Church of England Children’s Home. They were all boys – nobody wanted girls. They came sometimes when they were only a few weeks’ old but they were rarely adopted in the full legal sense, perhaps because the foster‐parents would lose the home‐allowance if they were. Two of these boys became a schoolmaster and a Battle of Britain pilot and both tried to find out who they really were, but they never did. A lot of the Barnardo boys were sent to Australia when they were fourteen and new ones came in their place. Their foster‐parents didn’t seem to turn a hair when the replacement happened; it always amazed me.

  The old people were not taken care of. This is another thing which people like to think now, that grandfathers and grandmothers had an honoured place in the cottage. In fact, when they got old they were just neglected, pushed away into corners. I even found them in cupboards! Even in fairly clean and respectable houses you often found an old man or woman shoved out of sight in a dark niche. People were most suspicious at first when I called. There was no such thing as a welcome, you had to make your own way. They didn’t want anybody outside to know their business. I had to ask questions, especially about tb. They hated that. I had to collect long lists of facts about them and they were so unwilling that it often took me days. I had to feel my way, exchanging trust for trust. They had their secrets, like all families, but I had to know some of them! There were families in Akenfield who never told anyone anything. It was – their entire life, you know – all bolted up behind the back door. Not many people were taken away to the infirmaries. The
y were born at home and they died at home. I now know so much about them all – things nobody else could ever know. In time I heard everything. They told me things they could not tell each other. I knew them body and mind. None of them, neither the best nor the worst, were so very different to each other, if they did but know it. They liked to imagine they were, of course. I suppose we all do. Five years after I arrived in Akenfield it got so that I could walk in nearly every house. Sometimes they all looked so strong and well that I wondered why I had been sent for, then the worry would come spilling out. It was usually about the relations. Practically every family was related. It is the same with myself, except I don’t know my own cousins. So many village marriages used to be cousin marriages. It is different now because the young men drive about all over the place and find girls. Nobody moved a yard in the old days.

  People died from much the same things as they do now, except there was more cancer then, unless they whip the cancer patients off to Ipswich and one doesn’t hear of it. If they thought they had cancer in the old days they would keep quiet about it. They put up with it in secret for as long as they could. Things were more or less hidden – all life was hidden – and then, of course, it was difficult to move the doctors. They didn’t bother too much. Time after time I would try and get a doctor to a bad case in the village but most times he never came. He would come when he thought he would. Sick people were on parish relief but the doctors ran their own medical clubs. If people didn’t pay into the club, then they didn’t get a doctor. A doctor could not be reported for not coming, although I did report a doctor once. It was for refusing to believe that a woman had tb and telling her to get up. She got up and she collapsed. But then there was Dr Denny who would come out any time of the day or night. He was most unusual. There were quite a few country doctors in the neighbourhood but none of them did this. They were important folk then and the villagers were a bit nervous of them. But Dr Denny was different. Even if it was somebody else’s case, he’d come. As for the old family doctor – he was for the old families, if you know what I mean.

  People think of me as the person who is present at the beginning of their lives but in most cases I have been present at the end of them too. I used to stay up one night or several nights when they were passing. Some talked of God, but very, very few. Even the people who had been brought up in chapel or church rarely talked of God as they died. It is a fact. What can you make of it? I was with them as they passed. Not much talk of God at the last.

  Quite a lot of old people spent their last weeks alone. Their absence of family was only noticed at this time. I remember a clean, respectable old man who lived in a hut on the Framlingham Road. His name was Dixon and the name of his hut was ‘Travel On’. He had not worked in Akenfield but had arrived there, presumably after he had retired. Some people said he had been a sailor. He certainly looked clean like a sailor. Then people began to say, where was he? Where had he got to? So the vicar went to ‘Travel On’ and, oh dear! What a sight. Apparently Mr Dixon had been terribly ill and had just laid in his hut. Worse, he had tried to light his oil‐stove to keep warm and had knocked it over and burnt himself. The vicar had walked up after midday Communion on Sunday, just to say hello, as he thought. Instead of which he spent all the afternoon cleaning Mr Dixon and scrubbing ‘Travel On’ out. He was so convinced that it was a case of village neglect that he prayed about it during the evening service, but we later discovered that Mr Dixon had been attended by his own doctor, who, seeing he couldn’t last much longer, had simply shut the door on him. There were plenty of things like that. I often found awful, dreadful things. The village wasn’t shocked. They expected people ‘to go a bit behind at the end’.

  I’m making it sound miserable, aren’t I? It wasn’t really. It is just that Akenfield is still very close to the old conditions. People weren’t worried about these conditions because they were the only ones they knew. They were natural but bad. There was no main water. We all drank from the ponds or the pump or from some wells. It was nothing for me to nurse where the boiled water was bright green! As for my equipment, well I will tell you. I had a saucepan for boiling up my instruments, a spirit stove and several enamel bowls. I carried all this stuff about from house to house in a huge American cloth bag which I made myself. I used to have to strain all the village water through muslin before I dared use it. As well as these things, I carried plenty of odd pieces of mackintosh and a big bundle of clean rags – torn sheets from the better‐off houses mostly. We never had nearly enough dressings. As for drugs, well there was aspirin and little else. People in great pain might be given occasional morphia by the doctor. Nothing much. On the whole, people took pain and illness for granted; they weren’t very frightened. They didn’t worry very much. They supposed they would get better. Nor did they seem fearful of death. They had all worked so hard and so long, I suppose there was a kind of comfort in it.

  Mothers worried most. Families were so big that there was nothing restful in lying upstairs with a house full of children. Some families, well you knew that they did not have enough to eat, but they wouldn’t tell you. Nor could you find out. Not the real facts. I had a case on the Myddleton Road – a young mother – I knew perfectly well what the trouble was. She was hungry. So I saw the vicar and he got some of the church charity money, which was lying in the bank from one year to the next, and we bought her some ordinary good food. That was all the medicine she needed. We always tried to get the mothers to come to the village school when the county council doctor examined the children, but when he asked them what they gave these thin boys to eat the answer was always, ‘porridge, eggs, meat, cake…’ You should have heard! All the mothers thought it right to lie. They thought it shameful not to be able to feed their children, not to be able to manage. Yet I knew of quite a few children who came to school without any breakfast and who walked home to dinner after dinner of just potatoes. That was what they ate, potatoes, and for tea, bread and jam. They had meat on Sunday. And suet puddings and jam. It was easier for the children when they were babies for then they came under what we called ‘infant life protection visits’ and a very good committee which saw that they had food and clothes. There was little or no cruelty where children were concerned. The stick was used but it was thought quite normal and nobody took much notice of such punishments, although there was talk about a man in the next village who used to whip his daughters. They were getting big girls and they would walk freely along the roads.

  Did you know about our gipsies? They came every November to winter down by the Drift on the lower road. They used to camp there in what I called igloos – half hooped tents. The village didn’t like them a bit, but in those days they didn’t like anyone except themselves. They were always hostile, always suspicious. It is so different now. Looking back, I see this hostility as the worst thing. The least question and they froze. Eventually I found out that I had to get my answers without asking questions. The gipsies were so used to cold faces that they took them for granted. They had lots of babies but in all my nursing years I was only asked to visit them once, and then it was a false alarm. The young father had heated up the water on a tripod and the mother was lying in a glittering, spotless caravan. What a difference to the cottages! An old gipsy, Mr Martin, died in his caravan and it was burnt on the day of his funeral. This was in 1936. He had several children including a girl named Ocean who was a famous Suffolk pedlar – cottons, buttons, things like that. All Ocean’s children are married and live in houses now. There are eighteen people in Akenfield who are descended from the Drift gipsies. They are the good‐looking ones – you can’t miss them.

  The village people tend not to look old when they are no longer very young. It is hard to tell their age above fifty. They are strong, quiet people. They endure. Some cannot, of course. There was this middle‐aged farmer at Plomesgate, well to see him you wouldn’t think he had a care in the world above a bit of a bad leg – nothing to worry about really. Then came this message to say, ‘come q
uick’. It’s his leg, I thought. When I arrived, there was his wife and all the neighbours huddled like hens in the parlour. A woman said, ‘He’s through there, nurse.’ So I went into a shed, with her following, but when I started to pick up a sack she cried, ‘Oh, don’t do that while I’m here. Don’t! Don’t!’ The farmer had slashed his throat in the shed. That morning he had got up and made the tea as usual. Then he took some up to his wife and drank some himself, then he strolled up to the shed with his razor… He had almost cut his head off. ‘Bind that up, nurse,’ said the doctor when he arrived. That nearly finished me for laying‐out. I had to put it in my report, you see, and except for mothers and children it was against the rules to lay‐out bodies. All the same, I did it and I went on doing it after I retired. When people want help they must have it. What matters more than this? I wash and straighten them for the grave. It is such a small thing and somebody must do it for me. It is such a small thing but people cannot bring themselves to do it. They find it hard to think away from themselves. It is sometimes why they are as they are. They are learning all the time.

  Bruce Buckley · aged seventeen · forge apprentice Thomas Dix · aged seventeen · farm worker

  Bruce and Thomas (Tompo) are the classic mates of the ‘Til‐death‐do‐us‐part’ kind and are at present at the zenith of the bosom‐pal stage. Time, with its steadying proprieties, is the only thing which will prevent them colliding joyously like a couple of ponies whenever they meet. Mrs Sullivan pushed them into the same double desk on their first day at school when they were five and told them to look after each other. An arranged mateship which works has followed. At eleven, they were both pulled out of a hole in the ice, drowned to all accounts. At thirteen they ran away to hitch‐hike. Where? That was the problem. So after two days of it they walked home. These two events seem to have made them staid, cautious and quite gratuitously contented.