Voices of Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

  Bruce is thin and fair. His long, pale neck grows out of his leather jacket like an iris stylosa stem out of glossy damp, dark mould. He is watchful, sharp. He thinks quite a bit of himself but his friend manages to rub the edge off the worst of Bruce’s conceit without his realizing it. Tompo, in fact, makes Bruce more likeable than he would be if left on his own.

  Tompo himself is square and dark, with a ready‐to‐smile furry, red‐brown face and an expansive, roly‐poly body. A plain, good‐natured Morland character. Both boys giggle a lot and exude a challenging kind of mindless delight. They have an occasional way of tumbling over each other like cubs which seems to irritate older people, who frown. Both have established reputations for accomplishing prodigious amounts of work. They chat cheerfully across each other in an amiably disconnected sort of way. Their world is small and they are determined to keep it so.

  TOMPO: What do we do? We read books.…

  BRUCE: I don’t have much time so I read small books…

  TOMPO: We’ve been to Woodbridge this afternoon, just to walk round, and that. We’re going to the pictures in Ipswich tonight. We’re going to see a film called Casino Royale. We only go to the pictures in the winter; in the summer we like to get our motor‐bikes out and zoom around. We go into all the other villages and drink Coke and shandy in their pubs. We don’t look at things much. I like to see the birds but I can’t say that I’m very interested in them. Let them fly about, I say. Suffolk is a great place for birds. Everybody knows this.

  BRUCE: Last night I went brushing for Colonel Eldon. They got 210 pheasants. I’m not a good shot myself, I tend to miss everything. The Colonel rears about 600 birds and holds four shoots a year. Yesterday, there were eight guns and fifteen brushers. I like to meet the guns and brush for them because they pay me pretty well. I get 36s., a bottle of beer and a packet of cigs. I like birds too.

  TOMPO: We’ve been friends for years and years and years.

  BRUCE: I earn £6 flat. This is what I take. Motor mechanic boys would be lucky to get £34s.

  TOMPO: Sometimes, when my mates have been with me chopping out sugar‐beet, I’ve made as much as £15 clear. This is on piece‐work, mind you. But my usual wage without deductions is £514s. 6d. I stick it into my wallet, you know. When I was young I put it in the bank. Now I keep it in my wallet in case I need to spend it. It is nice to have money. I bought this motor‐bike six months ago.

  BRUCE: Girls take your money – Tompo’s had nine girls.

  TOMPO: Well, not had them…

  BRUCE: You had one of them –

  TOMPO: He gets a bonus on top of his wages – £4 5s. a month. It’s a share‐out of the profits which the forge makes every month. They must be doing pretty well if they can afford to give that much back.

  BRUCE: There’s a girl in Saxmundham who would be easy for TOMPO but he won’t look at her.

  TOMPO: Who’s talking about girls?

  BRUCE: It’s all right for you. (Pause) I didn’t have to apply for the job at the forge, you know – they asked me. I’m glad that they did.

  TOMPO: I started going to the Agricultural Training Centre last September. The term starts in September and ends in March, so that we have six months off during the busy time on the farm. I am doing a three‐year course because I am an apprentice but some farm boys only go for two years. I work for the farmer who hires land from my father, so I am really working my father’s farm for another man. I am particularly interested in farm machinery. We have 600 acres and two tractors, and we mostly grow spring barley. Then it will be winter wheat. We have forty acres of sugar‐beet and 100 acres of peas for Birdseye.

  BRUCE: I once found an old, old book dated 1874. It was full of recipes to cure horses and oxen. It had a cure for foot‐and‐mouth disease. The master read it and said, ‘Rubbish’. My father, who was a horseman, read it and said nothing.

  TOMPO: When I was a little boy I used to come outside and watch the horses on the farm. There were six, then there were five, then there were none. I didn’t care. I’d sooner have a tractor any day. This is just my opinion, you understand. They just stick you on a tractor now and say, ‘plough the field up’. Easy! You stick your old wheel down and – plough! Who worries if it isn’t straight?

  BRUCE: Arnie.

  TOMPO: Oh, Arnie! Bugger Arnie. (Mimicking) ‘When I was your age, I didn’t get five or six quid a week, I got five or six bob!’ Arnie’s old. He’s fifty‐four.

  BRUCE: We shall be fifty‐four one day – in the same month.

  TOMPO: Well, let’s hope we both live to see it. We’re learning Old Time Dancing at the youth club; that should come in handy. It is a very big club and people come to it from miles around on their bikes. They are nearly all village boys.

  BRUCE: And girls.

  TOMPO: And girls. Saturday night is the village night out. In the summer we all zoom off to Felixstowe on our bikes. We don’t swim there. We swim in the river at Melton. Did you know that there are a tidy few swimming pools in the gardens round here? The farmers built them – I don’t know why because they can’t swim. We go to Wimbledon to watch the stock‐car racing. I used to be mechanic to a stock‐car driver. We also go to the wrestling at Felixstowe. It looks pretty terrible but it isn’t really. It is all put on. Anyway, the men don’t wrestle well if they’re not being televised, and you can’t blame them. What do we like doing best of all? – motor‐bike scrambling. This is the most favourite thing in the whole village. We all belong to a motor‐bike club – there are more than fifty of us – and we all go off to the scrambles at Blaxhall and Wakes Colne. The club costs us 10s. a year and we meet every Tuesday night. Our leather clothes are expensive but they keep us warm. We have ordinary haircuts, as you can see. Maybe mine is fairly long. It is just to keep my head warm. When it begins to blow in the wind, then I begin to think about the barber. There’s some very fancy dressing now, isn’t there? People who want to do it should do it. Why not?

  BRUCE: Have you seen Hughie?

  TOMPO: Hughie’s O.K.

  BRUCE: I didn’t say he wasn’t, did I?

  TOMPO: You’re a nut.

  BRUCE: (Amazed) I am?

  TOMPO: (of Bruce) What would you do with him? – you tell me. [Uproar. Tina, a sheepdog, joins in. Bruce’s mother rushes in.] ‘Clear out you together now! Whenever are you going to grow up? Grow up, do!’

  Anthony Summer · aged twenty‐three · shepherd

  I was born in Akenfield. All my family is here, my mother, my uncles, my aunties and my granny. But not my father – he was a sailor and was drowned when I was a baby. The ship he was on was torpedoed during the last war as it was sailing through the Dodecanese Islands and he has no grave. When the Greeks put up a memorial to all the British men who were killed helping them, the Legion paid my mother’s and my fares to see the unveiling. I was sixteen. The princesses of Greece shook my hand and I walked through Athens. Greece is a very nice place. I think about it. You get such contrasts there. I would like to go back to it. There are no middle people, as in Suffolk, only rich and poor. We drank goat’s milk there – just as we have always done at home. I was pleased to see the Greeks drinking goat’s milk because it is free from bruc and very good for asthma. I also drank ouzo and ate honey, and sometimes I thought how strange it was that I was walking about in Athens because my father was in the Greek sea.

  This was the year I went to Chadacre Agricultural College, which is one of the oldest of the agricultural training places. I had done a year on a farm before going there. It was just a job at first and then I began to like it. My mother said, ‘If you’re going farm‐working, you’re going to do it properly. You are going to be a trained man – so no arguing.’ So I applied and was accepted. There were about fifty students there and they mostly came from Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex. Nobody specialized in anything: we each took the general course of management, sheep, cows and machinery. The College has changed a lot since it was founded and most of the boys who go there are much better ed
ucated than they were before the war. They are nearly all farmers’ sons or village boys like myself – hardly anybody from a town.

  There were only a few sheep on the farm when I started here at fifteen, then, when I got back from being trained at the college, the farmer took on some more and we had about 250 all told. We did so well out of these that we lost our heads and went straight up to 1,000! Then the profit margin dropped and we soon cut back to 500. This was a good number; it meant that I could look after all of them myself – plus William. William is my dog. He was bought by the farm but he thinks he is my dog, and I think he is too. He does a good half of the work. He can do anything. He can put the whole flock through the footbath without my even being in the field, and he is fond of conversation.

  The autumn is the beginning of the shepherd’s year, as you might say. The tups go into the ewes about the first week in September. These aren’t the proper tups; they just bring the ewes on. We call them teasers. It means that when you put in the proper tups the ewes are good and ready for them, and can be served in one bunch. Let them love together and they’ll lamb together, and that will be convenient. A good ram will serve fifty ewes after the teasers have been with them for a month. I work it like this. I put half my proper tups in with the ewes for two days, then take them out and give them a rest while the other half have a go. Each ram has a harness full of crayon strapped round him, so that when he jumps he marks the ewe. I then know how many ewes are coming. I change the crayon – the raddle – every fifteen days. So the first raddle will be blue, then red. In the olden days they painted the jumped ewes with red ochre but now we have this system of telling. If all the ewes are covered the first fifteen days and none of them come back, then I take the tups out. I leave them roughly three periods to come over – about forty‐five days all told.

  I usually start lambing in mid‐February, although one year I started as early as Christmas Day. It was much too soon. The grass wasn’t ready so the lambs had to be kept indoors. The food bills were terrific! I don’t have to help a great deal with the births, only be there. This is most important. I never leave the flock then, I am there all the time. I only call the vet if there is a big mishap, such as the womb coming out. I take each lamb away from its mother and do all the little odds and ends like. You can’t raise every lamb which is born, there must be some loss. I try and arrange things so that each ewe has two lambs. This shouldn’t be difficult if each ewe has been well flushed before the tup services her and has had good pasture. You see, before tupping time the ewes are kept on a bare pasture and then, just a week before the rams are put in, I put them on a high plane of nutrition which is supposed to bring down more ovaries. And so two eggs will come down, and I have had three and even four. I had five sets of quads last year but they were poor little runty things.

  I castrate the male lambs, the little tups, about an hour after they have been born. They say that what you’ve never had, you never miss. I wonder. I do it with rubber rings. It used to be done much later. The tails used to be cut off with a hot iron and the balls nicked out with the shepherd’s teeth. He ate well that day. But the tups still go behind a bit after they have been castrated. They get thin. It pulls them down. It is a surprising thing to happen to you when you have just come into the world on a spring morning. And, of course, I cut the tails off later on – to prevent fly‐strike in the summer‐time.

  I like to sell the first crop of lambs at about twelve or thirteen weeks old when they weigh about seventy‐five pounds. There would be about thirty‐five lambs in this crop. Some go to the local market and some to the meat‐traders – British Beef. The late lambs are sold about September and a few are carried over the winter and not sold until the following spring. But I haven’t got enough grass to keep the store lambs through the winter.

  I did my first shearing this summer. I sheared 500 ewes. The wife came out and rolled the wool for me and it took us just under the week – that was everything. We took the ewes out from the lambs about seven in the morning and worked right through until about nine at night. We worked every hour that was possible. I used electric shears and now and then I gave some poor old sheep a nip, but nothing as bad as would have happened had I been using the old‐fashioned shears. The year [1967] was better than average for the price of wool.

  Nobody tries to keep a really big sheep farm in East Anglia these days. Sheep are fitted in with the crop rotations and are just part of the farm. My sheep are put on to rye grass and they also have hay and pea silage, carrot wastage, etc. The ewes also get two pounds of concentrates each when they lamb in order to prevent pregnancy toxaemia. But they get things wrong with them, bad feet mostly. Foot‐rot and flies, these are the bad things with sheep. I put them through a footbath twice a week. There is very little intensive sheep‐farming in the villages round here although I hear that somebody is trying it out near Diss. He has his sheep on slats, like calves. Poor sheep! that is what I say. I bring my sheep in during the winter but they’re out in the air all the rest of the year.

  I sometimes think of shepherding in a big way – all young shepherds do. Here we buy‐in old ewes and sell them out for meat. But I quite like the idea of breeding and selling pedigree animals. And I’d like to show. This farm only shows in the lamb carcass competitions which means that you show three sheep, then one is picked out, killed and its carcass is judged. I’d sooner show live. My best friend is a Dorset shepherd and he’s got a pedigree flock to show down there. I envy him rather.

  I belong to Suffolk but I wouldn’t mind moving. I once even thought of going to Australia but then I thought to myself, ‘Supposing you get out there and you don’t like it – then what will you do?’ You need a lot of money to start in Australia. All the same, it is always in the back of my mind to do a bit of farming on my own. I’d like to own something, even if it is only a little smallholding where I can keep pigs. Being on my own is a dream which I want to come true. I don’t want to get old and look back and think that I have been looking after somebody else’s sheep all my life. But land is dear here – too dear. So I don’t know what will happen.

  It is easy on the farms against what it used to be. The old men wore their bodies to death but we only wear out a few machines. We all get on very well together on the farm. Ages don’t count. There is an old shepherd who still works here part‐time and he has helped me a lot. He lends me books and tells me many things. The young men are very fond of him because he is so interesting. It is pleasant here but, all the same, I dream, I make plans. I think you must have some ambition – not just carry on. I mustn’t get old and look back at nothing. If you can look back on a farm which you have built up, that is something. If you haven’t struggled to do something different – better – by the time you are thirty it is all up with you.

  [… ]

  Derek Warren · aged twenty‐nine · ploughman

  I have been ploughing continuously since last June. All the time. Now it is February and I haven’t stopped. I have ploughed every day, Sundays too, for eight months. But it is nearly finished now. There will be a break until after the harvest, then, as soon as a field is cleared, I’ll be on it. There are about 400 acres of corn‐land and I plough it all. All the fields are different. They have their names and they feel to be different places. It is how it should be. I wouldn’t like the village to become a Tannington where the hedges have gone and the ploughman doesn’t know where he is. A well‐kept hedge is a good sight and tells you where you are. The hedges belong to the village. You get so used to seeing them standing there – they are like buildings and you miss them when they are knocked down. Some hedges are important and when they go you feel as bad as if a wood had been taken away. I think that there are certain hedges which the farmers shouldn’t touch without asking the people – although I can’t see this happening.

  I’m contented here. I haven’t got the education for a farm manager’s job and I wouldn’t like it even if I had. All the same, as things are today you really do want s
ome education whatever you do. But if you haven’t got it you must learn contentment. Without education you can pick up plenty of practical experience on the farm, but you’ll never grasp the new theory or understand the money. If I had gone to the agricultural college it would all have been different, no doubt. I started off working with the cows when I first left school. I didn’t like this. I hoped I was going to be a keeper, you see. Ever since I was a boy I wanted to be a keeper but it never happened. ‘You won’t like it,’ they said. ‘It is seven days a week and a young lad likes his week‐ends off.’ I don’t know why they said this. They knew I had no Sundays, so to speak. I was in working clothes and round the woods of a Sunday, just as of an ordinary day, so I might just as well have been paid for it. You see, keeping is the job for a man who has an eye to nature. There will be something different to look at every day and you’ll have never seen it all. But there is no keeper in the village now. The last keeper had the double job of forester and keeper. He had to plant trees when he wasn’t feeding pheasants. Whether you can really do both these jobs together, I don’t know. There wouldn’t be much time to think if you did. You’d have to be two men, which one man can’t be if he’s to stay honest. But there you are, that’s modern demands for you! All the same, keeping would have suited me wonderfully.

  I started ploughing, with a reversible plough, when I was eighteen. Somebody took me up to Scarlett Hill and said, ‘This handle turns this over, this does something else – and away you go!’ I kept straight as I could but I don’t trouble so much these days. I don’t know why. Because of the plough I suppose. With the old plough you had to have everything marked out and the furrows had to be kept straight if you wanted to finish up anywhere at all. The old men criticize. ‘That wouldn’t have done,’ they say. ‘You’d have had to have made a better job of it than that when I was a boy – God’s truth, you would!’ But they forget that they had the labour to do these fine things. There is double the arable in the village and few men wanting to stay and work it, so fancy fine ways aren’t needed. The old men will tell you what an interest they took in their tasks – you could call this their main argument. They were brought up on quality work. Now it is quantity work – you’ve got to cover the ground. I can plough up two acres of the clay land in a day, and more on a light field.