Portrait of Elmbury

by John Moore

  But he was wise, I think, to get out of the business when he did. He knew which way the wind was blowing; and he knew it was going to be a cold wind for farmers. Stock prices were beginning to sag; wheat at seven shillings a bushel was scarcely worth growing; many of his friends, who had less capital than he, were giving up their farms not because they chose to but because they must. The Bank was beginning to call in its mortgages; mortgages which had been taken up in the prosperous times just after the Great War, when land was selling for twice its real value. My uncle’s firm had sustained within a month three bad debts each amounting to more than a hundred pounds. “Dear, dear!” said my uncle, shaking his courtly old head. “Poor old So-and-So—and I’ve known him for thirty years!” He thought of the debtors’ misfortune before he thought of his own. My uncle in his declining years had a theory that if only he had known a man sufficiently long, there could be nothing wrong with the man; and this was associated with a still more dangerous theory, that if the man could afford to owe the firm a sum as large as a hundred pounds, he must be financially stable. Both notions did great credit to my uncle’s heart, but great harm to his pocket.

  “Don’t press him!” he would say. “Write him a nice letter, John. I wouldn’t hurt the old fellow’s feelings for worlds!”

  Property Sale

  Mr. Jeffs’ farm had been sold by my uncle at Michaelmas, in the long market-room at the Swan Hotel. In contrast to the bustle and noise and boisterous fun of stock markets there was always a pleasant quiet dignity about property sales. The presence of lawyers, who always like things to be done according to the form and the tradition, lent to the occasion something of the air of dusty respectability which hangs about their offices. There was no badinage or shouting; for the sale of several hundred acres of green English land was a solemn occasion and out of respect for the owner who was like a tree about to be uprooted the company seated themselves in hushed silence. There was a rustle of papers as they re-read the Particulars of Sale which they already knew by heart. Then my uncle got up, stroked his silvery hair, and began in his silvery voice to describe the property. “It is not very often, gentlemen, even in my experience—fifty-two years of it: it was fifty-two years last month that I joined my late father’s firm—it is not very often that I have the pleasure (a pleasure, though, mixed with regret) of offering for sale by auction a farm such as this. Four hundred and forty-two acres, two roods, five perches of rich, loamy, easily-worked arable land and sound old pasture; its orchards well planted with mature fruit trees in full bearing, including the choicest cherries, Early Prolific plums, Blenheim, Russet, and Cox’s Orange Pippin apples, and Bon Chrétien pears. (Only two years ago I sold the fruit in these orchards for more than three hundred pounds.) The farmhouse, whose hospitality many of you have known”—a few respectful handclaps—“was well and solidly built in the time of Queen Anne; the byres and buildings are modern and commodious; I don’t need to describe the place to you, you know it well. As I say, it is very rarely, even in a long life such as mine, that one sees such a property come under the hammer. Such places remain—as they should remain, as we all would wish them to remain—in the hands of our old farming families, passed down from father to son, from generation to generation. But I do not need to remind you of the sad circumstances, which we all most deeply regret, which have caused this valuable, this unique and valuable possession, to come into the open market and to be offered for sale by auction this day.”

  My uncle was referring to the death of Mr. Jeffs’ sons in the Great War. If they had lived, they would, of course, have taken on the farm from their father.

  “Now, gentlemen,” my uncle went on, adjusting the little hour-glass which he always had before him when he sold property —an old-fashioned affectation, for if there was a chance of another bid he took no notice of the sands running out inside it— “Now, gentlemen, I have taken up too much of your valuable time already. What are you going to offer me for this splendid farm, with its beautiful house, its dairies and outbuildings, its arable land, pastures, well-watered meadows, orchards and coppices—the timber alone is valued at four hundred and fifty pounds—and its four labourers’ cottages all in good repair? What shall I say for a start, what will you give me—come, come, gentlemen, surely you will not remain silent for long with one of the best and most famous farms in all the county going a-begging?”

  Live and Dead Farming Stock

  The farm was sold to Jerry, Mr. Nixon’s son of Downend, he who rode in the Midnight Steeplechase and married Dorrie Monks in consequence; and that pleased everybody, including Mr. Jeffs, who saw in him, perhaps, a shadow of those two sons of his own who fell with the Yeomanry.

  Early in October the farming-stock was sold. The sale was a great occasion. There was a marquee, and the landlord of the Swan got a licence to sell drinks and sandwiches; farmers came from forty miles away, and it was a day out for all the neighbours.

  The first part of the sale took place in the farmyard. I remember Mr. Jeffs sitting on the gate and watching, with young Jerry beside him, and Jerry putting his hand on the old man’s shoulder, as if to say, “I know it’s hard to watch them go,” as a son might do to his father. The horses, with beribboned manes and tails and coats polished till they shone like horse-chestnuts glossy-new out of their shells, were trotted up and down so that knowledgeable dealers standing behind them could criticise their action. Then the milking-cows were sold, the cows with calves, the proud imperious bull, and the store-cattle; the sheep; and lastly the pigs. Now the men who had come to buy stock could retire to the marquee or set off home with their purchases; and the auctioneer, with the crowd following him wherever he went like rats behind the Pied Piper, made his way to the Home Field —the pasture nearest the house—where the wagons, carts, and implements were set out in a long irregular line which looked from the distance like the reconstructed backbone of a dinosaur. The posters advertising a farm sale always began:

  THE WHOLE

  OF THE

  LIVE AND DEAD FARMING STOCK

  and since there were never any carcasses I suppose the wagons, binders, rakes and mowing-machines were “dead” within the convention of auctioneers’ English.

  As I stood beside the auctioneer—one of my uncle’s partners —during his slow progress down the line of implements, I realised for the first time the extraordinary complexity of the farmers’ job. There was the binder and the threshing-machine,1 each needing the frequent services of a mechanic to keep it in running order. There were the implements of haymaking: the mower, the tedder, the horserake, the haysweep; the implements of sowing and cultivation—drills of different sorts, scuffles, ploughs, horseshoes, harrows, and so on; and there were all the various tools which a man’s hands must learn to use—which Mr. Jeffs’ hands during the long years had learned to use—such as spades, forks, hoes, pitching-forks, hayrakes, scythes, short curved bills for ditching and hedging, saws, hatchets, and so on. The good farmer must be handy with all these, he must possess the ancient knowledge of the ploughman and the new craftsmanship of the motor-mechanic for he will have to keep in order his petrol-engines, gas-engines, tractors and lorries. He must be a bit of a carpenter, a bit of a wheelwright, a bit of a blacksmith. He must know the old secrets of the dairy and the modern practice of chemical manuring. In a single morning he may be called upon to repair a gate, to clear a blocked drain, to cold-shoe a horse, to mend a pair of reins, to graft a young apple-tree, and to clean the lorry’s carburettor.

  But besides this considerable technology, he must possess a kind of wisdom which is much more profound and much more difficult to acquire. He must know about land and about the use of land, how to match his stock to the pasture and his crops to the soil. This is something which cannot be described in terms of technology. It is true that he must be in a sense a botanist, a chemist, and a biologist, a good meteorologist, knowledgeable in genetics, and perhaps a horticulturist and a forester as well. But it is much more than that; it is much more t
han technique. There is strategy mixed up in it. His farm is the battlefield, upon which he deploys his crops and stock against his foes, which are sometimes visible, such as pests and blights and weather, and sometimes invisible such as economic blizzards and falling markets.

  Unless he is a bad farmer, or a sort of farm-cum-dealer, his problem is hardly ever a short-term problem; it is not a matter of tactics. For he must look forward into the future, to next season and the season after that; and he must look back and seek wisdom out of the past. Always it is a strategist’s battle; and the battle never ends.

  Tenant Right

  We saw something of the planning of the battle when we undertook Mr. Jeffs’ Tenant Right valuation about the same time as his sale. “Tenant Right” means the cultivations and improvements which an outgoing farmer hands over to his successor and for which he is entitled to be paid: seeds sown, dressings of lime, manure, and phosphates, labour of harrowing, hoeing and so on. The incoming farmer will get the benefit of these Acts of Husbandry; so a valuation is made to settle the price he must pay.

  The young wheat pricking the ploughed land in spring; the beans pushing their stout cotyledons through the dark brown earth; and in autumn the plough slashing the first red scars across the yellow stubble, the little heaps of burning squitch1 in the fallow field, the pile of purple and bronze mangels earthed and thatched against the frost—all these are aspects of the farmer’s long war. As we stood on the hill and looked down upon Mr. Jeffs’ farm, we could see most of his battleground spread out below us; we could read his plan of campaign, his blueprint of next summer’s battles, written in the hieroglyph of hedge and headland, furrow and fallow, green pasture and seeded field.

  It would have been unthinkable to Mr. Jeffs, or to any good farmer, to skimp his labour in the summer because he knew he would be leaving the farm at Michaelmas. Seeds were planted, fields were hoed, with the same loving care though somebody else would reap the crops. There was more in this than mere professional pride; for a man who has farmed since boyhood sees himself, I think, as the servant of the soil and the seasons, he has a duty towards the land, he is not so much its owner as its High Priest. Ancient compulsions drive him on, though he can only hobble round his cattle and lean on the gate to watch the wheat growing.

  Ave Atque Vale

  When the valuation was done we went back to the farmhouse and had tea while my uncle totted up his figures. Mr. Jeffs and Jerry sat down to a bottle of whisky and talked about the farm.

  “I was thinking I might fallow that long field next season,” I heard Jerry say.

  Mr. Jeffs shrugged his shoulders.

  “Thee’ll never do much with un. Starveall, ’tis called; Starveall by name and Starveall by nature. Nigh forty years I’ve strove with un. ’Tis the only blot on a fine farm.”

  Then Jerry asked: “What’d you say to puttin’ Cheviots on those hill pastures?”

  “Nay, nay! Take a tip from an old un, me boy, and stick to black-faced sheep. Cheviots are all right on the big hills where they can run free; you’d never keep ’em in here. You’d be chiwyin’ ’em and chasin’ ’em over half the county. They’d give you Midnight Steeplechases!”

  Mr. Jeffs poured out another whisky and the two men fell silent. Jerry, perhaps, in a daydream saw his acres peopled with the broad-backed Oxford sheep and the deep-flanked Shorthorn cattle, his wheat rippling like a golden sea, heard the murmur of bees about his beanflowers and the swish of the knives of the mowing-machine in the long grass; while Mr. Jeffs looked back into the past, at his full barns and his sweet-smelling rickyards, at the fat cattle in the yard knee-deep in straw before the Christmas market, at the apple-blossom in the Home Orchard and the cherry’s snowdrift on the slope of the hill.

  At last my uncle finished his complicated sum. He told them the amount, and there was no word of discussion about it, though the old man may have thought it too little and the young one thought it too much. The cheque was written out and accepted, there were handshakes and drinks all round. Mr. Jeffs lifted his glass and said suddenly:

  “Listen, Jerry. I’ve had a good life here and I wish you as good fortune as me. But ’tain’t going to be easy. I’m an old man with an old man’s headful of fancies. And I can smell bad times coming. You know how a man goes out in the morning with the barometer set fair and he wonders if he shall cut his grass, but he smells change in the air? Well, that’s how I feel about the world. There’s a storm brewing, there’s tempest in the sky. You mark my words, Jerry. You’ve got a tougher job in front of you than I had.” He paused, then laughed his great rumbling laugh. “An old man’s fancies! Don’t let ’em trouble you. We’ll have another drink all round; and I wish you good fortune with all my heart.”

  The Pattern

  When it was time to go, Mr. Jeffs came out into the garden to see us off. Few farmhouses have flower gardens; but his was ablaze with tawny chrysanthemums. Jerry had gone to the stable to saddle his horse (he never drove anywhere that was not too far to ride) and my uncle was having a last word with Mr. Jeffs about the valuation. I leaned on the garden gate and looked down upon Elmbury.

  It was a perfect autumn evening. There was mist like blue smoke hanging about the little wood they called the Dogleg Spinney and down in the vale you could see streaks of whiter mist over the river. The sun was setting in a mass of airy pink clouds like flying flamingoes and the Abbey tower, catching the light, burned like a beacon. The chestnut trees in the churchyard, with brown and yellow leaves, were incandescent also. Sprawled around the Abbey, half in light and half in shadow, lay the lovely and haphazard town.

  I knew it so well that I could people the crooked streets in my imagination, see the townsfolk passing to and fro, the tradesmen locking up their shops for the night, Pistol, Bardolph and Nym setting forth on an evening scrounge, the alleys like anthills stirring suddenly into life as the men came home from work and the housewives got the evening meal and rounded up their numerous children to put them to bed. Round the rim of the green bowl of the Ham the evening fishermen would be rigging up their rods and chucking in their ground-bait. The nightshift would be going to work at the flour mill; the white-dusted men of the day-shift would be coming back into the town.

  It was as if I could even see through the weathered roofs; watch Millie and Effie, those indefatigable blondes, lighting the first autumn fire in the Shakespeare bar, Mr. Chorlton in his cottage boiling up his “sugar” for a night’s mothing, Mr. Parfitt in his dark and secret workshop firing a dust-shot cartridge at ten yards’ range into a mahogany chair to produce the necessary worm-holes, Jim Meadows feeding his canaries, Bassett stuffing an improbable squirrel, the regulars gathering in the Swan for their evening drink.

  There was hardly a house there, great or small, which I hadn’t been into; hardly a person whose life-history I didn’t partially know; hardly a man or woman who didn’t know me by my Christian name. I belonged to the place as a limb belongs to the body.

  I looked beyond the town at the villages which lay about it: Brensham with its smooth cricket-field, Tirley and Tredington misty in the hollow, Dykeham by the river where everybody owned a punt, Overfield in the deep woods, Flensham where already the lads would be kicking about a soccer-ball, Marsham with its allotments always smelling of pigs, Partingdon among its oaks with its great house and green parkland, Adam’s Norton with its tall-spired church and crooked-chimneyed pub where all the men were singers. I looked, between the villages, at the great pastures and stubbles and the rootfields and rickyards of the rich land from which they and Elmbury drew their sustenance; at the byres and the barns and the labourers’ cottages and a hundred farmhouses nearly as fine as Hill Farm. And I understood the inter-relation of all these good things, and how they wove themselves into a pattern, which was a microcosm of English life and history.

  And now Jerry came back, on his great raw-boned Point-to-Pointer, Demon, and leaned down to shake hands with Mr. Jeffs. “I think I’ll cut up along the Stanks and into Dogleg
Spinney,” I heard him say, “then along Tomtit Lane and so to Downend.”

  “You know your way about,” said Mr. Jeffs, “as if you’d been born here.”

  I could guess what he was thinking. Jerry looked very splendid on Demon. He didn’t look very different, I expect, from those two proud young men who had ridden away on their Point-to-Pointers in 1914. I believe Jerry guessed too; for once again he let his hand rest on the old man’s shoulder in that typical, affectionate gesture of his. And so for a moment they were still against the landscape: the grand old man with his brave buttonhole, with his red face and white hair like snow on a berry, Cobbett come to life; and the young one magnificent upon his great horse. Behind them lay the big farmhouse, the background to their lives, with its orange-red bricks aglow, and the fields sloping down to Elmbury, and the deep-cut rutted lane between the hazels along which each season for hundreds of seasons the fine fat cattle had gone to market and the crops had gone to the mill.

  They stood there, Mr. Jeffs and Jerry against the flaming sky, and I saw them in that moment as part of the pattern; and Mr. Jeffs’ two sons, who had galloped their horses against a hundred guns, they made part of the pattern too; and my uncle, and his sons who fell with them, and the old ploughman in Starveall cutting his last furrow, and the labourers going home to tea, and the poacher who may have been Pistol shuffling along at the edge of Dogleg Spinney; and the Shorthorns grazing in the meadows, and the cart-tracks in the lane leading down to Elmbury and the market and the mill and the barges and the boatmen and the Abbey and the alleys and the pubs.

  There might be other patterns; and even this pattern would change; but it was all I knew, and I was part of it, and I found it very fair.

  Part Four