Indian Summer Notebook

by Henry Williamson

And distempered being of mine.

  In all I work, my hand includeth thine;

  Thou rushest down in every stream

  Whose passion frets my spirit’s deepening gorge;

  Unhood’st mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream;

  Thou swing’st the hammers of my forge;

  As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,

  Moves all the labouring surges of the world.

  Pierce where thou wilt the springing thought in me,

  And there thy pictured countenance lies enfurled,

  As in the cut fern lies the imaged tree.

  This poor song that sings of thee,

  This fragile song, is but a curled

  Shell outgathered from thy sea,

  And murmurous still of its nativity.

  This tremendous music continues for page after page, to the glory of love and of life which has its being and all its transformations ‘under the fostering hand of the Creator’, to employ a phrase used by one in a book composed in prison during the last war, a work which for its divination and sanctity will one day surely be part of our heritage of literature.

  Francis Thompson is a major poet, applauded in his life-time. In the words of his friend and host Wilfrid Meynell, who with his wife, the poet Alice Meynell, cared for him after his days and nights of dereliction in the streets of London, the work of this ‘aloof moth of a man’ has long suffered the fate of many other great poets, who ‘learn in suffering what they teach in song’. His poetry is still ‘mighty meat for little guests’. One living minor poet, not so long ago, reviewed a book on the poet’s life as ‘rags and rubbish’, particularly The Mistress of Vision which attempts to convey, and does convey, what another living poet, Mr. Robert Graves, calls the White Goddess.

  Love is the dayspring of all true poetry, the major force of evolution. There is indeed, as William Blake perceived, a war between Heaven and Hell, of the social instinct which would create higher forms of consciousness despite chaos. The imagery of all poetry, as of all religions which strive to create harmony, is a vehicle of this greater love, which arose from within Wilfred Owen – a poet declared, foolishly, by another great poet, Yeats, to be not worth a corner for versifiers in any local newspaper. But even great poets do sometimes disprize their relatives. Did not Byron disesteem the poetry of Keats, until Shelley, the gentle creature, pointed out to Byron his error?

  Those charred stumps of trees in High Wood, standing stark on the skyline of the Somme uplands, come to mind as one reads again Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, to pause, and live again a moment, tenuous and ‘unreal’ as his Mistress of Vision,

  Ah! must –

  Designer infinite! –

  Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?

  Essay in The Mistress of Vision, by Francis Thompson, with a commentary by the Reverend John O’Connor and a preface by Father Vincent McNabb, O.P. Reprinted with an Introduction by Joseph Jerome.

  Saint Albert’s Press, 1966

  English Farming

  If anyone had told me five years ago that I should be a farmer in Norfolk during the second phase of the Great War, I should not have believed him. Yet my determination to become a farmer, at the age of forty years, was perhaps not so sudden or unpremeditated as at the time I imagined.

  Five years ago, in 1936, as I sat by my open hearth in a Devon cottage, while the salmon river outside roared in spate, bringing down roots and trees from the valley which ended as a hillside cut on the wild moor, I realised definitely that I needed new stimulation as an artist. I mused on the orange groves of Florida; the great silver salmon of Newfoundland; the mountains of the Tyrol or the Black Forest, or perhaps Corsica; of the luxuriant forests of New Zealand, with its vision of strange mountains and rainbow trout in the rivers.

  I felt I had outlived my Devon countryside, with its otters, foxes, stags, salmon, and badgers. I had written books about these things, also about the village and the people. There was nothing more to write; I had used up all my knowledge.

  My four sons were entered for Blundells School; in due course they would go there, and be fitted for some sort of future. What future, I did not know; I had no thoughts, no ideas, about it.

  The young men of Britain would have to make their own future. They were Britain; and they would make a new Britain, I hoped, better than the one which I and the friends of my youth had known. We had known what it was to kill, and be killed, about the time we had learned to shave. Afterwards, we walked the streets seeking work; while the Old Men pooh-pooh’d our ideas of a better country. The dole queues remained, and the world did not seem to be getting any better, despite the universal platitudes. Indeed, it seemed to many that the platitudes were a semi-unconscious smokescreen put up to hide reality. A world different from that which broke periodically into war needed fundamental changes; not platitudes.

  And so time went on, until five years ago I decided suddenly to do my own small active part in the rebuilding of a better Britain. Farming was in a bad way; so I would start to farm. Many labourers’ cottages were rotten; I would rebuild as many as I could. By chance I saw a near-derelict farm in Norfolk, and bought it six months later. I bought it against the advice of lawyers, land valuers, relatives, friends and acquaintances. An experienced farmer told me that English land had not been so cheap for a hundred and fifty years. The near-destitution of so much of the English arable farming was a symptom of the decay of the Old World; but I knew the true English spirit, and believed it was due for a great revival. In that revival, I believed, English land, the mother of the race, and the English people themselves, would be put first.

  So I started farming, and in an old lorry took my belongings and part of the family (the others to follow) across England, from the lush West Country, with its rains and rocky streams and soft airs and burring speech, to hardy East Anglia, with its droughts and sluggish rivers and sharp, keen air and shrill, clipped speech. I could not have had such a contrast if I had gone to California or the Rockies – and I was in the best land of all, England!

  As I look back now, with the fourth year of my farming venture nearing completion, I am not sorry I turned farmer. People told me I had undertaken a tough job, and I knew it; but I did not know how tough it would turn out. I’ve had to buy my experience, in everything. Those three condemned cottages, which I rebuilt myself, are finished now; but it took a long time, while farm-work was neglected. When they were done, I had to rebuild and alter two others for a farmhouse; for there was none with the land. The family, five children with father and mother, lived for months in a broken-roofed granary with no windows and a wet brick floor, with only a small stove and no water or bath or drains. The farm was weedy, hedges tall and ragged, gates broken or fallen, the roads were bogs or deep ruts, the buildings ruinous and rat-ridden, the meadows snipe-bogs, the woods full of broken trees and dead elderberries. And all this viewed daily, hourly, by an impatient, imaginative temperament, which longed to see it altered in a moment, but which, to make the transformation real, had to earn money by writing articles, often half the night.

  I am glad I undertook the work. Our bullocks lost money (beef didn’t pay), the sheep trade fell and flockmasters sold up, wheat was subsidised, and then, at our first harvest, the barley trade (East Anglia grows the finest malting barley) crashed. But I had foreseen a greater decline; and although it meant that my capital was gone and an overdraft was mounting up, I knew things would come right.

  They came right when the war broke out. Immediately the Government set about putting things on a proper basis. We farmers now have stable markets. We know what we will get for our pigs, our milk, our sugar-beet, our beef, our mutton. We can plough, cultivate and drill for a crop of barley knowing that we will not only get the bare costs of production back after threshing and taking samples of corn to the merchants at their stands in the Corn Hall, but an increase enabling us to farm better the following season.

  My friends and advisers, who thought me r
ash, even foolhardy, to buy land in 1936, now congratulate me on my foresight. The weeds on the land are gone, the meadows are being drained (Government grant covers half the cost), the arable fields are being chalked (to sweeten the soil, again a half-cost grant), the roads are made up (oh, the blisters of 1937 digging 1,000 tons of flints and gravel out of a pit!), my home-bred bullocks are in the yards, treading clean barley straw to make the dung to grow the corn and the sugar-beet of next season. Sheep graze the grassy hills; the circular saw, driven by the tractor, cuts up tons of firewood from the reclaimed hedges. My three sons go to the village school, while the eldest, aged 14, drives the tractor and ploughs the fields. Their mother looks after the hens, and mends the clothes, while a village maid cleans our small renovated farmhouse and cooks with electricity.

  Norfolk is famous for its wild pheasants. Pigeons come from Scandinavia to the woods, and once a week the villagers, by invitation, shoot them from hides in the woods. Wild duck flight to the willow-fringed pond on the meadows, geese pass over, woodcock flap across the North Sea and settle in the hedge-bottoms, trout rise in the chalk stream which runs through the lower land; so we do not lack for food. Our mill in the chaff-barn grinds barley and wheat for flour, for a variety of loaves we bake ourselves. And, of course, we have our own cream and butter. And less this seem too selfish a catalogue, I must add that not the least of our achievements is giving employment to four families and a home to three others in warm, dry cottages. Those four years gave me some white hairs (the placid temperament is best for a farmer’s life, with its myriad anxieties!), but I do not regret anything. All was, and is, experience.

  It has taken a war to put British farming on its feet, and to bring back to us generally the idea that work is the true basis of life in the world. A nation that neglects its land, and its peasants – which are its root-stock – will perish. The idea of living by easy money is no good. Napoleon said that toil produced a hard and virile race, while trade produced a soft and crafty people; and that is true. We British are hard and virile, and we must have overseas trade in order to build up a high standard of life; but the cut-price, get-rich-quick idiom was beginning to spoil that hardness and virility. The by-products of that past epoch were over-intellectualism, spiciness and hyper-stimulation of feeling: too many cocktails, too-glamorous movies, a rootlessness showing itself in artistic distortion; pavementism. These things were an emanation of the same system that produced the dole-queues, slums, malnutrition, the ‘class-war’. The war has brought us back to the fundamentals of life; and when it is over, on the basis of our new, hard economy, we shall build a fine civilisation in this country, and its Empire, on the simple virtues of life. There will be enough work for everyone under a modernised, planned system which puts first its land and its people.

  I want to see town children educated by bodywork in the country, getting to know its trees, its birds, its coasts, its soils, mountains, streams, counties. I want to see country children having technical education; I want to see them travelling to the Empire, and returning with a knowledge of what their inheritance truly means. I want to see thistles and docks as rare plants in Kew Gardens – extinct elsewhere! I desire to see gardens where once there were slums; to see salmon leaping again by London Bridge, in water no longer polluted by sewers, chemical plant, and all the filthy, chaotic dribble of an unplanned, many-headed commercial monster which in the past put profit first and regarded human life as a mere accessory. These and all the other things of a full and proper social life are not only possible, but inevitable; they will arise from the purgatory of the present.

  Introduction to English Farming, by Sir John Russell

  Britain in Pictures series, Collins, 1941

  The Winter of 1941

  I

  One day towards the end of October three soldiers on motorcycles arrived by the corn barn of my farm. They were soon followed by an officer in a small camouflaged car. With this obvious advance-guard came several lorries, also camouflaged, and loaded with stores. I regarded them with grim dismay: was I to have another camp on my farm, which meant more scrounging townees stealing hens, eggs, and anything else they could find . . . and of course dumps of filthy litter and young officers regarding me as an old fool whom they (as one once told me) were saving from Hitler? But I tried not to reveal my thoughts when the officer came towards me and without any preliminary whatsoever demanded to know where the water-supply was. I told him, and he turned away, giving an order to a sergeant to bring the water-lorry. I walked after him, and coming to him, said with what easy amiability I could assume, ‘Perhaps if you want some water, you will tell me, then I shall ask one of my men to fill your tank for you. Are you passing through the district?’

  ‘We are going to stay several weeks up there,’ he replied, pointing to the grassy Home Hills and the woods above.

  ‘Then you are the advance party?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied, obviously wishing to be rid of me. However I was persistent, and said, ‘May I see the requisition order? You cannot come here without a requisition order, you know.’

  ‘Haven’t you had an order? One has been sent to you.’

  ‘I haven’t had it, and until I do receive one, I must ask you not to come here.’

  ‘Well, you can’t stop us. There’s a war on.’

  ‘Yes, we know; that’s why we must safeguard our crops.’

  ‘You’ll get compensation.’

  ‘That’s not the point. How many are coming?’

  ‘Several hundred, I expect.’

  ‘What’s your regiment, please?’

  ‘That I will not tell you.’

  ‘Then what is your name?’

  ‘I’ll give you no information.’

  He was using the current ‘security measure’ of giving no information ‘likely to be of use to the enemy’. So I thought I would counter that with its equivalent. ‘I quite understand; but how do I know who you are? How do I know you are not German parachute troops in British uniform? May I see your identity card, please? I am entitled to ask, you know, as the owner of this land.’

  ‘The captain and the major will be here soon, and I’ll send them to you,’ he said and turned away.

  Perhaps, I thought, he has been primed by the local gossip and black marketeer, who hung about the village Cross and told all and sundry – when they were the sort who would care to listen to such an individual – that I was the local spy and fifth-columnist.

  Meanwhile the lorries were moving slowly up the new road we had made with such toil and sweat in the Gulley. They were ten-tonners, and the ribbed tyres tore up the loam-and-gravel surface of the road. At the top of the hill they turned off on the grass, and began to unload their gear by Pine Tree Camp, where I had lived during my first year on the farm. Branches of trees were cut off or torn down for camouflage. After watching this, I went to and asked the officer when the troops were expected. He replied that he wasn’t able to tell me. For how long were they coming, I demanded. ‘You must ask the officer commanding,’ he retorted. I explained that my ewe-flock was on the Home Hills – where they proposed, without authority, to camp – and cows and bull, too, on the only available grass, as the paddock and meadows were flooded after the recent heavy rains. And, being persistent, I asked again about the requisition order

  ‘You are sure that a requisition order has already been sent to me?’

  ‘That’s what I said. Sergeant, move that Bren gun over there.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  I went home and telephoned the local Anti-Aircraft Gunnery School, which had a permanent camp by the marshes, and learned from the Adjutant that Midland troops were coming to practice for a few weeks, and that their camping site was already allocated on the strip of grass above the marsh known as the Sheep Walk. There would be a lot of them, the voice said, adding, ‘I should kick them off, if it were my farm.’ I said, ‘Thanks, I will,’ and seeing the subaltern officer down the road, went after him. Before I could catch h
im, he went into the public telephone-box. I guessed he was asking for further instructions; and when he came out, I told him that his camping site had been allocated on the Sheep Walk. He made no reply.

  Later in the afternoon, an elderly major called with another officer whom he introduced as his second-in-command.

  In civil life they had probably been provincial business men, I judged, by their manner and address. The major, who had a heavy reddish indoor face, began by telling me that he had never received a complaint from any farmer on whose land his men had been, and they were coming only for ten days or so, after which another unit was replacing them, and then a third replacing the second lot. I listened, and then asked him straightly:

  ‘Is this land requisitioned, or is it not? If it is, why have I not received the requisitioning order?’

  ‘The order will come, no doubt.’

  ‘But there is doubt, sir, if you will forgive my mentioning it. Will you please give me a direct answer to my question?’

  The major looked at the captain. The captain was younger, or looked younger. He wore the two later ribbons of the 1914-18 war, once known as Squeak and Wilfred. The major, whose left breast was modestly vacant of even coronation ribbons, looked like a mayor of some provincial town. He deferred to his junior to deal with this difficult question.

  ‘The order, as far as it is humanly possible to say, is being made out now,’ said the captain, suavely, with a smile. I was used to being told lies, which usually I met with a blank and evasive face, except to those nearest to me, when I had tried, with various manners, to convert them to the truth; but nowadays I was tired, and had not the resistance I had before the war; so I continued with toneless persistence,

  ‘I understand that you are supposed to be parking on the Sheep Walk, by the marshes. Your subaltern told me categorically that my land was already requisitioned. Is that a fact?’

  ‘I think he was a little uncertain about his facts,’ replied the captain, with an attempt at amiability, adding, ‘Of course, you will get compensation.’ ‘I am not thinking about that, but of my livestock. What area do you intend to occupy?’