I’m fond of the old widowed men who sit quietly in their houses. Most of them aren’t so much waiting for food, or whatever, as for a talk. I feel so guilty. I chat my way through a quick cup of tea and they’ve got a look on their dear old faces like Bessie here, just longing for you to go on and on. I skip the groaners. It really does take it out of you to be groaned and moaned at. I like the ones who say, “Well, that’s life!”
Well, now, Samaritans. We find that we don’t reach the village people as easily as we reach the Ipswich folk because it costs so much to advertise and we can’t afford it, so that they just don’t know. Then there is the other problem. Your village person would as soon undress outside his own front door as divulge his innermost feelings. You see, your real countryman or woman is unpersuadable. Unless he wants to tell you about himself you will never be able to even guess at what is worrying him. And there’s another thing, if a country person is absolutely driven to seek help because worry has got the better of them, they’ll also take it for granted that somebody like myself will wave their fairy wand and simply “do something.” Otherwise they wouldn’t come. They’ve never believed in confession being good for the soul. I make tea, offer a cigarette and gossip. It is a kind of priming. Once they start talking I shut up. I never criticize—no Samaritan ever criticizes—and I never offer an opinion if I can help it. And I never moralize. I just listen. And I am often listening to something which has never been told to another soul in all the world. Everything is confidential. You never tell anybody anything of what you have heard. And usually, to be quite honest, it isn’t worth telling! The things which can worry people to the point when they seriously consider killing themselves often turn out to be small—trifling. You think, is that all? But the worry has assumed enormous proportions to the sufferer and you, the outsider, aren’t there to belittle it but to break it down. Samaritans don’t even try to re-organize a person or start putting his life together. They just listen until they hear the trouble and then they might channel it in the direction where they think it might get the best kind of help. It could be the doctor or the Marriage Guidance Bureau but the truth is that a good fifty-five per cent of the people who come to us are just plumb lonely. Their lives have gone up the spout, and there isn’t a single soul they can talk to. So they sit and think and everything gets magnified and soon they are demented.
I try to get people to join the W.I. There is this idea that it is all cakes and home-made jam but we work hard for charity in Akenfield. We help the organization to run a farm in West Africa and we send money to the Cheshire Homes. What the members like most of all are outings, trips to the theatre, mystery tours, things like that. There are crowds of young women. They meet at the apple-picking and say to any newcomer, “You must join the W.I.” The only women who don’t belong are what I call the non-joiners. You’d hardly credit it but there are certain people who won’t join anything. We have the meetings in the evening so that the husbands can look after the children. The women don’t like their children to come to the parties and things. Even if it’s the pantomime, they say, no children! They want to escape them now and then. All the members write on a piece of paper what kind of speakers they want to listen to the following year and then the committee has to try and get them. They like travellers best—foreign places. You don’t know the village women until you have seen them in action at the W.I. They would certainly surprise their husbands! I watched them when we’re singing Jerusalem. I watch Mrs. Ferrier.
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire! . . .
What ever can she be thinking about, I wonder.
The biggest age-group is the twenty-fives to forties. You hear, for instance, of the reverse side of the pregnant unmarried girl problem, of the boy who wants to marry her but whose Mum won’t let him. The boy is eighteen, maybe, and according to his Mum, he is a “nice boy”—meaning that the girl has tricked him. But you discover that the boy and girl have been lovers for over a year—something like that. One is constantly seeing the other side of a lot of familiar coins in this job. People with worries are the easiest to deal with. It is some deep psychiatric problem which a person has somehow managed to conceal from the village but which has become unendurable which is the big difficulty. I’m no psychiatrist and wouldn’t dream of meddling in this deep water. With the client’s permission, I put him in touch with the professionals.
People are amazed when they learn of the amount of suicide there is. Very often, when I am addressing a meeting, I will say, “Since you have had your tea and have come here to the village hall to listen to me, somebody has killed herself”—and it shakes them. Fourteen village men and six village women committed suicide in East Suffolk this last year [1966]—as against the nine men and five women who took their own lives in Ipswich during the same period. So villages aren’t always the cosy, friendly places they are supposed to be, are they? People can be as lonely there as anywhere else.
There are Samaritans like me all over Suffolk. It works like this. A troubled person will pluck up courage to go to the Ipswich office and give his address as Akenfield. So the main office will ring me up and say, “Well, now, Mrs. C-E, you live near, you go and befriend.” Befriending is our word for making contact. So I go and see the woman. I don’t find the beginning very difficult; the very fact that they have asked for help gets you quite a long way along the road. I never attempt to explain the Samaritans to them. I say, “You’re worried. Tell me what you are worried about.” And then I sit back. It’s surprising. I might be there for three hours and never say another word.
A lot of people just get abandoned by their children. They leave home and simply don’t come back any more. There are a few letters, then nothing. There is this frightful law which says that children aren’t responsible for their parents. It makes it easy for those who want to shed responsibilities. But, on the other hand, you sometimes find a strong family situation, but where the family contains the last folk who can help. Family emotion gets in the way, family embarrassment. Samaritans mustn’t get emotional. You’ve got to forget yourself and not be conceited. You’re there to be kind and sensible. You never act on outside information or gossip. It wouldn’t be any good your ringing me up and saying, “I’ve just seen Mrs. Thingummy and she looks as though she’s about to do herself in, so please go and see her.” Samaritans mustn’t be people who like giving orders. The last thing you must say is must. If you can get it across that the troubled person needn’t be alone any more, then they’ll begin to not want to die.
You can’t always help. Sometimes you are let into a kind of wilderness and you plod on and on, losing your way and wondering what it is all about. But you mustn’t pry. You just wait and hope that soon you’ll come up against something which makes sense. And sometimes, having met you several times and told you all their miseries, a person will kind of fall for you—and then what do you do? It’s all a problem. You’ve befriended them and now they’re befriending you! It can be a bit awkward—the real challenge, I suppose. However, one must soldier on. . . .
14. THE YOUNG MEN
The moon-mist is over the village, out the mist
speaks the bell,
And all the little roofs of the village bow low,
pitiful, beseeching, resigned.
—Speak, you my home! What is it I don’t do well?
—D.H. LAWRENCE, End of Another Home Holiday
Terry Lloyd · aged twenty-one · pig-farmer
In spite of the sweet reasonableness or dire warnings offered by the advocates of bigger units, Britain remains remarkably full of farmers going it alone, or who would go it alone given half a chance. The young men aren’t showing lack of greed but realism when they say “ten acres will do.” Whether it is some far cry back to the old pre-Enclosure days or the same uncooperating spirit which confronts the French agricultural economists with the blunt fact of two million or so small farms, the truth is that the almost sensuous contentment of
doing what you like on your own bit of land persists as strongly now as ever it did. The Akenfield small-holders will tell you that they have to work all the hours that God ever made, that they never have a holiday and that they have to watch every penny. Yet even William, the young shepherd, with his new estate house, bigger than most wages, responsible work and generally superior prospects, dreams of “getting out and having a little place of our own. My wife wouldn’t mind; she’d do anything to help me. It is all she wants too.”
Terry Lloyd achieved this enviable state the week he left school at fifteen, when his father gave him four acres and an old barn. At twenty-one he shows some of the conventional signs of the free-lance, a precariousness accepted as an ordinary condition of being alive, enough fear not to do anything silly and quite a bit of unegotistical self-assurance. He is a small, quiet, thoughtful young man, mature in his outlook but without that essential limitation or simplicity which makes things comfortable. He is a thinker. His mind is restless in the way that the Suffolk rivers are restless. The water hardly seems to move at all, yet it reaches the sea. He is a natural maverick, a masterless one. There is a searching quality in his manner, as though he is looking for somebody who will instruct him in the basic grammar of an as yet faintly grasped language, some key which will lead to “all the rest.” Books? The question brings the inevitable embarrassment. The village people of all ages seem frightened at the mere mention of books. Why isn’t this book-fear dispersed at an early time? Why should it exist at all? A seventeen-year-old wrought-iron worker from the village, a good craftsman and an apparently lively youngster, said, “Yes, I have read books. I read Enid Blyton when I was at school.” The normality of reading scarcely exists. To nearly every person interviewed, it was a strange thing to have read a book. The book is a kind of frontier across which few seem to have the nerve to pass, even when, as in Terry’s case, it is the only way out.
The county day-release agriculture centres are producing interesting side-effects. In the purely social sense, they have contributed more to the destruction of the derelict vision of the farm-worker as a kind of sub-2standard human being than any previous plan to improve his status. But something else is also taking place. The mere process of class attendance and an intelligent interest in his affairs by equal-seeming adults has set the learning process in motion for the first time for many youngsters who left school at fifteen. This is what has happened to Terry, now in his last year at the Centre. One master in particular has helped him, and others like him. What has emerged from this still fairly new—about ten years old—governmental further education programme is that one part of a student’s intelligence cannot be trained to the degree necessary for him to learn the new sophisticated farming methods without his whole intellectual nature being awakened. Terry is grateful for the extraordinary amount of tangential information Mr. Austin has been able to throw off upon such subjects as natural history, politics, current affairs—even art. To an outsider, many of the students appear famished, starving for something more than the curriculum provides, and there seems to be a unique opportunity to accomplish on the young adult scale something comparable to what Sybil Marshall achieved in her condemned Cambridgeshire playground and described in An Experiment in Education.
The truth is that there is a void where the old village culture existed. Ideas, beliefs and civilizing factors belonging to their grandfathers are not just being abandoned by the young countrymen, they are scarcely known. A motor-bike or universal pop might appear to be a reasonable exchange—but not after you have begun to think.
* * *
I went to day-release about five years ago. It starts off pretty basically—machinery, crop husbandry, stock husbandry—and then, in the second year, it goes on to the farm institute level. I am taking the management course at the moment. It is made up of two parts, records and accounts and general management. I feel myself that the day-release scheme really offers more than the full institute course. It has certainly made all the difference in the world to my life. There are five masters at the Centre. I get on very well with Mr. Austin—we all do. He’ll discuss anything with us—insurance, history, morals, religion, sex—anything. It is tremendous. Something completely different. Other industries have had their training schemes for years and, as usual, the poor old farm-worker gets his last! Anyway, we’ve got it now. It isn’t philanthropy. There was suddenly a need to train the village boys to use machinery and understand the new scientific methods. There is such a massive amount of machinery used in farming now. The men are going down, down, down on the farms and the machines up, up. What men are left have got to be real good—different to what they used to be.
I always wanted to work on a farm—but I was born in Leeds! I can’t remember Leeds because I was so little when we left, nor can I ever imagine myself as being there. Me in Leeds—impossible! But I was. Then we went to Scotland, where I went to school in a little town in the mountains. Everything was beautiful there. But if you want to know how I came to Suffolk, you will have to hear about my grandfather Merriam Lloyd, who farmed the Dove. And if you haven’t heard of him, then you’re a newcomer yourself. He wasn’t really a farmer, in fact he was a bicycle-shop owner by trade. He came to Suffolk in 1910 and bought the Dove for about £500. He was a bachelor who walked about with a gun—you know the sort. He was very independent and nobody could tell him anything. He knew it all. His farm wasn’t much when he bought it, by all accounts, but it was a sight worse when the Second World War broke out. He hadn’t done a thing except walk round it. Of course the War Ag. told him to plough up his meadows—told him! Of course, he wasn’t having that. He took no notice. So they pushed him out. Some men came and literally pushed him out of his own front door. Then they brought some bits of furniture out and stood it round him on the lawn. They wanted the house, you see, for administration. Well, he went to live in a shepherd’s hut in the orchard, where he stayed all through the war and doing absolutely nothing, of course, and the Dove was given to Jolly Beeston to farm. Jolly was nothing then but he’s very, very big now. The war made him. He paid a florin a year on each acre for the Dove, just to make it legal. He ploughed it all up, ploughed all his own margins and wastes up, got subsidies—he was quids in. He was made. He’s never looked back. The war put him on his feet and, do you know, although he didn’t do one single stroke of work, it made my grandfather quite well off too. He was so lazy that he didn’t fill-in his compensation claim forms until after 1951—and he was still living in the shepherd’s hut—but eventually they sent him £350 damages for putting Nissen huts in the Dove garden. So he had a good war. I don’t blame the farmers for the war fortunes; I’m glad it happened. But, all the same, when I see their big cars and little swimming pools, and think how, before 1939, some of them were riding around on bikes and having to sell a calf on Tuesday to pay the men on Friday, well it is amazing. Some of them really suffered. They won’t, they can’t talk about the old days. Not because they are ashamed of them but because they were so badly hurt. Some of them can’t rid themselves of little economical habits which can’t possibly matter any more. Like Mr. Clary, who must be worth a couple of hundred thousand, but who still sweeps the last drop of barley from the barn floor himself.
The war and the price of the land going up has made them all. And good; the land shouldn’t rot. But it has also made it quite impossible for someone like myself to go into arable farming. The net profit on an acre of barley is about £10 and wheat about £17. Put this against land worth £300 an acre with ingoing valuation—it’s about three per cent! Well you can’t do it. Everybody is trying to manage bigger acres with bigger machines and less labour. Put it like this, to manage 200 acres you need two tractors, but with two tractors you could also manage 250–80 acres. You see, you have to try and spread the machine cost over as many acres as you can.
Then you have another problem—labour. Although labour is being cut and fewer and fewer men are needed to work the farms, it is still hard to find them. Th
ey are all going away from the land. An intelligent young married chap simply can’t afford to be a farm-worker. Those who stay, the bright ones, I mean, stay because they really love the land. A young man like this can be found working all hours of the sun. This love-the-work business is all very well but sooner or later these clever, hard-working countrymen will have to be seen as experts, and paid accordingly. Otherwise they will simply have to drift off into the service industries like the Milk Marketing Board and the seed and fertilizer merchants.
I am lucky, I work for myself. When I left school at fifteen, my father let me have four acres of his ground rent free. So I got a job on a farm at £4 7s. a week. I gave mother £2 for my keep, put £2 in the bank and spent the seven bob. I never spent notes, only silver. I saved for about six months and then I had enough to buy three little pigs. I fattened them, sold them, and bought five. One of these was a gilt. £45 it cost me. I’ve still got this same gilt today. She’s had ten litters and I’m very fond of her. I kept on selling off the litters because this makes a quick turnover. You buy a gilt in pig and take the pigs off her when they are eight weeks old and sell them as stores, and the money turns over nice and quick. You’ve got to pay for the gilt’s keep from the minute you’ve bought her. You must turn her out on the meadow, put her in pig, care for her. Anyway, eventually I’ve built up until I now have thirty sows, which are as many as I can manage. I daren’t do any more to it, not yet, anyway.
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Page 28