All Among the Barley Page 3

  ‘Constance has asked to meet Grandfather. Can you take over from me in Great Ley? I think John’s already put up a bird.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Miss FitzAllen.’ Then, nodding at me, ‘These rabbits are a regular plague. I shall get Doble to fetch up some sulphur cartridges,’ he said.

  Our farmhouse was old and timber-framed, with a long, crooked thatch roof, small, deep-set casement windows and a brick chimney leading up from two huge hearths scratched, if you knew where to look, with the mysterious circular patterns we called ‘witch-marks’, drawn with compasses many hundreds of years ago. Downstairs the floors were of yellow brick laid in a herringbone pattern and covered, in the parlour only, with threadbare Turkey rugs; upstairs there were wide elm boards. From the kitchen, a set of steep stairs with shallow treads led up in a half-turn; at its foot was a heavy, faded curtain against draughts. We had a coal-fired range, a fifteen-gallon copper for heating water and a pump at the backhouse sink, but no electric supply or refrigerator; we washed once weekly in a zinc bath, and there was an outdoor privy with a tin of Keating’s Powder to keep the flies down. Wych Farm was draughty and ramshackle, and little had changed there in five long centuries – certainly not what Grandfather called our ‘loving’ clay, which wore out horses and men and in winter made our mother curse. But despite its privations I was happy to grow up there because I loved our land fiercely, every single inch of it – and because I knew nothing else.

  There was nobody in the yard and I could see that the pony and trap were gone; the back door was closed and Mother nowhere to be seen. She had probably gone to visit Mary, or perhaps Doble had taken the trap somewhere and she was working in the vegetable-garden, or in the orchard seeing to the bees.

  I asked Constance to wait at the door, because I didn’t want to surprise Grandfather with a stranger in the house. I suppose I was worried what he would make of her. I hardly knew myself.

  He was seated in one of the two wing chairs in the parlour, which meant that he must have heard us cross the yard. He turned his face with its sunken eye sockets towards me as I came in.

  ‘Well, child?’

  His tone was curious, not scolding, and I went to him and laid one hand on his shoulder so that he would know I was there.

  ‘She’s called Constance FitzAllen and she’s staying in the village,’ I said. ‘She’s come to learn about farming, and – well, about the old ways.’

  ‘She were here an hour or so ago, is that right? Your mother sent her off with a flea in her ear.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Oh yes, that she did. Sent her packing. Looks like she’s got her own ideas, though. Do you bring her in.’

  I found Constance in the backhouse peering inside our copper, which was just then empty of water and unlit. ‘It’s such a shame you don’t make your own butter and cheese here,’ she said. ‘I told your mother as much earlier. We simply must keep the old skills alive.’

  So that was what had made Mother take against her. ‘I’ll – I’ll introduce you to Grandfather now, if you like,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes please! What a treat. Yes, lead the way!’

  Grandfather was standing, leaning on his stick. I had forgotten to tell her he was blind, but I could see that she understood it straight away, which was a relief.

  ‘Mr Mather, I’m Constance. Constance FitzAllen. It is such a pleasure to meet you,’ she said, taking his hand in both of hers. ‘Thank you so much for sparing me your time.’

  Indoors, her voice was softer than it had been, and she herself seemed smaller, or perhaps gentler somehow.

  ‘No, no, missy,’ he said. ‘Sit yourself down. Edith, let’s have some tea, shall us? Your mother’s gone to the village with Doble. She won’t be back for an hour.’

  In the kitchen I moved about quietly, setting the kettle to boil on the range and reaching down teapot and cups from the dresser. I strained to hear what the two of them were saying, but I could make out nothing above a low murmur. I cut some slabs of ginger cake and found three good plates, feeling a stab of irritation that I should have to play mother and miss out on the talk. Already I felt that Constance belonged to me and not to Grandfather, or anyone else at the farm.

  I set the tray down on the little walnut table by Grandfather’s chair. But before I could do anything further, Constance took the lid from the teapot and peered into it, and then began to pour.

  ‘Yes, those were hard years – hard years,’ Grandfather was saying. ‘We shall never see the like again, God be praised.’

  ‘They say in the village –’

  ‘This? It’s nothing hard work won’t remedy, you mark my words.’

  Grandfather had farmed through what the old men of the village called ‘the coming-down years’, and although he would not often speak of those times we knew that thistles had grown head-high on Seven Acres and Far Piece, and that, despairing and half-starved, his two brothers had left for New Zealand – where perhaps, we sometimes speculated, they lived on still. ‘Buy nothing and sell nothing!’ he would sometimes say to our father, and bang his stick upon the floor.

  Now, Constance picked up Grandfather’s cup and saucer as though to hand them to him, then put them down again and looked to me. I took the cup, set it on the arm of the wing chair and guided his hand to it. Through the open window came the distant whirr of the mower in Great Ley.

  ‘Thank you, Edith,’ he said.

  I poured my own tea, took a slice of cake and went to the window seat. It was my favourite place to sit, as I liked to look out at the yard and feel myself at the heart of the farm; I’d picture the way the fields and lanes stretched out from me to the other farms and woods and villages beyond. It felt like the way I wrote our address in my notebooks, beginning ‘Wych Farm’ and ending ‘The Universe’. Yet sitting there now I felt dismissed from the visit, as though I were a child again – despite the fact that I was fourteen years of age now, with school behind me for good.

  ‘What delicious cake, Edith,’ Constance said brightly. ‘Is it your mother’s recipe?’

  ‘Oh no, we buy it from the shop in the village,’ I said. ‘But – Mother makes her own honey cake,’ I added hurriedly, blushing red; ‘and we make preserves, of course – I help with that – and we bake. Mother doesn’t hold with shop-bought bread.’

  ‘But you’ve no mill hereabouts any more, have you?’

  ‘It is a great shame that we lost the mill in Elmbourne, a great shame,’ Grandfather said. ‘No, the railway put paid to it. Our corn is taken away in a lorry now, and it goes all the way to – to – well, my son can tell you all about that. Ada buys her flour in the village, and who knows who grew the wheat for it, or where! Such times we live in.’ Lightly, he tapped his stick upon the floor.

  ‘I suppose you’ve brought in a good many harvests, Mr Mather?’

  ‘That I have.’

  ‘It must worry you to see all the changes.’

  ‘Worry me? It don’t worry me. We must have change. We must have it! I didn’t farm like my father, and George don’t farm the same as me. That’s the way of it. You can’t stand still, not if you want to get on.’

  I smiled to myself. Constance was wrong if she’d thought he was the type to praise the olden days and set his face against anything new.

  ‘What about the horses?’

  ‘Well, what do you mean?’

  ‘Most farms are using tractors these days; I read an article about it in a magazine.’

  ‘We’ve got a Fordson,’ I interjected. ‘It’s in the barn.’

  ‘Oh, they’re all very well on light land, but they’re no good here, we found that out. No, they engines shan’t ever replace horsepower,’ Grandfather said.

  Frank’s friend Alf had his supper with us that evening, for he had walked over in the afternoon to help Frank on our land. The two of them had been in the same class all through school, and used to go egg-collecting and hunting sparrows with catapults together. Now they were both seventeen, and men, they h
ad given up such childish things, instead playing darts at the Bell & Hare, going rabbiting with Alf’s four ferrets and helping on one another’s farms from time to time.

  I’d known Alf and his elder brother Sidney all my life. Sid had a stutter, and a palsy that caused his head to pull sharply to the left as he spoke and rather spoiled his looks; Alf, though, I’d been a little sweet on when I was a very young girl. For he was a nice lad: everyone said so. He was taller than Frank and less stocky, with dark hair and eyes; I don’t think anyone would have called him handsome, exactly, but he had a pleasant face. He was funny, too: ‘Alfie Rose could get a laugh out of a wet hen,’ Mother sometimes said. He smiled a lot, and his teeth were good; he had an easy way with people, and was generally well liked. He wasn’t book-clever, perhaps, but that didn’t matter; he was what the old men of the village called ‘knacky’, which mattered much more on a farm.

  By the time I left school no traces of my childish pash remained, for I had experienced greater loves by then – Percy Bysshe Shelley; John from Swallows and Amazons; Miss Carter, my teacher, too. Yet there must have been something left of it in me that he, with his more worldly eyes, could discern, for why else would he behave as though I was still sweet on him, a conviction I didn’t have the first idea how to shake?

  After we had eaten that evening I carried the plates to the backhouse to wash up. Frank and Father had gone to the barn with Doble to see to something or other; John and Mother sat on at the table discussing Malachi, who had that morning cast a shoe. Mother was the only person with whom John would discuss the horses, for while he was at the Front she had been seen to plough and harrow and drill from foredawn to sunset, despite having Mary to look after, and then Frank coming along. I sometimes wondered if she missed those days now.

  Alf crept up close behind me as I stood at the sink, his warm breath sudden on the back of my neck. He made me jump.

  ‘Can I do anything? John’s gone to the stables.’

  I felt his hands at my waist.

  ‘Please let me, Edie,’ he muttered, moving his hands to the front of my ribcage and letting them creep up. I could feel his thing pressing against the small of my back.

  It seems strange to me now, but I felt nothing but a blank whenever Alf Rose touched me – although I usually thought about a lot of things very fast. I thought about whether I was clean, and whether, up close, I smelled of sweat; that possibility tormented me a great deal in those years. I wondered what I was expected to say and do – what other girls did – and sometimes at night I would find myself consumed with worry about the trouble I would be in if someone found out. As I stood there at the sink that evening I could see us as though through someone else’s eyes rather than my own: Alf shuffling up close behind me, me staring down at my wrists where they were lapped by the warm, greasy water. Of course, it was tremendously flattering that he liked me so much.

  Then he stepped back quickly and picked up a plate and dish-cloth, and I turned to see that Mother had come in with the last of the things to wash up.

  ‘Oh Alfie, you are a good boy,’ she said.

  III

  My diary that summer was a green Silvine exercise book, one of four that Miss Carter had given me on my last day of school so that I might compose poetry, or keep up my penmanship, or copy out improving passages from books. I did try to write poems for a time, but they came out horribly imitative – feeble versions of Shakespearean sonnets, or John Clare’s verses, or Keats. Clearly I hadn’t a voice of my own, and so quickly gave it up as a bad job and decided to use the exercise books as diaries instead.

  Yet even this I found that I failed at; for instead of sparkling aphorisms, fascinating conversation and news of current affairs, all the pages revealed each week was that I saw to the hens twice daily and grudgingly fulfilled my other tasks, was pleased when Mother made jam roly-poly and petulant when it was liver, read greedily, said my prayers dutifully, was chided frequently for mooning about and once a month suffered the Curse.

  Now and again I tried to scribble down something of my fears for the future, in an attempt, I suppose, to clarify the deadening vagueness of my thoughts. But while I was starting to know what I didn’t want from life, I had no idea yet what I did; or – more pertinently – what I might and might not be allowed. I knew only, at fourteen, that I wanted to matter to the world in some way.

  I wrote nothing of Alf Rose in my diary, and for that I am glad – for who knows where that book is now, or in whose hands. But I did write about Connie in it, and about everything that happened, as far as I understood it. And for a little while, at least, I think it helped.

  Frank and I went upriver: we went for the whole day. It was a Monday, I remember, because I should have been helping Mother; but Father had given us leave because the hay was nearly in and he allowed that we had worked hard.

  Mother had objected: ‘It’s wash-day on Monday, I can’t spare Edie.’ We were in Great Ley then, all of us together; Mother and I had brought cold tea and meat pies and laid a rag rug in the shade of a hedgerow oak, and Doble, in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, had brought Grandfather with him over the fields to feel the June sun on his face. Only John was missing; he had gone to fetch water so that the horses might drink.

  My heart had sunk at Mother’s words. I hated wash-day almost as much as she did, and what’s more I hadn’t had a day away from the farm in weeks. I looked to Frank for help, but he was gazing out at the meadow before us, its mown grass left where it lay to wither; under the bright sun the new hay was already fading from green to gold, and it smelled sweet. Probably Frank would be granted a day’s holiday, I thought. It wasn’t fair.

  Doble helped Grandfather into a canvas chair while Mother poured the tea. Father and John planned to mow Middle Ley after we had eaten, and then between us we would take our wooden rakes and ted it all into haycocks to parch. We would rest on Sunday, and on Monday, if Father judged it dry, the men would cart it back to the yard and build the rick.

  Father lay back on the rug and tipped his hat over his eyes.

  ‘You can manage one wash-day by yourself, Ada,’ he said. ‘God knows you’ll have to when we get Edie wed and off our hands.’

  And so, on Monday, after I had seen to the hens and helped Mother strip the beds, Frank and I set out. Straight away, it was as though we were little children again: Frank turned as he opened the farm gate and grinned at me and I couldn’t help but grin back, I don’t know why; perhaps the sheer rarity of it, for we hardly ever spent time together now unless we were working in the same field. He started to run up the lane, and I ran after him, and we raced one another, laughing at the prospect of the day-long river and the blue sky above.

  At the four-a-leet with its white-painted finger-post Frank stopped running and I helped him buckle the knapsack properly onto his back. He was one of those boys who do everything slapdash-fashion; at home I could tell where he’d been by the drawers and cupboards standing open, the lids left off jars and the lamps burning in empty rooms, a carelessness Mary or I, as girls, would never have been allowed. His work on the farm was meticulous, however; Father and John saw to that.

  ‘Shall we go by the road, Ed, or walk across the fields?’

  ‘Let’s go by the fields.’

  Some say that ours is a flat county, but that isn’t quite true: it undulates gently, unlike the level landscape of the Fens, and dips to the winding course of the River Stound; but the skies are huge, and the views, from any slight rise, go on for miles. The lanes are narrow, the fields small and deeply hedged, sometimes in double rows, tree-high: oak and ash, field maple, and dog-roses twining through. Because our part of the country was never reshaped as other places were, by prosperity or the railways or industry, a great many of its dwellings have survived to a great age. The farmhouses are often sway-backed, with deep thatch and crooked timber frames; the black barns are brick-footed, with tall gables and great doors. Our churches are of knapped flint gleaned from the fields, the land itself raised
up in prayer; and everywhere the corn reaches right up to the village edges, as I have been told the vineyards do in France.

  We walked along the margin of a long, narrow field on the other side of Hullets, land that Bob Rose farmed with the help of his two sons. A few years ago he’d let ninety acres down to grass and was breeding red polls for beef, and he was now trying his hand at market gardening, too – though he couldn’t quite give up his feeling for corn.

  ‘I see Rose’s bit of barley’s addling well,’ Frank said. ‘I wager this’ll run ten coomb an acre.’ He looked out thoughtfully across the breeze-rippled field, the barley’s green beards giving it a soft nap, like a dog’s fur.

  A good barley crop is, in corn country, the pride of every farmer, for it is so exact in its requirements: it will not forgive poor weather, and to please the maltster, and not be sold for pig-meal, it must be cut when perfectly ripe – a matter sometimes of a single day – and carted immediately rather than being left in stooks in the field, for even light rain then may set the kernels to sprout fine hairs and spoil the crop. Yet despite its demands it takes less out of the land than wheat, and a good malting sample will see it fetch a high price. Most of our neighbours risked some portion of their land to barley, for a good year filled their coffers as well as redounding to their credit among their friends. It was why Father had sown about half of our own land down to it that year.

  ‘Rose’s land’s wonderful light compared to ours,’ continued Frank. ‘More heart in it, too, somehow. But see, Ed, this barley was nursemaid to the grass Rose sowed last April, so he’ll have to harvest carefully or the butts of the sheaves will be green.’

  ‘He keeps it tidy, though – don’t you think? There’s hardly a weed, to my eye, and he keeps his ditches clear.’

  Frank bridled a little. ‘Well, he can afford to pay for extra hands – he makes a fair profit on that young beef he’s got. Oh yes, he’s rich as Croesus, is old Rose.’

  ‘Where did he get the money to turn over to beef, though?’