The Innocent Eye. I
I
WHEN I went to school I learned that the Vale in which we lived had once been a lake, but long ago the sea had eaten through the hills in the east and released the fresh waters, leaving a fertile plain. But such an idea would have seemed strange to my innocent mind, so remote was this menacing sea. Our farm was toward the western end of the Vale, and because all our land was as flat as once the surface of the lake had been, we could see around us the misty hills, the Moors to the north, the Wolds to the south, meeting dimly in the east where they were more distant. This rim of hills was nearest in the south, at least in effect; for as the sun sank in the west the windows of Stamper’s farm in the south caught the blazing rays and cast them back at us, continually drawing our eyes in that direction. But we never traveled so far south as those hills; for the Church and the Market, the only outer places of pilgrimage, lay to the north, five or six miles away. By habit we faced north; the south was ‘behind.’
I seemed to live, therefore, in a basin, wide and shallow like the milk pans in the dairy; but the even bed of it was checkered with pastures and cornfields, and the rims were the soft blues and purples of the moorlands. This basin was my world, and I had no inkling of any larger world, for no strangers came to us out of it, and we never went into it. Very rarely my father went to York or Northallerton, to buy a piece of machinery for the farm or to serve on a jury at the Assizes; but only our vague wonder accompanied him, and the toys he brought back with him might have come from Arabia or Cathay, like sailors’ curios.
The basin at times was very wide, especially in the clearness of a summer’s day; but as dusk fell it would suddenly contract, the misty hills would draw near, and with night they had clasped us close: the centre of the world had become a candle shining from the kitchen window. Inside, in the sitting room where we spent most of our life, a lamp was lit, with a round glass shade like a full yellow moon. There we bathed before the fire, said our prayers kneeling on the hearthrug, and disappeared up the steep stairs lighted by a candle to bed; and, once there, the world was finally blotted out. I think it returned with the same suddenness, at least in summer; but the waking world was a new world, a hollow cube with light streaming in from one window across to a large bed, holding, as the years went by, first one, then two, and finally three boys, overseen by two Apostles from one wall and adjured from another, above a chest of drawers, by a white pottery plaque within a pink lustre frame, printed with a vignette of an angel blowing a trumpet and the words: —
PRAISE YE THE LORD
Sometimes the child’s mind went on living even during the darkness of night, listening to the velvet stillness of the fields. The stillness of a sleeping town, of a village, is nothing to the stillness of a remote farm; for the peace of day in such a place is so kindly that the ear is attuned to the subtlest sounds, and time is slow. If by chance a cow should low in the night, it is iike the abysmal cry of some hellish beast, bringing woe to the world. And who knows what hellish beasts might roam by night, for in the cave by the Church five miles away they once found the bones of many strange animals, wolves and hyenas, and even the tusks of mammoths. The night sound that still echoes in my mind, however, is not of this kind: it is gentler and more musical — the distant sound of horse hoofs on the highroad, at first dim and uncertain, but growing louder until they more suddenly cease. To that distant sound, I realized later, I must have come into the world, for the doctor arrived on horseback at four o’clock one December morning to find me uttering my first shriek.
I think I heard those hoofs again the night my father died, but of this I am not certain. Perhaps I shall remember when I come to relate that event, for now the memory of those years, which end shortly after my tenth birthday, comes fitfully, when the proper associations are aroused. If only I can recover the sense and certainty of those innocent years, — years in which we seemed not so much to live as to be lived by forces outside us, by the wind and trees and moving clouds and all the mobile engines of our expanding world, — then I am convinced I shall possess a key to much that has happened to me in this other world of conscious living. The echoes of my life which I find in my early childhood are too many to be dismissed as vain coincidences; but it is perhaps my conscious life which is the echo, the only real experiences in life being those lived with a virgin sensibility — so that we only hear a tone once, only see a color once, see, hear, touch, taste, and smell everything but once, the first time. All life is an echo of our first sensations, and we build up our consciousness, our whole mental life, by variations and combinations of these elementary sensations. But it is more complicated than that, for the senses apprehend not only colors and tones and shapes, but also patterns and atmospheres, and our first discovery of these determines the larger patterns and subtler atmospheres of all our subsequent existence.
II
I have given the impression that the farm was remote, but this is not strictly true. Not half a mile on each side of us was another farmhouse, and clustering near the one to the east were three or four cottages. We formed, therefore, a little community, remote as such; in Doomsday Book we had been described as a hamlet. The nearest village was two or three miles away, but to the south, so that it did not count for much until we began to go to school, which was not until toward the end of the period of which I write. Northward our farm road ran through two fields and then joined the highroad running east and west; but eastward this road soon turned into a road running north and south, down which we turned northward again, to the Church five miles away, and to Kirby, our real metropolis, six miles away.
The farmhouse was a square stone box with a roof of vivid red tiles. Its front was to the south, and warm enough to shelter some apricot trees against the wall, but there was no traffic that way. All our exits and entrances were made on the north side, through the kitchen; and I think even our grandest visitors did not disdain that approach. Why should they ? On the left as they entered direct into the kitchen was an old oak dresser; on the right a large open fireplace, with a great iron kettle hanging from the reckan, and an oven to the near side of it. A long deal table, glistening with a honey-gold sheen from much scrubbing, filled the far side of the room; long benches ran down each side of it. The floor was flagged with stone, each stone neatly outlined with a border of Bath brick, rubbed on after each washing. Sides of bacon and plump dusky hams hung from the beams of the wooden ceiling.
By day it was the scene of intense bustle. The kitchenmaid was down by five o’clock to light the fire; the laborers crept down in stockinged feet and drew on their heavy boots; they lit candles in their horn lanthorns and went out to the cattle. Breakfast was at seven, dinner at twelve, tea at five. Each morning of the week had its appropriate activity: Monday was washing day, Tuesday ironing, Wednesday and Saturday baking, Thursday ‘turning out’ upstairs and churning, Friday ’turning out’ downstairs. Every day there was the milk to skim in the dairy — the dairy was to the left of the kitchen, and as big as any other room in the house. The milk was poured into large flat pans and allowed to settle; it was skimmed with horn scoops, like toothless combs.
At dinner, according to the time of the year, there would be from five to seven farm laborers, the two servant girls, and the family, with whom, for most of the time, there was a governess — a total of from ten to fifteen mouths to feed every day. The bustle reached its height about midday; the men would come in and sit on the dresser, swinging their legs impatiently; when the food was served, they sprang to the benches and ate in solid gusto, like animals. They disappeared as soon as the pudding had been served, some to smoke a pipe in the saddle room, others to do work which could not wait. Then all the clatter of washing up rose and subsided.
More peaceful occupations filled the afternoon. The crickets began to sing in the hearth. The kettle boiled for tea. At nightfall a candle was lit; the foreman or the shepherd sat smoking in the armchair at the fireside end of the table. The latch clicked as the others came in one by one and went early to bed.
The kitchen was the scene of many events which afterward flowed into my mind from the pages of books. Whenever in a tale a belated traveler saw a light and came through the darkness to ask for shelter, it was to this kitchen door. I can no longer identify the particular stories, but they do not belong to this period of childhood so much as to my later boyhood and youth, long after I had left the farm; and even to-day my first memories easily usurp the function of the imagination, and clothe in familiar dimensions and patterns, exact and objective, the scenes which the romancer has purposely left vague. Perhaps the effect of all romance depends on this faculty we have of giving our own definition to the fancies of others. A mind without memories means a body without sensibility; our memories make our imaginative life, and it is only as we increase our memories, widening the imbricated shutters which divide our mind from the light, that we find with quick recognition those images of truth which the world is pleased to attribute to our creative gift.
III
The Green, a space of perhaps two acres, lay in front, of the kitchen door. It was square; one side, that to the left as we came out of the house, was fully taken up by a range of sheds. A shorter range of buildings continued in line with the house on the right -— first the saddle room, one of my favorite haunts, then the shed where the dogcart and buggy were kept, and finally the blacksmith’s shop. Beyond this were the grindstones and the ash heap (in just such a heap, I imagined, Madame Curie discovered radium), and then a high hedge led to the corner of the Green, where three enormous elm trees, the only landmark near our farm, overhung the duck pond. On the other two sides the Green was bounded by hedges. The farm road led past the sheds and then to the left through the stack yard; to the right there was a cart track leading across the fields to the next farm with its cluster of cottages.
Our dominion was really fourfold: the Green I have just described, and then three other almost equal squares, the one to the left of the Green being the farm outhouses, a rectangular court of low buildings enclosing the Foldgarth (or fold-garth), and two others to the south of the house, the orchard to the east, the garden to the west. Each province was perfectly distinct, divided off by high walls or hedges; and each had its individual powers or mysteries. The Green was the province of water and of fowl, of traffic and trade, the only province familiar to strangers — to the postman and the peddler, and the scarlet huntsmen. In winter we made the snowman there; in summer avoided its shelterless waste. On Mondays the washed clothes flapped in the wind, but for the rest of the week it was willingly resigned to hens, ducks, geese, guinea fowls, and turkeys, whose discursive habits, incidentally, made it no fit playground for children. The pond was more attractive, but because of its stagnation it could not compete with the becks not far away. I remember it best in a hot summer, when the water dried up and left a surface of shining mud, as smooth as moleskin, from which projected the rusty wrecks of old cans and discarded implements. Perhaps it was a forbidden area; it serves no purpose in my memory.
The pump was built over a deep well, in the corner of the Green near the kitchen; it was too difficult for a boy to work. One day, underneath the stone which took the drip, we discovered bright green lizards. Behind the pump, handy to the water, was the copper-house — the ‘copper’ being a large cauldron built in over a furnace. Here the clothes were boiled on a Monday; here, too, potatoes for the pigs were boiled in their earthy skins, and the pigs were not the only little animals who enjoyed them, for they are delicious when cooked in this way.
Outside the same copper-house the pigs were killed, to be near the cauldron of boiling water with which they were scalded. The animal was drawn from its sty by a rope through the ring in its nose: its squealing filled the whole farm until it reached the copper-house, and there by the side of a trestle its throat was cut with a sharp knife and the hot blood gushed on to the ground. The carcass was then stretched on the trestle, and the whole household joined in the work of scraping the scalded hide; it was done with metal candlesticks, the hollow foot making a sharp and effective instrument for removing the bristles and outer skin. The carcass was then disemboweled and dismembered. The copper was once more requisitioned to render down the superfluous fat, which was first cut into dices. The remnants of this process, crisp shreds known as scraps, formed our favorite food for days afterward. In fact, pig killing was followed by a whole orgy of good things to eat — pork pies, sausages, and pigs’ feet filling the bill for a season.
The scenes I have described, and many others of the same nature, such as the searing of horses’ tails, the killing of poultry, the birth of cattle, even the lewdness of a half-witted laborer, were witnessed by us children with complete passivity — just as I have seen children of the same age watching a bullfight in Spain, quite unmoved by its horrors. Pity, and even terror, are emotions which develop when we are no longer innocent, and the sentimental adult who induces such emotions in the child is probably breaking through defenses which nature has wisely put round the tender mind. The child even has a natural craving for horrors. He survives just because he is without sentiment, for only in this way can his green heart harden sufficiently to withstand the wounds that wait for it.
On the south side of the Green were two familiar shrines, each with its sacred fire. The first was the saddle room, with its pungent clean smell of saddle soap. It was a small whitcwashed room, hung with bright bits and stirrups and long loops of leather reins; the saddles were in a loft above, reached by a ladder and trapdoor. In the middle was a small cylindrical stove, kept burning through the winter, and making a warm friendly shelter where we could play undisturbed. Our chief joy was to make lead shot — or bullets, as we called them; and for this purpose there existed a long-handled crucible and a mould. At what now seems to me an incredibly early age we melted down the strips of lead we found in the window sill, and poured the sullen liquid into the small aperture of the mould, which was in the form of a pair of pincers — closed while the pouring was in progress. When opened, the gleaming silver bullets, about the size of a pea, fell out of the matrix and rolled away to cool on the stone floor. We used the bullets in our catapults, but the joy was in the making of them, and in the sight of their shining beauty.
The blacksmith’s shop was a still more magical shrine. The blacksmith came for a day periodically, to shoe or reshoe the horses, to repair wagons, and to make simple implements. In his dusky cave the bellows roared, the fire was blown to a white intensity, and then suddenly the bellows shaft was released and the soft glowing iron drawn from the heart of the fire. Then clang, clang, clang on the anvil, the heavenly shower of ruby and golden sparks, and our precipitate flight to a place of safety. All around us, in dark cobwebbed corners, were heaps of old iron, discarded horseshoes, hoops, and pipes. Under the window was a tank of water for slaking and tempering the hot iron, and this water possessed the miraculous property of curing warts.
In these two shrines I first experienced the joy of making things. Everywhere around me the earth was stirring with growth and the beasts were propagating their kind. But these wonders passed unobserved by my childish mind, unrecorded in memory. They depended on forces beyond our control, beyond my conception. But fire was real, and so was the skill with which we shaped hard metals to our design and desire.
IV
The front garden was an annex of the drawing-room, and not part of our customary world. If we went there during the day, it was to see if the forbidden apricots were ripening, or to play for a short time round the monkeypuzzle tree which grew in the middle of a small lawn. But a monkey-puzzle tree is not a friendly shelter: its boughs are too near the ground; it is hirsute and prickly. The lawn was enclosed by hedges of box, through which narrow arches led to the flower garden in front, to the vegetable garden on the right, and to the orchard on the left. Again, all these provinces were rectangular, without any picturesque charm, but riotous with natural detail, with great variety of shrubs, fruit bushes, and vegetables.
Through the wicket that led into the orchard, there came first the water trough, an immense stone tank fed from the eaves; this rain water was very precious for washing purposes, so we were forbidden to play with it. It is one of the few memories I have of the sternness of my father that on one occasion, finding me transgressing this law, he immediately picked me up by the seat and immersed me in the water.
Above the trough, high up on the gable of the house, was another forbidden object: the bell which was pealed at midday to announce dinner to the scattered laborers, none of whom was likely to wear a watch.
Behind the saddle room, in this region of the trough, was the sand heap, in a corner formed by a lime house and a low cowshed. The hours we spent in this corner were too habitual to linger much in the memory. It was a generous heap, allowing an extensive system of trenches and castles; near by was the shade of the apple trees and the elms; our days there were timeless. Once, playing in the sand, I slipped into the cowshed to stroke a young calf housed there, closing the door behind me. The calf was lying in fresh clean straw, and did not stir at my approach. Hours later I was missed, and after long searching and much shouting in the farm and the fields I was discovered sleeping with my head against the calf’s warm flank.
The orchard, like the Green, must have been about two acres in extent. I have no memory of it, except in spring and summer, when the branches, with their succession of blossom, leaf, and fruit, met to form an overgrowth, supported by aisles of trunks, green with moss or misty gray-blue when the lichen was dry and crusted. One old russet tree sloped up from the ground at a low angle, easy to climb; and in its boughs we shook the blossom till it fell in flakes like snow, or helped ourselves unchecked to the sweet rough-skinned apples. I think the orchard held only two treasures besides the trees: an old disused roller about which we clambered, and in a far corner, by a bush whose hollow twigs made excellent stems for improvised pipes (in which we smoked a cunning mixture of dried clover and pear leaves), a small trough which usually held rock salt, brown and glassy. In the orchard, and in the paddock beyond, we dug up sweet pignuts, and ate them without much regard for the soil engrained in them.
When we emerged into the paddock, where our pony and the mare for the dogcart used to graze, there was a sudden sense of space. The ground sloped down gently toward our main stream, the Riccall, which formed the southern boundary of the farm. Beyond the Riccall, which flowed rather deeply in the soft earth and was quite impassable to us, lay a mysterious land we never explored: the south, with the hills rising in the distance, the farm with the fiery windows hidden in their folds.
V
The fourth kingdom, the Foldgarth, was the animal kingdom. We usually entered it from the north corner of the Green, and here on the right were the main cowsheds, and the most familiar part of this complex of buildings. Morning and night, and most often by lanthorn light (perhaps it is only the winter scene which is impressed on my memory), the cows were milked in a glow and atmosphere which is for me the glow and atmosphere of the Nativity. The patient beasts stood in their stalls, exuding the soft, slightly sickly smell of cow breath; a girl or a man sat on a three-legged stool, cheek against a glossy flank, and the warm needle stream of milk hissed into the gleaming pails. At first it sang against the hollow tin drum of the base, but as the pail filled it murmured with a frothy surrsurr.
Here I learned my first bitter lesson of self-limitation; for, try as I would, I could not learn how to milk. To manipulate the teats so as to secure a swift and easy flow of milk demands a particular skill; I never acquired it, though my brothers, younger than I, seemed to find no difficulty. This was my first humiliation in the practical affairs of life. Another which I might mention here was an inability to make the kuk-kuk noise between the tongue and palate which is the proper sound to urge a horse on gently. These failures in trivial things loom much larger in childhood and affect us much more deeply than any backwardness in learning facts, for they reflect on our physical capacity, and that is much more real to us than any mental power.
Then, along the northern side of the Foldgarth, ran the stables for the cart horses. We were a little scared of these immense noble beasts, for some of them were known to be savage, and ready to bite anyone but the man whose duty it was to look after them. At the end of the stables a gateway led into the stack yard, and so out on to the road and the fields beyond. At this gateway I once witnessed a terrible scene. An ignorant laborer had taken a pregnant mare out to plough, and by overstraining her caused a miscarriage. My father and I met him bringing in the horse, with her ghastly trail, and so terrible was my father’s passion that he quite forgot my presence as he heaped his curses on the offending man.
My memories of my father are too intermittent to form a coherent image. His sensitive face, his soft brown eyes, and his close curly black hair were not the features of a normal farmer. He loved his farm and was well known for his fervor and enterprise, a tradition he had inherited from my grandfather; he brought some visionary quality to his life and labor. He was a man of austere habits and general uprightness, whose friendship was sought by men of a more recognized intellectual standing. And yet I do not remember that he read much or was in any sense bookish. But they know little of the life of a farmer who imagine that it is consistent with a life of even elementary scholarship. Only, a sensitive and intelligent mind, in daily contact with all the problems and processes of farming, acquires more than a weather wisdom — an intuitive sense of reality and right values which no sheltered schooling can give.
Along the western side of the Foldgarth ran a line of higher, doublestoried buildings. The first was a big hay barn, open to the rafters, with the pigeon house built in at the gable end. It was a favorite playing ground in wet weather; we could make giddy leaps from one level of hay to another; we could burrow into caves and hide completely in its scented warmth. A door at the other side of this bam led to a circular building, with a grinding mill in the middle and a circular track round which a horse could drag the mill beam.
Then came various sheds for fodder and implements, and over these, approached by stone steps at the end of the building, and outside the Foldgarth, was the granary — a long, dry, sweet-smelling loft, with bins of golden wheat and stacks of oil cake, and a store of locust beans which we ate when we were hungry. A machine for crushing oil cake stood against one wall, and in this one day I managed to crush my little finger. I fainted with the pain, and the horror of that dim milk-white panic is as ineffaceable as the scar which my flesh still bears.
The other two sides of the Foldgarth were occupied by pigsties and cowsheds; the middle by a steadily steaming morass of sodden straw known as the Mig Heap, the infinitely precious store of manure from which the land recovered some of the strength given forth in corn and pasture. The acrid stench of this heap, never unpleasant to anyone brought up with it, pervaded the whole of the Foldgarth. The pigeons flocked from roof to roof. An inquisitive calf would lift its head over the low door of its stall. A scurry of hens, an occasional grunt or squeal of pigs, the running of a rope through a ring in the stables — these were the only sounds that disturbed the day’s peace, until the men returned from the fields with the weary horses, and the Foldgarth was filled with the clatter of hoofs on the stone sets, with the whistling and hissing of the men over their grooming.
On the southern side of the Foldgarth, some of the stables opened into a lane whose other side was the high wall on the north of the vegetable garden. Here lived the hunters, beautiful pedigree horses which were the pride of the farm — lived in a cleanliness and comfort which put them in a class apart, halfway between humans and animals. I fancy that the fortunes of the farm depended far more on these splendid pampered darlings than on the normal crops and cattle. It was a great day when they were paraded in all their glossy splendor before some horse dealer, and a bargain struck. But sorrow must have been mingled with satisfaction when they left us, and a farm is, indeed, the scene of many sad farewells: pet lambs and ducks stolen away to go to the market with the rest, leaving a broken-hearted child to weep the day away until some consolation is found.
VI
Beyond the Foldgarth lay the stack yard, looking like an African village, especially after the harvest, when it was stored to its limits. The stacks were of two shapes, — circular and rectangular, — with swelling sides and neatly thatched roofs. The ridges of the rectangular ones were braided with osiers; the round ones were finished off with a fanciful panache of straw. Birds sheltered under the narrow eaves, and darted out at our strident approach. One summer evening something not bird nor bat fluttered among the stacks; the farm was roused to excitement and the winged creature finally netted. It was a rare death’s-head moth, for which some collector paid the fabulous sum of five shillings. That such riches could lurk in a stack yard was a new portent. We learned that the death’s-head moth was fond of the potato flower, and the season never afterward passed without a vain hunt among these despised blooms.
The great festival in the stack yard was threshing time. Late one afternoon we would hear the chuff and rattle of the engine and threshing machine far away on the highroad, and off we would race to meet it. The owner of the engine, Jabez by name, was a great hero in the eyes of children. He was a small man with a little twinkling face and a fuzzy black beard. He would stop his rattling train and take us up into the engine cabin. I love to this day that particular smell of hot steam and oil which was then wafted to us. With amazement we watched Jabez push over his levers and set the monster in motion. With more chuffing and much complicated shunting, the machines were steered into position for work, and then left shrouded for the night.
Very early the next morning we would hear a high-pitched musical hum coming from the stack yard, and it was with difficulty that we could be made to eat any breakfast. Then we would run across the Green and find round the corner the most exciting scene of the year. The engine stood before us, merry with smoke and steam; the big flywheel winked in the sunlight; the bright balls of the revolving ‘governor’ (Jabez had taught me the technical names) twinkled in a minor radiance.
Jabez was in the cabin stoking the glowing furnace. The big leather belt swung rhythmically between the flywheel and the threshing machine. Two men on the top of a stack threw down the sheaves; two others cut them open and guided them into the monster’s belly; the monster groaned and gobbled, and out of its yammering mouth came the distracted straw; elsewhere emerged the prickly chaff, and below, into sacks that reached the ground, trickled the precious corn. A cloud of dust and chaff swirled round everything.
As the stack disappeared, and approached ground level, we were armed with sticks, and the dogs became attentive and expectant. The last layer of sheaves was reached; out raced the rats which had made a home in the bedding of thorns on which the stack rested, and then for a few minutes the stack yard was an abode of demons: dogs barked, men and children shouted in a lust of killing and the unfortunate rats squealed in panic and death agonies. Sometimes we found a nest of newly bom rats, and then we were suddenly sad.
I think this festival used to last two or three days; it was our only contact with the Machine God. I suppose we were dimly aware of the railway six miles away, and must have traveled on it, for I know that once or twice we went to Scarborough; but for some reason I have no vivid memory of these excursions, nor of anything associated with them. They were not lived, but pushed without roots into the soil of our daily existence.
One curious experience, however, remains with me, and it may as well be mentioned here; it is the first of several instances in my life of which I remain incapable of asserting that the experience was of the dream world. My reason tells me, in this case at least, that it must have been a dream, but the mind does not necessarily assent to its reasoning. I ‘appeared (let me say) to walk down the cart track that led along the top side of two or three fields toward Peacock’s farm; I climbed on to the gate that separated the last field from the highroad, and as I rested there I was terrified by the sudden onrush of a large steam roller, traveling northward. It was distinguished from ordinary steam rollers (which I had no doubt seen at work on the roads) by the fact that the boiler rested on an enormous bellows, and as the engine roared onward these bellows worked up and down and so seemed to throw up through the chimney a fiery column of smoke, steam, and sparks. This apparition, which came to me perhaps in my seventh year, remains distinct in every detail in my mind to-day.
I do not think that I was more than usually subject to nightmares (if such this was), but one, which I fancy belongs to a common form, is also remembered by me with peculiar vividness, though it is difficult to describe. I am laid as in bed on a bank of clouds. The sky darkens, grows bluish-black. Then the darkness seems to take visible shape, to separate into long bolsters, or objects which I should now compare with airships. These then point themselves toward me, and approach me, magnifying themselves enormously as they get nearer. I awake with a shriek, quivering with terror. My mother hears me and comes quickly to comfort me, perhaps to take me back with her to sleep away the sudden terror.
VII
There was a sandy rankness about the fields stretching toward the river, but these were the main pasture lands. The cow pasture, by far the largest field on the farm, lay on the west of the farm buildings, and its boundary was the western boundary of our land. A path led across the middle of it, and across the neighboring fields to Riccall House, distinguished from the rest of us by its whitewashed walls and thatched roof. This pasture was rather a godless waste: it was pock-marked with erupted rabbit warrens, countless molehills, and dark fairy rings in the grass. We implicitly believed in the mysterious origin of these rings, and felt that we might any misty morning find the fairies dancing. Periodically the rabbits had to be decimated, and then fierce dark men with waxed moustaches appeared, bringing ferrets in canvas bags. We would go out in a party, carrying guns and spades, to attack the warrens. The ferrets were loosened from their bags and disappeared down the holes. We listened for subterranean squeals, watched for the sudden dart of terrified rabbits, and for the eager inquisitive emergence of the baffled ferrets. The spades, digging easily in the sandy earth, discovered the labyrinths and occasionally a nest of newly born rabbits.
There was a wide watery ditch on the south side of the cow pasture, inhabited by frogs, who spawned among the cress and kingcups. Beyond were narrow fields, running parallel with the river, lush and marshy. The river itself ran between banks, for it was liable to flood over. Eastward it ran for about half a mile, till it disappeared under a bridge which carried the road near Peacock’s farm — the road of the dream engine. By the bridge was a pool with a projecting pier; this was the sheep dip, where annually the sheep were given some kind of antiseptic bath.
I remember the oily smell of sheep, sheep shearing, their ludicrous nakedness when first shorn. Most years there was a pet lamb, a weakling that had to be wrapped in blankets before the kitchen fire, fed from a bottle, and gradually nursed into life. His field would be the Green, and we were his playmates until the inevitable day of parting came. The long tails of lambs were usually bitten off, because of some tradition that human teeth were the only safe means. But the tails of young colts were cut off with special clippers, and then seared with a red-hot iron. Full-grown sheep are disgusting animals; their feet rot and have to be scraped and anointed. Maggots burrow into their flesh and pullulate, are gouged out and the sheep again anointed. Their wool is infested with nauseous black ticks. Only on the moors, where the sheep are black-faced and agile, with curled horns and quivering nostrils, docs this animal acquire any dignity.
The greater part of the farm was given over to various crops, — wheat, oats, barley, and rye, — and the fields devoted to these spread northward. Some of them seemed very remote to us. One was sinister, for a large oak tree grew in the middle of it, and here a man sheltering under it had been struck by lightning and killed. Another field, at the extreme north of our land, had high hedges full of May blossom; I think there was a wood on one side; and here, years afterward when the farm was only a memory, I staged incidents from the Morte d’Arthur, or Idylls of the King.
In the nearer fields we watched the labors of the months. We were aware of the ploughing, the harrowing, the rolling, the sowing, and finally of the harvest. We followed the ploughman, and sometimes ran between the shafts of the plough, pretending to guide it to a truer furrow. At the harvest, as soon as we could walk we became laborers, because then the whole household would turn into the fields, the women to bind the sheaves and pile them into stooks. At lunch time my mother would drive out with the buggy laden with sandwiches, cheese, and bread, and great stone jars of draft beer. We played at hide-and-seek among the stooks, gathered the shorn poppies and cornflowers, watched the field mice scurry in fright among the stubble and scarlet pimpernel. At the end of the harvest, the last wagon was escorted back in triumph, often late at night in the moonlight, and a great harvest supper was spread in the kitchen, at which my father and mother presided.
In November all the hedges were trimmed and layered; the thorns were raked up into great heaps and fired. When we were old enough, my father would have a cartload of thorns pitched on the Green, and there one night we would dance around the bonfire.
Almost in the middle of the farm was the fox covert — a piece of land of perhaps four acres, thickly covered with gorse and scrub, hedged with hazel trees. Twice in a season the Hunt met at our house. They assembled on the Green — the Master, the Kennelman, and several others in their scarlet coats and peaked caps, the farmers and ladies in hard billycock hats. The hounds moved in a compact mass, their upcurved tails swaying rhythmically. When the Meet was present, they moved off to the fox covert, and always without much difficulty started a fox. My father rode one of his beautiful hunters; my mother had her pony. At first we children went on foot as far as the covert and saw them take off, and piped our tallyhos if we caught sight of the fox. We heard the huntsman’s horn as they sped across the fields, waited until we could hear it no more, then went home to wait until the weary hunters returned. But when I was about seven I was given my first pony, and then rode away with the hounds — my first hunt ending in the middle of a hedge which my impetuous pony had taken too rashly.
At the first kill at which I was present I had to be ‘blodded.’ The severed head of the fox was wiped across my face till it was completely smeared in blood, and I was told what a fine huntsman I should make. I do not remember the blood, nor the joking huntsmen; only the plumed breath of the horses, the jingle of their harness, the beads of dew and the white gossamer on the tangled hedge beside us.
(To be concluded in the April issue)