Clodhopper

by HENRY WILLIAMSON

1

FEELING the deteriorating trend of European civilized life acutely in 1936, while not being able to determine actually what form or tragic turn events would take, I decided to buy with my small literary savings a farm of 240 acres in East Anglia. Since the last war I had lived in Devon, right at the other side of England, and had been a writer. I knew nothing about farming.

I found the farm by chance. My friend and publisher, Richard de la Mare, the son of the poet, had a country cottage in Norfolk, and one day when I was staying with him he took me to see an old house a few miles along the coast. The house was empty, and had been so for some years. It had been built by Francis Bacon’s father in Queen Elizabeth’s time, of local flint and brick; it had two decaying towers, the ruins of a banqueting hall, in which owls and hawks nested, and it stood picturesquely old and alone among blighted apple trees beside a trout stream. And a chalk stream, moreover, in which trout of three and four pounds had in the past been taken on a dry fly, and sea trout “ran” up in the summer, fish weighing so much as twelve pounds!

As for the marshes of the flat coast, they were famous for wildfowl of every kind, from jacksnipe to the great geese which flew there in the winter from Spitzbergen and the north. It was wild, deserted country, thinly populated, on the edge of the arable or corn district of East Anglia — once the granary of England, but then suffering from the long depression of British farming.

After several visits to the gloomy old house, said to be haunted, with its cellars and floors that looked to be dry-rotten, its attics of great oak beams hung with clusters of pipistrelle bats, — it was winter, and it rained every time I went to see it, — I decided that it was too big, and probably too costly, for me. It was for sale with 240 acres of land with hills, valleys, woods, a mile of the trout stream, and wonderful views over the marshes. Woodcock flying from Scandinavia in the hunter’s moon alighted in those woods; teal, mallard, and wigeon flighted to the willow clumps. During one visit I watched eight “guns" standing on the meadow below one of the woods, and it seemed that, hundreds of pheasants were flying out before the beaters advancing through the trees.

What a place to own! It had everything! Half a mile away was the sea, with many creeks for sailing a small boat, shellfish for the gathering, and pools for bathing. I visualized ponies for the children, our own hams hanging from the farmhouse beams (only there was no farmhouse with the land!), and myself with a red fat face, where before I had been thin and pale, myself a proper John Bull, staring at pigs and corn stacks, slow and easy where before I had been quick and irritable. In fact, at forty years of age I was entering the Faustian phase; and I knew it, but avoided the direct realization by telling myself that in the painful transitional years to come I would be justified in having decided to educate my sons as peasants or yeomen on the land. The old order was deteriorating; it had been deteriorating since I was a boy, and a youth in the World War; and now direct action was needed. So the plow was exchanged for the pen.

I had enough sense to have a professional valuer look over the farm. It was in a terrible condition. Weeds everywhere: weeds which were excellent cover for the wild pheasants. The farm was let to a farmer who paid £100 a year rent, and regarded it as a game preserve for the rich sportsmen who came to stay at the luxury hotel a mile or two away down the coast. It was burdened by a tithe of £80, to be paid annually out of the rent received by the landlord; and when taxes and drainage rates had been paid, the landlord was out of pocket. So he was amazed when someone made his agent an offer for the land, which no one else had ever wanted. Everyone else had been after that old house, but had shied at the encumbrance of the farm.

But by this time I was entirely transfixed by the immovable idea that I must have that farm. My only hope in life lay in being the farmer of my imagination. I must restore its arable fields to fertility, throw and trim its sprawling hedges, which had overgrown since the end of the last war, drain the bogs in its meadows, make up its roads, erect new gates and gateposts (not one was standing anywhere on the farm), repair the hundreds of square yards of its Elizabethan tiled roofs, remove the thousands of rats which had tunneled the wide flint walls almost hollow, clean its trout stream of the mud which had accumulated there and ruined its fishing, build a farmhouse, teach myself to farm by day and write by night to earn money to pay the bills.

I must at all or any cost to myself or my family restore the land to what it had once been, and in doing so perhaps make of myself what I should have been had there not been a world war and all the mortifying experiences leading up to it. Somehow, scarcely formulated at the back of my mind, somehow I hoped desperately that all these self-imposed difficulties would help in the beginning of a backta-nature movement which would transform the machine mentality of man and so avert war; and in my own person I trusted that the arduous work would give me the mental and domestic harmony which I had lacked in the years since I went to Devon to become a writer soon after the Armistice of 1918.

2

THAT was in the winter of 1936. By the summer of that year I had bought the land, against the advice of my valuer, and even against the advice of the lawyers of the old owner, who for six years had been hoping to find a purchaser. I started with a friend in May, 1936, arriving from Devon with a truck and a van. We made a camp in the pine woods overlooking the sea. By the winter of 1937 my friend had quit, unable to stand it all; but meanwhile four old condemned cottages I had bought had been restored and made dry and light, and the family was living in two of them. Our dwelling there was but temporary; for with the land I had bought two better cottages, standing in an acre of garden, and I hoped one day, if I could earn enough money, to alter them and join them into one farmhouse. My friend and I had rebuilt the four cottages with the help of two unemployed laborers in the village, teaching ourselves as we went along. I learned in that time that I would never try to build anything by myself again!

That building job went anything but smoothly. We were racing against time — three of the cottages had to be stripped to the shells of the lower walls and also doing other jobs at the same time. The usual error of the amateur: taking on too much at once! I had hired a gravel pit, and with two other men dug about a thousand tons in three weeks and made up half a mile of potholed roads. After the usual blisters and exhaustion due to unformed muscles, the picking and shoveling was easy; but what I did find hard was the writing at night. We were not having sufficient food, and the differences with my “partner” (who had neither experience nor capital) were sometimes acute. I am told that our midnight arguments from the hilltop camp among the pine trees were sometimes audible throughout the village.

However, I kept the worst aspects of our disharmony out of the weekly broadcast talks from the BBC in London, and also out of the several articles I wrote each week for the Daily Express and other London papers. It meant working to the small hours and rising again at 7.00 A.M., but it was done somehow. At Michaelmas, 1937, the old bankrupt farmer left, and I found I had to pay him, by law, a year’s rent for “disturbing” him! However, I was now the farmer of my own land.

My plan was to plow the hundred acres of the arable and leave them plowed until the luxuriant weeds were high, and then plow them in again to make humus, afterwards cultivating the furrows and killing with harrows every successive generation of weeds that came up. Thus by 1930 my fields would be clean, sweetened by air and sun, and the bare fallow would restore much of the fertility lost by shallow plowings of the past and by cropping with the use of artificial fertilizers only. That was my scheme.

But the men I took on — two, a father and son who had been left entirely to themselves by the old farmer and were spiritually one with the frightful condition the farm was in — persuaded me to grow grain, to “get something back; otherwise it’s pay, pay, pay all the time, guv’nor, and ‘twale break you, ‘bor.” So instead of remaking the old cow-house, re-laying all the roads, clearing the old overgrown hedges, tiling the fallen roofs, setting new oaken posts and gates, and draining t he meadows, as I had planned, I found myself involved in farming a year before I was ready. Thus I got deeper, as they say in Norfolk, “in a muddle.”

Oh, those early dawn risings! Taking the truck alone along frosty miles to auction sales of bankrupt and quitting farmers, to buy machinery and implements of whose function or condition I knew absolutely nothing! What was the difference between a one-horse roll, a two-horse roll, and a rib or heavy Cambridge ring roll? What were they for, what did they do? How dare I find out ? Ask the gypsies? But if I did, would they see I was a mug, as the men at home had solemnly assured me, and so “run me,” making me pay twice or thrice the value of what I had been told I ought to get? I stood there, hollowfeeling, afraid to bid, afraid to lose what was urgently needed.

Time after time I returned home at night with rolls and harrows, barrels and old bedsteads (for concrete work, making future bridges across the meadow dikes), root cutters and scufllers, thill gears and horse collars (to this day I don’t know what a thill gear really is), harness and hay knives, old churns for making butter, and Napoleonic wooden machines for dressing the grain, objects like small windmills enclosed in large worm-eaten dog-kennels, bought for a few shillings. I wore overalls and had no time to eat my sandwiches at lunch; rushing home, I unloaded and then, after a wash and a hopeless stare at the fire, set about writing an amusing account of my day’s adventures, to pay for what I had acquired that day.

3

A THOUSAND times during that obscure time I said I must give up, for instead of uniting my family on the land, the experience seemed to be breaking it up. No bathroom in the cottages, no plumbing, hardly any furniture. The new roof blew off in a gale. The chimney caught fire; the electric light nearly electrocuted us. But after every depression my spirits rose, and I told the men that one day the farm would be unrecognizable. “So will you, guv’nor, if you harn’t keerful!” warned the old cowman, who refused to wash out the new cow-house with the new hose and piped water I had put up, from the new artesian well bored 76 feet into the chalk. (At least I had the sense not to attempt that boring myself.)

We grew barley that last year of the peace, and it met the biggest slump for fifteen years. It was the Munich crisis that caused it; the brewers bought of the abundant mid-European grain which came hurriedly to most of the southern and eastern ports of Britain, and when the British barley went on the market, the price dropped overnight. So instead of my arable cleaned and restored for the 1939 market, as I had planned, I had about fifty tons of unwanted barley lying in the grain barn. That old barn had beams made out of the spars of sailing ships which had probably carried grain from port to port along the east coast before King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. Instead of looking at those beams, so much of an attraction before the buying of the farm, I looked ruefully at the thousands of rats’ trails over the heaps of fine malting barley which nobody in the Corn Hall at Norwich wanted. Once again I learned the folly of not trusting to my own ideas.

So the war came, and the land I had bought at a period when British agricultural land had not been so cheap for one hundred and fifty years was immediately an asset. People who only two years before had warned me of my folly now complimented me on my foresight. “Ah, you’re a farmer!” they exclaimed. “The finest life on earth! Lucky fellow!” adding that they wished they had a farm. What did I think of their chances as farmers, if they “took the plunge” and did what I had done? Quite sincerely I returned to them the very excellent advice they had given me in the past. In farming, I said, you haven’t time to look at the view; farming is all technical problems and often frustrations. Ah, they replied, you farmers are never satisfied!

I don’t want to think of those occasions when I gave in to some persuasions and yielded to this or that request from an urban escapist, usually of military age, for a job on the farm. None of them cared about farming, and one and all were a burden in their various ways.

You can’t borrow or lend experience; you have to buy it. I bought mine. And somehow I stuck it out. Four derelict cottages made good, and occupied by my men working on the farm; another two cottages made into a habitable farmhouse for the family, with plumbing; an old ruinous barn turned into a librarystudio, where I sit before a warm open hearth and read my books; a garage built decently of old tiles, natural-edge elm boards sawn on our own bench, and concrete blocks inside plastered white; the acre of garden plowed up and planted with fruit trees; the stream bed cleaned in sections by slanting boarddams (fights with the Drainage Board men over those dams) and the meadows drained; a thousand tons of rich black mud spread over some poor fields, which after two years grew bumper crops; the roads ruined again by an invasion of practice tanks in a wet winter, but made up again a year later; two hundred tons of logs for our open hearths, got from the old thorn hedges cut down; rich leaf mold in the woods plowed out and spread on the arable, to restore fertility; our own game to shoot, and poultry, butter, and eggs. Only one of the original men remains; the others left declaiming there was nothing but work, work, work.

At last I achieved some sort of stability, and began to learn that farming was a whole-time job and a life job at that, if one wanted to become really a first-class yeoman. But the eldest boy, Windles, who was thirteen when war broke out, and was taken away from school in order to learn to be a real worker from that moment, now takes most of the farm work off me. After seven years of it — and the hardest part of it was bringing men grown up in the depression and decay of British farming standards to learn new ways from a “foreigner”— I am a writer once more, with a zest that is almost equal with that of my beginnings after the World War. Farming taught me my limitations; I am content with a small sphere; the world illusions of the sedentary and the untried are no longer mine.

(To be continued)