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CHANGE IN THE VILLAGE
BY
GEORGE BOURNE
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1912
_Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons, Ltd., Guildford, England_
TO
MY SISTERS
CONTENTS
I
PAGE
I. THE VILLAGE 3
II
THE PRESENT TIME
II. SELF-RELIANCE 21
III. MAN AND WIFE 38
IV. MANIFOLD TROUBLES 50
V. DRINK 65
VI. WAYS AND MEANS 79
VII. GOOD TEMPER 97
III
THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES
VIII. THE PEASANT SYSTEM 115
IX. THE NEW THRIFT 127
X. COMPETITION 143
XI. HUMILIATION 151
XII. THE HUMILIATED 167
XIII. NOTICE TO QUIT 180
IV
THE RESULTING NEEDS
XIV. THE INITIAL DEFECT 193
XV. THE OPPORTUNITY 200
XVI. THE OBSTACLES 217
XVII. THE WOMEN'S NEED 229
XVIII. THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING 244
XIX. EMOTIONAL STARVATION 260
XX. THE CHILDREN'S NEED 272
V
XXI. THE FORWARD MOVEMENT 289
I
THE VILLAGE
I
THE VILLAGE
If one were to be very strict, I suppose it would be wrong to give the
name of "village" to the parish dealt with in these chapters, because
your true village should have a sort of corporate history of its own,
and this one can boast nothing of the kind. It clusters round no central
green; no squire ever lived in it; until some thirty years ago it was
without a resident parson; its church is not half a century old. Nor are
there here, in the shape of patriarchal fields, or shady lanes, or
venerable homesteads, any of those features that testify to the
immemorial antiquity of real villages as the homes of men; and this for
a very simple reason. In the days when real villages were growing, our
valley could not have supported a quite self-contained community: it
was, in fact, nothing but a part of the wide rolling heath-country--the
"common," or "waste," belonging to the town which lies northwards, in a
more fertile valley of its own. Here, there was no fertility. Deep down
in the hollow a stream, which runs dry every summer, had prepared a
strip of soil just worth reclaiming as coarse meadow or tillage; but the
strip was narrow--a man might throw a stone across it at some
points--and on either side the heath and gorse and fern held their own
on the dry sand. Such a place afforded no room for an English village of
the true manorial kind; and I surmise that it lay all but uninhabited
until perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time a few
"squatters" from neighbouring parishes had probably settled here, to
make what living they might beside the stream-bed. At no time,
therefore, did the people form a group of genuinely agricultural
rustics. Up to a period within living memory, they were an almost
independent folk, leading a sort of "crofter," or (as I have preferred
to call it) a "peasant" life; while to-day the majority of the men, no
longer independent, go out to work as railway navvies, builders'
labourers, drivers of vans and carts in the town; or are more casually
employed at digging gravel, or road-mending, or harvesting and
hay-making, or attending people's gardens, or laying sewers, or in fact
at any job they can find. At a low estimate nine out of every ten of
them get their living outside the parish boundaries; and this fact by
itself would rob the place of its title to be thought a village, in the
strict sense.
In appearance, too, it is abnormal. As you look down upon the valley
from its high sides, hardly anywhere are there to be seen three
cottages in a row, but all about the steep slopes the little mean
dwelling-places are scattered in disorder. So it extends east and west
for perhaps a mile and a half--a surprisingly populous hollow now,
wanting in restfulness to the eyes and much disfigured by shabby detail,
as it winds away into homelier and softer country at either end. The
high-road out of the town, stretching away for Hindhead and the South
Coast, comes slanting down athwart the valley, cutting it into "Upper"
and "Lower" halves or ends; and just in the bottom, where there is a
bridge over the stream, the appearances might deceive a stranger into
thinking that he had come to the nucleus of an old village, since a
dilapidated farmstead and a number of cottages line the sides of the
road at that point. The appearances, however, are deceptive. I doubt if
the cottages are more than a century old; and even if any of them have a
greater antiquity, still it is not as the last relics of an earlier
village that they are to be regarded. On the contrary, they indicate the
beginnings of the present village. Before them, their place was
unoccupied, and they do but commemorate the first of that series of
changes by which the valley has been turned from a desolate wrinkle in
the heaths into the anomalous suburb it has become to-day.
Of the period and manner of that first change I have already given a
hint, attributing it indefinitely to a slow immigration of squatters
somewhere in the eighteenth century. Neither the manner of it, however,
nor the period is material here. Let it suffice that, a hundred years
ago or so, the valley had become inhabited by people living in the
"peasant" way presently to be described more fully. The subject of this
book begins with the next change, which by and by overtook these same
people, and dates from the enclosure of the common, no longer ago than
1861. The enclosure was effected in the usual fashion: a few adjacent
landowners obtained the lion's share, while the cottagers came in for
small allotments. These allotments, of little use to their owners, and
in many cases soon sold for a few pounds apiece, became the sites of the
first few cottages for a newer population, who slowly drifted in and
settled down, as far as might be, to the habits and outlook of their
predecessors. This second period continued until about 1900. And now,
during the last ten years, a yet greater change has been going on. The
valley has been "discovered" as a "residential centre." A water-company
gave the signal for development. No sooner was a good water-supply
available than speculating architects and builders began to buy up
vacant plots of land, or even cottages--it mattered little which--and
what never was strictly speaking a village is at last ceasing even to
think itself one. The population of some five hundred twenty years ago
has increased to over two thousand; the final shabby patches of the old
heath are disappearing; on all hands glimpses of new building and raw
new roads defy you to persuade yourself that you are in a country place.
In fact, the place is a suburb of the town in the next valley, and the
once quiet high-road is noisy with the motor-cars of the richer
residents and all the town traffic that waits upon the less wealthy.
But although in the exactest sense the parish was never a village, its
inhabitants, as lately as twenty years ago (when I came to live here)
had after all a great many of the old English country characteristics.
Dependent on the town for their living the most of them may have been by
that time; yet they had derived their outlook and their habits from the
earlier half-squatting, half-yeoman people; so that I found myself
amongst neighbours rustic enough to justify me in speaking of them as
villagers. I have come across their like elsewhere, and I am not
deceived. They had the country touch. They were a survival of the
England that is dying out now; and I grieve that I did not realize it
sooner. As it was, some years had passed by, and the movement by which I
find myself living to-day in a "residential centre" was already faintly
stirring before I began to discern properly that the earlier
circumstances would repay closer attention.
They were not all agreeable circumstances; some of them, indeed, were so
much the reverse of agreeable that I hardly see now how I could ever
have found them even tolerable. The want of proper sanitation, for
instance; the ever-recurring scarcity of water; the plentiful signs of
squalid and disordered living--how unpleasant they all must have been!
On the other hand, some of the circumstances were so acceptable that, to
recover them, I could at times almost be willing to go back and endure
the others. It were worth something to renew the old lost sense of
quiet; worth something to be on such genial terms with one's neighbours;
worth very much to become acquainted again at first hand with the
customs and modes of thought that prevailed in those days. Here at my
door people were living, in many respects, by primitive codes which have
now all but disappeared from England, and things must have been
frequently happening such as, henceforth, will necessitate journeys into
other countries if one would see them.
I remember yet how subtly the intimations of a primitive mode of living
used to reach me before I had learnt to appreciate their meaning.
Unawares an impression of antiquity would come stealing over the senses,
on a November evening, say, when the blue wood-smoke mounted from a
cottage chimney and went drifting slowly down the valley in level
layers; or on still summer afternoons, when there came up from the
hollow the sounds of hay-making--the scythe shearing through the grass,
the clatter of the whetstone, the occasional country voices. The
dialect, and the odd ideas expressed in it, worked their elusive magic
over and over again. To hear a man commend the weather, rolling out his
"Nice moarnin'" with the fat Surrey "R," or to be wished "Good-day,
sir," in the high twanging voice of some cottage-woman or other, was to
be reminded in one's senses, without thinking about it at all, that one
was amongst people not of the town, and hardly of one's own era. The
queer things, too, which one happened to hear of, the simple ideas which
seemed so much at home in the valley, though they would have been so
much to be deprecated in the town, all contributed to produce the same
old-world impression. Where the moon's changes were discussed so
solemnly, and people numbered the "mistis in March" in expectation of
corresponding "frostis in May"; where, if a pig fell sick, public
opinion counselled killing it betimes, lest it should die and be
considered unfit for food; where the most time-honoured saying was
counted the best wit, so that you raised a friendly smile by murmuring
"Good for young ducks" when it rained; where the names of famous sorts
of potatoes--red-nosed kidneys, _magnum bonums_, and so on--were better
known than the names of politicians or of newspapers; where spades and
reap-hooks of well-proved quality were treasured as friends by their
owners and coveted by other connoisseurs--it was impossible that one
should not be frequently visited by the feeling of something very
old-fashioned in the human life surrounding one.
More pointed in their suggestion of a rustic tradition were the various
customs and pursuits proper to given seasons. The customs, it is true,
were preserved only by the children; but they had their acceptable
effect. It might have been foolish and out-of-date, yet it was
undeniably pleasant to know on May Day that the youngsters were making
holiday from school, and to have them come to the door with their
morning faces, bringing their buttercup garlands and droning out the
appropriate folk ditty. At Christmastime, too, it was pleasant when they
came singing carols after dark. This, indeed, they still do; but either
I am harder to please or the performance has actually degenerated, for I
can no longer discover in it the simple childish spirit that made it
gratifying years ago.
Meanwhile, quite apart from such celebrations, the times and seasons
observed by the people in following their work gave a flavour of folk
manners which dignified the life of the parish, by associating it with
the doings of the countryside for many generations. In August, though
one did not see, one heard about, the gangs of men trudging off at night
for the Sussex harvest. In September the days went very silently in the
valley, because the cottages were shut up and the people were all away
at the hop-picking; and then, in the gathering dusk, one heard the buzz
and rumour of manifold homecomings--tired children squalling, women
talking and perhaps scolding, as the little chattering groups came near
and passed out of earshot to their several cottages; while, down the
hollows, hovering in the crisp night air, drifted a most appetizing
smell of herrings being fried for a late meal. Earlier in the year there
was hay-making in the valley itself. All the warm night was sometimes
fragrant with the scent of the cut grass; and about this season, too,
the pungent odour of shallots lying out in the gardens to ripen off
would come in soft whiffs across the hedges. Always, at all times, the
people were glad to gossip about their gardens, bringing vividly into
one's thoughts the homely importance of the month, nay, the very week,
that was passing. Now, around Good Friday, the talk would be of
potato-planting; and again, in proper order, one heard of peas and
runner-beans, and so through the summer fruits and plants, to the
ripening of plums and apples, and the lifting of potatoes and carrots
and parsnips.
In all these ways the parish, if not a true village, seemed quite a
country place twenty years ago, and its people were country people. Yet
there was another side to the picture. The charm of it was a generalized
one--I think an impersonal one; for with the thought of individual
persons who might illustrate it there comes too often into my memory a
touch of sordidness, if not in one connection then in another; so that
I suspect myself, not for the first time, of sentimentality. Was the
social atmosphere after all anything but a creation of my own dreams?
Was the village life really idyllic?
Not for a moment can I pretend that it was. Patience and industry
dignified it; a certain rough jollity, a large amount of good temper and
natural kindness, kept it from being foul; but of the namby-pamby or
soft-headed sentiment which many writers have persuaded us to attribute
to old-English cottage life I think I have not in twenty years met with
a single trace. In fact, there are no people so likely to make ridicule
of that sort of thing as my labouring-class neighbours have always been.
They do not, like the middle classes, enjoy it. It is a commodity for
which they have no use, as may appear in the following pages.
To say this, however, is to say too little. I do not mean that the
prevailing temper in the village was sordid, bitter, cruel, like that,
say, of the Norman peasantry in De Maupassant's short stories. In by far
the greater majority the people have usually seemed to me at the worst a
little suspicious, a little callous, a little undemonstrative, and at
the best generous and happy-go-lucky to a fault. Nevertheless, tales as
repulsive as any that the French writer has told of his country-people
could have been collected here by anyone with a taste for that sort of
thing. Circumstantial narratives have reached me of savage, or, say,
brutish, doings: of sons ill-treating their mothers, and husbands their
wives of fights, and cruelties, and sometimes--not often--of infamous
vice. The likelihood of these tales, which there was no reason to doubt,
was strengthened by what I saw and heard for myself. Drunkenness
corrupted and disgraced the village life, so that good men went wrong
and their families suffered miserably. I have helped more than one
drunkard home at night, and seen a wretched woman or a frightened child
come to the door to receive him. Even in the seclusion of my own garden
I could not escape the evidences of mischief going on. For sounds echo
up and down the valley as clearly as across the water of a lake; and
sometimes a quiet evening would grow suddenly horrid with distracted
noises of family quarrel in some distant cottage, when women shrilled
and clamoured and men cursed, and all the dogs in the parish fell
a-barking furiously. Even in bed one could not be secure. Once or twice
some wild cry in the night--a woman's scream, a man's volley of
oaths--has drawn me hurrying to my window in dread that outrage was
afoot; and often the sounds of obscene singing from the road, where men
were blundering homewards late from the public-houses in the town, have
startled me out of my first sleep. Then, besides the distresses brought
upon the people by their own folly, there were others thrust upon them
by their economic condition. Of poverty, with its attendant sicknesses
and neglects, there has never been any end to the tales, while the
desolations due to accidents in the day's work, on the railway, or with
horses, or upon scaffoldings of buildings, or in collapsing
gravel-quarries, have become almost a commonplace. In short, there is no
room for sentimentality about the village life. Could its annals be
written they would make no idyll; they would be too much stained by
tragedy and vice and misery.
Yet the knowledge of all this--and it was not possible to live here long
without such knowledge--left the other impressions I have spoken of
quite unimpaired. Disorders were the exception, after all. As a general
rule the village character was genial, steadfast, self-respecting; one
could not but recognize in it a great fund of strength, a great
stability; nor could one help feeling that its main features--the
limitations and the grimness, as well as the surprising virtues--were
somehow closely related to that pleasant order of things suggested by
the hay-making sounds, by the smell of the wood-smoke, by the children's
May-day garlands. And, in fact, the relationship was essential. The
temper and manners of the older people turned out to have been actually
moulded by conditions of a true village kind, so that the same
folk-quality that sounded in the little garland song reappeared more
sternly in my neighbours' attitude towards their fate. Into this valley,
it is true, much had never come that had flourished and been forgotten
in English villages elsewhere. At no time had there been any of the
more graceful folk arts here; at no time any comely social life, such as
one reads of in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_ or Gray's _Elegy_; but,
as I gradually learnt, the impoverished labouring people I talked to had
been, in many cases, born in the more prosperous conditions of a
self-supporting peasantry.
Bit by bit the truth come home to me, in the course of unconcerned
gossip, when my informants had no idea of the significance of those
stray scraps of information which they let fall. I was not alive to it
myself for a long time. But when I had heard of the village cows, which
used to be turned out to graze on the heaths, and had been told how
fir-timber fit for cottage roof-joists could be cut on the common, as
well as heath good enough for thatching and turf excellent for firing;
and when to this was added the talk of bread-ovens at half the old
cottages, and of little corn-crops in the gardens, and of brewing and
wine-making and bee-keeping; I understood at last that my elderly
neighbours had seen with their own eyes what I should never see--namely,
the old rustic economy of the English peasantry. In that light all sorts
of things showed a new meaning. I looked with rather changed sentiments,
for example, upon the noisome pigsties--for were they not a survival of
a venerable thrift? I viewed the old tools--hoes and spades and scythes
and fag-hooks--with quickened interest; and I speculated with more
intelligence upon those aged people of the parish whose curious habits
were described to me with so much respect. But of all the details that
now gained significance, most to be noted were the hints of the
comparative prosperity of that earlier time. For now some old woman,
half starving on her parish pay, would indicate this or that little
cottage, and remark that her grandfather had built it for her mother to
go into when she married. Or now, a decrepit man would explain that in
such and such a puzzling nook in the hillside had once stood his
father's cow-stall. Here, at the edge of the arable strip, a building
divided into two poor cottages proved to have been originally somebody's
little hop-kiln; there, on a warm slope given over to the
pleasure-garden of some "resident" like myself, a former villager used
to grow enough wheat to keep him in flour half the winter; and there
again, down a narrow by-way gone ruinous from long neglect, Master
So-and-so, whose children to-day go in fear of the workhouse, was wont
to drive his little waggon and pair of horses.
Particulars like these, pointing to a lost state of well-being,
accounted very well for the attraction which, in spite of individual
faults, I had felt towards the village folk in general. The people stood
for something more than merely themselves. In their odd ways and talk
and character I was affected, albeit unawares, by a robust tradition of
the English countryside, surviving here when the circumstances which
would have explained it had already largely disappeared. After too many
years of undiscernment that truth was apparent to me. And even so, it
was but a gradual enlightenment; even now it is unlikely that I
appreciate the facts in their deepest significance. For the "robust"
tradition, as I have just called it, was something more than simply
robust. It was older, by far, than this anomalous village. Imported into
the valley--if my surmise is correct--by squatters two centuries ago, it
was already old even then; it already had centuries of experience behind
it; and though it very likely had lost much in that removal, still it
was a genuine off-shoot of the home-made or "folk" civilization of the
South of England. No wonder that its survivals had struck me as
venerable and pleasant, when there was so much vigorous English life
behind them, derived perhaps from so many fair English counties.
The perception came to me only just in time, for to-day the
opportunities of further observation occur but rarely. The old life is
being swiftly obliterated. The valley is passing out of the hands of its
former inhabitants. They are being crowded into corners, and are
becoming as aliens in their own home; they are receding before newcomers
with new ideas, and, greatest change of all, they are yielding to the
dominion of new ideas themselves. At present, therefore, the cottagers
are a most heterogeneous population, presenting all sorts of baffling
problems to those who have to deal with them, as the schoolmaster and
the sanitary officer and others find. In no two families--hardly in two
members of the same family--do the old traditions survive in equal
degree. A lath-and-plaster partition may separate people who are half a
century asunder in civilization, and on the same bench at school may be
found side by side two children who come from homes, the one worthy of
King George III.'s time, the other not unworthy of King George V.'s. But
the changes which will remove the greatest of these discrepancies are
proceeding very fast; in another ten years' time there will be not much
left of the traditional life whose crumbling away I have been witnessing
during the twenty years that are gone.
Some grounds of hope--great hope, too--which begin at last to appear,
and are treated of in the final chapter of this book, save the tale of
Change in the Village from being quite a tragedy, yet still it is a
melancholy tale. I have dealt with it in the two sections called
respectively "The Altered Circumstances" and "The Resulting Needs." The
earlier chapters, which immediately follow this one under the heading
"The Present Time," are merely descriptive of the people and their
conditions as I know them now, and aim at nothing more than to pave the
way for a clearer understanding of the main subject.
II
THE PRESENT TIME
II
SELF-RELIANCE
There is a chapter in Dickens's _Hard Times_ which tells how it was
discovered that somebody had fallen down a disused mine-shaft, and how
the rescue was valiantly effected by a few men who had to be awakened
for that end from their drunken Sunday afternoon sleep. Sobered by the
dangers they foresaw, these men ran to the pit-mouth, pushed straight to
the centre of the crowd there, and fell to work quietly with their ropes
and winches. As you read, you seem to see them, spitting on their great
hands while they knot the ropes, listening attentively to the doctor as
to an equal, and speaking in undertones to one another, but regardless
of the remarks of the bystanders. The best man amongst them, says
Dickens--and you know it to be true: Dickens could have told you the
men's names and life-history had he chosen--the best man amongst them
was the greatest drunkard of the lot; and when his heroic work was done,
nobody seems to have taken any farther notice of him.
These were Northcountrymen; but there was a quality about them of which
I have often been reminded, in watching or hearing tell of the men in
this Surrey village. It is the thing that most impresses all who come
into any sympathetic contact with my neighbours their readiness to make
a start at the dangerous or disagreeable task when others would be still
talking, and their apparent expectation that they will succeed. In this
spirit they occasionally do things quite as well worthy of mention as
the incident described by Dickens. I remember looking on myself at just
such another piece of work, in the town a mile away from here, one
winter day. The sluggish "river," as we call it, which flows amongst
meadows on the south of the town, is usually fordable beside one of the
bridges, and men with horses and carts as often as not drive through the
ford, instead of going over the bridge. But on the day I am recalling
floods had so swollen the stream that a horse and cart were swept down
under the narrow bridge, and had got jammed there, the driver having
escaped over the iron railings of the bridge as the cart went under. I
don't know what became of him then--he was but a lad, I was told. When I
came on the scene, a number of people were on the bridge, while many
more were down on the river banks, whence they could see the horse and
cart under the arch. A few were bawling out unheeded advice as to what
should be done; in fact, a heated altercation had arisen between the two
loudest--a chimney-sweep and a medical man--whose theories disagreed;
but it was plain to everybody that it would be a risky thing to venture
under the bridge into that swirling stream. For ten minutes or more,
while the horse remained invisible to us on the bridge, and likely to
drown, the dispute snapped angrily from bank to bank, punctuated
occasionally by excited cries, such as "He's gettin' lower!" "He's
sinkin' down!" Then, unobserved, a bricklayer's labourer came running
with a rope, which he hurriedly made into a noose and tightened under
his armpits. None of the shouters, by the way, had suggested such a
plan. The man was helped over the railings and swiftly lowered--Heaven
knows who took a hand at that--and so he disappeared for five minutes.
Then a shout: the horse came into view, staggering downstream with
harness cut, and scrambled up into the meadow; and the man, drenched and
deadly white, and too benumbed to help himself, was hauled up on to the
bridge, and carried to the nearest inn. I never heard his name--people
of his sort, as Dickens knew, are generally anonymous--but he was one of
the labourers of the locality, and only last winter I saw him shivering
at the street corners amongst other out-o'-works.
Behaviour like this is so characteristic of labouring men that we others
expect it of them as if it were especially their duty. Again and again I
have noticed it. If a horse falls in the street, ten chances to one it
is some obscure labouring fellow who gets him up again. Whether there is
danger or no, in emergencies which demand readiness and disregard of
comfort, the common unskilled labourer is always to the fore. One summer
night I had strolled out to the top of the road here which slants down,
over-arched by tall trees, past the Vicarage. At some distance down,
where there should have been such a depth of darkness under the trees, I
was surprised to see a little core of light, where five or six people
stood around a bright lamp, which one of them was holding. The scene
looked so theatrical, glowing under the trees with the summer night all
round it, that, of course, I had to go down the hill and investigate it.
The group I joined was, it turned out, watching a bicyclist who lay
unconscious in somebody's arms, while a doctor fingered at a streaming
wound in the man's forehead, and washed it, and finally stitched it up.
The bicycle--its front wheel buckled by collision with the Vicarage
gatepost--stood against the gate, and two or three cushions lay in the
hedge; for the Vicar had come out to the man's assistance, and had sent
for the doctor, and it was the Vicar himself, old and grey, but steady,
who now held his library lamp for the doctor's use. The rest of us stood
looking on, one of us at least feeling rather sick at the sight, and all
of us as useless as the night-moths which came out from the trees and
fluttered round the lamp. At last, when all was done, and the injured
man could be moved, there rose up a hitherto unnoticed fellow who had
been supporting him, and I recognized one of our village labourers. He
looked faint, and tottered to a chair which the Vicar had ready, and
gulped at some brandy, for he, too, had been overcome by sight of the
surgery. But it was to him that the task of sitting in the dusty road
and being smeared with blood had fallen.
And this quiet acceptance of the situation, recognizing that he if
anyone must suffer, and take the hard place which soils the clothes and
shocks the feelings, gives the clue to the average labourer's temper. It
is really very curious to think of. Rarely can a labourer afford the
luxury of a "change." Wet through though his clothes may be, or
blood-stained, or smothered with mud or dust, he must wear them until he
goes to bed, and must put them on again as he finds them in the morning;
but this does not excuse him in our eyes from taking the disagreeable
place. Still less does it excuse him in his own eyes. If you offer to
help, men of this kind will probably dissuade you. "It'll make yer
clothes all dirty," they say; "you'll get in such a mess." So they
assume the burden, sometimes surly and swearing, oftener with a
good-tempered jest.
To anything with a touch of humour in it they will leap forward like
schoolboys. I am reminded of a funny incident one frosty morning, when
patches of the highway were slippery as glass. Preceding me along the
road was a horse and cart, driven by a boy who stood upright in the
cart, and seemed not to notice how the horse's hoofs were skidding; and
some distance ahead three railway navvies were approaching, just off
their night's work, and carrying their picks and shovels. I had left the
cart behind, and was near these three, when suddenly they burst into a
laugh, exclaiming to one another, "Look at that old 'oss!" I turned.
There sat the horse on his tail between the shafts, pawing with his
forefeet at the road, but unable to get a grip at its slippery surface.
It was impossible not to smile; he had such an absurd look. The navvies,
however, did more than smile. They broke into a run; they saw
immediately what to do. In thirty seconds they were shovelling earth out
from the hedgerow under the horse's feet, and in two minutes more he had
scrambled up, unhurt.
In such behaviour, I say, we have a clue to the labouring-man's temper.
The courage, the carelessness of discomfort, the swiftness to see what
should be done, and to do it, are not inspired by any tradition of
chivalry, any consciously elaborated cult. It is habitual with these men
to be ready, and those fine actions which win our admiration are but
chance disclosures in public of a self-reliance constantly practised by
the people amongst themselves--by the women quite as much as by the
men--under stress of necessity, one would say at first sight. Take
another example of the same willing efficiency applied in rather a
different way. In a cottage near to where I am writing a young labourer
died last summer--a young unmarried man, whose mother was living with
him, and had long depended on his support. Eighteen months earlier he
had been disabled for a week or two by the kick of a horse, and a
heart-disease of long standing was so aggravated by the accident that he
was never again able to do much work. There came months of unemployment,
and as a consequence he was in extreme poverty when he died. His mother
was already reduced to parish relief; it was only by the help of his two
sisters--young women out at service, who managed to pay for a coffin for
him--that a pauper's funeral was avoided. A labourer's wife, the mother
of four or five young children, took upon herself the duty of washing
and laying out the corpse, but there remained still the funeral to be
managed. An undertaker to conduct it could not be engaged; there was no
money to pay him. Then, however, neighbours took the matter up, not as
an unwonted thing, I may say--it is usual with them to help bury a
"mate"--only, as a rule, there is the undertaker too. In this case they
did without him--six poor men losing half a day's work, and giving their
services. The coffin was too big to be carried down the crooked
staircase; too big also to be got out of the bedroom window until the
window-sashes had been taken out. But these men managed it all,
borrowing tools and a couple of ladders and some ropes; and then, in the
black clothes which they keep for such occasions, they carried the
coffin to the churchyard. That same evening two of them went to work at
cleaning out a cess-pit, two others spent the evening in their gardens,
another had cows to milk, and the sixth, being out of work and restless,
had no occupation to go home to so far as I know.
Of course this, too, was a piece of voluntary service, resembling in
that respect those more striking examples of self-reliance which are
brought out by sudden emergencies. But it points, more directly than
they do, to the sphere in which that virtue is practised until it
becomes a habit. For if you follow the clue on, it leads very quickly to
the scene where self-reliance is so to speak at home, where it seems the
natural product of the people's circumstances--the scene, namely, of
their daily work. For there, not only in the employment by which the men
earn their wages, but in the household and garden work of the women as
well as the men, there is nothing to support them save their own
readiness, their own personal force.
It sounds a truism, but it is worth attention. Unlike the rest of us,
labouring people are unable to shirk any of life's discomforts by
"getting a man" or "a woman," as we say, to do the disagreeable or risky
jobs which continually need to be done. If a cottager in this village
wants his chimney swept, or his pigstye cleaned out, or his firewood
chopped, the only "man" he can get to do it for him is himself.
Similarly with his wife. She may not call in "a woman" to scrub her
floor, or to wash and mend, or to skin a rabbit for dinner, or to make
up the fire for cooking it. It is necessary for her to be ready to turn
from one task to another without squeamishness, and without pausing to
think how she shall do it. In short, she and her husband alike must
practise, in their daily doings, a sort of intrepidity which grows
customary with them; and this habit is the parent of much of that fine
conduct which they exhibit so carelessly in moments of emergency.
Until this fact is appreciated there is no such thing as understanding
the people's disposition. It is the principal gateway that lets you in
to their character. Nevertheless the subject needs no further
illustration here. Anyone personally acquainted with the villagers knows
how their life is one continuous act of unconscious self-reliance, and
those who have not seen it for themselves will surely discover plentiful
evidences of it in the following pages, if they read between the lines.
But I must digress to remark upon one aspect of the matter. In view of
the subject of this book--namely, the transition from an old social
order to present times--it should be considered whether the handiness of
the villagers is after all quite so natural a thing as is commonly
supposed. For a long time I took it for granted. The people's
accomplishments were rough, I admit, and not knowing how much "knack" or
experience was involved in the dozens of odd jobs that they did, I
assumed that they did them by the light of Nature. Yet if we reflect how
little we learn from Nature, and how helpless people grow after two or
three generations of life in slums, or in libraries and drawing-rooms,
it would seem probable that there is more than appears on the surface in
the labourer's versatility of usefulness. After all, who would know by
the light of Nature how to go about sweeping a chimney, as they used to
do it here, with rope and furzebush dragged down? or how to scour out a
watertank effectively? or where to begin upon cleaning a pigstye? Easy
though it looks, the closer you get down to this kind of work as the
cottager does it the more surprisedly do you discover that he recognizes
right and wrong methods of doing it; and my own belief is that the
necessity which compels the people to be their own servants would not
make them so adaptable as they are, were there not, at the back of them,
a time-honoured tradition teaching them how to go on.
Returning from this digression, and speaking, too, rather of a period
from ten to twenty years ago than of the present time, it would be
foolish to pretend that the people's good qualities were unattended by
defects. The men had a very rough exterior, so rough that I have known
them to inspire timidity in the respectable who met them on the road,
and especially at night, when, truth to tell, those of them who were
out were not always too sober. After you got to know them, so as to
understand the shut of their mouths and the look of their eyes--usually
very steadfast and quiet--you knew that there was rarely any harm in
them; but I admit that their aspect was unpromising enough at first
sight. A stranger might have been forgiven for thinking them coarse,
ignorant, stupid, beery, unclean. And yet there was excuse for much of
it, while much more of it was sheer ill-fortune, and needed no excuse.
Though many of the men were physically powerful, few of them could boast
of any physical comeliness. Their strength had been bought dear, at the
cost of heavy labour begun too early in life, so that before middle-age
they were bent in the back, or gone wrong at the knees, and their walk
(some of them walked miles every day to their work) was a long shambling
stride, fast enough, but badly wanting in suggestiveness of personal
pride. Seeing them casually in their heavy and uncleanly clothes, no one
would have dreamed of the great qualities in them--the kindliness and
courage and humour, the readiness to help, the self-control, the
patience. It was all there, but they took no pains to look the part;
they did not show off.
In fact, their tendency was rather in the contrary direction. They cared
too little what was thought of them to be at the pains of shocking one's
delicacy intentionally; but they were by no means displeased to be
thought "rough." It made them laugh; it was a tribute to their
stout-heartedness. Nor was there anything necessarily braggart in this
attitude of theirs. As they realized that work would not be readily
offered to a man who might quail before its unpleasantness, so it was a
matter of bread-and-cheese to them to cultivate "roughness." I need not,
indeed, be writing in the past tense here. It is still bad policy for a
workman to be nice in his feelings, and several times I have had men
excuse themselves for a weakness which they knew me to share, but which
they seemed to think needed apology when they, too, exhibited it. Only a
few weeks ago a neighbour's cat, affected with mange, was haunting my
garden, and had become a nuisance. Upon my asking the owner--a labourer
who had worked up to be something of a bricklayer--to get rid of it, he
said he would get a certain old-fashioned neighbour to kill it, and then
he plunged into sheepish explanations why he would rather not do the
deed himself. "Anybody else's cat," he urged, "he wouldn't mind so
much," but he had a touch of softness towards his own. It was plain that
in reality he was a man of tender feelings, yet it was no less plain
that he was unwilling to be thought too tender. The curious thing was
that neither of us considered for a moment the possibility of any
reluctance staying the hand of the older neighbour. Him we both knew
fairly well as a man of that earlier period with which I am concerned
just now. At that period the village in general had a lofty contempt
for the "meek-hearted" man capable of flinching. An employer might have
qualms, though the men thought no better of him for that possession, but
amongst themselves flinching was not much other than a vice. In fact,
they dared not be delicate. Hence through all their demeanour they
displayed a hardness which in some cases went far below the surface, and
approached real brutality.
Leaving out the brutality, the women were not very different from the
men. It might have been supposed that their domestic work--the cooking
and cleaning and sewing from which middle-class women seem often to
derive so comely a manner--would have done something to soften these
cottage women. But it rarely worked out so. The women shared the men's
carelessness and roughness. That tenderness which an emergency
discovered in them was hidden in everyday life under manners indicative
of an unfeigned contempt for what was gentle, what was soft.
And this, too, was reasonable. In theory, perhaps, the women should have
been refined by their housekeeping work; in practice that work
necessitated their being very tough. Cook, scullery-maid, bed-maker,
charwoman, laundress, children's nurse--it fell to every mother of a
family to play all the parts in turn every day, and if that were all,
there was opportunity enough for her to excel. But the conveniences
which make such work tolerable in other households were not to be found
in the cottage. Everything had to be done practically in one room--which
was sometimes a sleeping-room too, or say in one room and a wash-house.
The preparation and serving of meals, the airing of clothes and the
ironing of them, the washing of the children, the mending and
making--how could a woman do any of it with comfort in the cramped
apartment, into which, moreover, a tired and dirty man came home in the
evening to eat and wash and rest, or if not to rest, then to potter in
and out from garden or pig-stye, "treading in dirt" as he came? Then,
too, many cottages had not so much as a sink where work with water could
be done; many had no water save in wet weather; there was not one
cottage in which it could be drawn from a tap, but it all had to be
fetched from well or tank. And in the husband's absence at work, it was
the woman's duty--one more added to so many others--to bring water
indoors. In times of drought water had often to be carried long
distances in pails, and it may be imagined how the housework would go in
such circumstances. For my part I have never wondered at roughness or
squalor in the village since that parching summer when I learnt that in
one cottage at least the people were saving up the cooking water of one
day to be used over again on the day following. Where such things can
happen the domestic arts are simplified to nothing, and it would be
madness in women to cultivate refinement or niceness.
And my neighbours appeared not to wish to cultivate them. It may be
added that many of the women--the numbers are diminishing rapidly--were
field-workers who had never been brought up to much domesticity. Far
beyond the valley they had to go to earn money at hop-tying, haymaking,
harvesting, potato-picking, swede-trimming, and at such work they came
immediately, just as the men did, under conditions which made it a vice
to flinch. As a rule they would leave work in the afternoon in time to
get home and cook a meal in readiness for their husbands later, and at
that hour one saw them on the roads trudging along, under the burden of
coats, dinner-baskets, tools, and so on, very dishevelled--for at
field-work there is no such thing as care for the toilet--but often
chatting not unhappily.
On the roads, too, women were, and still are, frequently noticeable,
bringing home on their backs faggots of dead wood, or sacks of
fir-cones, picked up in the fir-woods a mile away or more. Prodigious
and unwieldy loads these were. I have often met women bent nearly double
under them, toiling painfully along, with hats or bonnets pushed awry
and skirts draggling. Occasionally tiny urchins, too small to be left at
home alone, would be clinging to their mothers' frocks.
In the scanty leisure that the women might enjoy--say now and then of an
afternoon--there were not many circumstances to counteract the hardness
contracted at their work. These off times were opportunities for social
intercourse between them. They did not leave home, however, and go out
"paying calls." Unless on Sunday evenings visiting one another's
cottages was not desirable. But there were other resources. I have
mentioned how sounds will travel across the valley, and I have known
women come to their cottage doors high up on this side to carry on a
shouting conversation with neighbours opposite, four hundred yards away.
You see, they were under no constraint of propriety in its accepted
forms, nor did they care greatly who heard what they had to say. I have
sometimes wished that they did care. But, of course, the more
comfortable way of intercourse was to talk across the quickset hedge
between two gardens. Sometimes one would hear--all an afternoon it
seemed--the long drone of one of these confabulations going on in
unbroken flow, with little variation of cadence, save for a moaning rise
and fall, like the wind through a keyhole. I have a suspicion that the
shortcomings of neighbours often made the staple of such conversations,
but that is only a surmise. I remember the strange conclusion of one of
them which reached my ears. For, as the women reluctantly parted, they
raised their voices, and one said piously, "Wal, they'll git paid for
't, one o' these days. Gawd A'mighty's above the Devil"; to which the
other, with loud conviction: "Yes, and always will be, thank Gawd!" This
ended the talk. But the last speaker, turning round, saw her
two-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change from
satisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck,
you dirty little devil," she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud of
her children, and disliking to see them untidy.
III
MAN AND WIFE
For general social intercourse the labouring people do not meet at one
another's cottages, going out by invitation, or dropping in to tea in
the casual way of friendship; they have to be content with "passing the
time of day" when they come together by chance. Thus two families may
mingle happily as they stroll homewards after the Saturday night's
shopping in the town, or on a fine Sunday evening they may make up
little parties to go and inspect one another's gardens.
Until recently--so recently that the slight change may be ignored at
least for the present--the prevailing note of this so restricted
intercourse was a sort of _bonhomie_, or good temper and good sense.
With this for a guide, the people had no need of the etiquette called
"good manners," but were at liberty to behave as they liked, and talk as
they liked, within the bounds of neighbourliness and civility. This has
always been one of the most conspicuous things about the people--this
independence of conventions. In few other grades of society could men
and women dare to be so outspoken together, so much at ease, as these
villagers still often are. Their talk grows Chaucerian at times.
Merrily, or seriously, as the case may be, subjects are spoken of which
are never alluded to between men and women who respect our ordinary
conventions.