hops are really grown in gardens, little pieces often not more than half
an acre or even less in extent. Capricious as a woman, hops will only
flourish here and there; they have the strongest likes and dislikes, and
experience alone finds out what will suit them. These gardens are always
on a slope, if possible in the angle of a field and under shelter of a
copse, for the wind is the terror, and a great gale breaks them to
pieces; the bines are bruised, bunches torn off, and poles laid
prostrate. The gardens being so small, from five to forty acres in a
farm, of course but few pickers are required, and the hop-picking becomes
a 'close' business, entirely confined to home families, to the cottagers
working on the farm and their immediate friends. Instead of a scarcity of
labour, it is a matter of privilege to get a bin allotted to you. There
are no rough folk down from Bermondsey or Mile End way. All staid,
stay-at-home, labouring people--no riots; a little romping no doubt on
the sly, else the maids would not enjoy the season so much as they do.
But there are none of those wild hordes which collect about the greater
fields of Kent. Farmers' wives and daughters and many very respectable
girls go out to hopping, not so much for the money as the pleasant
out-of-door employment, which has an astonishing effect on the health.
Pale cheeks begin to glow again in the hop-fields. Children who have
suffered from whooping-cough are often sent out with the hop-pickers;
they play about on the bare ground in the most careless manner, and yet
recover. Air and hops are wonderful restoratives. After passing an
afternoon with the drier in the kiln, seated close to a great heap of
hops and inhaling the odour, I was in a condition of agreeable excitement
all the evening. My mind was full of fancy, imagination, flowing with
ideas; a sense of lightness and joyousness lifted me up. I wanted music,
and felt full of laughter. Like the half-fabled haschish, the golden
bloom of the hops had entered the nervous system; intoxication without
wine, without injurious after-effect, dream intoxication; they were wine
for the nerves. If hops only grew in the Far East we should think wonders
of so powerful a plant. At hop-picking a girl can earn about 10_s_. a
week, so that it is not such a highly paid employment as might be
supposed from the talk there is about it. The advantages are sideways, so
to say; a whole family can work at the same time, and the sum-total
becomes considerable. Hopping happily comes on just after corn harvest,
so that the labourers get two harvest-times. The farmers find it an
expensive crop. It costs 50_l_. or 60_l_. to pick a very small garden,
and if the Egyptian plague of insects has prevailed the price at market
will not repay the expenditure. The people talk much of a possible duty
on foreign hops. The hop farmer should have a lady-bird on his seal ring
for his sign and token, for the lady-bird is his great friend. Lady-birds
(and their larvae) destroy myriads of the aphides which cause rust, and a
flight of lady-birds should be welcomed as much as a flight of locusts is
execrated in other countries.
II.
One of the hop-picking women told me how she went to church and the
parson preached such a curious sermon, all about our 'innerds' (inwards,
insides), and how many 'boanes' we had, and by-and-by 'he told us that we
were the only beasts who had the use of our hands.' Years since at
village schools the girls used to swallow pins; first one would do it,
then another, presently half the school were taking pins. Ignorant of
physiology! Yet they did not seem to suffer; the pins did not penetrate
the pleura or lodge in the processes. Now Anatomy climbs into the pulpit
and shakes a bony fist at the congregation. That is the humerus of it, as
Corporal Nym might say. At the late election--the cow election--the
candidates were Brown, Conservative, and Stiggins, Liberal. The day after
the polling a farm labourer was asked how he filled up his voting paper.
'Oh,' said he full of the promised cow, 'I doan't care for that there
Brown chap, he bean't no good; zo I jest put a cross agen he, and voted
for Stiggins.' The dream of life was accomplished, the labourer had a
vote, and--irony--he voted exactly opposite to his intent.
Too-whoo! ooo!--the sound of a horn,--the hunt was up; but this was not
the hunting season. Looking out of the kiln door I saw a boy running at
full speed down the lane with a small drain-pipe tucked under his arm. He
stopped, put the pipe to his mouth, and blew a blast on this 'dread
horn,' then jumped through a gap in the hedge and disappeared. They were
playing fox and hounds; who but a boy would have thought of using a
drain-pipe for a horn? It gave a good note, too. In and about the kiln I
learned that if you smash a frog with a stone, no matter how hard you hit
him, he cannot die till sunset. You must be careful not to put on any new
article of clothing for the first time on a Saturday, or some severe
punishment will ensue. One person put on his new boots on a Saturday, and
on Monday broke his arm. Some still believe in herbs, and gather
wood-betony for herb tea, or eat dandelion leaves between slices of dry
toast. There is an old man living in one of the villages who has reached
the age of a hundred and sixty years, and still goes hop-picking. Ever so
many people had seen him, and knew all about him; an undoubted fact, a
public fact; but I could not trace him to his lair. His exact whereabouts
could not be fixed. I live in hopes of finding him in some obscure 'Hole'
yet (many little hamlets are 'Holes,' as Froghole, Foxhole). What an
exhibit for London! Did he realise his own value, he would soon come
forth. I joke, but the existence of this antique person is firmly
believed in. Sparrows are called 'spadgers.' The cat wandering about got
caught in the rat-clams--_i.e._ a gin. Another cat was the miller's
favourite at the windmill, a well-fed, happy, purring pussy, fond of the
floury miller--he as white as snow, she as black as a coal. One day pussy
was ingeniously examining the machinery, when the wind suddenly rose, the
sails revolved, and she was ground up, fulfilling the ogre's
threat--'I'll grind his bones to make my bread.' This was not so sad as
the fate of the innkeeper's cow. You have read the 'Arabian Nights'--that
book of wisdom, for in truth the stories are no stories; they are the
records of ancient experience, the experience of a thousand years, and
some of them are as true and as deeply to be pondered on as anything in
the holiest books the world reverences. You remember the Three Calenders,
each of whom lost an eye--struck out in the most arbitrary and cruel
fashion. The innkeeper had a cow, a very pretty, quiet cow, but in time
it came about that her left horn, turning inwards, grew in such a manner
that it threatened to force the point into her head. To remedy this the
top of the horn was sawn off and a brass knob fastened on the tip, as is
the custom. The cow passed the summer in the meadows with the rest, till
by-and-by it was found that she had gone blind in the left eye. It
happened in this way: the rays of the sun heated the brass knob and so
destroyed the sight. Unable to call attention to its suffering, the poor
creature was compelled to endure, and could not escape. Now the Three
Calenders could speak, and had the advantage of human intelligence, and
yet each lost an eye, and they were as helpless in the hands of fate as
this poor animal.
Down in one of the hamlets there was a forge to which all the workpeople
who wanted any tools sharpened carried their instruments, the smith being
able to put a better edge on. Other blacksmiths or carpenters, if they
required a particularly good edge for some purpose, came to him. This art
he had acquired from his grandfather as a sort of heirloom or secret. The
grandfather while at work used to trouble and puzzle himself how to get a
very sharp edge, and at length one night he dreamed how to do it. From
that time he became prosperous. If a celebrated sonata was revealed in a
dream, why not the way to sharpen a chisel?
When he was tired the drier said he was 'dreggy.' They were talking of
the lambs, and how that dry season they had scarcely any sweetbreads. The
sweetbreads were so scanty, the butchers did not even offer them for
sale; the lambs had fed on dry food. In seasons when there was plenty of
grass and green food they had good large sweetbreads, white as milk. The
character of the food does thus under some circumstances really alter the
condition of an organ. The sweetbread is the pancreas; now a deficient
pancreatic action is supposed to play a great part in consumption and
other wasting diseases. Have we here, then, an indication that when the
pancreas may be suspected plenty of succulent food and plenty of liquid
are nature's remedies? We looked over at the pigs in the sty. They were
rooting about in a mess of garbage. 'Oh, what dirty things pigs are!'
said a lady. 'Yes, ma'am; they're rightly named,' said he. Some
scientific gentleman in the district had a large telescope with which he
made frequent observations, and at times would let a labouring man look
at the moon. 'Ah,' said our friend, shaking his head in a solemn,
impressive way, 'my brother, he see through it; he see great rocks and
seas up there. He say he never want to see through it no more. He wish he
never looked through him at all.' The poor man was dreadfully frightened
at what he had seen in the moon. At first I laughed at the story and the
odd idea of a huge, great fellow being alarmed at a glance through a
telescope. Since then, however, on reflection, it seems to me perfectly
natural. He was illiterate; he had never read of astronomy; to him it was
really like a sudden peep into another world, for the instrument was
exceptionally powerful, and the view of the sunlight on the peaks and the
shadows in the valleys must have been extraordinary to him. There was
nothing to laugh at; the incident shows what a great and wonderful thing
it is that rocks and mountains should be whirled along over our heads.
The idea has become familiarised to us by reading, but the fact is none
the less marvellous. This man saw the fact first, before he had the idea,
and he had sufficient imagination to realise it. At the village post
office they ask for 'Letterhead, please, sir,' instead of a stamp, for it
is characteristic of the cottager that whatever words he uses must be
different from those employed by other people. Stamp is as familiar to
him as to you, yet he prefers to say 'letterhead'--because he does. There
are many curious old houses, some of them timbered, still standing in
these parts. The immense hearths which were once necessary for burning
wood are now occupied with 'duck's-nest' grates, so called from the bars
forming a sort of nest. In one of the hamlets the women touched their
hats to us.
Not far from the hop-kiln I found a place where charcoal-burning was
carried on. The brown charcoal-burner, upright as a bolt, walked slowly
round the smouldering heap, and wherever flame seemed inclined to break
out cast damp ashes upon the spot. Six or seven water-butts stood in a
row for his use. To windward he had built a fence of flakes, or wattles
as they are called here, well worked in with brushwood, to break the
force of the draught along the hill-side, which would have caused too
fierce a fire. At one side stood his hut of poles meeting in a cone,
wrapped round with rough canvas. Besides his rake and shovel and a short
ladder, he showed me a tool like an immense gridiron, bent half double,
and fitted to a handle in the same way as a spade. This was for sifting
charcoal when burned, and separating the small from the larger pieces.
Every now and then a puff of smoke rose from the heap and drifted along;
it has a peculiar odour, a dense, thick smell of smothered wood coal, to
me not disagreeable, but to some people so annoying that they have been
known to leave their houses and abandon a locality where charcoal-burning
was practised. Dim memories of old days come crowding round me, invisible
to him, to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met
with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the
noble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their
castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is
there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other
mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which
of yore stretched between cultivated places. I looked at the modern
charcoal-burner with interest. He was brown, good-looking, upright, and
distinctly superior in general style to the common run of working men. He
spoke without broad accent and used correct language; he was well
educated and up to the age. He knew his own mind, and had an independent
expression; a very civil, intelligent, and straightforward man. No rude
charcoal-burner of old days this. We stood close to the highway road; a
gentleman's house was within stone's throw; the spot, like the man, was
altogether the reverse of what we read in ancient story. Yet such is the
force of association that I could not even now divest myself of those dim
memories and living dreams of old; there seemed as it were the clank of
armour, a rustic of pennons in the leaves; it would have been quite
natural to hold bow and arrow in the hand. The man was modern, but his
office was ancient. The descent was unbroken. The charcoal-burner traced
back to the Norman Conquest. That very spot where we stood, now
surrounded with meadows and near dwellings, scarcely thirty years since
had formed part of one of the largest of the old forests. It was forest
land. Woods away on the slope still remained to witness to traditions. As
the charcoal-burner worked beside the modern highway, so his trade had
come down and was still practised in the midst of modern trades, in these
times of sea-coal and steam. He told me that he and his brothers were
maintained by charcoal-burning the year through, and, it appeared, in a
very comfortable position. They only burned a small quantity here; they
moved about from place to place in the woods, according as the timber was
thrown. They often stopped for weeks in the woods, watching the fires all
night. A great part of the work was done in the winter, beginning in
October--after the hop-picking. Now resting in his lonely hut, now
walking round and tending the smoking heap, the charcoal-burner watched
out the long winter nights while the stars drifted over the leafless
trees, till the grey dawn came with hoar-frost. He liked his office, but
owned that the winter nights were very long. Starlight and frost and slow
time are the same now as when the red deer and the wild boar dwelt in the
forest. Much of the charcoal was prepared for hop-drying, large
quantities being used for that purpose. At one time a considerable amount
was rebaked for patent fuel, and the last use to which it had been put
was in carrying out some process with Australian meat. It was still
necessary in several trades. Goldsmiths used charcoal for soldering. They
preferred the charcoal made from the thick bark of the butts of birch
trees. At the foot or butt of the birch the bark grows very thick, in
contrast to the rind higher, which is thinner than on other trees. Lord
Sheffield's mansion at Fletching was the last great house he knew that
was entirely warmed with charcoal, nothing else being burnt. Charcoal was
still used in houses for heating plates. But the principal demand seemed
to be for hop-drying purposes--the charcoal burned in the kiln where I
had been resting was made on the spot. This heap he was now burning was
all of birch poles, and would be four days and four nights completing. On
the fourth morning it was drawn, and about seventy sacks were filled, the
charcoal being roughly sorted.
The ancient forest land is still wild enough, there is no seeming end to
the heath and fern on the ridges or to the woods in the valleys. These
moor-like stretches bear a resemblance to parts of Exmoor. The oaks that
once reached from here to the sea-shore were burned to smelt the iron in
the days when Sussex was the great iron land. For charcoal the vast
forests were cut down; it seems strange to think that cannon were once
cast--the cannon that won India for us--where now the hops grow and the
plough travels slowly, so opposite as they are to the roaring furnace and
the ringing hammer. Burned and blasted by the heat, the ground where the
furnaces were still retains the marks of the fire. But to-day there is
silence; the sunshine lights up the purple heather and the already
yellowing fern; the tall and beautiful larches stand graceful in the
stillness. Their lines always flow in pleasant curves; they need no wind
to bend them into loveliness of form: so quiet and deserted is the place
that the wide highway road is green with vegetation, and the impression
of our wheels is the only trace upon them. Looking up, the road--up the
hill--it appears green almost from side to side. It is well made and
firm, and fit for any traffic; but a growth of minute weeds has sprung
up, and upon these our wheels leave their marks. Of roads that have
become grass--grown in war--desolated countries we have all read, but
this is our own unscathed England.
The nature of the ancient forest, its quiet and untrodden silence,
adheres to the site. Far down in the valley there is more stirring, and
the way is well pulverised. In the hollow there is an open space, backed
by the old beech trees of the park, dotted with ashes, and in the midst a
farmhouse partly timbered. Here by the road-side they point out to you a
low mound, at the very edge of the road, which could easily be passed
unnoticed as a mere heap of scrapings overgrown with weeds and thistles.
On looking closer it appears more regularly shaped; it is indeed a grave.
Of old time an unfortunate woman committed suicide, and according to the
barbarous law of those days her body was buried at the cross-roads and a
stake driven through it. That was the end so far as the brutal law of the
land went. But the road-menders, with better hearts, from that day to
this have always kept up the mound. However beautiful the day, however
beautiful the beech trees and the ashes that stand apart, there is always
a melancholy feeling in passing the place. This thistle-grown mound
saddens the whole; it is impossible to forget it; it lies, as it were,
under everything, under the beeches, the sunlit sward and fern. The mark
of death is there. The dogs and the driven cattle tread the spot; a human
being has passed into dust. The circumstance of the mound having been
kept up so many years bears curious testimony to the force of tradition.
Many writers altogether deny the value of tradition. Dr. Schliemann's
spade, however, found Troy. Perhaps tradition is like the fool of the
saying, and is sometimes right.
SWALLOW-TIME
The cave-swallows have come at last with the midsummer-time, and the hay
and white clover and warm winds that breathe hotly, like one that has
been running uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges are so
delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if made by cleft human
fingers to human design, whose globes of down are like geometrical
circles built up of facets, instead of by one revolution of the
compasses. With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat; with green
cones of fir, and boom of distant thunder, and all things that say, 'It
is summer.' Not many of them even now, sometimes only two in the air
together, sometimes three or four, and one day eight, the very greatest
number--a mere handful, for these cave-swallows at such times should
crowd the sky. The white bars across their backs should be seen gliding
beside the dark fir copse a quarter of a mile away. They should be seen
everywhere, over the house, and to and fro the eaves, where half last
year's nest remains; over the meadows and high up in the blue ether.
White breasts should gleam in the azure height, appearing and
disappearing as they climb or sink, and wheel and slide through those
long boomerang-like flights that suddenly take them a hundred yards
aside. They should crowd the sky together with the ruddy-throated
chimney-swallows, and the great swifts; but though it is hay-time and the
apples are set, yet eight eave-swallows is the largest number I have
counted in one afternoon. They did not come at all in the spring. After
the heavy winter cleared away, the delicate willow-wrens soon sang in the
tops of the beautiful green larches, the nightingale came, and the
cuckoo, the chimney-swallow, the doves softly cooing as the oaks came
into leaf, and the black swifts. Up to May 26 there were no eave-swallows
at the Sussex hill-side where these notes were taken; that is more than a
month later than the date of their usual arrival, which would be about
the middle of April. After this they gradually came back. The
chimney-swallows were not so late, but even they are not so numerous as
usual. The swifts seem to have come more in their accustomed numbers.
Now, the swallows are, of all others, the summer birds. As well suppose
the trees without leaves as the summer air without swallows. Ever since
of old time the Greeks went round from house to house in spring singing
the swallow song, these birds have been looked upon as the friends of
man, and almost as the very givers of the sunshine.
The swallow's come, winging
His way to us here;
Fair hours is he bringing,
And a happy new year!
They had a song for everything, the mill song, the reapers' song, just as
in Somerset, the apple country, they still have a cider song, or perhaps,
rather, an orchard song. Such rhymes might well be chanted about the hay
and the wheat, or at the coming of the green leaf, or the yellowing of
the acorns, when the cawing of the rooks is incessant, a kind of autumn
festival. It seems so natural that the events of the year should be met
with a song. But somehow a very hard and unobservant spirit has got
abroad into our rural life, and people do not note things as the old folk
did. They do not mark the coming of the swallows, nor any of the dates
that make the woodland almanack. It is a pity that there should be such
indifference--that the harsh ways of the modern town should press so
heavily on the country. This summer, too, there seems a marked absence of
bees, butterflies, and other insects in the fields. One bee will come
along, calling at every head of white clover. By-and-by you may see one
more calling at the heathbells, and nothing else, as in each journey they
visit only the flower with which they began. Then there will be quite an
interval before a third bee is seen, and a fourth may be found dead
perhaps on the path, besides which you may not notice any more. For a
whole hour you may not observe a humble-bee, and the wasp-like
hover-flies, that are generally past all thought of counting, are
scarcely seen. A blue butterfly we found in the dust of the road, without
the spirit to fly, and lifted him into a field to let him have a chance
of life; a few tortoiseshells, and so on--even the white butterflies are
quite uncommon, the whites that used to drift along like snowflakes.
Where are they all? Did the snow kill them? Is there any connection
between the absence of insects and the absence of swallows? If so, how
did the swallows know beforehand, without coming, that there were no
insects for them? Yet the midsummer hum, the deep humming sound in the
atmosphere above, has been loud and persistent over the hayfields, so
that there must have been the usual myriads of the insects that cause
this sound. While I was thinking in this way a swallow alighted on the
turf, picked up a small white moth from among the short grass, and went
off with it. In gloomy overcast weather the swallows at the sea-side
frequently alight on the pebbles of the beach to pick up the insects
which will not rise and fly. Some beaches and sandbanks are much
frequented by insects, and black clouds of them sometimes come drifting
along, striking the face like small hail.