Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer Part 2

Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer Part 2

The men compare notes, and give and take sage advice. "Where I had that crop o' dwarf peas last year I be goin' to have carrots this,"

says one. Another answers, "Well, then, if I was you, I should dig that ground up now--rake off the stones" (carrots being "a very tender herbage"). "Then, if it comes rain, that'll settle it a bit. After that, let it bide an' settle for about another fortnight, and then as soon as you gets a shower shove 'em in as fast as you mind."

"Or else," Bettesworth explains in telling me this, "if you don't let it settle the drill sows 'em too deep; it sinks in. Carrots is a thing you wants to sow as shallow as ever you can."

Somebody informs the company that he had "quarter of a acre o' carrots last year, and he made five pound of 'em." Or was it that he had five tons, and sold them for thirty shillings a ton? This was it, as Bettesworth at last remembers.

"I 'spose you'll soon be puttin' in some taters, Fred?"

"I got most o' mine in a'ready."

"_Have_ ye? I en't sowed none yet, but...."

So says Tom Durrant, the landlord.

"But cert'nly," as Bettesworth observes, "down there where he is it do take the frost so--right over there in Moorway's Bottom. Up here, though, we no call to wait. I likes to git taters in. You see, where they lays about they spears so, and then the spears gits knocked off--you _can't_ help it; or, if not, still, where you sees a tater speared so, that must weaken that tater? About two foot two one way and fifteen inches t'other--that's the distance I gen'ly plants taters. Ten't no good leavin' 'em wider 'tween the rows. But old Steve Blackman, up there by the Forest, I knowed he once plant some three foot both ways. And law, what a crop he did git! 'Twas a piece o'

ground his landlord let 'n have for the breakin' of it up. And he trenched in a lot o' fuzz--old fuzz-bushes as high as you be--and so on. Everything went in. And such a crop o' taters as he had--no, no dressin'. Only this old fuzz-stuff. _Regents_, they was. Oh, that was a splendid tater, too! But you never hears of 'em now. They sims to be reg'lar gone out. I got some o' these here _Dunbars_, down here. I should like to see half a bushel o' they in this bit o' ground o'

yourn. Splendid croppin' tater they be. I ast Tom Durrant if he could spare you half a bushel. He said he didn't hardly know. There's so many bin after 'em--purty near half the parish. They be a splendid croppin' tater, no mistake. He got 'em of some gentleman's gardener to begin with, I reckon. Reg'lar one he is, you know, for gettin' taters an' things, and markin' 'em and keepin' the sorts separate. He had four to start with, an' they produced a peck. Then he got three bushel out o' that peck. And last year he sowed 'em again--three bushel--and he got thirty-nine bushel."

II

_May 13, 1896._--The Tom Durrant just mentioned was frequently spoken of by Bettesworth, and always in a tone of warm approval. "A wonderful quiet sort o' man," steadily "putting together the pieces," but not a.s.suming any airs, he managed his public-house well, and with especial attention to the comfort of his older neighbours. "If any of the young uns come in hollerin' about, 'twas very soon 'Outside!' with Tom.

'There is the door!' he'd say. 'I don't keep my 'ouse open for such as you.'"

So Bettesworth has told me, more than once--perhaps not exactly in those words.

But sometimes Bettesworth's talk was too thick with detail to be remembered and written down as he said it in the time at my disposal; whence it happens that I am able only to summarize an anecdote about Durrant, which Bettesworth told with considerable relish. The publican was the owner of two cottages which were supplied with water from a good well--a precious thing in this village. These cottages had lately been overhauled and enlarged--Bettesworth detailed to me all the improvements, praising the new sculleries and sheds that had been added--and then the tenants, as if stricken with madness, found fault with the water-supply, and lodged a complaint with the sanitary inspector. The inspector insisted that the well should be cleaned out.

Durrant thereupon examined the water, found it "clear as crystal,"

cleaned out the well as he was ordered to do, and--gave the tenants notice to pay sixpence a week more for their cottages, or to quit. "So they didn't get much by _that_," said Bettesworth approvingly.

After all, this was but a kind of parenthesis in a talk which, not hurried, but quietly oozing out as we worked side by side in the garden, fairly overwhelmed my memory with variety of subject and vividness of expression. At one time it dealt with a certain road which was to be widened--"all they beautiful trees to be cut down, right from so-and-so to so-and-so"; at another, it discussed three parcels of building land for sale in the vicinity, estimated their acreage, and related the offers which had been already made for them.

From that, working all the while, Bettesworth would wander off to the drought, and I would hear how long this or that neighbour had been without water; how a third (whose new horse, by the way, "was turnin'

out well--but there, so do all they that comes from" a certain source, where, however, "they works 'em too hard")--how a third neighbour was obliged to keep his old horse almost constantly at work fetching water, since he had twenty-two little pigs, besides other live animals whose numbers goodness knows, and so did Bettesworth. At the new schools, again, the water was failing; and how, and why, and what the caretaker thought, and all about it, Bettesworth was able to explain.

The receptivity of the man's brain was what struck me. One pictured it pinked and patterned over with thousands of unsorted facts--legions of them jostling one another without apparent arrangement. Yet all were available to him; at will he could summon any one of them into his consciousness. A modern man would have had to stop and sift and compare them, and build theories and systems out of all that wealth of material. Not being modern, Bettesworth did not theorize; his thoughts were like the dust-atoms seen in a sunbeam. But though he did not "think," still a vast common-sense somehow or other flourished in him, and these manifold facts were its food.

_September 26, 1896._--Nor was it only of current topics that he could talk with such fullness of detail. Getting shortly afterwards into the reminiscent vein, he succeeded in paralyzing my memory with the tale of things he had observed many years before in just the same unsystematic yet thorough fashion. My hasty jottings, made afterwards, preserve only a few points, and do not tell how any of them were suggested. The talk was at one time of Basingstoke Fair, "where they goes to hire theirselves for the year." Of "shepherds with a bit o'

wool in their hats, carters with a bit o' whipcord, and servant gals,"

and so on. "I went once," said Bettesworth, "when I was a nipper--went away from Penstead; but I never got hired.... There's the place for games, though! They carters, when they've jest took their year's money, and be changin' 'racks,' as they calls it. 'You bin an' changed your rack, Bill?' 'What rack be you got on to?' 'You got on for old Farmer So-and-so?'... There they be, hollerin' about. And then they all got their shillin', what bin hired...."

I did not stop then to consider whether this hiring shilling, and the token in the hat, might have any relationship, in the world of old customs, to the "King's shilling" and the bunch of ribbons of the recruit for the army. Bettesworth was talking; and presently it was about a certain Jack Worthington, of a neighbouring village, who was known as "Cunnin' Jack," and played the concertina at fairs, clubs, and so on: "Newbury Fair, Reading Fair, Basingstoke Fair"--Bettesworth essayed to catalogue them. Cunnin' Jack "learnt it all by hisself, but I've heared a good many--travellin' folk and the like--say as they never heared anybody play the concertina like him. He's the on'y one 's ever I heared play the church bells--chimes, an' fire 'em, and all--wonderful! _Blue Bells of Scotland_, too--to hear him play that, an' the chimes, jest exact! No trouble to make out what 'tis. Oh, he's a reg'lar musician! He've trained all his sons to same thing. One of 'em plays the fiddle; another of 'em got a thing what he scratches along wi' wires, sounds purty near like a fiddle.... 'Ten't no good for 'n in a town, 'less 'tis a fair or summat o' that; but in any out-o'-the-way place. 'Relse, if he gets to a fair, there'll be three or four landlords about tryin' to get hold of 'n; and they'll give 'n five shillin's and supper, and his drink an' a bed, an' what he can pick up besides. Very often he'll make as much as five-an'-twenty shillin's in a night(?). And when he comes 'ome, he bring p'r'aps a gallon o' ha'pence along with 'n. Never no silver, o' course. Often, when his wife thought he hadn't got nothing but a pound or so, he'd chuck her five or six pound. Then in the winter he'd go gravel-diggin', onless there come a fair, or anything o' the likes o'

that. At these pubs where they dances, too, he'd put round the hat after every dance, an' if there was a good many stood up, p'r'aps he'd pull in half-a-crown or so."

Cunnin' Jack had a contrivance of musical dancing-dolls, about which I did not clearly understand. And I have quite forgotten how Bettesworth spoke of the man's brother, a deaf-mute, who refused to work, and "lived about at Aldershot, along o' the soldiers."

Afterwards another "dummy" was mentioned: "terrible big strong feller.... Spiteful.... Goes gravel-cartin' with his father." At a difficult place in the gravel-pit the father reached out and struck his son's horse. The "dummy" springs on him, throws him on his back, making a noise "'bu-bu,' like a calf.... Sure way to upset 'n--if you was in the gravel pit, touch his hoss...."

Bettesworth had once seen "a dummy, talkin' with a friend of his," in the finger alphabet. "Can't you understand it?" said the friend to Bettesworth. "'No,' I says; 'how should I?' But, law! to see him! And then write, too! Purty near as fast as you can talk. And all the time his eye 'd be on ye, watchin' ye. But to see him write on his slate--wonderful fast! and then" (here Bettesworth breaks into dramatic action, licking his hand and smudging out slate-writing)--"and then, when he'd rubbed it out, to see him write _again_! Spiteful, though, _he_ was. So they all be, I s'pose." There was another dumb man, for instance, who had been apprenticed to a shoemaker....

Unfortunately, I cannot reconstruct this instance. I only remember that the man had become "a wonderful good shoemaker, but didn't sim to care about follerin' it," and had "took to gardenin' now," instead.

_May 5, 1898._--On a morning early in May it was raining, quietly, luxuriously, with a continuous soothing shattering-down of warm drops.

In the doorway of the little tool-shed I stood listening--listening to the gentle murmur on the roof, on the long fresh gra.s.s of a small orchard plot, and on the young leaves of the plum and the blossoming apple which made the daylight greener by half veiling the sky.

Beside and beyond these trees were lilacs, purpling for bloom, small hazels, young elms in a hedgerow--all fair with new greenness; and farther on, glimpses of cottage roof against the newly dug garden-ground of the steep hillside. Above the half-diaphanous green tracery of the trees, cool delicious cloud, "dropping fatness,"

darkened where it sagged nearer to the earth. The light was nowhere strong, but all tempered moistly, tenderly, to the tenderness of the young greenery.

I ought to have been busy, yet I stood and listened; for the earth seemed busy too, but in a softened way, managing its many businesses beautifully. The air seemed melting into numberless liquid sounds.

Quite near--not three trees off--there was a nightingale nonchalantly babbling; from the neighbourhood of the cottage came, penetrating, the bleating of a newly-born goat; while in the orchard just before me Bettesworth stooped over a zinc pail, which, as he scrubbed it, gave out a low metallic note. Then there were three undertones or backgrounds of sound, that of the soft-falling rain being one of them.

Another, which diapered the rain-noise just as the young leaves showed their diaper-work against the clouds, was the all but unnoticed singing of larks, high up in the wet. Lastly, to give the final note of mellowness, of flavoured richness to the morning, I could hear through the distance which globed and softened it a frequent "Cuckoo, cuckoo." The sound came and died away, as if the rain had dissolved it, and came again, and again was lost.

Framed by all this, Bettesworth stooped over his pail, careless of getting wet. His old earth-brown clothes seemed to belong to the moistened nook of orchard where he was working; so, too, did his occasional quiet chatter harmonize well with the pattering of the warm rain. And for a time the drift of what he said was so much a part of our quiet country life that I took it as a matter of course, and let it pa.s.s by unnoticed.

But presently he raised his head.

"Have ye heared 'bout young Crosby over here? He's gone clean off his head. They took 'n off to the asylum at Brookwood this mornin'. Got this 'ere religion. I s'pose by all accounts he went right into 't; and that's what 've come of it."

I suggested that religious mania was often curable.

"Yes. I've knowed a many have it; and then they gets over it after a time. Get 'em away--that's what it wants. If they can get 'em where they can dummer somethin' else into 'em, then they be all right. Wants to give 'em a change, so 's to get a little more enlightenment into their minds."

He came to join me in the shed doorway, for shelter from a temporary thickening of the rain, and standing there he continued,

"I was up to my sister's at Middlesham o' Sunday. She'd bin to Brookwood to see her sister-in-law. If they hadn't let her" (the sister-in-law) "'ome too soon that first time, she'd ha' bin all right. Wherefore now she's there again, and jest like a post. If they puts her anywhere, there she bides, and don't try for to do nothing.

'Relse, when she was there afore, they told my sister she'd work as well as e'er a woman in the place. She see several there what she knowed. Fred Baker's wife, what used to be signalman, for one. But what most amused her was a old woman, when they was goin' out two by two for their walk in the grounds, flingin' her arms about and liftin'

up her skirts an' dancin'.... She was havin' her reels and her capers in highly deglee." The old man pondered a few moments, then concluded pensively, as he stepped out to his work again, "What a shockin'

thing, this mind!" His accent on the last word sounded almost resentful.

_May 6, 1898._--The next day he reported that the man Crosby was said to have got "religious ammonium, is it? Some such name as that."

The talk of religion reminded him of a former employer, of the Baptist persuasion, who, when annoyed with him, was wont to say impatiently, "Bother your picture!" So, of a dead pigeon, from whose crop seventy-two peas were taken, "Bother he's picture!" said the Baptist.

Another imprecation of this man's was, "Drabbit it!" at which, however, Bettesworth used to expostulate, telling his master, "Look 'ere, you Baptists may lie, but you mawn't swear! And so he could lie, too," he added--"no mistake. And once he said anything, he'd stick to it."

A month or more pa.s.sed, and I forgot all about poor Crosby, until one delicious morning, when Bettesworth thought fit to tell me that he was no better. A neighbour had cycled to Brookwood on Sunday to see him and report about his family, Crosby's wife being in child-bed. But the information quickened no interest.

"All he kep' on about was the devil. The devil kep' comin' and botherin' of 'n. 'Tis a bad job. I s'pose he went right into it--studyin' about these here places n.o.body ever bin to an' come back again to tell we. n.o.body don't know nothin' about it. 'Ten't as if they come back to tell ye. There's my father, what bin dead this forty year. What a crool man he must be not to 've come back in all that time, if he was able, an' tell me about it. That's what I said to Colonel Sadler. 'Oh,' he says, 'you better talk to the Vicar.'

'Vicar?' I says. 'He won't talk to me.' Besides, what do he know about it more 'n anybody else?"

Early in the summer of 1896 Bettesworth had been immensely proud of his peas, which were ready for picking quite a week before other people had any. The fame of these peas had got abroad in the parish; it had reached a youth--a new curate fresh from a theological college--and had appealed to his fancy so strongly that he sent a servant to buy threepennyworth of the precious crop. And Bettesworth had chuckled.

"I bin a-laughin' to myself all the mornin'.... _Three penn-'oth o'