I owe this title to George Ewart Evans, taken from his classic descriptions of village life and farm work over the first half of the twentieth century, based on interviews and oral accounts from older inhabitants of East Suffolk. He believes that change has occurred over this period to such a great degree that it might be described as a revolution, so that life in these places will never again be the same. In seeking to understand this disappeared society, he suggests we need to help the ‘backward traveller’ “not so much to know the past as to feel it. For history is not merely the acquisition of knowledge about the past, it is more than anything else the imaginative reconstruction of it’. (Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay p.13 Faber and Faber 1956)
I am wholly persuaded to this view myself. A problem with such classic accounts, and there are others based in oral history, is a tendency to create a picture of the past that is essentially unproblematic. We can still enjoy such accounts, especially where they focus on communal practices such as harvesting, or the charm of old tools like flails and scythes, or give us sepia-tinted photographs of splendid Suffolk Punch horses. These accounts are full of interest for the twenty-first century reader, and I have just come across an excellent recent story of one rural labourer’s life and work (see the photograph above). Mont Abbott describes his life and work in Oxfordshire from about 1915 to 1985. His account carries real conviction because it conveys one, very recognisable voice, rather than several grouped into a generalised narrative. Lifting The Latch: A Life on the Land (Day Books 2003) is both a fascinating and moving account.
An earlier account by George Bourne (Change in the Village 1912, Penguin Books 1984) has its fair share of nostalgia, but also recognises the harsher aspects of life and work for rural farm labourers and their families. “A majority perhaps of the labouring folk endure … chronic poverty, in which at some point or other every day, the provision for bare physical needs falls a little short” (p.59). He notes too that this largely poor and exploited group of rural workers seems just to accept an unhappy fate: “The truth which economists begin to recognise, that where there are wealthy and idle classes there must as an inevitable result be classes who are impoverished and overworked, has not found its way into the villager’s head” (p.63).
My own oral resources for this part of my memoir are my own parents. They left written accounts of their lives which have little room for nostalgia, but tell us a great deal about the courage, resolve and determination required to cope with the always challenging conditions of hard work, inadequate housing, and very low income. In telling their stories, I have had to do a great deal of backward travelling myself, while trying to observe George Ewart Evans’ dictum of ‘imaginative reconstruction’.
Yes. I think of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s poem about aa labouring family’s baby, first published 1948 in The Countryman:
“My Doll, my Trumpery!”
O sleepy child lulled on the jogging knee
With eyes brilliant as gems new-fetched from the gloom
Of the mine you stare about the cottage room.
On the ceiling badged with smoke the flies crawl.
The flowery paper sags from the damp wall,
The wind bellows in the dark chimney throat, the rain
Darkens the dish-clout stuffed in the broken pane.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
Time drops like water from the alarm clock
That jars your Daddy from bed for the milking at five,
And will do the same to you, if you live and thrive.
And before the narrow fire on the wide hearth
She sings to her child, her jewel new-fetched from the dark
Of the womb, and candles him on a weary knee :
“My Doll, my Trumpery!”
Wonderfully evocative poem, thank you Jan. I can just about remember flowery paper sagging from the damp wall.