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Man Alone

Part Two — Chapter XVIII

page 189

Part Two
Chapter XVIII

When the European fighting started again in the summer of 1936, just a few manoeuvres in Spain down there in the sunlight and the hot hills, just a little sparring to try out the equipment for bigger and better days, a few shots, a few shells, a few bombs, and nobody's business – when all that started some time ago now, Johnson was working on an English farm. He was working there quietly to pay off the money that he still owed to his brother. He was working there because it was the only work that he understood and he was living quietly and saving ten shillings for Jim from thirty-two shillings each week.

He had changed his name by then and changed himself a good deal from the Johnson of other days. He was not the man who had grown up in England by the Chiltern hills, nor the man who slight, callow, afraid, had served with the light infantry in mud and cold and dirt and death, fighting a war, to him incomprehensible, to the world unnecessary. He was not that Johnson who had liked sun and free country and beer and small race meetings, not that man living free, not caring where he worked, what he did. Nor that other man knowing hardship and fear of the future and death by poverty as old friends. Nor that last man hunted, in a life over which he had no control.

He was a different man now, grown old but still active, strength wiry and reserved, no longer eager but still living, grey but not beaten, moving impersonally and unquestioning through a world of which he had not yet understanding but which he could accept. He stood for the war and the peace in between and the war to come. He had endurance.

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This farm was in Northamptonshire, in the lowlands, where the fen country begins to rise into the hills of Lincolnshire. It lay beside the Great North Road. It was old England and new England. Its grey stone walls and buildings were of the slate grey stone that runs over England from Cornwall through the Cotswolds to die away on these Northamptonshire hills. The old house, with its slate roof and courtyard surrounded by barns and outhouses, stood on a rise, and below them was the mill-house and the foreman's cottage. A small stream that ran down to find its way into the sea was dammed up behind the mill-house and ran through it to turn the millstones that, still creaking, slowly ground rough meal and flour for the farm. Near the house were green fields and a small herd of dairy cows, below in the flats pigs moved in open pens. Beyond that were fields with wheat coming up green from the spring rains, and not yet ripened with the summer sun, and long rows of beet and potatoes hoed cleanly. The first field of potatoes had been ploughed up and men moved in line across the field picking them. It was a poor summer in England in 1936. The mown hay lay in the fields and dried, and was soaked again and turned and dried, and soaked until it lay straggling and wispy, waiting to be stacked.

Across from the farm ran the Great North Road with traffic thundering along it night and day. No horses there, but heavy trucks and motor coaches, and the smart cars of new England, tearing through the country-side. There was a military aerodrome two miles to the north and all day planes sang overhead like fighting birds.

Poets had moved in this country once, Cowper and John Clare, but few poets moved there now.

They were good fellows on this farm, kind, solid, well-meaning fellows. There was Tom White, drove the tractor and the farm lorry, jealously mechanical, no one else could page 191 drive them, short, dark, and strong, with two children Reg and Alf Barrow tended the horses and drove them in the fields. There was little Wilson, not good for more than a hoeing job, but cheerful, unambitious for specialization, and old Joe the verger, growing old now, called from the safe and ordinary slow-working jobs of the farm only at those times when there was thatching to be done and a stack well covered. Solemn Bill Jessup, the foreman, the best ditcher in Lincoln in his day, so they all said, his right forearm monstrously thick with strength as a result and now not hasty nor driving in his work but leaving men alone to go their way. Below the mill in the beet-fields were the three Irishmen, two old men and one young, who came each year and hoed, working piece-work, and stayed over harvest time. They were quiet, poor, unintelligent men. They did their own cooking and lived apart in an old caravan, not caring for friendship with Englishmen. There was Fred Stuckey who could catch rats with his bare hands when they turned out a barn, skilled with birds and animals, hoping some day for gamekeeper's work on the big estates, and Frank Whiteman, home from factory work in the cotton country, remembering big wages and bad times, but cheerful being home again, doing farm work again that he had not forgotten.

Johnson did not belong easily with these men. They were settled in a way that he was not. He worked with them and talked with them. He liked them, was not worried by them, but he made them uneasy. He could feel this. He was older than they were, he was older than old Joe. He was more worn, more travelled, though he never talked of this. He did not belong there and they knew it.

That July Saturday in 1936 when the fighting began was a warm, wild, blustering day in Northamptonshire. Coming in at midday from hoeing beet, Johnson knocked the mud off his shoes, cleaning his hoe, and leaving it in page 192 the shed below the mill. He was leaning up against the stone wall, sheltered from the wind, and rolling a cigarette when Bill Jessup came by.

‘Boss wants us to get the hay in up top this after,’ he said. ‘You good for that?’

Johnson nodded. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘I got no dinner here.’

‘You better come in and eat with us, then we'll get the engine up. Boss wants us bail it.’

He stroked his chin, looking up at the sky, the easy purr of Lincolnshire in his voice.

Johnson ate dinner in the lodge below the mill with Bill Jessup and his wife, his small son and daughter, boiled beef and carrots on the oilskin table-cloth. Afterwards he rested his legs in front of the stove while Bill Jessup's wife cleared away.

When they came out into the sunlight again the warm west wind had blown the clouds away, uncovering a tearing blue sky. A solitary aeroplane hovered overhead, pushing slowly into the wind like a boat making up-stream. They went down to the shed and waited for Tom White.

‘Old Tom gets real mad if anyone touches the machine save him,’ said Bill Jessup. ‘Likely he thinks no one save him knows how to work it.’

After a few minutes he came in on his bicycle from the village, his bag of bread and meat and cold tea slung over his shoulder. Together they uncovered and oiled the tractor. Tom started it up and they went across to the field where the boys were already at work with the horse-rakes. Up here, and away from the shelter of the hollow, the wind seemed wilder still. The wind caught the rows of raked air-dry hay and blew them across the field again. They waited then until two more men had come back from dinner and the oldest Irishman came slowly over to join them.

page 193

Once the sweep had started bringing in hay in loads to the bailer, there were not many intervals for talking or smoking. Johnson worked quietly and economically, forking hay up on to the platform where it was caught and pressed. The wind, coming in gusts, scattered the hay from their forks and from the spread of the sweeps, driving it away from them across the field.

As they worked they could see the crowded week-end traffic of the roads going north. In mid-afternoon there were aeroplanes in the air, crossing and re-crossing in formation low overhead. The men working were not disturbed by them. The roar of the engines droned heavily in with the clattering tractor.

When they stopped at five Tom White passed his bottle of cold tea to Johnson, and they shared bread and meat sandwiches sitting in the shelter of the bailer.

The boys got talking of the war just casually as they might talk of anything else. Little Wilson was telling them how he was up in London in the war and an old lady met the train, on a mission she was, to entertain country boys in London on leave, and took him home to tea in the suburbs and fed him and put him back on the leave train at night. It was surprising the way things happened in war-time he said.

Tom White, tilting back his head to finish the cold tea, grunted, listening.

‘Ah, war,’ he said. He was too young to have been in the war. ‘We'll all be in it this time,’ he said. ‘Conscription the first bloody day, you can bet on that.’

‘Not me,’ said little Wilson. ‘Passed out C3 at the end of the last'n, Ah did,’ and chuckled, pleased to think that some of these things, not even the old lady and her cake, would happen to him again.

page 194

And Bill Jessup, looking speculatively across the field, nodded, saying:

‘Ay, every b–'ll be in the bloudy army first bloudy day. That's a fact.’

It was nearly seven by the time they had finished and staked a tarpaulin over the pile of baled hay. The sun was setting when Johnson walked home down to his lodgings in the village. He had fed the pigs by the homestead with Bill Jessup and led two working horses down to the home field. The week's work was over.

Going out through the farm gates on to the road, he met the owner of the farm driving back from Peterborough. He held the gate open for the car to go through and nodded doing so. Coldly the heavy head, with its red burned face and iron-grey hair and clipped moustache, nodded back. The eyes passed over him without friendliness. Johnson worked there on sufferance, a good farmhand. He did not touch his hat as he should have done. He was not likely to get the friendly recognition that was extended to man who lived and worked a lifetime there. He represented a foreign and unknown quantity, something alien among the corn. The eyes that met his were without friendliness. Johnson closed the gate carefully after him and went on down the road.

There was a cricket fête in the village that night, tents and music on the village green. Johnson avoided that; he avoided, too, the new roadside inn that had been built to draw custom from the north road and took his beer instead in the ‘Carpenter's Arms’ beside the church. In its lowceilinged, smoky rooms there was company. Tom White was down there and little Wilson and Bill Jessup came in after a little time.

Wilson and three others played darts. Johnson sat and drank two pints of mild ale thoughtfully. He was reading page 195 in the Leicester paper about the fighting that had broken out in Spain. There was plenty of other news in the paper and he was not taking any account of it. He talked to Tom White.

Tom White was telling him about the future of farming.

‘There's other fellows,’ he was saying, ‘go off the land into the gravel pits and such, better wages, they say, ah, better wages when it doesn't rain, I say. Ah'm sticking on farm. Ah've seen the way it's been coming with the tractor and all. Ah've said to missus, if Ah stick to't, a man can get to be important to th’ farm. Gets so they need you, drive the lorry, drive the tractor, more and more machinery coming on – boss is awake to ‘t. Told me so. “White,” he says, “I reckon for you for machinery on th’ farm.” Ah can drive ‘em. There's naught yet Ah can't drive.’

Johnson nodded.

‘That's right,’ he said. ‘Machinery's the thing.’

There'll be no end to ‘t.’

‘I've seen a lot of it,’ Johnson said, ‘one place and another. Used to milk cows with it once.’

‘A fellow Stamford way has machine for that. Reckon it don't do cows no good.’

‘I don't think it hurts them.’

‘Reckon it doesn't do them no good. It wouldn't be in England you were doing that.’

‘No, it was in New Zealand, Australia.’

‘Ah, Australy,’ Tom White said. ‘Australy, I've heard a lot of that.’

His square dark face was thoughtful.

‘Never wanted to go there, did you?’

‘No, not Australy. Never wanted to travel much. Ah used to think – funny the things you think when you're a kid – Ah used to think A'd like to go to China.’

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They drank up their beer not talking and Johnson nodded, saying good night as he went out.

Lying in bed that night, still wakeful, gazing up at the whitewashed ceiling of his bedroom, Johnson was trying to work something out. He was trying to work out a restlessness that would not leave him in peace. He was thinking of Tom White and his machines, and Bill Jessup who would live and die there with his wife and his two daughters, maids at the house, growing up and marrying and living and dying there, with Lincoln still a far journey to them, untouched by the cars going by and the aeroplanes overhead. He himself could never live anywhere again. He had tried to live and settle and things had happened to him. Now he could not do that again. He lived now to earn his living, and lying there he was thinking, trying to work out in himself what it was beyond that that he could want. There were memories of men he had known and liked, men, black and clay-stained on New Zealand roads, sweating on steamer decks, paint-blistered, dirty, and lice-ridden in the seamen's camp at Panama, tough, sceptical on New York docks. There was a desire in him now for a life that would give warmth and meaning to these memories before he grew too old, for a life active, but with good food and good drink, and men moving, making something together.

It was not here in old-new England, not in these dark green lanes, not here in this village of stone and white-washed timbers, with men, quiet soft-spoken, and honest. He did not know where it would be, and went to sleep hearing up the main street of the village two girls laughing as they walked home from the fair, and the church tower striking eleven through the warm, windy, summer night.