Bell Silver Ley

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-25294-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 316 Seiten

Reihe: A rural trilogy

Silver Ley, first published in 1931, is the second volume in Adrian Bell's classic rural trilogy (the other volumes being Corduroy and The Cherry Tree). In Silver Ley the author moves from being a farm apprentice to a farm owner.

Adrian Bell (1901-1980) was born in Lancashire, grew up in London, and was educated at Uppingham School which he hated. His father, news editor of the Observer, was a republican and a socialist and had no truck with university education. His son was to do something useful; in 1920 he went to East Anglia to work as a farm apprentice. He subsequently became a farmer himself. These experiences provide the material for his famous rural trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. In total he wrote over twenty-five books, he also set the first Times in 1930 and continued to devise crosswords for the paper for the next thirty years.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bell, Adrian

Leseproben

I

I awoke, and heard a wind soughing at the gable-end where the greying window was. It seemed far and unexplained to me in the stillness of the room, and the trance of sleep hardly cast off. It was just light enough to see the wooden ribs of the Gothic ceiling inclining up to each other, like fingers meeting at the tips in thoughtful poise. I heard a thud or two; but nothing seemed to break a sense of the absolute solitariness of my little chamber, not even my watch ticking.

I lay blank-minded, enjoying that delightful reprieve from knowledge and responsibility, that minute of the opening of the eyes from sleep, wondering where I was and what hold I had on the life to which I had returned, or it on me; yet knowing that in a moment memory would come surging back like the tide into a cave.

Another thud; and suddenly I remembered that for the last year I, a young man from London, had been learning farming with Mr. Colville of Farley Hall, Benfield St. George, Suffolk, a big farmer and one of a big family of farmers who lived like a ruling clan in the neighbourhood, co-operating and conferring. Another thud, and I remembered that I had left Mr. Colville’s and had just wakened to the morning of October 13th, after the first night in a fifty-acre farm of my own on the outskirts of Benfield. Another thud, and recollection concentrated on the immediate fact that, whereas all my wakings hitherto had been to the cheerful sound of the feet of twenty men walking into a farm, leading out horses, opening fowl-houses, milking and feeding cattle, I was now alone and my own master, and nothing would be done on this holding until I left my bed and did it. For those thuds were the sound of my horses stamping in the yard, while the sun rose and the hens cackled in the hen-huts. There was a little heart-failing at the thought, and at the sense of time bearing us all along, as the ticking of my watch insisted. The knowledge, too, that nothing stood still on my demesne, but went forward or back. For the blank fields of autumn, erased of their last season’s tale, waited for me to plant them with corn, or the wind would with weeds. There was no sealing them to the status quo as a house, nor drawing down of blinds as a shop, but always day and night the wakefulness of vigil, and a stirring through all the expanse. I was aware of it, the unceasing continuance and change, in the wind that had been playing about the house all night as I lay in my cast-iron bed under the strong suppliant beams of my chapel of a bedchamber.

I took heart that I was not altogether ignorant of the business, having been at it a year under Mr. Colville. So I rose, and all the brass knobs of the bed clattered cheerfully as I got out. I presumed once they had been tight, and had not announced one’s getting in and out with a tambourine flourish. It was a double bed, and when I bought it for 13s. at a sale it had been hung with some faint feminine material, which I had detached as ill-befitting my use. I had no doubt that it had done bridal honours in its time, but now, sated with the mysteries of birth and death, it had grown old and loose, seemed pleased with this young bachelor for a tenant, and chattered cheerfully every time I moved a limb. As much as to say, “Having already the land and the weather to coax and contend with, what a fool a man must be to marry also a woman.”

The hens flocked out when I opened their doors, indignant that the sun should be up before them. The cocks, stammering and strutting, proffered their sidelong attentions, but were disregarded. The other sex was already intent on grain. It was ever so, my bed would have rattled out; while man is sentimentalising, the woman is thinking of the next meal.

I fed my horses, Darkie and Dewdrop, giving them, I believe, too much oats to their chaff. There were many unforeseen gaps in my education. Judgment of quantity in farming is a whole subject in itself which Schools of Agriculture seem to neglect, relying on weights and measures. But in practice the farmer has no time to weigh and measure; he speaks to his men of “double handfuls, siftings, forkfuls,” and they understand by practice what those terms amount to.

I had not yet acquired the ploughman’s skill in the manipulation of harness, and was still liable to get into a Laocoön pose in my struggle with the chains, thongs, and plough-cords which together made up the tackle. However, I got the horses harnessed without much difficulty, the chief trouble being to get the collars on; they being disinclined to lift their heads from the manger for that purpose, and my cries of “Hold up” not having a gruff enough intonation to be compelling. I rode them out to a field which I must lose no time in ploughing up for winter oats, as Mr. Colville had advised, and there made a start. I cut two sticks from the hedge, peeled them to show up the better from a distance, and planted them one in the middle of the field and one at the farther side. I eyed them well that they were in line with my team, to which I then returned. I had coupled the horses well apart that I might get a clear view of the sticks between them. Tilting the plough into the ground, I braced myself and drove straight for the first of the sticks, gazing on that only and leaving horses and plough to my arms alone. I heard the plough hushing through the earth, and the stubble crackling over: it desired to leap to right and to left, but I crouched over it and held it to the course. The horses passed one on either side of the first stick; the plough caught it and bore it over. I felt it crack beneath my feet. I had eyes only for the second stick, which we came to without much wavering and trod down. Then I turned and surveyed my work. I sighed with relief: it was nothing to be ashamed of, the first furrow I had ploughed on a field of my own.

The first furrow is the most difficult to draw out: the others have it and each other for guide. I continued then to and fro about it with easy rhythm. I found the day bright about me, though the too-clear dawn had yielded to a fleet of clouds that threatened to close their ranks across the sky. At present there remained those jagged fragments of blue that watercolourists like to paint. Starlings quickly learned that ploughing was going on, and came and made a hopping, fluttering procession of my progress.

At eight-thirty I returned to the farm for breakfast. I had bought some provisions the day before. I had, amongst other things, some bacon, a frying-pan, and some coffee. My cookery knowledge was slight, but equal to this occasion. It included a maxim that it was unnecessary to melt fat in the pan for the frying of bacon. A chopped faggot and some logs soon made a blaze, to which I sacrificed a whole candle, as I was hungry. I put the rashers in the pan, and after a minute of silence, they began to splutter companionably. Making the pan balance itself, I next turned my attention to coffee, which I made in two mugs, not having a jug to spare. Encouraged by these authentic mingled fragrances, I determined on some toast as well, and fixed a fork through the fender in such a way that that too “did itself.” Meanwhile I laid the table for my simple meal, keeping one eye on my automatic cookery. As I sat at it, the postman came with a letter from home in which they hoped that I was getting on all right in my new abode. A well-timed enquiry. The coffee was excellent (wood-smoke being no drawback); the bacon done to a turn. Though my mother might have found certain things to take exception to—a drop or two of spilt fat, fork prongs tarnished with the fire—to a man’s skimming eye it was well enough.

After breakfast I returned to the fields. As I ploughed I thought. When I rested the horses at the headlands I looked about me. I heard the clock in the village below strike one, but I knew that those who put their hand to the plough did not leave off till two-thirty. And, seeing that to-day I was a ploughman, I continued. But I realised that my present work was more of a gesture than a real attack on the autumn cultivation before me. It was a mere obedience of the first rule of arable farming: that horses must not stand still At two-thirty I surveyed my work. So narrow compared to the rest of the field looked the strip of dark earth I had been all this while making even so wide. There was so much else to be done, and that quickly; harrowing, trimming the grass from the sides of the fields, hedges to cut down, manure to cart. I must, of course, have help; a man, perhaps two for a time.

I am always one for settling into comfortable rhythms, swift or slow, according to the demands that life makes, coping with things with the help of an ordered day. That to me is half the battle: if jolted out of it, a sudden anxiety magnifies the affairs ahead into mountains. So, until I had discovered and engaged labour adequate to my needs here, I was quite at sea and knew not which way to turn, my own activities seeming but to nibble at the edge of the problem.

I felt strangely alone with the birds and the clouds on my plot of earth, as I rode the horses homeward. But I was not to lack visitors. In fact, I had not got fairly into the home meadow before the first of them made his appearance—a young man in blue overalls with a spanner sticking out of a pocket just above the knee. His complexion was pale, and his having last shaved yesterday gave it a tired shadow. His knuckles were scarred and his nails were squarely outlined in a grime that did not come from dabbling with earth. Blood showed at a recent graze, more brilliant for the ingrained oil; an...