Portrait of Elmbury (9 page)

Yes; the student of social science could do worse than become a clerk for a year or two in some such office as my uncle's. But this is very much of an afterthought; for I myself was nothing of the kind. I was a tough young rascal with my head full of poetry and the rest of my interest divided pretty equally between horses, fishes, motor-bikes and girls.

The office stood in the High Street, quite close to Tudor House; by squinting sideways you could still see Double Alley out of its big plate-glass window.

It needed a coat of paint outside and a thoroughly good clean-up inside. It was shabby with the shabbiness of enormous respectability. A coat of paint might have suggested that it needed (like a tart) to advertise its presence. Such a notion would have been abhorrent to my uncle. As for cleaning it within, there were documents and shelves of books on which the dust had lain since 1750. In the course of a spring-clean papers would be disturbed, books no doubt would be mislaid, it would be difficult to find things afterwards. That notion was abhorrent to my uncle also.

If the place was drab and dusty, then the very drabness and dustiness were earnests of its integrity. Cheapjacks and bucket-shops, no doubt, had to look smart; we could afford to be shabby, as a gentleman can afford to wear shabby clothes.

Although the building was large, with plenty of rooms to spare on the first and second floors, everybody who worked there crowded together on the ground floor. This was either because nobody had ever been able to face the task of clearing the junk from the upstairs rooms or because none of the partners would move up there for fear of being left out of whatever was going on. Instead my uncle and his two partners sat together in a very small office so full of maps and papers that if a fat farmer should visit them there was literally no room to turn round.

A slightly bigger office—the one with the plate-glass window— accommodated the articled clerks, who perched like monkeys on high stools at a long polished desk. In a corner of this room, hidden away and surrounded by a sort of barricade, as if we were ashamed of them (as indeed so old-fashioned a firm might be) reposed our only typewriter and an astonishingly pretty typist.

The walls of this office—and indeed of every room in the building—were lined with books: books in red morocco bindings, several thousand of them, which contained the “Particulars of Sale” of every property that had passed through the firm's hands —almost every dwelling-house, in fact, every farm, smallholding, shop, pub, orchard and meadow within six miles of Elmbury. Out of these dreary-looking books, if you shook off the dust and opened them at random, sometimes there would leap out at you names that were pieces of poetry: the ancient country names of wood and field; names like Poppies' Parlour, Salley Furlong, Coneygree, Hungry Harbour, Merry-come-Sorrow.

There were other books, rows of great ledgers, which contained a record of all the firm's transactions since its foundation in 1750. If somebody could have translated the contents of those books into terms of flesh-and-blood—of human prosperity and human catastrophe—he would have been able to read the complete social history of a county during a period of one and a half centuries. Indeed, he would have found, within the stout leather covers of those books, a microcosm of English life and history. He would have learned how good times had alternated with bad: how poor men had risen to wealth and power and how rich men had come down into the gutter; how the great farming families
had prospered, generation after generation, until some elder son, by his folly or his drunkenness or his bad luck, had brought them to bankruptcy and their patriarchal acres under the hammer; how little tradesmen and smallholders had struggled in vain against periodic “depressions,” against the flow of economic tides which they were as powerless as Canute to stem. It would be a tale of great manors and little country pubs; of deer-parks and jerry-built housing estates; of pheasant shoots and workmen's cottages; of bloodstock and the poor man's pig.

Written here, in the neat impersonal handwriting of nineteenth-century clerks, you might read how John Smith in a lucky year received two hundred pounds for the fruit in his orchards on High Perry Hill; how he took a pub with the proceeds; and how, four years later, when he had drunk away all his capital, the miserable remnants of his estate were sold by order of the Official Receiver in Bankruptcy: one kitchen table; two Windsor chairs; pony trap; bay gelding, aged. You might read how a June flood ruined a dozen farmers whose hayfields lay along the banks of the river; how a man was saved from disaster by a sudden miraculous crop of mushrooms which appeared like manna from heaven in his barren fields; how a great estate was broken up because the son who should have inherited it married a barmaid against the wishes of his father; how another was sold because its owner fell at Bloemfontein.

England's wars would cast their shadows over the pages of the books and Stock Exchange crashes have their reflection there. They would reflect faithfully how successive Acts of Parliament had prospered some fortunes and caused others to decline. The clerks' cold copper-plate would record in brief undramatic entries, as Gabriel himself, the inevitable consequences of human frailty and human passion. And the old story of Naboth's vineyard would be told again there.

But the dust lay thick on the firm's old ledgers, and nobody took them down off the cobwebby shelves.

The duties of an articled clerk were not very arduous. We were expected to learn the value of things, and the way to do that was to see things sold. We went to all the sales, of farming-stock, of horses, of growing fruit, of furniture, and stood beside the auctioneers, writing down the price and the purchaser's name in one of the red morocco-bound books. (Modern firms use tear-off sheets for this purpose. These would have seemed shockingly impermanent to my uncle, who believed that if a man bought Lot 224 Bedroom Utensil and sundries for two shillings the fact should be recorded for two hundred years.)

We also accompanied the partners when they made farm valuations, or took inventories, or valued a publican out of his old pub or into a new one. Thus we learned the huge and strange vocabulary of the auctioneer's catalogue; and we learned also those old and curious systems of weights and measures which are used to describe quantities of the various things men buy and sell—we got to know the precise meaning of such terms as a pipe of cider, a pot of plums, a bundle of osiers, a foot of timber, a bag of peas, a boltin of straw.

Even as a child I had loved words and the bright or sombre patterns which are made of them; and the new vast vocabulary delighted me. Nobody, surely, employs in his everyday work a greater number of unfamiliar nouns than the auctioneer. Each trade and business has its own extensive vocabulary; but the auctioneer must know them all. Each of his catalogues is addressed to the expert; and when he gets up in his rostrum to sell he must be prepared to speak as an expert. In the stock market he must talk of downcalving heifers, tegs, tups, wethers, ewes in yean, large white bacons, and so on. At the farm sales he will have to offer such things as a half-legged gelding, a Massey-Harris binder, G.O. lines, a scuffle, and a set of badikins, whippletrees, swivel-trees or suppletrees (the term varies according to the district). And he must know the terms, not only of the farmers' and the horse-copers' trade, but of the timber-merchants', the builders',
the market-gardeners', the publicans', and many more. Moreover, he must pay tribute in the proper form to the Lares and Penates by cataloguing correctly the thousand-and-one household possessions of all kinds and conditions of people; the mahogany tallboy, the Welsh cheese-cupboard, the whatnot, the oak refectory table, the Windsor chairs, the Wedgwood plates, the copper-lustre jug, the Worcester teaset; the glass, the brass, the pewter, the linen; the pictures and books; the kitchen utensils; the garden tools. And if by chance it falls to his lot to make a valuation or hold a sale in a factory, he must accustom his tongue to the outlandish new words which men use who speak of machines.

If nouns were gold, he would be richer than Midas; yet in curious contrast his adjectives are as beggarly, as thread-bare, as out-at-elbow and down-at-heel as you would expect them to be after having been overworked for nearly two hundred years. The Desirable Freehold Residence; the Capital Farming Stock; the Sound Pasture Land; the Commodious Premises; and the Old-world Cottage: the adjectives never vary. But perhaps after all it is not for lack of epithets that the auctioneer always uses the same one; there is a convention in the matter, as strict as that which bound great Homer himself. The Residence must be Desirable; just as the dawn was always rosy-fingered.

During that winter of 1923-24 there was a widespread epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease. It passed like a blight from end to end of our green vale, striking at random the smallholder's little piggery and the dairy farmer's pedigree herd. Nobody knew where it would appear next; some farms escaped although surrounded on all sides by the infection, others remote from any outbreak were suddenly stricken.

The weekly markets were closed, except for the sale of fat stock to be killed immediately; and the auctioneer's painful job was to value the affected herds for purposes of compensation. Thus I had a grim introduction to agricultural life. There was no work
to do in the office; we just sat and listened for the telephone. It rang almost every day to summon us to another valuation: the disease had been confirmed on a small farm near the Leigh; Guilding had it at Dykeham; Loveridge had it at Hardwicke; the vet had been called to investigate a suspicious case at Coombe Hill.

It was like the plague that walketh at noonday; and the farmers feared it almost as much as Londoners once feared the plague. Mr. Jeffs, driving down Elmbury High Street behind his high-stepping chestnut, encountered the vicar and demanded in a loud voice why he didn't pray. “If thee be any good,” said Mr. Jeffs rudely, “get down on thy knees; for that's what we pay thee for, out of the Tithe.” Shaking his whip threateningly, as Cobbett once shook his whip at the Botley Parson,
Earn thy keep
, roared Mr. Jeffs; and with that he flicked his mare, and her bright-shod hoofs struck sparks out of the cobbles as she set off at a good spanking pace towards Hill Farm.

But when he got home—'twas a judgment on him, said old Jabez Jones who worked for the vicar and believed in an old-fashioned, implacable and hard-smiting Jehovah—when Mr. Jeffs got home his cowman asked him to have a look at a calf which was drooling saliva and going a bit hoppy on its off hind. Early next morning our telephone rang; and it summoned us to Hill Farm. It was a still, misty day; and as we drove along the brown dripping lanes we could see here and there the smoke rising from funeral pyres, and we could smell the sickening smell of burning flesh and hide.

For although only a single beast on a farm might be affected, all the rest of the stock had to be slain. This was the decree of the Ministry of Agriculture; and it was probably a wise decree. But the carrying-out of it was painful and often tragic. Because of one sick beast—such as Mr. Jeff's drooling calf—a whole healthy herd of valuable dairy cows might have to be killed; and not the cattle only, but also the sheep and the pigs. When that was done, and the bodies had been burned, the farm would be “shut-up” for weeks. The farmer must not restock his land until the mysterious infection had been given time to die out.
He was not allowed to buy or sell; and in any case he had nothing left to sell. Even though he was paid compensation for the slaughtered beasts, he suffered a loss which was always crippling and in some cases ruinous.

When we arrived at Mr. Jeffs' farm we found a printed notice on the gate—“Foot-and-Mouth Disease—Road Closed,” and the village policeman already standing guard. The Ministry's man and the slaughterers were waiting for us; we all put on rubber thigh boots and rubber gloves and smocks to cover our clothes, and went up to the farmhouse to meet Mr. Jeffs. He took us through the wet November fields, through the Home Orchard and the rough ground called Starveall, to the meadows where the cattle were peacefully grazing: a herd of more than fifty pedigree Dairy Shorthorns which represented, perhaps, half of Mr. Jeffs' working capital.

“Took twenty years to build up that herd,” he said. He looked at the Ministry's man, as if he pleaded, “Surely there's some way out, surely you won't kill my beautiful cows?” He went up to one and ran his hand over her sleek side. “Brockeridge Bountiful,” he said. “I bred her on the farm. Refused seventy-five for her only last week.” We all tried not to look at Mr. Jeffs; it didn't make any difference, we knew, whether the cow was Brockeridge Bountiful worth seventy-five guineas or just Blossom or Daisy or Old White-face, gone in two quarters and worth a tenner for fattening. Pedigree Shorthorn or old screw, it must be slaughtered all the same.

Mr. Jeffs, usually so jovial, looked grey and old. “My father never used to take no note of Foot-and-Mouth,” he said. “Nine times out of ten he'd cure it with a bit of rocksalt and a dab of Stockholm tar.” He couldn't understand the necessity for wholesale massacre; couldn't understand the new scientific methods, the careful statistical surveys, which had proved to the Ministry of Agriculture that it was better to slay ten thousand beasts than to risk the infection of a million: a million which might recover but would be useless for milk or fattening for a year. Mr Jeffs didn't realise that if the epidemic was allowed to spread it might ruin the whole industry of stock-rearing for a generation. He
only looked back into his long memory and remembered what his father and his father's father had done. “Rocksalt and a dab of Stockholm tar. … If they'd killed off grandfather's herd for Foot-and-Mouth he'd have shot 'isself.”

My old uncle, silver-haired and courtly, sympathetically shook his head.