Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer Part 1

Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer.

by George Sturt (AKA George Bourne).

INTRODUCTION

Bettesworth, the old labouring man, who in the decline of his strength found employment in my garden and entertained me with his talk, never knew that he had been made the subject of a book. To know it would have pleased him vastly, and there is something tragical in the reflection that he had to wear through his last weary months without the consolation of the little fame he had justly earned; and yet it would have been a mistake to tell him of it. His up-bringing had not fitted him for publicity. On the contrary, there was so much danger that self-consciousness would send him boastfully drinking about the parish, and make him intolerable to his familiars and useless to any employer, that, instead of confessing to him what I had done, I took every precaution to keep him in ignorance of it, and sought by leaving him in obscurity to preserve him from ruin.

Obscure and unsuspicious he continued his work, and his pleasant garrulity went on in its accustomed way. Queer anecdotes came from him as plentifully as ever, and shrewd observations. Now it would be of his harvesting in Suss.e.x that he told; now, of an adventure with a troublesome horse, or an experience on the scaffolding of a building; and again he would gossip of his garden, or of his neighbours, or of the old village life, or would discuss some sc.r.a.p of news picked up at the public-house. And as this went on month after month, although I had no intention of adding to the first book or writing a second on the same lines, still it happened frequently that some fragment or other of Bettesworth's conversation took my fancy and was jotted down in my note-book. But almost until the end no definite purpose informed me what to preserve and what to leave. The notes were made, for the most part, under the influence of whim only.

Towards the end, however, a sort of progression seemed to reveal itself in these haphazard jottings. His age was telling heavily upon Bettesworth, and symptoms of the inevitable change appeared to have been creeping unawares into my careless memoranda of his talk. I do not know when I first noticed this: it probably dawned upon me very slowly; but that it did dawn is certain, and in that perception I had the first crude vision of the present volume. I might not aim to make another book after the pattern of the first, grouping the materials as it pleased me for an artistic end; but by reproducing the notes in their proper order, and leaving them to tell their own tale, it should be possible to engage as it were the co-operation of Nature herself, my own part being merely that of a scribe, recording at the dictation of events the process of Bettesworth's decay.

To this idea, formed a year or so before Bettesworth's death, I have now tried to give shape. Unfortunately, the scribe's work was not well done. Things that should have been written down prove to have been overlooked; and although in the first few chapters I have gone back to a much earlier period than was originally intended, and have preserved the chronological order all through, the hoped-for sense of progression is too often wanting. It existed in my mind, in the memories which the notes called up for me, rather than in Bettesworth's recorded conversations. Much explanatory comment, therefore, which I should have preferred to omit, has been introduced in order to give continuity to the narrative.

Bettesworth is spoken of throughout the book as an old man; and that is what he appeared to be. But in fact he was aged more by wear and tear than by years. When he died, a nephew who arranged the funeral caused the age of seventy-three to be marked on his coffin, but I think this was an exaggeration. The nephew's mother a.s.sured me at the time that Bettesworth could have been no more than sixty-six. She was his sister-in-law, having married his elder brother, and so had some right to an opinion; and yet probably he was a little older than she supposed. It is true that sixty-six is also the age one gets for him, computing it from evidence given in one chapter of this book; but then there is another chapter which, if it is correct, would make him sixty-seven. Against these estimates a definite statement is to be placed. On the second of October, 1901, Bettesworth told me that it was his birthday, and that he was sixty-four; according to which, at his death, nearly four years later, he must have been close upon sixty-eight. And this, I am inclined to think, was his true age; at any rate I cannot believe that he was younger.

At the same time, it must be allowed that his own evidence was not quite to be trusted. A man in his position, with the workhouse waiting for him, will not make the most of his years to an employer, and I sometimes fancied that Bettesworth wished me to think him younger than he was. But it is quite possible that he was not himself certain of his own age. I have it from his sister-in-law that both his parents died while he was still a child, and that he, with his brothers and sisters, was taken, dest.i.tute, to the workhouse. Thence, I suppose, he was rescued by that uncle, who kept a travelling van; and the man who carried the boy to fairs and racecourses, and thrashed him so savagely that at last he ran away to become Farmer Barnes's plough-boy, was not a person likely to instruct him very carefully about his age.

The point, however, is of no real importance. A labourer who has at least the look of being old: thin, grey-eyed, quiet, with bent shoulders and patient though determined expression of face--such is the Bettesworth whose last years are recorded in these chapters; and it does not much matter that we should know exactly how many years it took to reduce him to this state.

MEMOIRS OF A SURREY LABOURER

I

_December 7, 1892._--The ground in the upper part of the garden being too hard frozen for Bettesworth to continue this morning the work he was doing there yesterday, I found him some digging to do in a more sheltered corner, where the fork would enter the soil. With snow threatening to come and stop all outdoor work, it was not well that he should stand idle too soon.

"Oh dear!" he said one day, "we don't want no snow! We had enough o'

that two winters ago. That was a fair scorcher, that was.--There! I couldn't tell anybody how we _did_ git through. Still, we _got_ through, somehow. But there was some about here as was purty near starved. That poor woman as died over here t'other day...."

Here he broke off, to tell of a labourer's wife who had died in giving birth to twins, one of whom was also dead. Including the other twin, there were seven children living. Bettesworth talked of the husband, too; but presently working round again to the bad winter of 1889-1890, he proceeded:

"I _knows_ they" (this woman and her family) "was purty near starvin'.

_I_ give her two or three half-bushels o' taters. I can't bear to see 'em like that, 'specially if there's little childern about. I give away bushels o' taters that winter, 'cause them as _had_ got any had got 'em buried away--couldn't git at 'em (in the frozen ground). Mine was stowed away where I could git 'em."

Accordingly, antic.i.p.ating hard times, I set Bettesworth to work in the sheltered spot where digging was still possible, and left him. The day proved sunny on the whole, with a soft winter sunshine, dimmed now and then by grey fog close down to the earth, and now and then by large drifts of foggy cloud pa.s.sing over from the north. By mid-day the roads were sticky, where the sunshine had thawed the surface, but in shady places the ground was still hard. Here and there was ice, and odd corners remained white with the sprinkling of snow which had fallen two nights previously.

Towards sunset I went to see what Bettesworth had done. He had done very little, and, moreover, he had disappeared. The air glowed with the yellow sunset; the soft dim blue of the upper sky was changing to hazy grey in the south-east; in the west, veiling the sunset, lay a bank of clouds, crimson shaded to lilac. I turned to enjoy this as I climbed the garden to find Bettesworth, where he was busy at his yesterday's task.

"Well, Bettesworth, how are you getting on?"

"Oh, _cold_, sir."

Overhead, one or two wisps of smoky-looking cloud were floating southwards. In the sunlight they showed amber against the soft blue, but from their movement and their indistinct and changing form it was plain that they belonged to the system of those larger clouds which had all day been crossing ominously out of the north. I glanced up at them, and remarked that I feared the snow was not far off now.

Bettesworth straightened up from his work.

"Ah, that's what everybody bin sayin'."

"Well, it looks uncommonly like coming."

"Ah, it do. Didn't it look black there, along about nine or ten o'clock this mornin'? I thought then we was goin' to have some snow, an' no mistake." He chuckled grimly and continued, "I dunno how we shall git on if it comes to that. But there, we've had it before an'

got through somehow, and I dessay we shall git through again."

"It's to be hoped so. Anyhow, there seems to be no way of altering it."

"No, sir; there don't. I 'xpect we shall have to put up with it. Bear it an' grumble--that's what we shall have to do. We've had to do that before now."

It was a blessing, I laughed, that we had the right to grumble; but we hardly learnt to like the winter the better for being used to it.

"No; that don't make it none the sweeter, do it? Still, we can't help that. As my old neighbour, Jack Tower, used to say, 'Puverty en't no _crime_, but 'tis a great ill-convenience.'" The touch of epigram in Tower's saying seemed to please Bettesworth, and his speech flowed out with a smooth undulating balance as he repeated slowly, tasting the syllables: "No, cert'nly, puverty en't no crime; but it is a very ill-convenient thing, an' no mistake."

To the same period as the foregoing piece belongs an undated fragment, which tells how news came to Bettesworth of a certain boy's being bitten by a dog. "Have he bit'n _much_?" was the first eager exclamation, followed by, "These here messin' dawgs! There's too many of 'em, snappin' and yappin' about. I don't _like_ 'em!"

Then he went on, "I don't see what anybody wants to keep dogs for, interferin' with anybody. Why, there's Kesty's dog up there--look at that dog of he's! Why, that dog of he's, he've bit three or four of 'em. He bit the postman two or three times, till they sent to 'n from the Post Office to tell 'n 'less he mind to keep his dog tied up he'd have to send an' fetch his letters hisself.... Nasty sly sort o' dog he is, no mistake. He goes slinkin' an' prowlin' about up there; he's never tied up. And he don't make no sound, ye know. No, you'll never hear 'n make no noise; but he'll have ye. And he en't partic'lar, neither, about lettin' of ye go by, even if it's on the highroad, onless he've a mind to. He'll come slinkin' round, an goo for ye, 's likely as not."

"Odd," I suggested, "that a man should care to keep a dog like that."

Bettesworth shook his head.

"There's too _many_ of 'em about, by half. And I en't partic'lar fond o' dogs, nowhen." He looked up, and a knowing look came into his grey eyes as he continued, "I was workin' one time for Malcolms up here, and they had a dog, and one day he stole a shoulder o' mutton, indoors. Sort of collie, _he_ was. And he took this 'ere shoulder o'

mutton and run upstairs into one o' the rooms, and he wouldn't come out for n.o.body. I was at work out in the garden, and the servant she come runnin' out to me, to ast me if I'd come an' get 'n out. 'I dunno s'much about that,' I says; "ten't a job as I cares about.' I can tell ye, I wa'n't partic'lar about _doin'_ of it. 'Oh,' she says, 'do come an' get 'n out. We be all afraid. And you can have a stick,' she says. 'No,' I says, 'I won't have no stick'--'cause, what good's a stick, ye know? He'd ha' come for me all the one for that. So I _catches_ up a 'and-saw...."

"A _hand-saw_?"

"I did. I took this 'ere 'and-saw, and I went upstairs to 'n, and he come for me sure enough. But I give 'n two or three 'cross the nose with this saw, and he didn't like that. He went off downstairs quick sticks."

"H'm! I shouldn't have relished the job."

"No, sir; I didn't _like_ it. I was afraid of 'n. I drove 'n out, but I was afraid of 'n all the one for that."

_January 7, 1896._--A task reserved for this winter's leisure was the making of an arched way of larch-poles and wire to cover a short flight of steps in the garden. Two briars at the top of the steps, one on each side, had overgrown them, and these were now to be trained to the new framework, which was to slant down at the same slope as the steps.

Until we began the work, it seemed simple enough; but almost immediately we plunged into bewilderment, owing to the various slopes and slants to be considered. The steps go askew between two parts of a zigzag path, and our archway, therefore, needed to be several feet longer on one side than on the other. The consequence was that the horizontal ties at the top not only clashed with all the gradients of the garden, but converged towards one another, so that, seen from above, they were horrid to behold. And then the slanting side-rails!

They agreed with nothing else in all the landscape save the steps below them. Of course, when the briars covered these discrepancies, all would be well; but just while Bettesworth and myself were at work upon this thing, the farther we progressed with it the more distracted it looked, as though we had gathered into one spot all the conflicting angles of this most uneven of gardens, and were tying them up into one hideous knot. The work became a nightmare, and for an hour or two we lost our good spirits, and found it all we could do to keep our temper.

However, we got the framework together somehow, after which the straining of wires over it, being, as we fondly imagined, an easier task, released our thoughts a little. Bettesworth paid out and held the wire while I fastened it.

"Is that tight enough?" said he.