Homage to Gaia (11 page)

As June 1940 approached, and with it the end of my first year as a student of Manchester University, I found that I was broke. I had spent the entire loan from Kent County Council and the smaller donation from the charity. I did not intend to return home to Orpington to be a charge on my parents for the three summer months before the next term started. I wanted to take a temporary job as a merchant seaman, but soon found that if I did I would probably find myself at some distant place abroad when term was due to start in October. My Quaker friends suggested I try for farm work and recommended a Quaker farm at the village of Nether Kellet near Carnforth, about fifty miles north of Manchester.

Dale Barns was a large farm even by present-day standards. There were about 150 acres around the farmhouse and vast amounts of grazing land along the seashore at Bolton le Sands, a nearby village. There was also hill grazing at another farm site near Ingleborough in the Pennines. In peacetime, the sheep grazed the mountains in the summer and the shore in the winter, and the middle farm was kept mainly for cattle and dairy farming. Wartime law obliged farmers to use up to forty per cent of their land for the growing of cereal crops and similar foodstuffs. Of the many things I learned from those months at the farm was how many skills were needed, and how often improvisation and invention were required. I had, I am ashamed to say, previously regarded the farm-worker as some dim unintelligent fellow whose mind worked as slowly as his crops rotated. I also learnt that farming life was not for me. It is an unremitting occupation. Keeping animals demands seven days a week of attention and we had to milk the cows twice a day; Sunday cannot be an exception. We could not leave the sheep to graze unattended because the weather happened to be foul with the rain driving in horizontally. The thing that most put me off farm work was the healthy euphoria of every evening, which made me so contented that there was no desire for reading or thinking. The work was so hard during the day that by evening time I just fell asleep the moment I lay down on my bed.

After a week or so I grew used to the daily round of work. I never managed milking by hand without pain and I admired Peggy, the farmer’s daughter, for her facility when occasionally she would help us out. The haymaking strengthened my arms so much that by August I could lift two fifty-six-pound weights, one in each hand, above my head. The Whittaker boys and Gilbert, the Irishman who worked on the farm with us but lived in the village, were fine companions. They were forever teasing me about my love for Mary Delahunty back in Manchester. It was the daily sending and arrival of letters that stirred their interest. To them, writing was as hard a chore as milking was for me. To them, a love that inspired such a flood of correspondence must be profound indeed. Their celibacy puzzled me. The two young men never ventured far from the farm except to the Friends Meeting House on Sundays. There were plenty of eligible local girls around from other farming families, including Quakers, for this was one of the few Quaker communities in England. Perhaps even for them, the sheer drudgery of wartime farming with its shortage of labour drained them of energy and desire.

The boys’ father, old Mr Whittaker, was a widower, and lived at the farm on the shore at Bolton le Sands. He was a tough, stern character and feared by the family. I found him critical and difficult to deal with at first. He had no patience with my learning phases and seemed to expect me to be as strong and as skilled as his own sons, but there was one thing I did that brought me his approval. He was obsessed about thistles and would nag endlessly about their growth in the meadows and ask why someone didn’t do something about it. I found that I could use Father Time’s reaper, the scythe, efficiently, and I took on voluntarily the job of mowing down the thistles from the meadows, a job the boys detested. So on days when the weather or some other event prevented haymaking and turnip-weeding, I would gladly take my scythe, walk to whatever meadow I hadn’t already mowed, and attack the thistles. It was satisfying work. I saw these plants as my imaginary enemy and rejoiced in the swish of the scythe as I mowed them down. On my 21
^st
birthday in July 1940, to the amazement of everyone at Dale Barns, old Mr Whittaker gave me a pound note and told me to take the weekend off. I immediately went to the village on my bicycle, telephoned Mary, and arranged to meet her in Blackpool on that next Saturday. The purchasing power of £1 in those days was equivalent to about £100 now, so the weekend in Blackpool was not stinted. The boys told me that their father had never previously made
such a gesture, and I can only assume that my diligence with the thistle mowing had moved him deeply.

Mary Delahunty and I spent my twenty-first birthday in Blackpool. We saw a Spitfire fly by at a hundred feet or so above the beach. The sight of it made us think how beautiful it was, yet we were pacifists, and what we saw was a perfectly constructed killing machine. Like Blake’s tiger, it had a perfect symmetry. I remember the spirited but outrageous reply of a Cambridge don in the First World War. A
super-patriotic
woman gave him a white feather, symbol of cowardice, because he was young, apparently fit, but not fighting at the front. He replied, ‘Madam, I represent the culture the other men are
fighting
to save.’ In the civilized atmosphere of the Second World War, white feathers had no place, but in a way, their absence was just as hard to bear. It really was our finest hour, although few then knew the cost. The war brought the nation from the status of a superpower to a state of impoverishment, barely better than that of a developing country now. In a way, it left us worse off than the vanquished, for we still had to keep up the appearances of a superpower, and pay the costs expected of one, from almost no reserves.

August came, and soon we encountered the hardest work of all: harvesting the oats by hand. It had been good summer weather for northern England, but even so, enough wind and rain had beaten down a great deal of the crop. The horse-driven side-cutter could manage only a part of the cutting; we had to do the rest by hand with scythes and sickles. I soon learnt that wonderful swaying motion and movement needed to cut a flowing swathe through the oats. Much harder was the gathering of the sheaves of cut oats, which we tied together by two stems of oats, forming a kind of string. I was
hopelessly
inefficient at this and they left me to scythe on. The sheaves of oats were stacked in piles of six, with two on top acting as a kind of thatch to stop the rain from rotting the crop beneath. The hardest job of all was the pitchforking of the sheaves onto the cart. Hard, because in the fickle weather of this mountainous oceanic region, we had to do the job immediately the sheaves were dry. We started at first light one day in late August and the job was not finished until midnight. I did not see the end of it: the boys told me I passed out in the field in the evening and they carried me back to the house to bed. I can only remember waking the next morning, stiff and still feeling tired.

September, after the harvest was over, was by comparison a
wonderful
month. Work eased off and there was time to visit the delightful
small towns like Silverdale, and for picnics on the River Lune. One job for me in this month was taking the milk round, or, should I say helping the horse to deliver the milk. The Whittaker boys harnessed this wonderful intelligent animal to the milk-cart and, as soon as I shook the reins, it set off for Bolton le Sands. It knew the way and stopped of its own volition at the first house where milk was due to be delivered. All that I had to do was ask the woman at the door how much milk she needed and then ladle it from the churn into her jug. After collecting the payment I went back to the horse, shook her reins, and off we went again to the next house. This went on until the horse decided, not me, that the round was over and that we should go back to the farm. I have rarely felt so redundant as on this occasion when I served as an assistant to a horse. The Whittakers were farmers who were unusually compassionate and understanding of their
animals
. They were concerned for their pain and seemed to know them all as individuals. The farm dog was intelligent enough that when called from the bedroom window at 7 am she would go out into the fields and round up the milking cows from the rest of the herd. She would drive them back to the byre unaided so that they were there waiting to be milked by the time we had washed, dressed, and shaved.

When it was time for me to go back south in the middle of
September
, Peggy arranged a special dinner on the Sunday to send me on my way next morning. I had grown very fond of the family and of Dale Barns and thought of it as a home. The parting was painful. Next day I rode my bicycle into Lancaster to catch the train to Manchester. I badly wanted to see Mary but I knew that I had to move on to my home in Kent. I had promised my mother and father that I would see them for a while before starting the autumn term, and I compromised by
spending
just a day in Manchester. I then hitched a ride with a friendly lorry driver I knew who regularly travelled between Manchester and the London suburb of Mitcham. I went to a factory in the east of Manchester to pick up the lorry. The business of the firm was
packaging
. Packaging is usually associated with the wasteful extravagances of marketing—think of the ballpoint pen displayed in what looks like an acre of white card emblazoned with hyperbolic advertising. In spite of wartime austerity, some products still needed packaging, and my friend the driver spent his days and nights moving the material of packaging between Manchester and London.

It was early in the morning of 14 September when I boarded his lorry; a medium-sized panel truck with a diesel engine separating the
passenger and driver’s seats in the cab. When moving, it was
intolerably
noisy and smelly and the seats hard and uncomfortable. It was so miserable as to make long-distance charter flights in economy seem like an orgy of hedonism. We slowly trundled south along the narrow roads of England, and I remember passing through the beautiful town of Lichfield but skirting Birmingham. We stopped to eat at my driver’s favourite diner called Clifford’s Closet on the Cliff. It was at Bromsgrove, and an island of prosperity in a heavily rationed
landscape
. Almost anything to eat was there and consumer goods were exchanged freely. There were prostitutes also, plying their trade
discreetly
. Wartime truck driving was a miserably stressful job, but an essential one. I guess the authorities knew what went on at Clifford’s Closet but ignored what was a small matter nationally, just as they never attempted to ration the farmers. Rationing worked well in wartime United Kingdom. We never were indignant about these minor cheats by the producers and carriers of food. What brought community disapproval and anger was cheating by wealthier
neighbours
; happily, this was rare.

After a farm-style lunch, we drove on. By evening, as the sun was setting, we were near Luton and on the Dunstable Downs, looking south towards London. The sky was red in the west but to our surprise, it was red in the south also. At first we thought we were looking at mock sunset, a meteorological phenomenon. Then we realized that it must be a large fire. So free of action had the first year of war been in England that our first thought was not of a fire caused by bombing but one that had happened naturally. Nothing was further from our minds than the fact that London was burning because of a large bomber raid. As we moved south through Watford and darkness fell, the southern sky glowed red. We began to wonder what was in store for us. We crossed London on the western side, as this was our route to Mitcham, and it was then clear that most of the fires were to the east. We encountered only occasional evidence of bombing: crumbled houses, blocked-off roads and the occasional fire. We crossed Hammersmith Bridge and went on to Mitcham, where all was relatively quiet. I had planned to take a train from there to Orpington, where my mother and father lived, but no trains were running. This was the first large air raid and the disorganization was far worse than it was later with even worse raids.

To me the greatest military blunder of the Second World War was the blind belief of all participants in bombing as a means of winning
the war. It almost equalled in cruel stupidity the blunders of the First World War, when men died horribly by the millions in the noxious mud of the trenches. All of us, military and civilian, had drawn wrong conclusions about the effects of bombing. What misled us were the events of the Spanish Civil War, where almost unopposed fleets of bombers defeated the defenders of small, tight Mediterranean towns like Teruel and Guernica. The larger European war was not like this, and in addition the emotional impact of the Spanish war was for many of us, especially those of Leftist inclinations, so great that the Second World War seemed quite tame by comparison. The Spanish war was for the Left almost a holy war; the Second World War was merely a job to do. Both sides believed in the myth of the all-powerful bomber and that strategic bombing would certainly lead to capitulation. The evidence of the bombs in the Second World War is quite to the contrary, and it was only when there was a qualitative change in intensity, with the dropping of the first nuclear weapons, that they had the expected result. In London, most of those who were seriously frightened by bombing left for safer places, and the remainder adapted stoically. The only time during that war when I can recall a sense of real unease about military action was towards the end of the war when the V-weapon missiles were used. I think it was the absence of any definite respite, the period of peace between raids, that made the difference. Bombs dropped by aircraft can be withstood because the event is never continuous; with missiles you never know when another one will fall and there is no spell of quiet and safety for recuperation. We have heard far too little about the feelings and plight of average German and Japanese people. They suffered bombing at a higher intensity and for far longer than ever we did. That their spirit was never broken is surely proof of the inefficiency of bombing civilians as a practical way of winning wars.