Chronicles of a Norfolk Farmer: Contributions to the Daily Express, 1937-1939: Henry Williamson Collections, #2

By Henry Williamson

Covering Williamson's last months at Shallowford in Devon, the family's move to a derelict farm in North Norfolk, the difficulties encountered by a total beginner to farming – including the disastrous crash in the price of barley in 1938 – and the opening months of the Second World War, these 45 articles written by Henry Williamson (author of Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon) for the Daily Express between 1937 and 1939 form a fascinating contemporary record of those times. Ten million Daily Express readers enjoyed them then – now you can join them. Also included are four of Williamson's's classic short stories, set in the North Devon countryside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Jan 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507339

Henry Williamson

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895. Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy. He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka. His writing falls into clear groups: 1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird. 2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 1914–1918, both in England and on the Western Front. 3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books. Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full. The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.

Book preview

How do they know?

Awriter receives all sorts of letters from strangers, a few abusive or appreciative, some requesting help or advice (dangerous to give: often evokes scorn), but the majority either telling of some natural incident, or asking questions, such as:

How does the salmon find its way back to its native river? How do eels, which are now proved to have been born under the floating weed-masses of the Sargasso Sea, manage to travel the thousands of miles back to European rivers?

The baby eels, called elvers, are hardly a couple of inches long, and thinner than a match. Every April, usually when the spring tides fill the river estuaries, the elvers move up in vast, wriggling masses.

Men wait for them, dip them out in special nets, hundredweights at a time.

Salmon, lying in the fresh-water pools, flee from the advance in terror: elvers in their gill-rakers mean torture, disease, death. One of the mysteries of nature, declared the ancients.

We know that the long journey from the Gulf of Mexico is almost ordinary. Elvers are carried home to Europe by the Gulf Stream, 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Corked bottles have made the journey across the Atlantic in three months.

Yet the parent eels, returning, you say, must reach the spawning ground of the world’s eels somehow. What makes a Rhine eel find the Sargasso, alongside a Severn eel?

I’m no scientist, but it seems obvious to me. The eels nose their way back into the warm drag of the Gulf Stream, tainted by scents of rotting weed, etc. – the eels’ especial smell in memory.

What, an eel can smell, you ask? Watch them from the bridge over the river near my cottage, working upstream, to the rabbits’ guts in my summer eel-trap, when it is dropped in!

They work up the currents (there are many currents under even a placid surface: due to the irregular rocky bottom) like hounds on a good scenting day.

In September the big, mature eels drop down-river: their eyes grow larger, for the deep darkness of their destiny. These are the wretched creatures you see writhing feebly, thousands entangled, on the slabs of eel-shops in London and elsewhere. Fixed nets like inverted hock-bottles take them.

As for salmon, they live two–three years in their native rivers, fly-feeding, looking like small trout, red-spotted. In May the samlet changes moorland dress for silver sea-suit: drops down to the sea: wanders off, two–three ounces in weight.

Returns two–three years later, weighing twenty–thirty pounds. Having fed on herrings, prawns, and other small fish.

How comes it home? By instinct, you say. And what might that be, sir or madam? One of the mysteries of nature, you promptly reply.

Ha, that gives me a chance to display my pet theory about instinct. Now listen. Instinct is ‘inherited’ custom or habit of one’s forebears. It takes a long time to make an instinct: thousands of generations.

Witness the otter, a land animal that’s been underwater hunting for centuries. Otter cubs are afraid of water, have to be thrown in by their mothers.

So do seal cubs: and seals have been in water ages before otters – witness the flippers which once were padded mammalian feet.

Go further back, to the porpoises, which also are animals which have changed land for sea. Their young, borne under water, instinctively swim, instinctively hold their breath for periods submerged – and still feed on their mother’s milk like kittens.

That’s instinct, as thought out by Professor Williamson. It may be all wrong, unscientific – the explanation, I mean; but I believe it to be factual.

Back to salmon. Some say they return by instinct, of course.

But I know a chap who hatches eggs of Tay salmon in his Somerset fish farm, and he says the Tay fry duly return to the Exe, whose foster-waters first nourish them. The Exe fish is long, lean; the Tay salmon is deep, hog-backed.

The individual samlet remembers its way back to its foster-river. And now here’s a suggestion.

The samlet, on its way to the feeding banks of the Atlantic, follows along a sunken gorge which once, in a prehistoric age, was the bed of that river.

It is said by geologists that the rivers of Eastern Scotland were once tributaries of the Rhine – before the intervening land subsided and the sea covered what is now known as the North Sea or German Ocean.

Each river has its old submarine bed; each river family of salmon feed along that sunken way, and return thereby.

Occasionally one loses its way, through greed or shifting currents, and when repletion has stirred its sexual instinct, ascends the nearest fresh water.

To generalise therefrom, every so-thought mysterious action of the lower species has a human explanation.

Sentimentalist! anthropomorphist! cries the man of science. Well, it’s what I think, or rather, the thought that comes to me as I watch fish doing this or that in the manner I’d do them were I fish.

Do you, scientist, know that salmon play around one another in fresh water? That obvious joy breaks out of them at evening, after being confined in a small stream during the summer day, hidden under the muddy roots of a tree?

I’ve watched them rolling around one another, caressing one another, at sunset, in less than two feet of water.

Coming to cats and dogs, tame ones: how do they find their way home from long distances?

Instances are known – this cat, taken twenty-two miles away secured in a basket, returned after nine days. By what sense did that happen?

Those cats who don’t find their way back took the wrong turning, and adopted some one else; and adoption isn’t news.

This goes for dogs – except that a dog, who recognises landmarks for miles around its home (unless it’s a very special poor little rich dog, always riding on some one’s bosom) by the senses of smell and sight, usually knows far more than we think it does.

I had a dog once that moved its eyes as it stood still; you could see it thinking. Being a bit of a cunning dog myself, I knew what this particular innocent, honest-to-goodness little parson Jack Russell terrier was thinking about. Chickens!

He’d pass them, walking with me, with unconcern, complete indifference; but, oh, how he scattered the feathers when no one was looking! The record was fifty-four at one go. The dog he was a-go, too.

One of the haunting sounds of ‘Plugstreet’ Wood in 1914 was the nocturnal cries of a cat which, half-starved, haunted the ruins of a burnt-out, shelled-out farmstead we called Hampshire Farm.

I used to see it walking on the broken walls, meowing most plaintively for the return of the life it knew. Cats are attached to places; dogs to individuals.

There was a hen there, too, in those early days. She used to walk, clucking, along the parapets of the dangerous Hampshire T trench.

Our chaps used to shoot rabbits, pheasants, and even wild geese in the wood, but they left that hen alone.

So did the Germans. One Saxon ex-waiter, with beard and double-set of aluminium trouser-buttons (German efficiency!), told us during the Christmas Day truce that they had similar feelings for that hen.

She used to feed, always a little anxiously, among the dead cows lying in the turnip field between our trenches. What her fate was I know not; but ultimately she found a way home, as all of us will.

Saturday, 23 January 1937

Try digging, for a change

English diary by Henry Williamson

FRIDAY

After weeks of working indoors, sitting at a table, writing, typing, reading – a clerk’s life – I put my sleeping bag (moth-eaten, 1917 origin), with earthenware demijohn of water and food-basket, in the car, and drove to hilltop field.

The ‘hedges’ – raised banks of earth and stone, thorn-topped – enclosing my two-acre field needed making up. Each was a rabbit-warren. And sheep in neighbouring field had trodden outer sides hollow.

Eighty tons of soil and ‘clats’ (Devon for clods or turves) had to be shifted and banged into place, 2ft. to 4ft. upwards. Work that out in foot-pounds, you who do so little with your brains that you fix happily on any crossword puzzle.

As always, it was hard to begin, to change over from brain-worker to body-worker. Eighty tons, ten pounds at a time!

Rabbits were a plague, vermin. Four rabbits ate as much as a sheep, and soured the land where they sat and nibbled. They ate my young trees.

No good cursing rabbits, or tons of fallen earth. Experience told that the only way was to begin, and to continue slowly.

The brain had to stop rushing the body forward to get it all done in a thought-flash. The body took time to get into the slow, contented rhythm of natural work.

Using the long-handled Devon shovel, with its pointed, heart-shaped blade, I cut out a clat, lifted it to the bank top, and withdrew the blade.

The Devon shovel is a delight to use; it swings across the thigh, and the light, curved willow handle gives a 2 to 1 leverage when throwing up the clats.

Devonians have little sense of constructive beauty; their buildings are crude, four-square walls of mud and stones roofed with straw; they muddle, are slow, easy-going, and put off until next year what they might do today.

When I’m gone from this country I hope they won’t remember my faults; and I’ll never forget their one creation of genius, the Devon shovel.

SATURDAY

Work went easier today. Yesterday I dug too fast, with long pauses, leaning on the handle, while the north wind made my thick fisherman’s jersey, thick Canadian hunter’s shirt, and woollen vest feel like damp newsprint.

For weeks the north wind has had a cutting edge of glass; icy rain lashed down, and sleet; the lanes below are running with water from the broken hill springs.

At noon, in weak sunlight, a barn owl drifted low over the northern hedge, coming from the little plantation of beech trees.

These trees are cripples of the salt sea winds, which have sheared them to the shape of a porcupine, its nose pointing to the Atlantic.

The owl lives there. I have known him six years. He has his regular perching or pausing places in my field, which with its rough grass gives much cover to mice and voles.

The perches vary with wind and weather. On a still day he alights on lichened oak-posts, now rotten, which used to support the wire sheep-netting.

Another place is the end ridge-tile by the hipped gable end of my hut. Today the wind is too strong for him to perch and peer and listen (owls have enormous ears; they are feathered cats) for mice.

He has a big wing-spread for his weight. Wings, white under and yellow-grey above, span about a yard, and are broad, with soft feathers for silent flying. Yet the body is smaller than a pigeon’s.

Its round head, set with two large, dark eyes, looks to be six inches in diameter, but the skull is long and narrow, set with feathers like an Elizabethan ruff.

Like a white and gold moth the owl fanned a few feet from me, hovered, swung up soundlessly, and passed me again, so near I thought he would perch on my head. He knows me to be harmless; indeed, I think we like to see each other about the place.

SUNDAY

Reluctantly I left the field last night, yet eager to see what mail was for me at home.

My chief, my only interest nowadays is in farming; in particular my own land, which I enter to farm next Michaelmas.

About this I feel like Columbus when he set out to sail westward, ever westward, until he made his landfall.

For years only a feeling for salmon kept me going; and when that book was done, after about five thousand hours of water-peering and picking all available brains, I felt finished. The actual writing was laborious: one word a minute, and that chipped from my breastbone.

Now the sight of well-rotted dung-piles in a field – dark brown on stubble, heraldic quartering on England’s shield – fills me with glowing keenness. I live now to see fertility brought back to our cornlands again; English land feeding English people.

But we’ve got to be poor, very poor, before that happens, maybe. Anyhow, I’ll do it on my little bit of England.

MONDAY

Yesterday was a polar gale, many trees blown over in neighbouring deer park. Squelching by the river, more by habit than interest, I walked to Sawmills Weir.

The salmon are running. I saw two trying to get up the falls. They try to swim first always. They fear white water; it means bruises, perhaps death.

One swam up in the centre, where water-weight is greatest, and I saw its shadow in the green glissade curving over, its vibrating shadow moving so slowly, almost imperceptibly, upwards.

It was swimming all out, 20 m.p.h. probably, while the water was falling at 19¾ m.p.h. A bold fish, confident, twenty-four hours from the estuary twenty river-winding miles away.

I expected it to turn on its side, beaten, and be washed back, belly upwards, but it made a spurt – I could feel it – and its head got to the top of the stone weir-sill, and then with a sudden glide forward it was gone.

I waited for it to leap in the pool above; and out it came, vertically, splashing back on its side, deliberately, a gesture of joy.

Two months in some pool of the shrunken river, and all its élan vital will have gone, its silver tarnished … if otter or poacher’s gaff leaves it so long.

TUESDAY

Meant to go back to the field today and get on with making-up banks. But I’m first a clerk; my right-hand pen finger is spatulate.

Wrote and read proofs until two, when I went to the sawmills to see the yew-wood being cut. Three 900-year-old trees were to be sawn for gate-posts, but I bought the timber, for 1¼ in. planks, for a staircase.

Yew wood is harder than oak, salmon-pink, very lovely. Curious to think the trees, a yard in girth, were planted for bow-wood by my landlord’s ancestor, who carried the shield of William at Hastings, when last England was invaded.

WEDNESDAY

Carried the yew planks and posts home in my trailer, made out of old car axle, and laid them out for seasoning, with billets between planks for air-drying.

If my farming succeeds, they’ll last 900 years of boots going up and down stairs. If it fails, that is, if I fail, lose vitality, or dull myself with too much brain-racing and not enough body-rhythm, they may yet be gate-posts.

No gentleman farming for me; the word yeoman is music to me.

THURSDAY

Back at the field, in the glass-cutting wind, drifts of snow under banks, happy in old tarry trousers and holding the smooth willow handle of the Devon shovel.

Saw a weasel in a stone-heap, sharp as a needle, pert and with terrific concentrated hunting determination.

Nothing stops a weasel, it goes like furred quicksilver after its rabbit, its rat, its mouse.

I’ve seen a weasel weaving fascination round a rat six times its weight, with teeth four times bigger than its own, and jaws twice as strong, while the rat squealed with impotent rage, petulant, irritable, finished.

And the weasel ran round and round it, turning ‘backsivore’ and slipping about, while the rat wept and chattered and … did absolutely nothing. The weasel bit it in the neck, drank, flicked, and vanished. I was too fascinated, appalled, impotent to interfere.

But I’m told they make lovely pets, very affectionate and intelligent. They’re good parents, too, playing for hours with their cubs and one another, and keeping together long after young are grown.

Must stop now, and get on with some more of those eighty tons!

Saturday, 3 April 1937

Don’t go fishing today –

you’ll enjoy this article by Henry Williamson more; and you’ll be more certain to catch something

Isat at my desk in a fume of frustration and resentment.

There was a luminosity in the air outside that made a shut-in existence, mind furiously visualising in a vacuum, an intolerable occupation.

By the dark yew tree’s shade a small delicate globe of light arose slowly, followed by another, and a third. The olive duns were hatching.

Many birds were singing. A spider-thread gleamed across the window, a shine of light slipping along its length as the wind moved it slightly. The air was buoyant; light seemed a living presence.

My desk, the blank wall and paper before me, the worn pen, myself having to force imagination of my other self moving buoyantly in the very air and light denied