Heart of England: Contributions to the Evening Standard, 1939-1941: Henry Williamson Collections, #4

By Henry Williamson

Written originally as a way of paying off unexpectedly high bills during his early years of farming in Norfolk – 'There was one thing for it: to pay off the debts by writing', he wrote in his farming classic The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941) – these beautifully written articles by Henry Williamson, set in both Norfolk and Devon, are counterpointed and given immediacy by the inclusion of the evening's headlines after each article, depicting the deteriorating international situation as the Second World War begins. Williamson had taken over the derelict farm in 1937, at a time when the farming industry was seriously depressed; by the time that war was declared, the farm was given an 'A' grade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507353

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

Wilderness?

Moving along the sky-line of the southern boundary of my farm were six old-fashioned wagons. They were loaded with barley straw. The straw was being moved to another farm, four miles away. The farmer was ‘gone in’, and his farm had been taken over, for the remainder of the year, by a neighbour.

The straw is part of the land’s heart. It should, by the rules of good farming, which are the same rules applying to human life, remain on the farm. Bullocks should tread it in the yards, making it into manure, to be put back into the land. When ploughed in, roots – turnips and mangolds or perhaps sugar-beet – should be nourished by it. When those roots are lifted the green tops should either be ploughed in or fed to sheep where they lie; in either case, being returned to the land, to maintain its heart.

After the subsequent ploughing and cultivation barley should be sown, and when the barley is scarcely high enough to hide a crouching partridge, ‘small seeds’ of clover and grass should be drilled or broadcast among the barley plants, then harrowed and lightly rolled in.

When the barley has been cut, the plants of grass and clover will be seen amidst the stubble. Pigeons and rabbits will take some of them during the winter months, but if the land is sweet – not deficient in lime – they will increase in spring and summer and turn into a good crop of hay. This will be cut and stacked – winter food for horses and bullocks and cows. The aftermath will spring up on the field, and either be fed to sheep, who will manure the land as they nibble, or else it will be ploughed in.

Clover is full of nitrogen, which is part of the strength of the soil. Early spring frosts have helped to crumble the furrows, make them soft and workable, and corn will go in once more.

That is the ‘four-course shift’ which the great Coke of Norfolk devised in the eighteenth century, after his neighbour, ‘Turnip’ Townshend, had introduced roots from Belgium. Before that, bullocks were killed in the autumn, and their beef salted for keeping. With roots and ‘long hay’, and, nowadays, linseed or cotton cake and crushed oats and barley meal, the finest beef in the world can be grown during the English winter, in the yards, while the straw is being trodden into rich, dark ‘muck’.

But what has been happening during the last twenty years?

There was a landowner and farmer I knew of, in Devon, who sold up after the war because he thought England was finished. He was a rich man apart from his land and his farms; and because he was a rich man, with an orthodox economic training, he got out as soon as he saw things were not going to be so good. At least he put his capital in the Empire; he started farming on a large scale in Kenya.

Today it is Kenya where the going isn’t so good. The farmer who bought his Devon land has done better in Devon than the rancher has done in East Africa. Devon has become the playground of England, and the strong green grass fattens bullocks of itself. People on holiday like to eat English beef if they can. If the old landlord had regarded the land as a way of life rather than a way to make money – that is, more than a modest living – he might have stuck out the depression and been the gainer.

That is an exceptional case, however. It isn’t every farm that can let hundreds of sites for caravans, and have great hotels adjoining, with markets for cream and butter at fancy prices. I think the case of my neighbour up here in Norfolk is more typical.

Since so many prudent business men have decided in the past that England wasn’t what it had been, much money has been invested abroad, under the orthodox idea, of course, that business returns must be bigger and better wherever possible. And that, until comparatively recently, has been going on quite a lot, with the result that all sorts of foodstuffs and manufactured goods have been coming into our country, in greater and greater amounts, virtually as interest on the money exported abroad. And the yeoman farmers are forced to leave the land of their ancestors.

How can my neighbour compete with beef grown thousands of miles away, brought here in refrigerators, and sold at a price below that which enables him to buy and fatten bullocks to tread his straw into muck to grow his barley? And his barley: how can it compete with imported grain which is sold at the ports for a sum which equals three-quarters of his barley production costs?

So gradually he loses heart, and then his natural way of life, and when he is gone the straw leaves the land; and the new tenant, if one can be found to take that impoverished soil, will have to put the equivalent back into the fields before he can take any decent crops from them.

Once it is lost, it is lost for ever. The land must be fed, like any other living thing. It is not just dirt. It is a highly complex balance of bacteria feeding on what is generally called humus – old plant tissues – and breaking them up, so that the new plant life can draw strength from it while putting forth other roots to draw up phosphates, salts of nitrogen and ammonia, and so to fulfil itself in the sunshine.

Look what they have done in America! They ploughed in the prairie, under the grasses and flowers of which lay stored the humus – the vegetable graveyard – of centuries. They grew crop after crop of wheat, scores of crops, saying the soil was inexhaustible.

The soil was nobody’s real home, that was the trouble. There were no real human roots in it; only the temporary roots of business. At last they got to the end of the reserves, and dust remained. Then Nature took a hand, and the winds blew, and what was left of the fields went overhead, so that in some places the chimneys of farmhouses were literally filled up. Tens of thousands of square miles all desolate.

The task facing our own new Minister of Agriculture is a pretty tough one. Roughly three hundred acres a day have been going out of cultivation in Great Britain since the war. Corn no longer pays; nor does beef, nor does mutton. Here and there are farms which pay a fair profit; but they all have special markets.

Why grow corn? Well, hundreds of thousands of acres in East Anglia, for instance, are only kept from either blowing into dust heaps or reverting to heathland by the grass and clovers which are sown once every four years to get hay to feed bullocks to tread the straw to make the muck to grow the roots to feed the sheep to tread the land and compress it. Also the rotted straw, the tendrils of the humus, help to hold it together.

Then the corn crop comes, and pays (or should) for the expensive crop of roots, and the less expensive crop of hay. The good farmer doesn’t sell hay, he feeds it, and gets it back for his fields as manure; no decent farmer robs his land. He’d rather go broke.

And so he is going broke – unless Britain wakes up, sees what is going on, the gradual decline of fertility, now brought to the point of near-exhaustion, and says: This land is ours; it is the mother of our race; we are trustees of it for our children and our children’s children, and so on until the sun burns out and the purpose of human life on this planet is fulfilled.

Wednesday, 29 March 1939

TERRITORIAL FIELD ARMY TO BE DOUBLED

Strength of 340,000

Immortal corn

At 3.30 a.m. the other day I was seated on my tractor, drawing a cultivator through the southern half of the field called Twenty-one Acres. The night before, in consultation with the steward of the farm, it had been decided that the seed-bed for the sowing of sugar-beet was not good enough; not fine enough.

When it had been cultivated before – the winter-ploughed furrows broken up and worked down – the ground had been a trifle ‘sumpy’. The tractor wheels, and horses’ hoofs, had pressed it down, and on those places the sugar-beet would not form its long parsnip shape properly. It was, for us on the farm, a risk to sow beet seed on that field as it was; but time was short.

We were short-handed, too. Labour was scarce. Many new airfields were being made in Norfolk. The best barley field in the county was now growing anti-aircraft camp buildings, for live-shell practice. Anyhow, few young men want to go on the land these days. The town mind, with its idiom of international trade before everything else, rules England today.

As the dawn was spreading up the eastern sky, and the lapwings were beginning to wheel and cry over the field, I went down the top headland, drawing the cultivator with its iron spikes digging eight inches into the soil. Behind the cultivator was attached an old one-horse roll, made perhaps during the Boer War, an affair of half-rotten wooden shafts and a cylindrical roll of sheet-iron. The spikes loosened the soil, the roll crumbled the damp-to-dry lumps. I tested the result by drawing my foot through it. The mould came loose and fine before my boot-cap. It was a beautiful seed-bed.

As the eastern sky clarified, a lark rose singing, and another lark. I climbed on the iron seat of the tractor, engaged second gear, and went on, happily.

A man on a tractor has plenty of time to meditate, or think. Here I was, one of hundreds of thousands of